Fight for Love - Rosie Makinney

Is your husband addicted to pornography? Don't miss today's Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman. It's not about just white-knuckling it and saying, don't look a porn, don't look a porn.

You have to replace it with something. Porn's been serving a really important function in your life. It has been helping you medicate all those uncomfortable feelings and deal with the stress in your life. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Today, Rosie McKinney gives a biblical battle plan for wives to take their marriage back from porn. And because of the subject matter, today's conversation is sensitive and deals with an adult topic that's affecting children, so we wanted to give that caution to parents. Our featured resource at FiveLoveLanguages.com is Fight for Love.

Again, you can find it at FiveLoveLanguages.com. And Gary, that word fight says it all, I think, because this is a battle and a huge struggle in a lot of marriages today, right? Well, Chris, you are exactly right. I cannot tell you how many men and women I have talked with who have been involved or their spouse has been involved in pornography. And I am super, super excited about this conversation today because I believe that many wives and husbands are going to find help in our conversation and in the book that we're going to be discussing today.

Well, let me introduce our guest. Rosie McKinney is a writer, speaker and podcaster who 10 years ago entered the fight against her husband's compulsive porn use. Through her faithful and uncompromising stance and his repentance, counseling and group work, their marriage is now porn free. There's now a thriving recovery community in California supervised by her husband, Mark, a certified sexual addiction therapist. Rosie is the founder of Fight for Love Ministries, and you can find out more about that and our featured resource at FiveLoveLanguages.com.

Again, FiveLoveLanguages.com. Well, Rosie, welcome to Building Relationships. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm really excited to be here. Well, at the very beginning of our program, tell us your story. How did you become involved in this battle against pornography addiction? I have two stories because I have been through this twice. Once before I became a Christian and once after. So I think it's important that you get the whole picture because although the details of my story are different from wives, the arc is exactly the same.

The arc of realization of what works and what doesn't work is exactly the same. So let me take you back to the first relationship. So, yes, this was before I was a Christian and I discovered that the person I was with, this long-term relationship, was using pornography and it was absolutely devastating. It really was such – I had a physical shock. I was like, what do I do? Do I pack my bags? Do I leave?

What do I do? It was such a shock. I was totally blindsided. And I tried everything. I tried to compete with it. I tried to ignore it. I tried to provide an environment where he felt so loved and cared for that he wouldn't need to do it. And nothing worked. Absolutely nothing worked. He refused to admit that it was a problem. He'd even twist it around and somehow make it my fault, like I wasn't good enough.

And because of all the lies that you hear in the media and in the culture that actually porn is healthy, it's harmless, it's beneficial to relationships, it's empowering and liberating for women even. I was so confused. I didn't know what to do and I was trying my best to fix it and nothing worked and it just got worse and worse and worse. And eventually that relationship fell apart.

So now we fast forward. So then I become a Christian, have this amazing experience, meet the man who's become my husband. He's been a pastor and he's a really great guy.

I'm utterly in love with him. And then because I'm telling him about my past relationships, he admits that this has been a struggle for him in the past. But naively, I thought, wow, here's a guy who is admitting it.

Here's a guy who said he has struggled. He admits it was a problem. He's dealt with it.

This isn't going to be a problem. And so I went on my merry way and we got married thinking everything is going to be fine. It will sort itself out because he is on board and he said that it's not a problem at the moment. Little did I know that this doesn't go away when you get married. This is an inherent problem that started way before he met me and it was absolutely nothing to do with me. So very soon, even on the honeymoon, it became apparent that this was going to be a huge issue in our marriage. This was affecting him inside the bedroom.

This was affecting him outside the bedroom. And suddenly I had all the old feelings from the past relationship of how traumatic this was to be in a relationship where someone is being controlled by this outside force. And I was just felt totally overwhelmed.

And I do believe it was the Holy Spirit inside me that just sort of rose up and went enough. I cannot do this. I cannot do this again. I can't go round that merry go round again.

I know that nothing works. And I just I just set this firm boundary. I said, you can have me or you can have the pornography, but you cannot have both. And I have no idea that this was actually the exact right thing to do. I did it by accident. I did it out of desperation because I'd already been through this little understanding that setting boundaries is the very thing that you need to do when pornography is an issue in your marriage. So that's how this became my journey. And then going forward and my husband got, you know, he recovered, I recovered, we recovered. He went on to retrain as a certified sexual addictions therapist.

