Fight the New Drug (00:00)
Well, Jeremiah, thank you so much for being here with me today. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what life looks like for you?

Jeremiah (00:07)
Yeah, so my name is Jeremiah Light. I’m a husband. Me and my wife, Sarah, have been married for a little bit over a year now. Our one-year anniversary was in May. And I’m also an expecting father. We are about three months pregnant right now. So that is, thank you, that is something that we are very excited about.

Fight the New Drug (00:22)
Congratulations.

Jeremiah (00:27)
And I would also describe myself as someone who is a lifelong learner. I’ve always been interested in reading. I’ve always been interested in reading wisdom literature, especially ancient philosophy. And I’m really passionate about fitness too. I enjoy going to the gym. So I would just describe myself as somebody who is committed to improving himself in all aspects of life, both mentally and physically. And also write a little bit on the side on my Substack. That’s something that I also started doing this year.

Fight the New Drug (00:54)
Awesome. Well, thank you for being here with us today. And we are here to talk a little bit about your personal story. So can you share how you were first exposed to pornography and what do you remember about that experience and how it impacted you?

Jeremiah (01:08)
I was first exposed to pornography very early on when I was about eight or nine. It was just something that happened with a quick pop-up whenever I was on the internet at a very young age. But I didn’t start seeking it out, actively seeking it out, until I was about 14 or 15 years old. I had very good parents and a good family. They instilled values like internet safety into me at a very young age. I understand that 14 or 15 is kind of a late start, especially in this digital age with pornography.

I have my family to thank for that, but ultimately, I was exposed to it willingly around 14 or 15. That was because I had friends at school that I had overheard talk about. They talked about how good it felt and what a good experience it was for them. So I decided to give it a try, so to speak. And after I sought it out for the first time, at first I was extremely guilty. It went against a lot of values that I was raised with, but it wasn’t a guilt that

I would say move me to change. Those values weren’t values that I had really accepted for myself. They were kind of instilled into me, certainly, but I never really grasped the importance of them. So it wasn’t a guilt that made me want to stop. So I largely consumed pornography throughout high school, guilt-free, as a result of that.

Fight the New Drug (02:24)
Yeah. And as you moved through high school, what role did porn play in your life? You said you were kind of guilt-free, but was it something you saw as a problem at all in high school?

Jeremiah (02:36)
I would have saw it as maybe a bad habit, but not exactly something that I was desperate to stop. You smoke one cigarette every once in a while and it’s not quite an addiction, it’s just kind of a bad habit. And that’s how I would describe my relationship to pornography. Whenever I was in high school, I did it once every few days, once a week, and I wasn’t binge watching, staying up all night or anything like that. It was just something that kind of happened whenever I was bored or needed to fall asleep or something like that. I wouldn’t quite describe it as a…

addiction at that point. Certainly a problematic habit, it hadn’t taken control of my life or anything like that.

Fight the New Drug (03:13)
And was that something that felt pretty common among your peers, your experience with pornography?

Jeremiah (03:19)
Yeah, certainly. Pretty much every guy I was friends with, it was something that we just accepted that it was a part of life. It was something that happened. I played basketball, and in the locker room, it was just kind of something that we accepted as normal. It happened.

Fight the New Drug (03:34)
Yeah. And tell me about when you got to college, did things change? What did your relationship with pornography look like?

Jeremiah (03:44)
So I’ve actually thought a lot about this time period in hindsight. I’ve done a lot of autopsies on it because it was a very consequential time in my life. I would say that this is when my relationship with pornography became very problematic. And I still think about, was it pornography that caused these problems? What were these problems that caused me to search porn out more? Was it a little bit of both? But I do know that there were certainly some negative things happening around this time of my life.

First of all, my family is from West Virginia, and the college that I went to was in South Carolina. So, all intents and purposes, I was completely isolated from my family. Still called, still texted, still FaceTimed. I still kept in touch with them, but it wasn’t the same as having them physically there, if that makes sense. And I went to a very small college, so I actually did not have a dorm mate or a roommate, anything like that.

