What’s your view on mutual masturbation?

Mutual masturbation is making your partner climax without penetration. Is it really healthy? Let’s ask ourselves the following question: what do we want to experience?

Do we want to establish a dynamic of giving and receiving, or one of taking, grasping, possessing the other, watching the other climax? Do we want to be united, sharing in the joy of an intimate relationship? Sexual maturity lies down a long road of learning, it demands time and great attentiveness to each other.

Be brave and say it how it is: mutual masturbation is a dead end. In the long term, it drives us to a create a parallel sexuality, yes with pleasure, and sensuality, but not a conjugal communion. We set foot in a world where we’re not giving ourselves completely to each other. One or the other abstains from giving themselves. It’s incomplete. One of them experiences pleasure, not the other (or much less): the couple is stopped from entering into a conjugal sexuality.

Worse than that: mutual masturbation can lead to other distractions in which the search for pleasure becomes an end in itself, for example pornography or sex toys. Remember that orgasm is not an end in itself, it’s the result of, and the fruit of a union and a communion of love. If we start looking for it in itself, we cut ourselves off from real love, lasting and whole. Remember also the communion of the couple manifests itself wholly (body, heart, mind) in conjugal union.

In order to help the communion of your conjugal life grow, it’s important that every gesture is geared towards the total gift of self, without delay, without expecting something in return and not based on certain conditions. This is why we say that pleasure is not an end in itself but a gift… within a communion of conjugal love. We receive it, live it, and can even pursue it with no scruples, when it’s the fruit of communion, because the essential point is communion between two beings who love each other with great love.

One of the signs tending to show we favour a communion between spouses, is when peace reigns in couple and not dissatisfaction or irritability, etc. Mutual masturbation is also the sign of a lag between two people, not being on the same page. One might not know how to wait for the other, which can signal frustration and tension. Don’t then reinforce this disunion, but on the contrary, find full sexual and bodily harmony again through the total gift of self, and a complete communion of two people who love each other!

And you, what do you think? Come and talk to us using the chat’ (free and anonymous)!

Going further:

• “How and why, I stopped masturbating”
• Is masturbation harmful?
• Pornography and masturbation, are they sinful?

 

Jessica Hariss was a porn addict : her testimony!

Do women struggle with porn too? Author and ex-porn addict Jessica Harris says women can succumb to a porn addiction just as easily as men do. She also warns parents: it’s not a matter of if your child will be exposed to porn, but when.

Jessica Harris is now the founder of Beggar’s Daughter, a ministry dedicated to walking with women who have an addiction to pornography. Telling her own story of porn addiction and struggle with lust, Jessica seeks to help other women find hope, healing, and grace. Jessica enjoys traveling and speaking on the topic of female lust addiction and how churches can minister to women who struggle. She resides just outside of Washington DC where she works as a teacher and serves on the Biblical counseling team in her church. She is the author of Love Done Right: Devos—A Journey From Lust into the Love of God.

• To go further: read his many articles about porn addiction on Covenanteyes.com

So, what do you think about what says ex-porn addict Jessica Harris? Come and talk to us via the live chat’! (Free and anonymous listening service)

And you, what do you think? Do you believe it’s possible to stop using porn? Do you too want to receive help from heaven to get rid of this addiction? We are here to pray with you and ask Carlo Acutis for his intercession:

Going further:

• Edgar’s testimony: “what if marriage could resolve my problem?”
• Ran Gavrieli: “Why I stopped watching porn” (vidéo)
• “My husband was miraculously cured through Carlo Acutis thanks to SOS Porn!”

How to rediscover your unity and freedom in 10 steps?

Here is an extract from the book ‘Delivered’ by Tanguy Lafforgue, helping you rediscover unity and freedom in 10 steps

Addiction has consequences on every dimension of your person. Therefore, only an overarching strategy, relying on a general overview is what will help break the deadlock and mean you can rediscover unity. Here are some pointers to help you establish good limits and put the addictive fake-me in its place.

Step 1: Recognise a strategy that involves escaping doesn’t work.

Step 2: Discover how to regain control

Step 3: Treat the external and internal triggers, and deactivate any brain-conditioning

Treatment of triggers will bring serenity and security, will lower the excessive stimulation of compulsive behaviours and help you take back the control of your environment.

Step 4: Recognise that mindset is responsible for urges in a big way, learn to think more flexibly, and sort through thoughts that bother you

The addictive false-me brings out problematic thoughts; these, lock themselves into addictive behaviours justifying themselves, draining self-confidence and self-esteem. But we can identify the times we tell these “stories” to ourselves and then either modify them or distance ourselves entirely from them.

Step 5: Tame our emotions and make allies of them in order to grieve and move on

The addictive false-me had the bad habit of not trusting my emotions, which were presented as something bothersome and provoked shame. Through a lack of self-confidence and out of fear of being bothered, it became preferable they were numbed and ignored. By behaving in this manner, we’re cut off from the useful messages our emotions send us. But you can rediscover how to become conscious of them again and learn to decipher them in order to have a better understanding and ability to interact.

