Over the last two months, many of the responses I’ve received to our first two columns have been from wives or family members with a loved one caught in pornography addiction. This spiritual plague is challenging the Church like no other, and like every other addiction, its cruel repercussions spread far beyond the life of the addict. Wives are especially susceptible to a husbands’ sexual addiction. For that reason, I’ve chosen to address this month’s column directly to them. I hope, though, that you will keep reading-whether you are a wife or not. If you have any loved one affected by this or any addiction-the principles covered here will be worth your prayerful consideration.
Understanding Our Shared Experience
When you find out your husband has a sexual addiction, it feels a lot like your own personal 9-11, the day the Twin Towers fell and America’s safety and security was irreparably violated. It feels like one of the single worst tragedies you could ever imagine facing . . . one you never imagined facing: Your husband is sexually active, sexually involved . . . without you. You confront him. You sob. You rage. You begin to frantically try to police his life. Over and over again, with tears and sorrow he either pledges to reform or he responds with defensiveness. Bitterness begins to replace love in the heart and mind of both of you.
Or maybe, by the time you discover his addiction, it has escalated to the point that his heart and mind have become enslaved, his values twisted and perverted to the point he has actually “acted out.” He’s had an affair or been with a prostitute. And all the while you were faithful, believing, trusting. Now, your trust turns to humiliation and pain. Your own sanity feels like it’s hanging by a thread. You walk through your days, dealing with the children, going about your routine like a Zombie. Nothing seems real or tangible any longer. It feels like something in you has died, and appropriately so. In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Jacob speaks to the men who had violated their marriage covenants in those very terms:
“Behold . . . Ye have broken the hearts of your tender wives, and lost the confidence of your children, because of your bad examples before them; and the sobbing of their hearts ascend up to God against you. And because of the strictness of the word of God, which cometh down against you, many hearts died, pierced with deep wounds .” (Jacob 2:35, emphasis added.)
Wherever you are in your journey, hope and peace can truly come into your heart even after this devastating situation you now face. It may take some years and a lot of rethinking and redesigning of your life and priorities. However, I can promise you that your faith, hope and trust in marriage and even in your husband, if he chooses to allow it, can be rebuilt.
I can promise you, by my own experience that you can choose to survive this and heal from it, whether your husband chooses to or not. It is a choice between living in denial, pretending it didn’t happen and keeping it a secret, and facing this reality and reaching out for help to overcome it. Just like strenuous exercise causes temporary pain because of torn muscle fibers that then heal by building new fiber, this terrible pain and heartache can actually be survived and make you a stronger person.
This season of your life will be a time of intense spiritual exercise of all the principles of the gospel. First you must start seeking help by asking questions, reading literature, talking to priesthood leaders, trusted family and friends, or professional counselors. Above all you must start seeking direct counsel and comfort from your Heavenly Father and from His beloved Son Jesus Christ. Elder Richard G. Scott of the Quorum of the Twelve made this statement about seeking help to recover from a devastating life experience:
“No matter what the source of difficulty and no matter how you begin to obtain relief-through a qualified professional therapist, doctor, priesthood leader, friend, concerned parent, or loved one-no matter how you begin, those solutions will never provide a complete answer. The final healing comes through faith in Jesus Christ and His teachings, with a broken heart and a contrite spirit and obedience to His commandments.” 1
Five Truths That Became My Lifelines
Mary is a young friend of mine. Our deep sense of friendship comes from an afternoon we spent together over two years ago when she came to my home to talk to me about her recent discovery of her husband’s pornography addiction. She had heard about my husband, Phil’s, successful recovery from the same problem and she wanted to know what I had done to help him. She was shocked at my quick response: “As little as possible.” She demanded an explanation. I offered her the following guidelines:
Live in the light of truth and let it set you free
Learning the truth about your husband’s sexual addiction is so hard, but it is actually for most wives, the beginning of sanity, not the end of it. Perhaps we had suspected something was wrong with our marriage, even assumed it was our fault. Often our spouse allowed us to take the blame to draw attention away from himself. Thus, a marriage becomes damaged and unhealthy in direct proportion to the secrets the partners keep from one another. This is actually Satan’s goal when he entices a partner to indulge in secret sin-to infect the relationship with the lying and pretending that will eventually destroy their family.
