Counseling Blog
Emotional & Relational Health from a Christian Perspective
We are not motivated in a long term way by the negative or by threats of punishment. If the only goal is to stop viewing porn, this becomes a very negative and discouraging journey in which you are constantly faced with how much shame and guilt you feel. So I would propose shifting the goal to understanding on a much deeper level why you viewed porn, what wounds or life problems you were trying to deal with, and finding new ways of addressing these problems.
Porn doesn’t care about you or the people involved in producing it. It cares about making money and keeping you hooked and it is very good at doing both. It wants you to love pleasure while also feeling worse and worse about yourself and your life. It wants you to judge others and find them wanting and to embrace ideals of physical beauty and sexual behavior. It doesn’t want you to look beneath the surface or to think about what it takes to create porn or keep the industry going.
Many people enter counseling feeling truly hopeless about their circumstances and the loops that they are in, and I have a lot of empathy for that. It’s a terrible feeling. But we need to know that the remedy to hopelessness is not a quick solution to our suffering or simply finding ways to make it go away. The first step is to feel the suffering, to listen to it, to make good choices within it, and to allow it to create a new character in us. God’s love is pouring into us as we do this. This is how we find hope.