I had a dorm room all to myself, so I had a lot more alone time than most people have. Whenever they start going off to college, that certainly fed into it, I would say. And a lot more stresses that, or stressors, I should say, that I hadn’t really encountered up until this point. And they were things that I wasn’t really adequately prepared to deal with. Things like being responsible for my own studies, work study on campus. I had to make a car payment, so I also worked a job outside of campus, definitely a lot of stressful situations piling on top of another. And as a result of that, my pornography consumption, it didn’t skyrocket, but I started to watch it more while I was there. It went from every other day to every day, multiple times a day, and then before I knew it, by the time I got to, I believe it was November of my first semester, I’m staying up all night to watch pornography. I’m losing sleep. I’m calling out work, I’m missing out on dates with my current girlfriend and now my future wife. I’m calling out of classes. So it was when I got to college that things very bad. I would describe my pornography as compulsive by this point.

Fight the New Drug (05:53)
Yeah, it sounds like it escalated rather quickly. Did you notice an escalation or a shift in the type of content that you were consuming?

Jeremiah (05:57)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, certainly. Not initially, but over time as the years went on because I would say that that pattern of escalation definitely continued for years and it wasn’t something that got better until fairly recently within this past year. So this habit of escalation continued over a period of several years. And during that time, at first, the shift was subtle, and

At first, it just went from, you’re looking at provocative images, provocative videos of just one person. And then it went from that to Pornhub and some of the videos that you can find on there. And then once I actually got to watching the videos that they released on Pornhub, I would say that the escalation took place rather quickly. Rather quickly, I found myself watching content that completely disagreed with my own personal values and even my own.

I don’t want to get too much into it, but videos that involve humiliation, both humiliation on part of the guy and the girl. I watched a lot of videos where the woman is obviously much younger than the man. It’s nothing illegal, but videos that play into that sort of fantasy that people have, unfortunately. And then by the end of it, I found myself watching porn that completely went against ⁓ even my own attractions. I’m a straight man, and I found myself watching gay porn.

And this was extremely confusing for me, as you can imagine. because I knew pretty much the moment I hit puberty that I was straight, that I liked girls. And I understand that some people are gay, they are bi, and that’s who they are, and I think that’s beautiful. But I knew that that wasn’t me. I remember what it was like whenever I first started becoming attracted to women, and never once had I become attracted to dudes and even as I was watching this content I never found myself becoming attracted to men it was like my pornography consumption became completely out of touch with what I actually liked in real life and that was particularly distressing and even confusing I just couldn’t understand why I was watching content that I knew I would never want to act on in real life and looking back it’s you know the content that I started out with it just wasn’t exciting to me anymore I needed something new. I needed something more stimulating, and it just led me down that path.

Fight the New Drug (08:32)
You know, we know from research that porn habits do tend to escalate and over time, individuals tend to seek out more extreme content, including things that, you know, they never could have imagined themselves being interested in at first. And that is something that’s part of the escalation for many people. Did you notice that over time, your compulsive habit with pornography was something that was starting to impact other areas of your life?

Jeremiah (09:01)
Certainly. I had subscribed to a particular belief set about myself that was very harmful around the time that this habit started escalating. I believed myself to be very, very broken in a way, very incapable of doing things right. And that definitely fed into the habit, but once the habit just blew out of control, ⁓ it definitely fed into that. had a very, very low view of myself by the end of it.

So I did notice that, outside of that, I would say that there were a lot of problems that I didn’t notice until I tried to quit. It’s almost like when you’re in a toxic relationship and you know it so you get out of it, but you didn’t really realize just how bad things were until you got out of it. That was kind of what my relationship was like with porn. It really took me taking a conscious effort to stop before I really saw just how bad it was.

Fight the New Drug (09:57)
Yeah. What were some ways that your habit, your pornography consumption, impacted your romantic relationship with your now wife who you were dating at the time?

Jeremiah (10:09)
So romantic relationships prior to her I would say were largely not impacted just because it wasn’t a full-blown compulsive habit. I would say just something I did every once in a while. Most of the time, I didn’t even consider it important enough to mention. That was just how inconsequential it was. So before my wife, it really didn’t cause many problems but I met my wife while I was starting to escalate. So it did impact her. And our relationship in a way, like I said, there were times that I slept in through dates because I had stayed up all night to watch porn. was canceling dates. She didn’t know why I was doing that at the time. Unfortunately, I actually lied to her about it. She didn’t find out that I was watching pornography until we were married. So I had told her shortly in our relationship that I had left it behind. So, unfortunately, the full brunt of it didn’t start to impact her until we got married because that’s when she found out that I had in fact not given up this habit. But even before that, before she knew 100%, she certainly suspected that things were off. You know, our first year of marriage, we weren’t having a lot of intimacy together, we weren’t having a lot of sex, and that’s very confusing in your first year of marriage, that’s not what you expect. And then she definitely had a lot of questions about that, and that was a particularly distressing time for her and for me. So it impacted us in many ways.

