The following is a transcript of a live presentation given at the Cyber Secrets Conference on Pornography at Brigham Young University on February 7, 2001.

Cyber Secrets: The Problem of Pornography:
The Illusion of Intimacy: The Effect of Pornography on Individuals in Relationships
Dr. Wendy Ulrich
February 7, 2001

It's a lot of fun to be here. This has been an interesting topic to work on and to prepare for. I've learned some interesting lessons in working on this topic. You get some really interesting files on your computer when you're working on this. And if you're sitting next to your stake president in ward council meeting sometimes it doesn't look really good when he looks over at your laptop and it says "pornography" or "pornography hand out." Maybe even more provocative is "BYU pornography." I've also learned that you cannot do pornography research on the Internet. Very bad idea. Do not try this at home. Even when you go to the official American Psychological Association site and look up pornography research and that's the only thing you do you start to get stuff come to you advertising all kinds of little goodies that you can have absolutely for free if you'll just go and try this out. So it's been a real eye-opening experience to find out how pervasive pornography is on the Internet and how easily one can get pornography handed to you without even looking for it. I've also learned that there are a lot of perfectly good innocent words that take on a lot of dangerous connotations when you're on this subject matter. So I apologize now to anybody that I offend by saying something stupid.

There are a lot of people here for a lot of different reasons. You're here because you are struggling yourself with pornography. Or you're here because you know someone who is or you are in a relationship with someone who is. You're here because you have a student or someone in your ward or your branch who is struggling. Would you just take a minute and write down just for your own information -- I'm not going to ask you to reveal this, and you can use code words -- but write down what is your question today? What is the issue that you are kind of wondering about that you wish you had a little bit of insight on? Particularly when it comes to pornography in relationships. Would you just take a minute and do that? I think it's really helpful sometimes to know what we're looking for. The Lord tells us repeatedly to ask that we might receive. And sometimes unless we take the trouble to ask the question, we don't get the answer. As you go through this whole experience at this conference today I hope that you will continue to keep that issue in mind so that you can look for information that will help you with it.

I'm supposed to be talking about the effect of pornography on relationships. I assume that the primary relationship that people might be concerned with on this topic is the relationship between a husband and a wife, either the potential relationship between a husband and a wife or the current one. I'm assuming therefore that there are a few upset wives out there or perhaps husbands who are wanting a little ammunition so let me get that out of the way first by stating my solid belief that pornography hurts relationships. Pornography makes spouses feel inadequate, unwanted, unattractive, and used. Pornography destroys trust. It makes the spouse feel unsafe and worried about the user's spirituality. A number of wives will say to me, "I just feel like I'm married to this pervert. You know, I thought I was marrying this wonderful person, and he has turned into this creep." And it is shocking to find out that a spouse is using pornography for that reason. Another reason that pornography is hard on relationships is because it gives people stupid ideas. Instead of having the opportunity to explore their sexuality in a natural, loving way within the context of the marriage, all kinds of crazy stuff is introduced that makes one spouse or another feel uncomfortable. Pornography is also a huge waste of time, and in this world where time is of such an essence, especially the precious time to develop relationships, if we had no other reason than that pornography is a waste of time, it would be a dumb thing to do. Pornography is a mood altering and mind altering drug with highly addictive potential. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that we are not dealing with a potent substance here that actually has an effect on the brain chemistry.

Having said all that, I can consider the biggest problem with pornography to be that pornography does not get us what we really need. It is an illusion that distracts us from getting what we really need.

I would like to start then today with the Garden of Eden. That is always a good starting place. God created man as a lone man in the garden. You'll remember that in each day of creation as God is proclaiming how He feels about what He's made so far, at the end of each day He says, "It's good." But when He gets to this point in the creative process creating man He says, "It is not good. It is not good for man to be alone." God corrects that "not goodness" in the world by creating Eve as a help to Adam. That word "help" is really interesting. I have it on, I hope, good authority that the word that is translated as "help," which is what Eve is to be for Adam, is only used in the scriptures to refer to one other person and that is God himself as in the phrase from our familiar hymn "Oh, God our help in ages past." Eve is supposed to be that kind of help to Adam. That is an interesting assignment to contemplate as spouses. We are to be the kind of help to one another that God is to us, that kind of help.

