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Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

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Pocket Porn: Nearly a third of teens carry portable X-rated theaters

by Frank Honess

http://purelifepodcast.wordpress.com/2014/05/15/frankhonessgmail-com/

Jeff first saw porn when he was seven years old when he came upon a Playboy magazine. By fifth grade, the Internet became a main source of pornography for his young mind. As technology advanced, so did his obsession. But it was his iPod, and later his iPhone, that gave him such easy access.

The days of the X-rated movie theater may be nearly over, but unfortunately, many teens and young adults today are carrying around an adult theater in their pocket. Last year, US Internet users crossed a threshold. According to what is possibly the largest porn website in the world, now more than half (52%) of US porn use is coming from smartphones—yes, the majority of those who access porn in the United States are doing so from a mobile device.

Sadly, many teens are joining the ranks of mobile porn viewers. Today, 31% of 14-17-year-olds own a smartphone, and with no restrictions, smartphones can access graphic hardcore pornography with ease.

The Downward Spiral of Technology

Jeff describes his childhood introduction to the Internet as an “‘instant,’ vast, and deep hole.” Once online, he would look at anything and everything his fifth-grade mind could find. He soon discovered AOL Instant Messenger and the ability to sex chat with strangers. Peer-to-peer networks gave him access to vast amounts of porn, but with the invention of Flash and broadband Internet, his access to videos became even easier in middle school and high school.

Finally, his sophomore year of college, he got an iPod for his birthday. Jeff could lay in bed and watch porn with his headphones on while his roommate sat at the other end of the room unaware.

Realizing the depth of his addiction, he would attempt some sobriety, but these were short-lived seasons of success.

The summer after graduation, Jeff got an iPhone 4 with 3G access, and the pit got deeper and deeper.

Generation XXX

Talking to today’s college students, we know digital access to porn in the teenage years is not a new thing. More than 90% today’s college men and more than 60% of college women in the US saw porn before the age to 18. For most men (51%) their initial exposure to porn came before their teenage years (a third of women say the same).

Moreover, young men and women are not just consuming porn—they are becoming porn. Conservative estimates say about 20% of 16-year-olds and 30% of 17-year-olds have received a sext (sexually explicit text message) from someone else. Teens use Snapchat to send nude images of themselves—with the false hope that the image cannot be saved. Boyfriends and girlfriends use Skype to masturbate in front of their webcams for each other. Teens can use Tumblr or Facebook to post leaked sexting photos of their peers. Ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends are even posting sexual images of their ex online—a phenomenon called “revenge porn.” Sexual images like this are often a catalyst for “slut shaming.”

The Need for Mobile Accountability

Now more than ever, parents and schools need to broaden their approach to Internet safety.

  1. Both parents and schools need to be proactively teaching teens about the negative impact of pornography. Programs like Fight the New Drug are coming to schools nationwide, teaching teens about negative health effects of porn compared to healthy human sexuality.
  2. Both parents and schools need to recognize the problem with the anonymity of mobile pornography. Schools need to think hard about the devices they distribute to their students. Do school-issued iPadshave access to porn both on and off school grounds? Does that iPod touch parents purchased for Christmas have protective restrictions?
  3. Parents need to take a leading role in encouraging an environment of loving accountability in the home, showing sympathy for present struggles (if there are any) while setting appropriate limits on what should and should not be accessed on mobile devices. Accountability software should be installed on all mobile devices with a clear expectation that there is no room for privacy when it comes to harmful content online. (By the way, if you use Covenant Eyes Internet Accountability, you can now use our Android app to lock down other apps, like unmonitored browsers.)

Like Father, Like Son

Jeff isn’t the only one in his family impacted by pornography. His father, George, was also a porn addict—all while pastoring a church.

Jeff remembers his father catching him with porn when he was young and being punished for it. He also remembers the day when he was 18 years old—the day George confessed to him, his mom, and his siblings that he had an addiction to porn and had been wrapped in an affair. A few days later George resigned from his Senior Pastor position. “First he was my dad who punished me for looking at porn,” Jeff says. “Then he was the hypocrite who failed his family.”

After Jeff graduated college he moved in with his parents. After many valiant efforts to quit looking at pornography, and after a stint of victory, one day he found himself stressed out about an upcoming job interview. The stress triggered in his mind a desire to return to his old release valve of porn. He binged all afternoon and evening, and by that night he was sitting under the heavy weight of his shame.

Then a still small voice reminded him: “You know, your dad can help you with this, and he’s just at the end of the hall.” At this point in his life, Jeff still hated his father for the grief he put his family through, but he finally gave in and knocked on his father’s door.

