Curtis & Jenny Solomon: Our Story: Sexual Addiction

One of the things that was missing was a lot of times in couples counseling, everybody would just turn to me and be like, okay, if we can get your problem resolved, then there won't be a problem. And almost no attention was given to Jenny and the pain that she was going through and the questions, the doubts, the insecurities, the things like that, they were going through her.

And that's where she realized like, I know I need help. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app.

This is Family Life Today. So we go to write Vertical Marriage and I map out, I'm going to write these five chapters, you write these five chapters. And on day one, it didn't go the way I thought.

Right. Well, I mean, you mapped them out. And then I got on my computer and I thought, okay, hmm, what do I feel like writing about? And so I started the chapter and it was called Dave's Neck Problem.

And it just started flowing. I'm like, okay, I'm going to write about this and this. And all I know is I'm on another laptop and another part, a friend gave us this big house and I look out and Ann's on the deck and she's like going crazy. I'm like, wow, what is she writing? I can't believe she sat into it. So I pull up. She didn't know I could do this.

I pull it up on my laptop to see. And I see this title, Dave's Neck Problem. I'm like, what is Dave's Neck Problem? I don't even know what this is.

We've never talked about this. And long story short, I think listeners probably maybe heard this story, but you know, it was about my struggle to turn my neck when a girl in a bikini went by in our first year of marriage, which I denied I even did, but it was all true. So I sit down day two to write a different chapter. And then I'm like, wait a minute, if she wrote Dave's Neck Problem and perspective, I'm writing Dave's Neck Problem, Dave's perspective.

And here's the thing about that. So I sort of tell my side of the story, but as I got about halfway through the chapter, I had this pause where I was like, okay, do I talk in this chapter about how I struggle with porn decades later? In other words, about year 10 or 12 of our marriage, my first thought was, no, this is one of those sins that you just keep to yourself. My second thought was, nobody writes about this in the Christian world. I'm going to be honest and see where it goes. When we sent it to our publishers, we thought those two chapters will never make it in the book, which is fine. They came back and said, those are two of the most helpful chapters in the book because this is an issue that needs to be talked about. And we're going to go there today, folks, just so you know, this is critical to understand and talk about.

We have a couple in the studio today with us, Curtis and Jenny Solomon, who have not only written about it, but they've been honest enough to say, we want to help people, so we're going to tell people our story. First of all, let me say, Curtis and Jenny, thank you for being here at Family Life Today. Welcome. Well, thank you for having us.

It's a pleasure to be here. Curtis wrote, redeem your marriage, hope for husbands who have hurt through pornography. And then Jenny wrote, reclaim your marriage, grace for wives who have been hurt by pornography. I honestly don't know if I've ever read a book for wives.

Is there anything out there, Jenny? There is not anything from a perspective of a wife who stayed in a marriage that I know of. Vicki Teede wrote a book that I did use for research, and she talks about a situation where she and her husband eventually did divorce. And so that was one of the impetuses for writing, is I wanted to say, what does this situation look like when there's reconciliation and healing, and hope that actually in Christ your marriage can be stronger on the other side of this difficulty? I would say that Dave and I have been speaking on marriage for probably— Thirty-five years?

Yeah, I would say thirty-five years. We're old. That's what that means. But I would say also, in the last seven years, this is the main focus that wives are coming to me about, where their husbands are struggling and they don't know what to do. But it's also, there's women that are struggling with it as well. And Dave, would you say the same is true for you? Oh, and you guys would know.

You've put some of the statistics in your book, but yeah, men come to me rampantly. I mean, it's gone from a day when I was a young boy and a teenage and even a twenty-year-old where you had to go find a magazine and you basically didn't do the work. It's like, I'm not going to do that.

I don't want to do that. But if it ended up in your lap, you struggle. Today, it's in your phone.

It's in your laptop. It's everywhere. So the problem's heightened. And now, you're a counselor. I mean, you do counseling, therapy, you teach at a seminary, you've got kids, so you're living in those worlds.

Do you agree? Is it just a day and age where this is pretty prevalent? Oh, it's massively prevalent. It's almost, I basically go into every situation and having worked in youth ministry where I don't think, has this person seen porn?

I assume everybody has. It's just how much of a struggle is it for each individual? Because it's, like you said, it's in everybody's pocket.

I just wrote a blog for the release of this book talking about how we need levels of accountability added back in. Because like you were saying, even decades ago, you had to look somebody in the face or talk to somebody to get illicit images to yourself. But nowadays, it's completely anonymous, you know, relatively, obviously, God knows. And it's everywhere. It's almost impossible to not see, especially in other places of the world where it's on advertisements. And the types of pornography people are getting into is getting darker and darker and darker.