Fight the New Drug (11:38)
Yeah. And was porn ever something, obviously she didn’t know you were consuming it until after you were married, but was porn something you ever discussed with her while you were dating or engaged?

Jeremiah (11:48)
It was something that, unfortunately, I lied to her about. I believe it was a few months into our relationship I told her that I had left it behind. I had stopped. That wasn’t true. But I didn’t want her to know, and I didn’t really have bad purposes in that. I knew that it would be very hard for her to know that I was watching porn in our relationship. So I think I went about it in the wrong way but I lied to try to protect her in a way. I denied myself the help that I needed and also set her up to be really hurt when she did find out I was lying to her but ultimately, I do believe I was trying to protect her in a way whenever I told her that. That doesn’t justify it but I didn’t have any malicious intent in not telling her.

Fight the New Drug (12:32)
And that’s a really common thing that we hear is a lot of individuals who have a compulsive pornography habit think like, when I get married, I just won’t do it anymore. Is that something you kind of experienced that you just thought, ‘well, I’ll just be able to kick the habit and then we’ll move forward’?

Jeremiah (12:42)
Yes, certainly. I told myself once I get in a sexual relationship, I’ll stop, and I’ll be able to stop. I didn’t realize that my addiction got so bad that I wasn’t even really desiring sex. I was just desiring porn. And I didn’t really realize that until we got married and I wasn’t really looking forward to or excited about sex. And then that’s what it took me to realize that. I realized then that the whole idea of I’ll just keep doing this until I’m in a sexual relationship, that is so counterproductive, at least in my personal experience it was.

Fight the New Drug (13:23)
Yeah. And you mentioned in your first year of marriage, you didn’t have a lot of intimacy. Were there other ways that you noticed that kind of having this secret was affecting your relationship?

Jeremiah (13:34)
Certainly, I found it lot easier to lie to her because I lied to her about this one thing and I had to keep lying to maintain it. I found it lot easier to lie to her about other things. In hindsight, it’s almost kind of scary just how easy it was for me to lie to her about so many things as a result of this. And certain, I don’t want to say trust issues, but it was definitely harder for her to trust me in this time because she would see something on my iPad or on my computer or my phone that was a little bit suspicious and she would ask about it and I would come up with some excuse while that’s not what it looks like and she would buy it but I could tell it took a lot out of her to keep believing me over and over again so we definitely had lots of issues when it came to trust. That was a big problem for us at that time.

Fight the New Drug (14:22)
Yeah. Can you walk us through what happened when your wife found out about your porn use and what that moment was like for you?

Jeremiah (14:31)
Yeah, so she found out it would have been in January of this year, January 2025. And it was in the morning before we went to work. We both used to work at Chick-fil-A together, at the same Chick-fil-A. It was kind of convenient. And in the morning, we were getting ready for work. And I can’t remember exactly why. I think it was a college assignment or something like that. I had asked her to go get my iPad and check it, and bring it to me. And she went and got it. And I… I had always tried to be very diligent about closing tabs and making sure I made it look like I had been absolutely clean with my internet use but I hadn’t done a very good job this time apparently, because she saw something that was on my iPad that related to pornography. Well I didn’t know that she had seen this so she came back in the bedroom and she wasn’t accusatory or anything she just asked me if I was still struggling with porn and I actually started getting angry with her for even asking it was very strange. knew I was lying to her. I had no good reason to be frustrated with her for asking. I knew in the back of my mind that I was continuing to watch porn, I was just… I abandoned all rational thought in a sense. I was still angry with her for even asking me about it. And as I got increasingly frustrated, she basically just said, well then why is this on your iPad? What does this mean? And I don’t know how else to say it, but it was like the air just came out of the room. I realized, oh my gosh, I’m acting crazy right now. And I eventually had to confess to her that I had been watching pornography pretty much from the moment I met her into now. And it took me a while to even get that out. I remember us sitting in our bed and I was silent for the longest time because I didn’t even know how to tell her. I wanted to soften the blow as much as I could. I just did not know an appropriate way to say that in a way that wouldn’t rock her world. And she was distraught. She was very upset. And I believe she was upset because of what pornography meant. I’m looking at other women and giving a part of myself that truly shouldn’t belong to her. She was certainly upset about that. But more than anything, I know she was upset that I lied to her about it for so long, that I didn’t trust her and that I let that trust between us just evaporate. It was a very humbling moment. It was a very devastating moment, but it was a moment that, unfortunately, was necessary for me to be able to make the recovery that I needed to make.