Pornography, however, restores us to the "not goodness" of being alone. It gives us an illusion of intimacy, but it leads to increasing cycles of loneliness. It gives us an illusion of power, but it leaves us out of control. It gives us an illusion of pleasure, but it leads to spiritual and emotional pain and suffering. It is not an innocent pleasure that a mean prudish God or mean prudish leaders are trying to take away from us. It is an illusion that God is trying to expose to us, so He can lead us to places where our true needs can be met. So true intimacy is the real need that pornography cannot fill. True intimacy is the "help" that we really need. So what would we have to do to increase the intimacy in our lives? For example, if we were in a classroom setting right now and we wanted to have an intimate experience here, what would have to happen for true intimacy to occur? Well, I would be telling you personal things about me. I would be revealing to you something about who I am, and I would be asking you to do the same in return. We would get to know each other as whole human beings and all of those kinds of obvious things are what pornography short circuits completely. So that path of intimacy requires a lot of unnatural acts. Sometimes pornography is full of what look like a lot of unnatural acts, but intimacy requires a kind of unnatural act. It requires us to take risk. It requires us to be vulnerable. It requires us to reveal who we are and risk having that accepted are rejected by another person. That is the help that we really need. Taking the risk of being disappointed and being disappointing to others, which is inevitable in intimacy, so that we can get our true needs met.

Now Satan offers us another path. I want you to imagine for just a minute, now I know none of you know the answer to this question, that you happen to be looking at something sort of shady on the Internet and your mother walks in. What are you going to do? You're going to hide. Anybody got a different answer? You are going to turn it off real quick. That is a kind of hiding, isn't it? There are lots of ways for us to hide. But that's really what Satan would suggest that we do – that we hide – and that is one of the problems with doing things that we believe are not part of our value system is that we feel like we have to hide them from other people. Now how does the relationship of intimacy develop between you and your mother at that moment? Do you feel known for who you really are? Do you get "help"? Do you feel like you can be close to her? Do you feel like you can get to know her better in that context? No. Because we don't just hide our sins, we hide ourselves, and that's one of the big things that interferes with us getting what we really need.

I'd like to talk about two paths: the hiding path of loneliness and the path of help to true intimacy. I'd like to begin my topic on the effect of pornography on relationships by talking about the effect of relationships on pornography. How do we get this pornography addiction going in our lives? What are the things that happen in our relationships with other people that set us up for that? First, I say again there is a powerful chemistry that goes with the addiction to pornography. There are obsessive compulsive disorders that get latched onto pornography in dangerous ways. But I want to talk about some other things that contribute to that addictive process that have more to do with our relationships with each other and less to do with our chemistry perhaps. I want to talk about this because I am keenly aware that the people who are being affected by the onslaught of pornography in our culture are not just freaky people over in the corner doing strange things that you know are kind of weird. The last four or five couples that I have worked with who have had addiction to pornography as one of their central issues, the men in every case were either at the time or are currently serving in bishoprics. I was having a brief conversation with someone in the Counseling Psychology Department yesterday who's husband is a therapist. She said his experience was that the people who are coming in with this problem are not people who have really quirky personalities who are sitting in a room by themselves or who don't have good values. People who are good folks, in positions of leadership and authority, positions of strength are getting hooked by this stuff. They look at it innocently perhaps to begin with or at least they convince themselves that it's innocent. Then it is a jolt to their system. That chemistry is elicited in the brain and it draws them and they can't get away from it. They start to get in increasing cycles of it, and they can't get away.

Of course, trying to avoid pornography in our culture is a little like trying to avoid salt. It is really difficult to do. We are so surrounded by sexually provocative images that it is almost impossible to stay away from it. If you had an alcoholic who was trying to avoid alcohol, you would tell him to stay away from all the places where its served until he's really solid at least in his or her ability to say no. Pornography is much, much more difficult. It is as if someone were coming to your house every day many, many times a day and offering you this alcohol. Bringing it to you for free. As a matter of fact, they'll pay you to drink it and they keep coming back and back and back and back until they become like a member of your household. That's how hard it is to avoid this stuff sometimes.