It's unfortunately not a shrinking problem, but a growing one. So what's your story? Let's hear the Solomon journey. We met in seminary. I grew up in Arizona.

She grew up in Arkansas. We met in Kentucky. We both started at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary the same semester and started attending the same church. What made you both go to seminary?

What was on your heart? So I grew up in a home where I didn't hear the gospel. And friends from high school invited me to church. And I heard the gospel at youth group and responded and became a believer. And God just put a sense in my heart that he was calling me toward ministry. And so for the next several years, and I even in some ways still feel like I'm still working out what that means. You know, God, what's your call for me?

What does this look like? I think what I've come to now is that I'm not going to know until I get to heaven and look back and see what he's had for me. I think what he wants me to know is this next step and not worry so much about the grand picture that he's unfolding. But I went to college and I started out majoring in PE, which I loved. But along the way, I just felt this in my spirit, this tug, I guess, that PE was wonderful, but God wanted me to have more training in his word, more equipping. And so my sophomore year, I changed my major to philosophy and religion. So I got to study the Bible, ended up minoring in physical education because I still loved it so much. But when I reached the end of my college career, I really didn't know what was next for me.

But I thought, well, if God is calling me to ministry, the best thing that I can do is know his word better. And so my parents had told me at that point that I was an adult. They helped me with college and they said, once you're done with college, you're on your own.

I didn't have any money. So I applied to several seminaries and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky gave me a scholarship. And so that's where I ended up. And Curtis and I met there our first semester.

Curtis, how did you end up there? When I was 14, I really felt the Lord calling me to full-time vocational ministry. And I thought that was going to be as a senior pastor preaching all the time. And from that moment forward, just put my eyes toward Bible college and then had no intention of going to seminary. I had a lot of those stories about seminary and cemetery.

You know, that's where you go for your soul to die. But in my senior year at college, the one, the more I learned, the more I realized I didn't know. And two, the president of the college got up and said, hey, some of you will not have the opportunity to go to seminary. And you just need to get out there and start doing what God's called you to do. But for others of you, the opportunity is there.

And if you can become a more polished vessel for God to use, do it. And I was like, all right, Lord, I'm going to seminary. And started looking at a few different schools, kind of wanted to diversify my education a little bit. And a lot of my professors pointed at different schools and different strengths. And I knew biblical counseling was central to what I wanted to do and to study. And actually one of my counseling profs said, well, if you want to be a pastor, not just a preacher, where you really are full orb and ministering to the whole person, go to Southern. I was like, all right, that's where I'm going. Not knowing you're going to meet your wife there. No, that was probably the best. No, not probably. That was the best thing to come out of seminary.

No doubt about it, bar none, the best. So you met the first semester. Did you date a long time or you get married pretty quick or what happened? So we met probably in August, September, and we got married that April 5th of next semester. Oh, wow. So you're married students in seminary. Yeah.

Everybody who's married thinks it's better for the single students and all the single students think it's better for the married students. Yeah, that is what we did. So then what happened after school? Immediately after, long story short, the Lord led us to a ministry where I was going to be evangelizing, discipling legislators and legislative staff in the state capital of Arizona in Phoenix.

So we went back to Phoenix. That ministry, through a number of things, kind of imploded. I did one session with the legislature there doing Bible studies with the staff and legislators once a week. And there was some sin in the leadership, the leader ministry imploded. And we're like, God, we just moved across the country from all of our friends and support back in Kentucky.

Why did you bring us here to kind of see this thing devolve? And then he took us to a church in California in a small town called Atascadero, where I was an associate pastor. And they had had a one year gap between guys they're looking for. And we're like, okay, Lord, maybe this is why we were temporarily in Arizona for a year. And that's where we went and we're there. That's our son turned one right after we moved there, our oldest. And our second son was born while we were there.

And then about five, six years into that ministry is when I got the call to do the ministry that I'm doing now, being the executive director of the Biblical Counseling Coalition. So that's a long story short. I joke with people in my life when Arizona, California, Kentucky, Arizona, California, Kentucky, because that's where we are now. And Jenny always says, let's not move anymore, but if we do, let's skip Arizona and go straight to California. Absolutely.

That's why I want to go back if we go anywhere. Had you guys, Jenny, had you guys had any conversation before you got married about pornography, about your past? Did any of those things come up? Yeah, they did. Yeah, they did come up.

Probably in marriage counseling and other places like that. And just too, I had struggled with pornography actually for a long time. The first exposure I had to pornography was actually when I was about eight. And I was at my neighbor's house and those were the people, my parents both worked. So he and I were together all the time, especially in the summers, no school, hanging out.

