Many partners of addicts have told me they feel bad about themselves for staying in the relationship because of the betrayal they’ve experienced. They imagine that the people who know their past judge them to be stupid for staying with the person who’s caused them so much pain. I often counter this thinking, explaining that leaving may seem quick and easy because they can pretend they’re okay and the problem has disappeared. However, if you leave your relationship, you’ll be stuck with your pain and sorrow without the person you loved to help you sort it out. Why is this true? Because even though it feels as if your pain comes from your partner, it’s actually coming from inside you. From the book “Erotic Intelligence: Igniting Hot, Healthy Sex While in Recovery from Sex Addiction” by Alexandra Katehakis,
sex addict
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
Late 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.
Study: Watching porn boosts support for same-sex marriage
Study: Watching porn boosts support for same-sex marriage
February 4, 2013 | 8:51 am
by Paul Bedard
There is no delicate way to say this: Exposure to pornography softens opposition to same-sex marriage among the largest group of naysayers, heterosexual men.
A new scholarly analysis suggests that the more straight guys, especially those who are less educated, watch pornographic videos, the more they warm to same-sex marriage. The reason: Porn opens their mind up to accepting non-traditional sexual situations, like gay sex.
“Our study suggests that the more heterosexual men, especially less educated heterosexual men, watch pornography, the more supportive they become of same-sex marriage,” Indiana University Assistant Professor Paul Wright told Secrets.
Explaining the findings of the analysis published in the authoritative Communication Research journal, Wright said, “Pornography adopts an individualistic, nonjudgmental stance on all kinds of nontraditional sexual behaviors and same-sex marriage attitudes are strongly linked to attitudes about same-sex sex. If people think individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to have same-sex sex, they will also think that individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to get married to a partner of the same-sex.”
He added: “Since a portion of individuals’ sexual attitudes come from the media they consume, it makes sense that pornography viewers would have more positive attitudes towards same-sex marriage.”
Consequently, the results of the study co-authored by Ashley Randall of the University of Arizona, could be interpreted as suggesting that backers of same-sex marriage should encourage men to watch more porn.
The authors tapped into National Science Foundation-funded studies of some 500 heterosexual men over the past six years. “Pornography consumption did predict over-time increases in support for same-sex marriage,” the duo found.
Of note, the authors suggested that since lesbian porn “is quite popular among males,” the change seen in the men toward same-sex marriage suggests “a change in males’ attitude regarding male-male marriage.”
Knuckling down on sex trafficking
WORLD | Knuckling down on sex trafficking | Whitney Williams | Jan. 30, 2013.
R.A. Dickey came face to face with the hell-on-earth ugliness of Mumbai’s red-light district last week, and he said nothing could have prepared him for it.
A young boy locked his sad, wondering eyes on Dickey. Three years old, maybe four at best, the boy wore no pants, his body marred with open sores.
“He was playing amongst the open sewage and filth with rats as big as dogs. Unsupervised,” the Toronto Blue Jays’ new knuckleballer told The Canadian Press on a conference call Tuesday from India’s most populous city. “You see these images and pictures that just don’t seem like they should exist. And you hope that it’s the only one … but that’s what’s representative, these lives that just don’t have a voice.”
The 38-year-old took his two daughters, 11-year-old Gabriel and 9-year-old Lila to India to work with Bombay Teen Challenge (BTC), a Christian organization that has rescued women and children from sex trafficking for the past 23 years.
The cause is very dear to Dickey’s heart, as he himself was sexually abused as a child, a hurt he’s spoken openly about with his daughters and the world. He shared about his wounded past in his stirring autobiography, Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball.
“I want to give my children a heart for humanity,” Dickey said. “The only way to really do that is to get them outside of the bubble that they live in, and expose them in very measured ways to what real life is to a lot of people. They’ve responded beautifully.”
The 2012 National League Cy Young winner admitted the visit has produced “a roller-coaster” of emotions, from seeing women marketed like animals in red-lit doorways, to witnessing the actual cages the girls are put in when they’re first trafficked. But he and his daughters also have witnessed glimmers of hope.
The “most hopeful days” of their trip occurred during their stay at Ashagram, a rehabilitation campus outside of Mumbai that’s home to 300 women and children. They played cricket and sang songs with the children, many of whom are HIV positive.
“Those are the miracles, the 300 lives in Ashagram, those are 300 living miracles,” Dickey said. “Sure [my daughters] heard about the wickedness and the darkness, but they got to actually see the redemption, so their response has been really positive. This is a seminal trip for them.”
During the trip, Dickey also helped celebrate the opening of a clinic in the midst of Mumbai’s red-light district—a clinic he’d helped pay for by raising more than $100,000 to climb Mount Kilimanjaro last winter.
BTC’s Thomason Varghese said the organization was blessed by Dickey’s presence.
“But we think we’ve been even more blessed by his daughters,” Varghese said. “Just to see innocent girls loving our girls and playing with them with no inhibitions, it’s just been a real joy for us to see and experience. There are friendships that have come through this despite how different their backgrounds are.
“Today the girls were in our feeding truck serving food to those who are coming from the street, just watching that was a sight to see.”
While estimates of sex trafficking in India vary, most studies put the number at more than a million children involved in the country’s sex trade.
Despite the magnitude of the problem, Dickey said groups like Bombay Teen Challenge must focus on individuals.
“If the organization rescues one human life from that hell, then it’s done its job in some way,” Dickey said. “You’re talking over the last 23 years over 1,000 lives being rescued, given a second chance to have a life, rescuing children, people who were left for dead on doorsteps of these brothels. …
“How do you measure success? I think it’s one life at a time.”
Copyright © 2013 God’s World Publications. All rights reserved. Articles may not be reproduced without permission.
The Agony & The Ecstasy
The Agony & The Ecstasy
Posted by James Browning on January 16, 2013
Psychologically, triangles are very complicated. Most people don’t seek them out—at least not consciously. They just seem to happen. One moment you are happily single. The next thing you know you are in love with someone who is married. Or you are happily married and suddenly you realize your partner is seeing someone else. Sane people get out of a triangle as soon as they realize they are in one. Love addicts stay engaged hoping things will resolve themselves in time. This is because love addicts can’t let go. They have no tolerance for separation anxiety. Once they have bonded with someone, letting go is like death to them. One of the reasons love addicts have a high tolerance for the pain of a triangle is because when they were children the natural triangle between the mother, father and child, went horribly wrong. Furthermore some love addicts unconsciously try to resolve the wound of their childhood by recreating the triangle of their childhood—over and over again. They are obsessed with the idea that things will end differently each time. Unfortunately, this is not how you heal the wounds of childhood. You don’t go back to the scene of the crime and commit the crime all over again. You go back to the scene of the crime in therapy with an enlightened witness to guide you. You go back to grieve, forgive, let go and move on. Taken from “Triangles: The Agony & the Ecstasy” by Susan Peabody http://loveaddicts.org/triangles.htm
“The events of childhood do not pass, but repeat themselves like seasons of the year.” – Eleanor Farjeon