There is also within the family a set of external messages, however, that become part of the internal landscape that sets people up for addiction, particularly sexual addictions. Those external messages include: if you need more than I can give you then you must need too much, you are bad, too needy and unacceptable as you are. Now, of course not too many parents, I wouldn't say no parents, but not too many parents come right out and say this to their kids. But I don't know too many parents who aren't overwhelmed enough at times at least that their children's needs don't feel like they are just too huge. We can't meet them all, and the message we give to the child is, "It's your fault. You are too needy. That is a bad thing about you. You're the one who is creating a problem for me. It is not that I don't have enough, it is that you ask too much." And that becomes the start of the unrolling of a set of messages of how the child puts the world together. "Oh, I'm too needy. My mom, my dad think I'm asking too much. I must be bad. I have to learn to hide who I am or what I need." Children start to learn to hide their true feelings at the age of two. They start to learn that there are rules that say you are not allowed to be interested in certain things, you are not allowed to display certain emotions, and they learn to hide. That's not all bad, that's part of the socialization process, but if there isn't a lot of opportunity at other times to also be authentic with our parents and the people around us, we learn to hide so much that we start to not even know what we believe and what we're putting together and how we see the world. So even if it is not said, the child gets the message. (Patrick Carnes is the expert on sexual addiction who talks about this pattern.) The internalized core belief then is, "I am bad and shameful. Others won't like me if they know who I am. I have to hide what is real about me, about my family, about what's going on in the world as I see it. I have to hide that. And I have to take care of myself without help. I have to take care of myself without help because people can't be trusted to help me because they won't like me. Why would they help me? I'm bad." So do you see kind of the mind set that we get started here. People get into that and they start to become too independent. Intimacy starts to feel like a dangerous thing, because if I get too close to somebody I will disappoint them. They will disappoint me. I won't be able to get help. I will just get risk and disappointment and feel vulnerable and it will be scary and hard and I don't like it. So that's the internal mind set that we get into that causes us to look for ways to distract ourselves from our true needs instead of really meeting them, to assume that other people are a danger to us instead of an a source of help, and to feel like the best thing that we can do is to become really, really independent and take care of ourselves. We can take care of our sexuality by ourselves. We can take care of our needs for intimacy by ourselves. We can take care of our appetites by ourselves, and our passions by ourselves. And in that process we get set up for ways to do that which don't require us to take the dangerous risk of intimacy.

So what are the things that trigger the start of an addictive process? The family relationships that seem to be most related to sexual addiction are families with high expectation and low structure or support. Lots of demand, lots of expectation for being wonderful and great but not a lot of help in knowing how to do that. Not a lot of help in processing the emotions of failure and disappointment and discouragement that come along. So it is not too hard to imagine that later on in times of high stress and low structure we are most susceptible to something coming along and grabbing us that feels like a good distraction from all of that pressure that we feel, all of that internal inadequacy. With how many of you does that fit? High demand in your life, low structure? That's the world we live in, isn't it? Lots of demand, not a lot of structure and support.

College is a particular time when people get into addictive problems and patterns of all kinds. They go away, the structure kind of diminishes, the support systems diminish, and the expectations are huge. And so a lot of people when we go away to college start slipping into addictive patterns to try to get out of that dilemma. Why do we see so many people who are bishops and elders quorum presidents and young mens presidents and leaders in the church falling into this pattern? High stress, high expectation, low structure and support. It is part of the equation that sets us up for that. Times of loss and loneliness, failure and fear are big times for this to become a problem in our lives.

