Part 1: The Wound Beneath the Habit
I was addicted to pornography for over a decade.
I am not saying that to shock you. I am saying it because if I skip past it, you will read what follows as theory. It is not theory. It is the testimony of a man who struggled with it himself, who tried everything available to him and kept falling, until he stopped treating the wrong problem.
My journey into pornography addiction started on a sunny afternoon after I returned from school. I stumbled upon a CD in our living room after I dropped my school bag and wanted to watch a movie. I didn't know who left it there, but I plugged it in. It was a pornographic video. I was the first person home. I closed the door in shock, sat down, and continued watching it. The shock was real but so was the curiosity it awakened, and something else: a feeling of warmth I had not been able to name or find anywhere else.
It seemed to come just to fill a void that had been sitting there long before that afternoon. I began to find pleasure in it. A temporary satisfaction, followed immediately by guilt and that same void returning. What began as a mistake became a means to fill a void, and I paid the price for it.
I tried to stop many times. I made resolutions every new month, sometimes every two weeks. I went to church, I prayed, I fasted, I answered altar calls. I genuinely repented before God and asked Him to help me. But it didn't work. What I did not understand then, is that I was not fighting the root. I was fighting a symptom.
What I did not understand then, is that I was not fighting the root. I was fighting a symptom.
It took a decade of falling and rising before I made a desperate resolution. One day, after watching a documentary of how pornography destroys men. Fuelled by sheer hatred for what it was doing to me, to my mind, my self-esteem, my capacity to look at a woman with clean eyes, I decided I had to stop. My hatred for the consequences, and my recommitment to God, pushed me to ask for help with absolute seriousness.
And God helped me. For the first time, I regained power over my will. I deleted everything. I didn't go back.
But in the months that followed, I battled severe anxiety and depression. Even though the videos were gone, the void persisted. I couldn't look at women without impure thoughts. The desire would return. I had gained control over whether to act on it, but the root was still there, alive, waiting.
I had often wondered why all the disciplines I built couldn't produce permanent freedom. It wasn't until I came across a book on Dealing with Rejection by Dr. David Ogbueli, that the connection became clear. For four days I stayed on that book, tracing the roots of the pornography in my own life. I saw myself on almost every page, as if my spiritual father had been watching me, maybe someone had told him about my past.
The book named what I was battling with for all these years: rejection.
My father left early. Not by choice, but death does not ask permission. I didn't lack his love while he was alive, but it was cut short. As much as I grieved his death, I had always treated it separately from the pornography. One was loss. The other was sin. I handled them in different compartments, which is exactly why neither fully healed.
The book connected the dots I had refused to connect myself. The love cut short by my father's death had left a void in me. I was filling it with pornography, masturbation, eventually alcohol and other obsessive habits. That realization did not arrive gently, it was painful, exposing, and necessary.
When I finally understood that, God began His surgery in my heart. It was uncomfortable. There were things I couldn't bear to look at in myself - the real reasons behind the real behaviors. But that was the turning point. As He opened the wounds, the void that pornography had been filling began to be filled differently. The Word of God became food. I stayed in it. My healing began there.
Sometime in the last few weeks, I was having severe headaches and falling sick repeatedly. I kept going to the chemist, getting medicine. The symptom would ease for a week or two and return. It wasn't until I went to the hospital that a doctor found the root cause: high blood pressure. My immune system had been compromised by a condition I hadn't treated. He told me to take some time off and rest. As soon as I did, my blood pressure came down. I had been medicating the headache while the blood pressure quietly did its damage.
When we attack pornography without diagnosing the soul, we are treating a headache while ignoring the high blood pressure.
When we attack pornography without diagnosing the soul, we are doing the same thing. We treat the headache. We ignore the blood pressure.
That is what Part 2 is for.