CASTIMONIA

Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

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Woody’s Story

22 years ago today, I entered a rehab facility for help with sexual addiction.

I was 35 years old, and for the first time in my life, I began to grow up.  One thing I have learned about myself, I was immature because I was stuck in my childhood.  I was sexually used, then abused from the time I was 8 until I was 12 years old.  That locked me into my childhood.  I grew up full of embarrassment, shame, anger, fear and neglect.  Ironically, the one thing that was the source of my shame became the one thing I used to make me feel good.  Sex.  Masturbation, porn, girls, fantasies, daydreams, these became my way of life.

I became two personalities, basically, a public persona and a private persona.  Who I was publicly, was all about image control.  I projected a public image of myself that I wanted others to see, and I held onto the private persona so I could retreat into my hidden world.  Eventually, I got to the point where I knew I needed to stop, I knew I wasn’t a man of integrity.  I wanted to be honest, but I was a liar.  I wanted to live in such a way that I didn’t have to spend my time looking over my shoulder, trying not to get caught doing things I shouldn’t be doing.  I told myself many times, with the gravest of sincerity, “I will never do that again”.  I was never able to keep that commitment, though.  I discovered, later, I didn’t lack the desire to stop, I simply didn’t have the power to stop.
I was a very lonely man, even though I was married, and I used to look at other married couples and wish I had what they had.  I knew I could never have what they had unless I came clean and got honest.  But, there was a high price for honesty.  It could cost me everything to get honest and I might lose my marriage, my job, my future.  The fear of that high price kept me from coming clean for a long time.
I tried all kinds of ways to deal with my problem, I figured, as long as I never did any of those things again, I would never have to tell anyone anything, I could just go on living and be honest from this point on.  But, I always knew, deep inside, that doesn’t work.  So, on May 18, 1991, I began, what eventually became a month long process of coming clean to my wife.  Eventually, I realized I needed professional help, but not before denying I needed that help.  So, I paid that high price to become honest.  I resigned my position as a pastor and checked myself into a rehab facility here in Houston.
22 years ago today, and I have had a few slips, but I never returned to my old lifestyle.  I am one person now, not two.  If you were to watch me secretly and compare me to who I am in public, you would see I am no longer two “Woodys”, I am one person.
I live in freedom today, because I surrendered my will to God’s will, and prayed for His strength to do for me what I could not do for myself.  I’m no longer a liar and I practice rigorous honesty on a daily basis.  Now, when I disappoint my wife, it isn’t because I betrayed her and broke my wedding vows, but rather, it’s because I’ve done something that normal husbands do that disappoints their wives.
My sobriety cost me everything too!  I was homeless for about two months, my wife and I were separated and heading towards a divorce.  I discovered though, there is no price too high to pay for sobriety.  No matter what the cost, I was willing to pay it.  That hasn’t changed in me in the last 22 years either, no price is too high to pay for my sobriety.
It is amazing to me to be the recipient of so many absolutely undeserved blessings in my life.  My Bride and I did not divorce, instead, we worked it out and are truly in love with each other today.  I have a home and two new cars, all paid for.  I am debt free financially and am able to give generously to support Christian and other charitable causes.
I still go to 12 Step meetings, and sponsor other men who want to recover from sex addiction.  I will always be grateful that I received grace and forgiveness, especially when I least deserved it.
Praise God, I am a free man.
My name is Woody, and I am a grateful believer in Jesus Christ and a recovering sex addict, and I have been clean and sober for 22 years.

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Dignity: Women are People

October 8, 2012 · by

KS is a single mom who has been the victim of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. She was with us recently when we shared with a group the truth about human dignity as it relates to the social and human costs of pornography with its connections to the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of our women and children.  Afterwards, a man who had been a user of pornography and exploiter of women, approached KS to apologize and ask for forgiveness for being one who so wrongfully abused young women like her. It was a powerful experience. (KS will share more of her story with us in the coming months.)

