The following is a transcript of a live presentation given at the Cyber Secrets Conference on Pornography at Brigham Young University on February 7, 2001.

Cyber Secrets: The Problem of Pornography:
Pornography Effects and Ultimate Consequences
Dr. Victor Cline
February 7, 2001

When thinking of pornography addictions, I am reminded of an experience that I had when I was in fourth grade in Los Angeles. On one occasion they took all the students on a school bus and went to West Los Angeles where the La Brea Tarpits were. In prehistoric times this was a place where large animals such as dinosaurs came to water when they were thirsty, but it was a terrible trap. A mirage of fresh cool water appeared on top which enticed the animals but just underneath was a deep pool of sticky black tar that went down over a thousand feet. To quench their thirst, these giant animals would step out into what appeared to be a pool of refreshing water, and then one foot would get stuck and then they'd put another foot in to get leverage to pull out the first one. Very shortly they were trapped in the tar that swallowed them whole to be discovered thousands of years later, their bones perfectly preserved, by scientists studying early life forms on our planet.

Unfortunately I see too many of our choicest children and their fathers being caught up in a similar trap. No matter what they do they cannot extricate themselves from this trap. In the past 25 years, I've worked with maybe 350 people, mainly LDS males of all ages, who have been caught in this trap which they can't get out of. We are seeing, daily, an increasing number of human casualties from excellent families. Those of us who witness this and work daily with these tormented individuals cannot remain silent. It is important to realize that even though some things I speak about may be distressing to learn, there are also solutions and ways to heal.

I believe the media has a great power to teach, inspire, inform and entertain but they may also corrupt, degrade and pervert. They have the power to influence profoundly, for good or evil, all aspects of our values, our feelings and our behavior. We are all affected by what we choose to expose ourselves to. I see examples, almost daily, of gracious, good people of all ages and both sexes who have had an exemplary upbringing, but have become addicted to viewing pornography or violence. Many have cultivated an appetite for voyeuristically viewing sexually explicit scenes of multiple adulteries or the seduction of innocents all in living color, accompanied by a memorable musical score and muted sax. Evil is presented as attractive and destructive behaviors are marketed as exciting and rewarding. Often, humor is used to make pornography or the loss of innocence entertaining and palatable.

A New York psychiatrist, Frederick Wirtham, who was a specialist working with disturbed children once said, "A child's mind is like a bank. Whatever you put into it you get back ten years later with interest." Some parents would never dream of feeding their children contaminated food, yet, pay little attention to the toxins in their media entertainments. But what starts out as a spectator sport introduces into the brain a vast library of anti-social fantasies. Forty years of behavior science research suggests that these have the potential to repeatedly get acted out resulting in harm to the individual and those around them. Some have argued that pornography is essentially harmless and that it is just another form of entertainment. But I have seen too many patients who have had bad experiences with it.

Ideologically, I have other concerns such as where pornography is mixed with violence eroticizing aggression against women. Several years ago a mother brought into my office her 13-year-old daughter with a 14-year-old boyfriend. They had accidentally found and uncovered the father's secret cache of pornography. The pictures and stories that they viewed had helped break down their self restraint and now the girl was pregnant and uncertain of her father's real values. The shocked, outraged mother was suing for divorce.

As I view it, the human reproductive drive is one of Deity's great gifts to mankind. It allows us to participate in the act of creation and to know the great joy of having children who are forever linked to us biologically and spiritually. Sexual intimacy with genuine affection can bond the husband and wife together, heal wounds in the relationship and bless the couple with a special kind of joy and caring for each other. In contrast, pornography degrades sex. It dehumanizes the participants and those who witness it. And much of it is anti-sexual because it gives a great deal of inaccurate and misinformation about human sexuality; rather than being sex education most of it is sex mis-education.

Several years ago I was expanding my private practice as a psychotherapist. I commented to my wife, Lois, that I was puzzled by a deluge of new male patients all with pornography addictions. In addition, I was finding that these illnesses were evolving into broad-ranging sexual addictions, marriage break-up, depression, a loss of control in their lives, shame, guilt, chronic lying to the people they loved, and most important an inability to stop what they were doing and a sense they had lost their free agency.

My wife looked over to me as I commented about this and she said well, "Just tell them to stop. Nobody has to look at those gross pictures or videos or go into porn internet sites if they don't want to. Just tell them to stop looking at that terrible stuff."

I was getting a little impatient, and I responded, "Yes, Lois, but these people are addicted. They can't stop."

