A House Divided
May 25, 2025 Leave a comment
A case study of Mike (not his real name) from the archives of Primrose Path Behavioral Health Center. This session took place when Mike was 55. . .
Mike recalled that as a ten-year old he had gone out exploring the undeveloped area behind the new subdivision where his family had bought a house. He came across a page torn out of a magazine. It was almost hidden in tall grass. He described what he found.
On the glossy page were two barely dressed women. One was seated and bound with rope and another was standing over her holding a whip.
He thought about folding the page up and putting it in his pocket. But after five minutes he put the page down and walked away.
He related that a month before he had given his testimony and was baptized before a full church. He thought the world would somehow look different after that. He was given a baptismal certificate and was considered “saved and going to heaven.”
Mike reflected on that event. He said that after he was baptized no one prayed that he would receive the Holy Spirit. No one discipled or mentored him. No one came alongside. He was on his own. He felt “abandoned to his own devices and the osmosis of Sunday preaching and teaching about salvation, heaven and hell, and not being shameful.”
Mike shared that what he saw in the field that day affected him. He felt guilt and shame. He tried to put the image out of his mind but it kept coming back into his imagination.
To deal with this he said that he began mentally separating himself. On the one side was the good Mike –his baptized self-image that he could present to the world. On the other side– the desire for images that brought him pleasure – Mike would keep to himself.
He did this, he said, to avoid the conflicting thoughts and emotions brought on by the tremendous battle going on inside. He said that this compartmentalization carried on throughout his life. It was defense mechanism. He feared being found out.
By the age of twelve his parents had given him the “birds and bees” talk. But his sexual development had already formed with symbols far from what his parents presented.
He recalled looking for more and more images of the opposite sex. He had neighborhood friends who shared the porn magazines of their older brothers and fathers.
Mike began to tear out images from magazines. He would then take them somewhere to be alone – the bedroom, the bathroom, or the basement – and masturbate to them. He had a great fear of being discovered.
Mike felt that if anyone knew about his addiction to images, he would be considered a horrible sinner. The church denounced fornication but no one he knew in church or in life talked about this addiction. He did not view the church as a healing community. The church was there to scold. So, he continued to hide.
He felt that castigation was not enough to rid him of the addiction. He already carried shame and the fear of being outside rather than “a part of” a community. The scolding would only push him toward the comfort of more sexual release.
Mike felt that if anyone knew who he truly was, they would never accept him. He never accepted himself in this state. His self-hatred at being weak and fleshy grew.
Mike related that his seeing the first image was in the 1960s. When the internet came around, he began spending his time looking at porn on the computer. His sexual addiction escalated. Whenever he was alone, he’d be looking at porn.
Mike’s job had him traveling about sixty percent of the time. He was alone a lot.
He began going to strip clubs and was involved with women there. Women at this point, he said, were objects to comfort him in his loneliness, loneliness that he admitted had been brought on by his need to be alone with his addiction.
Mike’s porn sources included in-room-pay-for-view, VHS videos, adult magazines, the internet, and human interaction involving visits to strip clubs. The men he worked with would go to strip clubs. He said that he felt the need to fit in to keep up a persona of being a man and that persona, he felt, was needed for the job.
It was easy, he said, to convince himself to look at women as objects, as women were posing and what man doesn’t look at a woman?
His sexual addiction affected his marriages. They ended in divorce. He described being unable to be intimate with his wives. He said that porn was like another presence in the room and his conscience was another. The back and forth of the two kept him from intimacy with his wives.
Mike stated that in his fifties he came to the bitter realization after failed marriages and the financial and spiritual costs of his addiction, that the out-of-control sexual behaviors he engaged in were destroying him and hurting those around him. He said that his compulsive sexual thoughts, desires, and behaviors wreaked havoc on his self-image as a man, on his relationships with women, on his finances, on his body, and on his soul. All aspects of his life, he said, suffered.
He said that it was easy to feel misunderstood and on his own throughout his life because no one he knew had issues like his. The guys he worked with acted like it was a natural thing to go to a strip club and view porn. Nobody in the church ever talked about sexual addiction.
