The short podcast at this link gives some great perspective and advice on how to share your struggle with pornography with your spouse.

Here are a couple of points:

• Talk to someone “safe” first such as your pastor, a counselor or trusted friend
• It is better to tell your spouse than to be caught by them
• Honesty is the foundation of intimacy
• All of the gory details are not necessary
• Don’t unload on your spouse to ease your guilt, but to create openness and honesty
• Be prepared to receive their anger and don’t let that deter you from being honest
• Don’t wait for the perfect time – it will never arrive – it will always be awkward and difficult

The Emotional Cup diagram is reproduced with permission from Intimate Life Ministries

This diagram illustrates a concept called “Emotional Capacity.” The idea is that we can only hold so much emotion. Think of our emotional capacity as a cup. It is full of all sorts of different emotions. Some positive, some negative. The point is that when we are filled up with negative emotion, our ability to experience positive emotion is significantly diminished.

It is very important for us to go through whatever steps are necessary to drain our emotional cup of as much negative emotion as possible. In doing so, we greatly increase our capacity for positive emotions. Notice in the diagram that “Positive Emotions” only represents a small portion of the cup. As the other negative portions grow, the positive section shrinks. Conversely, as the negative portions are eliminated the positive capacity increases.

Another important point is that our cups are filled with some very OLD emotions that have settled way down to the bottom. Unless emotions are “emoted” (expressed, felt, experienced and validated) we will continue to carry them around. These emotions become breeding grounds for more negative feelings that bubble to the surface. When we are “squeezed” by life, all of the unhealthy things popping out of the top of the cup are what we get. (I think we know what that thing is for us who struggle with sexual integrity.) This is the “baggage” we have all heard about. We are all walking around with this junk lodged in our hearts.

This diagram and analogy has been EXTREMELY helpful to me in understanding the anthropology of addiction. We are humans and as such we are emotional creatures. Show me the coldest of people and I will show you someone with a full emotional cup; full of hurt, anger and fear that they have learned to shut themselves off to. In denying ourselves the opportunity to express negative emotion, we also rob ourselves of the joy of experiencing positive emotion. Addiction is a way to numb ourselves to the negative emotions we have been carrying around.

At the bottom of the cup notice there is HURT. We numb the pain with our addiction. It is the hurt, the pain, the negative emotions that fuel our addiction. It is not a flaw in us, it is our humanity straining to express itself; our silenced emotions crying out to be heard. That is why when we stop acting out we can feel so incredibly bad. After the numbing effect of acting out wears off, the emotions rise to the surface. The key is to feel them, express them, talk about them, and empty our souls of them. In doing so, we chip away at the bedrock of our addiction.

I know this is deep, but it very relevant to the process of recovery. Have you ever noticed how much better you feel about life when you feel good about yourself? Have you ever noticed how much better you feel when you confess you are struggling to someone else? Have you ever noticed how much better you feel when you forgive someone from the heart and stop carrying around the bitterness? You are experiencing this concept first-hand.

Let’s keep on this road so our lives can be as full of joy as possible. The Discussion Forum at The Purity Report is a great place to unload some of our negative emotions. It is meant to be a safe place for us to support one another in this endeavor.

Really take some time to study this diagram and ponder how the concept of emotional capacity has played out in your own life.

God Bless!

David Zailer posted an extremely good update to his blog today.

http://operationintegritydaily.blogspot.com/2010/08/recovering-healthy-relationship-with.html

Here are a few quotes from the article. They are in the context of doing a Step 4 inventory of our past sins.

No matter how we may rationalize it differently, our addictions have been destroying us. Part of the insanity of addiction is how we tend to minimize the damage that our addictions do.

…

We look ourselves over much like we would examine a part of our body that is hurting. We do it with care, in a nurturing way.

…

We need to understand that addictions grow because of self-centeredness. Addiction is not the cause of moral failings nor is it a moral failing in and of itself. Addiction, and any subsequent moral failings are caused by spiritual and emotional longings that have gone unmet. Because of this, it is critical that we see how we have contributed to our own spiritual and emotional deprivation. For you see, our addictions take hold of us as we seek to meet needs that we cannot meet and escape pain that is too much for us to handle on our own. Sadly, in addiction, the very things that we have used to escape our pain actually increase our pain. Then, addictions grow and deepen all the more.

