How to break porn addiction

Pornography is an easy way to experience sexual pleasure. But porn addiction does not give you happiness and satisfaction. Your heart will remain empty and lonely. You do not experience love, intimacy or security.

The most important characteristic of healthy sexuality is the sharing of love with another person. In porn there is no love or intimacy. You are alone with an illusion. It is a false satisfaction. The actors are being paid a lot of money to pretend they are enjoying themselves but everything they do is fake, it’s just business and money for them. And you are the victim of it. But pornography is not only self-deceit, it’s even harmful for real love and true intimacy.

Porn addiction destroys more than you realize. Countless precious love relationships are damaged by pornography.

It’s not easy break porn addiction, but if you realize how destructive it is, it helps to fight for your freedom. This article is designed to help you understand and face the number of harmful effects porn addiction has on you and to motivate you to stop forever.

Harmful effects of porn addiction

#1 There is no love in pornography

God has meant sexuality to be a source of joy between a man and woman. It’s a heavenly gift from God to mankind, to experience wonderful love together. Porn will give you temporary egoistic kicks that have nothing to do with love. It’s just about your own physical satisfaction without giving and receiving love. There is no intimacy, no love, no acceptance, no respect, no security – nothing. Only the lies of actors that are being paid to pretend they are experiencing enjoyment and deceiving you. The effect is that they earn money from it and you are being damaged in your sexuality.

#2 Pornography leaves you empty

Sexuality as God designed it, satisfies more than your physical need: it fills you with a healing sensation of acceptance, security and happiness. It satisfies a deep need of your heart. That is because in true sexuality deep appreciation and cherishing of each other takes place. Pornography doesn’t do that at all. It leaves you more empty than you were before. It just emphasizes the loneliness. It does give a brief sensation of pleasure but doesn’t satisfy your heart. Just like with hard drugs, you run from you inner misery for a moment but you dig an increasingly deep hole for yourself.

#3 Porn addiction is a jail

Porn turns you into a prisoner. It’s something you can’t let go. Many people who start with pornography, sink deeper and deeper into it. It is literally a prison from which you can’t just escape anytime you want. Jesus Christ can and will set you free if you openly acknowledge your sins and break with them. But the absolute requirement is that you have to want it yourself. You need to realize that you are chained by deep darkness and you have to make a lasting choice to free yourself from its bondage. God wants to set you free from the prison of porn addiction. But he needs your full cooperation. Only your strong, radical decision can give you that breakthrough.

#4 Porn distances you from God

The Bible shows us that only people with a pure heart and pure hands can live on the mountain of the Lord. The mountain of the Lord is a symbolic term for the presence of God where all love, blessings and happiness you long for are flowing.

‘Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord?

And who may stand in His holy place?

He who has clean hands and a pure heart,

(…) He shall receive a blessing from the Lord

And righteousness from the God of his salvation.’

(Psalm 24:3-5)

Without purity of heart and hands you cannot live close to God. Pornography fills your thoughts. It makes your inner being impure. Your whole thought pattern becomes perverted. This uncleanliness keeps you away from God.

#5 Pornography distances you from people

Porn addiction separates you from others since you are living with a horrific secret of which no one can know. You live behind a wall, you can’t be your true self. You are hiding something that hinders true friendships and candid relationships.

#6 Porn damages your view of your partner

Porn fills your thoughts with images of naked bodies which causes you to be unable to look at the body of your own (future) partner in a pure and uncontaminated way. You will compare him or her subconsciously with the often beautified pictures of artificially adapted pictures on internet or TV. Moreover you will start to see your partner more like an object of lust, as a ‘thing’ that needs to satisfy your sexual needs instead of appreciating and loving each other. You will lose the normal respect for your fellow human being.

#7 Porn addiction is rejection of your loved one

If you surrender to porn, you are showing that you don’t want to be happy and satisfied with your (future) partner. The partner who knows that the other one is involved in porn can experience a great deal of pain. It inflicts a feeling of rejection and inadequacy and causes love and openness to be destroyed. Many families have been ruined by porn. Your (future) marriage can be destroyed if you give into it. It destructs the promise of faithful commitment to your partner.

#8 Porn opens you up to unclean spirits

The Bible shows that a person is a spiritual home in which either the Holy Spirit of God can live or be destroyed by unclean spirits. By surrendering yourself to porn, you open your spiritual home (your inner being) to a great number of unclean spirits. These spirits have the potential to control your life. They control your thoughts and feelings. Jesus Christ wants to free you completely from this spiritual bondage.

#9 Porn is a gate to the deep pit

God says in the Bible that ‘a strange woman’ is the gate is to the deep pit. This is primarily talking about the spiritual, inner death. Read carefully these words from the Bible.

‘With her many persuasions she entices him; 

With her flattering lips she seduces him.

Suddenly he follows her as an ox goes to the slaughter,

Or as one in fetters to the discipline of a fool,

Until an arrow pierces through his liver;

As a bird hastens to the snare,

So he does not know that it will cost him his life.

Now therefore, my sons, listen to me,

And pay attention to the words of my mouth.

Do not let your heart turn aside to her ways,

Do not stray into her paths.

For many are the victims she has cast down, 

And numerous are all her slain.

Her house is the way to Sheol,

Descending to the chambers of death’.

(Proverbs 7)

#10 Do you want life or death?

God will bless you in abundance if you turn away from all that is wrong. A basic principle that is being taught in the Bible is: do the right thing and you will receive the blessing of your heavenly Father. Commit evil and you will miss the blessing and even be accursed. That’s why God says: choose who you want to serve, darkness or light. Light will give you life. Darkness will give you death. Death in your heart, death in your love life, death in your relationship with you, death in many areas of your life. Choose who you want to serve!

#11 Porn addiction creates inner turmoil

You will throw away your inner peace if you indulge in porn. Guilt always causes inner turmoil. A despondent conscious causes a lot of tension. If you stay far away from porn, your mind will remain pure and clean and you will keep your inner peace. The peace that living in purity gives you is a great key to real life happiness! The peace of God is a precious gift of Jesus that you should not let yourself be robbed of by the brief satisfaction of sexual desires. The inner turmoil of a despondent conscious can slowly but surely tear you apart.

#12 Porn addiction obstructs God’s plan with your life

Porn obstructs the perfect completion of God’s plan with your life. Disobedience to God hinders His plan with your life. A tree that extends its roots to poisonous water will become ill. A sick tree cannot bear good fruits. God has called you to be a tree, planted in pure water to become a healthy, strong tree. Choose to be a pure channel of God. That way He will be able to fulfill a wonderfully beautiful plan with your life.

#13 Sin closes the door to God’s Kingdom

Possibly the worst consequence of living in sexual sin is losing your place in the Kingdom of God. Read what the Bible says about it:

‘For this you know with certainty, that no immoral or impure person or covetous man, who is an idolater, has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.’ (Ephesians 5:5)