Addiction and Recovery

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John_Henry

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Hi,
My Protestant friend is struggling with addiction to pornography and masturbation, and is feeling like there is no way out. He has asked me for a Catholic reference on addiction and recovery, preferably at a website, but I will also accept book recommendations. I will go ahead and do a search myself, but was wondering if anyone had any recommendations.

Thanks.
 
I can tell you that my husband struggles with this and the progression of this addiction was almost the end of our marriage. He looked into a lot of Catholic resources but nothing helped him as much as Sexaholics Anonymous and attending their meetings. He feels very comfortable there now and he has a lot of hope and our marriage has hope. I can’t say enough about it. Although you can’t discuss your particular religion in the meeting, you can afterward (may not pertain to your friend). If there was anything anti-Catholic he woundn’t have kept going (that is info for other Catholics reading this thread).

This addiction thrives in secrecy. He needs to be able to share with a group of men who can relate. At the least, send him to the www.sa.org website where he can order the SA Manual (the White Book). My husband saw himself all thru that book.

If you are a man with this problem, have the courage to change. Remember, nothing changes if nothing changes.😉
 
I had this problem too, and there is a way out (although you have to be Catholic for this one): confession and Eucharist. Every time I fell, I overcame the shame and went to confession and I received Eucharist (almost) every day. Of course faith and decision not to sin are required too. Success is guaranteed 🙂
 

Ask your friend to read the bible or see the film of jesus for couple of days ,if he is spiritual.automatically he will recover from the addiction.​

sathyan

Drug Rehab
 
Sathyan
Getting over an addiction isn’t that easy. Otherwise there wouldn’t be the need for SA or AA or any other group. I’m trying to quit smoking, and reading the bible isn’t a cure all. It may sound that simple to you, but it’s far from it.
 
I have several posts on this topic. Here is one of them. One of the keys to kicking the porn habit is to realize that without the accompanying masturbation, porn is completely useless. When all forms of pornography have been removed from your life, the masturbating habit will start to lose it’s power as well. Another key is to be patient. A fire (masturbation habit) will go out only after you stop throwing gasoline (porn) on it! This method might not be perfect, but it has worked like a charm for me so far! This is NOT an endorsement of masturbation. It is cutting off the fuel source for this habit that is sinful… millions of people are struggling with this and see no other way out. Killing the porn is amazingly easy when you decide that you are going to deprive it of the accompanying physical pleasure and release of masturbation. Later on, you can work on stopping the the masturbating. 😉

HERE MY PLAN:
Prayer is a good start but in my experience, failure was always right around the corner. For years, no matter what I tried every attempt that I made to stop both habits at the same time led to failure. Masturbation is always the end result of private porn viewing. If you want to escape this viscious trap, you must separate your masturbating from your porn viewing. Immediately destroy every shread of porn in your house. Give yourself permission to skip the porn the next time you KNOW you are going to masturbate. Use no “visual aids” whatsoever and that includes the underwear ads… no exceptions. Any use of visual aids and you will be right back to porn in no time! After you’ve fallen, immediately say an Act of Contrition and thank God for giving you the ability to complete this critical first step.

Remember, you are on the road to purity, and you’ve just stuck a hunting knife into the chest of purity’s worst enemy, this demon called porn. Get thee to a confessional at the first reasonable opportunity.

Get into the habit of guarding your eyes and ears of all things that lead to impure thoughts. Television and movies must be selected with care. Clean up your speech and personal habits and pray fervently asking for grace, patience and forgiveness. Ask God to help you by filling your mind with the innocence of your boyhood when your mind was filled with baseball, schoolwork, and playing games with your friends! One of the things that I mourned the most after looking at porn was the loss of my innocence. As your mind purifies itself your masturbating will slow to a stop. After a 35 year struggle, this is how I finally escaped the snare of this sin!

This is not an endorsement of masturbation, but the masturbating will NOT stop until your mind starts to become more pure. If you are married, work on becoming the most loving and giving husband you can possibly be. Focus all of your sexual energy into the marriage bed. If you are not married, ask God to send you a good catholic girl to become your wife. Pray for your future wife every day. Frequent confession, prayer and weekly Mass should become your best friends. I’ll pray for you.
Good luck and God Bless!