I had to learn that although honesty hurts, it is the only way to clean things up, and begin to heal. I heard someone once say, “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you mad.” I had to accept the unavoidable truth that if my husband and I weren’t willing to bear the burden of each others reality, we weren’t really experiencing a true marriage. A true marriage is based on unwavering honesty. I look back now, and realize that the crisis of facing the reality of my husband’s addiction to pornography was the turning point that demanded we finally start having a heart-deep, honest relationship that included the whole truth. We had to sit still and face both of our realities, weaknesses and all. I had to be willing to hear him talk about what was really going on with him including how far his addiction had progressed. He had to be willing to listen to me tell him the truth about how I felt.
At first, I was ashamed that I couldn’t speak of these things calmly, without tears and terrible pain, but I came to realize they had to be said honestly. I learned that it was absolutely essential that I tell him the truth about how his actions were affecting me and our family. I came to realize that only the truth , no matter how painful it was to tell it, could contribute to making the situation right. I had to be plain and I had to speak true. (See 1 Nephi 33:6.)
If you are unable to avoid crying and expressing yourself with “energy” when you share your own pain and fear with your husband, don’t feel bad. People who feel like their whole world is collapsing are not usually able to be totally unruffled or calm about it. For this reason, you may want to arrange to be away from the children when you tell him how you feel. Go for a drive, or better yet make arrangements to include your Bishop or a therapist if possible.
The one boundary for this “hour of reckoning” is this: Don’t tell him your feelings in a spirit of vengeance or hatred. Believe me, he deserves your pity far more than your hatred. Speak in a spirit of someone who is hurting so bad they can’t avoid crying out about it. Without raging or attacking him personally, explain the repercussions his behavior is having on you emotionally and physically. Tell him how close you are to having your own heart and the love in it die, pierced through, as Jacob put it, “with deep wounds.”
But what if he just ignores my feelings? I’ve actually expressed my feelings before and he’s gone right back to acting out.
Telling him the truth about how his addiction is affecting you can’t be done as a front or guise to try to make him change. The harsh, cold truth is that his inability to change immediately is not an indication of whether he respects your feelings or not. He is addicted . No matter how much he may want to change, even motivated by a deep love for you and his children, he no longer has the power to stop. Addiction is not just a “bad habit.” One of the truths you must deal with is that during his recovery process, he probably isn’t going to have perfect, “black-or-white” abstinence at first.
In the first year of my husband’s recovery work, he had an occasional slip and part of his recovery was to tell me when it happened and part of my recovery was to let him tell me. Keeping a prayer in my heart, I would listen to my husband’s truth. I didn’t ask for details.
But I feel desperate to know the details. How can you not want to know the details?
I didn’t want to know the details because dwelling on details isn’t helpful for anyone involved. This is something both mental health professionals and prophets agree on. I came to realize that the details of our sins is what the prophets refer to when they say we should remember (ours and others) sin no more once we have repented. Obviously, they don’t mean forget that the experience ever happened, because then we would learn nothing from our experience and would be setting ourselves up to have it happen again. What they’re pleading with us to do is to forget the details, to stop obsessing about and rehearsing the particulars. Both of you will be tormented if you choose to replay the details.
As I enlarged my own understanding of prayer by studying the scriptures, especially the Book of Mormon, I learned that I could look unto the Lord in every thought (D&C 6:36) and counsel with Him continually in my heart and mind (Alma 37:37; 3 Nephi 20:1). I began to pray in the midst of my conversations with my husband, seeking the Lord’s Spirit to guide me and to give me the ability to react as He would react. Drawing on this power, I found myself able to hear my husband’s truth and recognize it as the burden, the scourge, and sorrow that it was to him.
I felt the Spirit witness to me that my husband’s descent into addiction happened over time and that recovery would also take time. I was actually able to reassure my husband that we could both be patient and long-suffering with the process of recovery, which for most people includes a few slips. If your husband is willing to be honest with you and expresses sorrow and remorse, you can both be reassured, he’s on his way out of the abyss. Discouragement and panic needs to be avoided if a slip occurs.
I began to realize that it took a lot of pressure off my husband when he knew I wouldn’t go into hysterics if he shared his reality with me. This actually removed another excuse for him to lie. He didn’t need to “protect” me. Gradually, I came to genuinely value living in the light of truth. It helped me to remember that Satan thrives and revels in secrecy. The truth could and did make me free. It made me free to live in reality and to make my decisions from a more informed position. It wasn’t always what I wanted it to be but the truth made us both become real to each other.
“Don’t take his behavior personally.”
How can you say “Don’t take it personally?” Can’t you understand how responsible I feel for what he’s doing? Isn’t this all about me and my inadequacy as a partner?