So we try to adapt to the world and to keep these core beliefs. We don't even really know we have these core beliefs. We believe, "I'm bad I'm shameful, others won't like me in they know who I am. I have to hide. And I have to take care of myself." If we took a multiple choice test we would know those aren't the right answers. We know we're supposed to believe we're good. We're supposed to believe that intimacy is a good thing. But internally somewhere those beliefs that we are bad and that intimacy is dangerous are guiding our behavior. So we try to figure out ways to adapt this crazy world we live in and still hold onto these core beliefs that organize our life, because if we give them up what organizes our life? We don't realize that this has become the ground we walk on. But if we don't believe these things anymore we don't know how to be in the world. So we do things like lowering our expectations of other people. We just quit asking people for help. We quit trying to get intimacy. We don't say what we want. We may just assume, "Well, it must be obvious what I need because I don't need very much so whatever I need must be perfectly legitimate to need and everybody should be aware of what I need. So I shouldn't have to ask for it. And if I do have to ask, I'm really annoyed with you for not just giving it to me and reading my mind and knowing that's what I want." And the intimacy just disintegrates.

"I can just withdraw from conflict," is another choice. Passive/aggressive behavior is very common in people who are addicted to pornography. I remember asking one individual that I worked with, "How did you rebel when you were a teenager? Because all teenagers rebel in some way or another." He said, "Oh, I didn't rebel. I did everything my parents wanted me to. I was really very, very good." I said, "Okay. Talk to me a little bit about what is going on in this pornography stuff with your wife." His wife knew he was looking at pornography and they'd come in for help. It turns out that his wife is quite a controlling individual. She is a pretty scared person. She's not feeling very comfortable in the world, and she's not at all comfortable with what her husband is doing. And she's trying very hard to control it. So she does things like tell him when to go to bed, tell him when to wake up in the morning, tell him when to get his studies done. He's not doing very well in school. She's hounding him about that. She's pushing him about it, she's scared to death she is going to end up with this guy without this big fancy degree and no money. So she's being the assertive one here, and he's just saying, "Oh, yes I need her to do that. That's just wonderful I am really not doing a very good job with all of this stuff." And how is he getting out his anger about being told what to do all the time? He is doing something she really doesn't like, and he can't figure out why. That is passive/aggressive. That tendency to not really deal with our problems in an assertive appropriate way but to pull back away from them and kind of do little things that we know will bug our partner as our way of rebelling, as our way of standing up for ourselves -- that is one of the patterns that I see.

Another choice for trying to avoid true intimacy is over-control, getting into all kinds of patterns of perfectionism and workaholism and other addictions, blaming, criticizing, all of those kinds of things. Over-control is one of the ways that we try to hold onto our core beliefs that we are really bad, but we can be better if we stay in control. We can keep it all under control if we just work ourselves to death.

Or, I might find other people who will agree with my core assumptions about being bad and about being shameful and set up a family with them. Now we can both do it together. And we see that happen a lot. We don't ever say that of course, but it is like we have a dog whistle inside of us that only certain frequencies, only certain people can hear. Other people who share those core beliefs hear that dog frequency and they don't even know it and they are drawn to us and we set up a family where we continue these core beliefs of shamefulness and badness. Or, I may start looking for intensity instead of intimacy; for control instead of safety; for obsession instead of trust (see Patrick Carnes's books for more about this idea). Those become the substitutes that give me the illusion of intimacy and trust and safety but don't fulfill their promises. Or, I can over- and under-function in all kinds of way. This poor wife is over-functioning like crazy, trying to control her husband's behavior. He is under- functioning like crazy trying to act like he really can't help it. And they set up that pattern and they balance their lives around it. Anybody tries to change that pattern and frankly it is going to be upsetting to the whole apple cart. So when we see addictive processes it is important to look at the whole relationship and how it has become stable in the relationship and how it works.

The addictive cycle (see Beck and Beck, Breaking the Cycle of Compulsive Behavior) starts when we give in to the addictive distractions that temporary make us feel better. However, we then feel more shame and failure than ever. "I've done this shameful awful thing. If anybody knew they would be really upset with me. If anybody knew that I'm the bishop and I'm looking at these X-rated movies in my hotel room, they would just be horrified." So I feel more shame, more of a sense of failure. I may rationalize my behavior and tell myself it is really not that bad. Either way, I hide it from other people. Others wouldn't understand. I'll not tell them about this. But then when do I feel? More alone than ever. I can't be who I really am with you because if I am you'll think I'm terrible. And so I feel more alone than ever. In that loneliness, the cycle starts over. I give up. I give in to the addictive distractions that temporarily make me feel better. I feel more shame and failure, those internal core beliefs are reinforced, and I go around and around.

