How Do I Break Free From Porn?
Real change starts with the heart
Do you feel like you’ve tried everything to be free of porn with no success? You may despair of ever finding lasting freedom.
In this episode of our ongoing series, Dealing with Your Addictions, John and Austin talk about what it really means to break free from porn. You may have approached this issue in the past with shame, unrealistic expectations, or quick fixes that don’t last. Instead, we invite you start a process of healing that involves your heart, mind, and relationship with God.
You’ll hear about:
5 things that don’t help you break free from porn
4 core beliefs behind every porn addiction
5 habits that begin the process of breaking your addiction
If you struggle with porn or love someone who does, this conversation will bring you hope, grace, and real tools to begin the process of breaking free.
Why “Breaking Free” Doesn’t Happen Overnight
The title of today’s episode is How Do I Break Free from Porn? We need to add a little bit of nuance to the title. The way it’s phrased makes it sound like it’s possible to do something that will free you from porn once and for all. We wish!
Instead, a more realistic expectation regarding pornography addiction, and almost every other addiction, is to view it as breaking free—in other words, it’s an ongoing process rather than a one-time act. We want to make this distinction because it’s more faithful and realistic to what the Bible says about the human heart. But it’s also faithful and realistic to our experience as counselors and pastors.
Relapses or difficulty breaking an addiction doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. It doesn’t mean that further levels of healing and freedom aren’t possible. Having victory for a little while gives you a freedom of conscience that can bring back the enjoyment of walking with God. Even if you lose that, God still loves you and is waiting for you to return to fellowship with him.
As we mentioned in our last episode, pornography addiction isn’t just a guy issue anymore. Women struggle with it as well. In fact, the fastest growing demographic of people watching porn is girls between the ages of 13-17. It’s extremely disheartening, and it begs the question, “Why are women watching?”
Women use porn is because it releases stress and anxiety and because they want to learn what guys like. Many women aren’t watching explicit sexual content but watching TV series or reading romance novels that create fantasy and longing for relational connection—and those can often include sexual content. It’s sometimes called ‘emotional porn’. Men and women are using porn differently but it’s destructive for both genders.
What Doesn’t Help Porn Addiction
We’re actually going to begin with some things that don’t help to break porn addiction. Some of them might surprise you!
1. More sex or having sex. Many times single people hear that if they get married and have legitimate God-approved sex, they won’t struggle with temptation, lust, or porn. Unfortunately, that doesn’t usually happen. If you’ve built pathways in your brain for visual stimulation through porn, those urges don’t go away once you get married.
In fact, the myth that you can swap sex for porn has often put pressure on women to think that if they offer their husbands or partners more sex, they won’t be tempted to look at porn. It shames women into thinking that their husband’s porn addiction is their fault. It’s not!
Why does ‘more sex’ not work? It has a lot to do with novelty. Online porn is so addicting because you can click a button and see something different within a matter of seconds. Even more than the novelty piece, God created you for something even more profound than sex. Your soul longs for God, and no person or thing—not even sex—can meet that need for you.
2. Strict behavioral change. Changing outward behaviors without dealing with heart issues fails to address the underlying neurological piece of addiction. Addiction alters the brain’s reward pathways, and simply repeating new behaviors doesn’t change established neural circuits.
3. Control. Sometimes the offended partner takes the approach of monitoring the other person to try and get them to stop watching. The threat of betrayal or abandonment is real, and trying to control the other person’s behavior is an understandable response. But the addict isn’t experiencing heart change when they’re being monitored; they’re just afraid of getting caught—and shame keeps them in the addiction cycle anyway.
4. Making your spouse your accountability partner. There’s just too much at stake for both people. Each partner may view the problem differently—men are so visually stimulated, they may be able to compartmentalize and think that what they’ve done isn’t that bad. Whereas women are more relational when it comes to sex, and they feel betrayed and heartsick.
Husbands need to get into therapy or a support group where they can have accountability, where they’re challenged to learn about the unhealed wounds that led them into porn. It’s healthy for the wife to check in from time to time by asking how his recovery is going. She will benefit from therapy and outside support as well.
5. ‘White-knuckling’. Willpower alone isn’t enough. And the ‘willpower only’ approach can leave you helpless when you aren’t ‘strong’ enough to change. You may turn back to porn to deal with your hopelessness and shame, and now you’re in an addiction cycle.
Why Don’t These Approaches Work?
The answer has to do with 4 core beliefs of people who are addicted to pornography. Patrick Carnes, who has conducted groundbreaking research of pornography and sex addiction since the 1980s, discovered that almost every porn addict has the following 4 core beliefs:
I am a bad, unworthy person.
