How is it that a three letter word can impact a person’s life so much?! S-E-X. Sex. Maybe if I say it enough the sting will go away and we can talk more honestly about it. SEX. I was so very young the first time I had It. A teenager! I look at girls who are fifteen now, and they are but infants to me! The first time I had sex, I was fifteen. And I was raped.
At the time, I had no idea. I thought he was only one or two years older than me; that he liked me. He said lovely things to me; and, boy, did he make me feel special. But…one night I woke up after being drugged and raped, was put in a car and then dumped in an unfamiliar location with no phone. I later found out he was twenty one…and I didn’t feel so special anymore. I was left completely emotionally shattered.

This was the first key moment in my journey down a dangerous sexual path.

Naturally, this event rocked my world. I was insecure, afraid and had no self worth. I was from a Christian home, I went to a Christian school, I went to a Christian church: I was the Christian girl. Yet none of this stopped the overpowering emotions and the choices I began to make in my life.

I was so broken. I began to sleep with any man who would tell me I was “pretty”, anyone who would show me attention. But by seventeen, I had experienced my fair share of men and the broken things they could do, and began to hate them. I began to sleep with women. I was still filling my brokenness with others- with that little three letter word. That dirty, little three letter word. Sex was dirty. It was bad. It was shameful. It was lustful…It was never loving or gentle.

As I got older again, though, I began dating some amazing women. Sex felt better. It was loving and good…but still not quite right. There was something about it that I still used to block out the world. It was my escape. It was my secret.

It was coming back to Jesus about four years ago that I realized I must stop this destructive path. I need to stop. I need to find clarity and love in Jesus, not in bed. I would just love to say I woke up the next day feeling liberated, and have been that way since- but, it didn’t happen like that. It took me a long time, still, to have the courage to stop having sex, and I kept stumbling along the way.

Once I had stopped having intercourse, I just swapped to watching pornography instead. Again, I was escaping the pain, I was living in secrecy and shame. I became addicted to pornography as I had with sex.

Through confessing my struggle to my best friend, meeting one-on-one to talk with her about my fears and hurt, and praying together, I have begun to heal and recover. I am daily accountable to her, and vice versa. After years of friendship, we discovered we had been fighting the same fight against sex and pornography, alone! Now we face it together, stronger.

I mean it when I say every day is a struggle. Every day I’m tempted, and every day I have to stop myself. But every day I do that, my faith grows stronger and I grow deeper into love with Jesus. I am so blessed to have a beautiful new church family, who have never judged me, but let me be free and honest about my struggles. What a blessing from God!

I wish I could go back in time and tell that little girl that she is loved, and valued and worthy of protection. I would tell her about the wonderful plans God has in store for her future. But alas, I cannot go back and change the past. But I sit today, in awe of my creator, and thankful to be on the road to recovery from sexual addiction.

Growing up in a Christian household and being a Christian until I was in mid high school years, I always knew that I wouldn’t disobey God’s word and would wait until I was married to have sex.

…Of course, that didn’t happen. I met boys. I got hormonal. Even when I was 15, I was fooling around with my boyfriend who I was ‘in love with’. Committing acts that I didn’t consider to be sex, but in essence it was. It seemed that whenever I had a boyfriend, I would struggle with my faith and relationship with God because I wanted to please them and wanted to feel loved by doing sexual things.
When I was 16, I started attending youth group yet I was having sex with my boyfriend at the time. I knew it was wrong to have sex but I still did it anyway because I wanted it and he wanted it, and I wasn’t strong enough to stay with Christ. I was a ‘Sunday Christian’. The people I associated with and the very liberal ideals of my school meant that our lunchtime talks consisted of the different sexual experiences we had with our boyfriends or how many boys we’d had sex with.

Looking back, all of my sexual experiences and talks are simply to just fit in with other people and feel wanted/loved. Even now, I still will find myself regaling my old tales with my non-Christian friends because I guess I want to feel that I can contribute something to the conversation. After breaking up with my boyfriend last year, I downloaded that dreadful app… The one that starts with T… The one with the flame. Yep, Tinder. I spent night after night swiping right and left. Hoping I’ll find a nice guy to talk to and have sex with. It was like an addiction. I was ashamed of it though. I had sex and sexual relations with numerous guys within a very short amount of time, to fill the hole in my heart left by my breakup.

