How Past Hurts Fuel Porn Use & Where To Find Hope

A pastor once said that only 5% of what a person is dealing with is in relation to the present. When dealing with porn or sexual addiction, this is crucial to understand.

If this is on your church's radar, start a Conquer Group at your church is worth a look.

The experiences you’ve had in life often form the present beliefs that you are operating out of. You may have had wonderful, godly parents, but that doesn’t necessarily make you immune to the dark cloud of negative thoughts.

Even great parents are not perfect. In the mind of a child, even those small shortcomings can be significant. Add to that peers, siblings, extended family, or significant others, and they all play a role in triggering feelings of worthlessness, rejection, and low self-esteem.

Maybe someone told you, “You’re worthless,” “You will not amount to anything,” or “I wish you were never born.” Those hurtful words form scars that create low self-esteem. Or maybe you had a void in your life that was the result of a parent’s busyness, absence, or even death. Subconsciously, the enemy has used these things to tell you that you have little or no value.

Battle the enemy by being in God’s Word and finding strength in prayer!

Those scars are deep and have helped create the shame and low self-worth that you try to self-medicate with porn. Because of your struggle with porn, you are filled with an even higher level of shame. It fuels an on-going cycle of destruction. And now you realize that your porn usage is not only negatively impacting your life, but is causing harm to your family, and your relationship with God.

As a result, you may have decided that you are not worthy of anybody’s respect, love, or help. But that could not be farther from the truth.

You Are Not Worthless

The intense shame you feel because of your porn usage causes you to withdraw into your fictional world of pornography. In your isolation there, you don’t have to worry about the people in those images judging you or rejecting you like you think real people will.

Related Article: How Toxic Shame Keeps You Trapped In The Destructive Cycle of Porn

Dr. Doug Weiss, a licensed psychologist and the founder of Heart to Heart Counseling Center, explained that many men in sexual sin feel that they don’t deserve to be loved by God or their wife. They think “I’m bad. If you really knew me, you wouldn’t love me.”

Dr. Weiss said,

“A lot of men believe that because the shame of sexual sin has gotten into their heart and infected it, and it no longer says, ‘I did bad,’ it now says ‘I am bad.’ When you believe you are bad, you’ll push love away, you’ll push help away, you won’t feel worthy of the blessings of God, and then you’ll act like you’re worthless.”

Related Article: Breaking Free From Porn By Understanding Your Past

Unforgivable

You realize that viewing pornography is a sin because of the lust, adultery, and other improper sexual thoughts and actions involved. But porn usage is not an ‘unforgivable’ sin, and it is not an ‘unconquerable’ sin.

According to author Carl Thomas,

“The problem is that we have been lied to and told that sexual sin is especially heinous and needs to be covered up. However, the truth is that sin loses its power when we expose it.”

He added, “Jesus did not die so we all can live in our own little prisons of brokenness and isolation. When he took on your sin he also took all the shame that comes with it.”

Romans 3:23 reminds us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” You may struggle with porn, but everyone has sinned. And thanks to God’s eternal and amazing love for us and Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection, we can have complete forgiveness of every one of our sins – past, present, and future.

Even A King Can Commit Sexual Sin

Of course, sexual sin did not come into existence when internet porn started. In fact, the Bible has many stories that describe a wide assortment of sexual sin. They may not have had the internet back then, but Satan has been using sex to destroy lives and damage people’s relationships with God for centuries.