Samuru1
Fapstronaut
My addiction to porn started slowly. I discovered masturbation at a pretty young age and eventually started looking at underwear models in the Sunday newspaper ads. My first time actively searching out porn was with my first laptop when I was 19. I grew up in a Christian home with two former missionaries as parents, so I knew that looking at porn was wrong and I tried my best not to look at it. I was close with my parents and when I did give in to my cravings, I would confess to God and my parents right away. My folks were sympathetic, but they had no idea how to help me. My mom had never struggled with porn. My dad still struggled with it from time to time and he told me that as a man this is something that would always be a battle and that the best you can do when you relapse is to ask God for forgiveness, not beat yourself up, and move on with your life. This answer didn’t sit right with me at all. The Bible clearly condemned even looking at a woman lustfully, let alone looking at porn and masturbating. How could it be ok to stay stuck in this cycle? My porn use became a way to avoid stress during my college years and I was using it on a weekly basis. I briefly had a Christian accountability partner from my university, and I managed to get about two weeks clean, but that relationship faded after my friend gave up on accountability because he felt it was just “sin management” and that we should focus more on grace. Later on during college, I even tried joining a 30-day accountability program online for Christians trying to break free from porn addiction. Having to check in with someone online daily helped me to stay clean for 30 plus days, but both due to my spiritual immaturity and lack of positive lifestyle changes I quickly fell back into my addiction once the accountability ended.
My porn addiction steadily got worse as I got into the workforce and was living on my own overseas for the first time straight out of college. On paper, I probably looked like a great success. I graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering with a 3.99 GPA. I was fluent in Japanese and was working full time in Japan as an engineer. I was living the dream, but I was constantly dealing with feelings of inadequacy and failure at work as well as loneliness and the desire for intimacy with a woman. It was during that time I turned to porn and alcohol. This process went on for nearly 9 years. Slowly but surely, I was watching more and more porn and I was living a double life. I would get drunk on Friday, grudgingly go to church on Sunday and be looking at porn at least once a week. I reached a breaking point in 2018 when I told my parents that I wasn’t going to church anymore. By God’s grace, I came back to the faith in 2019 and stopped getting drunk almost immediately. I moved back to the US at that time and was going to a great church and reading my Bible and praying regularly, but I was still dealing with tremendous work pressures and feeling like a failure in my career which drove me even more to porn. Later in 2019, I briefly had a long-distance girlfriend and for a time, my motivation to stay pure for her helped me to get clean for a 60-day streak, but I fell back into my old habits shortly before we broke up. For the next three years or so before I found Pureheart Ministries, I was trying in fits and starts to deal with this addiction. I would watch tons of videos on how to get over porn addiction on YouTube, I joined the Nofap forum where people who were trying to break free would provide tips on how to quit and encourage each other, and I even hired a Chrisitan counselor to help me work on my anxiety. All these things helped to a degree, but I was still just as addicted as I was before. I felt hopeless in breaking free. I felt like there was something that I was missing. I knew I couldn’t do this on my own, but I didn’t know who to ask for help or where to find it.
It was when my relationship with my second girlfriend was falling apart that my addiction was getting worse than ever before. I was desperate to get clean and was looking over the Christian section of the Nofap forum (https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?groups/christian-fapstronauts.8/forums) when I noticed a post from a Christian who had finally gotten free and was strongly recommending counseling with Tim Davis from Pureheart Ministries. After looking at the Pureheart website I still had my reservations. The idea of doing group counseling with a bunch of strangers made me very uncomfortable. But when I mentioned it to a Christian friend from Argentia on the forum (big thank you to @FreeAdventurer !), he strongly urged me to give this counseling a shot if I thought there was any chance it would help me get free. I took his advice and shot Tim an email.
Joining Pureheart was both scary and exciting. I was incredibly nervous about sharing my testimony of all my past sexual sins with a bunch of strangers and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get clean. But I quickly came to really appreciate the value of going through counseling as a group. At first you start out wondering if you’ll ever feel comfortable sharing your deepest darkest side with people that you might never have spoken to in normal life, but through sharing the struggles you truly become like brothers.
The four main things about the Pureheart process that really helped me achieve now nearly six months clean are daily accountability, tangible consequences, cutting off all access to porn, and calling guys in the group for support.
Accountability with Pureheart is done in both a daily check-in text in a secure group chat reporting on how your day went and how your purity was, as well as doing a weekly phone call check-in on the weekends with two guys from your group. This was my first time ever being this transparent about what I was doing each day with a group of people, but the power of knowing that you will need to face a brother and tell them about why you relapsed is incredible.
