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It takes over your life. It’s something that’s easy to get into and almost impossible to get out of. It’s something that, if you’re not careful, can come to define you and your worldview and the way you see life. Books upon books have been written about it, all filled with stories of how marriages were ruined and lives destroyed from the submission to it.  Once it’s gotten a hold of you, it’s life consuming. 

I’m talking about an addiction to internet pornography. 

My addiction to internet pornography started when I was around 9 years old.  Surprised?  Many people are. 

I was on the bus with my friends.  One friend in particular, “Andy,” had always been the rebellious, wild one of the group.  What he said and did had a big effect on me, as did what he thought of me.  Whenever he would say things about female body parts and how attracted he was to them, I was all ears.  I got interested and began to look for ways to see for myself.  Then I remembered that anything you needed could be found on the computer.  So, as an ignorant, hormone-driven, socially influenced 5^th grader, I got on the computer and typed, “Boobs” and then “Hot girls” into the Google.  

What I saw after that had an immediate snowball effect.  As Ron White says, “Once you see one girl naked, you want to see them all naked.” So the snowball began rolling, and, I got better and better at typing into Google specific search terms to find more and more explicit photos and videos that were free.  I became familiar with promising websites.  It didn’t take long for me to become obsessed.  

Every time my parents let me stay up a little bit later to instant message my friends—which was a big thing at the time, I would sign off—tell my friends I was being forced to go to bed, make a crack at how oppressive parents were, and then get on Internet Explorer.  I was given an AOL account as a tweener but my parents put such high restrictions on what I could do, that I hardly used it.   They also put a software blocker on our Internet Explorer that took me about 5 minutes to figure out and work around.

I was a quick learner.

However, this is where the story gets interesting. Due to the snowball effect, I was getting into worse and worse stuff. Our computer was fairly old, and it didn’t have the best virus protection in the world, so our hard drive quickly became filled with downloaded images and things that I didn’t really want the rest of family knowing about. However, I had apparently signed myself up for a pay-per-view website.  It wasn’t until a month later, when a $1000 bill came in the mail, that I had realized my error.  

My parents had absolutely no idea. 

So the bill comes, and I get the heart-sinking call downstairs to where my father is sitting at the computer looking through the history of where I’d been on Internet Explorer.

I did my best to cover it up and play dumb, but I was busted.  From then on, it became not only a battle with myself, but also against my own family—mainly my parents.

But in addition to getting in trouble, I learned a valuable lesson that night:  how to delete the history from the history bar.  I developed a careful procedure to search, always being sure to cover my tracks carefully, deleting the history and emptying the cache of cookies.

The guilt was overwhelming.

I got better and better at hiding it and finding times to be on the computer.  I would sometimes get up in the middle of the night or wake up super early, making sure first that my parents were asleep.  You see how controlling it was?  One time, when our Internet was down, I resorted to going into my closet and using my cell phone to get onto the Internet to get my pornography fix.  That came back to bite me too, because cell phone bills are much more specific than Internet bills.  (To this day, my parents will still not allow me to have Internet/Wi-fi capabilities on my phone, and I'm pretty sure I might be the only one in the United States that doesn’t have it.)

Pornography changed the way I looked at women. Before porn, I saw women as friends and equals.  As I got deeper and deeper into it, I began to see women as the same objects I saw almost every night on my computer. I tried to keep it under control, but as we grew, the girls started to take on the form of the girls I lusted over at night.

I’m now in college.  I’ve had my victories and my defeats. I'm still fighting it and sometimes it seems, with no end in sight.  I’ve talked to many people about it, and I’ve been given practical applications of what I should do about it, but I just can’t shake it.   

I still feel a massive amount of guilt every single time I do it.

What I Know Now:

1.     I’m not alone.  For the longest time, I thought I was the only guy dealing with this.  When I finally got the courage to tell some close friends, I found out they were struggling with the same thing.  You’re not alone, and your parents love you.

2.      Viewing pornography can have a snowball effect on you. Once you pop, you just can’t stop. And once you’ve seen one thing, you want to see more and you want to see it again and again and again. 