I went on to help wives. And it just became such a mission of mine to get this information out to wives that, yes, you have to fight for your marriage, but you have to fight in the right way. Because the normal way that women and men get into recovery is when they reach that point of crisis. So normally it comes after years of desperate attempts and self sabotaging ways to fix this on their own.

By all those ways that I did in the first relationship, by competing and ignoring and turning a blind eye and forgiving unconditionally and being more graceful and being more sexual and just doing everything. It's exhausting and devastating and traumatic when really you just need to set boundaries. So my whole heart, my passion, my ministry and all the women who I work with, we just want to tell women how to fight and why they need to fight and that it is possible to be in porn free marriages. It is possible to be in marriages that you never even dreamed were possible.

But you do have to know how to fight. Well, Rosie, you talk about setting those boundaries and I like the way you put it. You can choose me or you can choose porn, but not both. What about the wife who does that? She verbalizes that and the husband says, choose porn.

What does she do? That's a great question because that is the reality. Because if a guy is addicted, he's not thinking straight.

We've got all the neurological studies now that show how his brain has literally been hijacked by this supernormal stimulus. And they do. They are in bondage. They are enslaved and they choose porn. And even when they say, no, I'm choosing you, they still slip back.

It's not a question of willpower. It's not a question of if they love you enough, they'll stop. They have been hijacked.

They need help to stop this. So if the guy outright chooses porn, then you need to draw that firm line in the sand. Pornography is going to progressively destroy our intimacy and our authenticity. And it will wreck our love. You cannot have an intimate relationship with pornography. They are not compatible.

It just doesn't work. So you need to set those firm boundaries. But if you've got a guy who says, no, I want you, but yet he keeps slipping back. That's a different issue. That's something you can work with because even if he keeps slipping back, you set your boundaries.

And by setting your boundaries, you will be impacting his behavior because he's now having to live with consequences that he wasn't experiencing before. And that's really key. Yeah. And I think when I see your book, I think your heart is you want to help wives not just walk away themselves, but to stay in the battle as long as the husband is willing to work with her.

Absolutely. And wives never really just walk away. Normally they're utterly crushed and devastated. It's not a case of wives. Oh, they're not, you know, they're not in this enough.

They're not fighting. Wives are working so hard. I mean, you know, we have a support group and the letters we get on a daily basis of how hard they have tried for years to make it work. Do you think that often wives at least initially blame themselves?

Yeah, absolutely. They've even done a study that said 75 percent of wives at some point believe that it's their fault. And this is such a devastating lie because it goes straight to your heart, straight to your identity as a woman, that somehow you are not enough.

You are inadequate. And it's an utter lie. Even the women who are in the porn films themselves, they say that they cannot compete with their partner's porn addiction.

Even they can't compete. It's not about trying to emulate or compete with the women that they're seeing or what they're doing. It's a completely separate experience. Rosie, I have to ask a question because I've listened to Dr. Gary Chapman say this for years and years and years. And he said over and over and over again, you can't change your spouse. You can't change your spouse. You're not saying that a wife who has a husband with a porn addiction can change her spouse. You're saying that you can fight to influence him, but he needs to want to change.

Is that true or false? Enlighten me. You're nearly there. You're totally nearly there.

So absolutely right. You cannot fix your husband's porn addiction. It doesn't matter what you do. You cannot cure it. You cannot control it. And you certainly didn't cause it. Your other question about he has to be willing to change.

Well, yes and no. There has to be something in the relationship that he really cares about. And that's normally the wife that motivates him to change something that he doesn't want to lose. Because while you're in this porn addiction, you actually want to do your drug. It is medicating something. It is effective.

It has been a really powerful tool in the way that you cope with life so far. You don't want to give that up. So it's not a case of I want to give up the porn. It's that I don't want it to wreck my life. And I think that's an important differentiation because he just has to be willing to do whatever it takes.

If he's still there thinking, do you know what? I really do still want to do porn, but I want to give it up. That's okay.

That will come. But when you're an addict, you're predisposed. You're neurally wired to crave this stimulus. Because I think sometimes guys can get stuck like, I don't really want to give this up. That is not a good enough reason to not try to give it up because those feelings will lessen. They're not always going to be driving in the front seat. They're going to be in their trunk.

But they won't be driving you. So I just want to give hope to guys who are like, I don't actually want to give this up, but I do want to save my marriage. Because they do want to give it up and they don't want to give it up. Does that make sense?

It does make sense. And I think what I hear you saying also is that if the wife is loving to him, he's got something to lose. And the more loving she is, the more he's got to lose, which motivates him.

