The following is an outstanding article (used by permission) on the bondage of pornography.  If you or a loved one is battling with porn you must read this.  This is not your typical approach to this life dominating problem.  I have my study & thoughts along with some personal stories of people breaking free from porn's grip at the end.        

Pastor Jeff

The Bondage of Pornography

by Dr. Lloyd A. Sparks

If there were a way for you to be free from the bondage of pornography once and for all, you’d want to know about it, right?  You’d do just about anything to be free of its influence.

There is a way. It’s cheap, even free. It’s painless. It’s practically instantaneous. I can’t promise that it will be easy, but it is difficult only once.

Before I share it with you. Let’s talk a little about how you got yourself into this state, what you have done to conquer it and why nothing has worked so far.

You grew up, like most of us, with a firm indoctrination that certain parts of your body are bad. But early on you discovered that they felt good, and were soon confused about how to feel, both hating these parts and loving them. When you play with them, you feel guilty. When you try to be good, you can't get away from the pleasure they promise.

Eventually, you came to the realization that you would never be completely happy. You would never share the bad parts of you with a nice girl, the kind you would marry; and to share them with a bad girl would be a horrible sin.

You try to keep the paradox out of your mind, but it keeps coming back. You take pleasure from pictures YOU can both enjoy and justify - as normal like underwear ads. Or National Geographic articles on unclothed primitive societies. Then you advance to pictures you can both enjoy and condemn. The bad girls.

You progress from pictures of clothed girls to topless ones, and then completely nude girls. They are always bad girls. Then came pictures of bad people doing bad things. Things that no good wife would ever do.

You want a happy, guilt-free, full and satisfying, pleasurable sex life, but you know it will never be yours with a nice girl and you can't get it out of your mind.

Except for a while. You occasionally indulge in a fantasy with pictures of the bad girls. You have learned to take your pleasure from the pictures. Your entire sex life is trained to respond best to pornography, so much so that no other avenue offers as much pleasure. To have sex even with your wife, the nice girl who you love dearly, you must call up those memories and fantasies of the women you have had sex with in the pictures. You need the pornography even to provide your wife the pleasure she deserves.

You may have seen a counselor to resolve this problem. He may have tried some behavioral modification, like advising you to continue to fantasize about the pornography until just before orgasm, and then to bring your wife full into concentration in an effort to train your mind into the habit of associating her with the pleasure of sex. He may have advised sessions of non-sexual toughing, then sexual toughing without completion in order to restructure your habits. It may have helped some. It was certainly a lot of work.

But is hasn’t made pornography any less attractive. The threat of sliding back into the old habits is always there, like the bottle to an alcoholic, or the scent of tobacco to an ex-smoker.

Nothing has worked so far because nothing has gotten to the root of the problem, which is that you associate nude women with sex, wicked sex, and only wicked sex. To you, nude women are bad women. The idea that men and women could be nude together and be completely relaxed and comfortable, with sex the farthest thing from their minds, is absolutely inconceivable to you.

You can’t imagine people being nude together for any other reason than sexual pleasure. Sex is your only association with nudity. If you were put nude into the company of other nude people, you are sure you would loose all control. It would be embarrassing beyond belief.  Your nasty secret would be revealed to all. Only nasty people with nasty fantasies get together in the nude.

Believe it or not, there are literally millions of completely normal people worldwide who enjoy non-sexual nude recreation. In fact, many of them are even more prudish than you. Others grew up in families where nudity was the norm. You don't have to believe it without evidence. There are many you can meet personally (even clothed) to see for yourself. There are books and videos of these people enjoying themselves together, families, young and old, male and female, with no evidence of sexual activity.

How can you imagine yourself naked in the company of a naked woman without a thought of sex intruding? Yet normal men can and do – men who are free from the sex association with nudity.

To be able to be naked with a beautiful naked woman and not think about sex unless you decide to – would that not be a complete cure?  Would you still chase after pictures of naked women, or would you realize that pornography portrays a situation so far from reality that you couldn't tolerate it any more than pictures of flying cows or walking trees?

The one sure way to kill an illusion is with a healthy dose of reality. Pornography is an illusion. Unreality. In fact, the normal response to pornography is a few minutes of curiosity, and then boredom.

Come with me to a nudist park and you will never feel compelled to buy another piece of pornography again in your life.

Learn that nudity does not equal sex.

See that nice people are naked sometimes.

Come with me and see that beautiful people come in all shapes and sizes.

Learn what normal people really look like.

Learn that you are normal, too.