Lois looked at me quizzically and a little put-off, and she said, "That is nonsense. Just tell them to quit."

I then said, "Why don't I just give you an example? I'm counseling a married religious male in his 30's with a wife and three kids, a professional man. He believes in God, he prays regularly and always attends church but, he's addicted to pornography and he is ‘acting out.' Because of this, he'll probably lose both his wife and his church membership. And no matter how hard he tries he can't stop what he's doing; it is just like being on crack cocaine. He wants to turn his life around, but he can't. Nothing he does works. He has no self control or discipline. Now, somewhat desperate, he hopes that maybe counseling can cure or heal him."

Since we found that looking at pornography always proceeded his acting out sex behavior, I decided to give him a very powerful incentive not to look at it anymore in order to break the destructive cycle that he was in. So I asked him right there, "Would you give me $1,000? Write me out a check for $1,000?" I went on to explain, "I'll put it in a special bank account and if you can go 90 days and are porn-free you get your money back. If, however, you relapse even once just a little bit the money goes to charity, not me." I didn't want to have any reason to personally gain or benefit from or want him to fail in any way.

With a big grin on his face he said, "Fantastic. How did you know that I was such a tightwad with money? There is no way that I'd look at pornography if it is going to cost me that much money, $1,000. You know you have chosen the right incentive for me." And he proceeded to write out a check for that amount, and I put it in a special bank account.

Our succeeding therapy sessions were most productive. And he stayed sober for many weeks. On the 87th day after he had given me the money, he was in Phoenix, Arizona on a business trip. This is a wide open city with regards to the display and the sale of pornography. While driving down one of its major streets in a rental car he noticed an adult pornography store. He slammed on the brakes, pulled over to the curb and went inside. For two hours he gorged himself on all kinds of obscene materials. And then when I saw him the next Tuesday night with our evening appointment with his wife, he was in tears. He admitted that he had relapsed seriously and had lost his $1,000.

I felt bad too, but I commented hopefully, "You know, if you were able to go 87 days, I know you can make 90. I'll tell you what, I'll erase everything you have said from my memory. The money will not go to charity. We will keep it in the bank and we will start over tonight for another 90-day trial. I know you can do it."

He had a big sort of relieved smile on his face and his wife was most appreciative too. But 14 days later he blew it again, another relapse, and the money then did go to a local charity.

Curious, I asked him, "What if that check had been for $10,000? Would that have made any difference? Would you have stayed sober then?"

He sadly raised his head and looked at me and said, "No. Even if I'd given you $10,000 I would have still lost it. You don't know what it's like."

I never used that technique again with any patients. It just doesn't work. All it does is impoverish them. In some 25 years of treating mostly males with this problem, I found that there were four major things that happen to them when they get immersed in a pornographic milieu and become ill with it.

The first consequence is addiction, which I discussed earlier. It usually starts, I find, no matter what age they are when they come in, when the person is a teenager with a friend being the most common source of their exposure. Usually pictures in men's magazines, then later the internet, videos, erotic films and cable or satellite TV. They looked at this material initially out of curiosity and found it sexually stimulating and arousing. In time, they increase their frequency of exposure, nearly always masturbating to it. The addiction gains an increasingly stronger hold over them as they keep going back to the material and repeating the cycle. It provides very exciting and powerful imagery which they can frequently call to mind and elaborate on in their fantasies. Thus, most of my male patients have an X-rated library right up here in their head. Try as they might, they're not able to keep the door locked all the time. And some very uncomfortable things keep popping out intruding into their consciousness, which can further arouse and stimulate them. As some get older, they think that marriage will solve the problem and cure the addiction. But this doesn't happen no matter how affectionate their wife is. The pornography addiction still persists, fueled by fantasies in a different part of the brain. My clients who have been addicted to drugs and other kinds of things say that pornography addiction is the toughest one to get out of and to get released from.

The second thing that happen is desensitization. What was first shocking and revolting in time becomes common place and ordinary. They get used to it. Their spirit is stunted. It no longer warns and protects them. Eventually they incorrectly assume that everybody is looking at this sort of stuff. They become inured to its pathology. Conscience and constraint is diminished or turned off. They get hardened. They lose compassion. Nothing bothers them. Viewing extremes of sexual pathology becomes merely titillating. In time, they become incapable of understanding the deviance and the inappropriateness of the material they lust after.

