Reddit reviews Breaking Free: Understanding Sexual Addiction the Healing Power of Jesus

Hey man love the quote and i've been meaning to get my hands on the book! If you are interested, another book that goes into depth even more than that one (just guessing here) is Breaking Free: Understanding Sexual Addiction & the Healing Power of Jesus. I would highly recommend it. SOOOO accurate with all of it's insights! you'll be incredibly surprised how great it is! I mentioned it and my accountability group in this post. hope this helps! good luck brother!

Imagine sexual desire as a drop of water.

Now picture desire for friendship as another drop of water.

Now picture, as water-drops, these other desires:

• acceptance
  
  
• (escaping) shame
  
  
• distraction
  
  
• empowerment
  
  
• freedom
  
  
• unmet childhood developmental needs
  
  
• competence/adequacy
  
  
• safety
  
  Etc, etc, etc.
  
  Got all those water drops pictured? Good.
  
  Now bring them close together. What happens? POP! They all join together. THAT megadrop is sexual addiction.
  
  ---
  
  To "weaken" overactive, addiction-level sexual desires, we have to explore/learn what all those other "unmet desires" are, differentiate between them, and being addressing/meeting those other desires individually.
  
  This is like "unbraiding" a giant rope, then snapping the little strands one by one. Or, like tearing a whole phone book in half...by separating it into individual pages and tearing those up.
  
  (Likely, your tears from the song you linked indicate one or more of those unmet longings in your soul. Those longings need to be identified and addressed.)
  
  ---
  
  Getting married will absolutely not cause this problem to stop, because marriage does not magically address/fix/resolve/heal all those other heart-wounds and cravings.
  
  I recommend groups like Celebrate Recovery or Sex Addicts Anonymous, as well as books like Breaking Free.

I've often had the same problem. It's demoralizing to be stuck in the cycle and, when I am, I hide from God. What I've learned is that 1) I need to cut off all my access to porn entirely, and that often means making annoying and/or difficult choices, 2) I need accountability from trusted friends, and 3) I need to continually check my attitude on why it's a positive thing to want to do things God's way.

Regarding filtering, it may mean cutting off access to Reddit, or Facebook, or YouTube, or all of the above. It may mean locking Google Safe Search and blocking access to other search engines. Obviously it means blocking access to all porn sites and deleting your "porn stash" if you have one. For filtering, I recommend OpenDNS.

For accountability, having a small group of men you know from church with whom you regularly meet, pray, study the Bible, and keep up-to-date with each other's lives, is essential. I've been a member of three or so such groups, and with the last one I decided to cut the bullshit and dive right into sharing my sexual struggles even though I barely knew half the guys there. That encouraged the others to open up as well, and we've now been meeting a little over a year and feel we know each other quite well. I also have Covenant Eyes, which sends weekly reports of my web browsing history to accountability partners I choose. The drawbacks are that it costs money and slows down your computer. I've found it is well worth the cash, though I do at times get really frustrated with how much it bogs down my already slow machine. They also offer filtering, which I use in addition to Open DNS's filtering.

The attitude check may be the hardest part. Just under a year ago, I was in a sexual relationship with my (now ex-) girlfriend, and decided to make a list of verses for the two of us to read daily for a couple weeks in order to detox. Those verses are Isaiah 53:4-5, Romans 5:20-6:14, 1 Peter 4:1-4, 1 Thessalonians 4:3-8, Hebrews 13:4, and 1 Corinthians 6:18-20. The first couple passages don't deal directly with sex, but taken together I think they help to bring a discussion of sexual sin into the wider context of sin and redemption.

I also highly recommend the book Breaking Free by Russell Willingham.