I’ve sat in front of a screen for countless hours and just looked and looked and looked. I’ve thought ‘Now I really have to go to bed,’ and then sat there for an hour more. I’ve looked at films, video clips and photos of people who have sex. I’ve watched porn for hours, and for years. I’ve watched it at home in my flat, at school, at my work and on my mobile phone. I’ve watched it during coffee breaks, at night, in the morning, and in fact right before I went up on the stage to lead worship in my church!

I’ve been terribly preoccupied with sex. And every time I’ve looked at porn I’ve been terrified of being found out. Of being caught red-handed. I’ve turned the sound off or almost completely off, so that at least I could hear a little groaning. I’ve learnt many tricks to hide my tracks: delete the log, change passwords and so on. There and then, while I watched it, while I masturbated, it seemed so good. SO good! So enjoyable. The women on the screen were mine. They liked me! They didn’t demand anything of me, never criticised me or treated me badly. They were simply there, with no commitments. It was so easy and felt so good.

Immediately after, however, I felt absolutely terrible. I felt so ashamed! I always felt totally worthless after looking at it. ‘A Christian shouldn’t be doing this,’ I thought. I felt like I was the only person in the world who did it. What would people think if they knew? If they knew, I would lose everything. Who would have anything to do with me? So I had to keep it to myself, and I did, for years. Keeping this inside me year in and year out was a heavy burden.

What was the solution? Of course, there IS a solution. I started to say that I HAD been hooked on pornography. If you’re reading this and recognise yourself here, please don’t doubt it. No matter how dark the darkness is, the sun’s rays can dispel it. I started to think about what kind of life I’d like to live. Did I really want to live a hidden life? Did I only want to receive affirmation from a screen? Life is empty if you only get good self-esteem from films and pictures on a screen. It’s hollow but also very false. It’s a lie! So after some time I confided to an adult I trusted. It wasn’t someone I knew well, but someone I trusted. Now, not everything was fixed immediately, but it was a beginning; someone knew what I had done, someone believed that I could in fact stop, and perhaps most importantly, someone prayed for me.

A conversation like that was the first step to me being free from porn. And now I’m FREE!

Porn-Free

In the first part of my story about addiction to pornography, I said that I was addicted to porn for years. In this part I want to explain what I did to get out of the addiction.

The process started when I decided to contact a man I knew about. As I write this, I know from experience that there will be many readers who can identify with my situation, who think ‘That’s out of the question! There’s no way I’d tell anyone!’

I also thought that way, for many years. But just as often I thought, ‘Now I really have to talk to someone, I just can’t keep on going like this.’ I didn’t know the man I contacted. We had been in the same church and I knew that he had taught on topics like pornography at Bible school, but that was all I knew. In a sense this made it much safer. He didn’t have anything to do with me, and I didn’t have anything to do with him. We were both men, with the same desires and the same needs, but he had lived longer than me.

I either sent an email or a text message, I don’t exactly remember how I contacted him. But the result was that we agreed to meet at my house one afternoon. So I found myself in my kitchen, sitting opposite a man I didn’t know, and here I was supposed to tell him a dark and awful secret no one had heard me tell before! The strange thing was that it felt fine! I was nervous, of course, but a lot less than what I feared I’d be, because soon everything was going to get better. Now I would dare to do what I’d been dreading for many years! It went so well! He didn’t get angry, nor disappointed, nor judgemental, nor despairing, nor sad, nor hard-hearted. He didn’t ask for a lot of details, he didn’t dig into my private life, he didn’t make me feel ashamed (I had enough of that from before), he just listened. He let me speak as much as I wanted to, and when I was finished he said something I already knew: ‘The sex drive is one of the strongest drives in the world!’ But what I didn’t realise was that other people also experienced this drive! The fact that he, an older married man, said that he also felt the same urges as I did, was so good for me to hear.

Then we talked about several other things to do with sex, pornography and faith. We ended up praying together. It was relaxed, easy and so good to be forgiven. Everything didn’t change after that one conversation, I would have been pretty naive if I’d thought that. Sometimes I fell into the temptation of looking at porn again, but what did change was the fear. The fear of being the only one, the fear of being discovered, the fear that there was no hope, the fear of never being able to stop. Pornography had lost its power over me, I had suddenly found hope, and today I’m free.