Posted on 06/20/2013 12:01:02 PM PDT by Resettozero
Recently I was asked about a very difficult situation.
A woman has been married to a man with a long-term addiction to pornography. The last few years he’s been trying to stop, but by his own efforts alone. When she asks him if he’s struggling he will deny it. She finds out he’s using again and then has the double-hurt of his use and his lying.
At one point, with her husband’s permission, she talked with their pastor (who is also her husband’s brother) about this situation. He told her that her husband had to seek help (true) and that there was nothing he could do (not necessarily true). He then said a prayer. If her hope was for anything more than that, she was disappointed.
She concluded this part of her story (there is another piece of the story we’ll take up in subsequent post) by saying “this problem has gone on for so long I don’t talk to my husband about it anymore.”
(Excerpt) Read more at covenanteyes.com ...
I just don’t think the article is very helpful. Sorry.
It talks about how the wife has needs and how the wife can get her ‘needs’ (I’m sure she can!) by going to a support group.
That’s the only actual advice proferred. No discussion on, “what could her husband actually want”.
It’s not her fault, but it certainly is her problem. She’s the one who’s unhappy about it. Here’s the real deal - you can remind, monitor and/or push your man to seek help, but do you want to know what will really fix it? Immediately?
Open communication about sex, open communication in general, a willingness to expend sexual energy and creativity regularly, and an interest in your own desires as well.
He is an addict; he is genuinely powerless over the attraction porn has for him.
Well, I think that's nonsense. Calling this an addiction is a scapegoat. Not that I don't think they could use some intervention, but it needs to be someone more objective than HIS BROTHER to counsel them.
____________________________
Worked with a lot of couples dealing with porn.
Men will ignore warm willing loving women to masturbate to porn.
Porn is easy, and the user controls all aspects.
Relationship is messy and requires give and take.
Well said.
Porn is psycologicaly addicting. It does not fill a need, just like oxycotton does not fill a need in an addict, or rat poison fills in need in rats.
The man is addicted, and most likely can no longer get aroused by normal sex any more. Just like an Oxycotton addict, the guy is toast, there is no way out for him without confesson and repentance to God.
But then, I suspect that is the lesson he must learn.
I would say she was at fault for not CANCELING the wedding but delaying it when she found out the guy was a porn addict.
By not fornicating with him before the wedding, she may have saved herself many years of trouble. There is a reason that the bible says that “Two shall become one”. Unless she wants to fight the scourge of porn in HER life for the length of her stay here, she better no polute her soul with his.
“It does not fill a need, just like oxycotton does not fill a need in an addict.”
Oxycontin does provide a need. It provides a high. Addiction doesn’t just happen. Addiction happens because it fills a need in the person’s life that’s not getting met by other things.
Quitting drugs is hard. But, you have to address other things including the desire to use the drugs and their physical dependency. I wouldn’t be surprised to see porn works the same way. However -
There isn’t a natural source for the Oxycontin high that the person is used to so they have to get used to not having Oxycontin. Porn - there is a natural source that would meet many of the desires in sex. Especially sex with his wife.
So why’s he preferring what doesn’t actually fill to something he does? Habit, yes, but I have to wonder if he’s actually having sex with his wife on a regular basis. That to me is the elephant in the room, something we’re not getting here.
What if he wants sex everyday and his wife is good with once a month?
She needs to demand that he seeks help or she divorces him... let him rot in his addiction... sorry, folks, I’ve had it with tip-toeing around those who won’t come out of sexual sins that destroys the family... God says, if they are christians, to turn them over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that the sole might be saved. 1 Corinthians 5:5. The wife and her husband’s brother, the pastor, needs to stand the husband up and read this verse to him, give him a day to repent and seek help or pronounce this spiritual judgement upon him, and divorce him.
The husband DID NOT seek advice, she did.
I know someone who was married, quite young, to a guy who turned out to be abusive, both verbally demeaning and physically aggressive. A few times he pushed her out of bed and told her to sleep on the floor at his feet -- while she was pregnant. Being very true to her church, she sought advice from her pastor. He told her that marriage was sacred and she needed to do what she could to "understand" and "change" her husband. In other words -- "what could her husband actually want".
Is this the type of good Christian advice you're talking about?
Actually, that was my first response.
“Relationship is messy and requires give and take.”
Marriage requires give and take on the part of both husband and wife. So why is it easier for him to use porn than to talk to his wife? There’s serious, serious problems in their marriage that go well beyond the porn and have nothing to do with it.
“I ask again, what need is porn filling?”
The need he’s trying to fill is the need for God.
Thank you!!
porn and masturbation are inextricable. The prior issue is self gratification. That is the fundamental sickness.
“The husband DID NOT seek advice, she did.”
Well, of course. It’s difficult in dealing with addictions. The first step has to be that the person is willing to change. That’s hard for a person who’s stuck in the relationship to decide what to do about someone who does have an addiction and how to work past that.
It’s been my experience that change only happens when something happens in the person’s life to make staying where you are less comfortable than the change. Sometimes it’s losing a job. Sometimes it’s having someone who loves and cares for you try to reach out and stage an intervention.
It’s not easy. I’ve deal with this before.
“I know someone who was married, quite young, to a guy who turned out to be abusive, both verbally demeaning and physically aggressive.”
I would say get out because Scripture is very clear on this, in Ephesians, “husbands are to love their own wives like their own bodies, because no one ever harmed his own body.”
It’s part of the marriage covenant and physical abuse breaks this covenant between husband and wife.
“Is this the type of good Christian advice you’re talking about?”
Actually, I’m talking about this one:
“The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.”
This is the problem. Marriages without sex were never meant to work this way and the wife here is explicitly told that refusing sex without having a good reason for it in marriage is a sin.
I’ve not seen very many pastors cite this, but I think it’s an important principle to understand that in marriage, you are no longer your own, your wife has a claim to your body just as you have a claim to your wife’s body. If a husband truly understood this they wouldn’t cheat on each other and they wouldn’t deprive each other.
Wives get many things. This article does nothing to convince me that they understand this principle right here.
She needs to read 2 chapters further down before doing anything of the sort.
Actually, I don’t think that going to a pastor *first* will be of much help. It took years for this problem to develop and it will take a long time to dismantle it. Only then will the pastor be of help, but by then, he *will* be of help.
To start with, he needs a psychological *diagnosis*, because there could be all sorts of underlying reasons for this, including inability to be intimate; obsessive compulsion; compelled perversion; neurotic fixation; you name it, there can be some real spider’s nests in his head. But until you know what kind, getting rid of it is very hit and miss.
In some cases, there might even be an organic problem with his brain, in which this could be a *symptom*, of something much worse, even lethal.
But a “best case” would be that he has been sociopathically conditioned, he’s trained himself, to only get a libido response from porn. I say “best case” because this is the easiest to treat, possibly just with marriage and sex counseling. That is, he trained to get it, and his training can be redirected away from it in a more appropriate direction.
In any event, after punching through these things, hopefully he will be on the mend, and *that* is when he will need a lot of spiritual help and support, and a pastor will really be helpful. By then he should again be in a team with his wife, working together.
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