3.      The lens through which I see the world has been greatly affected by this addiction. Even as I'm writing this, I'm looking around the library for the prettiest girls. Now I'm not necessarily lusting over them, but I admit I don’t see women the same anymore. It’s a very objective view, and something that I'm not proud of, but also something I don’t know how to change.

4.     My parents wanted to help. I admit I thought they were just out to get me at first, but what young teenager doesn’t? I felt they were ashamed of me. That wasn’t true at all. They loved every part of me, and wanted me to be the best I could be.  And they recognized that in order to maximize my potential, I couldn’t be controlled by pornography like I was.  I owe all the control I have over it now, however miniscule that might be, to them loving me through this.   

5.     My addiction impacted my siblings.  I destroyed more than one computer and my addiction caused my parents to put even tougher blocks in place.  Often, those programs they installed to block my pornography use, made doing research for papers and homework tough for my brothers.  I thought they were ashamed of me, and wanted me out of the family. However, it was quite the opposite. They knew what I was going through and were very sensitive to that.

6.     I needed to take the lead in my controlling it.  I put in place a computer program that sends a weekly report to five men I respect (including my dad) and who hold me accountable.  Every week, these men are sent a report of all the web sites I visit.  So, whenever I am tempted, I think about these men and whether or not I want to disappoint them.  That pause in my actions has made a huge difference in me being able to control it. 

To parents, here are some things to look for that may indicate your son or daughter is struggling with pornography addiction:    

1.     If your child begins to act very skittish whenever the mail comes, whenever you call them from another room, whenever you’re using the computer they use or whenever you’re in their room, he may have a problem with Internet pornography addiction.

2.      If your child’s happy-go-lucky attitude suddenly turns sour. For me, the overwhelming guilt and depression (because I thought I was the only one) was, at times, too much for me to handle. I had always been a very fun-loving kid but when pornography took over, I turned into something I never intended to be. I took offense to things that usually didn’t bother me and I looked for the negative things in people as opposed to the positive.

Advice For Parents: 

1.      If and when you find out your son has been viewing pornography, DO NOT ignore it or think “boys will be boys.”  As I said above, the habit snowballs.  If you’ve caught him, he already has a problem.  Start talking to him now and get him help.  Now.

2.     Advice-wise, parents, please try to understand what your son is going through and don’t just lecture.  After the first of many bills came in the mail, my parents could not understand why I couldn’t just give up on everything and just not do it anymore. My father had gone through something similar, but not nearly to the measures I did.  It was miserable. They sat me down, told me how bad it was, and how I needed to get it under control. I could sense their anger and frustration and heard the shame in their voices.  That tore me up inside and didn’t help. If anything, it made it worse.

3.     Advice-wise, parents should skip the heart-to-heart chats.  After my parents lectured me, I was sent to my room.  After a while, my father would come up and talk to me heart-to-heart, man-to-man. It seems like a good idea, but at that time, I was still feeling the intense guilt and shame (some of which came from them).  I wasn’t listening.  I just sat there, nodding occasionally, waiting for the time when he would get up and leave.  I know that it was more for him than for me, and that he desperately wanted to be in my life as much as possible and be my go-to man (which he still is), but it didn’t help. At that time, I resented my parents because pornography gave me an attitude that blocked out all the great things they were doing for me. 

4.     Lastly, just be there. Let your child come to you.  The guilt is unbearable and your child will want someone, anyone, to be there for him. Let that person be you. Be the light in his life and the strong foundation off of which he thinks that he can build a secure future.  You’re his parents, and he knows that.  He’s in an intense fight that’s impossible for him to win on his own, so you have to be there to be his reinforcements. However, you can’t just charge in, hoping to be the hero of the day. You have to wait for him to call you. He has to want to stop.  The wait for my parents was agonizing because you want to go in and fix everything and take his pain away.  But you have to wait. It’s vital. 

Otherwise, he might just think you’re trying to protect your name or your reputation as opposed to his.

Blake lives in the Cleveland-area. 

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