Etienne gives his amazing testimony, healed from pornography addiction⊠through a prayer!
I fell into the torments of pornography during adolescence. One day, rifling through my parentsâ stuff, I found pornography and erotic magazines. These images had a weird effect on me: I was shocked by them but they excited my curiosity, they provided material for masturbation, which I had been indulging in for a few months. I also clearly felt the desire to go further, always searching for more intense images.
Growing up, I rooted my daily life in a virtual sexuality. But it wasnât easy. In the 1980s, internet and smartphones didnât exist. Pornography or erotic magazines werenât that easy to buy. And you had to hide them, to avoid being caught. Then I met my wife during my studies. I quickly saw that our relationship was going to be serious. Once weâd decided to commit to each other for life, we naturally felt the need to ask for the Sacrament of Marriage.
I didnât say anything to her about the addiction I was suffering from. I was ashamed about the whole situation. I didnât dare talk to her about it because I was afraid she was going to think I was a pervert. Also, I thought that with her touch I would change and I could be delivered from this dependence. But I carried on using pornography.
There was a duplicity in my sex life: on one side, I was a good man, serious and responsible, and on the other I was a person on a constant quest for new pictures to satisfy my senses. From the year 2000, the internet started appearing in peopleâs houses. This arrival unfortunately marked a new step in my mess. From that point on, I could access virtual sex at home. I didnât need to buy or hide magazines anymore. It accelerated my consummation and my addiction. I always needed more. And the final nail in the coffin was getting hold of my first smartphone: with that, I could take a window into this dark world with me, wherever I went. I didnât even need to get in front of my computer anymore. I felt like I was able to build a virtual world into which I would dive, without having to confront reality.
The more I used âhardcoreâ pictures, the more I felt unsatisfied. I always needed more. The more I sank into pornography, the more I felt sad and unhappy. The images I saw were imprinted on my memory and often disgusted me. I realised it was harming me and in turn I was hurting my wife. I also realised that the image I had of women in general had been perverted. But I had the impression I was the only one suffering such a slavery. The consequences were numerous: shame, tiredness, a spiral of increasingly obscene images, weight gain, stress, damaged libido, all disturbing my married life.
I knew I had to stop. I was conscious of the fact this situation couldnât go on. I envied everyone who had a normal life. I tried so many times to stop. But each attempt was a failure. I fell once again into this dark world. It was a nightmare for me to have been stuck in an addiction like this my whole life. The idea of growing old, still with this shortcoming, terrified me. This is why I wanted to close down this double life. And I still didnât dare talk about it with my wife, who didnât suspect a thing.
Even if I had faith, it didnât occur to me to call on the Lord for help. In my head, God only called good people to himself, those who are perfect, with no ugly baggage. I thought the evil of pornography was too bad for God to be interested in me.
In April 2013, my wife made me read an article on a novena âMary, undoer of knotsâ. At that time, we were facing serious professional concerns, and she suggested we offer this novena to Mary, for this intention. I accepted. Mary gave us so much more than what we asked for. A few days later, and without telling my wife, I decided to personally consecrate another novena to Mary, undoer of knots, for deliverance from my addiction. Internally, I called on Our Lady: âMary, if youâre able help us with our work problems, then please help me again, and free me from pornography.â
From only the second day of the novena, I felt a peace: I no longer experienced a need to look at pornography websites. I had been healed of my dependence and I thanked Our Lady for saving me through asking her Son to help me.
I kept this joy a secret in my heart, without talking to my wife. Something had changed, but she didnât know what it was all about. The vision I had of my wife and of women in general wasnât the same⊠A verse from the Gospel of Saint John resonated in my heart: âThe truth will set you freeâ. And I wished so much to rediscover this freedom in our couple.
Six months after being delivered from my addiction, I decided to speak to my wife. The revelation was a shock to her. She was hurt by it. She felt betrayed, retrospectively, and she was angry with me. Also, she blamed herself, for not having noticed anything and not having done anything to help me. She needed time to process it all. We offered it to the Lord in prayer. Being rooted in the Sacrament of Marriage enabled us to overcome this trial. Christ filled us with his peace. We often evoke the Gospel chosen for our wedding (Saint Matthew 7:24-27): âEveryone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rockâ.
We came through it, thanks to God. In fact, our relationship was strengthened by it. We gave testimony about what had happened to us. By being open to speaking about it, many people have since confided in us their past or present suffering, on the subject.
I also understood that the Lord came to save those who were lost, and my pride made me believe he couldnât save sinners, or those who are ill or crippled. âBut when he heard this, he said, âThose who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, âI desire mercy, not sacrifice.â For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.â (Gospel according to Saint Matthew 9:12-13)
So, what do you think about it? Do you want to try to pray to be delivered from this addiction? Come and talk to us via the live chatâ! (Free and anonymous listening service)
During adolescence, Joseph fell into addictions little by little, video games, pornography⊠later, after failing an important exam, he cried out to God: âIf you exist, show me youâre alive and that youâre at work!â.
