Recovery. I’ve talked a little about when you know you have beaten your addiction, but I want to explore this a little further. I’m starting to see three distinctive layers forming as people find they’re way to freedom.

The first layer to finding true recovery is eliminating the cultural influences on us. If you haven’t cut out the media in your life you really haven’t got much of a chance of beating pornography. We are constantly bombarded in the media with the sexual power of women and pornography is a way of dominating that power. We must always remember pornography is about power. Understanding this is essential to beating our addiction.

The second layer to finding true recovery is rooting out the areas in our life were we feel powerless. This can be almost anything. The thing that was so revolutionary for me when I began to understand pornography was about power is that this doesn’t have to be about sex, it could be anything. The first place to start looking is at our relationships. It could be our relationship with our parents, our wife, our boss, a girlfriend etc.. It could be related to some abuse in our past, where we were made to feel powerless. Another place to look would be at our circumstances, this could be our work, are we overwhelmed by the amount of work we have, it could be our financial situation as well, it could be the fact that it is finals week, any circumstance that brings stress into our life. In all these areas we must find ways of taking control and not using pornography to fulfill our need for power. I’ve found though just identifying these areas of our life can almost be like magic when it comes to stopping our compulsions to view pornography. Just recognizing the areas in your life that you feel out of control may be all it takes to taking control back. So if you have eliminated the media and you are still finding it difficult to gain your freedom, start looking at these issues in your life and identifying them. Then take the steps necessary to regain control.

There is a third layer that was very surprising to me as I got further away from my addiction and that is a new found ability to be assertive. Many men involved in pornography are “people pleasers.” Being a people pleaser when you think about it is giving our power away to other people. When you begin to recover from your addiction to pornography you are going to begin to see an unwillingness in yourself to give power to others. This is what I’m calling the third level of recovery, it is the ability to take back control of your life and not give it to others. Jesus is the greatest example of this kind of power. All His power came from God, He did not care what other people thought of Him and you will find yourself following Christ in this behavior as well. I just had a man I’ve been counseling for a while tell me he went in and talked to his boss about something he had done that before his recovery he would have tried to ignore. He said normally he would have avoided talking to his boss about something that could have provoked a conflict. But he had found a new courage in himself to express his feelings about it even at the possible risk of upsetting his boss. When you see these kinds of things happening in your life you know you have dug down deep into the power issues of your life, and have made some significant strides in your recovery. When you find yourself being assertive when you normally would have been passive and tried to avoid expressing yourself and your opinions, you know you are on your way to overcoming one of the biggest power drains in your life, being a “people pleaser.”

With this knowledge of pornography being about power it give us the ability to be self evaluating. It gives us the ability to discover what is driving our compulsions and stop them. That is one of the biggest benefits I’ve found from this recognition that pornography is about power. It gives us the ability to help ourselves and not be on this continual marry-go-round of trying to find new and different techniques for regaining control over our addiction. We have everything we need to solve our problem when we know the truth about pornography.

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