The main points he makes to back up this statement are.

• It isn’t an illness, it’s a weakness – there is no evidence sex addiction is a valid psychiatric disorder.  It hasn’t been recognized as a bona fide disease by the mental health profession
• Sex addiction is wrongly applied the same characteristics of drug and alcohol addiction. He doesn’t believe there are any ill effects on the body, nor withdrawal symptoms.
• He doesn’t believe that men can get lost to the powers of internet porn.  He says that there is no evidence of harm it does or we would be awash in sex crimes and public sexual displays.  Since addicts can function at a high level there is no evidence of addiction.  Phil Varone of Skid Row never considered himself an addict to sex because he functioned so highly and it didn’t mess up his life.
• Sex addiction is a product of social and religious institutions that portray sexual desire as something destructive and weakening and men must rein it in.  These institutions have labeled sex as evil.  Sex is healthy and good for you; more sex equals healthier, happier people.
• People use the label of sex addiction to shirk responsibility for their actions.  The real reason is the bad choices they make.

Let’s deal with his statements one by one; you may be surprised at my point of view.

Dr Ley says that sex addiction isn’t an illness, it’s a weakness.  First off, I think it is funny that he keeps labeling this as sex addiction while stating there is no such thing.  He should come up with another term to label this weakness so that we won’t get his point of view confused.  On this point I have to agree with him.  Shocking as it may be I don’t think sex addiction is a disease.  Just like I don’t believe that drug and alcohol abuse are diseases.  In my very un-clinical mind a disease is an illness that you contract by either contact with another person or genetically.  You cannot catch alcoholism, drug abuse or sex addiction.  You are not born into them, nor do you have symptoms of them without bringing it on yourself.  I’m not sure where the disease label originated from, but I disagree with it.  You can have the tendency to like alcohol or pornography and drugs, but diving into these doesn’t happen without you first giving into the temptation after making some poor decisions.  We are not robotic in this sense.

Next he goes on to say that sex addiction is wrongly applied the same characteristics as drug and alcohol abuse, mainly because there are no ill effects on the body or withdrawal symptoms.  On this statement I have to disagree.  Too much sex or pornography does indeed have ill effects on the body.  I won’t give you all the details, but you can read my account on how pornography made me sick.  It wasn’t until I gave up porn that I began to recover from the mysterious illness that plagued me.  I’m not certain, but I believe it had something to do with the adrenal system.  How can he say for certain that too much sex is not bad for the body?  At what level is it considered too much?

To say there are no withdrawal symptoms with sex addiction is another unfounded statement.  There were many times that I decided to quit pornography and went through withdrawal.  It consumed me to the point I could not function.  There was no concentration or rest.  The urges would only go away after I would indulge in porn.  Don’t just take my word for it, read the testimonies of other sex/porn addicts.  Read Kastleman’s book on the brain science behind internet pornography use.

Dr Ley does not believe that men can get lost in the power of porn.  The quote by Skid Row’s drummer backs up his statement.  Do all addicts lose their functionality and mess up their lives…of course not.  Some are able to lead (on the outside) normal functioning lives.  They are able to compartmentalize their addiction from the rest of their lives.  Others are not so lucky and lose everything.  Dr Ley fails to realize the internal harm that wreaks havoc on the addict.  The guilt, shame and feelings of worthlessness as a result of the addiction may not always appear on the outside.  The truth is that porn is like the siren calling to you day and night to come in and visit her.  There is a pull that appeals to our sexual natures, our need for escape and the physical feeling of euphoria.  The call is there around every corner for the addict.

He also feels sex has been given a bad rap by social and religious organizations that have deemed sex to be destructive, weakening and evil.  These stigmas on sex then make those who have active sex drives to think something is wrong with them and they are addicts.  Lots of sex is good for you.  In this statement I think he has twisted the view by social and religious organizations.  Free sex and promiscuity are deemed destructive, sex without a boundary is destructive, not sex itself.  Sex within the boundary of a marriage is responsible and healthy.  Lots of sex within a marriage is very healthy.