No one would love me as I am.
My needs are never going to be met if I have to depend on others.
Sex is my most important need.
You can probably sense how sad and tragic those beliefs are, especially compared to the way God intends for every human being to flourish. You can also understand why strict behavioral changes or willpower won’t free you from porn addiction. You can get filtering software on your phone or computer, but that software will not change the view you have of yourself.
You can get filtering software on your phone or computer, but that software will not change the view you have of yourself.
Thankfully, there are some strategies that can challenge and change those core beliefs. Lasting change won’t happen overnight, but over time, you will begin to have freedom from porn.
5 Ways to Break Free from Porn
1. Get curious about your own story. Ask questions like, “When did this addiction start? What was happening? What was it in response to?” Another word for your story is biography. And your biography says that this addiction was employed—yes, employed like you hired it to do a job for you—as a coping mechanism to address a wound in your soul.
Working on your story will get to the roots of this wound. As long as this ache or longing is not understood and recognized, and not brought into connection with yourself, other people, and most importantly, God, it will continue to fuel your addiction.
2. Practice being kind to yourself. This isn’t a fluffy suggestion—it has some teeth and strength to it. That’s because it describes the posture that God takes towards you. It says in Romans 2:4, “God’s kindness is meant to lead us towards repentance.” What brings you to repentance? Not browbeating, not nagging, not judgment, not kicking yourself with critical and negative self-talk, but kindness.
When you are addicted to porn, you usually hate the pleasure-seeking part of yourself that is addicted. You want that part to disappear. That is understandable, but unrealistic. What’s better is to be kind to the pleasure-seeking part of yourself. This is best done with the help of an experienced therapist. Once the pleasure-seeking part of yourself knows that you can find relief and comfort in other things, you are on your way to freedom.
3. Find someone who can accept you with all of your flaws. It’s unbelievably encouraging when you tell someone what you’re struggling with and they look at you and say, “Is that all you got? Me too.” They don’t flinch; they’re not shocked. Find people who encourage you to be yourself, people who will listen, who give and receive healthy and meaningful relational connection.
When you have this kind of support, then in those moments where there’s temptation, you can come to your senses and remember that you have support and someone who can help you. It’s about being seen. It’s about being known.
4. Start the practice of experiencing awe and reverence. You may immediately think about nature as a way to experience awe, but it can include everything from eating a really great meal to finding someone who is an expert in their field and watching them work their craft, like a carpenter or chef or athlete.
Why does this matter? When you experience awe and reverence and marvel at something like a sunrise or a glass-blowing demonstration, you are captured by a sense of wonder and beauty. You’re taken out of your own little world and overwhelmed by something bigger and grander and more marvelous. You’re noticing the sacred. And God created you to have these experiences.
The same process of awe and reverence and marveling at the beauty of God’s creation happens in and through sex. You don’t have to have sex to experience this and to long for it. That’s part of the appeal and the power of sex and sexuality. Porn conditions you to believe that you’re in control, that you get to choose who and what to consume. That’s a false belief, because in the end, it’s controlling you.
Porn conditions you to believe that you’re in control, that you get to choose who and what to consume. That’s a false belief, because in the end, it’s controlling you.
When you experience awe and reverence in other areas of life, it’s like coming out of a dream; the pathways that have lain dormant for so long are now awakened. You see the difference between empty, false pleasure and the beauty of real pleasure. It’s not a quick fix. But if you can slowly but surely incorporate true pleasure into your life, it will have a healthy impact on your sexuality.
5. Be in constant, authentic, genuine prayer. You don’t have to use a rehearsed prayer or try to say the ‘right’ things to God. You can be raw, authentic, and honest with God. He can handle whatever you bring to him. And your only hope of being lifted out of being lost in yourself is by bringing yourself to God for healing and redemption.
Breaking free is going to be a process. It’s going to take time. In fact, some people will say you never graduate from this program. You just continue to work it. As a team of counselors and pastors, our heart is for as many people as possible to experience the process of breaking free from porn. If you know someone that would benefit from this episode, please forward it to them. Thanks for hanging in there with us.
Catch up on the first two episodes of this mini-series:
Listen or Read: How Did I Get Addicted to Porn?
Listen or Read: The Connection Between Abuse and Porn Addiction
Related podcast episodes:
Listen: The Sex Talk You Never Got – our interview with Sam Jolman on healthy sexuality
Listen or Read: The Trauma of Betrayal and Infidelity – our interview with Matthew and Joanna Raabsmith on restoring a marriage broken by sexual sin
We recommend this book:
Suffering and the Heart of God: How Trauma Destroys and Christ Restores by Diane Langberg