I expected the man from my childhood to tell me how horrible I was and how guilty I should feel. Instead I was saw a man I had never met before. He told me how sorry he was. He offered to pray for me and encouraged me towards Jesus with the Gospel. I cried so hard that night, but I found so much peace. That began a healing work in the relationship between me and my father. It has taken almost four years, but he is now my sponsor, and we talk every day—if anything, just to check in. I am very thankful for him.

Source: Covenant Eyes | Photo Credit: johnragai

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Afraid of Love

Real love makes us feel vulnerable. A new relationship is uncharted territory, and most of us have natural fears of the unknown. Letting ourselves fall in love means taking a real risk. We are placing a great amount of trust in another person, allowing them to affect us, which makes us feel exposed and vulnerable. Our core defenses are challenged. Any habits we’ve long had that allow us to feel self-focused or self-contained start to fall by the wayside. We tend to believe that the more we care, the more we can get hurt. When we enter into a relationship, we are rarely fully aware of how we’ve been impacted by our history. The ways we were hurt in previous relationships, starting from our childhood, have a strong influence on how we perceive the people we get close to as well as how we act in our romantic relationships. Old, negative dynamics may make us wary of opening ourselves up to someone new. We may steer away from intimacy, because it stirs up old feelings of hurt, loss, anger or rejection. As Dr. Pat Love said in an interview with PsychAlive, “when you long for something, like love, it becomes associated with pain,” the pain you felt at not having it in the past.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/compassion-matters/201401/7-reasons-most-people-are-afraid-love Read more from Dr. Lisa Firestone at http://www.psychalive.org/author/dr-lisa-firestone/

Love takes off masks
that we fear we
cannot live without
and know we cannot
live within.
James Arthur Baldwin

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Triggers and Healing

Originally posted at – http://joyfulheartfoundation.org/blog/1in6-thursday-triggers-and-healing

1in6 Thursday: Triggers and Healing
By Randy Ellison

 “A trigger is something that sets off a memory tape or flashback, transporting the person back to the event of his/her original trauma. The survivor may begin to avoid situations and stimuli that they think triggered the flashback. They may react to this flashback, trigger with an emotional intensity similar to that at the time of the trauma. A person’s triggers are activated through one or more of the five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.”1

I have had over five years of therapy, speak publically at least twice a month, write over two dozen articles a year and hear from survivors every day, yet I still find I get emotionally triggered at times. We moved back to Portland recently and I found a street near our apartment that made my stomach get in a knot every time I drove there. There is a retirement center on that street where my abuser took me once. I waited in the car while he went in. I don’t remember what happened before or after that stop, but whatever it was, it wasn’t good. The memory makes me feel like someone else’s property. A thing.

Since my realization, I have made it a point to go to the coffee shop across the street from that center to change how I feel about being in that place on earth and to take back my power. I don’t want him to own that space or me. 

Two days ago, my wife and I drove to the Oregon Coast. She drove a route that took us through Corvallis where we both attended college. I originally went there six months after my abuse ended. I have discussed this period in my life with my therapist and written about it in my book, but when we drove down that road I went to a place I did not remember. I felt overwhelming despair and oppression. Even my breathing became shallow. I don’t think in all my recovery work I have ever really gotten in touch with just how disconnected I was, with no direction or grounding, and completely out of control. In hindsight understanding that explains a lot.

It turns out that one of my longest standing triggers (and most destructive) has been my aversion to people who I perceive have power over me. I have changed careers six times. Each time I felt like power was being used over me, I literally walked away from everything, including moving my family to a different town. 

I recently found myself in a similar situation and, with the help of some loving friends and family, I changed my response. I sat down with the person in power and told them how it made me feel and then a true miracle happened. I set limits. I told them what I needed going forward. I actually protected myself in a healthy way. 

Remember in the first paragraph how there is a tendency for survivors to avoid activities that trigger their trauma? In my life, I want to identify my triggers so I can learn to change the outcomes. There are places no one should have to go, especially without support. Safety is critical to address these issues. For me it feels like the right time, and I have the need to go back to reclaim my life. I need those pieces to feel whole again. A healing journey leads to hope and grace.  May it be so.