A Pureheart Accountability group is not like so many other accountability groups/programs I’ve been a part of. My experience with accountability groups in the past is a group of people who tell each other about their relapses, comfort each other, but then nobody really gets out of their addiction. Pureheart accountability is not a sin-confess-sin-confess group. Tim said this early on in our group, but he really does expect you to change your behavior and lifestyle. If you relapse, you have to set a tangible consequence, in other words a penalty on yourself like paying $50 to charity or taking an ice bath. My tangible consequence was taking an ice bath for every time I masturbated and/or looked at porn. It was extremely uncomfortable, but I can speak from personal experience that it was an incredibly powerful motivator to not just keep relapsing and make excuses to the group. Another benefit of Pureheart accountability is that even after official group counseling with Tim ends (typically about a year), you still keep checking in with your group weekly to help you stay on track for the long term.
Another crucially important step for us single guys is cutting off all access to porn in your home. Tim teaches that we need to take Jesus seriously when he says “cut off your hand if it causes you to sin”. I had to remove all internet access from my smart phone and give my laptop to my parents so I couldn’t access porn when they weren’t around. I know that may sound a little extreme, but for a lot of guys like me, that’s what it takes to get pure initially.
The last thing that really helped me get clean was calling guys from the group when I would get triggered. Tim really pushes for us to call each other when we really feel tempted to relapse and to ask for support and prayer. Every month or so, I would go through periods of a week or two of intense urges and I would call different guys in the group throughout the week (and sometimes when I was really getting hammered with cravings, multiple times a day) to have them encourage and pray over me. I’d never had this kind of support before and let me tell you there’s something extremely valuable about getting out of your own head and asking someone who understands what you’re going through for help and prayer.
I also love how wholistic and practical this program is. Secular sources for quitting porn tend to focus only on exercise and self-talk. Church programs tend to only talk about the spiritual side and the moral implications of porn use. But Tim focuses both on positive lifestyle changes like getting more sleep, cutting off access to porn and exercising heavily to help deal with urges, but he also doesn’t neglect the spiritual warfare aspect that is a very real part of getting and staying pure.
There have been a lot of sacrifices along the way. Cutting off access is inconvenient (though you get used to it quickly and it’s not as bad as you might think). I had to quit my high paying career that was causing me so much stress and was the main cause for most of my relapsing. I’ve had to move back in with my parents so I can work a lower-paying lower-stress job while I work on finding a career that fits my true God-given gifts and talents. But let me tell you, the sacrifices have all been worth it. I don’t feel any of the shame when I talk to friends and strangers. Looking people in the eye is so much easier. Talking to God in prayer is richer. I can enjoy fellowship at church and take communion with a clean conscience. I now am forming friendships with godly Christian men at my church like I never have before. I feel much more ready to be in a committed marriage relationship with that right woman someday. I cringe to think how stuck in my addiction I would still be right now if it weren’t for Tim Davis at Pureheart and my brothers and I’m looking forward to moving forward in the destiny that God’s got for me.
Thank you for reading this far! I hope that this helps some of you! Keeping fighting brothers.
A special thank you to @Wilderness Wanderer and @Poor Yorick for your support too.
Here's the link to Pureheart Ministries https://www.pureheartministries.net/
My porn addiction steadily got worse as I got into the workforce and was living on my own overseas for the first time straight out of college. On paper, I probably looked like a great success. I graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering with a 3.99 GPA. I was fluent in Japanese and was working full time in Japan as an engineer. I was living the dream, but I was constantly dealing with feelings of inadequacy and failure at work as well as loneliness and the desire for intimacy with a woman. It was during that time I turned to porn and alcohol. This process went on for nearly 9 years. Slowly but surely, I was watching more and more porn and I was living a double life. I would get drunk on Friday, grudgingly go to church on Sunday and be looking at porn at least once a week. I reached a breaking point in 2018 when I told my parents that I wasn’t going to church anymore. By God’s grace, I came back to the faith in 2019 and stopped getting drunk almost immediately. I moved back to the US at that time and was going to a great church and reading my Bible and praying regularly, but I was still dealing with tremendous work pressures and feeling like a failure in my career which drove me even more to porn. Later in 2019, I briefly had a long-distance girlfriend and for a time, my motivation to stay pure for her helped me to get clean for a 60-day streak, but I fell back into my old habits shortly before we broke up. For the next three years or so before I found Pureheart Ministries, I was trying in fits and starts to deal with this addiction. I would watch tons of videos on how to get over porn addiction on YouTube, I joined the Nofap forum where people who were trying to break free would provide tips on how to quit and encourage each other, and I even hired a Chrisitan counselor to help me work on my anxiety. All these things helped to a degree, but I was still just as addicted as I was before. I felt hopeless in breaking free. I felt like there was something that I was missing. I knew I couldn’t do this on my own, but I didn’t know who to ask for help or where to find it.