In his case, he might want to consider finding a good protestant girl… or better yet, become catholic! 😃
👍 👍 :cool:
 
mary_s_kid said:
I can tell you that my husband struggles with this and the progression of this addiction was almost the end of our marriage. He looked into a lot of Catholic resources but nothing helped him as much as Sexaholics Anonymous and attending their meetings. He feels very comfortable there now and he has a lot of hope and our marriage has hope. I can’t say enough about it. Although you can’t discuss your particular religion in the meeting, you can afterward (may not pertain to your friend). If there was anything anti-Catholic he woundn’t have kept going (that is info for other Catholics reading this thread).

This addiction thrives in secrecy. He needs to be able to share with a group of men who can relate. At the least, send him to the www.sa.org website where he can order the SA Manual (the White Book). My husband saw himself all thru that book.

If you are a man with this problem, have the courage to change. Remember, nothing changes if nothing changes.😉
Click to expand...
As a middle aged married man, I struggled with this problem as well. It wasn’t until I began treating the pornography and the masturbation as separate sins that I found victory. Most men fall victim to this garbage in their youth and it is extremely addictive, even more so than crack cocaine. I was first exposed to this scourge at the age of eight when my cousin and I found a dirty magazine in the woods. It’s taken me almost 40 years to learn how to kill this monster.

When a man destroys his porn collection and purifys his life through prayer and wholesome (G-rated) sources of entertainment only then can he begin to gain control over the masturbating. It’s important during this time to begin to focus on becoming the most loving, giving and affectionate husband he can possibly be. The goal is to express all of his love and sexual energy in the most giving way within the marriage bed. Wives are a gift from God and us men need to thank the Lord Almighty every day for her.

Wives can help by praying for their husbands and being the best marriage partner they can be. It’s very important for wives to understand that this porn habit isn’t their own fault. Good husbands hate this sin with a passion but they get trapped by this early in life and simply do not know how to escape.
God Bless You!
 
Porn and masturbation go together. It just works and it creates a hard core addiction. When you stop the pornography, you will win 90% of the battle against impurity. Step one is getting rid of all your porn. Most likely its all stored on your computer, right? Delete it and run a program like Window Washer and bleach over all the deleted files and free space. Do what you have to do, but get rid of it.

Step two: There are filters that run over your computer and block sites that you want out. Gambling, violence, language, and porn to mention a few. The best one I know of is Integrity on line, but I am sure there are others. I am aware of a few. You need to tinker with it a bit. Get to know the software and I guarantee it will block out everything. Be sure to include proxy servers. If it does not block proxy servers its no good. Even with the filter on, you can open a free proxy server and open any site you want.

Step three: The better filter can provide accountability. It should send an email to a third party with all the sites you have visited. Every day. Thats your job John Henry.

All filters will slow down your connection speed a tad, but it is what it is. Not much at all, just a bit.

So, what about the password? If you are protecting yourself, give it over to your accountability partner to set it, or worse case, let customer support set one for you. They know the deal. They will be happy to help. Be sure you have tinkered with it enough and it is working right before you do. It can take time. You have to tweak it so you can still browse but not the sites you and the filter settings have blocked. When the time comes, you will know when it working. Then give up the password or you set it John Henry.

One like Integrityonline will really work. Netmop is another, but with less features. No matter how smart you are, it will defeat you if you set it up right. Its the Cadillac. You can allow certain sites, block others, block everything. Even keywords for the search engines. If you spend a little time with it, your computer will be completely free. Guaranteed.
 
YipYupYep said:
Porn and masturbation go together. It just works and it creates a hard core addiction. When you stop the pornography, you will win 90% of the battle against impurity. Step one is getting rid of all your porn. Most likely its all stored on your computer, right? Delete it and run a program like Window Washer and bleach over all the deleted files and free space. Do what you have to do, but get rid of it.

Step two: There are filters that run over your computer and block sites that you want out. Gambling, violence, language, and porn to mention a few. The best one I know of is Integrity on line, but I am sure there are others. I am aware of a few. You need to tinker with it a bit. Get to know the software and I guarantee it will block out everything. Be sure to include proxy servers. If it does not block proxy servers its no good. Even with the filter on, you can open a free proxy server and open any site you want.

Step three: The better filter can provide accountability. It should send an email to a third party with all the sites you have visited. Every day. Thats your job John Henry.

All filters will slow down your connection speed a tad, but it is what it is. Not much at all, just a bit.

So, what about the password? If you are protecting yourself, give it over to your accountability partner to set it, or worse case, let customer support set one for you. They know the deal. They will be happy to help. Be sure you have tinkered with it enough and it is working right before you do. It can take time. You have to tweak it so you can still browse but not the sites you and the filter settings have blocked. When the time comes, you will know when it working. Then give up the password or you set it John Henry.