The last point he makes seems to be the crux of his whole article.  Dr Ley feels that sex addicts use the label to escape responsibility for their actions when it is their choices that have gotten them into trouble.  I say right on!  People like to blame someone or something for their bad behavior.  Blaming sexual addiction and then checking into rehab somehow makes everyone feel OK about it, like it’s not their fault.  I say it is their fault and they are addicted.

I don’t believe being addicted to sex or porn and it being your own fault are exclusive of each other.  You are an addict and it is your fault!  This takes us back to the point where sex addiction is labeled as a disease.  A disease label seems to absolve the afflicted from responsibility.  I think this is the whole hang-up Dr Ley has with using the label Sex Addiction.  He firmly believes (as I do) that the person makes bad decisions and is fully responsible for their own actions.  They are not victims to a disease.  They are just people who succumb to a weakness or temptation that has taken them farther than they imagined they would go.

What do you think?  Please leave your comments below.

Other Posts you may find helpful:

The Signs of Pornography Addiction

Side Effects of Using Porn: Caution

Confessions of a Sex Addict

I want to share with you some of my most favorite videos of 2011.  These videos are well done and provide very useful information regarding pornography usage and addiction to pornography.  I think they are a fair representation of the anti pornography issues.

Becoming an anti-porn activist is a nicely done roundtable discussion that shows what you can do to oppose pornography in your world.  It features some guests that are already activists and they give you some great insight.  Check it out.

Becoming an Anti-Porn Activist from Covenant Eyes on Vimeo.

My next favorite video is a first hand testimony of a man named Jon.  Jon shares his first exposure to pornography, it’s effects that it had on his life, and how he quit using porn.  I could truly relate to much of what Jon relayed via this video.  Very Powerful.  Watch here.

This last video was produced by ex porn actress Shelly Lubben.  Her foundation, ThePinkCross.org helps porn actors and actresses get out of the business and heal the pain left behind.  As a recovering addict, I was shocked at the scenes here.  Watch here.

We tend to indulge in pornography for different reasons, but here are some of the most common:

• Opportunity – Most of us take time off around the holidays and this breaks our normal routines of sleeping and waking.  The opportunity presents itself for some late night or mid day sessions with the pornography.
• Need for escape – The holiday season is fast paced and fun-filled.  Sometimes we need to take a break from it all and escape into the fantasy world.
• Loneliness – For those who have no significant other or family to be with, the intimacy of pornography is what we turn to, to try and make us feel better.

The worst thing is that it doesn’t make us feel better and alleviate the pain or boredom; pornography only compounds our ill feelings and brings us down.  Instead of going on a pornography binge for the holidays, here are a few tips to help you not fall into that trap.

• Keep your normal schedule – Go to bed and wake up close to your regular schedule.  Don’t be seduced by late night movies or internet surfing, especially when everyone else has gone to bed.  Go to bed when the rest of the family does!
• Unplug from the holiday madness – Get away with your spouse for a quiet lunch.  Don’t go to every holiday party you are invited to, causing holiday burn out.  Go for a walk in the park and experience the chilly air, wildlife and solitude.  Go to church and connect with the true meaning of Christmas.
• Don’t spend the holidays alone – Invite friends or family over. Go volunteer somewhere such as a shelter, ring the Salvation Army bell, or at the local food bank.  Get out of the house and go to where people are and you can have human interaction.
• Make sure your internet is guarded by a good accountability software package.

May you have a blessed holiday season filled with true joy, peace and love.

My parents and I were concerned, did I have a disease?  I went to my internist until he exhausted his resources.  He sent me to cardiology, ENT and even infectious disease.  They all found nothing!

This illness was not in my head as a few people had suggested!  I just accepted the fact that I would be sick the rest of my life and there was nothing that could be done.  Boy was I really discouraged.

I only saw relief from my sickness when I quit using porn!  Looking back on the whole sickness period of my life, there was only one constant involved along the way and that was my using porn.

I have researched this to see if I could find any evidence that these two issues were related.  Here is what I have found out.