The third thing that occurs with all of my patients, no exceptions, is escalation. In order to get their highs, their buzz, their kicks, the erotic excitement, they develop the need for even more aberrant materials, something more gross, more stimulating, more deviant. Like with a drug, it takes more and more to achieve the same excitement they had in the past with lesser materials.

Eventually the fourth thing happens, which is "acting out." They eventually start doing the things behaviorally that were just fantasies in their head before. Their judgment is affected in the workplace and they do things that their female co-workers call sexual harassment. As their illness escalates they lose the ability to discriminate between what is appropriate and what may send them to jail. They and their employer get sued. They often lose their jobs and they may get put on the states list of sex offenders with their name on the internet. Probably the worse consequence of all is what it does to the marriage or the partner relationship as well as the family as a whole. This is where I see much pain, grief, and sorrow. The wife may divorce them. They are sometimes not allowed to see or visit their own children unless a paid professional is there to supervise the visit and protect the children from them.

I'd now like to make mention of the hormone epinephrine which is released into the bloodstream when one is emotionally or sexually aroused. It immediately goes to the center of the brain having to do with memory. There it locks in very powerfully one's memories of whatever is going on with them at the time and this is how many men create their own X-rated pornography library in their head with images they can never erase. They can't get rid of them. They hate them. And the images can be easily retrieved and played on their mind screen again and again.

Research of psychologist James McGaugh, at University of California at Irvine, is highly suggestive of how this happens. Once addicted, the men and boys cannot throw off their dependance on this material by themselves despite many negative consequences such as loss of family, divorce, and problems with the law.

I've also found anecdotally that many of the most intelligent of my male patients appear to be the most vulnerable. The brighter they are the worse it is. Perhaps because they have a greater capacity to fantasize which heightens the intensity of the experience and makes them more susceptible to the addiction. Thus higher intelligence appears to work against them with this problem.

Many wives have found their husband choosing fantasy sex over them as a love object. This occurred when the wives accidentally found them stimulating themselves with pornography rather than showing interest in them. This usually had a very disturbing and disrupting effect on the marriage relationship. One of my patients wives was in great pain and emotionally very distraught. She confronted her husband after she discovered him involved with pornography one night, the same night she had been romantically somewhat adventuresome earlier and he had rejected her. I remember she said, almost screaming, I'll never forget it, in this life or the next. "What do you see in those two dimensional faceless woman who you don't even know that I can't give you as a loving wife who is flesh and blood a real person who is committed to you and loves you?"

He did not have an answer, just as most men in his situation don't. To some extent they enjoy relationships with their wives but most prefer the fantasy sex because these pornographic women in their fantasy can do anything and are perfect in form and appearance. While some wives initially blame themselves as possibly being responsible for their husband's problems, they soon find that being extra affectionate with their husbands never solves the problem or slows down their acting-out or stop the constant deceptions and lying.

I found that once addicted, whether to just the pornography or the later pattern of sexual acting out, they really lose their free agency. It is like a drug addiction. They cannot stop the pattern of their behavior no matter how high the risk it is for them or terrible the price or how awful the consequences. With all of the men that I have worked with, nearly all experience shame and guilt, but they always keep it a secret. They never discuss what they are doing with their spouses, parents or rarely other adults. In a way they have a love/hate relationship with it. They intuitively know they should not be involved with it but they still continue. And each time they go through the cycle of exposure, arousal then sexual release it further strengthens the hold the addiction has on them.

Dr. Stanley Rachman, a British psychologist, has repeatedly demonstrated in the laboratory how simple and easy it is to condition adult males into sexual deviancy using erotic stimuli. This research was done at the Mavosley Hospital in London. Later, for ethical reasons, he attempted to uncondition them, to heal them, to reverse what he had done to them. But for some of his volunteers that turned out to be a far more difficult task than he had originally anticipated. Today, with all kinds of review committees nobody could ever do what he did. But, this landmark research by Rachman demonstrated quite strikingly how some addictive sexual illnesses can occur or originate through a learning or conditioning model.

In my sample of patients I found that the course of this illness may be slow and usually hidden from view. It is a secret part of the man's life and, like a cancer, it keeps growing and spreading. It almost never reverses itself. It's not like having a cold or the flu where you eventually get better. No. This illness keeps feeding on itself and it keeps getting worse. Denial on the part of the male addict and refusal to confront the problem are typical and predictable. Usually he has to be caught and confronted before he'll agree to get help.