Well, there is another path to this one that goes around and around and that's the path of help. The path that I'd like to spend the rest of our time talking about today. In that previous path either you are good or you are bad. And if you aren't really, really good then you're bad. And there is all of this shame and feeling of inadequacy that supports it. There is another principle, though, that Lehi sort of alludes to in 2nd Nephi -- that there is opposition in all things. There is opposition contained in all things. You, stand up for a minute (young female student in audience). Find the person on this whole row that you think looks the most opposite to you. Who is the most opposite? Yes, just walk over and pick them out. Who looks the most opposite? (Picks older man) All right, would you stand up so we can see? We want to get the visual image here. These people are opposites, right? They are opposites. They are very different in a lot of dimensions. One is older, one is younger. One is male, one is female. One has a tie on, one has a dress on. We can see all of the ways that they're opposite. But if you were to look at all of these species in the world, are these two people more alike or more different? They are more alike than they are different, aren't they? They are more like each other than they are like a giraffe for example, right? Even though they are opposites they really have a lot in common.

The idea of a dialectic says that even though two things are different we're not just interested in figuring out what that opposition is. We're also interested in looking at how we transcend opposition and find the alikeness, the commonality, the ways that opposition and opposites have to be transcended. The reason I take a minute to point that out is that when we are looking at dealing with sexual addiction of any kind, there are seemingly opposite things that have to happen at the same time. For example, we've talked a lot about shame. One of things that has to happen is we have to help people reduce their shame. That core belief is what sustains their addiction and it has to be reduced. But we also have to do an opposite thing, which is we have to help them see clearly the consequences and the reality of what they're doing and how bad it really is for them. So we're trying to do two opposite things in a sense at the same time. We're trying to look at how we get people to accept themselves and see the need for change. That's a tricky balance that we're trying to find. How do we do both of those things at the same time? ‘I accept you for who you are. You have no reason to be ashamed,' can feel like ‘great, I'm fine then. I can keep doing exactly what I want.' So we also need to tell people, "This is serious stuff. You are in deep "doo-doo" if you keep going down this path." But that call for change can feel like just reinforcing all of that shameful stuff that is at the core of the addiction. So we're trying to figure out how to do both of these things at the same time and this is a tricky thing to do. So what does this mean? It means that we need both. It means that we need to de-escalate the shame and loneliness around addiction, and still ask people to be responsible and to change.

I was talking to someone earlier who said, "I've got this group going where people who are struggling with pornography go and they can talk about it." And my comment was, "How do you get them to show up?" In my ward, in my stake where I live and practice, it is extremely difficult to get people who are dealing with this shameful behavior to come and be a part of the group. Nobody wants to do that. And yet in the absence of doing that, they don't get the help that they need. How do we de-escalate the shame and the sense of loneliness that underlies it? I think it is important to remember that pornography is a common problem in the world and among Latter-day Saints. It is too available for it to be otherwise. And so while we need to take it seriously we need to keep it in perspective. First of all, not all pornography use is addiction. People can use pornography without necessarily being addicted to it. There are sort of two different things that we're talking about. Virtually everyone here has been exposed to some form of pornography. It doesn't mean we're all addicted to it. Now, on the other hand, we've got a bishop in the Mormon church who just has an occasional beer. Is this a problem? Yes. When we're doing something that is against our value system even if it is something that the rest of the world would not consider that big of a deal, it is a problem. You don't have to be an addict to have a problem with pornography. So we need to reduce our sense of shame, validate that this is a common problem, but still see our need for change.