• Pornography usage is very similar to drug usage in that it causes ‘feel good’ substances to be released in your body.  This fact is one of the biggest reasons why people become addicted.
• Dopamine is one of those chemicals release in your body that is associated with pleasure.  These are release when doing drugs or pornography.
• Too much dopamine released into your body can cause a weakening of the immune system.
• Too much dopamine decreases the amount of serotonin in your body which is critical to sleep cycles.  Lack of sleep wreaks havoc on your immune system.
• A weakened immune system allows you to get sick.

I firmly believed that pornography almost killed me.  I was getting sicker and sicker and no one could diagnose me.

Now I only get sick whenever something is going around.

Life without porn is better!

Those things that I later found came in the form of a Jacques Cousteau book (sad to admit) and then a treasure trove of Playboy magazines in my basement.  At those times, I’m not sure what was more exciting, the pictures or the thrill of doing something wrong and trying not to get caught!

All the guilt eventually caught up with me and I asked my mom about the magazines and if Dad was still and ‘alright’ guy for having them.  Man, was I ever a hypocrite.  After a while, my Dad threw away his stash and guess who scooped up a bunch for his own collection…me of course!

I also remember buying single naked pictures from my friend for a buck a piece.  He would rip them out of his dad’s large collection and sell them to me and my friend.  I remember buying as many as he would sell.  He was very cautious and hesitant and eventually stopped selling them due to getting caught.

My own stash was stored in a few different places over the years.  I never put them under the mattress, that was such an amateur move!  At first, I would hide them under the carpet inside my closet.  It was perfect cause I would move stuff over top and no one would know.  I even cleared out half the closet so I could sit in there with my flashlight and look at my pictures. At other times I would hide my magazines in a bunch of auto show literature.

Those were the early days of my pornography addiction.  That first taste lit a desire within me that really took over me for about 20 years.  Why do I relay this story?  Well, a lot of it has to do with remembering this stuff today while I mowed the lawn.  The other reason is that I want to show you where I have been and to let you know that you are not much different than me.  Another thing – Do all you can to keep your kids away from pornography!  They eventually will come in contact with it, but make it much later in life after they learn about what real love is and how to treat a woman.

Please share your story with us… How did you get exposed to pornography?  What did that do to you?

We all leave the house and trudge through the outside world and bring dirt into the house.  The dirt clings to us and we have to take cautions if we don’t want it inside.  We can easily accomplish this if we wipe our shoes off and don’t wear them into the house.  What about the other dirt we can bring into the house?

The other dirt from the outside world is not of the organic type.  I am talking about the dirt of immortality, impurity, lust, and greed.  These things come into the house through various other sources.  We can unknowingly allow this dirt to enter our house through the radio, television, magazines and internet.  Our kids can bring it home from school or it can enter our homes from visitors.

While we can diligently fight the battle against organic dirt by using a vacuum or broom, but how can we fight against worldly dirt?  There are two ways to battle this, offensively and defensively.

To fight against worldliness offensively means to pour good values into your family.  Set standards for your family and teach your children right from wrong.  Teach children and actively practice yourself values such as modesty, generosity, thankfulness, being content, purity, and honesty.  Many of these values are found in the Bible and through a good Christian upbringing.  If you all are actively learning and practicing these values then it is easier not to get led astray by worldliness.

A good defense against worldliness is to protect your mind and heart from bad influences.  These influences are mentioned above and come mostly in the form of media.  The types of media we consume have a great effect on changing our morality and values.  The constant propaganda of the media can over time get us to buy into the world view.  Churches that once considered homosexuality an abomination are now ordaining homosexual ministers.  They were swayed by the changing morality of the world.

Defensive measures are monitoring the media you and your family read, watch and listen to.  You have to actively measure what you are consuming against your values to see if they fit.  If they don’t pass the test then get rid of them.  Rome didn’t crumble in a day; it took years to topple the empire.  Small compromises will also topple your family’s values and the end result is destruction.

