Avoiding/Overcoming Addiction

"It makes no difference what your intelligence, social status or position in life is. We are all vulnerable and capable of being injured."
-- Dr. Victor B. Cline

Introducing immoral or inappropriate sexual stimuli into the mind of those who view it can create fantasies that may never be erased. It has the potential for corrupting the values of, and degrading, those who indulge. It suggests behaviors that could negatively affect or even destroy one's marriage and family. Pornography, in a sense, is an attack on the family and the marriage covenant as well as on the bonds of affection or trust that hold a marriage and family together.

The experience of many men and adolescent males who repeatedly experiment with, or voluntarily expose themselves to pornography suggests four possible consequences:

1. There is a risk of addiction. Once involved with it, many get "hooked" as with a highly addictive drug, and keep coming back in a compulsive fashion for more.

2. They desire increasingly deviant material. In time, they need rougher and more explicit material to get the same kicks, arousal, and excitement as initially.

3. They become desensitized to the inappropriateness or abnormality of the behavior portrayed, eventually accepting and embracing what at first had shocked and offended them.

4. With appetite whetted and conscience anesthetized, they tend to act out sexually what they have witnessed. This almost always disturbs the most intimate aspects of marital and family relationships and attacks the participants' spiritual nature. As an individual acts out his desires and appetites, there is a significant risk of venereal infections, some of which are incurable and life-threatening. When this occurs, the health and life of the marital partner are also jeopardized.

-- Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Vol. 3

With God's help, an addict can come out of it. It takes a lot of prayer, a lot of support from those you love, to build the will power to come out of it.
-- Morality in Media