Fight the New Drug (17:13)
Yeah, and how did her reaction or response to finding out this information, how did that influence your next steps?

Jeremiah (17:25)
So at first, the first knee jerk reaction that I had was really one of shame and humiliation, I would say. That wasn’t necessarily a healthy response, but it was the first response that I had. I just couldn’t believe that I had let it get this bad. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t reach out for help sooner. I couldn’t believe that I had hurt her this bad. I truly hurt because of how much I had hurt my wife in that moment.

I also was moved to stop largely because I saw how much it hurt her. I still remember the look on her face, the look on her eyes, and just the tone of her voice whenever she said some of the things she did. She wasn’t mean to me. She was just hurt. And just thinking about how much I hurt her, that made me want to stop more than anything else. It was like a wake-up call, a moment of clarity. I truly saw the consequences of my actions in a way that I had never seen before. It’s one thing when you notice you’re losing sleep, you’re missing out on meals, you’re calling out of work. It’s one thing to notice that like I was, but it’s a completely different thing to see the person you love the most just breaking down in front of you as a result of what you’ve done. So that was the main driving force in my decision to make a conscious effort to stop.

Fight the New Drug (18:49)
Yeah, it’s almost like it was easier for you to justify if you saw some of the negative impacts, but they were only affecting you, how you could see lack of sleep or whatever that was. And you could kind of justify your way through that. But then once you saw the impact.

Jeremiah (18:58)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s like when you see the consequence of your action on another human being, it’s like the stakes are raised almost, least in my experience.

Fight the New Drug (19:09)
Yeah.

And what did your early steps toward recovery look like? I mean, I know that you mentioned that was just earlier this year, relatively recently, but can you walk us through how you began to approach healing?

Jeremiah (19:19)
One of the first things I did was I realized within the first few days that I didn’t want to just stop watching porn. I wanted to improve myself all around as a person. It seemed to me counterintuitive to just say, okay, I’m going to just go cold turkey on this thing that has dominated my life and I’m not going to replace it with anything else. That didn’t seem like anything that was really going to be sustainable for me.

So very early on, I realized I don’t just need to get rid of this bad habit. I certainly do need to get rid of it, but I need to replace it with better things. I need to develop myself as a person. And also wanted to educate myself on all the harmful effects of pornography. After I had a couple of days to process it, I realized some of the negative consequences that I had in my life, but I really wanted to inform myself. And that’s actually how I discovered Fight the New Drug and organizations like you guys was in that time of research.

Fight the New Drug (20:24)
Were you surprised when you found how much research there was about the harms of pornography? Were you like, my gosh, I can’t believe I never knew about this?

Jeremiah (20:31)
Yeah, certainly. In a weird way, I almost felt vindicated because I had noticed a lot of these patterns in myself and just thought, this is just me, I’m messed up or I’m alone in this. But I saw that a lot of things that I’ve been going through like escalation, both in content and in time, I noticed that I’m not alone in this. So was actually a very vindicating and almost comforting experience in realizing that I wasn’t alone, but also that there wasn’t anything necessarily wrong with me. This is just what happens ⁓ in some cases when you watch a lot of pornography.

I also just wanted to understand both what led me to this moment. How did I get here? How did I let it get this bad? But also, what do I do now? What steps I need to take in the future? So I definitely spent a lot of time reflecting about that There was one day in particular that I still remember because of how consequential it was but I actually took the day off work to just go to Starbucks, you know get in a public place not come along with my technology. I’m still trying to overcome this, but I went to Starbucks and just put some ambient music in my headphones and just thought for the longest time about where I was and what I had done both to myself and to my wife and what I wanted to do about it. That was actually a very consequential experience. It wasn’t a full 180 and everything didn’t just fix the moment I took a sip of that coffee at Starbucks, but it definitely was a step in the right direction really getting that time and getting that space to reflect on what I wanted to do about what had happened.