Step 6: Reconnect with your body to regain control of your brain, and to boost well-being

The human body provides useful information and resources. It enables us to connect with ourselves and to the world around us, to anchor ourselves in the present, to better know ourselves and so better control ourselves. The addictive false-me is often cut off from the body, and this is what gives disturbing thoughts a disproportionate place. Disconnecting from them enables you to find balance again.

Step 7: Teach yourself to no longer mechanically react to your desires, review the relationship you have with pleasure, face difficulties instead of fleeing them

The addictive false-me can be overcome, if we take action. Out of fear of failure and shame, it prefers to flee the situation rather than confront obstacles or difficulties. This means multiple opportunities are missed to learn and strengthen your self-confidence. Little by little you can take action, discovering how to be responsible, learning from negative experiences, becoming proactive in your life.

Step 8: Motivate yourself to change

When we want to stop an addictive behaviour, the vital ingredient is not willingness but motivation. There are so many sources of motivation; they are real assets. The more we are connected to good reasons for changing and conscious of what personal resources we may have, the more motivation and confidence will grow in us.

Step 9: Understand what withdrawal consists of, and prepare for it effectively

Stopping an addictive behaviour is not easy but it’s not a nightmare either. The keys: freedom and peace. The ninth step concretely explains how withdrawal will play out. We’ll never stop everything in one go. Like in any period of transformation, it will happen in an irregular and progressive manner, with highs and lows which we’ll need to learn to manage.

Step 10: When you’ve finished mourning get on with life, and stay vigilant

Taking back control of addictive behaviours is possible but a memory of the addiction will always remain somewhere in the brain. We’ll never eradicate the addictive false-me, but we learn to live with it, keeping it in its place. The last step invites us to savour life after addiction, staying humble and vigilant and keeping up the movement of personal growth undertaken during the withdrawal period.

What do you think? We are here for you, via the chat to listen and answer your questions:

Going further:

• How to rediscover your unity and freedom in 10 steps?
• Edgar’s testimony: “what if marriage could resolve my problem?”
• François’s recovery from a 25-year porn addiction.

 

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Extract from the book: Délivré – 10 steps to stop using pornography- Tanguy Lafforgue – Coeur Hackeur

Read about Tanguy

Watching porn, what does it do to you?

Watching porn, pornographic pictures or porn videos, distorts your vision and renders you incapable of having a normal relationship, with neither men nor women. It destroys love.

In fact, surreptitiously, through watching porn day after day, we start considering woman or man as an object for consumption, there to serve our pleasure. Instead of discovering our fiancé or our husband/wife in the context of their whole personality, including their body, spirit, heart, intelligence, sensitivities… we cut everything down to one thing: the pursuit of bodily pleasure.

In relationships with our friends or in the professional sphere, the longer we continue watching porn, the more our attitude becomes focussed on sex, as our memory is “imbibed” with erotic images. Interactions with others become ambiguous.

Within a couple, pornography destroys love. True love is the gift of yourself, is listening to the other, being delicate, tender, and attentive to the other. And our hearts can become blind, suffocated by the sadness and disgust invoked by eroticism.

We’re conscious that, God, the Creator, has inscribed in the depths of our being a desire to be pure. An aspiration which remains in us, even when we’ve done things to damage it. It’s possible to reclaim this purity, whatever we’ve got ourselves into. Firstly, through God’s forgiveness. And then keeping it, through daily life, by guarding our hearts: this is an interior posture which consists of simply but firmly distancing ourselves from anything which could blemish our hearts (turning our eyes away, cutting a daydream short, not reading magazines, adverts…). You can be certain that little by little our goodwill will win through and we’ll find peace and joy of heart.

Etienne’s story

Claire and I lived the first two years of our marriage as a young ‘modern’ couple: going out, seeing friends, films, the cinema… We wanted to see everything, know everything. It’s like this we went to watch erotic films. We would laugh a lot going into the showing, trying to hide the fact we were a bit unsettled, disgusted. We didn’t want to let ourselves feel guilty. In fact, when being intimate, it wasn’t exactly Claire I was seeing anymore, and it was the same for her. The images we’d seen imposed themselves on us, subtly and slyly, and it was clear we were drifting apart.

Following a difficult and heavy family issue, we started asking ourselves questions about who we were and about the life we had. We realised these images, preserved in our memory, were suffocating our love. We decided not to go and watch these films anymore, and more generally, not to “buy into” everything that was thrown at us just because it was fashionable! This enabled us to have a life that conformed more closely to what we really wanted.

What do you think? We are here for you, via the chat to listen and answer your questions:Go further:

• How to stop watching porn: 10 techniques!
• Liberated from pornography by Carlo Acutis
• What does pornography do to women?