We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

For God can use sorrow in our lives to help us turn away from sin and seek salvation. We will never regret that kind of sorrow. But sorrow without repentance is the kind that results in death. 2 Corinthians 7:10, NLT

“We can accept God’s good gifts too easily. Grace can be accepted only when we face our own inabilities. Forgiveness can be embraced only when we lay bare our wrongdoing, and hope can be imparted only when we face the reality of our own despair.” – Charles Ringma

Humility is an awareness that we are both imperfect and worthwhile at the same time. Humility is a high ground that traverses the bogs and swamps of grandiosity and self-hatred. Humility chooses to follow God’s plan over our own. When we live humbly, which we can be defined as consistently choosing God’s way of doing things over our own way of doing things, impossibly good things begin to happen to otherwise impossible people like us. We get turned inside out. Our attitude begins to change. Our outlook on life becomes healthier and more balanced. The destructive feelings we have had for ourselves will diminish. We will begin to see things differently. As we change on the inside, things around us begin to change as well. Life and the way we live it begin to make sense.

Humility is an acceptance of ourselves, sin and all. Humility helps us to see ourselves with one eye to evaluate and the other eye to appreciate. Humility admits to shortcoming and wrongdoing, then it reaches out and accepts the help that is needed to make serious changes. Humility helps us to understand the problems that we cannot solve on our own. This is why Jesus becomes increasingly important to us in our recovery. For you see, God never expects us to solve all of our problems on our own. He understands that our character defects and our addictions are beyond our ability to change. So, God offers to do for us what we can never do for ourselves. He offers to transform us by taking our character defects and, in exchange, replacing them with the character of Jesus. All we have to do to is to give up our character defects to Him and humbly receive Jesus’ character as God, according to His plan, builds it in us.

Insights and Inspirations for Christian Twelve Step Recovery

By David Zailer and The Men and Women of Operation Integrity

Chapter Seven Segment One

Copyright David Zailer, 2008

Operation Integrity

24040 Camino del Avion #A115

Monarch Beach CA 92629

1-800-762-0430

operationintegrity@cox.net

Being part of a recovery fellowship on an ongoing basis will provide us with many opportunities to hear others tell about how they have suffered because of their addictions and what it has been like for them to find recovery. One of the most incredible and amazing things that we will ever experience in a meeting is when someone shares how he or she has become grateful for having had addictions. In recovery, it is possible for the pain of our addictions to become a great motivator in our lives. Pain keeps us moving forward, compelling us to keep reaching out to find answers for the pain and troubles of life. As we recover, we find a very simple but profound solution. The solution is for us to want God, and what He has to give us, more than we want what we, or our addictions, can provide us. This new kind of God-given desire helps us to see that pain is not our enemy and we don’t need to run from it anymore. As we become wiling to face the day-to-day pains of life our pain and difficulties are transformed into powerful assets of learning and growth. Embracing pain as a learning opportunity brings us face to face with God’s work of redemption, a work that is only available to those who have the deep, pliable humility that soaks out of a desperate and dying pain.

We all seem to want more out of life than what we can provide for ourselves. Not only do we fail to supply ourselves with the things that we think will make us happy; our addictions prove that we fail to provide ourselves with a satisfying level of interpersonal and spiritual connectedness, too. We all fall short. We all fail to meet our own needs. By recognizing how we have failed to meet our own needs, no matter how hard we tried, we can see that the things that we’ve been addicted to are not our biggest problem. Our real problem is who we are. We are all in need of a complete, interpersonal overhaul, starting with the very core of our minds, our hearts and our innermost character.

Our addictions grow from a deep personal longing inside of us that silently cries out to be touched. When our deep longing goes untouched, we cry out all the more in ever deeper ways, craving with an ever-increasing intensity for more of the things that brought us relief in the past. This is how our addictions take hold of us. Deep-rooted painful feelings of uselessness, worthlessness and loneliness can be the triggers that send us back to our addictions time after time. With our longing unsatisfied, and after numerous and repeated attempts to do the right thing, invariably we fail, once again, falling ever deeper into our addictions. Desperate, over time, we become wholly and completely dissatisfied with who we are and with the way that we have lived our lives. Our good intentions and our failures have simmered together until, finally, with God’s help, we become entirely ready to be recreated into a fundamentally different kind of person. We are sick and tired of being sick and tired. We are convinced that we will never satisfy our own innermost needs. Staying the same is no longer acceptable to us. We want to be different. Deep in our hearts we know that if we do not humbly make the choice to change, we will eventually die still wallowing in our addictions.

This profound misery and discontent is the birth point of a new healthier desire – a desire based not on our previous loves or lusts, but more on a healthy and compelling desire, to experience new life inside of us. The pain of our addictions helps us to understand that we really don’t need things to change but it is the “I”, the “ME”, the “WE” that need to change. We are no longer satisfied with just being healed from our addictions. We want to have our complete and total self reformatted and changed by the perfect design of God.

