I am going a little off book today in what is on my heart, but in using these blogs to process out what I am learning and where my heart is at this is what is on my heart today for a world that is broken and hurting and the many, many, many, silent voices that are aching, ashamed, suffering, and struggling with a porn addiction that they have, or one they either know about or don’t know about with their partner. Something has to be done. People can’t be afraid to talk about a real issue that our culture has normalized into being ‘ok’ because “everybody’s doing it”. There’s more to life, and way more to relationships that pornography destroys. Here’s my top 10 reasons why I hate porn:
- It destroys relationships
When porn is present it hurts people. It doesn’t matter how much your brain says it’s not hurting anyone, it hurts people. The people you love, or will one day love with all your heart will be deeply heartbroken when they find out that someone habitually turns to an unhealthy outlet in their life.
- Creates excuse makers
Porn seems to be a hidden sport, something done in secret, in private, and it creates
small lies that turn into a lifestyle of excuses that become a habitual deceit you won’t even realize you’ve become good at.
- Develops a twisted world of false intimacy
Intimacy with another human being is meant to be treasured, special, and unique. Whether you think you are in control or not, porn (or any addiction) teaches your brain a form of intimacy it believes is real, a false intimacy that will make it harder for you to express emotions and love to the people in your life craving it.
- Teaches unhealthy ways to cope with life
Porn addiction most often turns into an emotional disorder. The habitual response of anytime during the day when a person feels frustrated, talked down to, insecure, disconnected, and the list goes on…porn can start out as a form of physical exertion, but on the turn of a dime it will turn into a form of emotional exertion as well. It will begin to turn into the drug that alleviates having to feel the things you don’t want to feel and allows you to gain an experience you want to have in that moment.
- Dehumanizes people
Anything that dehumanizes a human being is something that shouldn’t be a part of our lives. There are people we all pass every day that deserve to be looked at with respect and care. Beauty and degradation are two different things no matter how much you want to justify it in your head. How we view people, even in a private, closed door setting should be respectful and uplifting and not supporting the fact that porn encourages us to dehumanize human beings into mere objects. No one should ever feel that way about themselves. No one!
- Pulls you away from others instead of closer to people
When you find an addictive response like porn as a release for whatever is going on in your life, or whatever the root reason is for turning to this addiction it will always pull you away from people. Instead of turning to people and gaining connectedness through healthy avenues with others, porn will keep you quiet during struggles because you have found your source of therapy, you have found your sense of relief from a world that is filled with struggle. True connectedness and finding healing turning towards someone instead of turning towards your addiction is a beautiful aspect of life you are missing out on, you’ll just have to trust me on that one.
- Turns you into a person you won’t realize until you get out of it
When you are in a pornography addiction, you won’t even realize the weight it has become in your life, you won’t even recognize how far in you were until you finally get the strength to get out. (Yes strength. It is not as easy as someone saying “stop it”) You will have to relearn who you are, and it is truly scary because you have become someone that has found a sense of relief that has become a security you don’t know how to live without. (If you have never had this addiction you won’t get this one, but you have to love them through the struggle of recovery, it takes strength.) Once you recover, you will look back and not even recognize that you turned into that person, it happened so gradual that you won’t have noticed how big the problem became and how much of your life it effected.
- Prevents you from a life of freedom
Oh freedom. The peace in the air to just think of the word, and the hope in our eyes of the dream of being free from the things that weigh us down in this world. Turning to pornography becomes a dependency that creates a world that you will feel stuck in. It will grab a hold of you even if you don’t recognize it. You will have a connection and a relationship with a thing that you feel like you can’t get free from. When you get free from the deceit its enticing words whisper in your head, you will find a life that is free from the chains that have been telling you to be dependent on a false idealization.
- Life sucking instead of Life giving
Here’s the twist. People turn to porn because they truly believe it is doing something for them, but what you may not want to believe me saying is that it does more, it takes from you. It never says enough. It always says “again”, always says “one more time”, always says “this will make you feel better”. Voices that say that aren’t life giving they are life sucking. They take from you the strength you have. They teach you to become dependent on something you don’t need. Porn won’t solve your problems, it just helps you mask that there is one.
- It is void of love
Porn is completely void of love. It is a means to an end. It is an expression of self-medicating a stimulus response in your body. This isn’t love. But when you engage in an act that is void of love and then also share a similar act with a human being you do love, you can make them into a means to an end as well. You lose the beauty that physicality in a relationship is supposed to have when it is an act instead of an expression of connectedness.
Now here’s the other part you need to hear before I end, more than just the top reasons I
don’t like it’s existence in this world: it is here. Porn is a real issue. No one talks about it and the partners hurt catching their loved ones in the act are embarrassed and ashamed to get help. This addiction is real, and for the men and women that fall into the trap of pornography it will become so common place in their life that the harsh truth of what it is doing to them and their relationship or even future relationships they won’t be able to notice. When you are too far into an addiction you don’t even realize that you are stuck. You won’t even be able to see that it controls you more than you are in control of it.
Porn is a real problem, but not one for us to only complain about in a world that truly has a lot of vial destruction that we could complain about. We were meant to live a life of peace, of joy, of freedom. If that is you, either the partner struggling with your loved ones addiction that makes you feel like something is wrong with you, talk to someone, you’re not alone. And if you are reading this as someone who is in it, as someone who feels stuck in an addiction you didn’t even know was called that, you can live without this. This doesn’t have to control you anymore, and there are people who will love you, care for you, and gently stand by your side as you make one of the bravest steps of your life to seek help.
The last people I need to speak to from my heart is the person that completely disagrees, the person, or relationship, who truly believes porn is an innocent act that isn’t hurting anyone. I have seen the evidence of people living in both perspectives, and true life, true joy, and the abundant amount of peace you were created to experience with another human being just gets tainted when aspects of love get things added or even devoid of being in it. Try life another way and see if things don’t change for you, just give it a try.
My last challenge is that just because the world tells us something is ok, doesn’t mean it is good for us. Just because “everybody is doing it” doesn’t mean we have to too. We tell our kids that, and I am proclaiming a new way to live for you, for your marriage, for your future marriage, or even for the self-respect of what love really is that your body should experience.
I am tired of porn being a silent killer to the relationships in this world that were meant for so much more. Let’s do something about it, speak about it’s real prevalence, support each other in the pain it causes, and applaud the people willing to step out of something that has been controlling their life for far too long!
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Emily Rose Funderburk, LCMHC 
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