"What love? We just have sex," Melanie cried during a session. Melanie, whose husband is heavily into pornography, experiences no tenderness in their marriage. Everything is done so fast. She just feels so used.
Pornography damages. Psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. It enslaves addicts in sexual activities and fantasies that destroy their personhood. Far from making a man or woman a better lover, pornography poisons relationships and sexual enjoyment.
Author Victor Cline, in his book "Pornography's Effects on Adults and Children," wrote: "Pornography contains much scientifically inaccurate, false, and misleading information about human sexuality, especially female sexual nature and response."
Once, Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner (who died recently) compared himself to Jesus Christ. He said he was a "missionary" whose important achievement was "liberating people from sexual hang ups" through his worldwide pornography business.
If Hefner is right, wouldn't the porn addicts find themselves happy, fulfilled, with a strong sense of psychological identity? If Playboy pornography aids great sex, wouldn't you expect that married partners will have a good sense of love and real mutual pleasure in sex?
Brenda Mackillop, a former Playboy bunny, model, and prostitute, who worked with Hefner frequenting his mansion from 1973-1976, confided, "I lived the Playboy philosophy. I felt worthless and empty. Out of my despair, I attempted suicide on numerous occasions."
Not too long ago, a patient was telling me that watching porn on the internet during bedtime puts him to sleep. He "fantasize" first before going to bed to put himself to sleep. The pornography he watches appears to alter his mood.
Psychotherapist Dr. Mark Laaser writes, "Fantasy can be addictive. It stimulates chemical reactions in the pleasure centers of the brain. The addict then uses these effects to escape other feelings, to change negative feelings to positive feelings, and even to reduce stress. Given the chemical changes it creates, sex fantasy addicts are, in reality, drug addicts."
Evidently, pornography only produces psychopathology. It destroys self-worth, dignity, and mental health. It not only stimulates sexual coercion or predation, it encourages rape, promiscuity, and other forms of sexual addiction or sociopathy. Rather than enhancing love and great sex, pornography destroys marriages and relationships.
If you believe a pornographic video, film, or magazine cannot affect you, then you must also believe that the Bible, advertising, or theatre have no effect on readers or watchers!
"The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your entire body will be full of light; but if your eye is unsound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then, the very light in you is darkened, how dense is that darkness!" (Matthew 6: 22, 23)
Dr. Angelo Subida is a clinical psychotherapist, author, and speaker. He is author of books "Inner Healing," "Secrets Of Your Self," "Chess and Life," among others, blogs, and articles. He has appeared frequently as an expert on psychotherapy/life recovery issues on national television, radio broadcasts, print media, and webcasts, including GMA 7, TV 5, ABS CBN 2, Q-11, 700 Club, Radyo Veritas, Inquirer Radio, Smart Parenting Magazine, Business Mirror, among others, and has served as resident therapist/counselor for parents and kid-artists in the highly popular ABS-CBN 2 Voice Kids TV singing reality show. Dr. Subida is an eclectic, multidisciplinary therapist and originator of his own revolutionary high-tech, high-touch counseling plus model. His areas of specialization include parent-child therapy, clinical infidelity treatment, relationship/marital counseling, separation/divorce therapy, anger management, depression, addictions, psychotherapy-spirituality integration, and innovative chess therapy. For more of Dr. Subida, you can find him at www.drsubida.com.