Dear friends, as we discuss where porn/sex addictions begin and where they end, I wanted to share a recent conversation I had with a couple about their daughter’s pornography addiction. They were willing for me to share their story anonymously with you in the hopes that it would be able to help another family better protect their home and prevent their children from experiencing the same struggles their daughter has gone through.
Beth’s Story
Our daughter is now sixteen (where does the time go?!?!), and she is recovering from a cyber-sex and pornography addiction. Firstly, I have to say that it hadn’t really dawned on us that our little daughter could succumb to a sex-related addiction. Like so many, I think we assumed that pornography was a boy’s problem. We had a few conversations with our daughter about staying pure and protecting her body as she was growing up, but now, looking back, I realized we mostly left her to figure that stuff out on her own.
Our daughter was always pretty adept at using the computer—certainly more adept than her mother and I, but we didn’t necessarily think about how her time online might lead her to dangers. Some of her peers were really into online gaming, and she spent a lot of her time playing her friends. We let her use her gaming device in her room – I mean, she was playing games, right? What could be the danger?
Unfortunately, as we learned years later, gaming had been her entry point into pornography. Since the users can chat and connect with individuals all across the world, she had started to play with total strangers. The players all developed their own characters in one of the games that she played, and her character, like many, was pretty sexual in the way that it looked. The conversations that she had with these other players were also pretty sexual in nature. As she explained, it didn’t start that way, but as her friends’ friends started playing her, and as their friends started playing—suddenly, she was connecting with all of these people with whom she had no real connection. And these people would flirt with her and compliment her and her game avatar, and she liked it. She started to arrange time to connect with the people that she was playing with online in other venues—on social networks, in other chat venues, etc., and the conversations became more and more intimate, and eventually she had developed a relationship with one of the people she had met online.
They started exchanging sexual pictures, and this individual also introduced her to pornography and asked our daughter to do some of the things that were in the porn videos he sent to her. Later, he introduced her to a site that allowed her to connect with others sexually—like an online sex chat room. Somehow, she had allowed herself to believe that she needed to do these things to keep the attention of this man she had started a relationship with, and she also started to seek that sexual attention of many others online.
Since we discovered our daughter’s struggles, we sought out counseling for our family. I learned the hard way that we should have been engaging much more regularly with our daughter about her identity in Christ and her sexual purity. We also realized that we should have been using parental controls—on our daughter’s computer, her cell phone and her gaming device—everything! And we also should not have allowed her to take her Internet-connected devices in her room. We really left her alone, and we feel as though we failed as parents—I hope, through sharing this story, you will do better than we did!