No. The thing is about love, this is where wives get in a pickle. And they think if I am gentle, non-confrontational, loving, sexually available, I will create an environment where he doesn't want to do it.

Now, this doesn't work. It's just like if your husband was addicted to crystal meth or heroin, you wouldn't say, well, I'm just going to create a loving environment and therefore he's going to want to stop. It doesn't work like that. You need to set up boundaries.

You need to set up those very clear guidelines of if you do this, this will happen. They need to feel the consequences. So the way you fight and the way you love is tough love. It's that tough love.

It's not the love that we want to give. We want to be sympathetic. We want to be supportive. We want to feel close to our husbands.

We want to instantly forgive them and be on their side. But part of this journey is distance and it's feeling cut off from your husband because you're having to do the tough love that he can't do for himself yet because his brain is not working correctly. You're having to do those decisions for him and letting experience those consequences.

So once you really understand that it really is a brain disease, just like any other addiction, then you start to approach it with that tough love attitude. But that also removes any feelings that I'm somehow responsible. And it's actually quite empowering for the wife because she understands her role now. I can see that.

That makes a whole lot of sense. It's tough love that motivates the husband to change. Let me ask you this. What are the statistics about pornography among Christian men?

What's the depth of the problem? We are very fortunate that in 2016 Josh McDowell Ministries partnered with Barna and they created this fantastic, very in-depth study called The Porn Phenomenon. I think they spent like $300,000 really getting the data that we need to be able to address this problem. And they found out that 79% of Christian men who attend evangelical church regularly using porn. He said that 55% of married Christian men look at porn at least monthly and one in ten looks at porn at least daily. Wow. Yeah. Over half of marriages.

It's massive. What do you say to those who say, well, you know, that's just men being men. I mean, no big deal. Yeah, and you do hear that a lot, don't you?

You really do. You know, that's men being men. That's just boys being boys. But Jesus was fully man. Was he lusting after other women and using pornography? Is that what it means to be a man? This is not what it means to be a man.

This is a temptation and my husband doesn't look at porn anymore. Many, many men in our recovery community don't look at porn anymore. They're men. They are, you know, they are the epitome in my eyes of being a man. They have integrity and honesty and courage and bravery and they're willing to share their vulnerabilities. They're willing to walk through difficult struggles. That's what it means to be a man.

Not to medicate your pain and your feelings. Yes, everybody is visually stimulated. That's how we're wired. God created us, you know, for sex.

He, you know, in a very specific way with certain parameters around because he knew the way that we were designed. We can get really bent out of shape when we start misusing our sexuality and when we start putting in these supernormal stimuluses like porn that hijack the way that we're wiring, that actually hijack the way that we were created to be. We were never designed for pornography. We're not designed to be able to imagine ourselves with hundreds of partners in one sitting.

When you're watching pornography, your body is physiologically responding as if you really were there. We were never designed for that. That's not how God designed it. And that's why we get in a pickle when we go outside how we were designed. Yeah. You use the word hijack that porn hijacks the brain.

Talk about that further. So deep in our brain, there's this primitive reward circuitry that produces dopamine and a cocktail of other feel good chemicals every time we do something that theoretically furthers our survival. So when we do an activity like eating or having sex, we are biologically rewarded. And this is what motivates us to repeat the behavior. The trouble is it doesn't always reward the right things.

It can be hijacked, as I've said, by counterfeit substitutes. Now, when you watch porn, your brain is tricked into pumping out the same feel good cocktail as it would when seeing or physically engaging with a real mate. However, if you were having a real romantic encounter, eventually you would feel satisfied. There's a natural built in off switch for natural pleasures like food and sex. Dopamine stops being produced.

Yeah, here's the thing. With Internet porn, there is no off switch. The dopamine just keeps on coming. This is why you can literally binge for days. All you need to keep the dopamine endlessly surging is click on something new, something more stimulating. And the key here is novelty or surprise. And in one session of porn, as I've said, you can click on hundreds of potential mating partners and flood your brain with dopamine.

There's no way that any one woman can compete with that experience. We have literally been hijacked. Yeah. Can the brain actually be healed from the effects of that porn? Yes. Yes.

Here's the good news. The brain is neuroplastic. It totally can rewire. We can renew our minds.

And I'm so glad you asked that question because this is why it's worth fighting for. I've got a husband now that I didn't even know existed that he didn't even know existed because this was an issue that developed when he was a teen. So he had no idea the potential of what he could achieve and how he could feel and the relationships that he could have while he was being enslaved to this horrific addiction.