One like Integrityonline will really work. Netmop is another, but with less features. No matter how smart you are, it will defeat you if you set it up right. Its the Cadillac. You can allow certain sites, block others, block everything. Even keywords for the search engines. If you spend a little time with it, your computer will be completely free. Guaranteed.
Click to expand...
I am not a big fan of porn filters for the computer. Most addicts will simply get their porn from another source like DVDs, magazines, or even the underwear ads out of the newspaper.
This habit often forms in adolescence and is extremely hard to break if until you figure out that porn really is a paper tiger. Porn’s weakness is that without masturbation, porn is useless.

The key is to treat porn and masturbation as two separate and distinct sins with porn being the FAR more serious of the two. Destroying all porn in the house and going cold turkey on all visually aided masturbation (no exceptions!) is the first step toward victory over this monster. With time and prayer, purification of the mind will occur and the masturbating will rapidly decrease in frequency, with the ultimate goal being chastity and obedience to God in all manners of life.

Pornography only has power because of masturbation. An incredibly strong enemy must be outsmarted. I would advise men who have failed over and over to consider killing the porn first and then work on the masturbation issue. Porn filters are an EXTERNAL form of “forced” control and do nothing to change the heart and mind. When porn and masturbation are separared, both lose power.

Imagine getting jumped in an alley by a grown man and his twelve year-old son. You gotta knock out the man before you can subdue the boy. If you try to fight both at the same time, you are going to lose. It’s kind of like that!

😉 👍
 
TLM08 said:
This habit often forms in adolescence and is extremely hard to break if until you figure out that porn really is a paper tiger. Porn’s weakness is that without masturbation, porn is useless.

You comments on the spiritual reasons for this battle and the spiritual help you need in this battle seems to be well and good. The rest in my judgement is a formula for… well, its not going to be helpful. Porn is a paper tiger? Maybe true somewhere, but not on this planet. I mean, can I get a witness?

In any strong recovery, a filter and an accountability partner come second only to the healing touch of the Physician Jesu Christi. No reason to be an Iron Man because your not.

To think that Pornography only has power because of masturbation my be true but not where the rubber hits the road. Not in the larger sense my brother. Its the opposite. After addiction and compulsivity become imbedded, masturbation is the blasting cap that needs pornography to continue the addiction and the compulsive behavior. This addiction to porn is physical as well as emotional. This is really complicated.

I do not wish to defend a position for the sake of argument. I just want to be of help. So, there it is.
Click to expand...
 
TLM08 said:
This habit often forms in adolescence and is extremely hard to break if until you figure out that porn really is a paper tiger. Porn’s weakness is that without masturbation, porn is useless.

Pornography only has power because of masturbation.
Click to expand...
You comments on the spiritual reasons for this battle and the spiritual help you need in this battle seems to be well and good. The rest in my judgement is a formula for… well, its not going to be helpful. Porn is a paper tiger? Maybe true somewhere, but not on this planet. I mean, can I get a witness?

In any strong recovery, a filter and an accountability partner come second only to the healing touch of the Physician Jesu Christi. No reason to be an Iron Man because your not.

To think that Pornography only has power because of masturbation my be true but not where the rubber hits the road. Not in the larger sense my brother. Its the opposite. After addiction and compulsivity become imbedded, masturbation is the blasting cap that needs pornography to continue the addiction and the compulsive behavior. This addiction to porn is physical as well as emotional. This is really complicated.

I do not wish to defend a position for the sake of argument. I just want to be of help. So, there it is.
 
I have been helping people with this problem for about 30 years. You can get a little booklet that I publish that can help you by visiting my website at www.mountcarmelmedia.com The first thing anyone addicted to sin and having a tormented conscience must understand is that there is plenty of reason to hope. The tormented conscience is a big give away that your soul, slave as it is to sin, is not lost, or worse, dead.

The little booklet covers this and some very sound advice on how to work with God’s Grace to be freed from the slavery of sin. It doesn’t cost much, just enough to cover printing and mailing. I print them up myself, it is not a big operation.

If anyone would like to assist me in getting this booklet out to more people, please pass the word along. There is also a “donate” button on my website. The donation will not be tax deductible, but it will help me get more booklets out to souls in need, and trust me, there are a lot of souls addicted to masturbation.

God bless,

Mount Carmel Media
 
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