A few weeks ago, I asked a Christian brother to pray for me. For years, I’ve struggled with an addiction to porn, and while I haven’t watched porn in a year or so, the desire has been a consistent drumbeat that steals my attention away from things I actually care about. That night, I felt as though I was being prompted by God to do something about it.
My friend prayed for me, and over the next few days I noticed something remarkable.
It wasn’t that the desire for porn decreased in any way, shape, or form. But suddenly I was aware of the desire underneath the desire.
My desire for porn stems from a yearning to be pretty much anybody else. I used to pass random people on the street and wish that we could trade lives. I still feel envious of lots of people.
This desire to be someone else is strange, because the truth is that I have an amazing life. I have a beautiful and wonderful wife. I have amazing friends and family. I have my dream career and an ever-deepening relationship with the divine.
What I seem to mean when I say that I want to be someone else is not that I want a different present; it’s that I want to have had a different childhood. Mine was chaotic and unstable and marked by abuse. I yearn to have had something more stable, more secure. When I look at strangers and feel envy, it’s not that I want to trade our present circumstances; it’s more like, I wish that I could trade pasts and memories with them.
For years, I felt a desire to watch porn because the pain of being me felt both inchoate (why, exactly, did I want to be someone else?) and also too great to bear. And so I hid out. Porn was a numbing agent.
But after my friend’s prayer, I felt as though I had a new clarity on what exactly I was so unhappy about. With that clarify came the strength to face it.
And so I faced down my grief over my childhood.
This was not easy. The truth is that there are many things that we can change, but the past is not one of them. And rather than hiding out or wishing that I had a different childhood, I felt as though God was inviting me to face my grief over how I grew up head-on.
I spent a lot of time crying on walks, mourning a reality that was never going to change. Some days it felt like I was drowning in an ocean, the grief so enormous that I couldn’t see a shore. I was barely conscious of the presence of God. It was like the ocean swallowed up all of my attention, leaving relatively little for work or for relationships or for my walk with the divine.
But as I swam in that grief, I began to notice three things.
First, I no longer had much of a desire for porn. I was now conscious, on a bone-deep level, of what I actually wanted, and as a result I could no longer hide from the fact that porn would be no help to me. I could have watched porn every day for a decade and my childhood pain wouldn’t have budged one iota.
Second, the grief started to shift. It started to shrink. And as it diminished, the desire for porn did as well.
Third, even though God often felt distant, I felt as though I was somehow on the right spiritual path. As though what I was doing was growing me closer to Him in the long run. I think part of the beauty of the book of Lamentations is that it reminds us that there can be something holy about grief. So often, our culture encourages us to numbness in the face of pain. In the short-run, numbness can feel preferable, but when I found the strength to lean into my pain, I found healing.
I don’t know if the desire for porn is gone for good or if it will at some point come back. What I do know is that I have discovered something that many people have discovered before me: there is something cleaning and powerful about letting ourselves grieve.
P.S. the title is a homage to C.S. Lewis, excellent A Grief Observed, which I inhaled during this season and which seemed to give me permission and space to feel my own grief. Since I’m no Lewis, a self-deprecating spin on his title seemed appropriate.
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