There is tremendous potential for rewiring. As I said, it's always going to be that thorn in your side. So you're going to have to be careful and you're not going to put yourself in silly situations. But you can be free of it. It will no longer be driving you. I think our listeners would say what you just said gives hope to them because I think sometimes wives feel like, well, there is no hope.

It's never going to change. And that is one of the biggest lies of the devil because pornography is not even the problem. Pornography is the solution to a deeper problem that needs addressing in your husband, but also in your marriage. There's an intimacy disorder here. He's developed a coping mechanism that's prevented him from being authentic, which has prevented you guys from actually developing proper authentic vulnerability and intimacy. You cannot be there when someone is hiding and medicating and most often lying about this secret life that's going on. And also the wife is not often being authentic because she's so hurt and so confused and she's trying.

You've just got this. Everybody is hiding their true selves. So what recovery gives you is it forces you into learning how to be truly honest with one another and yourselves.

And that's a glorious thing. This is why all the women on my team, they can't wait to tell their stories because they just want to share that hope that this is not just about the same old marriage that you've got, minus the porn, because let's face it, you weren't that happy with the marriage anyway. They've got completely new marriages and they're so excited and hopeful and they just want to share that hope because we were designed for intimacy. We were designed to be naked, you know, emotionally, physically, spiritually in all aspects. And pornography gets in the way. But I see pornography addiction.

And the reason I'm doing this is that it's a really strange gift. And once you approach it like that, like this is the thing, this is the cancer that has forced us to really look at what's going on in our marriage. And there are brilliant programs out there and there are support networks that will help you journey along this path and get somewhere you didn't even imagine was possible.

Yeah, that's exciting and offers real hope. Talk about for a moment the devastation that oftentimes takes place in marriages and families regarding porn. Absolutely. And I'm glad you brought that up because quite often, because women are just trying to cope with what is going on and they are thinking that they can control it and that they are somehow responsible, they're so preoccupied with trying to fix it by dieting and trying new things and trying to stuff their feelings down and be more forgiving and just basically just not be authentic. They don't actually realize that the damage that it's doing to themselves and being with someone who is not only betraying you, but deceiving you about how they're betraying you is incredibly damaging and traumatizing. And they have done studies now that proven that wives, the symptoms, the physical manifestations of wives' trauma is exactly the same as veterans. It's the same PTSD. It's that traumatic because you literally feel like you're in crazy land. And then quite often, the guys actually turn around and they sort of gasp like you. They say, I haven't got a problem and if I've got a problem, it's actually that you've got a problem with it or this is your fault because you're not this or you nag me or anyone would understand why I do this.

And the wives think I'm going crazy here and they don't trust their intuitions and it is so devastating. And so part of the recovery for the wife is actually working through that trauma before she can even think about forgiving or trusting again. She's actually got to work through just how damaged she has been because I use the analogy of you're both in a car. He crashes the car.

It really doesn't matter who's crashed the car. You're both in it and you have been injured. You need to seek help.

You need to find people who can help you heal and recover. Does the pornography often lead to having affairs with other women or is that not normally the pattern? I think the statistic is it raises it like 300% because pornography addiction is progressive. It always escalates because when you're addicted to something, you become tolerant. We understand how this works with alcohol or hard drugs that whatever you're taking loses its effectiveness. You have to go harder or stronger and the same thing happens with pornography. And the way that you up your dosage is you either increase the duration of the time that you're using it or you go for something stronger, something more novel, something more taboo, something darker, perhaps interacting with somebody online, perhaps seeing somebody online. It doesn't mean necessarily they're going to act out with a real person and many, many, many porn addicts do not.

That's not part of their arousal template and they don't go there, but it does increase the likelihood. What if there's a parent listening today and they know that their son or daughter is involved in pornography? What would you say to the parent? I'm so glad that you said and daughter.

I'm really, really glad. Thank you for saying that because, yeah, this is a massive growing problem amongst girls as well. I would say, have you heard of Fight the New Drug? They are an amazing organization that make it so easy for you to start to have those difficult, difficult conversations. And if you've got younger kids, I'd say, have you heard of Protect Young Minds?

There's a fantastic podcast called Media Savvy Moms. There are all these resources out there that want to equip you and empower you to be able to take those steps because it's not a case of if your children see this. It's a question of when they're going to see it.

