Porn Addiction Breaks a Marriage
Porn Addiction Recovery
Relationship Restoration
Betrayal Trauma Recovery
What will you do
as your relationship comes crashing down around you?
Risks and Costs of Porn Use
Addiction: You lose your self-control. You no longer have sovereignty over your own mind, heart, and body. Life becomes subject to porn. The developers of porn sites use their knowledge of addiction, much like a casino entices gamblers to take ever-increasing risks. Addiction can be easily stimulated with reinforcements like pop-ups, and ever-increasing need for a fix, drawing the user progressively deeper.
Brain Re-wiring: Your brain ties certain beliefs and experiences together, creating likes, dislikes, beliefs, and habits. This wiring together creates a unique you...Porn alters who you are, from the inside out by rewiring your brain to be hungry for porn. The result--compulsion. You have lost control.
Relationships: The typical outcome is a permanently damaged and altered relationship. In the worst cases, it is totally destroyed.
Your Family: Imagine the impact of discovery of your porn use on your children...will you loose your moral authority to teach and protect your kids in order to keep porn in your life? Is the cost worth it to you?What will your daughters think? How will you coach your son to be a respectful husband?
Sexual Dysfunction: Porn use can dramatically effect your sexual performance, leading to Erectile Dysfunction. Reinforce and re-traumatize any effects from childhood abuse you may have suffered, or produce dissatisfaction with your spouse and lack of arousal.
Alters your Love Map: Exposure to extreme sexual content can alter your sex map. The slippery slope of enticement can draw you into arousal over children, same-sex.
Loss of Self-esteem: You already know the shame that porn use brings. If it isn't shaming, you would not hide it. Shame can quickly become toxic, destroying you from the inside out. The evidence is irritability, anger, lying, and blame-shifting. Porn reshapes your core self-identity.
Your Job: Porn drives risky behavior. Accessing porn at work, or on work computers can result in embarrassing confrontation, even termination. How will you explain that to your wife and prospective new employer?
Your Reputation: Church, work, family, friends, and others who look to you to lead will quickly distance themselves from trusting you when this addiction is revealed. People erroneously equate porn with perversion.
Supporting Human Trafficking and Sex Abuse: Online porn only exists because there is an audience. Many of those you use to get off are forced by economic conditions, forced by human traffickers, sold by parents, or are acting out shame from childhood abuse. Your use contributes to this evil, regardless of your denial. No mentally intact person dreams of growing up to be objectified and used in this way.
Your porn use has been discovered, and now you face the consequences
The primary struggle in dealing with porn use and managing relationship conflict is the difference in perception of the nature of porn use in a marriage between men and women.
Men tend to view porn as an activity that is not emotionally connected to a person, and is so familiar, a long-term habit used for self-soothing, that they fail to see the very real threat to their relationship, or even to themselves. To most men, porn use is no different than a few beers to relax after work, or a cigarette after a meal or when anxious. This belief is reinforced by years of excuses and social reinforcement from other men. This removes the barriers that normally exist that prevent otherwise good husbands from straying into cheating with others.
Women tend to view porn as actual cheating. They instinctively seem to know that while the man is using porn, the intimacy and trust in the relationship is under attack. Even more powerful is the faulty belief that they themselves have done, or failed to do, something that caused their man to stray. This thinking error combines with the hurt of betrayal to causes the relationship to be put into doubt.
As with most marriage conflict, the fight that ensues becomes focused on wining the argument. Lost is the actual underlying issue, the hurt that results from damage to the core of the relationship--trust. When a couple argues, they usually enter a battle dominated with circular reasoning and the transmission of points of view. Frequently, these arguments are energized by harsh words, raised voices, strong inflections, and mutual criticisms. The result, more pain, and seldom a cooperative solution.
The unfortunate truth remains that most people are terrible at conflict management and negotiating a mutual solutions. Instead, we dig in our heals and insist on our point of view, because we have come to believe it it the right one. Or, we defend out faulty point of view as a reflex to being attacked and not wanting to admit we are wrong. Regardless, the fight simply winds up, causes more hurt, fizzles out when energies are depleted, and then comes back later when re-triggered.
To stop the useless fight, and actually get on with healing, both sides need to learn how to stay connected, even when pain is present. The damage to your relationship is already done. Rather than add to it, learn how to come back from it. Conjoint Therapy and Porn Recovery Counseling teaches you how to stop fighting each other, and instead, focus on fighting for your restoration as a couple.