Mike learned through reading that the reason he kept coming back to porn was the pleasure derived from dopamine released during masturbation.
The loss of self-control and the negative consequences, Mike said, had him experiencing guilt, shame, hopelessness, powerless over his addiction, depressed, lonely, fearful, and anxious.
When asked if he was ever suicidal, Mike said “No. But something had to give. I was going crazy.”
Mike said he reviewed his options to deal with his sexual addiction. He could become a monk or hermit. He could move to Alaska and go off the grid and avoid all contact with porn.
He could, as Jesus taught, lose one part of his body so his whole body wouldn’t be thrown into hell. He then could, as Jesus said about breaking the bonds of marriage, become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake as others had done.
These options, he admitted, were severe but his compulsive sexual behavior was severe. He had repeatedly tried to abstain only to fall again and again. The repeated failures caused more self-hatred and more unresolved anger.
Everything he cared about – marriage, family, being a Christian, his soul – everything hung in the balance. He knew that the next relapse may be what took it all down. Every choice he made was “either the ascent of the soul or the descent of the soul.”
Mike told a previous counselor that he carried around a “hurt locker.” This was a term he borrowed from the 2008 film. It described the deep pain and psychological distress that he held on to and carried throughout his life.
He said that he never considered himself a victim in the Me Too sense except in that first instance of sexual abuse in the field at ten-years old. Seeing that first image was traumatizing. After that he came back to porn on his own.
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01:55:36 Pornography
Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction
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Resources for Combating porn:
Dealing with a porn addiction: Integrity Restored
Internet filter: Covenant Eyes
A book for junior high and high school level: Plunging Pornography
A book for the very young: Good Pictures Bad Pictures
Porn’s Effects on the Brain, Body, and Culture
With the invention of the internet, porn ceased being a back-alley issue and became easily accessible by anyone with a computer, smartphone, or tablet. Learn who uses porn and why it’s not merely a personal sexual choice, but a physiological, emotional, and even cultural problem.
https://www.covenanteyes.com/e-books/
Book: The Healing Church: What Churches Get Wrong about Pornography and How to Fix It
Porn is rewiring your brain.
Learn the top five ways porn rewires your brain and what you can do about it in Your Brain on Porn.
Download free copy: https://learn.covenanteyes.com/your-brain-on-porn-1/
https://www.ascensioncounselingutah.com/
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Fr. Meyer: Why We Must Talk About Pornography in the Church
By Road to Purity
In this episode of the Road to Purity podcast, we sit down with Fr. Meyer from the Archdiocese of Illinois for a candid and compelling conversation about one of the most pressing spiritual battles of our time: pornography. Fr. Meyer shares how he addresses this issue both within the Church and in the wider culture, offering powerful insights, pastoral wisdom, and hope for those struggling.
Whether you’re in ministry, in the fight yourself, or walking with someone who is, this episode offers clarity, truth, and encouragement in the battle for purity.
Tell Them For Me – Catholic Sexual Integrity Podcast | Road to Purity
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Instead of serving the devilish insanity of the lawless “Welcoming the Stranger” illegal immigration crisis created and financed by George Soros, do something to change lives. Support Prison Fellowship.
Prison Fellowship Founded in 1976, Prison Fellowship® is the nation’s largest Christian nonprofit equipping the Church to serve currently and formerly incarcerated people and their families, and to advocate for justice and human dignity both inside and outside of prison.
Because I support Prison Fellowship, I recently received a copy of I surrender: A 14-day Devotional Written by Prisoners. It is a blessing.
The Prison Fellowship Academy is “an intensive long-term, biblically based discipleship program that targets and address the issues at root in criminal behavior.”
“It’s statistically proven that the Academy dramatically reduces recidivism.”
I urge to you walk away from “Welcoming the Stranger,” the psyop conditioning that invites in more criminals and criminal activity (and chaos) and is a perversion of love such that a person values a “cause” more than his proper duty to himself or his neighbor.
Instead, support Prison Fellowship and the men and women who are incarcerated.
Right now, as the recent literature stated, there are 24,716 prisoners in Indiana.
“I was in prison and you came to visit me.” – Jesus, Matthew 25:36
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Cindy Wity 