It was when my relationship with my second girlfriend was falling apart that my addiction was getting worse than ever before. I was desperate to get clean and was looking over the Christian section of the Nofap forum (https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?groups/christian-fapstronauts.8/forums) when I noticed a post from a Christian who had finally gotten free and was strongly recommending counseling with Tim Davis from Pureheart Ministries. After looking at the Pureheart website I still had my reservations. The idea of doing group counseling with a bunch of strangers made me very uncomfortable. But when I mentioned it to a Christian friend from Argentia on the forum (big thank you to @FreeAdventurer !), he strongly urged me to give this counseling a shot if I thought there was any chance it would help me get free. I took his advice and shot Tim an email.
Joining Pureheart was both scary and exciting. I was incredibly nervous about sharing my testimony of all my past sexual sins with a bunch of strangers and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get clean. But I quickly came to really appreciate the value of going through counseling as a group. At first you start out wondering if you’ll ever feel comfortable sharing your deepest darkest side with people that you might never have spoken to in normal life, but through sharing the struggles you truly become like brothers.
The four main things about the Pureheart process that really helped me achieve now nearly six months clean are daily accountability, tangible consequences, cutting off all access to porn, and calling guys in the group for support.
Accountability with Pureheart is done in both a daily check-in text in a secure group chat reporting on how your day went and how your purity was, as well as doing a weekly phone call check-in on the weekends with two guys from your group. This was my first time ever being this transparent about what I was doing each day with a group of people, but the power of knowing that you will need to face a brother and tell them about why you relapsed is incredible.
A Pureheart Accountability group is not like so many other accountability groups/programs I’ve been a part of. My experience with accountability groups in the past is a group of people who tell each other about their relapses, comfort each other, but then nobody really gets out of their addiction. Pureheart accountability is not a sin-confess-sin-confess group. Tim said this early on in our group, but he really does expect you to change your behavior and lifestyle. If you relapse, you have to set a tangible consequence, in other words a penalty on yourself like paying $50 to charity or taking an ice bath. My tangible consequence was taking an ice bath for every time I masturbated and/or looked at porn. It was extremely uncomfortable, but I can speak from personal experience that it was an incredibly powerful motivator to not just keep relapsing and make excuses to the group. Another benefit of Pureheart accountability is that even after official group counseling with Tim ends (typically about a year), you still keep checking in with your group weekly to help you stay on track for the long term.
Another crucially important step for us single guys is cutting off all access to porn in your home. Tim teaches that we need to take Jesus seriously when he says “cut off your hand if it causes you to sin”. I had to remove all internet access from my smart phone and give my laptop to my parents so I couldn’t access porn when they weren’t around. I know that may sound a little extreme, but for a lot of guys like me, that’s what it takes to get pure initially.
The last thing that really helped me get clean was calling guys from the group when I would get triggered. Tim really pushes for us to call each other when we really feel tempted to relapse and to ask for support and prayer. Every month or so, I would go through periods of a week or two of intense urges and I would call different guys in the group throughout the week (and sometimes when I was really getting hammered with cravings, multiple times a day) to have them encourage and pray over me. I’d never had this kind of support before and let me tell you there’s something extremely valuable about getting out of your own head and asking someone who understands what you’re going through for help and prayer.
I also love how wholistic and practical this program is. Secular sources for quitting porn tend to focus only on exercise and self-talk. Church programs tend to only talk about the spiritual side and the moral implications of porn use. But Tim focuses both on positive lifestyle changes like getting more sleep, cutting off access to porn and exercising heavily to help deal with urges, but he also doesn’t neglect the spiritual warfare aspect that is a very real part of getting and staying pure.
There have been a lot of sacrifices along the way. Cutting off access is inconvenient (though you get used to it quickly and it’s not as bad as you might think). I had to quit my high paying career that was causing me so much stress and was the main cause for most of my relapsing. I’ve had to move back in with my parents so I can work a lower-paying lower-stress job while I work on finding a career that fits my true God-given gifts and talents. But let me tell you, the sacrifices have all been worth it. I don’t feel any of the shame when I talk to friends and strangers. Looking people in the eye is so much easier. Talking to God in prayer is richer. I can enjoy fellowship at church and take communion with a clean conscience. I now am forming friendships with godly Christian men at my church like I never have before. I feel much more ready to be in a committed marriage relationship with that right woman someday. I cringe to think how stuck in my addiction I would still be right now if it weren’t for Tim Davis at Pureheart and my brothers and I’m looking forward to moving forward in the destiny that God’s got for me.
Thank you for reading this far! I hope that this helps some of you! Keeping fighting brothers.
A special thank you to @Wilderness Wanderer and @Poor Yorick for your support too.
Here's the link to Pureheart Ministries https://www.pureheartministries.net/
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