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Source: extract from an article in ‘He is Alive!’, special edition July 2007 “50 questions on life and love”

Addiction to porn, sign of pschological distress?

Addiction to pornography or to masturbating regularly, even if your partner seems to ignore it, has an effect on the trust within a relationship. Shame, breaking the rules, or sinning, the subject is taboo. How can we address it differently? How do we talk about it, in all simplicity?

A man admits to his friend that he’s addicted to porn. His friend replies directly: “Your combat is essentially a question of control. You like the control that pornography gets for you. You’d prefer to dive deep into this universe rather than run the risk of real intimacy.” Stupefied, the man recognised that it was true: “I wanted control over the way I experienced pleasure and I didn’t want to face the perspective of not having my needs satisfied by a real person.” (1)

Exercising your sexuality in a solitary way is totally paradoxical. Contradictory even in the terms we use, if we accept that sexuality is made for relationship. Each one of us has a deep need for intimacy with another. To be intimate with someone, is to live in close physical and emotional proximity with this person. We have a first experience of this intimacy in the relationship with our parents. When a lack of intimacy, or a displaced intimacy with them, or with one of them, affects the child, a distrust is planted in them. The child hardens their heart, in an effort to survive it. Later, this can make them become a “detached” adult, who finds it difficult to be intimate and incapable of talking about it, because it implies surrendering. An adult in this case can become narcissistic, not able of taking another person into account. The partner of someone like this is clearly bound to suffer.

Porn addiction, sign of psychological distress

Porn addiction, like sex addiction, is not in the first instance a moral problem, but a psychological problem, and sign of psychological stress. Moral convictions will not help a person in breaking out of it. Rather, they need to become aware of the reasons behind their addiction, by working on themselves, accompanied by someone who is competent.

And where is God in all this? More intimate than my own self. God can be a source of healing.

• Read also: Liberated from pornography by Carlo Acutis

Therapy can also help you become aware of the causes behind these inappropriate sexual habits.

Sexual impulses and urges are the sign of a greater and deeper desire: that of being loved and of loving. In quenching this great and good thirst through solitary satisfaction we deprive ourselves of the inter-personal dimension of this desire, it deprives us of love. Break out of it! Get help!

So, how do we do it? Talk about it with your partner and/or talk to us using the chat’!

Going further:

• Is masturbation harmful?
• Joseph, ex-porn addict: “One day, I thought to myself: you’re not happy!”
• What are the consequences of porn on your health ?

 

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Notes

Extract of an article written by Sophie Lutz for ‘Famille chrétienne’, March 2013.

(1) Vers une sexualité réconciliée, by Andrew Comiskey, Éditions Raphaël.

Dos porn make it harder to meet people?

Porn doesn’t completely block an encounter with someone else, but it does lower the chances of a having a sincere exchange. Here, we’ll explain why.

• Porn is time-consuming

Porn use is aimed at producing the pleasure to satisfy urges which are more often than not the result of being unhappy, stressed, feeling undermined in your masculinity or femininity, an excessive fatigue, or not looking after your body.

Consuming porn like this, firstly creates a habit or reliance, and secondly an increasingly stronger need for it, because it functions on the same principal as using drugs. The time spent consuming porn is detrimental to other activities, which get pushed aside, mathematically limiting occasions for meeting and making friends, or entertaining the possibility for something more, if things go well.

• Risk of isolation and self-satisfaction

Addiction and individual pleasure, without the constraint of involving another person, can encourage us to be satisfied with the situation and not look to change. Taking the risk of meeting someone, then building a friendship or relationship with them, involves making certain adaptations to the other person. An attitude like this may be more difficult to adopt if we are used to a way of life where there is unrestrained pleasure, and as the consumer we select our merchandise, porn, in a unilateral way.

• Basing the relationship principally on its sexual potential

The habit of using porn, with its ‘drug’ effect, develops an increasingly greater need for it. This dependency will have an effect on the way you see the people you may meet, and what you expect from them. They’ll end up being judged and compared to model or porn actors you’ve seen and there’s the risk of prematurely breaking up relationships, and missing out on finding your lifetime partner, when porn is not at all a reference point for real life.

• What will your future partner think?

If you go on a date which launches into a relationship, what’ll your partner think? Will they be annoyed or disgusted with the comparison? And what if they accidently come across your porn consumption? If you don’t manage to get out of porn before meeting someone, the best option would be to talk to them about it, so they can help you on your journey. Contrary to the image given to us by society, which insists on presenting an idealised projection of yourself, sharing your wounds often strengthens the bond between two people because it’s a sign of trust and honesty.

And this combat, that you’ll face together, can give foundations to your couple, and bring something good out of something bad.

If you don’t have a partner to help you face this combat, come and talk on the live chat’, we’ll give you a shoulder to lean on in this fight:

Going further:

• Why do we need to educate ourselves about sexuality and Feelings?
• Porn: What’s the problem?
• François’s recovery from a 25-year porn addiction