The answer to this question is probably the most important and the most difficult answer you will have to face. To accept it, you will have to let go of your ego a bit. I can testify to you, without a doubt, that your husband’s sexual addiction is not about you.
Many boys have their first exposure to pornography before they reach puberty. And contrary to the expectations of most men with an addiction to it, getting married doesn’t cure it.
But why?
The sex men experience “alone” we call lust; the sex that is part of a genuine relationship with another living person can be genuine love . Most people think of lust as having to do with the physical feelings of sexual arousal. But lust is actually a thing of the heart and mind, not the body. Lust is the belief that something-food, sex, money, a more perfect house, more personal effort from us-is going to make us happy, fill us up, calm us down, take away our “bad mood” once and for all. In many ways the word lust could be used as a synonym for addiction .
Still, I feel like such a failure, like such a reject. Like somehow, I drove him to this.
The truth is you are not the cause of your husband’s sexual addiction. I can’t emphasize that enough. It’s not about you! It’s not your fault any more than if you found out he had diabetes or leukemia. It is not a reflection of either your adequacy or your attractiveness.
Almost every wife of a man addicted to pornography believes that if somehow she were more attractive, more “alluring,” if she were “enough for him,” he wouldn’t have to turn to these so called “perfect” images of other women. This belief is totally unjustified. If a man’s satisfaction with his wife depended on physical attractiveness or “sex appeal,” we would expect men married to supermodels or movie stars to be the most faithful of husbands.
When my husband and I began to honestly face his addiction together, he explained his involvement with pornography had nothing to do with him admiring the women in the pictures. He said, they really weren’t people but flat, two dimensional images that caused a certain reaction in his body, a reaction that he had become addicted to as a teenager. As I listened, I thought of the books on sexual addiction that I had started reading. Hormones are the most powerful chemicals in the human body that cause sexual arousal, which is extremely mood altering. Some experts have compared their power to heroin or cocaine.
But there must be something I can do to get him to quit!
As backwards as it may sound, the least you do to “get him to change,” the greater hope there is of him changing. It may help to picture what experts advise us to do if while on a camping trip in the mountains we wake up with a giant grizzly bear breathing in our face. Remain very still, even though it may seem to be the single most illogical and terrifying thing to do. Probably the single most powerful version of this counsel came in likening D&C 123:17 to my own circumstances:
“Therefore, dearly beloved brethren, let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then [when we can no longer function with kindness and good humor] may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed.
” (D&C 123:17, emphasis added.)
But, I’m terrified that if I quit trying to help him control this thing, he will just get worse.
That’s a real possibility. In fact, it may be a reality . . . for a while. Why? Because if he has either 1) been relying on your censure and blame to keep him from doing his addiction or (insane as it may sound) 2) using your censure and blame to justify doing his addiction, your decision to pull out of the “game” may leave him without a “conscience” on the one hand or an excuse on the other. He will be left alone with his own choices as well as with the pain they cause. He will have to begin to face and decide what he’s going to do about it. And don’t be surprised if he gives the twisted rationalization, “Well, I might as well act out. She didn’t even care enough to stop me.”
While it may be good to monitor a child’s behavior and teach them right from wrong, it is not healthy to treat a grown adult in the same fashion. When I tried to manage my husband’s life, I treated him like a child and only contributed to his excuse to continue behaving in a childish way. I learned to get out of the way and let him come face to face with the truth of how addicted he really was and how deeply it was damaging his life. I had to have the humility to allow him to find answers on his own, through other means besides me. I had to learn not to panic about the amount of time he spent attending recovery meetings and studying recovery principles. I had to take my heart and mind off of him and turn to the Lord to develop my own life-close to my husband, but not enmeshed, not as someone playing the exhaustive role of his parent figure.
“Let go and let God work with him.”
Remember that your husband’s addiction is about him and his relationship with God and the Lord Jesus Christ. The question he needs to ask himself is “What think ye of Christ?” Not, what think ye of your wife or children. Nothing less than a love and devotion to God Himself is going to sustain your husband to face the deluge of sexual temptations he encounters. There is no other way to escape. We must all become immune to the world from the inside out, from the spiritual depths of our living , loving relationship with the Savior and Heavenly Father.
