Surviving Your Husband’s Porn Addiction

YOUR
HUSBAND’S ADDICTION TO pornography has just been discovered. The
aftermath of this betrayal leaves every precious memory grimy and
tainted. You muse back on your wedding night. Was he thinking of some
porn star as he touched you? When you were working to conceive a baby
together by night, what had he been conceiving with his computer monitor
by day?

Your dreams are
shattered. You despise him for how his sexual addiction makes you see
him, and you’re panicked by how it makes you see yourself.

You’re
tempted to think, I knew he never had eyes only for me, but I never
dreamed it could go this far. I feel so ugly now. And when he isn’t
quick to repent, who can blame you when you icily sneer, “Just get lost
with that cuddly computer of yours and have fun.”

Head
spinning, heart breaking, you cry in desperate prayer: “Can I ever
trust my husband again? My whole marriage is a mirage! Where are You,
Lord?”

God is right beside
you. Sure, it may appear that He has taken His hand off of your
marriage, but your husband’s sin has been in God’s sights for some
time—a sin that has been washing out your spiritual protection and
threatening to flood your children’s lives with generational sin—in
spite of how well your husband’s been hiding the evidence. But now God’s
blown your husband’s cover, a sure sign of God’s active role in your
marriage.

God wants you to
take an active role, too, and the first step in rebuilding trust with
your husband is to trust God enough to find His heart for your husband
in this mess. God wants restoration.

GOD’S HEART FOR MEN WHO STRUGGLE
Recently,
my husband Fred and I knelt in intercession as he prepared to challenge
a large group of pastors to deeper sexual purity. Without warning, Fred
suddenly broke into deep sobs. Moments later, he walked out and spoke
with a grace and power I had never seen in him before.

Later,
he recounted, “I wasn’t sure I had the right attitude, so I prayed,
‘Lord, I want Your heart as I speak to these men today. As many as half
of these guys have been checking out the porn, and You know how that
frustrates me to no end. But Lord, I don’t want to speak out of my
feelings. Can You let me feel Your feelings toward them today?’

“Instantly,
the Lord laid His emotions inside my chest. I burst into tears, and
felt as though my heart would explode. Then, about three minutes later,
it stopped as quickly as it began. Quietly, the Lord whispered, ‘There.
Now you know how I ache for My cherished pastors, in spite of their sin.
Speak to them from that aching place in My heart.'”

God
wants you to minister to your husband in that same grace and power, and
He can give you His heart for your husband as easily as He gave Fred
His heart for the pastors. God wants His heart reigning inside of you,
enabling you to see beyond your husband’s sin and into the brokenness
behind it all.

I speak from
personal experience. Even when Fred’s temper and sexual sin were ripping
up our home, I could see value in him beyond his sin. He had put me
first in so many ways in our relationship and it made me willing to want
to go an extra mile for him.

I
could also see the dysfunctional pain and confusion still trailing him
from his broken childhood home. I saw that he had never had one
completely faithful person in his entire life. I decided to become that
first person.

There was
another reason I chose restoration over divorce. God loves restoration
for the same reason He hates divorce: the children. He knows how hard it
is to raise godly children in the wake of divorce, and He knows that
the message of salvation passes down to them most easily when the
parents are one.

Speaking of
husbands and wives through His prophet Malachi, God says: “Has not the
Lord made them one? In flesh and spirit they’re His. And why one?
Because He was seeking godly offspring. So guard yourself in your
spirit, and do not break faith with the wife of your youth. ‘I hate
divorce,’ says the Lord God” (Mal. 2:15-16, NIV).

In
light of all this, I knew I had no right to think of myself first in
our marital troubles. I had to think of the kids before I thought of
myself and, so, I had to see Fred and the marriage before myself, too.
The same is true for you.

Granted,
your marriage may now be in shambles, and what lies ahead might even be
worse. But God’s call on your life still remains—to build a marriage
that pictures Christ’s relationship to the church.

IS DIVORCE EVER AN OPTION? Obviously, some men will never soften. When is the damage from his sexual sin irreparable? Is divorce ever an option?

Sure
it is. Adultery always makes divorce an option, and if your husband
will not repent and refuses to turn from an ongoing, regular porn habit,
he is an adulterer.

But if
you want a magical line between “reparable damage” and “irreparable
damage” to trigger divorce proceedings for you, forget it. There is no
line of irreparable damage in the distance somewhere; it lurks right at
your door from the moment he refuses to repent. There is nowhere to
hide.

Staying married surely
isn’t safe. His sexual sin poses huge spiritual danger to the whole
family, and compromises his spiritual protection over you. I was chased
regularly in nightmares by Satan until Fred turned from his sexual sin. I
haven’t had such a nightmare since.