And it doesn't matter if your kid is an A grade student with lots of activities and friends and is very sociable and makes good decisions in the rest of their life. All teens are vulnerable to pornography. If you think that, you know, if you have reason to believe that they are struggling with pornography, that is something that they're hiding, you need to educate yourself, first of all. And you really need to think about how you're going to approach this because your most important tool in this is open communication.

Yes, there are things you can do. You can externally filter them. You can educate them to create an internal filter within their brains by using the resources like Protect Young Minds and Fight the New Drug. But the third thing is these open channels of communication. They need to be able to come to you and ask questions. They need to come and confess what they've seen. They need to know that you understand, you get it, you've had struggles of your own and that there are ways that you can work on this together, that you're going to help them because you just need to validate that this is a real struggle.

It's everywhere. They're dealing with stuff that we did not have to deal with and they don't need any judgment. They really need you to come alongside them and say, I totally understand why you're curious. It's totally natural and normal that you're doing this. However, this is going to be really detrimental to your future. This is going to stop you from having those relationships that you want to have. So we're going to work together and we're going to come up with a plan and all these resources really go through sort of family safety plans and technological advice to help you protect your kids the best.

But it really is your attitude that is most important. I would say that if this is a struggle in your marriage and you deal with it, you are better equipped than anybody else to deal with your children. And actually the children of the people in our recovery community are little warriors. They're little fighters. They're up there giving their own testimonies at age 12, at age 16, at age 18, because this is an open table conversation. This is what we talk about around the dinner table. And the kids say, we are so grateful that we can talk about this.

None of their friends talk about it. You are really empowering and equipping them. So even if you feel like, I can't face dealing this in my own marriage. This is too big.

This is too scary. Just think about your kids. Just think about your kids. Rosie, let's say that there is a husband listening right now who has said to his wife or is saying to the radio, yeah, I know this is a problem, but I'm not addicted. I don't want to do that anymore, but I'm not addicted. What do you say to that man? I'd say, have you tried to stop?

I think that would be the best indicator. Try and stop and see if you can. And if you can, great. Stop it. And if you can't, you're going to need help because you cannot do this on your own.

You really can't. And the reason you can't do this on your own is going back to the fact that it's an intimacy disorder. It's not about just white-knuckling it and saying, don't look at porn, don't look at porn, don't look at porn. It's about you have to replace it with something. Porn has been serving a really important function in your life. It has been helping you medicate all those uncomfortable feelings and deal with the stress in your life and also deal with happy things in your life, deal with anything in your life. That's the way your brain's been rewired. So you need to replace it with something, and what you replace it with is healthy intimacy with other guys.

This is what makes all the difference. Yes, a therapist is very, very, very important and can really make a difference, but you need to develop healthy, intimate relationships with other guys. You need to learn how to be authentic and vulnerable, and then you transfer those skills back into your marriage and that's what your wife's doing also in a group.

She's learning how to be challenged, how to challenge, how to set boundaries, how to validate her own instincts, all those good skills, and then you bring them back together. So you're talking about like a support group for the husband. After he's been to therapy, there needs to be follow-up and his openness with other men who are also struggling.

I would say that it needs to be at the same time. The model that my husband does and that a lot of therapists do is, yes, you see a therapist, but also you've got weekly groups where you are developing relationships with those guys and during the week you are making calls to those guys and you are taking calls from your guys because the way you get out of this is by walking in the light. That's it. That's the magic bullet. So when you feel tempted, you call somebody and you express all those horrible feelings like, I'm really mad. I really hate my wife right now. I'm really fed up with my boss. I really can't cope.

I'm depressed. I'm blah, blah, blah, and just vomit all that out at somebody. And somehow that takes away the pressure and you may act out. However, you then ring back up and go, I've just acted out. I'm walking in the light and they say, good job.

Thanks for sharing. They don't try and fix you. But the very act of just walking in the light weakens that bondage and that's what you learn so that you are never helpless. You are never, yes, you may be blindsided by lust, but there's always someone to call. Even in the middle of the night, you can leave a message on someone's phone if you can't get hold of somebody. There's always somebody to call. You are never on your own.

And that's one of the lies that needs to be broken. Like, I can't do this. I can't do this. I have tried so many times.

I have tried so hard and nothing works. And it's like, have you tried walking 100% in the light with other guys? And I've heard from guys and they said, yeah, my wife told me that this behavior was unreasonable for years, but it wasn't until I sat in a group of guys and they went, hey, knock it off. Actually, they listened and suddenly it made sense. And that's just how it works.

As much as we want to believe that we can somehow get our guys to understand how much it's hurting us and what they're doing is wrong, quite often they can't. Yet. That comes. That does come.

