Looking for advice - am I handling this right?

[milletsmo]

I think you are handling it well considering, however I don’t think the shock tactic will work.

He knows what he is doing is a sin. To put it in a simple way, when you get cross and shout at someone you know it is a sin to be nasty but you still do it (I’m not saying you’re nasty btw I’m just using what is probably one of the more common examples of sin) You might repent for it and try your hardest not to do it again but you still did it and it is still tempting to do the next time you are angry.
With your husband and porn it is obviously a bit more serious because he is addicted. If he knows it is wrong then I guess thats a good start because otherwise he would be in total denail. I guess the only think you can do is encourage him to get help and hope and pray that one day (soon) he will.

Someone suggested marriage counselling. Maybe go to that, even if he won’t go with you it might be useful for you, though do try to encourage him to go.

Like any addicts it will take a long time before the recovery happens.

Keep your faith.
x

 

[iluvmybabies]

The best advise I can give regarding porno addicted husband is seek counseling! Go and continue seeking counseling with your priest and outside of your priest through a psychologist. It’s a long rocky road but it’s worth the fight…To defeat that demon will be worth it, don’t give up on your husband…Everyone has a problem and ends up looking for an escape route…For my bf’s fiance it’s smoking pot, my fiance seems to be hanging around them too much and I am starting to freak about it…I am not saying that drinking and partying once in a while is bad I party as well, but the way they seem to be using is like an every day every couple of hours and that is just over board and if I start doubting my fiance then there will be huge problems… The easiest thing to do is to embrace what makes us feel like we are free, for your hubby it’s porno, for my bf’s fiance it’s pot, etc… Instead of grabbing the “bull by the horns” and work on the problem, we all try to find an easy way out and hope the problems will just disappear…

That’s when the other partner comes in and starts some kind of intervention…The best thing is the counseling…And never ending support…Yes it’s hard and yes it’s devastating and yes it’s a lot of work but your dedication and love and care will pull him through…

Good luck and God bless! Just don’t give up…

 

[flyingfish]

There are hundreds of thousands of faithful men (and women) of integrity who do not look at porn.

The numbers might be different for the older generation of men who didn’t grow up with porn, and couldn’t look at it no matter how badly they may have wanted to. Maybe men like that would have been less likely to form a habit.

Men who grew up in this time, the men who are under 30 now, grew up with the internet and probably have been looking at porn since they young teens. Their whole attitude to sex is probably vastly different from their fathers and grandfathers.

It’s sad, but it’s true. I have many male friends in their twenties, and they are pretty perverted. The cleanest guys tend to be ones who’ll look at porn once a week instead of every day.

When you go to Mass, does it really matter if you came there by way of a limo or the city bus? The important thing is you are at the celebration of the Holy Mass.

If you go to hell, does it matter the mortal sin that got you there? The important thing is, you are eternally separated from God.

Well, all mortal sins might be the same from the perspective of where you end up, but not from the perspective of the quality of the person.

If you had to choose a roommate, and for the sake of the argument knew that he could not harm you, would you really just flip a coin when it came to someone who rapes and murders and someone who deliberately misses Mass?

 

[royal_archer]

The numbers might be different for the older generation of men who didn’t grow up with porn, and couldn’t look at it no matter how badly they may have wanted to. Maybe men like that would have been less likely to form a habit.

Men who grew up in this time, the men who are under 30 now, grew up with the internet and probably have been looking at porn since they young teens. Their whole attitude to sex is probably vastly different from their fathers and grandfathers.

Porn was here long before the internet. The display quality, intensity, and variety may have changed but it has been there (and readily available) for generations.

 

[kage_ar]

Porn was here long before the internet. The display quality, intensity, and variety may have changed but it has been there (and readily available) for generations.

It is amusing how people under thirty think they are the first ones do deal with this sin, and you know - when I was under 30 I thought the same thing. Now, I see, there is NOTHING new under the sun.

Simply because your circle contains those who feel that the sin of porn is something to accept does not mean that all people under age 30 are that way.

There are hundreds of thousands of faithful people of integrity who are UNDER age 30 who choose not to commit this sin. Seek them out!

 

[flyingfish]

Porn was here long before the internet. The display quality, intensity, and variety may have changed but it has been there (and readily available) for generations.

To be sure, but in the recent past you could only access it by going to a porn video store to watch in your vcr (not something teenage boys could frequently, if ever, do), before VCR you’d have to look for print magazine with semi naked women, or maybe go to strip clubs. Still before, it was only “strip clubs.”

Sure it was a problem then, but nowhere near the problem it is now. Right now CHILDREN are growing up looking at porn, the age of first exposure is something like 11 years old. Something like 90% of teenagers view porn while doing homework.

Those are the kinds of men that are under 30 today. They have probably been looking at that **** since they were 11 years old, their brains and other sexual aspects are probably so drastically altered that to hope they would be chaste is asking too much.

You’re lucky if they just want to see a man and a woman have normal intercourse, instead of far weirder stuff.

Maybe I’m a pessimist, but that’s what I see.

 

[royal_archer]

To be sure, but in the recent past you could only access it by going to a porn video store to watch in your vcr (not something teenage boys could frequently, if ever, do), before VCR you’d have to look for print magazine with semi naked women, or maybe go to strip clubs. Still before, it was only “strip clubs.”

Sure it was a problem then, but nowhere near the problem it is now. Right now CHILDREN are growing up looking at porn, the age of first exposure is something like 11 years old. Something like 90% of teenagers view porn while doing homework.

Those are the kinds of men that are under 30 today. They have probably been looking at that **** since they were 11 years old, their brains and other sexual aspects are probably so drastically altered that to hope they would be chaste is asking too much.

