What do you do if you discover that your child has already viewed pornographic images?

If you find out that your child has already seen pornographic images, you must have the courage to talk to them about it and tell them that porn has nothing to do with love and that it defiles them.

Learn to say NO to porn!

Pornographic images are untruthful and degrading. They seriously damage how we see people and how we view love because they reduce a person to just a body and the sexual act to a technique.

You must explain to your child that these images will mark them, that it will be difficult to break free from them and that the attraction of pornography is as strong as a drug addiction.

When you start looking at these types of images, it’s very hard not to keep going back to them, even though you know it harms you and stops you from growing as a person. It will take a lot of willpower and often a lot of help to never fall back into it.

You also need to know how to say to your child:

“You can break free of this, but you have to want it. Do you want it?”

Also see:

• How to stop watching porn: 10 techniques
  

Prevention is better than cure: parents should warn their children about the dangers of pornography as soon as they are allowed to be alone in front of a screen. Then, don’t forget to protect all of your children’s computers and cell phones with effective parental controls.

A teenager may be able to bypass parental control, but they will not “accidentally” come across a pornographic website. It may be possible to appeal to their sense of personal responsibility.  Parental filters prevent children from being unintentionally exposed to inappropriate images, for example, when a teacher asks them to look something up.

We should take this opportunity to ask whether it is a good idea to buy smartphones for our children. Are they really necessary for their development? Don’t they pose a real danger to our children today?

And how about you? What do you think? Talk to us now via the live chat (There is no charge and you remain anonymous):Going further:

• What’s wrong with looking at pornography?
• What are the consequences of porn on your health ?
• François’s recovery from a 25-year porn addiction.

 

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Source: adapted from the book by Inès de Franclieu, Amour et sexualité, comment en parler aux enfants et aux adolescents, (Love and sexuality, how to talk to children and teenagers) Editions Quasar 2016.

Why do i keep falling, in spite of all the efforts I make to get ouf of porn ?

 

Is this a question you’ve asked yourself before? You make all these efforts to stop using porn but it doesn’t work? It’s important to first identify why you’re relapsing and then you can be savvy about reacting where it’s needed.

Do you know why you keep relapsing?

It’s because every time you say to yourself, “I won’t fall into pornography again”, you don’t replace it with another activity, it creates a hole in your schedule, and your body misses it.

It’s important to know that the body hates emptiness, it’s perpetually searching for pleasure, so if you don’t choose to fill this emptiness, your body will do it for you.

And for your body, it’s very simple; you were doing it already and it gave you pleasure, so why stop? Why deprive yourself of this pleasure? And so, it’ll tell you, “Look just once more, it’ll be the last time, this time, take it for yourself, then that’ll be it”.

You’ll find yourself so exposed to thoughts like this that you end up giving in. This is how you find yourself relapsing, time and again. An endless cycle…

What should you do in this case?

How can you strengthen your efforts to stop using porn?

You must fill the hole, for your body to be in balance, so your body doesn’t feel the recurring need or emptiness.

On the one hand there is: “stopping to visit pornography websites and exposing yourself to images of a pornographic nature” and on the other hand “replacing it with other activities to help you regenerate and to break the addiction”.

Concretely, the time you previously used for destroying yourself, you can now use to rebuild yourself, by reading the Bible for example, praying, playing sports, spending more time with your family, your friends, your colleagues, and concentrating on long-term and short-term projects, reforging for yourself a new mentality…

By doing what you’re meant to be doing, you’ll no longer have the time to do what you shouldn’t be.

For there to be a real and definitive change, you must be conscious of the fact you’re still vulnerable, you’ll always face the temptation to go back, so you have to adopt the right attitude, avoiding a maximum, any exposure to pictures or thoughts which could drive you towards pornography again, and most importantly you must point your thoughts, reflexions and your mind in general towards positive and regenerating activities.

Getting out of pornography; here are 10 best techniques.

Don’t hesitate to talk to us via the chat (free and anonymous), and ask us your questions. We’re here for you!

 

Going further:

• Liberated from pornography by Carlo Acutis
• François’s recovery from a 25-year porn addiction
• Prayer for deliverance from porn addiction, what good can it do?

Sir Josaphat Bakajika
@Sir_Josaphat_B

“I feel guilty, how do I break the cycle of guilt?”

Being imprisoned in pornography can lead us to feel guilty, we are torn between the immediate artificial pleasure brought by looking at pictures, and the awkwardness of a broken chord somewhere, feeling that something is being damaged within us. We would like to give ourselves to another, in fullness and in truth, but our sensual preferences make us close in on ourselves, like Adam hiding from God, after sinning. In facing all this, we can take one of several different paths.

1) Despair

Every time we end up falling again, it’s so easy to say it’s all useless, we’ll never manage to be successful. We let ourselves give up, to despair, to experience depression, perhaps worse…

2) Pride

Yes, I fell, but I’ll get up again, for sure, because I’m strong, I can control myself… vanity of vanities, all is vanity…

3) Humility

The third solution, and the only one to help us break the infernal cycle of guilt, lies in recognising that we can’t succeed alone. It creates an opening to God, for those who believe in him, acknowledging before him that we’re weak, and imploring his mercy: this is the sense of confession.