But not in the beginning. Rosie, I'm guessing that we have some wives listening today who are saying in their mind, I don't know if my husband's involved in porn, but I got this feeling that he is. What does a wife look for to find out if her husband is moving in that direction?

That's a super question. There are red flags inside the bedroom and outside the bedroom. And if pornography is an issue in your marriage, you know something's off in the bedroom. So guys go one of two ways. Either they become hypersexual, wanting more frequent sex, trying to pressure you into doing pornographic acts that they might have seen. And there's a bit of coercion going on and you feel pressured and uncomfortable. Or the other way that they go is they become sexually avoidant.

They withdraw. They have conditioned their brain to only be aroused by pornography. So they're ignoring their wives sexually. And this is devastating and so, so common. And when wives actually get in a support group and they go, they finally confess that actually their husband hasn't touched them for years. Half the other women go, oh yeah, me too.

And they go, really? And that's such a powerful moment of breaking the shame. And that's why I'm grateful that I'm here and you're allowing me to say this. Because I want to break that shame that if your husband is sexually avoiding you, it's not you. His brain has been hijacked, but there is hope.

He can rewire. And the thing is when the porn starts to drain out of their brain, when they start to sober up, their attraction comes back and they can be aroused by a real person, by the woman that they love. And women need to hear that outside the bedroom. Now I had no idea at the beginning of my journey that actually this affected outside the bedroom.

I didn't connect the dots. But very often because of the way that the brain responds to this highly artificial crazy stimulus, what it does is the brain produces this break-like chemical that basically dulls your pleasure receptors so that you stop responding to this crazy stimulus. So it basically numbs it. And that's why you need to escalate what you're using. But also this break-like chemical pushes down your baseline of happiness. So everything becomes a bit boring, a bit dull, a bit lackluster in comparison. And so this is why guys are appearing critical and distant and moody and resentful because they actually need to get a hit of their drug to feel normal.

And that is total bondage. So you've got a drug which is losing its potency, but you actually need to get it to feel normal. So if your husband, if you think what has happened to my husband? You know, he's not the man I married. He just seems like a completely different person.

He's just so angry or distant or critical and I can't put my finger on it because, you know, everything in his life is fine. You know, this could be the issue. Yeah. Those are extremely helpful things and they make sense.

And I think the wives that are listening will say, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. There are sort of practical things as well and I didn't mention those. Things like unaccounted for periods of time. Where is he? What's he doing?

Staying up late. And I would just say trust your instinct. If there are periods of time that you just think, I don't know where he is.

My spidey sense is going off. Trust your instincts. You know, that is the Holy Spirit talking to you. And many times wives have come forward and said things like, you know, I just had a dream, this recurring dream that he was having an affair.

And it turns out he wasn't having an affair but he was looking at pornography. It's like it just sort of seeps into you that there is something else going on. And just to trust, trust your instincts.

Even if you're told that you're imagining things and you're paranoid and you're nagging and you're critical, trust those instincts. Let me ask you this. What about the church? How do you think the church has responded, is responding to this tremendous need in our country? There are 7% of churches with a ministry are tackling pornography addiction. And I don't believe that the reason there's only 7% of churches with a ministry is anything to do with the church's willingness to tackle this topic or pastors' willingness to provide support.

Simply because people aren't coming forward. So statistically we've got 80% of guys in the pews. We've got a third of women now addicted. That's overall not just in the church.

So I think the numbers are slightly smaller for women but they are there. We've got these huge numbers of people addicted but they're just not coming forward. Now, the guys aren't coming forward because, yes, they're shame but there's also if you really are hijacked by pornography addiction, there's this condition going on called hypofrontality which is the same thing that you get in a car crash. And basically this is an impairment of the prefrontal cortex is functioning. You can't think straight. You're not making good decisions. So even though there's a part of you that is going, this is ruining my marriage. This is not the man that I want to be. This is getting in the way of the ministry. This is stopping me from being present with my kids. But it stops the pain.

I need to do this. It doesn't really matter. You're not making good decisions. So that's why they're not coming forward. And the reason the women aren't coming forward is because they simply don't know they have to. They think, oh, well, you know, unfortunately we do get told a lot of times at church that if we are sexually available more with our husbands, that will help the temptation. And if we could just provide this loving, graceful, supportive, forgiving environment that will somehow help him, help him feel better about himself and he won't need to do it. It's not true. Women need to be told.

They need to set boundaries. He's in trouble. He's drowning. Throw him a lifesaver.