You’re lucky if they just want to see a man and a woman have normal intercourse, instead of far weirder stuff.

Maybe I’m a pessimist, but that’s what I see.

Their have been indecent movies almost as long as their have been movies.

Kids always had a bit of a black market going on where this stuff was readily available The younger you were the longer it took to get to you but it was available to all.

 

[milletsmo]

Also there has always been prostitutes etc. I know thats not technically porn but just because there was no technology doesn’t mean people weren’t acting in similar sinful ways, just obviously were restricted by whatever era they belonged to.

It always baffells me when people think “todays society/generation” is more prone to something. For example a lot of people often say todays society is much more violent due to knife crime or whatever is popular with the media at the moment, but look back at any part of history and you will come across countless occassions of brutal bloody violence.
That goes for any sin that people think the people of this generation are commiting more often. I don’t think so.Maybe media makes things like porn have easier access but it has always been around.

Having said that I do agree that it is a LOT easier for children to access pornography due to the lack of any kind of governing over the internet. This is something I feel we need to rally against. However I must stress it is not just the internet that is allowing children to view porn - Playboy is essentially a pornography company, yet it seems to be “ok” to allow you girls to buy pencil cases with the bunny logo on, bedding, clothes, you name, Playboy sell it and I think that that also has a LOT to do with people cheapening sex.

 

[flyingfish]

Their have been indecent movies almost as long as their have been movies.

Kids always had a bit of a black market going on where this stuff was readily available The younger you were the longer it took to get to you but it was available to all.

I don’t know, when I was growing up I didn’t even know of such a thing as porn, neither did my friends. But when internet became prevalent suddenly everyone knew, and the young boys in particular knew all too well.

To be sure, people always have been and always will be lustful. But the kinds of things people lust after nowadays, and the kinds of things they do to satisfy those lusts have changed.

Before VCR’s (fairly recent in the grand scheme of things) it would have been really hard for young people to view porn. How could they? Were there “porn theaters”? And even with VCR’s there would be problems unless the young person had access to a TV and VCR.

Now you can type “sex” into google, and see porn. And the kind of stuff that will come up will be pretty out there too.

–

It’s not that I think today’s people are more prone to something, I’m sure if people had these technologies back in the day they would have done exactly the same.

My point is that young people today have grown up viewing porn since the beginning of puberty. Children today see the nastiest kinds of sex acts that I would bet in the past the average person had trouble imagining. What can you really expect from people who grow up this way? That they will suddenly become chaste?

 

[royal_archer]

Also there has always been prostitutes etc. I know thats not technically porn but just because there was no technology doesn’t mean people weren’t acting in similar sinful ways, just obviously were restricted by whatever era they belonged to.

It always baffells me when people think “todays society/generation” is more prone to something. For example a lot of people often say todays society is much more violent due to knife crime or whatever is popular with the media at the moment, but look back at any part of history and you will come across countless occassions of brutal bloody violence.
That goes for any sin that people think the people of this generation are commiting more often. I don’t think so.Maybe media makes things like porn have easier access but it has always been around.

Having said that I do agree that it is a LOT easier for children to access pornography due to the lack of any kind of governing over the internet. This is something I feel we need to rally against. However I must stress it is not just the internet that is allowing children to view porn - Playboy is essentially a pornography company, yet it seems to be “ok” to allow you girls to buy pencil cases with the bunny logo on, bedding, clothes, you name, Playboy sell it and I think that that also has a LOT to do with people cheapening sex.

The part that bothers me is that I do monitor my kids internet usage and I found them getting porn spam at very young ages. (They spent most of their time at cartoon sites.)
Cases like that need to be dealt with. For instance there should be a government email address where you forward dirty spam and they prosecute the sender. Sending this stuff to kids should be treated the same as any other sex crime. I am not talking about kids forwarding it between themselves, I am talking about professional predators.

Trying to take this back to the OPs issue, if her husband is addicted and trying to avoid smut; it is much harder to avoid than it used to be. In fact even the Disney channel has had some border line stuff. And Sports Illustrated sends out the swimsuit eddition to subscribers of their youth version of the magazine.

So I guess I have to conceed that smut is much more public than it used to be.

This would make it harder for addicts to avoid it. Could you immagine someone who goes to church to pray for the strength to stay pure only to have some 20 something girl with “inappropriate attire” sit in front of him? With alcoholism you can easily stay out of a bar, with sexual viewing addictions it is a bit harder to get issolated.

 

[royal_archer]

I don’t know, when I was growing up I didn’t even know of such a thing as porn, neither did my friends. But when internet became prevalent suddenly everyone knew, and the young boys in particular knew all too well.

To be sure, people always have been and always will be lustful. But the kinds of things people lust after nowadays, and the kinds of things they do to satisfy those lusts have changed.

Before VCR’s (fairly recent in the grand scheme of things) it would have been really hard for young people to view porn. How could they? Were there “porn theaters”? And even with VCR’s there would be problems unless the young person had access to a TV and VCR.

Now you can type “sex” into google, and see porn. And the kind of stuff that will come up will be pretty out there too.

–

It’s not that I think today’s people are more prone to something, I’m sure if people had these technologies back in the day they would have done exactly the same.

My point is that young people today have grown up viewing porn since the beginning of puberty. Children today see the nastiest kinds of sex acts that I would bet in the past the average person had trouble imagining. What can you really expect from people who grow up this way? That they will suddenly become chaste?

I’m wondering if the most we can hope for is for them to become so numb to it that it doesn’t have the effect it used to. When I was young getting a girly magazine was a big deal and kids would get excited about it. Now I hear stories that kid don’t think it is a big deal. maybe we need to change the way we address it with children.