Fornication And Adultery is a Sin!Whats wrong with looking at pornography? Im declaring war!Here is a transcript of a radio show she was being interviewed on. This is just a small portion
Richard Land: Laurie, from your own personal observation of your husband and your counsel with scores of other women who have seen the ravages of pornography on their husbands and on their relationships, describe what happens to a man who gets sucked in to this vortex of pornography.
Laurie Hall: Pornography has a profound effect on the body. For example, there is a neurological impact on the brain. When you fantasize, you create neural pathways. The more you think about a thought, the more you reinforce that neural pathway!
So there is actually a physiological, neurological effect in the brain in the thoughts associated with pornography. Also, pornography causes you to release endorphins, so what you're really doing is you're becoming a drug addict. You're self-medicating. And that's why it's so difficult to break this addiction.
In addition, pornography has a profound effect on the central nervous system, particularly as it relates to your sexuality. In a healthy sexual relationship, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system work together. The sympathetic nervous system turns us on while the parasympathetic nervous system calms us down. The parasympathetic nervous system is the one that has to be in control in order for us to achieve full sexual release. For instance, the urethra, the vagina, and the anus - all of those are controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system.
But it only gains control when we feel trusting. If you give sex a guilty meaning, an anxious meaning, an embarrassed meaning, or a stressful meaning - and guys who are looking at pornography are putting all of those meanings into the sexual experience - all of those things are going to block the parasympathetic nervous system. What is going to happen then is, according to the way their nervous system is becoming configured; they will begin to link sex with stress, sex with fear, and sex with anxiety.
A man involved with pornography is going to bring that into his marriage bed because he's conditioned his body to that kind of sexual response. He might not even be aware of it, but his spouse will pick up on it. She's going to sense that there's something unsettling or disquieting. She may blame herself, but it's not coming from her. It's stuff that her husband's own central nervous system is sending out.
The other thing that happens in our soul when we're exposed to pornography is that our belief system begins to change. It takes as little as 6 one-hour exposures to soft-core pornography to change your belief systems. Men begin to view faithfulness as a less important quality in their own lives. They come to have great dissatisfaction with their sexual partner. They come to trivialize the crime of rape. They also begin to believe that women deserve to be disrespected. States that have the highest readership of porn have the highest rates of domestic violence and rape. All of that is what happens in the mind when you begin to believe the lies that are attached to pornography.
Richard Land: So the idea that pornography is a victimless crime is a cruel, cruel joke?
Laurie Hall: It is a very cruel joke. The biggest thing that they're not telling you is the economic impact of this addiction. Forty percent of professional men who are involved with pornography are going to lose their jobs due to their involvement with pornography. Some of that is because of the effect it has on their mind; they lose their ability to reason.
When you're engaged in fantasy, you lose your ability to connect between action and reaction. You no longer follow cause and effect. When you're involved in fantasy, you create your own effects. You make the effect be whatever you want it to be. But in real life, there's a natural law in operation. When I do A, then B is going to happen. The more you fantasize, the more you become disconnected from what I call common sense. It effects your business judgment; it effects your ability to interact properly with other employees.
In order to be intimate you have to live in truth. Intimacy is about allowing somebody to see all the way inside of you. If you're hiding something from yourself or from them, then you're not going to allow yourself to open up and allow somebody to come in and see you. People don't realize that pornography completely robs them of the ability to enter into lasting and satisfying relationships.
http://www.pastors.com/article.asp?ArtID=2973
Here is a review of the book.
http://www.springsofwater.com/wildernes ... html?id=44
"An Affair of the Mind" is a first hand true story account of one woman's experience through the hellish nightmare of her husband's pornography addiction. She becomes the voice of all spouse of sex addicts as she describes the devastating effects that pornography has on the lives and souls of all those that it touches.
One of the main premises of this book is that pornography is not a victimless crime. Hall relates.."I saw my husband lose his soul to pornography. I have held other women and listened to them weep as they told me how their husbands also lost their souls to pornography. Pornography kills the soul, steals, the heart, and destroys the mind. Pornography is not a victimless crime."
Laurie Hall describes the very real life of living with a sex addict, one that lives in a very false world of pornography. She describes the gradual descent of her husband into his addiction when she states. "Jack's deterioration was gradual. The light in his eyes did not go out all at once, and his laughter didn't turn to sulleness overnight. The guy with the easy, open ways didn't evaporate into a pathological liar in the blink of an eye. If the changes had been sudden, they would have screamed, pay attention! Something is very wrong here! I mourned the changes, but I wasn't suspicious. Suspicion is such an ugly thing. It's so opposite of what love is all about, which is believing the best in each other, going the extra mile, giving the benefit of the doubt. I wasn't really aware of the danger until it reached a boiling point."
Hall describes the greatest anomaly for the people to overcome in gaining insight about this addiction, when she explains ... "because Jack was so clever with his lying, and because he was so skillful with his 'nice guy' public persona, I couldn't get anyone else to agree that something was terribly wrong. I was all alone in my conviction that things weren't as they appeared, and it almost drove me insane. In fact, I'm not sure that I didn't."
This book is incredibly validating in this regard because finally we, the voice of the wives of the sex addict is being heard. Hall states, "To those looking on, the marriage seemed strong, but in the hidden places there was rot. The wives could feel this decay with their spirits but kept telling their spirits to be quiet because everything they could see with their eyes and hear with their hears said things were fine."
The wives of sex addicts live in a hell that few people can believe or understand. "The enemy was unseen, but her presence permeated every aspect of our lives." There is no drunken stupor or needle marks as evidence. Only an imagination that shoots up with the vilest forms of erotic visualizations.
Hall devotes quite a bit of her authoring to address the issues of lying and deceit that accompany this duality in the life of the addict. Because lying is a form of insanity, it denies reality and attempts to force others to deny the reality of a situation by manipulating their understanding of the truth.
"Sex addicts are pathological liars. They lie bout everything, not just their sexual behavior, and they do so with straight faces. they lie when telling the truth would save them time and money. They lie about little things as well as big ones. They lie to themselves about what they're doing. They lie to their wives and families about where they are going and what they are going to do when they get there, even if there's no sexually inappropriate behavior going on. Pornography is itself a lie, and they embrace it."
It is when a wife realizes how dangerously pathological her addicted husband has become that she often chooses to no longer stay in the marriage. Hall, in writing a letter to her husband says, "That's when I knew you were dangerously pathological. That's when I knew I'd crack if I stayed with you any longer."
Hall devotes chapters to dealing with the issues of denial and how those layers are peeled off gradually, usually through the intercession of the spirit. In regard to this Hall writes, "I was certainly in a dance of denial, but inside I was crying out for the truth. I'm so glad that God looks past the surface, to the innermost part of our beings, sifting through and analyzing the thoughts and intents of our hearts. Then, when the groanings of our pain are too terrifying for us to bring into the light of day, the Holy Ghost intercedes for us before God's throne and says, 'Look, she says that she doesn't want to know, but she needs to know.' And then we are shown. And the truth is ugly, ugly indeed."
Hall devotes many chapters to describing the spiritual quest that began with the peeling of the layers of denial. When one is dealing with the forces of evil, the father of all lies, one must center themselves and focus on the omnipotence of an all knowing Father who the source of truth and revelation to them. The avenues of prayer, scripture study and sustained close association with Deity are the greatest and sometimes only source of strength to the wife in this situation."
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