Don't just stand there and wave at him. The approach that is normally taken in a church, although very noble and worthwhile, you know, we have these big conferences for guys where we have the designated addict who stands up and tells his story and then everybody sort of puts their hand up and says, yes, I struggle too. And then it stops. It's like this one-off event. We don't have this sort of weekly daily accountability of rigorous honesty with guys, which is what they need. That's how you're going to tackle it. You know, this is the biggest issue facing the church.

That's what Josh McDowell says. This is the biggest crisis. This is what I believe holding back revival. We are drowning in this stuff and we need to be tackling it on a weekly basis, not just a one-off where we have the one person who comes forward and tells their story. We really do need to normalize this, but even if we do normalize it, we need to raise up the women. We need to tell them that they play a pivotal, important role. They are the catalyst for getting their husbands into recovery.

My husband often says pretty much every guy who arrives in his office arrives with the footprint of his wife on his back because the wife is so desperate, she's reached a crisis point, she's on the verge of a nervous breakdown or a divorce, and she's just gone, enough. I want to educate her and empower her to stand up early and say, enough. We're going to do early intervention because I love you and I love our marriage too much to let this be our story and to throw this away because I was not willing to stand up and confront you on what is enslaving you. So I hear you saying that early confrontation is always better than waiting months or years. Well, it's a choice, isn't it?

I mean, it's inevitable. Porn is going to take your marriage down or you're going to stay in a really unhealthy, stagnant, dysfunctional, painful marriage. So you're going to confront it early, you're going to confront it late, or you're going to stay stagnant, you're going to stay stuck. I just plead with women, please educate yourself with why this is important that you do this really difficult step because it's hard, it's really hard to make waves in your marriage when everything's kind of looking okay.

Who wants to cause trouble when you don't need to? Please educate yourself and also get support because there is so much misinformation out there and you do need other women who are a little bit further down the journey to go, yeah, this is really hard, but you really are doing the best thing for him, for you, for your family, and we're here for you and we've got your back. And that's what the church should be doing. The church should be, you know, this should be our topic on every women's ministry schedule.

Why isn't it? This is what we're actually dealing with. You know, every time I speak, I have dozens of women coming up in tears going, I never knew that this wasn't normal. I never knew this wasn't normal.

And it breaks my heart and I just want to shout from the rooftops, this is not normal and this is not how it needs to be. So for pastors listening and hearing this or picks up this book, how do you hope it's going to impact the pastor? I hope it just helps him hear how much it hurts women because they did a study where they asked pastors, if another pastor came to you and said he was struggling with pornography, would you advise him to tell his wife? And 58% of them said, no, I wouldn't advise him to confess to his wife that he's struggling with porn. And that is the wrong answer. That is so the wrong answer. I mean, I understand it because it's like, well, what she doesn't know doesn't hurt her.

But that's not true. What she doesn't know is really hurting her and it's making her second guess herself and actually assume responsibility where it isn't warranted. So hopefully it's helping pastors hear that a wife is hurting. She is affected.

But also she has a crucial role to play in marriage to become one. And what pornography has done is put a dirty great hole in the boat. And if he's unable to fix it because his brain is out of action at the moment, he's hijacked by this addiction, she's going to be the one who she can't fix it, but she can say, hey, we've got a hole in the boat. We need some help.

Can someone come and help us? That's her role. Not to fix him, but to get him to somebody who can. What about the pastor who is himself involved with pornography? Yeah, and that's so hard.

That is so hard. And they have that extra layer of difficulty because there are double standards in the church where we all need a savior apart from our pastor who has to be perfect. And statistically one in 10 senior pastors are struggling and one in five youth pastors are struggling currently.

And where are my stats? Yes, so 36% of senior pastors say it sometimes hurts their relationships. So there's just a lack of information.

I feel like we're in smoking in the 50s. There's just this dearth of information about what it does to relationships, what it's doing to your brain and how you actually get out of there. So in 20 years' time we're going to know this stuff and we're going to realize the ramifications of letting a whole generation fill their brains full of this stuff. But at the moment it's down to us to educate each other.