Most everyone enjoys a clean house free from dirt and odor, but the dirt of worldliness is less noticeable and requires both offensive and defensive measures to keep your family safe.  Just like neglecting a little dirt here and there can lead to a filthy house, small compromises let the worldliness get a foothold that will eventually take over your household.  Stay clean.  Stay vigilant

He is wired to be visually oriented – Men are visual creatures.  We find what we like by site and feelings come later.  Women use their feelings to determine what they like then they translate that into physical attraction.  This being said, a man is usually always scanning females searching for something pleasant to the eye.  He gets great satisfaction just from observation because he is stimulated by sight.  Using pornography develops his visual appetite and makes it more satisfying and therefore he will keep going back for more.  Don’t neglect yourself physically and stop wearing nice clothes for him.  He will notice you more if you take time to get his attention.

He is hooked on the high he gets – Pornography has been documented to mimic the same effects on the brain as drugs do.  It releases all kinds of feel good chemicals that provide lots of pleasure for a while.  It is so easy to get hooked on pornography for this very reason.  Men like the view and the feeling it gives them.  You may be a good looking sexy woman, but your husband will go to pornography for the variety and to get his fix.  I’ve seen men with very attractive wives go back time and again to pornography.  This is very hard to comprehend for a feeling oriented woman.  Many women will blame themselves because they don’t look sexy as they used to, but the truth is, he is an addict and is acting out of addiction and not directly as a result of your physical beauty.

He is searching for an intimate connection – Even though men are visually oriented, deep down inside we are lonely and seeking an intimate connection.  If you and your husband have a rocky marriage, make love infrequently or don’t take time to go out on dates and connect with each other, he may be starving.  It’s hard to understand how a man can get intimacy from a video screen, but in his mind these girls are there for him and to please him.  They draw him into a false intimacy that he eats up if he doesn’t have an intimate connection with his wife.  It’s not just the sex he is looking for, it’s the feeling of being wanted, appreciated and being able to please someone else.  If you can provide those things for your husband he will rather spend time with you over them.

Wives, I write this from a man’s point of view to help you understand where we are coming from.  A man does not always look at pornography as a direct result of something you have done or not done.  Sometimes he does it because it is what he has done for a long time, but other times he does it because something is lacking or he is just plain stressed out with life. 

My best advice to you is to be sensitive to your husband’s needs.  Try to be understanding and let him get close to your physically and emotionally.  Also, make certain he knows you love him and don’t like the fact he is using pornography.  Try not to be confrontational but don’t let him off the hook if you know he is looking at pornography. 

Together you two can work through these issues and come out on the other side a stronger and closer couple.

The new top level domain .xxx was just recently approved and will be offered for sale soon.  Anyone wishing to purchase their website.xxx to mirror their website.com will be able to order. 

Will this new red light district on the internet help to regulate pornographic material?  Does this ‘legitimize’ pornography by giving it its own section of the internet?  Will it help families keep pornographic materials away from their children? 

I want to bring up the issue of legitimization of the pornographic industry.  They have been allowed to take over the normal .com world by putting up over 12% of content on the internet.  They were here at the advent of the internet to the point where some people think the porn industry created the internet.  Truth is that the internet is like the wild west and almost anything goes on it.  Does it legitimize them?  Maybe, but I think that giving them a .xxx is only the first step to regulating the industry on the internet.

Pornography industry leaders are not willing to be decent citizens and move their filthy material from their .coms over to the .xxxs, nor will they be required to do so.  These websites are fully entrenched with years of history, programming and search engine indexing behind them.  They have much invested and much to lose by ditching their dot coms.

The truth is that they like the easy access that dot coms have given them.  Type a wrongly spelled word into the search or just about any topic and your results will yield pornography.  Pornographers love the fact that they are easily found and can entrap anyone who takes the bait and enters into their dark world.  This would all change if they were forced to take their smut to the triple x domains. 

Search engines would be able to more easily restrict triple x domains from search results and internet searchers would know that any results that carry a .xxx are off limits.  This would be good news for families and anyone wanting to maintain their purity online. 

In my opinion the establishment of a triple x domain is a good first step, but it will be useless until pornographers are forced to migrate over to the new TLD.  Currently as it stands, the triple x domains will just be extra web addresses that forward people to their established dot com sites.  The internet will be just as perverse as it is today until the pornographic dot coms are shut down and moved.

Is anyone with me and ready to start a campaign forcing pornographers over to the triple x domains?  Leave your comments below.  Let’s organize and get started.  Who is with me??