Most of us would agree today that any system that subjects women, children and men to exploitation for money, power, and personal gratification goes against the very being of our Creator. William Wilberforce was the crusading Christian reformer who was responsible for bringing an end to the cruelty of the African slave trade.  He understood that all people have been made in God’s image – and one of the attributes we inherit and portray is human dignity.

Therefore, acknowledging that all women, and children, are indeed Somebody’s daughter and Somebody’s son literally captures the essence of every person’s value and human dignity created in God’s image.

We encounter opportunities every day to repaint the landscape of our culture, to see the hearts of people be awakened about the issue of pornography and its related activities.  We simply need to be willing to make these issues part of our everyday dialogue.

A community leader recently said, “William Wilberforce realized that he couldn’t end slavery until England realized that a slave was a man…now, get the men of America to understand that women are people.“

We truly can become a nation that honors and values the dignity of every woman and every child.

She’s Somebody’s Daughter. He’s Somebody’s Son.

Let the conversation begin.

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Stating the Obvious

Posted on October 8, 2012 by

 

by Noel Bouché

I’m having one of those days.  You know, one of those days when, for whatever reason, your tolerance for pretense, apathy, insincerity, superficiality, ignorance, and indifference is particularly low.  One of those days when you just want to, well, call a pole a pole.

So here goes.

Porn is evil.  It is prostitution, it is sex trafficking, and it exploits, it demeans, it corrodes, it poisons, and it is everywhere.  Including in your home.  Do something about it.

Sex is sacred.  God created it, blessed it, and speaks about it with a holy frankness and candor throughout Scripture.  You should too, and so should your pastor.

Marriage is beautiful.  Honor it, celebrate it, protect it, enjoy it, and fight for it.  Today.  The opportunity to do so will be there if you look for it.

Children and teens are being assaulted.  Pimps and traffickers have access to them 24/7. Especially the pimps and traffickers who moonlight as media executives.  Wake up and lead these beautiful young people to Jesus, who gave everything for them.

There.  Just had to unload that.  No footnotes, no citations, no references.  Thanks for listening.  Peace out.

Noel Bouché serves as Vice President of pureHOPE.  If you would like more straight-forward, no-poles-barred talk in 140 characters or less, you can follow him on Twitter @noelbouche. 

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Video – Just One Click Away

Chilling video courtesy of Pure Hope for us to watch about how pornography can grab hold of us, keeping us captive, even in the presence of our families.

Yes, that is a chilling video.  Yes, sexual brokenness is a pervasive and painful issue. Yes, there is an attack on our youth just 1 click away.

But yes! There are ministries and individuals rising up, saying “Here am I, Lord” (Isaiah 6:8).

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Pornography’s Effect on the Brain, Part 2

Disclaimer from the leaders of Castimonia.  Although we agree with the author’s general assessment that pornography can have negative consequences on the human brain, we do not endorse, agree, nor disagree with Dr. Darkmoon’s personal thoughts and feelings on human sexuality or the site to which this article was originally posted.  I have removed any triggering links.

Pornography’s Effect on the Brain, Part 2
By Dr. Lasha Darkmoon
September 30, 2012

4.  PORN ADDICTION AND FRONTAL  LOBE  SYNDROME

It seems that frontal lobe damage, caused by long-term porn addiction and the compulsive masturbation that accompanies it, will give rise to a constellation of behaviors called “frontal lobe syndrome”. These include four main behavior patterns:  (1) Impulsive behavior with little regard to consequences. (2) Compulsive behavior, often leading to total loss of control. (3) Emotionally labile behavior, i.e., sudden and unpredictable mood swings. (4) Impaired judgment, leading to disastrous decision making.

All these conditions, it is now clear, are caused by frontal lobe damage. Though they can be produced instantaneously by a car crash or other serious trauma to the brain, they canalso occur as a gradual process by the habit of compulsive masturbation to pornography over a long period of time. “Nemo repente fuit turpissimus,” the Roman satirist Juvenal noted long ago. “No one became extremely wicked all at once.” It happens by slow degrees, step by painful step. Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny. Whoever said that was certainly on to something.