I received a phone call late one night a few years ago from an attorney from Arizona asking me to do a psych evaluation on Randy. He was an architect president of his firm, was raised by loving parents in an ideal protected home environment. In high school he excelled in sports and academics. Everybody liked him. He continued in college at the University of Arizona. He married well, and had several lovely children. He was active in his Protestant church where he was chosen to head a committee devoted to doing good works for disadvantaged children. His whole life was successful and trauma-free. There was only one problem which his wife never knew about. He was a serial rapist who did very bad deeds using a knife and gun to intimidate and get what he wished from his terrified female victims.

As I conducted this assessment in a county prison it was clear that he had come from an ideal family background, one that anyone of us would be lucky enough to have. The only negative in his life was a deep and secret addiction to pornography, especially videos and films showing extreme aggression including rape against woman. He watched and stimulated himself to these videos for years in the local pornography stores. Doing this evaluation was like seeing a deadly virus in a pure culture. Consequently, in many of these debates about pornography effects I have with my colleagues, they will argue that a person who does some bad things sexually must come from a bad environment. But Randy's environment and family history were about as choice as he could ever have. There was only one negative in it, which was his addiction to violent pornography. That was the only negative in his life and it eventually led to a long line of violence and rapes against woman, life imprisonment, and of course the loss of his family.

Consider Frank, Deputy Major of the City of Los Angeles several years ago. He was in his late 40s, an esteemed public servant. One afternoon while watching hard core pornography in a West Los Angeles adult theater, his arousal got to the point where impulse over came reason and he began to sexually assault a woman in a darkened theater sitting near him. She turned out to be an undercover police vice squad officer. She handcuffed him, booked him in central jail where he was later tried and found guilty and his life and career were in shambles.

Consider the parents of two Utah boys the ages of 10 and 12 who brought their sons to me. The sons had been exposing younger children in their neighborhood to porn videos, which the parents owned, and then sexually assaulting the children. Their sons had found the videos hidden in their bedroom closet. The abuse had been going on for many months. These two boys threatened to shoot any of these younger children if they told on them with their BB gun. Finally one of the young victims became so terrified of what was going on that he finally broke down and confessed to his mother what these two older boys had been doing to him. In this instance it was older children abusing younger children in a sexual way, imitating what they were repeatedly watching on the absent parents hard-core porn videos. This occurred while both parents worked during the day.

You cannot have this junk in your house and the kids not find it. For example, I like gum. I like to chew gum but my kids they like it too so I have to hide it, but they always find where I hide it. If you've got kids in your home and you have inappropriate materials there, the kids will find it.

Consider the Walt Disney Company executive recently caught by the FBI trying to arrange for intimate relations with a young child he had made internet contact with or the Ogden pediatrician caught trolling the internet searching for children to have intimacies with. Various men have been fired from responsible high level job positions after they were discovered spending hours a day on company time and on company computers surfing internet pornography. Those I see say they knew the company had the software that could track wherever they went on their computers and yet they still did it. These were very bright capable people, but they did very stupid and high risk things that got them into trouble.

Nearly all sex addicts that I have worked with develop, in time, an alien egostate or a "dark side" whose core is anti-social lust devoid of most values. In a sense this is the raw id of the natural man which is described in the "good book" as an enemy to god. It is almost as if there are two people or two identities in each patient that I work with. And it is the good side that the wife marries, but now she finds later that there is someone else there that she doesn't really know. Wives tell me that they can see and recognize these different personalities and they can see it, they tell me, in their husbands' eyes. There is a different person there, a different spirit almost.

It has been commonly thought by many health educators that masturbation is not harmful. They say it is okay, it has negligible consequences merely serving to reduce sexual tension. You'll find something like this in most college health science textbooks but there are some things the books leave out probably because the writers are not aware of it. In my work and experience with addicts when they repeatedly masturbate to inappropriate or deviant pornographic imagery either as memories in their head or with explicit external pornographic stimuli they risk, via classical conditioning, the acquiring of sexual addictions or related sexual illnesses or pathology. The work of such investigators as Dr. RL. McGuire, Dr. D.R. Evans., Dr. D.P. Jackson and many others, independently find and corroborate that masturbatory conditioning is the key to acquiring many sexual deviations and illnesses. It makes no difference if one is an eminent physician, attorney, minister, athlete, corporate executive, unskilled laborer, an average 15-year-old boy or even the President of the United States. All can be conditioned into deviancy. The process of masturbatory conditioning is inexorable and the deviations produced do not spontaneously remiss or go away.