Lloyd A. Sparks, M.D.

Porn Free : Breaking the Bondage

In my studies that produced the paper on Good Nudity and my personal experience in Naturism I discovered something truly amazing – addiction to pornography can be broken.  As Dr. Sparks suggests, it can be broken by experiencing non-sexual nudity found in a nudist / naturist context.

Theologically speaking the Apostle Paul provides us with the overall approach of “put off / put on.”  In Ephesians and Colossians it is presented:

Notice in these passages the putting off the bad behavior or sin and the putting on of a good behavior or righteousness.  It was Christian counseling pioneer Dr. Jay E. Adams that further developed this “put off / put on” concept of victory over life dominating sins.  He was one of the first to point out that if a sinful behavior is to be overcome it must be not only be put off but a righteous behavior put on or established in place of the bad.  (See the Christian Counselor’s Manual, pp.171-216)  If you attempted to stop a particular sinful habit and you didn’t replace it with a good righteous habit, then when you are tempted the old habit would come right back.

The Christian church has failed in helping people overcome the obsession with pornography.  We have done a good job in showing the badness of porn: how it dehumanizes those involved in it – reducing them to sex objects instead of the glorious image of God in which we were created.  Our problem is that we’ve not acknowledged the goodness of the human body and have actually helped in creating a porn addicted society by our insistence that nudity is always bad.  We have made the image of God – our bodies – something of which to be ashamed.  So when a person sees any bit of naked flesh they instantly react in a sexual way and we conclude that nude = lewd.  Yet a stark naked body isn’t lewd.  (How can God make anything lewd?)  Rather it is our warped perspective of the naked body that creates the lewdness.  So what do we do?  Typically we conclude that we cannot learn to control our minds so we must put on the fig leaves.  “That will stop the mind from lusting” – so we think.  But we all know it doesn’t.  We’ve told the person stuck in porn to quit looking at porn.  We tell them to stop buying the magazines and looking at the videos.  We set up accountability partners, hold group meetings, pray, memorize verses and yet the success rate of such programs is abysmal.  Why?  Because we have only part of the solution, we’ve only put off the bad!

The Apostle Paul also tells us that to complete the process we must also put on the good.  If bad nudity is the issue, is there such a thing as “good nudity” that can be put on?  Yes there is!  It is the non-sexual nudity often found in art; the health field; and in nudist-naturist beaches, resorts and clubs.  As Dr. Sparks pointed out, viewing the naked body demystifies it and causes a reorientation of the thought process.

When participating in social nude recreation a person is naked (i.e. they are not voyeurs or “peeping toms” looking over the fence), they see other naked bodies, and the whole thought process gets reoriented.  This is especially true for the Christian who has never experienced good nudity.  The goodness of non-sexual nudity replaces the badness of pornography.  The Christian sees (often for the first time in their life) the glorious image of God found in human bodies of all sizes and shapes, not just the ones porn presents.  People are seen to be people and not objects of lust or fantasy.  And most importantly, pornography gets exposed for what it is – that being the fake, fantasy world that promises sexual or personal happiness but always leaves it’s victims unfulfilled.

If you have read this article and have experience the frustration of breaking free from the grip of pornography it is my prayer that you’ll find deliverance.  If I were talking to you, I’d tell you to: “Come with me to a nudist resort and you’ll experience the goodness of God’s image that will renew your mind.”  If you are married, it is critical that you take your spouse.  You don’t need them being suspicious over something they are not experiencing with you.  Plus, you have kept your porn secret and you don’t need to create another secret to hide from them.

One final thought.  I think we have confused looking with lusting.  Jesus makes the distinction between looking and lusting:

The important point in what Jesus says is the looking TO, or with the purpose of, lusting.  Lusting isn’t a simple joyous admiration of beauty.  It a strong desire to take or get what isn’t yours – even mentally.

I remember being told that if you look at a girl once that is OK and not a sin.  However, if you look twice the looking becomes lust.  Have you ever heard something like that?  It really is a ridiculous idea.  Yet so many have accepted such an idea.  Looking at the human body, the glorious image of God isn’t a sin.  Nowhere does God forbid looking at the pinnacle of His creation.  I believe that many people get stuck on bad nudity because they have a simple curiosity to see God’s image in naked form.  Looking and admiring the creation of God is not lusting.  Seeing good nudity displaces the lust pattern, renews the mind, and brings deliverance from the bondage to porn.     

Testimonies

Here are real stories from people who have broken the bondage of pornography by the solution offered here:

Dan's Story

Finally a Freed Man