Dr. Victor Cline, possibly the world’s foremost expert on sex addiction, has this to say on pornography and compulsive masturbation in his classic essay Pornography’s Effects on Adult and Child:

In my experience as a sexual therapist, any individual who regularly masturbates to pornography is at risk of becoming, in time, a sexual addict, as well as conditioning himself into having a sexual deviancy.

A frequent side effect is that it also dramatically reduces their capacity to love. Their sexual side becomes in a sense dehumanized. Many of them develop an “alien ego state” (or dark side), whose core is antisocial lust devoid of most values.

In time, the “high” obtained from masturbating to pornography becomes more important than real life relationships. It has been commonly thought by health educators that masturbation has negligible consequences, but one exception would appear to be in the area of repeatedly masturbating to deviant pornographic imagery which risks (via conditioning) the acquiring of sexual addictions and/or other sexual pathology.

It makes no difference if one is an eminent physician, attorney, minister, athlete, corporate executive, college president, unskilled laborer, or an average 15-year-old boy. All can be conditioned into deviancy.

The process of masturbatory conditioning is inexorable and does not spontaneously remiss. The course of this illness may be slow and is nearly always hidden from view. It is usually a secret part of the man’s life, and like a cancer, it keeps growing and spreading. It rarely ever reverses itself, and it is also very difficult to treat and heal. (See here)

The Frontal lobe, located directly behind the forehead, involves several different functions but is concerned above all with judgment and behavior control, i.e., the ability to recognize the consequences of one’s actions and to avoid reckless and impulsive behavior inimical to one’s survival.

5.  A PORN ADDICTION  CASE  HISTORY

Before we go any further, it is necessary to convince the reader that porn addiction is indeed a serious problem—in fact, an epidemic unprecedented in human history.

Pornography is no longer the relatively mild aphrodisiac it used to be in the Summer of Love, 1967, when the Sexual Revolution first began to take off.  With the advent of the internet and the advance in audiovisual communications, its lethality has increased exponentially. Future advances in the area of holographic images and reality drugs threaten to make porn so irresistible to future generations that ordinary sex as we know it will pale into insignificance and fail to exercise its customary charms. Autoeroticism will then reign supreme; and the zombie sex addict, dead-eyed and drooling with unquenchable lust, will inherit the earth and turn it into a vast masturbatorium.

This is one vision of the sex dystopia to come: a science fiction nightmare that has every chance of being realized. This is a world in which only the sexually fit will survive as the masters, those schooled to self-discipline and impulse control. The weak-willed and degenerate will not necessarily die out. They will simply sink into the amorphous lumpenproletariat as permanent slaves.

I will now allow Dr Victor Cline to present one of his most revealing case histories of porn addiction:

One of my patients was so deeply addicted that he could not stay away from pornography for 90 days, even for $1,000. It is difficult for non-addicts to comprehend the totally driven nature of a sex addict. When the “wave” hits them, nothing can stand in the way of getting what they want—whether that be pornography accompanied by masturbation, sex from a prostitute, molesting a child, or raping a woman.

An example might help illustrate this problem. Ralph was a sexual addict, married 12 years with three children. He was active in his church and held sincere, high moral principles. He believed in the Ten Commandments and opposed adultery. Yet his particular cycle involved pornography use, followed by paid sex with prostitutes. After each incident, he begged God for forgiveness and swore that it would never happen again. But it did, again and again.

Since the trigger of each adulterous act was pornography-use, we decided to try to free him from his dependence on this material. I asked him to write me a check for $1,000, indicating that I would return it if he went 90 days without using pornography. Ralph loved to hang on to his money and was quite attracted to our strategy. “There’s no way I’d look at dirty videos or magazines if I knew it would cost me a thousand dollars!” he said.

He managed to resist temptation remarkably well for a while. But on the 87th day, he drove past an “adult” bookstore in an unfamiliar city while on a business trip. He slammed on the brakes, entered the store, and went virtually berserk for 90 minutes. When I saw him the following week, he tearfully confessed that he had lost his $1,000. Since he had gone 87 days “sober,” I decided to give him another chance.