Then came my European trip. Whilst it was an amazing experience, it also was terrible. Travelling with a couple meant I felt very alone. Alcohol was very cheap in Europe and thus, I spent a lot of nights at bars getting drunk and being picked up by attractive, foreign boys. Spending nights in their hostel rooms, to never see them again. Within six weeks, I had hooked up, had sex, you name it with 7 men. I felt dirty and disgusting and tainted. Like no one could love me. My heart continued to yearn for love from someone.

Two months after coming back, a friend invited me to come back to church. Funnily enough, this friend I actually met on Tinder and now we are both Christians (new ministry maybe? Haha). Since finding my love for God and knowing he loves me, weirdly enough, sex hasn’t been a struggle for me. His love has filled my heart and has allowed me to set my heart and mind on things above. I feel very blessed to not struggle with this now, like I thought I would and to have support from friends and powerful messages and worship at church to help me grow in God. I worry though that if I meet a non-Christian guy and end up dating him that this will be a struggle again. I’ll be putting that in God’s hands though to give me strength and solidarity in my faith. Tinder has been uninstalled since I came back to Christ! He is so good.

The thing about innocence is that when you let go of a little of it, it feels so hard to keep a grasp on the rest. It’s a slippery sucker, and I let go of mine at the young age of 13. It isn’t that I gave my body away or that my innocence was stolen from me by someone cruel. I stumbled into a world of anonymity and let my imagination be captured by pictures that, once embedded into my mind, could never escape.

At that tender age, I began writing erotic literature, and over 300 people took time to read every word that I wrote. It was strange, to be so consumed by these thoughts of what pictures I could create with words; scenarios that would shock; characters that would give up their own innocence for the sake of their lover.
I would give up my mind, but I never gave up my body. That way, what I was doing wasn’t really all that bad and I could go on with my daily life; my imagination touched in every possible way but my body still somehow pure.

Of course, that point of view was wrong, because soon after the writing began, my hands began to wander and my mind began to crave more. More. Always more. When my readers didn’t satisfy my desire to be validated, I found my way to pornographic chat rooms where I would speak with men, lie about my age, and engage in cybersex with them over webcam, doing whatever they commanded of me and my body.

I still remember the things I did for the sake of their approval. I just wanted to be wanted. I wanted someone to tell me that I was desirable, and these men did that for me. These readers of the erotic fiction I wrote did it. It was all I thought about.

My 13-year-old self began to attend a youth group, and I heard the gospel for the first time, then the second, then the third, and kept hearing it again and again over the next few years. People kept speaking these words of faith and love and hope into me and I kept writing fiction to captivate people’s minds with erotic scenes. They kept speaking. I kept writing.

One day in my 16th year, I listened at last. It was a reluctant surrender to the God who had called to me for so long, and it was a surrender that involved, for the first time, accepting that this invisible heavenly Father could possibly love me, and letting Him do that. For the first time, I wept because God cared about me. It was as if a wall had crumbled and my soul felt the warmth of grace cover it.

I forgot the usernames and passwords of the accounts that contained my erotic fiction. I began to read the Bible. I began to trust that God loved me more than these men on the other side of the world did. But I couldn’t tell anyone what I had written. Church girls don’t struggle with sexual sin. At least that’s what it seems like most of the time. The struggle isn’t visible. It’s a secret shame that people only ever whisper about to those they trust the most.

I never told a youth group leader about what I had done. It felt too bad, too unforgivable, and I was certain they would retract my salvation at that point, and I’d find myself out on the curb, disapproved of with angry eyes by the God who loves everyone but dirty little me.

I’ve been alive almost 25 years now. Soon, it’ll be ten years since I last spun a tale for the sake of sensuality and sensations and sex, and still, I find myself sitting in a strange place, because physical scars heal but how can we heal our imaginations? What can we do but plead to God that He would take away these pictures and scenes we once so intricately described?

And oh, how I plead with Him. He tells me that His grace is enough. He tells me that who I was when I wallowed in sin is not who I am now. He tells me I am His. He tells me I am loved. He tells me that no shame can remove His love from me. And still, I plead.

He is enough, though. He must be.

As I’ve learned to draw nearer to the God who is love, I’ve found myself fighting to walk away from these pictures. Sometimes it is a physical action – a movie will delve into scenes that send my imagination spinning, and I will need to stand and leave the room. Sometimes it is a fight to push thoughts from my mind – a moment in the middle of the night when my mind starts to form words that draw me away from Him, and I have to fight to remember His words and ignore my own.