Fight the New Drug (22:11)
Yeah. And you also explored things like mindfulness or philosophy as part of your recovery process. Tell us a little bit about how you decided to do that.

Jeremiah (22:17)
Yeah, so it started out really as a quest for taking care of myself. I realized that it had been so long since I did something just for myself in that moment. In a way, I was doing pornography for myself. I say that in quotation marks because it wasn’t something good for myself. But I really let this thing destroy myself, destroy my sense of self-worth, of purpose, and even my own dignity. And it started out as a quest to take some of that back, to take care of myself and to do something that I believe was good for me. I heard a lot of people talk about and bring out research about just how good mindfulness meditation could be for you. It could make you less impulsive. It could make you more present in the moment. And that was what I wanted. So I decided to just give it a try. And once again, it wasn’t a quick fix, something that you do and everything suddenly better, but it definitely helped as I grew to a better understanding of mindfulness and meditation. I was able to, whenever an urge or craving hit, I was able to take a step back and realize it for what it was. It was just a cue. It was just an appearance in my brain. It wasn’t something that was literally pulling me that I had to obey. It wasn’t a command. It was just an appearance in consciousness. And that was a really big help for me in making that break between the urge and then doing. It was all my life up until this point. The moment a craving hit, I was already on my way to look for pornography. So anytime that cue came to my mind, that was just immediately associated with doing something about it. But once I came to a good understanding of mindfulness meditation, I was able to get to a place when I could realize that cue for what I was and just stop and breathe for a second before acting out on it. So mindfulness was a big help for me and a big step in the recovery process. And so was ancient philosophy. I had mentioned that I held to a lot of beliefs that were harmful for myself and that definitely exacerbated my pornography use. And ancient philosophy in a way was really how I dealt with that, how I started disbelieving a lot of those lies about myself. At this point, I believe myself to be utterly powerless over everything that happened to me. And I also believe that I was broken, I was flawed, that there was truly something that was inherently wrong with me. And I was able to fix those beliefs. I realized that I certainly wasn’t perfect. I had done a lot of harmful things to myself and to my wife and to probably countless other people around me.

Deep down inside, I’m still a good person. I care about my wife. I care about myself. I care about my friends. I care about humanity at large. So what I have done is not a true extension of who I am. I don’t need to identify with that. I don’t need to identify with my mistakes. Deep down inside, I care about people. I love people. And that’s what I need to identify with. I was able to stop believing those very harmful things about myself. And I was also able to take matters into my own hands. ⁓ I came across Stoic philosophy and I loved it. It talks about one of the main teachings of the philosophy is that you don’t control external things. You don’t control even the things you did in the past. You don’t control ⁓ how that affects you in the present, but you do control what you do about it now. I couldn’t go back in time and stop watching pornography, as much as I would have loved to. I can’t go back in time and stop before it escalates as much as would like to, but I can ⁓ make the change that needs to be made now. And that’s what’s under my control and that’s what I need to focus on. So mindfulness and philosophy really helped ground me and build the proper foundation I needed to move on.

Fight the New Drug (26:26)
Yeah, thank you for sharing all of that. Earlier, when you were speaking about your habit in college, you mentioned that you had an increase of stressors in college. And it sounds like your pornography consumption was somewhat of a coping mechanism for that. As you were going through this, were you able to identify where and how you’d been utilizing that as a coping mechanism? And what did you replace it with, I guess? Or that’s something that people commonly experience is the coping mechanism for stress. What do you do about stress moving forward?

Jeremiah (26:59)
Yeah, and I can’t believe I failed to mention this, but in high school, I loved going to the gym. It was really what I built my life around my senior year, and I loved it. I actually wanted to be a physical therapist starting out. know, things didn’t work out, and that’s not ultimately what I went to college for, but I really enjoyed going to the gym. And when I got to college, I actually stopped. was too hard to keep going to the gym. I was too busy.