Who is watching You?

  My family and I just came back from one of those indoor water park resorts.  We had a great time together and did plenty of swimming.

  These types of places are filled with people, pools and lifeguards. 
There are lifeguards everywhere you turn whether you go on a water slide or wade in the wave pool.  They do an excellent job of whistling people away from unacceptable behavior and unknown dangers.  Their job is to make sure you are safe and don’t do anything stupid to hurt yourself.

One thing I noticed with my kids is that they would look to the lifeguard every time the whistle blew.  A few times it was for them, like when they were doing handstands on the bottom of the pool.  Most of the time it was for someone else that was getting to close to the edge or to close to the buoys where the wave machine works.

The lifeguards were watching everyone swim and would not let you get away with breaking a pool rule.  My kids would do something and then look up to the lifeguard to see whether it was ok to do it.  Once they found out that handstands were not allowed they didn’t try to do them again.  They love handstands, but the lifeguards were always watching and they did not want to get busted.

When we are tempted to look at pornography, where is the lifeguard ready to blow the whistle on us?  Believe it or not, there are lifeguards to keep us from sinning.  One of them is called our conscience.  Right before you click on that button to look at pornography, your conscience tells you to stop. 

Another very similar lifeguard is the Holy Spirit which will do the same thing and urge you to run.  Hopefully you can still hear your conscience or the Holy Spirit as they blow the whistle and tell you to stop.  If you cannot hear them anymore, you have crushed these warnings long enough that you can’t hear them!  You are ignoring them and need to slow yourself down to recognize them again.  Remember that the eyes of The Lord are everywhere and while you think no one else can see you, He can!

Other lifeguards are the ones that we set up for ourselves.  Internet filtering programs such as Covenant Eyes or X3 watch will serve as a lifeguard when you get tempted.  There is also a program that will text your accountability partner when you start hitting websites that suggest you are ready to fail. 

Some other practical lifeguards are locking out certain cable channels, keeping your computer in a public place, not allowing or getting yourself out of perfect storm situations, and calling your accountability partner to share your temptations with them.

Don’t allow yourself to even come close to drowning in pornography.  You must heed the natural and supernatural lifeguards in your life.  Don’t forget to set up some other practical lifeguards in your life as well.  When you do these, it will be much harder to harm yourself and fall prey to the satan and his schemes.

The Perfect Storm

I write this tonight from a point of vulnerability.  This is a lesson we all can learn from. 

The title for this post is the perfect storm to be bad.  The perfect storm is that storm where all the conditions are just right to produce a real powerfull, destructive, wickedly dangerous storm.  When the perfect conditions come together like this, you better take shelter.  On the sea, you may not have a choice but to ride it out, but on dry land you have many options.  You can take shelter inland if a hurricane is coming.  You may run to the storm shelter if a tornado is on its way. 

The perfect storm I am talking about tonight is not of the natural disaster kind.  I am talking about the perfect storm to be bad.  When I say be bad, I am refering to the temptation of pornography.  Indulging in pornography is definately acting badly.

The perfect storm is the right combination of circumstances and opportunities that present themselves to the addict who has to make a decision.  That decision is whether to succomb to temptation or to run away and change the circumstances. 

Tonight I have the perfect storm here:

• A semi private computer
• My wife away for the night
• My kids in bed
• A little beer in my system

I so want to take a peak at some images or videos on yahoo search.  You know, just fringy things, no big deal right?  Wrong.  I need to change my circumstances and quickly.  I decided to write this post to express what I am going through and to show you how I am going to run from this. 

In a moment when I finish this post I am going to shut down and go to sleep.  I don’t need to be on the computer at 10:36 on a Friday night.  I will flip on the TV and veg out till I fall asleep.  I also will not have any more beer.  The beer is good, and I don’t drink a lot of it, but it dulls my inhabitions and conscience causing me to think things that I know I shouldn’t. 

So before I sign off and claim a victory over temptation, please tell me what are the conditions for your perfect storm?  What do you do about it?  Do you forsee the storm and immediately get out of the way?  Please share below.