And pornography would be a pretty prevalent part of that time. Did you experience shame during that time at all? Oh, absolutely. I was just torn because I grew up in a Christian home and I had made a profession of faith when I was a young kid, was involved in Awanas. I mean, I was externally looked great, memorizing scripture, youth leader, all this other stuff. But in the background, there was this just constant struggle with porn that was going on really my whole life.

So it was a secret. Yeah, until I confessed to my youth pastor that one time. And I think that was one of the things that helped me actually even be able to write this book is his willingness to share that he struggled was what enabled me to open up to him that I struggled. So when we met, I told Jenny, like, just so you know, this is a part of my past, something I've dealt with.

And she kind of asked me to just like, make sure this is not going to be a problem ever again. Because I don't, I'm not sure I can handle this. Jenny, what did you feel when he shared that with you when you were before you were even married? Yeah, I mean, we were 21 or 22 at the time, and I was so naive. And I had no experience with sexual sin. And so it just really wasn't on my radar, personally, but my dad had had an affair. And so my first real exposure to sexual sin was at age 15, when I found a letter that the woman he was having an affair with had written to him. And I had a panic attack when I read it.

And so that just started for me a long string of having panic attacks pretty regularly, and especially related to anything that had to do with sexual sin or things like that was a real trigger for me. So when he shared his experience, I said, I forgive you. It's not that, but I just need for you to know I can't handle that. So if you can't promise me now that that's never going to be an issue, we probably aren't right for each other, which was a very naive thing to do.

That's definitely not advice I would give to anyone, but that's what I said at age 22. Did you say, okay, I'm done? Oh, of course.

Yeah. Because you thought this was in my past. Well, I thought, yeah, I thought it was in my past, had no desire to go back to that, didn't want it. I think we have this idea in our minds, too, like once I get married and can actually have sex, then this won't be an issue. And did you think that, too, Jennie? I did. I think there was a sense in which I thought that it just wouldn't be a problem.

Our marriage will solve the whole problem. Yeah. So what happened? So it didn't last super long. And actually, it was an issue again for me a little bit in our engagement, which was short, as you just heard. Yeah. But I didn't come clean, wasn't honest about it.

So it was a secret. Yeah. Were you fearful? Oh, absolutely. Did she walk away?

Yeah. Well, I thought she would. Didn't know for sure. But that's what I thought, especially based on the conversation we had. So I kept it secret until after we were married. And I remember the first time where I came clean in our marriage. But it was, I know, devastating for her. Do you remember the first time, Jennie?

Maybe vaguely. I do remember during that season, there were confessions and just being crushed by them when they happened. Sometimes we'd reach out and try to get some counseling a few different times. Sometimes years and years would go by, and then something else would come up. And a lot of times there would be an accidental exposure.

By God's grace, a lot of times we're not seeking this out. But I was in the military. And so guys would have stuff around even in the office. And I was in a lockdown facility by myself with nobody else around and cable. And guys would bring in magazines, you know, it was just right there in your face. And I would give in to those temptations, try to hide it for a while, try to buck up and just overcome it and say, I can get over this, I can do it by myself, all those things that we tell ourselves.

And then conviction again, confession, more counseling, other help, those kind of things. And Jennie, here you are. You're living your nightmare. Absolutely. Did you feel betrayed?

I did. I felt betrayed. And I mean, I think there's a sense in which anytime there's a betrayal, you feel crushed. But also, I think because there were lies before we were married, I felt like there was a sense in which my agency was taken away from me. You know, would I have married him if I had known? And so especially in those early years of marriage, when he was in the military and going through that cycle, it would come to my mind often, would I have married you? This isn't even fair to me that now I have to deal with this.

I'm under the weight of this. And I don't even know that we would be together, you know, if it had been exposed earlier than it was. And did you feel like, okay, this has happened? And I know that Dave used to say, like, it'll never happen again. And at first I believed him, like, okay, that's something in the past. I actually believed me too.

Yeah. At first, I really thought I can win this. It's one and done. And then after a while, it would happen again and again. And I thought, no, like, I'm not even going to believe you anymore or get my hopes up that this will be conquered. I've felt consumed by it.

This is my life now. And I responded horribly. You know, I know that looking back now, and we'll talk more about this, Jennie, but I thought, is this me?

Is there something wrong with me? There's so many doubts, fears, insecurities. And man, I wrestled with that. And I think a lot of women do, of wondering, is this my fault? And then I would go to like, well, of course, it's my fault. You know, look at me.

You know, I'm sure that I'm not enough. And so it took a long time for me to get out of that cycle of anger, of trust. Did you struggle with trust?