Within the past five years there has been an explosion of involvement with cybersex on the internet, which I have found for most of my clients extremely addicting. Internet pornography has three special problems that make it attractive and irresistible to some of the people I work with. They call it the three a's. It is anonymous, easily accessible, and affordable. It is like a vast smorgasbord of depravity. Any appetite that you have for salacious material it will satisfy for a brief moment, first with free teasers and then for pay in cyber warehouses full of tens of millions of erotic images to peruse and download for further review and stimulation. Your children should know that some of these pornography sites have been especially rigged or mouse trapped so that once you get into them your delete and shut down keys become immobilized. You can't get out. It's like being in a maze. They've got you. They don't want to lose you or let you go. No matter what keys you punch on your computer, you get nothing but more deviant kinds of imagery and materials on your computer screen.

For parents trying to protect their children or their husband there are a variety of filters available to help block out objectionable material. Unfortunately, with approximately 400 or more new pornography sites estimated to be added daily, these filters or blockers can be out of date the moment you install them. Plus, many computer savvy children can, with a little skill and determination, bypass them and still get into forbidden material. So the filters, while still recommended, are only partly effective. Many parents will still have to keep their computer in a very public place in the home so their children's on-line activities can be monitored. The parents need to make use of secret passwords which only the parents know or maybe the wife has access to.

I should also mention caution about internet chat rooms for children. Chat rooms make it possible to start friendships as well as affairs on the internet. It is possible for pedophile to pose as a child and entice innocent child surfers to meetings with promises of friendship but this could be very dangerous for the child. This is a common method for child molesters to find and recruit children who could later be abused. The person who pretends to be a 12-year-old girl who your daughter has befriended on the net could easily be a 54-year-old male pedophile cruising the net looking for child victims. It has happened many, many times. Lonely single females may hook up with a stranger on the internet who may in fact be a predator but present himself as highly principled, lonely male looking for some friendship. Most of the data he gives about himself is fiction but it makes him appear more dateable and a possible candidate for a future romance.

In treating individuals with pornography problems, I find that I must first assess their motivation to go through a healing experience. Some of them will show up because a judge has directed them to get help or maybe its their parents or their spouse. Yet, if they don't really believe they have a problem and are there just for appearance sake, treatment usually doesn't work. Some aren't ready to change and give up their addiction. I've had them tell me, "I like what I'm getting into. Tell you what, wait a month and then I'll be ready to stop." The consequences haven't yet become painful enough to get their attention. But, hopefully soon, they will want help.

When they are finally ready to get help it's important that they first find a sex addiction therapist with similar values who has specialized in this area with many successes. It is important to remember that although there are many therapists such as social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists who are helpful and competent in other areas of mental illness, many of these therapists don't know how to treat these kinds of addictions. Plus, there are a number of them that I find whose values are very different than their clients. For example, I went to a conference for professionals in Florida with Patrick Carnes, the world's leading researcher on this subject. At the end of the first day he said, "Whenever I give a conference like this to professionals I always find that there are some in the audience who are addicts themselves. So for all of you social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists who are addicts, sexual addicts, we will have a special 12-step meeting tonight at 7:00 in room such and such." I really wanted to go there and look in the door and just see how many people showed up but I didn't have the nerve to do that. What I'm suggesting is that even some of my colleagues are afflicted with this illness.

The person who wants to totally give up their addiction will first start a program where we give them lots of homework which they can easily do. In the beginning, we don't help them by telling them to never go to the internet again or never look at pornography again. They have promised a wife, their father, mother or clergy this very thing many times before and they end up breaking their promises repeatedly even though they don't want to. They want to quit, but they just can't. So even though they may not, in the beginning, be able to be totally sober, we give them lots of homework. We give them the kinds of things that they can do such as studying assigned books and articles. We want them to be world experts on pornography and sexual addictions.

They need to have 90 percent attendance at support groups and participation in marriage counseling if married. There is always pain. There is always trauma. The wife is always traumatized because she has been living with somebody she may love but who she knows has a serious problem. They also need to show up regularly for their counseling session. If they don't follow through on the little easy things they're assigned to do, then this does not auger well for healing the big areas of their illness.

