It was many years ago, at the age of 12, when quite out of the blue, a classmate told me about sexual arousal. I was totally unaware until then but that information caused me to indulge in occasional self-gratification for the first time. Later, when I was about 17, I noticed one or two soft porn magazines on display for sale in a shop that sold newspapers and I soon became hooked. That was a couple of decades before the digital age of video, computers, and the internet. That's when my addiction really started, watching porn on a screen in another room until the early hours while my wife was asleep in bed, not knowing what I was doing. That would recur off and on over many years.
I'm just an 'ordinary Joe' who just wants to live a quiet, decent life but I felt compelled to write these few pages to alert others who may be suffering and to warn because I know the mental conflict and anguish that this addiction can cause. I hated the secrecy, the deception, the feelings of guilt and feelings of unworthiness as my conscience convicted me. I began to recognise and understand what pornography had done to me over the years; that it had got me nowhere but resulted in a deep sense of shame. I had a feeling of loss and like the character George Bailey in the acclaimed film 'Its a wonderful life' who realised he had made the wrong decision that changed his life's direction for the worse as that decision affected the lives of so many others, I deeply wanted to return to the way life was before I had allowed this darkness to enter in.
Who was I kidding when I tried to justify my actions by saying that millions upon millions of others were doing it; that I wasn't doing any harm to anybody? Well I got that wrong! I was doing untold harm to myself, to my health and to my relationship with my wife due to my neglect. I finally accepted that I was a part of the problem, a drop in the ocean maybe but that's what oceans are made of, by fuelling the perverse, money-making machine called the Porn Industry. Without that demand, that industry would die and I truly hope that it does.
The only way back for me was to return to my faith and as I did so, I freed myself of porn's grip on me. The chains that bound me were well and truly severed and I have my life back.
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