There
is also the generational sin we spoke of, as well as the ongoing danger
that your sons and daughters will stumble upon his magazines, tapes and
Web sites—the most common way young men fall into sexual bondage. Worst
of all, your husband will not be the example your son needs to teach
him that his Christian walk includes sexual purity. Cascading stages of
irreparable damage begin to flow from the moment your husband refuses
repentance.

Then why not
divorce? Because divorce brings destructive cascades of its own.
Statistics show that young men often turn to pornography in the wake of
divorce to salve their emotional pain and to begin to explore their
masculinity.

Furthermore,
sexual addiction counselors find that divorce is no effective answer.
Patrick Middleton, one such counselor in the Phoenix area, told me that
he has seen very little evidence that divorce leads to consistently
healthy results in families shattered by porn.

So
whether you stay or go, his sexual sin will wreak its havoc and there
are no easy options. But if you do choose to stay, it is time to take an
active role in the battle, doing all you can to release the law of
reaping and sowing into your husband’s life.

Perhaps
your husband has paid little price for his sin in the past. Those days
must end, so that he might come to his senses in the midst of the mess
he has made.

A HELPMATE IS AN ACTIVE ROLE
As
wives, God has given us two roles to play in marriage. One role relates
to submission, and the other involves our responsibility to be our
husband’s helpmate. The trouble is that we too often play the wrong role
in the face of sexual sin, submitting quietly in the messy tide of
events, alternating between wringing our hands in worry and folding our
hands to pray while we wait for our husbands to turn.

This
is time to play the other role. You were created to help your husband
from the beginning: “‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will
make a helper suitable for him'” (Gen. 2:18).

The
word helper comes from a Hebrew word in Genesis, which means “a help as
his counterpart.” So what does a helper do? Fred likes to explain it
this way: As a helper, a wife’s role is to help lift her husband—boost
him, prod him, encourage him—to Christian greatness, or maturity in
Christ.

What is the most
effective way to help your husband? First, take steps toward your own
healing. Then, confront your husband, telling him what a Christian wife
expects of a mature, Christian husband in marriage and holding him
accountable to become that very man. Then put these four key actions in
motion:

1. Learn about the differences.
When a sexually addicted husband is unrepentant, a wife begins to heal
by learning the sexual differences between men and women. The real root
of his sexual sin lies elsewhere. Once you understand that his problem
is not about you, your beauty or sexiness, you can quickly recover your
sense of worth and focus on restoration.

2. Develop spiritual disciplines.
Prayer and Bible reading will allow the Lord to speak to your heart and
keep a steady walk with Him. If you are to heal, you need a stronger
prayer life than ever before.

You
also need to develop a few close female relationships for support,
insights and sharing your pain. Avoid male relationships like the
plague…hold yourself emotionally separate from any other men and avoid
discussing your dreams and desires with other men. Secular TV, movies
and books can feed the discontent that you have in your life, so avoid
them.

Also, do not
overcommit your time. You have already been called to an important
ministry in God—restoring your husband and marriage. Give it the time
and energy that any great call deserves.

You
do not need to add other ministries or time stresses to your life. Keep
things pared down enough so that no matter what you are doing (raising
kids, working at an outside job, volunteering) you still have the time
and focus for the restoration process at home.

3. Reject hyper-vigilance.
Perhaps a fear-motivated question is plaguing you: But what if he does
it again? Reject fear. You naturally desire the safety that control can
bring, but a hyper-vigilant focus upon his every move cannot deliver the
safety you crave.

What you
really need if you are to feel safe is a sense of your own self, your
value in God, and the development of your own skills to communicate your
pain and to set and enforce boundaries. Settle for nothing less than
God’s picture of marriage.

4. Set boundaries.
Refuse to be muzzled verbally. Your husband needs your complete honesty
so that he can feel the full extent of the damage he is causing.

Insist
that he bring his “church image” in line with the truth—that his sin is
damaging his ministry in the spiritual realm. If he is on the church
board, then he must step down. If he is on the worship team or missions
board, then he must step down.

Clearly define what trustworthy means to you. If you need him to read a book and he won’t, that will set back your trust.

If
you need him to find an accountability partner and he doesn’t, that
will set back your trust, too. If you need him to go to a counselor with
you and he won’t, ramifications follow.

Explain
to him that his patience with your healing process is a sign of a deep,
genuine repentance in him and clear recognition that he understands
what he has done to your relationship. That will grow trust every time.

Although
God loves mercy, He never taught that we are to turn our cheek to any
and every behavior in marriage. As a wife making your difficult decision
on whether to stay or go, you must base all your decisions up His full
Word.

Only then will your
faith stand through to the end, no matter what your husband does, and
only then will you feel free to take any appropriate actions.

Brenda Stoeker is a registered nurse and co-author, along with her husband, Fred, Stephen Arterburn and Mike Yorkey of Every Heart Restored (WaterBrook Press). Fred Stoeker assisted in the writing of this article.