This opening can also be made through a third-party, someone who has our trust: a friend, a priest, a psychologist… Lots of options exist, competent individuals ready to provide help. I’ll mention a couple here:

• Talk to us about it via the chat!
• Novena to Carlo Acutis. The possibility of reciting the same prayer for nine days, asking the intercession of a young Italian who died in holiness and who was passionate about new technologies.

So we should never give up, we need to use the ways given to us to make progress, getting to know ourselves and our limits, and always staying hopeful.

If you’re asking yourself, ‘how do I break the cycle of guilt?’ Don’t hesitate to talk to us about it via the chat (free and anonymous):

Going further:

• How to stop watching porn: 10 techniques
• Liberated from pornography by Carlo Acutis
• Watching porn, what does it do to you?

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?

 

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

We follow training and courses in so many different areas, but at school, sexuality is very often limited to its biological aspect, topped-up with a dose of civil education, and remains far from even a preliminary introduction to emotions and their role in it.

• Separating feelings from sexuality? A good idea?

By focussing only on the biological and pleasurable aspect of sexuality, we run the risk, in the first instance, of passing by something important, and secondly, emotionally hurting the people we meet. This means that what our body does, affects what’s on the inside, and vice versa. When we refer to the inside we mean the soul, for Christians, or more simply, the heart, feelings, spirit, psychology. It’s a case that no longer needs to be made, as doctors have now made a link between the unhappiness of a person and physical symptoms in the body.

• Set out in life without baggage

Not learning the rules of emotional bonding and sexuality is like setting off in life with baggage. It obliges us to learn things through experience, which carries its own risk of hurting people or getting hurt, getting caught in hidden traps, and suffering bad emotional surprises. All this in an increasingly egotistical world, which really doesn’t make the learning process easier.

• Choose your friends carefully

To deepen your understanding of sexuality and feelings involves choosing your companions on the road of life. This idea isn’t really spoken about very much anymore, but there are good and bad influences, especially when spending time close to people who are immature because they’re uninformed on these subjects. Without having at least an initial theoretical understanding, it’s hard to discern and differentiate between them.

• Sexuality to the detriment of emotions?

Lifestyles of today promote a form of unbridled sexuality. Look around you, it’s not clear this approach enables you to be emotionally fulfilled, what do you think? Being formed in the domain of your emotional life allows you to better nurture love, in the romantic sense, but also within friendships. It raises the chances of succeeding in this area, but of course we can never guarantee a 100% success rate when it involves human lives. Sexuality is not simply to enjoy, but it’s also to show the other person that we love them. Why show them you love them if you don’t love them, and you really just want pleasure instead? Is this situation completely clear for the other person, deep down?

• We’ve only got one life

With only one life on Earth, all the more reason to arm yourself to do things well. We invest so much in professional success, spending years studying for it, but what does it mean in terms of personal success? Better to put the right tools in your hand to achieve success in life, than learning from failure after years of marriage and children who’ll suffer the consequences. Of course, despite the failings of each of us in our lives, it always remains possible to turn, in prayer, to Jesus for help. But as we say; better prevention than a cure.

Talk to us about this article through the live chat’. Who knows, amongst the volunteers who are available, maybe you’ll come across the person who wrote it! They’re here for you, if you need help answering this question.

Going further:

• Managing your sexuality: how and why?
• Handle my urges? It’s impossible !
• Porn deconstructs sexuality and empties it from the inside

Managing your sexuality is a key element to living your emotional life to the full.

Every man and woman on this Earth has experienced the interior and intimate “force” called sexuality. A vital force which during certain moments of our life is incredibly powerful, like during adolescence, and at other times is weak, like during depression. Let’s learn a bit more about it.

Sexuality is not just sex!

Sexuality, as we might believe, is not linked exclusively to “sexual relations”, in and of themselves. It touches all that I am: body, mind, soul. Our sexuality expresses the beings that we are, in their masculinity and femininity. I’m not just a body that moves, I am a mind that thinks and reasons, and a spirit also, which animates and desires. Sexuality embraces each of these aspects.

Our body is not an object

The unity that exists between the spiritual and material components of the human person means that the way we manage our bodies has consequences on the spiritual part of us. If I « use » my body only as an instrument for pleasure, I will quickly see that in my soul there grows anxiety and a sense of emptiness. With time, I risk becoming a slave to my urges and will begin to live a sort of “schizophrenia”, a division within myself, between the emotional part and the sensory part. This will create a desert in me, and can even diminish my experience of pleasure.

Advice for managing your sexuality

We need to learn how to manage our sexuality, especially when our happiness is at stake. But how do we do this?

Firstly, in recognising the intimate connection between the interior and exterior expressions of myself; what I do with my body, can it hurt my mind?

Secondly, solitude and frustration are often things which encourage a “disordered” sexuality. We must train ourselves to build sincere and profound relationships with others.

Thirdly, by recognising the sacredness of our being, in respecting what I am, and what the other is.

Sexuality is a manifestation of love.

A well-managed sexuality fortifies our capacity to love, of respecting others, of giving value to each gesture expressing my masculine or feminine being. My sexuality will manifest itself through progressive steps; where every day I can learn to give myself to others and not ‘take advantage’ of them, or myself.

To learn how to manage your sexuality, you can turn towards specialists in the field, who will help you understand what true sexuality is and help you discover a new way of seeing your deepest nature.

Read also:

• How to channel your sexual desire with 7 decisions!
• Is porn true sexuality?

If you want to talk to us, we’re available via the chat!