To get over failing his exam, he spent some time apart, by himself. And at that point I thought to myself:
âJoseph, there are some things which arenât quite right in your life, youâre not happy, youâre as hard as stone, your heart is all dried up, you havenât found a reason for living, the flavour of lifeâ
And in that moment, I cried out from my heart and I said to God:
âIf you exist, you have to show me your presence in my life, you have to intervein and show me youâre alive, that youâre at work in the worldâ.
From that moment on, I started getting closer to God. One day, I went into a church, I had the desire in me to go to confession, I went to confession with a priest⊠For my penitence, the priest invited me to kneel before Jesus in the host exposed on the altar, and ask him to tell me how much he loves me. This moment was a huge turning point for me, I knelt down in front of the altar and I said to Jesus:
âHere I am Lord, if you want to show me your love, Iâm here, available for You.â
Right then, I felt all the intensity of Godâs love and mercy in my heart, I broke down, I burst into tears and since that moment, my life has never been the sameâŠ
And you, what do you think? Do you want to be an ex-porn addict too, delivered by Jesus from this addiction? 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:
Why I stopped watching porn… and how, in doing so, I stopped contributing to the ugly sex industry.
Speech given at a TED event in Jaffa by Ran Gavrieli, a speaker specializing in “safe sex” topics. Viewed over 21 million times on Youtube!
Beware, he does not go into detail and some of his words that depict what is done to women in porn movies can be shocking!
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I stopped watching porn for two reasons basically. The first one was that porn brought so much anger and violence into my private fantasies. And these were anger and violence that were not there originally to begin with. And I did not want it for me anymore. This was not me and, I decided to just put an end to it. Easier said than done â I got it later on.
Filmed prositution
The second reason was that I came to realize I think that only by watching porn I take part in creating a demand for filmed prostitution because thatâs what porn really is:filmed prostitution.
PornÄ stands for prostitute; graphia stands for documentation. And prostitution was nobodyâs childhood dream, it is always a result of trouble and distress.
Now, I became aware of that gradually, when I was volunteering with men and women in prostitution, some of them victims of human traffic, serving aid in brothels, under the bridge and street corners. But you donât really need to do all that in order to understand how this mechanism of porn and prostitution works.
Because porn is a genre â itâs not about erotica or healthy sexual communication. It is all about male domination of women, subordinance of women. Not only the sexual practice, but as a way of being, as a genderial hierarchy in this world.
If we would ask porn â if we were to ask porn, how does it define something as sexual? What qualifies, what defines something as sexual? Porn would laugh in our face. What defines sexual? Whatever men find arousing â men find it arousing to choke a woman â to have a brutal sex without one touch, hug, kiss, tender caress?
Well then it is sexual. It arouses men to see a woman or child cry? It is sexual. It arouses men to rape a woman; well, then it is sexual.
In every mainstream porn gallery on the web, we can find the rape category side by side with the humiliation category, abuse category, crime category and so on. And this is all as if this regular porn is not already filled with these motives. Even in its mildest version, the mildest version of porn, what porn is showing us like, I know, 80%, maybe 90% of the time is actually sex with no hands involved. This is not how we authentically desire.
Sorry, Iâll repeat that, I see your look. Sex with no hands involved. Okay.
If you and I are not going to give up watching porn, the next thing you do watch just you just notice that porn cameras have no interest in capturing any normal sensual activities such as petting, caressing, making out, touching, hugging, kissing. No.
What porn cameras are into is the penetration. So normally the composition will be a man and a woman, hopefully just one, okay. So, one man and one woman. His penis is inside her. Donât be picky. It doesnât matter where inside. Somewhere inside. His penis is somewhere inside her, okay? And in order not to block the camera for doing this extreme close up on the penetration, heâs standing with his hands behind his back most of the time.
And the woman is in this â uncomfortable position and she needs to handle the penis inside her without damaging the hair or make up or look down on her because thatâs money invested and time invested in her. Without disturbing his aggressive movement and mainly without blocking the cameras. So the result is that we got two people having sex different shapes and acrobatics or something. But theyâre having sex when the only body parts that actually touch each other are the penis and the part being penetrated. No hands involved.
Everything we look at invades us
Now I talked, I donât know, 250-300 times a year, soldiers, students, pupils. No one has ever come up to me and say, âRan, you know that part with sex with no hands thing that was my authentic desire, like when I was 11 or 12, I never wanted to kiss or touch anybody. I was not curious about that. It was all the penetration to begin with.â No one has ever said that â before porn. After porn…
In my private fantasies before watching porn, there was always a very strong narrative and the narrative was of sensuality and mutuality which means that I had always imagined what I would say to her? What would she possibly answer? What options do I have to respond?
