A personal story of recovery from sex and pornography addiction.

MY FIRST EXPERIENCE with pornography was at age six. Six-year-olds don’t have the strength or capacity to say no to an older person looking to expose them to pornography. I certainly didn’t. This was especially true after I heard the enticing description of the pictures I would find in the magazine hidden out in the cherry orchard. This older person, a teenage boy in the neighborhood where my family had recently moved, understood that the pornography he showed me became a secret we shared. He formed a covert bond with me and then used that bond to coax me to an isolated place so he could molest me. These experiences, coupled with an increasingly compulsive desire to flee into fantasy to escape the difficulty of living with a mentally ill parent, flipped a switch in me at a young age and I became a sex addict.

I think a lot of people have a pretty hazy idea of what a sex addict looks like. We imagine a pudgy, middle-aged guy in a trench coat with greasy hair and twitching, crazy eyes who sneaks around and peeps at women through their bedroom windows because he can’t control his sex urges. The reality, however, is that in much the same way that there is a broad spectrum of alcoholics—from apparently able and functioning members of society at one extreme to the poor inebriate passed out in the gutter in some large city at the other—there is a broad spectrum of sex addicts.

To be sure, some sex addicts do sit in dark, dingy bedrooms with the curtains drawn surfing for porn on the internet for days at a time. But sex addicts are also very often some of the ordinary men, women, and children in the community around us. Some of them are your bosses or employees at work. Some of them are the people sitting with their families in front of you in the benches at church. Some of them are the kids on your child’s baseball team. Although they come from all walks of life, I feel certain that most sex addicts share some common traits: First, they are miserable. Second, they wish that sex wasn’t such an overwhelming part of their lives that devoured everything else. Third, I would also bet that many, if not most, sex addicts don’t know that they are addicts. They think they just have a “little problem.”

Addiction has been, and remains, very misunderstood. A lot of people fear that if we acknowledge that addiction is something beyond a particular person’s control, we somehow give that individual a free pass to do whatever he wants in society without any accountability for the consequences. Although we appear to accept the reality of alcohol addiction, hard drug addiction, gambling addiction, a myriad of food addictions, and even shopping addiction, many of us honestly believe that addicts merely suffer from a deficiency of moral character. Addicts are not as righteous, are not as spiritual, are not as noble, and are not as sincere as the rest of us.

Addicts, we believe, just don’t want to get out of their addiction. If addicts were truly serious and wanted to change, they would just stop doing what they’re doing. Simply put, we think that addicts prefer to be the addicts that they are. They like the bondage of addiction, we assume, better than they like the freedom that the rest of us enjoy. Apparently, they choose addiction. I absolutely disagree.

The greatest misunderstanding about addiction, I believe, has to do with its size and power. I hope no one seriously thinks that an addiction is like a little red devil who sits on your shoulder whispering naughty thoughts in your ear and who may be easily disposed of by a flick of the finger. Perhaps those who have never dealt with addiction might imagine instead a couple of wrestlers in a ring. They are more or less evenly matched in size, weight and skill. Sometimes one wrestler gets the upper hand; sometimes the other one controls the match. The addict is one wrestler and the addiction is the other. The idea here is that the addict just has to learn some moves, build some strength, think positively, listen to his coach, and eventually he will prevail over the addiction. It’s tough work, but that addiction can be whipped. Again, I flatly disagree with this perspective.