Java with Juli:Â #564 Why People Turn to Porn and How to Break the Cycle
If you find out that your spouse is engaging with pornography, first of all, that can be very devastating for you, particularly if it’s something that you’ve discovered over and over again. Some research actually shows that a spouse who discovers their husband or wife using pornography can even have PTSD-type symptoms, where every time you see a phone or you pick up your spouse’s phone, you’re afraid you’re going to find it again. And so there’s a real fear there, and it’s there for a reason.
God created sex to be the expression of covenant love between a husband and wife. And any expression of sexuality outside of that is a violation of your covenant. And that includes using pornography. Even though that person isn’t in the room with you, you’re responding sexually to an image. You’re responding sexually to somebody that you don’t even know nonetheless don’t have covenant with. So we need to understand that looking at pornography is a violation of your covenant within marriage and it’s also a sin against God. Now how do you respond as a spouse? Well, let’s look at what the scripture says. The scripture really says two things. First of all, we humble ourselves. We respond with compassion and humility.
The first thing that you’re gonna do, Jesus said, is take the log out of your own eye so that you can remove the speck from your brother’s eye. Now, you say, well, I’m not the one looking at pornography. Well, in reality, we all have sin in our lives. It might be the sin of self-righteousness or pride or gossip or slander, even the sin of anger that can turn to bitterness. And so the first thing we want to do is humble ourselves, say, God, would you search my own heart? Would you give me a heart that is ready to handle this with the right attitude? And that means you probably aren’t going to respond to your spouse right away out of anger in the moment. You’re going to take time to put your heart before God, and ask him to give you the wisdom to handle this rightly with humility.
The second thing we do is we do confront, we are called to confront each other with sin. And so my encouragement to you, if you caught your husband looking at pornography is to go to him or her with an attitude of humility and to say, this is not okay. I’m hurt by your choice and I’m asking you to get help. And this is particularly important if your spouse, uses pornography habitually, or you’ve seen this happen more than once. For a lot of people, they can’t stop looking at porn just by deciding they want to stop. Their brain has actually become wired to be addicted to it. So you’re going to want to reach out to a ministry or to a counselor who has experience with sexual addiction or pornography and insist that your spouse engage with them. You know, some of the ministries that we work with at Authentic Intimacy, one of them is Pure Desire, which is a great resource, you can contact them from anywhere in the world. Another one is Be Broken. Again, they have retreats, have groups, they even have help for the offended spouse. But you might find within your local community a counselor or a mentor who again has experience. But with humility, you’re gonna confront the sin and insist that the sin is addressed, that the pattern is addressed so that there truly is change behavior.