It is also, I think, important when working with someone who is addicted or who is using pornography to remember that pornography does not define the whole person. Our use of pornography is not the totality of who we are. If I'm dealing with a spouse who is involved with pornography use and I've discovered this I'm shocked and horrified and upset. It is important for me to keep things in perspective. I say this because some of the people that I have worked with and known who have been involved with pornography feel so completely guilt-ridden about it, so shameful about this addiction that they cannot control that it is as if that's the only thing to know about them, and it's not. I need another volunteer -- who feels like standing up? All you have to do is stand up, honest. Please would you stand up (young man)? Okay, let's just pretend you have a little problem with pornography. Everything else about you is exactly who you are. What kind of a world would it be if everyone in the world were exactly like you? Would there be any need for jails? Have you ever been in jail? No. Ever killed everybody? Ever started a war? No. Kidnaped anyone lately? No. Can you think about what the world would be like if everyone in it were just like him? Pornography use and all? No jails, no murder, no war, no violence. Not too bad, really. Let's keep this in perspective.

At the same time that we work on self-acceptance, we also need to reclaim our realism and reduce the rationalizing and minimizing that goes with this use. Even sporadic use of pornography is still a problem. Pornography use is virtually always very hard on relationships and I have found that to be true with members and nonmembers, with spouses who are beautiful and spouses who are unattractive, with women who are nonmembers who have been sexually active their whole lives, who have even looked at pornography with their husbands. It is still very hard on marriages when someone is looking at pornography.

(I apologize to the men in the room for singling them out here, but visual pornography is primarily a male addiction. However, women do have their own versions of this. Women are much more inclined than men to look at romance novels or sexually-explicit chat rooms. Verbal forms of pornography seem to be more appealing to women whereas visual is more appealing to men.)

Pornography use, we need to remember, is not solving our real problems, and that is the biggest reason that we need to change. So what does this mean if we are trying to be helpful. If I am the spouse or the therapist or the bishop or the helper or the friend, how can I be helpful in this kind of situation? I can be truthful about my own feelings. It doesn't do a whole lot of good to try to control another person. I wouldn't recommend it. I wouldn't recommend threats and manipulations and all kinds of things to try to get obsessed with controlling the use of pornography by another person, but I do think it is appropriate that we let our spouse or our friend know how we feel, honestly and not shamingly. Owning our own feelings. We don't have to be angry. We don't have to be screaming, but to be honest about how we feel about this and the effect that it has on us. "When I find you using this stuff it undermines my sense of my own sexuality. I can't even feel comfortable being sexual, because I think you're thinking about that stuff. So instead of having more intimacy between us I want less. I don't want anything to do with it." Those kinds of things are important to explain. It is important to not shame the person but to expect responsible behavior. It is very appropriate that we expect people to be responsible. When someone is addicted that responsibility will take a long time to develop. To regain that sense of control takes a while. It is still important that we expect responsible behavior, but that we not shame the person, and that we acknowledge and educate ourselves about the difficulty that is involved in getting over this problem.

I think we can also be helpful by not using the other person's addiction to make us feel better. Oh, I don't have to worry about my weight problem because my husband's worse than I am. I don't have to worry about my own sexual anorexia because my husband's the one who is really sick. I don't have to worry about my own inability to be intimate with my wife. She's the one who is caught up in these stupid chat rooms. So it is important that we not use this situation to reduce our own shame about our own problems by focusing it all on the other person instead. Sometimes we'd rather be right than happy and that's a serious problem in relationships. When we would rather be right so we don't have to feel ashamed, so we don't have to feel like we're bad. "You can be bad instead." Rather than really working through the problems and coming to understand each other in an intimate appropriate way.

Another dialectic, another opposite, that needs to be reconciled as we're working with this is self-discipline and pleasure. We need both in our lives. As others have beautifully illustrated there is a beautiful world to be had and our bodies are the way that we access that beautiful world, our eyes see the beauty of nature, our ears hear the gorgeous music, we touch things that are soft and wonderful and we experience the world that God has given us. We do have a right and a need for pleasure and beauty and goodness in our lives at a physical level but we also need self-discipline. So what this means is self-discipline is not the solution to pornography addiction, but it is part of the solution. It is not enough to just be self-disciplined if you are really addicted, but it is a part of the solution.

