I love movies.  I love getting the scoop on upcoming movies.  That has led to reading entertainment and movie magazines and adding movie blogs to my blog reader. 

I have found movie trailers and even reading information about upcoming movies to be rather trigger.  Movie companies push the buttons we like.  For the teen and young adults it’s the action scenes, fast clips, and amazing CGI monsters.  For women it’s the romantic story, the hunky guy, and the story of love lost and love found again.  For college-aged kids they show parties out of control, sexual adventures, or the forever popular “guy or gal who has to lose their virginity before leaving high school” 

For those of us with a sexual appetite, trailers always seem to have the hot girl or guy and the glimpse of a sex scene.  My buttons are the sexy clips and the teasing of a sexual or romantic story. 

RED-BAND TRAILERS
Have you heard of these yet?  Redband trailers are “R-rated” trailers that could include heavy language, violence, gore, or sexier scenes.  Redbands are popular and accessible.  It’s another marketing technique that plays on our desire to explore the “forbidden”.  The trailers themselves can be trigger, but the idea of watching a video that’s too rough for the TV or movie theater is also triggery. 

SOME SIMPLE STRATEGIES
If trailers are triggery for you too, let’s strengthen our purity strategy around them.  Here are some tips:

  1. Don’t watch movie trailers or sneak peek scenes online.
  2. Stay away from redband trailers.
  3. Talk about this trigger to your accountability partner or spouse.
  4. Stick with safer movie sites like PluggedIn.com and CommonSenseMedia.org to research movies.

For the movie theater

  1. Come 10 minutes late to the movie or get your seats and step out for the trailers.
  2. Focus on the seat in front of your or the corner of the screen if a trigger scene comes on.
  3. Stop going to R-rated movies, which have the strongest trailers.

Struggles with movie trailers may not the same as porn and masturbation struggles, but they are all part of our purity strategy.  We are working toward “no hint of sexual immorality” (Eph. 5:3) and to develop pure minds (Phil. 4:8). 

Jeff Fisher is a blogger and podcaster living in Raleigh, North Carolina.  He and his wife run www.porntopurity.com.  Jeff’s podcast Top Tips For Sexual Purity Podcast (I-Tunes) is one of the more popular podcasts on sexual addiction recovery. 

You can reach Jeff at [email protected]