And there was also an unhealthy restaurant around every corner at the college I went to. So it was just very hard to maintain a good habit of ⁓ eating right and going to the gym. So I gave that up. And I do think that that contributed to my pornography consumption in a way, because that was something I found a lot of joy in. It made me happy. And I just ⁓ kind of stopped doing it. And very recently, I picked that habit back up. That was one of the things that I picked back up to eliminate those stress factors.

It’s helped a lot after work, especially. You kind of stretch, you had a long day at work. found in my personal experience that going to the gym and having a good workout is a great way to recuperate and to find a healthier alternative to what porn gave me.

Fight the New Drug (28:14)
Yeah, That’s something that we hear often as well for many people who are looking to kind of replace the coping mechanism for stress is that physical activity generally is really helpful.

Jeremiah (28:25)
Yeah. Now, that really is such a big part of the recovery process, not just taking porn away, but by replacing it with something else.

Fight the New Drug (28:35)
Yeah, well said. It sounds like as you started your healing journey, you had a lot of kind of individual acts of recovery. were processing, doing a lot of research, processing on your own, ⁓ looking into mindfulness and philosophy. Did you also have support along the way? Did community play a role in your recovery?

Jeremiah (28:44)
Mm-hmm. Certainly. First of all, biggest help in this regard was my wife. Shortly after she found out that I had been watching porn, it took her a little bit to process it. That’s certainly understandable. But one of the first things she did was just wrap her arms around me and tell me that she still loved me, that she still wanted to be my wife, and that she believed in me. And more than anything, just to hear that somebody believed in me was such a big relief because I didn’t even believe in myself by this point, but her believing in me gave me so much confidence and just a peace going forward. And her love, support, and companionship helps me. She still checks on me. still offers her support. She still asks how I’m doing with cravings and urges and stuff like that. So she does such a good job catching up with me on this matter. And I’m really thankful for her.

And I also was able to surround myself with a good group of guys that have helped me. As soon as my wife found out, I texted a lot of my closest friends and let them know, not only am I struggling with porn, but now my wife found out and a lot of them didn’t even know. At the time, most of them didn’t even know. So was kind of a surprise for them at first, but they offered their support. They agreed to help me and check up on me. And one thing that actually surprised me was, a lot of my friends struggled with it too. Friends that I never would have guessed struggled with it. And they said, let’s do this together. And we’ve been helping each other together ever since. There’s actually several guys that, since I texted them about it, we text each other every other day, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, just, hey, how are you doing? And we’ll call if we need to. And we were actually able to set up a really good support system with each other. And it’s been so helpful knowing that.

I have friends that if I do stumble, they’ll help me realize what went wrong, they’ll pick me back up, they’ll encourage me, but they’ll also keep me accountable. And just in general, I’ve also enjoyed the friendship. That’s another way I’m taking back what ⁓ porn stole from me in a way. I had basically given up almost all of my friendships. didn’t keep up with them. I didn’t check up on them. But going through this recovery process has actually been…the means through which I’ve gotten back in touch with a lot of my friends. And it was definitely a surprise that ended up happening, but I’m very thankful that it did.

Fight the New Drug (31:26)
Yeah, that’s so great to hear. I’m sure that, you for so many people who go through this, they feel like they’re alone and they’re the only person struggling with this. So I can only imagine how helpful it is to have a group of men who you can trust and who you can process recovery together and know that you’re not alone in this.

Jeremiah (31:35)
Yeah.

Fight the New Drug (31:46)
So, after you had disclosed your pornography addiction to your wife, you disclosed it to your friends fairly quickly. And having that support you mentioned has been so helpful for you.

Do you have any advice for someone on how to disclose to friends or how to reach out to friends to be able to gain some support, or even just to be transparent and open? That’s something that’s really difficult for a lot of individuals.

Jeremiah (32:16)
So the first thing I would say is that studies do show that the majority of people are walking pornography in some way or another. So don’t tell yourself they’re going to think less of me. There’s no way they would do this. That was the big thing for me. I was ashamed to tell a lot of people because I believed that it was just me. This was just my struggle. Not a lot of people go through it like I do.