In real life it never works like I planned, but it was super important in my mind in term of arousal, the build-up, the location, the setting, where will it be? What are the circumstances of me and her being all alone all of a sudden. How will this bodily inflaming between us will emerge step by step? It was super important. Before porn.
After making a habit out of porn, it conquers your mind and it invades your brain. And I lost my ability to imagine. Which means I found myself â and I wonât be too explicit, but trying to masturbate, just closing my eyes trying to fantasize desperately about something human and not making it because my head was bombarded with all of those images of women being violated and subordinated and forced into pretending they enjoyed diabolic sperm rituals.
So, this is pretty much the result. And we are all vulnerable to pornography. Itâs not just young people and we should be very careful, I think, with not only what we put into our bodies in terms of food and nutrition, but with the nutrition of our mind. Because everything we watch invades us.
Iâll give you a short example from non-sexual areas.
I came the other night, I came back home and my beloved one was watching some cultural junk. She was watching a karaoke show audition, the one with chairs spinning. We donât have a TV set back home, but only because it allows us to falsely present ourselves as deep and profound people. Iâve never heard of that.
Mastectomy who? Angelina? No, we donât have a TV. We watch every cultural junk possible, okay? Not me, not her, we donât contemplate about existence. We download stuff. And we download all cultural junk. So I am watching this 20 minutes karaoke show. And it was so boring and tedious. Two minutes talking, four minutes blabbering. I lost patience after 20 minutes and I went off to take a shower and the most interesting part was in the shower. Because what I found out there was myself in my most pathetic state ever. Iâm going to share it with you.
I want to feel that you accept and love me, so I have to share my most pathetic moment and you have to accept it now.
I donât know until I got over myself if it took me five, seven, ten minutes to realize that I am standing under the water in the shower pondering severely what wouldâve been my song for the auditions? Deep and profound, mind you. I wonât be doing this Rihanna or Lady Gagaâs. I will be doing Mercedes Sosaâs Como Un PĂĄjaro Libre. Iâll be doing a cover for Bob Dylanâs Blind Willie McTell. Ainât that deep and profound?
I had to realize that Iâm an idiot because I have no talent for music. More than that, I never wanted to be neither a musician nor a singer or songwriter. This was never a part of my inner world of wishes, okay? But Iâm a human being. What can I do? I was watching that for 20 minutes. It entered my brain for a while.
So if we take this example and we just try to measure or estimate the impact of 20 minutes of watching no matter what, how it invades our mind and conquers our wantings and desires.
Letâs just try to imagine or I can share it with you orally â what is the impact of 20 minutes of watching porn once or twice a week, nothing unmoderated? Itâs overtaking. And porn is in our household, whether we want it or not and I believe that it does not agree with our well-being. Because we have internet in the western world all over the place almost in every cellular phone now, weâve got 90% of 12 year-olds watching porn on a regular basis. And it has both an addictive effect and a paralyzing effect.
Itâs addictive, because it develops somewhat of a dependency on porn. And paralyzing part is because, mainly for young boys and men, porn is teaching us that as a man you are solely valued in sex by having a large penis and an eternal erection. According to porn, being a valuable sexual partner does not relate with being sensual, passionate, attentive, generous, well-coordinated. None of the above. It is all about large penis and eternal sunshine, which we donât possess.
So boys become paralyzed. And if they donât become paralyzed by watching porn, very often they turn into imitators of what they saw, which then means they become aggressors. Aggressors, even when emotion is involved. There is so much sexual abuse going on nowadays within the confines of what we perceive from the outside as beautiful teenage love stories, or healthy adult relationships. Because we donât really talk about sex, we just see it all over the place, we donât really talk about it.
So, what goes on in the confines of a certain room but these are all sexual mutations that happen.
If we talk about women, itâs not only that, but young girls and women get the message not only from hardcore porn but from a porn influenced main stream culture. Have you seen any Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga video clips or commercials? Thatâs porn with clothes on. So girls get this notion that if you want to be worthy of love, first and foremost you have to be worthy of sexual desire.
And now, the definition of sexual desire almost equals: be like a porn star. So I work in dozens and dozens of high schools and junior highs. In every single one of these schools I find girls that at a certain point agreed to be documented in an intimate situation because they wanted to please some guy that they had feelings for. And this guy misappropriated their trust. Always the same story. So he sells it on WhatsApp application or on the web, on the internet.
And normally nobody even addresses him in terms of moral. But it is always girls that suffer from shaming and mortification. They can change the school, they drop out normally. Change city, move to another city and still be haunted on social networks. They develop clinical depressions, severe eating disorders, as if we donât have enough reasons in our culture to develop eating disorders.
