CASTIMONIA

Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

Character Defects

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We Are All Wired For Affairs Part II

I do not necessarily believe that we are “all wired for affairs” but found this information interesting.

older-couple-angry-in-bedThe unsuspecting jilted spouse usually senses a problem when an affair begins. For one thing, an affair usually takes up quite a bit of time, and all sorts of excuses are given to be away from home — having to work late, impulsive trips to the store and unexplained absences from work — they all become more and more difficult to believe. Telephone records and credit card receipts are carefully hidden, for if they are found, they will often reveal the scope of the affair. When the spouses are together, an emotional distance usually prevails. Sex is almost always a problem for women who are having an affair, and many men having an affair find they cannot make love to their wives, either. In many cases, intimacy in marriage becomes so bad that a separation is requested to “sort things out.” An affair is often suspected by the jilted spouse, but almost always vigorously denied by the offending spouse. It usually takes solid evidence… to get an unfaithful spouse to admit the truth. I’ve seen so many spouses lie about affairs, that when one spouse wants a separation, my best guess is that he or she is having an affair. I’m right almost every time. Why would anyone need to be alone to sort things out? It makes much more sense to think that being separated makes it easier to be with their lover. Granted, there are many good reasons for a separation, such as physical or extreme mental abuse. But of all those I’ve seen separate, most have had lovers in the wings. Since an affair usually creates emotional distance between spouses, lovers describe their increasing dissatisfaction with their marriages. They talk about how incompatible they are in marriage and how compatible they are with each other. The addiction they have for each other turns the relationship into a passion that makes an eternal relationship with each other an absolute necessity. Many would rather commit suicide together than to return to their horrible spouses. “Coping With Infidelity” by Willard F. Harley, Jr., Ph.D http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi5059_qa.html

“A love affair is like a short story– it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well-knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Former ‘Scandal Queen’ Donna Rice Hughes on Becoming a Voice of Decency and Morality

Coming home:
Former ‘scandal queen’ Donna Rice Hughes on becoming a voice of decency and morality
by Marvin Olasky
http://www.worldmag.com/2013/01/coming_home/page1

hughes_1Late in 1987, the frontrunner for the following year’s Democratic nomination for president was Sen. Gary Hart. Reporters asked him about rumors of extramarital affairs, and he dared reporters to follow him. Two Miami Herald reporters staked out Hart’s Washington townhouse and saw Donna Rice, 29, going in one night and coming out the next morning. The National Enquirer soon after front-paged a photo of her sitting on Gary Hart’s lap. Seven years later Rice married Jack Hughes and joined the anti-pornography group Enough Is Enough: Today she is its CEO.

You grew up in Christian settings? From middle school up through high school and college I was very involved in youth group and choir. I was a summer missionary through the Southern Baptist Association and I dated Christian guys. I was really like a poster child for “good Southern Christian girl.”

When you graduated in 1980—a magna cum laude biology major at the University of South Carolina—did you know what you wanted to do next? I really was not sure. I knew I wanted to make a difference.

What happened over the next seven years? Toward the end of my college career, I started making these little left turns. Before long I was dating some non-Christian guys and thought, “That’s not a big deal.” As soon as I graduated I lost my virginity when I was date-raped by one of those non-Christian guys. I was Miss South Carolina in the Miss World pageant and was on my way to New York. That was the catalyst. I went radically prodigal for seven years.

It started with subtle compromises? It’s hard to believe how you can go from here to there—you don’t go there overnight, you go there by little wrong choices. I saw Hart only twice—but all that said, God had been trying to get my attention prior to that, and it took an international sex scandal because I was stubborn. God will track you down. He will let things happen, the natural consequences of our choices.

So suddenly you’re infamous: What happened then? It was a year and a half of hell. I had been a model, so all these old bathing suit pictures of me were popping up on covers of magazines all over the world. I was being called names you wouldn’t believe. Playboy said we’ll do an interview—it will start at a million dollars and go up, depending on what you’re willing to say.

You did the one commercial for No Excuses jeans—and what about the other temptations? I was offered some of the things I had wanted. The chairman of CBS saw me on Barbara Walters’ show and said, “Do you want to do drama, news, daytime, nighttime, whatever?” Millions of dollars thrown my way, blank checks at times, a lot of exploitive things—and over here God saying, “Come home.” I started taking baby steps back to the Lord. There were no good role models of women who had been in situations like this whose reputations had been restored and redeemed. So I started my journey back to the Lord and went underground for seven years.

Where did you go to get away from this? I hid in plain sight, living in Northern Virginia with a family, taking care of a disabled lady. Eventually I moved to California and started a production company, but moved back to the Washington area, planning to get married, and took a job with Enough Is Enough as communications director.

You’ve now been at it for almost two decades. Give us a two-minute education in the current pornography problem. Nine out of 10 kids have seen pornography on the internet. The pornographers put free pictures and free videos and everything else on the internet in order to get people to come to their site and get hooked on the material before they ever get charged for it. We have today, in this country, absolutely no regulation with respect to softer-core material. The harder-core material, including sex acts or any deviant material like bestiality, group sex, and rape, violence, everything else, is prosecutable for adults as well as for minor children.

But those laws aren’t enforced. They’re not, so it’s freely available for anyone, including kids. Then there is child pornography showing a child who’s being abused. It’s a huge business on the internet, and kids as well as adults have free and easy access to that as well.