But I'm going off topic, I beg your pardon. Your question was what does the pastor do? I mean the process is exactly the same, but he does have to be careful because there will be a large, maybe not a large, but there will be a proportion of his congregation who don't get it and think, well that's it, you can't possibly be in ministry because you have committed the ultimate sin, which is actually the sin that everybody is struggling with, which although it makes no sense, it's just kind of what happens. So they're going to have to be careful with who they tell, but they do need support. And I would say a pastor who tackles this comes out the other side and has transformation. Wow, his church will be on fire. His church will be incredible because of his bravery and his courage to actually tackle this issue that the vast majority of his congregation is struggling with. Yeah, his own authenticity sets the pace. Let me ask you this, once a person is willing to begin the road on recovery, typically how long does it take to walk through the recovery process before you get to the place where you are not involved in this?

That's a good question. Now all the literature says that it's a three to five year process, but before everyone goes, I can't hang around for three to five years, I would say that within six months, six to nine months, you are seeing big progress. You are seeing big change. There is something definitely changed in your relationship. We were ready to try for a baby after nine months, and there's no way I would have done that if I was not 100% convinced that he was on the right road and that we were going to be able to get through this. Because those early days, it's very, I mean, wow, it's a powerful time. It's a really powerful time because you're doing the big pieces, like you're doing a full disclosure and you're doing a period of celibacy and you're really revealing who you are to each other and to other people.

So there is tremendous momentum and progress in those early days. But it is a three to five year process because there are layers of stuff and it takes a long time for a wife to fully trust, to fully be able to feel safe because she's been traumatized. She might have her own issues to deal with. Some wives do, some wives don't. Some wives, it's strictly working through the trauma. Some wives like myself, I had a lot of codependency issues that I then had to acknowledge and face and work on, which was wow. I mean, what a gift to me that my husband's sex addiction actually helped me face my own stuff. I wasn't very grateful at the time, but now in hindsight, I'm tremendously grateful.

Yeah, right. How do you go about finding a good treatment program? Another great question. I would say please go to somebody who is experienced and qualified. You know, well-meaning counselors or pastors or anything may not have the experience and knowledge and skills to be able to deal with this very difficult addiction. It is extremely cunning and baffling, they call it, because a porn addict has the equivalent of an open bar in his head all the time. So you really do need someone who knows what they're doing in order to hold you accountable and equip you with the tools. Now, what you're looking for in a program is a level of rigorous honesty. Do they have to be completely honest past, present, going forward? Do they have to confess to their wife? Because there are programs out there where groups collude with secrets and, oh, you don't need to tell your wife, you just need to tell us in the group.

And I do not agree with that. If you've acted out, you need to tell the wife because she knows something's up, she's sensing it, and then she's doubting her own intuition. And also, it doesn't give her the opportunity to start putting in those consequences. If you're acting out and looking at this, I don't want to be intimate with you for a couple of weeks. That's respectful, giving her the information so she can make those choices, which will help her healing and also your own healing because if you've acted out, you need consequences or you're not going to get it. So rigorous honesty. And do they have, I would ask the questions, do you get people sober?

Because a group is only as healthy as its leaders. And if you've got a group of people struggling and sort of drowning and slipping all the time and not really getting sober, either join another group or you need to borrow somebody, borrow a leader from another group who has got a period of sobriety. In terms of professional certifications, there are CSAT, certified sexual addiction therapists.

And if you go to the International Institute of Trauma and Addiction Professionals website, ITAP, there you can search for a local certified sexual addiction therapist. And I would say that would be a good starting point. It's kind of difficult to get one who is also Christian, but they are out there.

They are out there. Rosa, your own experience, and then you're putting this in a book, and I think our listeners can tell that this book has a wealth of information. What do you hope this book is going to do for the wives who read it? I hope that chapter by chapter, those lies and misconceptions that have held them back are slowly dismantled and just melt away so that they feel empowered to pick up their sword and go forth into this battle, which is so worth fighting. But I just want to remind your listeners that they're not fighting on their own.

They are simply being obedient to God, and He is the one who will go with you and actually fight your battle for you. And that's so important. Well, Rosa, this has been, I don't want to say a delightful discussion. This has been an informative discussion because this is not an easy topic, and we don't have a lot of conversations like this. And I just want to thank you for being with us today. I want to thank you for writing this book, and I know that it's going to help those who will get the book and who will read it. So thank you for being with us today.

Thank you so much for having me. The other thing we've heard today is there is hope. And our hope for you in this conversation is that you have gained some tools to fight for love. That's the title of our featured resource at FiveLoveLanguages.com. Rosie McKinney is the author, and you can find out more about the book and her ministry at FiveLoveLanguages.com. And next week, the difference a dad makes in a child's life. Brian Loretz will talk about the four most important gifts to give your kids. A big thank you to our production team, Steve Wick and Janice Todd, Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.