I remember I was in the shower when my wife said I had a porn addiction. I blew it off. It wasn’t an addiction and I wasn’t an addict.

Did I want to stop the behavior? Yes.

Could I? No. No matter how hard I tried. For years.

To be fair, that’s a good sign of an addiction.

At the time, I believed that if I admitted I was addicted, it would mean that I was trapped by it. It would mean that I was in bondage. It would mean that their were chains constricting me.

As a practicing Christian, I had a big problem with this. You see, I had already prayed many prayers to God confessing my sins, asking for his mercy. He gave it, and and I would feel the weigh lifting. The chains falling off. I’d even been to services where they used that exact metaphor.

I had prayed those prayers with trust, trying as best as my little faith could to accept that as true.

So what did it mean if I was still in chains?

I thought it meant I wasn’t believing hard enough. I wasn’t waling in enough faith.

The way I imagined it is that the chains of lust addiction had indeed supernaturally dropped off of me, hitting the ground with Halelujah force.

The problem was that I kept bending over, picking up those chains, and tying myself up again.

13 years later I still beleive this to be true. But I now believe that I and am addicted to lust and pornography.

Because that is the cycle of this addict: every next choice I make to act out or not is the choice of accepting the freedom God has mercifully gifted me with, or locking myself back up with sin and shame.

If I had accepted that I was addicted back in the shower, maybe I would have sought the help that addicts need: community, accoutability, digging deep into your and discovering the roots of why I was turning to this damaging behavior instead of God.

Just like the saying goes: pornagraphy isn’t the problem, it’s the solution….it’s just the wrong solution.

I didn’t accept it then. But I do now. Now, after I have hit rock bottom and lost my job because of it.

So as I cling to my ruptured marriage with two hands, I wish I would have been more honest with myself sooner. I’m sharing this with the world in the hopes that maybe it will help someone else take steps to help themselves sooner than I did.