So we started another 90-day “sobriety” cycle. We both felt that if he could go 87 days, he could certainly make 90 if we tried again, especially if it meant recovering his $1,000.

This time he went only 14 days before he relapsed. He lost his money, which was given to a charity. He was extremely committed to quit in order to save his marriage and to live in harmony with his religious principles. But that was not the case. In my opinion, even if he had given me $10,000, he still would have relapsed. When the wave hits them, these men are consumed by their appetite, regardless of the costs or consequences. Their addiction virtually rules their lives.  (See here)

Every act of masturbation to pornography draws the fish, so to speak, deeper and deeper into the net. Professor Donald L. Hilton, making use of the fish-in-net metaphor, explains the whole process in the technical language of science:

Pornography is a triple hook, consisting of cortical hypofrontality, dopaminergic downgrading, and oxytocin/vasopressin bonding. Each of these hooks is powerful, and they are synergistic. Pornography sets its hooks very quickly and deeply, and as the addiction progresses, it progressively tightens the dopamine drag until there is no more play in the line. The person is drawn ever closer to the boat and the waiting net.

The claim that pornography addiction can cause brain damage is admittedly still controversial at this time—see the section entitled ‘Frontal Lobe Damage’ here,written by practicing neurosurgeon and associate professor of Neurology, Donald L. Hilton, quoted above—but the claim that tobacco addiction could lead to lung cancer and heart disease was equally controversial when it was first aired. Nevertheless, given the neurobiological findings discussed above, there is little doubt that brain areas underlying sexual reward become structurally altered with the result that individuals are far more powerfully motivated by sexually arousing imagery. Whether one wants to call this brain damage seems moot. The main point is that the result is an exaggerated attraction to sexual reward at the expense of other emotions—in particular, love.

In any case, we are dealing here with an addiction that is arguably worse than crack cocaine or heroin addiction. This is not even controversial nowadays. It is a claim made so often by sex addiction therapists that no one who has researched the subject is surprised by it any longer.

6.  COCAINE AND METHAMPHETAMINE: THEIR ROLE IN PORN ADDICTION

Particular drugs potentiate sex. This is well known to anyone who has ever taken drugs. Under the influence of the drug, the intensity of the sex experience can be increased tenfold: becoming either sacred or satanic, divine or demonic, depending on one’s state of mind, but always piquant, frenzied, and quasi-mystical. Drug addiction and sex addiction therefore often go together, intensifying each other and making the sex junkie’s dual addiction an exquisite pleasure indistinguishable from a stabbing pain.

Two of the most potent aphrodisiacs in use today are cocaine and methamphetamine. The easy availability of these drugs nowadays has increased not only the number of sex addicts in society but also the intensity of their addiction. It will be found that both cocaine and methamphetamine are used extensively in combination with pornography. The result is compulsive masturbation on an epic scale, such as few societies in the past have ever known. Indeed, ours is the first civilization in history to make masturbation a competitive sport.

For centuries, cocaine has been known for its potent aphrodisiacal properties. In fact, one of the reasons people take cocaine it is to get a sexual “super high”. In the early 1900s, cocaine gained notoriety for its ability to induce “sexual frenzy” and “uncontrollable lust” in the stereotypical “dope fiend”. Today, in San Francisco and other big cities, cocaine is openly sold in gay bathhouses where it leads to suicidal unprotected sex:

In my own city, Toronto, promiscuous unsafe sex is a popular feature of the bathhouses which have been springing up over the past few years. Some of them are now licensed to sell beer, which they supplement, unofficially, with poppers and crack cocaine (smoke it in your room) as additional perks.

Methamphetamine (“meth”) would appear to be an even stronger aphrodisiac. This is more popular with women than cocaine because it produces rapid weight loss, at any rate initially. Common features found among both cocaine and methamphetamine addicts are communal orgies, sex binges, and bouts of compulsive masturbation with the help of pornography. (See here)

The trajectory of the typical methamphetamine addict is particularly grim. No amount of orgiastic sex will compensate for the ravages of time.

