MINIMIZING – THE LIES WE TELL OTHERS AND OURSELVES
As a missionary I felt like I was in a double bind. I couldn’t continue to go back to pornography time after time, yet I didn’t know who I could talk with about this dark, dirty secret I had been hiding for years. Finally I was at a conference with fellow missionaries. One of our speakers was himself a former missionary and he spoke on how all of us are tempted and on the need to confess our sins in order to find healing. Later that day I asked him if we could talk in private. We sat down at a table in the hotel where we were staying and I opened up with him about my compulsive sin. And I remember saying that if I ever told my wife what I had been doing, she would be devastated.
So when I finally worked up the courage to confess my involvement with porn to my wife, I knew, but I didn’t know, how hard this would be on her. I thought that it would hurt her something like 97 or 98 on a scale from 1 to 100. The truth is her pain and sense of betrayal were more like 1000 on a scale from 1 to 100. I had been warned that she would take it hard and that the recovery process would be slow. But when I finally had to face it head on, it was all much more severe than I had ever imagined.
In one way this is not surprising because I had become a master at minimizing my “problem”. I didn’t even call what I did pornography. I just looked at pictures of women without their clothes on. Every man likes that, right? Women are beautiful right? Isn’t the human body a form of art? I don’t know if that was me lying to me or the devil lying to me, but it certainly wasn’t the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I discovered that most of my recovery from this sin involved replacing the lies with the truth. I was blessed by finding a support board where guys went to talk about their addiction to pornography and to help each other beat this ugly beast. And one section of that board was reserved for the “partners”, i.e. wives and girlfriends who went to talk about how they were dealing with this great tragedy.
I used to pride myself by saying that I had never cheated on my wife and that I had never so much as flirted with another woman. Well this is what one of those ladies on the support board wrote back to me in this regard: “If you’ve logged on and viewed pornography in your home, you have cheated at home, You have brought your porn girlfriends into your home. You did not go to a strip club, instead you brought a parade of strippers and prostitutes right in your home to perform for your viewing pleasure in private.
Porning is way worse than flirting. You are having mental and emotional sex with those women just as if they are right in front of you. You cheated with hundreds or even thousands of women behind your wife’s back. It sounds like you want to play it down so it won’t sound so bad. You are just as bad as all the other guys who cheat on their wives in whatever form they do it. Adultery is adultery. Calling it pornography doesn’t make it not adultery.”
That’s exactly how my wife felt. Her storybook marriage was over. She had never “signed up” for any of this. We met at Bible college. I was preparing to be a missionary. How could she ever have imagined that I would be cheating on her behind her back over and over again? She told me that it was totally unfair for me to put her in this situation. I created this horrible problem and now she had to go to a counselor for therapy. She went to a doctor to get medication. She had to read books on betrayal and porn addiction.
Yet, because of her love for me and her love for the Lord she did all of that and more. We did not work through our problems in a matter of weeks or months. It took a few years. If I recall correctly it took her between five and six months to say out loud for the first time, “I forgive you.” Those were sweet words to my ears, but not easy for her to say.
And through it all I did my best to do my part. Of course my first job was and is to remain clean and pure. But I also learned that she was going through the stages of grief. Anger is one of those stages. I learned that anger comes in waves. The waves can be huge and destructive, but before you know it they pass by and calmer seas return. I learned to say time after time: “You are right. I am sorry. Please forgive me.”
And since she didn’t want just a bunch of empty words I tried to show her my love through my actions. I would get up early and make her breakfast. Sometimes she didn’t even want me to touch her, but when she would let me, I would massage her feet. I washed dishes and washed the clothes. I did whatever I could think of to show her that she could count on me and that I was there to be her friend and her partner.
Those darkest days are now over ten years behind us. Our love for each other is deeper and stronger than ever. We both made a choice to stick together and beat this together with the Lord’s help. It wasn’t always easy. But it sure has been worth it. Love is better than hate. Love perseveres. And that’s our strategy from here on out.
By Hugh Houston, author of the new book: JESUS IS BETTER THAN PORN: How I Confessed my Addiction to My Wife and Found a New Life. Available on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DMF6ZQS
