GUEST POST: Traumatization – Confessing My 30-year Porn Addiction To My Wife by Hugh Houston

Note from Josh: While I’m ending the year finishing projects, starting new ones and trying to take a little down time, one of my favorite porn addiction bloggers, Hugh Houston, has agreed to share some of his late-2020 entries here. I’ll be sharing several over the next few days. You can follow Hugh’s blog HERE and pick up a copy of his terrific book, Jesus is Better than Porn through Amazon.

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By Hugh Houston

One day I read this quote:

“For a porn addict to change, he has to look in the eye of someone he has disappointed.”

I had been working on my recovery for well over a year.  I had made great strides, but something seemed to be holding me back.  I needed to confess my infidelity to the person I love the most and to the person most affected.

As I look back on my confession, I’m not sure if I told her because she deserved to know or because I needed to get it off of my chest. I had put it off for 30 years.  My pastor friend kept hounding me to tell her and I kept resisting.  I told myself over and over again, “I’ll just break free, and then since the problem no longer exists, there won’t be anything to tell her about and I won’t be hiding anything anymore.”  But my addiction kept rearing up its ugly head and one day I decided I just had to tell her.

Once I made this decision, I could hardly wait to do it.  I decided to confess on her day off.  I found a time when just the two of us were in the house.  That morning I woke up before dawn.  I was so agitated that I couldn’t go back to sleep.  When she woke up, I took her into the living room and we sat next to each other on the couch. I then broke the news.

When she tells the story today, she says she was in a state of shock.  It took several hours or perhaps even a few days for the truth of what I told her to fully sink in.  Finding out about my compulsive addiction to pornography made her feel used, inferior, inadequate, and betrayed. I had always told her that she was the most important person in the world, but I had chosen the “porn girls” over her.  It was almost more than she could believe and more than she could bear.  She says it was like a dagger in the heart.

I felt relief; that I had finally done the right thing.  My double life was over and the secret was out, but her suffering and pain were only beginning.  She was on an emotional roller coaster.  She has said several times how unfair this was—I was the one who made the mistake; I chose to do what I knew was wrong, yet she had to go see a therapist.  She had to read up on this dark, perverted illness and go back over our life together and see if any of it had been what she thought it was, or if everything we seemed to have together was all one big farce.

We both became experts in an area where we would rather have remained ignorant. I discovered that in her mind my involvement with pornography was if I had had an affair or worse yet, multiple affairs.  I had betrayed her and abandoned her to be with other women whom I found much more attractive and desirable.  She was nothing to me.  I loved them.

That’s not at all how I felt.  I wanted to break free from the pull of my addiction.  I desired the real love and intimacy, which only she could give me, but how could she trust me again?  Someone recommended the book “Not Just Friends” by Dr. Shirley Glass.  While this book doesn’t deal specifically with pornography, it is a classic on the topic of betrayal.  I learned it was important for me to be totally open and honest.  I had hidden so much from her for so many years; now it was time for me to answer her questions.  When?  Where?  How?  What about this time and that time?  She wanted to know what I had seen.  She wanted to hear how it all began.  She asked how I had hidden this for so long.  She looked at me sternly and demanded: “Why did you never get help?”

This was a tremendous loss for her.  Her storybook marriage had ended.  She thought she was marrying a Christian man, a man with values.  I was supposed to be someone who would never do these kinds of things.  She even asked: “How could God let this happen to me?  I went to a Bible college and married a man who said he would cherish me till death do us part.”

Since this was such a gigantic loss, my wife was going through the stages of grief.  The stage that appeared with the most intensity was the stage of anger.  She was furious.  Profoundly hurt.  Horribly shocked.  Words cannot even describe the blow that my betrayal inflicted on her soul.

The ladies on the online forum told me this would take time—years, even.  And they were right.  I knew I had provoked all of this hurt and pain.  My wife’s anger was normal and justified.  How would she not be upset by my betrayal?  I had not been the man she thought I was because I had looked to other women for pleasure and satisfaction.

There were days when she did not even want to look at me, much less allow me to come near her or touch her.  I remember seeing her crying and thinking it was my role to comfort her in her pain, as I had done so many times in the past, but now, since I was the source of her pain, she did not want any comfort from me.  A few times she was so angry, she told me she hated me.  Some nights I slept on the couch. Her wounds were terribly deep.  I learned to be patient and allow her all the time she needed in order to heal.

One day my wife told me: 

“I trusted you, I believed in you. The man I thought I married would never have hurt me and betrayed me like you did. I am having trouble in my mind reconciling who I thought you were, with what you did time after time after time, all through our marriage. How could you let it go on for so long?”

One evening I found her crying and my wife said:

“Every time you made a decision to look at pornography, you made a decision to hurt me. You chose them over me and were rejecting me. Every time you looked at porn it was like you were slapping me in the face or kicking me in the stomach. I trusted you too much. I was totally unprepared for this. I think that’s why it cuts so deeply.”

All I could do at that moment was to sigh and say I’m sorry. If only I had taken action sooner. If only I had not been so selfish, foolish, and afraid to tell someone or ask for help.

For my wife, this was all very personal. In her mind, I rejected her for women who were more beautiful and sexier than her.  This is both true and false.  Yes, my choice hurt her and in making that choice I was turning my back on her to look at other women.  But I did not do what I did because she is not beautiful enough or lacks sex appeal.  After all, men who are married to actresses and fashion models also struggle with addiction to pornography.  When looking at pornography, the first picture of the first woman is never enough.  There is an insatiable desire to look at another and then another.  There is no such thing as perfection and no such thing as satisfaction.  There is only an unending search for the next high, the next rush and thrill.

I saw the sun peeking through the clouds when a few months later my wife told me that I was now different from before, more attentive, more concerned, more present. I told her she seemed different too, more tuned in to me and more loving. She said that my being different made her become different. Then she told me she could foresee our relationship becoming better than it had ever been as we both strive to draw closer. In spite of the tremendous pain, she told me she was glad I told her the truth about my addiction. And she thanked me for all the work I had done fighting this sin and for the progress, I had made.  Her words blessed my heart!

Now that we are further removed from those sad, heavy days, my wife has said one thing that helped her survive was the obligation to get up every day to go to work and to help take care of our child who was still at home.  Otherwise, she says, she might have just stayed in bed all day, or curled up and died.  I am grieved that I inflicted those wounds on the person I love the most in this world.

When my wife made the decision to forgive me and to work on restoring our marriage I was extremely grateful.  Today I am immensely thankful to have been given a second chance.  I’m overjoyed to have someone believe in me and love me in spite of the hurtful, selfish things I have done.  It is so much more than I deserve — it is a gift, a manifestation of grace. Thank you, Lord!

Lead Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

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