I shared this secret shame with a boyfriend once. It was a strange moment, and we had been flirting with sexual sin for a while. He asked if he could read something I had written. I found myself shocked and scared and saddened by his words. I wanted him to be angry or sad or ashamed or forgiving. I did not want him to embrace the darkness of my imagination, yet he did. I did not let him read it, and the relationship did not last.

I need to step closer and closer to my God each day. I need to fight to be His. I need to fight to tame my wild mind by His Spirit. I need to trust His grace is sufficient for me. And you do too, dear one. You are His. You can fight. His grace is enough.

Your deepest shame is not enough to make him abandon you. You are His.

You. Are. His.

My family and I went to church every Sunday while I was growing up. I thought church was about wearing nice clothes and doing the right thing rather than having a relationship with God. I was the quiet girl growing up who never wanted to disappoint anyone. I never knew that God was concerned about the state of my heart more than the bible verses I could quickly recite without any thought or effort.

When I was in my late teens, I was accidentally exposed to a porn scene on someone’s TV while I was at their house. It was a scene with all women in it, and that image quickly burned itself into my mind. I had never heard or thought of doing anything like that before. The scene horrified me but made me curious at the same time.

Consequently, I started having dreams about a (female) friend of mine. These dreams were sexual in nature, and I didn’t know what to do with the thoughts that were quickly invading my mind and heart. I decided to tell her, and we ended up getting into a relationship with each other. Our relationship lasted 2 years before she moved away.

After we broke up, I started dating a guy who watched porn. I was embarrassed to watch it at first, but I eventually ended up watching it with him. I was able to convince him to watch movies with two women in them, so that’s what we would normally do. It worked for both of us. I would also find Playboy magazines that he had hidden, and out of curiosity, I would look at them. Focusing only on the women in the porn, I didn’t notice what was slowly happening. I was beginning to look at women differently. I wasn’t just attracted to them; I was lusting and continually fantasizing about them.

A few years later I gave my life to Christ, and married Kevin. I had stopped watching porn a couple years earlier, and I assumed I would never struggle in that way again.

After an emergency C-section with our first child two years into our marriage, I started struggling with post-partum depression. During this time, I found porn online. This was much different than the movies I had watched in the past. I quickly learned that I could get very specific about what I wanted to search for and watch. Before I realized it, though, I was trapped. I couldn’t stop. No matter what I did I continued to go back to it.

I was smothered in shame as a stay-at-home mom who was secretly looking at lesbian porn a good portion of the day while my husband was at work. My husband and I were both very involved in our church, and I felt like such a horrible hypocrite. I still had the exterior that said I had it all together, so no one even thought to question if everything was ok with me.

All the thoughts and fantasies I had about women were intensified and more vivid than ever. I started having dreams several nights a week that resembled the porn I was watching. I was like I had two identities. I felt like a lesbian at night in my dreams and when I was watching porn, and a married stay-at-home mom the rest of the time. I didn’t know how to confess this to anyone, and I felt trapped. I felt so much shame. I thought I was the only Christian woman who struggled in this way, and every time I promised myself that I would stop, I would go right back to it again.

I had tried to tell my husband several times, but I could never make myself bring it up. I didn’t know how to make myself say it out loud, so one day I wrote my confession on a piece of paper to show him. I handed him the piece of paper when he came home one afternoon. That was one of the most terrifying things I have ever done. I didn’t know what our future would look like, but I was relieved to have finally told him. That started a very long healing process for me and for us as a married couple.

When I started searching for help, all I found were resources for men. I felt so incredibly isolated and alone. I felt like a freak and was convinced I ruined my brain forever. Believing I was the only woman who was trapped in this struggle increased the shame I already felt so deeply.

As God took me through the process of healing my heart, He started showing me that what I really wanted, needed, and craved was intimacy with Him. It came as a huge surprise to me when I realized that what I really needed had nothing to do with sex.

As I started taking steps to guard my eyes and heart, I also started surrendering my thought-life to God. I wish I could say that I never looked at porn again, but that wouldn’t be true. There were times I fell, and plenty of times when I felt like nothing was changing. As I have learned how to lean into God’s grace and love for me, I have found freedom from the lure of pornography and the fantasies that go along with it. Yes, I have been occasionally tempted since then, but the power it once had over me is not there anymore at all. I have been set free!