It is not without significance that the sex-obsessed Satanist Aleister Crowley and the Father of the Sexual Revolution, Sigmund Freud, were both cocaine addicts. Here is Crowley waxing eloquent on cocaine in the context of “sex magick.” Freud, whose early psychoanalytical theory was reportedly a by-product of his cocaine use, recommended cocaine as an analgesic and antidepressant while discreetly omitting to mention its aphrodisiacal qualities.

A bizarre added feature found in cocaine addicts, seldom mentioned outside specialist publications, is that this is one drug that often manages to turn heterosexual males into homosexuals—even against their natural inclinations and much to their subsequent disgust. Gay porn apparently does the trick, easing the way into homosexuality for the doped-up male heterosexual. Straight females, it is said, can take cocaine without necessarily becoming lesbians. I personally doubt this. My own experience in observing others convinces me that bisexuality can be induced in both sexes by a combination of drugs and sex.

Chronic high doses of cocaine [we are told] can result in aberrant sexual behavior such as compulsive masturbation and multiple partner marathons. The disinhibiting effects of cocaine or methamphetamine open the flood gates to sexual adventurousness. Only under the influence of cocaine or methamphetamine do some heterosexuals engage in homosexual fantasies and behaviors….

The combination of stimulant drug use and sex, two extremely potent reinforcers, creates a “super high” that is more addicting than the drug use alone. For these individuals, drugs and sex are inseparable….

Similar to cocaine but even more dramatically, methamphetamine increases sex drive, lowers inhibitions, delays orgasm, and improves sexual performance in many users. The aphrodisiacal effects of methamphetamine are considerably longer lasting than those of cocaine … it [is] especially appealing to individuals seeking prolonged, highly erotic, and uninhibited sexual experiences….

An interesting phenomenon noted many years ago by one of the present authors, but discussed rarely in the literature, is the ability of cocaine to stimulate homosexual fantasies and engender homosexual behaviors in men who identify themselves as heterosexual. These men report that when high on cocaine, they experience erotic fantasies to have sex with other men. This may lead to a pattern of compulsive masturbation [while] viewing gay male pornography, or to sexual encounters with gay male prostitutes, often transvestites known as “shemales” or “half and halves”— men who have a female persona and breast implants, but male genitalia.

After the drug wears off, many of these men report feeling extremely dysphoric and upset about their homosexual behavior. Many experience intense feelings of shame. It appears that the overwhelming majority of these men are fundamentally heterosexual. (See here)        

7.  CONCLUSION

That pornography damages the character, weakens the will, and produces sexual deviance in those it infects, can no longer be doubted. That it can even, under the influence of drugs such as cocaine, occasionally turn heterosexuals into homosexuals, is an even more sinister development.

That long-term pornography use, accompanied by compulsive masturbation, actually causes structural changes in the brain is now beyond dispute. Whether this amounts to “brain damage” in the classic sense is a contentious issue and will be hotly denied by the Masturbation Lobby and all those who believe, erroneously, that masturbation is a stress reliever and a cure for depression. Porn addiction and its invariable accompaniment, compulsive masturbation, are in fact stress increasers. They are often found as major symptoms in obsessive-compulsive disorders. Far from relieving depression, they intensify it. Indeed, they are all too often the underlying cause of the depression in that they generate a huge loss of self-esteem. These are truisms, patently obvious to all except the merchants of lies.

Meanwhile, there is little doubt that the virulent sex epidemic we witness all around us is a deliberately planned sex psyop. This is what governments want. The Puppet Masters who pull the hidden strings of our Western regimes, all masquerading as democracies, have managed to manufacture exactly what we see when we look around us: widespread neurosis, mass misery, the collapse of moral values, Christianity in ruins, and the coarse brutalization of the common man.

No need for gulags for those who consent to their own chains.

End of Part 2 of 2.