Insights and Inspirations for Christian Twelve Step Recovery By David Zailer and The Men and Women of Operation Integrity Chapter Six Segment One Copyright David Zailer, 2008 Operation Integrity 24040 Camino del Avion #A115 Monarch Beach CA 92629 1-800-762-0430 operationintegrity@cox.net

I had to share this. It is from Lazaroo (www.lazaroo.com) a daily prayer devotional to which I subscribe. It is very relevant to the way I feel about my own struggle with porn addiction. Without it, I would not be the man I am today…

“Therefore I will make Samaria a heap of rubble, a place for planting vineyards. I will pour her stones into the valley and lay bare her foundations.” (Micah 1:6)

I’ve been there before, Jesus.

reduced to rubble all my stones poured into the valley

not one of them left stacked on another my foundations laid absolutely bare.

It may have been the hardest time of my life.

I fought it hated it

couldn’t escape it couldn’t understand it

I thought You had utterly forsaken me.

People wrote me off.

I wrote myself off.

But after all the agony, desperation and fireworks

I survived. I’m still here.

Looking back…

it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Now I know I have nothing to fear when they lay bare my foundations

so long as my Foundation

is You.

By Jonathan Daugherty

I’m going to do something an author really isn’t supposed to do when titling an article with a question. I’m going to give you the answer right up front (and keep my fingers crossed that you will still read the rest of the article).

Is purity for everyone?

No.

I have been working in full-time sexual purity ministry since 2003. In that amount of time I have heard the stories of thousands of individuals struggling with sexually addictive thoughts and behaviors. There are an unbelievable number of people carrying terrible shame and secrets of trauma and abuse that is truly unfathomable. Many shed tears. Some have memory loss and debilitating emotional problems. All have felt afraid, angry, lost, alone, weary, frustrated, hopeless and myriad other emotions. We offer help to all these people, yet only a few ever embrace a new life of purity.

There are many reasons (mostly excuses) why so many people carrying so much pain never find lasting freedom and peace from their addictive lifestyle. The most common reason is because they remain fixated on their circumstance, convincing themselves that in order for them to live a life of purity, their situation must change. Maybe their spouse is threatening a divorce or a boss is dangling a pink slip in front of their nose. Whatever the case, those who don’t ultimately experience long-lasting freedom have found a reason (however fickle and false) to return to the dungeon of lust and self-centeredness. (keep in mind, this is a generality based on thousands of cases; there are always exceptions…)

But are these the reasons why I say “no” to the question, “Is purity for everyone?” Not really. The reasons above (namely, believing circumstantial change, rather than personal change, will bring about a life of purity) are only one side of the coin of why purity isn’t for everyone. The other side, I believe, is a much more basic, spiritual reason of why purity isn’t for everyone. Purity is only possible for those in right relationship with God.

Recovery programs that only focus on correcting and managing behaviors are not understanding the true essence of purity. True purity is a condition of the heart, the inside of a person, not merely how a person chooses to use their body. To deny the reality of a spiritual need in sexual addiction recovery is to miss the point entirely. A person is pure when they are pure all the way through. How then does one achieve this sort of purity? Only from God.

God uses a particular word to describe his own attribute of purity: holiness. God is holy, perfect and pure in every aspect of his being. God created mankind in his image, breathing into Adam something of the essence of himself. Therefore, Adam and Eve were holy; pure and perfect in their original design. Then (you know the story) sin entered the world through their disobedience, and spiritually Adam and Eve (and the rest of humanity to follow) were stained, broken, impure. Man’s pride marred God’s holy creation.

Thankfully, God didn’t abandon his creation. He made a way for humanity to be restored, to be made new in spirit. He sent Jesus Christ to pay the penalty we deserved for our pride and sinfulness, thus erasing our debt and exchanging it for his life in us. And the only requirement of us to receive this indescribable gift is faith, simply trusting in Jesus. In that moment of faith, God restores our spirit to his original design for us. He breathes life anew into our darkened spirit and the holiness of God pours in. In this new state, we are now able to understand and even partake in a whole new life of purity, true purity that is based on God’s character and holiness, not our own.

So, do behavior modification techniques have any value in sexual addiction recovery? Of course they do. We each have a will, even if we have no relationship with God. But no person can experience the fullness of true purity apart from a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. And, ironically, even those of us who do have a relationship with God still have a choice: fully trust God and embrace his life-transforming grace or trust in our own intellect and effort to attempt to do what only God can do through us.

Purity, therefore, is only for those who 1) Know God through faith in Jesus and 2) Lay down their pride and let God have his way in revealing His holiness (i.e. purity) through them.

Final question: Is a life of purity for you?