They become so isolated socially. So some of them â like Amanda Todd, rest in peace â some of them actually commit suicide. Because they find no more value in life or in themselves.
So, porn is not only in our house. It is a capital case. It is not a minor phenomenon in our society. It is a question of life and death sometimes. It is mainly a question of life and death for the people who participate in porn, because porn is not an embodiment of freedom of speech, freedom of occupation, blah-blah. No. Itâs an embodiment of sex-exploitation, working side-by-side with human traffic, raping, pimping, solicitation.
For every one porn star with a book contract or a production company, weâve got hundreds of thousands of women and girls who do not survive out there. Literally, they just donât make it. The sex industry just chews them up and spits them back into brothels, into hooking in the street, escorting, massage parlors with happy or unhappy ending depends who you ask. And I am not joking. This is the whole spectrum of prostitution.
So many of them do not even make it to the age of 50. I am talking about countries that the life expectancy is at 75, 76 years now. They donât make it to the age of 50. Four reasons mainly: Drugs, STD â Sexually Transmitted Diseases, being murdered by a john, a pimp, a boyfriend and the fourth reason is suicide once again.
Because if you are a prostitute, on camera or off camera, you are in the situation that we can refer to as social death. We have all sat on the dinner table with people who probably consumed prostitution that have been to a brothel once, twice at least. We never sit down to the table with a prostitute. Not with a declared one. So thatâs social death. It is not glamorous. Not at all.
And when I sit in the privacy of my room and watch porn, even without paying â No need to pay, itâs free. I hope you know that, if youâre still consuming. Whatever I am watching is creating a demand. And wherever there is a demand, there will be a supply. There is a correlation.
If I watch pornography of black, older women, somebody is going to go out and pimp black older women. Asian minors? Somebody is already trafficking Asian minors in order to film them. Israeli women, Palestinian women WASP, all American college girls. Itâs a strong in the last few years, itâs a very upcoming category.
The scum of the Earth are already out there trying to solicit and prostitute these women on camera.
So, I stopped watching porn for my personal well-being, my intimate communication, my private erotic life, reclaiming control and responsibility over my mind.
But by doing that, I actually stopped contributing to this horrible sex industry. Thatâs a good thing to do, I believe. And I would really like to propose that notion of physically and emotionally-safe sex, emotionally-safe sex. It does not mean going back to be conservative or unliberated sexually. I am all for sexual freedom. It just means that we need to put genderial hierarchy aside, subordinance aside. And bring back in, letâs just say, laughter as a critical method for intimacy.
Two souls, two humans, two souls alone in private, can they please have a laugh together? Whether they know each other for a decade or for an hour. If two souls alone in a room do not manage to have a laugh together, what good could possibly grow there? Sexual and non-sexual. Thatâs emotionally safe sex.
Iâve got so many things I want to share with you but I feel like my time is almost up.
So I just really want to ask for us to speak about these issues more because I strongly feel that our history of silence never did us any good, because silence only perpetuates more silence, when talking normally gives birth to more talking, more sharing, more identification, more awareness, more change. A small change, we have a small humble life. But a real change, a true one, emotionally safer.
Thank you for listening.
So, what do you think? Come and talk to us via the live chatâ! (Free and anonymous listening service)
The testimony of Pierre, former pornography addict
“And us sinners, we put our hope in your inexhaustible mercy.â
For me, this phrase illustrates the face of hope which is an attitude of trust in God, an attitude of trust in the mercy of God, a God who is love, tenderness and compassion. He didnât come to call the just, but the sinners. For me, hope, is not leaning only on our own strength but counting on the mercy of God, to move forward, walking in his footsteps.
When sometimes we get frustrated, falling at the same sins, seeing our capacity to love is so small, we must entrust ourselves to Godâs mercy, because I believe thatâs what heâs waiting for us to do. That we might entrust ourselves to him, that we might ask his help to grow in love.
For me, hope is to walk the path, not just relying on our own strength but putting our hope in Godâs mercy.
Sharing my experience with you, I give you my testimony:
I was in high school, I was a pornography addict and little by little, when I realised that everything I saw, the things I was watching, werenât good for my heart, for my vision of things, or for my relationship with others, I wanted to stop. But in fact, I began to realise I was deeply anchored into an addiction and I wouldnât be able to stop using only my own strength. One day, I decided to go to confession, to give everything to the Lord and that day, I truly experienced Godâs mercy in my life.
I experienced this God who didnât judge but rejoiced to see his son asking for help. That day, I really experienced a freedom and a deep joy. It wasnât magic because things were deeply rooted in me and by the end of one month I had fallen again. But I had this experience of mercy and I chose to put my hope in this mercy. I chose to come back and go to confession again, to entrust myself to the Lord and rely even more heavily on his Love. As time went by, every time I presented myself to God, he came and broke more of my chains until one day they fell off completely.
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:
