By: Shane James O’Neill
Have you or someone you care about ever been damaged by the scars of pornography? It isn’t enough to say that porn just affects our bodies: pornography impacts our relationships, our bodies, and our imaginations.
Here are 3 practices that will help to heal you from pornography by allowing you to live the way God intended for you to live.
1. Build Relationships!
When you’re around people you can’t watch porn or act out. That’s already a win! As for as gods go, pornography is a pretty abusive one. Porn consumes the worship of our emotional passion. Yet, by being with people we can form healthy emotional outlets. As we develop significant and transparent relationships we are re-shaping the ways we trust and feel, hope and love. Porn isolates us by giving us false intimacy. But by intentionally creating relationships you are directly fighting your porn and masturbation addiction.
While the Christian worldview, along with modern biology, teaches us that humans are fundamentally selfish, it is also true that we are made to deeply know those around us and to be deeply known by them. A recent study in neuroscience and psychology has shown that humans need quality relationships; otherwise, all other areas of health and development begin to fall apart. Studies show that isolation “increases levels of stress hormones in the body and leads to poor sleep, a compromised immune system, and, in the elderly, cognitive decline.”
There are few things more isolating than porn — as we wait for an empty house, hide in dark corners, clear our search history, and lie to the people most important to us.
For all you introverts, like myself, some of the best relationships are the ones you can be around without feeling the need to interact. I even study much better by having people I know around me who are doing the same thing.
Just being around people creates safety.
You need to practice knowing people and you need to practice being known.
Game nights, cooking together, hiking, studying, whatever it might be — hang out with people!
2. Physical Activity
Your hormones will sit like a stagnant swamp inside of you if you don’t create healthy channels of release. If we only give our bodies one outlet for our hormones (masturbation) then our bodies demand that outlet more and more — from monthly, to weekly, to daily, to… more.
Physical activity breaks apart that swampy stagnation and enables healthy chemical circulation throughout the body. Studies show that even exercising 20-30 minutes on a near daily basis will improve mood, increase energy and vitality, significantly reduce your chances of being sick, and help you engage your day with greater productivity.
Hiking, climbing, running, lifting, yoga, martial arts, whatever — be physically active!
3. Read
Don’t just read for work, or memes, or tweets, or even blogs (except for this one, of course). Read books and read them for your own development, read them because you like them, AND read them often.
Your imagination is a massive part of who you are. Imagination shapes everything from memory to how you understand love to how you view people.
Here we can let C.S. Lewis be our guide:
“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself… Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
Read a story to start your day, read a story to end your day, read out of pure discipline, read because you love the topic, read to see through another person’s eyes, read to foster compassion, read because you want to be smarter, read to get into another world — Read!
New Creation
Porn captures our imaginations and it calls us into a story that our hormones are more than willing to embrace. When biology and imagination come together, as they do during pornography, we are always significantly impacted. So we need resources to rewrite ourselves. Physical activity, given time and consistency, will take care of the biological part. Building meaningful relationships and reading will re-orient our imaginations.
Porn will isolate you, rewire your body, and ravage your imagination. It isn’t a matter of believing hard enough, it’s a matter of living differently. God’s creation has resources to make us into a new creation, and Jesus’s Gospel shows us the way. Pursue people, strengthen your body, and engage your imagination.
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Shane James O’Neill is the Editorial Director for ProvenMen Ministries. He is currently working on a graduate degree in apologetics at Liberty University’s Rawling School of Divinity.