Until we allow the Savior’s Spirit and His power to remit the effects of sin-whether our own or another person’s-will keep returning to the addictive cycle:
“And they all cried with one voice, saying: Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually.” (Mosiah 5: 2)
Note that it was not the people’s exertion of their own will that wrought a might change in their hearts. Heart surgery is solely the province of the Lord. Once a person submits their heart to Him, He can literally change their disposition so they no longer desire wrong-doing. This is what has happened in my husband, Phil’s life.
“Don’t isolate. Find others with whom you can counsel.”
Dealing with this problem is the same as facing any other disease. It is like finding out your husband has cancer, epilepsy or some other malady. You can’t just wish away. After my initial shock, I was able to draw on the Spirit of the Lord to help me accept that this reality was a part of my God-allowed package of challenges in this life. It was something that I would have to live with, one way or the other-whether I chose to remain with my husband or leave him. You need to separate your husband’s challenge (the fact that he’s developed a sexual addiction) from your problem (you’re living with someone with a sexual addiction.) You need to realize that you have your own bishop to whom you need to go for your own sake, not just to fix your husband. Go to your bishop in the same spirit in which you must approach the Lord-seeking counsel and guidance, strength and blessings for yourself. It’s not tattling on your husband to go to your Bishop for your own needs-for help in your decisions.
What if I have actually participated in unrighteous sexual behaviors myself in order to appease or try to stay close to my husband?
Sadly, others in close relationship with the addict may get pulled into participating. Far too many boys, for example, have been introduced to pornography by finding their father or brother=s “stash.” Don’t think you’re unique, if, as a wife, you have been enticed to participate in some way. While there can be a great deal of overlap between men and women’s reasons for getting involved in sexual activity, a woman is usually motivated by a desire for emotional intimacy and a sense of connection with her partner. If this is your situation, it is even more reason to seek your bishop’s help.
“Turn to the Savior for your own comfort and strength.”
Just as your husband must “come unto Christ,” you must do so too in order to find His peace (Omni 1:26; Philippians 4:7).
“And moreover, I say unto you, that there shall be no other name given nor any other way nor means whereby salvation can come unto the children of men , only in and through the name of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent.” (Mosiah 3:17, emphasis added.)
Never did the following scripture mean more to me than when I was dealing with my husband’s addiction:
“Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings, and he will direct thee for good; yea, when thou liest down at night lie down unto the Lord, that he may watch over you in your sleep; and when thou risest in the morning let thy heart be full of thanks unto God; and if ye do these things, ye shall be lifted up at the last day.” ( Alma 37:37.)
As you have to think through this terrible challenge and make some heart-rending decisions, you must look to the Lord in as many thoughts as you can (See D&C 6:36). You must cultivate your own ability to perceive the whisperings of the Holy Spirit of Truth. Only by that source can you know what to do. More than just being active in your ward, you will need to have personal devotion, including sincere prayer and deep pondering of the scriptures. As you consult daily with the Lord (and sometimes each hour), He will lead you to know what you need to know in order to do what you need to do. You will be led to the right people to talk to. He will guide you to know what to say to your husband and when to say it. He will guide you to know when to show mercy and when to be firm.
The way you and your husband are going to get through this challenge (as well as the many others mortality will bring) is for both of you to put God first, come unto the Father through His Beloved Son Jesus Christ, and seek the companionship of the Holy Ghost and the counsel of the Lord.
Then , your love for each other will be grounded in His Love, even charity. Charity is the pure love of Christ (for Christ as well as from Him). When each of you come to the Savior, you will come to each other in a way that you’ve never known before. The greatest love you will ever feel for each other is His love.
Please pray and ponder these words. I know that you can enter spiritually into the Savior’s arms (D&C 6:20-21), and find an immediate relief from your hopelessness and trauma. His promise of comfort and rest is not just for “someday,” but for right now-in the midst of your sorrow and pain.
“Wherefore, I would speak unto you that are of the church, that are the peaceable followers of Christ, and that have obtained a sufficient hope by which ye can enter into the rest of the Lord, from this time henceforth until ye shall rest with him in heaven.” ( Moroni 7:3.)
It is my prayer that you will remain close to the Church and to your family, friends and church leaders. They will be the Savior’s instruments in bringing you much of the fellowship you need. But always remember, no one else’s help is the equivalent of the Savior’s. I know that you can “enter into the rest of the Lord” and have Him strengthen and inspire you, no matter what your husband’s choices may be.
P.S. This text was originally published in an expanded form in the book, Confronting Pornography , edited by Mark D. Chamberlain, Daniel D. Gray, and Rory C. Reid and published by Deseret Book, 2005, pp.146-161. It has been used here with permission from the publisher.