It is also important to remember that no matter what we do, there is a loss and a grief involved in giving up the old things that have structured our lives. Pornography is a way of structuring ourselves. Every time I feel bad I know what to do about it. Every time I'm feeling overwhelmed by the stresses of my work life I know what to do about it. Giving up that source of structure and pleasure is not easy. And sometimes we're looking for a way to fix our problem without having to feel bad about it and there often is not such a way. There is grief to be endured when we give up something that has structured our lives and given us pleasure or at least the illusion thereof. But grief prepares us to invest in new relationships, new structures, new sources of pleasure. The grieving process can't be side-stepped, but it is a process that prepares us for a different way of dealing with the world.

So we need self-discipline, and we also need healthy sexuality. Healthy sexuality is a legitimate goal. It is a legitimate thing to want in our lives. The ability to fully enjoy appropriate sexual expression and calmly avoid inappropriate sexual expression is a wonderful accomplishment worth striving for. We can claim our body with all its parts and passions. It is a wonderful gift that God has given us. It is not our enemy. The body does need to be reprogrammed when we have gotten ourselves addicted to our own chemistry. But learning to relax in some other way than looking at pornography, learning to find pleasure in some other way is a part of the process claiming our body. I think it also helps to know our own sexual history and to get help with sexual healing for both partners. There is often a family history of sexual dysfunction that needs to be recognized and brought up and looked at and taken into account.

Meeting our true needs is the other item on this list. But it is a big idea. Sexual addiction is often an effort to meet legitimate needs, albeit in not terrific ways. But we need to find legitimate ways to meet those needs if we're going to give up the pornography. Some of the needs that pornography pretends to meet for us are that it gives us a distraction and a soothing when we're anxious. We need to find other ways to do that if that's what we're using pornography to do. Pornography can give us an illusion of affection and closeness. We need to find other sources of those things if we're using pornography for that. It gives us an illusion of power and attention. We can pretend those beautiful girls are looking at us and that we're strong and dominant and in control. We have to find other ways of taking the risk of being seen for who we are and displaying our strengths if you want to put it that way. It gives us an illusion of safety and risk management, and we need to find other ways to feel safe and to control risk in our lives so that we can take the risks that we need to take without feeling too uncomfortable. Sometimes we need to expand our willingness to take risks without telling ourselves, "Boy, if I fail at this it will really be awful. It will be a catastrophe. Everyone will be looking at me and I will be humiliated." And that is often the belief that we have when we are afraid to display our strengths in appropriate ways. Pornography may be a source of structure and routine. We need to find others. It may be the way that we express who we are. It may be a way of exploring our identity. A lot of times people will use chat rooms to take on an alternative gender as their identity as a way of exploring their femininity if they are a man or their masculinity if they're a woman. We need to find on ways of exploring the full range of our identity and personality that are appropriate. Pornography may be our way of finding excitement and risk. If you don't have enough excitement and risk in your life and pornography is the only way you're getting it you've got to find some new ways to get excitement if you're going to give up that old one. Pleasure, enjoyment, relaxation, and peace -- these are all things people use pornography and sex as a shortcut to or a substitute for. I don't know how many men I've had tell me they use pornography to relax. Well, find another way to relax or it is going to be very difficult to give that up.

How can we as spouses or friends of an addict be helpful with this grieving, giving up process? Being helpful says that we acknowledge the reality of the loss without personalizing it, and that we deal with our own issues. We deal with our own sexual anorexia. We deal with our own addictions to food, to work, to control. If I'm the spouse, I focus on working on my own shame issues, my own internal core beliefs that are sustaining addictive behavior. And those are some of the ways we can be helpful on this issue.