Reproduced with permission from Be Broken Ministries. © 2006-2009 Be Broken Ministries and its licensors. All rights reserved.

The folks at XXXChurch.com have a good post about confession on their couples blog today. I am reposting it here.

Websters describes confession as such:1 a:an act of confessing a disclosure of one’s sin in the sacrament of reconciliation.

Confession is an amazing gift given to us by God in order to acknowledge or wrongful actions.  Just being able to confess something to him can make you feel like a load of bricks have been lifted off of your shoulders.  Just look at some of the confessions on the xxxchurch.com website and you will notice that many feel great relief in doing so.  The feeling of getting something out into the open can be such relief to your soul.

The only problem with many of us is that once we have confessed our sins to God that is all we do.  So many of us, me included have confessed our sin of pornography and our affairs with it many times.  I had confessed so many times to God that it was now becoming routine with all of the confessions running into one another.  Confession is an awesome gift given to everyone.  The only thing is what do you do after that?  For me I would usually be good for little bit then turn right back around and dive head first into the sinful nature of looking at porn instead of removing it from my life like I had told God I wanted to do.

Year after year my addiction kept getting more and more out of hand.  Time after time, I kept confessing to Him about this. The thing is I was only confessing to God and not to anyone else around me who I had destroyed if they could see it or not. As a married man I needed to confess my struggles to my wife and ask for her forgiveness.  As a leader of a small group I needed to confess this sin to them asking for their forgiveness.  Some day when my children understand I will once again have to confess this to them as well and ask for their forgiveness.  Some may think why would I have to ask this of my children.  The thing is porn took me down so many dark road that I ended up spending more time with porn than I did my own children.  For me I will not have closure of this sin until I do this.

The point is that confession between you and God is good and needed but, unless you confess to others around you it will be next to imposable to remove this sin from your life.  Maybe you have noticed that 99.9% of the people who have gotten over this addiction did so by confessing to others as well as God.  You will also notice that most of their stories reflectupon a time when they confessed to God and no one else spending more time in their sin.

If you are struggling with pornography and want out please confess it to God and then to another person who will help hold you accountable.  If you know your spouse or someone else is trapped by this sin please talk to them about it.  Do not be the one who sits by and watches as they flush their life, marriage, or career down the toilet.

If you are looking for resources to help please look at the resource pages at xxxchurch.com. If your a wife whose husband is struggling with this issue and would like to talk to someone who understands what you are going through please visit the Partners For Purity web site.  They have been were you are now and can help you heal in this process as well.

After being in recovery for a while, you realize that addiction of any sort, porn/sexual addiction included, is an attempt to meet legitimate needs through illegitimate means. The way we define sexual addiction on the Higher-Calling.com FAQ further explains this perspective.

With that in mind, I have come to believe that temptation to engage in acting out behavior is like the check engine light on the dashboard of my car. The pull toward pornography is an indicator that I need to check under the hood.

In recovery terms, this is known as identifying your triggers. The acronym HALT is a well-known list of common triggers (Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired). This article further explains HALT.

It is very helpful to identify triggers in two categories: visual/physical or emotional. HALT identifies two physical triggers (hungry or tired) and two emotional triggers (angry or lonely). Seeing a person or picture with certain physical attributes or wearing specific clothing can visually trigger arousal.

Emotional triggers are much more difficult to identify. In part this is because addicts are generally not connected to their emotional selves and therefore have a hard time identifying and expressing their emotions. Shame is probably the most powerful triggering emotion for addicts. Often confused with guilt, which is the negative feeling tied to wrong behavior, shame is a much deeper sense that we are fundamentally worthless and unacceptable. Anything that triggers our shame is sure to kick off a strong pull to act out.

Being aroused by certain physical/visual or even emotional stimulus is not abnormal. However, addicts take it a step further and engage in acting out behavior. Acting out repeatedly over time hard-wires our brains to associate arousal of any sort with our acting out behaviors. All arousal, regardless of the trigger, leads us to the same place.

Coming back to our metaphor, these triggers are glaring check engine lights on the dashboard of our consciousness. They indicate places where we may need to grow, establish accountability, forgive ourselves or others, or simply confess past sins in a safe place. The point is to not let the “service required” indicator go unnoticed.

Take a few minutes to reflect on what is going on under the hood the next time you are triggered to act out. It is an essential element of keeping the engine of our sobriety running smoothly.

Brian and Darcy on the Couple’s Blog at XXXChurch.com just posted a bit of their story. It is really worth the read; both as a wife or a man struggling with porn addiction.

Thank you Brian and Darcy for being so open about what God has brought you through. Your courage is inspiring and your transparency will help a lot of people begin opening up about their own struggles.