Understanding Porn AddictionSample

How It Begins: Abuse and Neglect

There are two kinds of damaging sins that others can inflict on us when we’re young, impressionable, and vulnerable:

1. Sins of commission, also known as abuse.

2. Sins of omission, otherwise known as neglect.

We often hear about the abuse children suffer, but we seldom hear about neglect. Quiet, compliant children are often overlooked. Parents neglect to affirm, praise, or validate them.

Your husband may be a bit like that – the quiet type, unlikely to cause trouble, compliant with many of your wishes, except for his pornography problem. Your husband’s parents might not have been intentionally unkind, and you may be very kind and affirming as a wife. But the emotional neglect your husband perceived in his childhood set the conditions for pornography to feel affirming and exhilarating and to offer him what seems like a helpful escape into a positive world.

Unfortunately, unless abuse and neglect are discovered and their victims experience healing and restoration, the impact of these damaging sins can linger well into adulthood. Abuse and neglect can be divided into five categories: physical, sexual, emotional, verbal, and spiritual. At this point, we’ve been talking only about men, but both men and women may have been subjected to abuse or neglect as children. You or your husband might have endured one or more of the following kinds of abuse or neglect:

· Physical: Hits, slaps, mistreatment, unmet basic needs, touch deprivation

· Sexual: Inappropriate touching, rape, incest, lack of godly sex education

· Emotional: Intimidation, mind control, manipulation, absence of love and bonding

· Verbal: Name-calling, criticisms, insults, lack of affirmation and validation

· Spiritual: Hellfire threats, religious manipulation, feeding toxic guilt/shame, withholding God’s grace and redemptive path

It’s important to understand that abuse and especially neglect can be extremely subtle in nature, almost to the point of escaping the victim’s conscious attention. Also, children who have been abused or neglected hardly ever blame the adults in their lives. They blame themselves. They grow up thinking, There must be something wrong with me.

Next, we’ll look at the accessibility of pornography.