The battle against sex trafficking is a strong priority for a lot of college students, but is “pornography” a cold topic right now? Yes, but pornography fuels the trafficking business: Someone gets hooked on it and wants to have the sexual experiences he’s seeing. Most anyone who’s been trafficked is appearing in pornography on the internet, and that fuels more and more of the behavior—a vicious cycle.

A lot of folks say, “Sure, I’m against something involving children, but with consenting adults it’s a private matter.” Why is it a public matter? The Witherspoon Institute has gathered the evidence of the harms against men and women from the addiction standpoint and how this fuels sexual abuse. There has been a rise in sex crimes by children against other children imitating what they’ve seen in pornography. Brain science is showing how this affects the chemicals in your brain: These images get so imprinted that it’s very hard to get them out of your mind and experience any type of sexual satisfaction without that material. There’s a whole epidemic of young men who are using Viagra because they are having trouble relating to their wives because of pornography. There is a big trend now with business people losing their jobs: About 40 percent of people who are sex addicts lose their jobs because of their addiction. They can’t stop, and then of course you’ve got acting out.

If you hadn’t visited Gary Hart in Washington and painfully become the center of a sex scandal, do you think you would have continued in the mistaken course you had set over the seven years since graduating from college? I really don’t know. Prior to going up to Washington, where The Miami Herald followed me, I had made a deal with God. I had said, “I just need to have one more conversation with this person, and then I’m coming back to you, Lord.” I hope I would have done that—but who knows? Oddly, I was Miss Scandal Queen 1987 and now I’m seen as this voice of decency and morality. That’s a God thing.

Copyright © 2013 God’s World Publications. All rights reserved.

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Hall and Oates helped me remember the problem….

ImageHall and Oates helped me remember the problem….
by Escape from Porn
Posted December 27, 2012

Shot this picture the other days while checking out at my local grocery store.  I knew I would use it in a post, but couldn’t formulate the words until just last night.  While driving home from a Christmas trip with my family I heard an old 80′s tune from Hall and Oats called, “Method of Modern Love”.  While I know what the song deals with, I instantly recalled my magazine cover.  As the world we live in becomes more and more pornified, there is more and more attention given to the mechanics of sex rather than the emotional intimacy side.  The world would have us master the art of “mind blowing” sex, rather than the art of communication and emotional intimacy and honesty.

In my recovery from daily viewing of porn and masturbation, I have found that striving to commit my thoughts and actions 100% to my spouse, the resulting levels of emotional intimacy are far more satisfying than the “EPIC SEX” the world would tell me I am missing out on.  Sex isn’t about the M-E-T-H-O-D but about honesty and communication.  The euphoria and resulting levels of physical intimacy I enjoy now are far more lasting than the temporary thrills and rush of dopamine I use to indulge in.  Pornography is a cheap counterfeit for the genuine love I feel now.

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Watching Porn Kills Masculinity

Watching Porn Kills Masculinity
http://intentionalwarriors.com/2012/12/11/watching-porn-kills-masculinity/

The New York Times recently ran this piece on the popularity of the Tough Mudder, an endurance race that combines running a certain distance with the challenge of overcoming very demanding obstacles.

The Tough Mudder forces participants to conquer countless obstacles which involve things such as low-level electrical shocks and endless cold mud.

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While women run these races, the majority of participants are men.  And often, they are men who have stressful corporate jobs which are far removed from the physical demands of life.

The races are overwhelmingly popular. According to the article, the organizers of the Tough Mudder will rake in $70 million this year.

So what is the relationship to pornography?

The connection is masculinity and the warrior nature.  The Tough Mudder is a testament to the warrior nature of men. The races thrive because men need to express their warrior nature.  They must have a battle to fight. They must be tested by a demanding situation or experience.

Pornography is a counterfeit masculine experience.

In the Tough Mudder, the true aspects of being a warrior are called forth through real challenges and legitimate obstacles.  Something is actually required of you and when you pass the test there is honest achievement.  Pornography is exactly the opposite.

Pornography makes you feel like a man without actually being one.  There is nothing in pornography that is a legitimate calling forth of masculinity or the warrior nature.

And yet, when you’re into porn you think it’s masculine. You think you are acting on the strength of the warrior within.

It’s a lie.

Porn emasculates men, makes them more passive than they already are — or makes them more out of control and destructive, depending on the man’s personality — and it give you a false sense of achievement and purpose.

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Codependency: A Family Perspective Part V

Codependency: A Family Perspective Part V

The following are statements which portray relationally addictive people(#19-25):

19. Our self-esteem is critically low. Deep inside we do not believe we deserve to be happy. Rather, we believe we must earn the right to enjoy life. We forget that we were all created equal and by the same maker.
20. Having experienced little security in childhood, we have a desperate need to control people, outcomes, and relationships. We mask our efforts to control people and situations as “being helpful.”
21. In a relationship we are more in touch with our dream of how it could be rather than with the reality of how it is. We don’t want to hear the little voice inside that tells us what is!
22. We are addicted to a person, people, and/or to emotional pain. This is not because we enjoy pain, but it is familiar; we understand it; it is all we know.
23. We may be emotionally and/or biochemically predisposed to addictions to substances, food, gambling, sex, etc.
24. Drawn to people with problems or to chaotic, uncertain, or emotionally painful situations, we avoid focusing on our responsibility to ourselves: to become all of the potential we were given!
25. Since we have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, it is easier to be concerned with others rather than with ourselves. This prevents us from looking at our ourselves. We give away our personal power!
From “Codependency: A Family Perspective” by Robin Norwood