This has been a long, often difficult and imperfect journey, but it has been worth it. Jesus continues to heal my heart, mind, and marriage in so many ways. I now have an intimate relationship with the One who meets my deepest needs, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world.

Amy Riordan is a speaker and author of ‘Longing for Intimacy: Hope for Women Struggling with Same-Sex Attraction’. You can find her at longingforintimacy.com

It started when I was 11.

When my brother was away from the computer I snuck into his bedroom and opened Windows Media player and the two videos were sitting at the bottom of the list of videos. I opened one and while it started to play the hairs on the back of my neck started to prick up. My eyes were wide, and my mouse hovered over the red cross in the corner. The video ended and then I hesitantly started to play the second one. A few seconds in and I heard my brother walking down the hallway and I instantly closed it. A day or so later when I had the chance I watched the rest of the second video.

I knew I had watched something I wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t tell anyone at the time, but it made me so curious and I wanted to watch more.

A couple of months later our church had a camp. My brother and all the kids from the church went, but I didn’t want to go. I made the excuse that I wasn’t feeling well and had to stay home. For the whole week while the kids were having a great time on camp, playing games, learning more about God and making great memories…I was home watching porn.

It was my hidden sin.

A year later while sitting in the lounge room with mum and my brother something came up on the T.V about porn. Mum made a comment to my brother and I that we should not look at that those videos and stay clear from them. I became nervous and sweaty, so I stood up and went to my bedroom. I fell on my knees. “God, what should I do?” In a clear voice that was only from Him, He said to me “Tell her. I am with you, go and tell her.” I cried my eyes out, the last thing I wanted to do was tell her! She didn’t even know, I could easily get away with it. After I gained some courage I went out and I told her. After a long chat with my nose and tears flowing, I confessed and promised I would never do it again. I went to bed feeling hopeful and proud that I told mum. A big weight had been lifted off me that night.

~

You think that would be the last time. You think that would have helped me…but it didn’t. For years up until I was 22 it was still something that gripped me and was my hidden addiction. Even after being saved and getting baptized it was the one thing that I struggled with. I became better at controlling it when I got older. I could go for months without watching anything, but like chocolate, you deny yourself for too long and one piece ends up being a family-sized chocolate bar. When mobile phones were more accessible, and the internet was suddenly in my hand, I would binge-watch porn every night for a week straight in the safety of my bed.

I asked God to take this off me, to take this burden away. How messed up can I be to keep doing this? Surely no-one else is as weak as me, and as hypocritical!

~

While I was in university I joined a group of Christians called Christian Union. In my third year we had this new study that was about Sex and Purity. For the first time since I was 11 years old, I heard another Christian sister proclaim that she struggled with reading books that had intimate scenes in them. She knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help but read those books, it was her guilty pleasure. I sat there in silence. A couple of other girls had nodded their heads and had admitted to watching porn at least once before. One of the leaders got us all to regroup and he read out some statistics stating that many Christians, including women…. watch or read porn.

Up until that point I felt I was the only Christian that was addicted to porn. I felt ashamed and hopeless. How could I act like a prude on the outside, when my mind was playing the videos over and over in my mind? How could I be a true Christian if I was blatantly watching porn and lying to my friends and family at the same time? Only myself and God knew what was going on.

Not long after that seminar on sex and purity I started to seek resources to help me out. I found ministries online dedicated to helping young people with their addiction. I found one dedicated to women called The Grace Spot and I was overwhelmed. Hope was a dwindling flame burning in the distance. I sat there and watched testimony videos from women talking openly about their experiences. The candle light shone brighter and I wept and wept and truly felt there was hope for me….as I wasn’t the only one.

~

It didn’t end there, and I wasn’t suddenly cured, but I did feel more equipped than I ever had before. If there’s one thing I can say that has been of help to me is to be honest with yourself and call it for what it is. For all those years since I was 11 years old I never called it an addiction. But when I finally faced myself…I realized that I needed to do something about it. Confront myself and talk about it, rather than hiding in the dark.

I don’t say nor think that I am cured. But I do know that there is hope. I can manage it to the point where I haven’t watched anything in a long time, but I know I will probably slip up eventually. I am a sinner. I don’t want to sin, but it is something that I will always struggle with. But I know that I have the help and support of others if I slip back into the addiction that was once so consuming in my life. I also have God’s love and grace. His grace and His love is what keeps me going.

You are worthy. You are loved.