The Light at the End of the Tunnel : An Account

Pornography: the silent struggle. It is an issue that more often than not gets over looked and swept under the rug. This week I want to relate a story of a person I know. This story is her personal account of what happened to her and her family because of pornography. This is just one of many, many similar stories. Here is her account:

                He was a great guy. There was no way I could have known what kind of problems he had. He was a football captain, involved in his high school choir, had a 4.0 gpa, was going to BYU, eagle scout, and a returned missionary. He was a very kind, gentle person who loved his family, and they loved him. There were some red flags that I saw, but at the time I didn’t really pay attention to them. It wasn’t until after we were married that I found out. One day I stumbled upon a magazine. This was the time before the internet or cell phones and the easy access to pornography. One had to go looking to find it; he had to go looking to find it. I grew up in a house of girls, my father was a member of the stake presidency so I had no contact with that kind of stuff growing up; it was a strong experience. When I confronted him about it, he shrugged it off saying that all men do it; “it’s normal” he said.

                If I could go back and change one thing now, I would change how we approached it. We kept it secret. We told his parents, we saw some counselors, although I don’t think my parents even knew about it… If I could, I would announce it from the roof tops now; I would have let everyone know that we had a problem.

                Over time it got progressively worse… I would find stashes of magazines, calendars and cut out pictures all over the place: in the closet, under the carpet. Everywhere. I remember going out to the shed one time and it was like these images would float down from the ceiling. Some of them even dated back to the time of his mission. We talked about it, we visited counselors, we did everything; yet nothing seemed to work. Finally we went to the Bishop, he sent us to a counselor. The counselor was basically teaching us about the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ, stuff we would learn in Sunday school. And I kept waiting for him to talk about the actual issue, about pornography, but he never did. He had periods of time when he was clean, when he was good. You can see it in the pictures, you could see the difference in his face, in his eyes, when he was good and when he was doing bad.

                I remember a time when I felt impressed to go up into the attic. I knew there was something up there. So I went up and sure enough there was a hole that he had dug out and it was filled with pornography. We gathered it all up and took it all to the dump, and he wept the whole way. He wept. You know how that felt? I felt like he was cheating on me. Women feel violated every single time their husband looks at it. You feel as though they are having an affair each and every time.

                Towards the end it started to get really bad. He was hollow inside. It just destroyed him from the inside out. I remember a time where we had an appointment with the therapist, and I had arrived early and he came barging in, angry. In the end he was just always angry; he didn’t care about his family any more. He even told the therapist that he didn’t care what his family did, he had chosen pornography over them.

                It wasn’t long after that when he came to me and told me he was having an affair. He left our family. My youngest son, who was two at the time, tells me that he still remembers the day that his father left the family. Vividly. He said he could even draw the grill of the car if he had to. Will, he was a good man but it ruined him. He began to break in and steal things from the house. My family was always in fear of what ‘Dad’ might do next. It got so bad that I had to get a restraining order. He was trying to become violent. I remember seeing in his truck one time a book entitled: Violence and the Demonic man. This was a man, who when I met him was gentle and kind, who now was reading books trying to become violent. Pornography did that to him. So with all the reasons and evidences that I had against him, I went with my mom to the judge to get the paper signed. I was worried that he might not sign it because I didn’t have a lot against him. But when the papers had come back, the judge had signed it as a protection order, which is a step higher than the restraining order.

              Eventually, when we were able to use that to get him to sign the divorce papers… Fourteen years I fought this battle with him. In the end it robbed him of everything.

This isn’t the only story like this. There are hundreds and thousands of stories similar to this that go untold.  I am grateful she was willing to share it with us. Women like her are heroes, and I respect them a lot.

The more I think about this topic, the more I decide that the way we treat pornography addicts is fundamentally wrong. It’s not just something that you “get over” and move on from. Pornography is a drug; therefore we need to treat it as such. We cannot keep thinking the same way we have thought about it if we want to begin to help those caught in its snare. Just as cocaine and heroin are highly addictive, so is pornography. It has the same effects on the brain chemically as any of the illegal or hardcore drugs do.

Next week, I will be writing specifically about what pornography does to the brain physically. We need to make a change. We need to begin to see pornography for what it is: a drug, not just something “boys” do.

Pornography ruins families. Let’s make a move to stop it dead in its tracks.

With love,

Will Glade

The one walking beside you.