I did, absolutely, yeah. There was a point in our marriage at which I just stopped asking how he was doing, because one, I didn't know if I would believe what he said, and two, I thought, well, if I'm not going to believe him, what's the point of even asking? And then three, I didn't know if I was in a place emotionally where I could handle the truth if he wasn't doing well and he shared it with me. So it's not that I didn't care. I still wondered all the time how he was doing, but I just didn't want to ask. So how in the world did you dig out of this?

It sounds pretty dismal. I mean, it had been over a decade in the marriage, and we were struggling, and she actually found a note. I had gone to a retreat of sorts and really been convicted and wrote down a note to myself, like I need to come clean to my accountability friend.

So she found this note, and she comes down, throws it in front of me, and says, what's this about? And I said, well, I mean, I've been struggling, and I haven't been forthright with my accountability partner or you. Within days, she just stopped talking to me and said, you need to find me a counselor, and we're not talking until you do. And we got probably the best counseling we've ever gotten at that point, and a lot of people coming alongside us to encourage and just really, really, really cutting off access.

And that's one of those things where people ask the question like, how did you climb out of this or how did you get over it? And I think sometimes we have an expectation of what faithfulness looks like. I would say in one sense I'm not over it, but we're working really hard to maintain faithfulness by cutting off access, having accountability relationships, really mostly pursuing the Lord and just growing in adoration for Him, because that's just like any addictive type of behavior. A lot of times we're going to those things to give us something that only God can give.

And so if we're not growing in genuine love and closeness with Him, all the other stuff, it has to be all of these things combined and just daily, weekly, monthly, moving forward towards Christ, towards each other and away from those things. Curtis, did you get counseling on your own as well as couples counseling? Yeah, we both got some counseling on our own. I mean, you had to find Jennie a counselor. She laid down the law. Yeah, she laid down the law.

Get me a counselor. By the way, that's great. And she was clear. It was for her, not for us. She was very clear.

I need help. Anybody who counseled us, please don't hear us saying you did a bad job. Like one of the things that was missing was a lot of times in couples counseling, everybody would just turn to me and be like, okay, if we can get your problem resolved, then there won't be a problem. And almost no attention was given to Jennie and the pain that she was going through and the questions, the doubts, the insecurities, the things like that. They were going through her.

And that's where she realized like, I know I need help. We'll hear what kept Jennie from divorcing Curtis in just a minute. But first, Curtis and Jennie have two books available. The first is Redeem Your Marriage, Hope for Husbands Who Have Hurt Through Pornography. And secondly, Reclaim Your Marriage, Grace for Wives Who Have Been Hurt By Pornography. You can get your copies at familylifetoday.com or by calling 800-358-6329.

That's 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Okay, look, I get it. Some people aren't the biggest fans of the kind of decorations and things that start going up this time of year. But what if you could share the gospel while carving out a pumpkin?

Well, you can with Family Life's latest free resource. It's called Gospel in a Pumpkin. It's a free download with activities, pumpkin face stencil sheets, and a guided script to help your kids learn about what matters most while you carve your jack-o-lanterns this year. It's a great chance to shine some light in the darkness.

You can download Gospel in a Pumpkin for free today at familylifetoday.com. And you know, resources like this are only made available because of like-minded, dedicated partners like you. You can give and help families this week at familylifetoday.com or when you call with your donation at 800-358-6329.

That's 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. All right, now here's Anne and Jennie on finding hope when all looked lost and divorce seemed likely. So Jennie, that last counselor that you found, what was different with this person for you?

I think going into it where I was emotionally was hopeless because I think at that point, the day I found the note in the car, I thought, this is never going to end. And I don't want to divorce him, but I think I will if I don't get some help. And so I need someone that's going to tell me, how can I love Jesus?

How can I stick with him and bear with this? And I think what the counselors did that was so wonderful is we certainly talked about reconciliation. We certainly talked about forgiveness. But the first thing they helped me do is come up with an accountability plan that I was comfortable with that actually was covering all the bases and the problems that I was seeing and saying, you have the right to insist on this. Like, his body belongs to you. So you need to go to him and say, these are the things you're going to do. And then I think once they gave me that freedom to use my voice and have some agency and say, I'm not okay with the way things have gone. We are dragging this out of the closet and into the light.

I don't care if you want to or not. I think then I was able to hear the other things about the reconciliation and the forgiveness and the bitterness and anger that had built up in my heart. And then I think once we got through some of that and our relationship was growing and he was showing repentance and those things, then I was able to move even further in and say, like, what about those panic attacks that really sometimes are about him but really are about things that happened even before that with your dad? Yeah, we'll hear lots more tomorrow from the Wilsons when they're joined again by Curtis and Jenny Solomon to talk about the importance of remaining an ally to your spouse. Like we say at our weekend to remember, your spouse is not your enemy. I know that's easier said than done, but we'll dig into that even more so tomorrow. On behalf of David Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.