In treating them we do such things as use sobriety contracts, fire drills for relapse prevention. We teach them to face their addiction a day at a time. We teach them to identify the triggers to their acting out and then develop coping strategies to deal with these. We'll use the three-second rule to help them engage in thought stopping or to block inappropriate fantasies. If they are married, we encourage them to always bring their spouses to attend all counseling sessions because experience has repeatedly have shown that if the spouse becomes part of the therapy triad it speeds up the healing for both of them. Both are wounded, both are injured but in different ways. It also improves the marriage and it gives a lot of hope to the addict that things can change and that he can get his free agency back again. It also means he's got somebody there he can talk to about the problem whereas before he only kept it secret.

One of the big rules that I teach them is: no secrets. Secrets kill you in this area. They absolutely kill you. You cannot live with this hidden inside of yourself. You have to have some support from the outside and a loving caring wife can be a wonderful part of the therapy team and help. Now with the wife on the team there is less chance that the patient will be deceptive or hide the truth. If it's a teenager you're working with, I encourage the attendance of whichever parent they are most closely bonded to. These joint sessions occur only with their permission but can be extremely helpful. Single male college students living a from home will present the greatest challenge because they are alone without anyone to act as confidant or give them support.

Some of the patients I work with turn out to have multiple addictions in addition to pornography. Maybe they are dependent on pain medications, amphetamines, maybe Valium, or cocaine. I have found that it doesn't really work to treat just one addiction at a time. It absolutely doesn't work. All addictions need to be treated and addressed together. Otherwise, all they'll do is just switch substances or addictions. They'll give up the pornography for a while but hit the cocaine hard giving only the appearance of making progress. The deep inner issues that lead to their dependance on one substance are the same as for all the others. The goal in treatment has to be sobriety across all substances and addictions.

After the first session or two I instruct them to start attending a 12-step support group such as SA which is acronym for Sex-aholics Anonymous. This organization is a cousin to AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, and they both use the same healing approaches. There is always anonymity, no last names, everything discussed in the group is confidential. And, of course, SA and AA use 12-step programs which is essentially a spiritual growth experience which relies on their higher power, God or Jesus Christ, to assist them through the illness. The core of this healing is essentially spiritual in nature plus a fellowship of mutual support. Those with long term sobriety may be asked to be sponsors for the newcomers and share their phone numbers where they can be contacted day or night to give support to their brother who is struggling with temptation.

They next read, study and discuss the white book and other literature which have many biographical success stories of others who have proceeded them in the healing experience. They study the literature on sex addictions. They learn a great deal from each other about identifying and coping with the triggers which set off their relapses.

SA groups are free, no cost to the attendees. Most are nondenominational, open to anyone of any faith or background of whoever wishes to attend. Other SA groups are provided for members of a particular faith, such as in the LDS community. We have some absolutely excellent SA groups which make use of LDS literature and doctrine along with their 12-step program. The group leaders are always individuals who have been previously through the fire and now have many years of sobriety. They volunteer their time usually out of a sense of appreciation to their higher power who has given them a personal healing or miracle. Plus, they want to be there to help others who are near spiritual death or in deep depression and who fear there is no way out.

Many years ago when I first started treating individuals with pornography addictions I did not make use of the SA groups. What I found is very interesting. No matter how many helpful, clever psychological strategies and procedures that I taught my patients, while they would greatly improve, they would always occasionally relapse. No matter what I did, this continued to happen. It was like I solved 95 percent of the problem but not that final percent, it was most frustrating. However, when they started also going to SA, many of them started to achieve long term sobriety with no relapses. And in my view it was because of the spiritual dimension.

I had patient after patient, client after client say that there was a day where they had a profound spiritual religious experience which helped them. To them it was the atonement in which Father in Heaven took from them the terrible load that they had been carrying and they were now free again. They had their free agency. One after another they each got their miracle. And if they followed through on doing the little things that we asked them to do, then God helped them with the big things.

I must also mention that there are many pathways to healing. Other counselors use variations of this with many innovations of their own which are also helpful and powerful, there are many roads to Rome. When people ask me why I work in an area that is so dark and discouraging the answer is very easy: because it is incredibly reinforcing to see good people heal and change, to see marriages come back together and families united. Can anything be more important in this life than that?

In sum, this is a curable illness. If one stays with the program, they will get well, but they've got to stay with it and continually avoid tampering with any salacious material in the future. The healing can be either fast or slow. Some people get healed quickly and for others, it takes a while. I personally don't care how long it takes as long as you are going in the right direction. The key is to find a good sex addiction counselor with compatible values and then participate regularly in your local SA support group and one's life will change.

I say this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.