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tlahwright
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| Joined: | Sat Aug 1st, 2009 |
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Posted: Sat Aug 1st, 2009 02:23 pm |
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HI,
I mentor or young men in University in England.
I have never been an addict of porn, I gave it up before I became a Christian. But so many of the men I mentor are stuck in porn and masturbation.
How can I help them outside of accountability? Any wisdom appreciated?
Thanks
Tim
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TM2
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| Joined: | Thu Jan 8th, 2009 |
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Posted: Sat Aug 1st, 2009 11:14 pm |
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Welcome! Thank you for finding your way here and for looking for ways to help.
The first thing for me to say is that I can't directly answer your question from personal experience, because as an addict I'm in a different place with regard to this problem than you are. That said, here's one approach you might consider.
I'm persuaded that sex addiction is just as real and just as serious a phenomenon as addictions to drugs or alcohol or anything else. Most of the people at my SAA/SLAA meetings are multiply addicted. I don't think any of these people have found SA easier to recover from than alcohol; I think almost none of them have found SA recovery easier than recovery from cocaine and other drugs. People often start out thinking that porn addiction is a metaphor, or that porn addiction is addiction lite. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
This means that sex addicts need all the tools for recovery that any other addict needs. It's not enough that we want to quit, or that we promise to quit, or that we pray to quit, or that we make ourselves accountable to someone else to quit. Alcoholics and drug addicts do those things all the time and manage to stay addicted. I did all those things over many, many years and I stayed addicted to porn. We need, I believe, the same tools you would recommend if the people you were mentoring were addicted to cocaine or to alcohol: 12-step or other support groups, professional counseling, reading and learning about addiction, and serious work with other addicts, face-to-face if at all possible, but over the Net if necessary.
If you're not an addict and don't have training in psychology, then what you can offer as part of that recovery is limited. As addicts, we behave irrationally, and so the calm and sensible and rational advice others give us has limited value. Things that make perfect objective sense fail to move us. This is deeply frustrating to outsiders working to help us, and it's deeply disturbing to us. Why do I do things that make no sense?
It's for that reason that working with other addicts who know what it feels like to be addicted and who know how recovery is working in their own lives is so critical. Addicts can offer one another understanding and hope, and can cut through one another's rationalizations, far more effectively than those who don't know the disease from inside.
So what can you as a civilian offer?
You can listen respectfully and non-judgmentally, encouraging people to open up and demonstrating that they can still be loved after they do so. This is an incredibly secretive condition, and anything that helps people to share themselves is a step toward freedom.
You can encourage people that not everyone is addicted, that life without porn is possible, that there are people who recover from addictions of all types.
You can encourage people to take their addictions and their pain seriously and to get serious help for a serious problem. Going to a counselor or walking into an SAA meeting is a difficult and scary step, and many of us have put these steps off as long as we possibly could. You can encourage people that it's OK to take these steps, that others do, that it's safe, that those who devote themselves wholeheartedly to recovery do find new lives.
Recovery is a spiritual process of coming to trust other people and to trust God, of believing that God and our fellow humans can and will act in our lives, of daring to face and to reveal aspects of ourselves from which we have hidden for our entire lives. That's a terrifying process of stepping off the edge into what looks like empty space. Have you ever done anything like that in your own life? Has it worked? Have you found that you could trust others and trust God in a situation where every fear you knew was closing in around you and when you were certain that God and others would reject you just as you had rejected yourself? Then you can tell that story. You can tell how you faced your own greatest fear and lived. You can tell how you struggled and how God and others acted. By doing that, you can model the openness and courage the people you are mentoring need to find, and you can offer them hope that there may be joy at the end of their road. They need to face themselves fearlessly and to expose themselves with rigorous honesty and to surrender themselves completely. Any stories you can share from your own life or from the lives of others that make these actions more possible to them will be blessings.
And you can continue to love and to pray for them whatever they do. Some addicts recover, and some do not. Some hit bottom early, but many need to spend additional years and decades suffering before the pain of continuing as they are becomes greater than the pain of change. In the meetings I attend, the average age of participants is probably somewhere in the 50s. Your students may never find the courage to get better, or they may find it, but only in 40 years time. But you can still be there for them, reminding them when appropriate that another way is possible, and accepting that they may not yet be able to begin that journey.
You can also encourage them to read. Patrick Carnes is the big expert on sex addiction. I also found the AA Big Book an eye-opening experience. I've never had trouble with alcohol, but I identified in every way with the people I found in "Alcoholics Anonymous" , and from their freedom I found hope and courage to begin my own recovery.
I don't know if that's wisdom, or if it's what you're looking for. It's a few quick thoughts from one addict, though, representing only my own understanding of this disease and of the hope for freedom.
Thanks again for visiting!
Tim M.
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truthseeker
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Posted: Mon Aug 3rd, 2009 12:53 am |
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Hi tlahwright,
Welcome, and thank you for caring enough to seek out more information in order to be the best mentor you can be.
I'm sure you have already been reading Mike's articles here. Other than browsing the forums generally, I would suggest that the "Resources" forum is a concentrated place to locate resources which have been meaningful to others.
Another site I found helpful in learning about this addiction is
Pure Intimacy.
You might also try
http://www.troubledwith.com
TruthSeeker
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