The next dialectic is self-confidence and humility. We need both of those things: to believe I can do this, and to know I really am not in complete control here. What that means is that we plan for success. We take advantage of therapy. We go to the 12-step groups that are available for people with sexual addictions. That is the best cure we seem to have for sexually addictive behavior. We are explicit about what things we need to avoid. You cannot just avoid all sexually explicit material in the world that we live in. But we can say I don't go to any more R- or X-rated movies. I don't turn on those movies in the hotel room at night. I don't get on the Internet sites that I know are pornographic. We can explicitly say I avoid Victoria Secret catalogs or whatever it is that you know is a problem for you. Be explicit about that, or at least start there. And then identify and avoid the triggers that set you up for failure. When are you likely to have a problem? For most people it is related to what they're using pornography for (from that previous list). For example, maybe I'm likely to have a problem when I'm wound up and I need to relax. Or I'm likely to have a problem when I'm feeling the stress of my work, and I'm feeling like I'm going to fail and I need something to distract me from that. So you identify those triggers, and then you make a plan. You fix the computer so you can't get access to that stuff. You ask for support. You stop going to the places where you indulge. Unfortunately, in the human brain what fires together wires together. Whatever you are around when you are doing that pornographic behavior becomes wired together with that behavior in your mind, and you can't get away from it in your head. When you sit down in the hotel room at night or in front of the computer, that pornographic image is wired together in your mind with that computer. And so you have to protect yourself from the automatic behavior that will just step in and take over when you are around that trigger. You turn on that computer and your brain knows what you're supposed to do next. You're supposed to start looking for pornography. So you've got to really work at managing your environment while those wires get pulled apart in your brain a little bit.

But the other half of this dialect is that in the face of all of that self-confident, proactive behavior we also have to be humble and accept our human limitations. That means we learn from our set backs, and we see them as an opportunity to learn something new. I'm told that the person who invented the Salk vaccine, Mr. Salk, was asked how he became such a wonderful scientist and he reported a situation with his mother when he was a little kid. He had a glass of milk sitting on the table and it was really close to the edge of the table and his mom said, "Honey, you better move that glass of milk a little further away from the edge of the table or it is going to fall off." And he just looked at her and he didn't really want to move the milk and he just let it sit there. And she warned him again, "If you leave it there it is going to be really easy to knock that off." Well he didn't want to do it and so he went on with his meal and then, sure enough, what happens? Mothers know best. He knocked the milk off. He then says, in essence, "what's important about how I became a scientist is what happened next. My mother didn't scold me, she didn't shame me, she helped me clean it up, and then she said, ‘So what have you learned?'" That is the question we need to be asking when we fail, when we have setbacks. Okay, what did I learn? What did I learn from this that I can apply? Not that I'm shameful and bad and awful and terrible -- that's not the message. What did I learn? What can I do to change that will help me? People who have addictive problems also tend to have a real problem knowing their own limits on anything. They work too long, they go without eating too long, they hold in their anger too long without dealing with it appropriately. They overdo the right and left and the in-between. Learning to accept our own human limitations is a very important step. Being helpful by the spouse or friend requires supporting our spouse in realistic self-expectations, acknowledging their human limitations and not expecting them to go beyond what's reasonable.

It also helps the other person to be responsible when we make it easy for them to be honest with us. Now I'm going to ask you one more group question here. How many of you ever in your life told a lie? All kids tell a lie at some point or another. What stops it? When you get scolded badly enough for it? Not usually. What stops it is when parents make it really easy to tell the truth. And what we can do for each other when we are trying to support each other and be helpful is to make it easy to tell the truth. That doesn't mean that we accept the behavior. It doesn't mean there aren't consequences for it, but it means that we don't add all of this extra burden of shame that makes it so hard to be honest.

The last dialectic I want to mention is that we need to have a stable sense of self, but we also need to restructure our identity. We have to be able to do both of those things at the same time. We need to be able to be who we are and develop the whole of who we are and build on our strengths. And then we also need to change who we are and work on our weaknesses.

There are some more things that we could talk about today but I'm going to stop there and just go back to your initial question. What was it you were trying to get help with? And have you received any? Can you think about what you might have learned from this experience that might apply to your question, and what else are you still looking for that you can keep looking for?

The conclusion I want to reinforce is: We can get out of the addictive patterns that interfere with our true needs being met in legitimate ways, and we can follow the path of intimacy and help. God loves us and He will help us. In fact, the very name "Jesus" means "God is help." I say with Paul, "We don't have a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. But he was in all points tempted like we are, but without sin. So we can come boldly before the throne of grace and obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need." In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.