1 PsychCentral. “What is a Trigger?”  http://psychcentral.com/lib/what-is-a-trigger/0001414.

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Difficult Emotions – Peace in Anxiety

by applyingmybeliefs

Phil 4:6-7 – Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.  ESV

Guiding Commentary – The days of those of us who have been harmed by the actions of another person are often peppered with difficult emotions.  Possibly the most challenging is anxiety.  We can all probably relate to the thought that anxiety seems to pop up in our life when we least expect it.  Our anxiety gets triggered by seemingly innocuous objects, places, smells, sounds or visual stimuli.  Often we are the only person we know who feels anxiety in certain situations.  Anxiety is a giant reality in our lives that sometimes moves us into panic attacks.  Anxiety is a major problem that debilitates and depresses us, and until the anxiety attack passes, we can’t function well, if at all.

Jesus in His Sermon on the Mount singled out anxiety as something He knew was unhealthy for us.  (Mt 6:24-34)  In our focus verses the apostle Paul, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit speaks to this issue again.

There is no chastisement on the part of God for those of us who deal with anxiety, in our verses above there is an offer made.  Through this scripture God acknowledges that we become anxious from time-to-time, He says to go directly to Him with things.  God says to bring our problems, our concerns, our troubles, our burdens and our fears, or anything else that causes us to slip into feelings of anxiety to Him.  He says to go to Him one-on-one in prayer and to thankfully give Him our list of concerns.  His promise is that He will replace our anxious moments with times of peace, the peace of God, which is a unique peace that comes only through the Holy Spirit on the inside of us.

This unique peace does things for us that no human originated peace can.  This scripture tells us that this peace is beyond our human understanding, and it guards our heart and our mind.  This assures us that one of the benefits of our prayer in the face of our anxiety will be that God helps to protect our minds from anxious thoughts and our hearts from those debilitating anxious feelings.

With this in mind, let us choose, because of these promises from a faithful and trustworthy God, to let go of our fears and our anxieties, and rely on Him.

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Terry Crews Details Severity of Porn Addiction in Three-Part Facebook Series: ‘I Felt Like My Wife Owed Me Sex’

As a fan of action movies (and Old Spice Commercials) it’s a blessing to see a man of Terry’s stature come forward to help others by sharing his own struggles with Pornography!

http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2016/02/25/terry-crews-reveals-he-went-to-rehab-for-porn-in-3-part-facebook-series/

Getty Images

Getty Images

by Daniel Nussbaum25 Feb 2016

Actor Terry Crews detailed his life-long battle with an addiction to pornography and revealed how it almost derailed his marriage in a three-part video series posted to Facebook.

The 47-year-old former NFL player and Brooklyn Nine-Nine star released his latest “Dirty Little Secret” Facebook video on Tuesday. In the first video posted earlier this month, the actor revealed he went to rehab for his addiction, and said it had “really, really messed up life in a lot of ways.”

“It became a thing where I didn’t tell anybody,” Crews says in the first video. “It was my secret, nobody knew, and that allowed it to grow, and it got bad. If day turns into night and you are still watching, you probably got a problem, and that was me. I didn’t tell my wife, didn’t tell my friends, nobody knew.”

The actor added that pornography can change the way human beings view each other, not as people but as “objects” and “body parts.”

“My issue was and is with pornography is it changes the way you think about people. People become objects, people become body parts, they become things to be used rather than people to be loved,” Crews said. “You start to use people, you start to feel like you’re the man and they’re just whatever.”

In the second clip, Crews said it was important not to let a sense of shame interfere in the battle against overcoming addiction.

“Shame doesn’t say you did something bad, shame says you are bad,” he said. “And when you think and believe that you are bad, there’s no way out. You say: ‘You know what, forget it, I might as well use drugs, I might as well overeat, I might as well use porn.’ Because if you believe that are bad, then you act accordingly. What you have to change is that paradigm in your life, you have to believe that you are good.”

In the clip posted Tuesday, the actor revealed his pornography addiction became so bad he “felt like my wife owed me sex.”

“When you have a sense of entitlement, it’s extremely dangerous,” Crews said. “What entitlement does is it gives you self-pity. And self-pity — it feels good. It feels good.”

“Every man out there desires intimacy. Every time you look at pornography, it’s a desire for intimacy,” he said. “You are trying to fight your feelings of being alone by filling it with pornography in an attempt to feel that you are with someone and you know someone. But pornography is an intimacy killer. It kills all intimacy.”

Crews also cautioned both men and women to take more responsibility to combat the problem.

“You cannot accept any pornography in your man’s life. Anything that will make you feel denigrated, make you feel less than, you cannot accept it,” he said.

“I’m calling on men to be more accountable. A true man and a true woman is a person who takes responsibility for everything in his life, good and bad,” he added.