Unfortunately, that’s just not what the numbers say. Unfortunately, pornography consumption is quite high. So if you’re nervous about telling your friends about this, are they just as nervous to tell you? So there really does need to be no shame there. That’s something that you don’t need to have any shame about opening up to. And it’s something that would probably also help them because more likely than not, they’re going through this as well. So that’s something that I would say. But then I would also just say that

For me, at least, I thought that the initial shame of opening up to them was worth it in light of the fact that I was finally going to be getting the help that I needed. At first, I was extremely uncomfortable with opening up about that. I didn’t want my friends to think less of me. But it didn’t take me that long to realize that if I keep going like this, I’m going to deny myself the help that I need to actually get over this and just get rid of the shame entirely. So that would be the advice I would offer.

Fight the New Drug (33:47)
Yeah, very well said. Thank you so much.

Yeah. And as you are on your way to becoming a dad, as you mentioned, have you thought about how you would approach this topic with your kids someday?

Jeremiah (33:55)
Certainly. It’s actually been one of the things that me and my wife have talked about the most as we prepare to become new parents. And I’m still not quite sure exactly how I want to go about it, but I do know that I don’t want to tell them, ‘hey, just don’t watch it.’ Like, certainly I’m going to tell them not to watch it, but I do want them to know that it’s out there. It’s in a digital age. Even if you don’t find it, it’s going to find you. And I want them to know that it’s out there, and I want them to know that they can trust me. With a lot of people that I grew up with, I didn’t feel like I could trust them with this. I was worried sometimes of getting in trouble, being ostracized, being grounded. And it was hard for me to open up about a lot of these things. And I don’t want my kids to feel that way. I want them to understand even that I’ve gone through it. I plan on telling them that I went through this and I know what it’s like and can come to me if they have any questions.

Fight the New Drug (35:05)
Thank you for sharing that. We know, we hear from a lot of parents who have struggled with this or are currently struggling with this and ⁓ they’re often are so unsure of how to approach this with their children and we remind them, you know, you’re the most qualified person out there actually to speak to the harms of this because you’ve experienced them yourself. And so I think that’s a great approach and you have plenty of time.

Jeremiah (35:28)
Yeah, I just I know a lot of a lot of kids don’t know how to deal with it because their parents either never talked to them about it or the only thing they said was just don’t do it and it’s it’s a lot more complicated than that most of the time when You know, you’re a young teenage boy and you see a pornographic image Just don’t do it is not going to be a good deterrent Unfortunately as much as we would like it to be I want them to understand the harms of it the dangers of it.

Fight the New Drug (35:39)
Absolutely. Since starting your recovery journey, have you noticed changes in your day-to-day life or what changes have you noticed in your day-to-day life?

Jeremiah (36:06)
I’ve noticed a lot of changes, both changes that have affected me and my relationships positively. I touched on some of them a little bit, but I’ve noticed that me and my wife are so much better off. We are definitely a much happier couple than we were whenever I was in the thick of things with pornography. She trusts me more. I certainly trust her more. And I just feel like she’s at home around me.

One thing that we, me and her, talked about was that I tended to be very impulsive while I was watching pornography. And I just, I do believe that that was a product of consuming porn as much as I did. It definitely, at least in my experience, made me a more impulsive person. I’ve noticed that the farther I’ve gotten away from it, the less impulsive I have been in general. And as a result of that, I was very impulsive while I was watching pornography. I had a pretty bad tendency of getting angry with her pretty quickly. We have a cat, I used to get pretty angry at the cat very quickly. It didn’t take much for me to get angry with the both of them, but since I’ve been able to distance myself from pornography, I’ve noticed that that has gone away and she has too. something that we’ve talked about. So she definitely feels safer, more comfortable around me. I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped criticizing her as less. Like if she says something to me, formerly I used to think why is she saying this, she’s nagging me, because one thing that I noticed was happening to me when I was watching pornography was that it made a relationship that required any effort seem undesirable, if that makes sense, because what you’re watching in pornography that that’s not a real relationship because that person’s not going to critique you, that person’s going to accept you as you are, bad habits and all, anger, whatever you’re doing, that person in pornography is never going to turn you away because of what you’re doing. And because of that, it decreases a lot of the actual discipline that is required to maintain a healthy human relationship. And consuming pornography like I did definitely conditioned me in that way. And as a result of that, I found it very difficult to take any kind of criticism, correction, even just simple advice from my wife. And as you can imagine, that wasn’t very helpful for the either of us. And I’ve noticed that I’ve been a lot more accepting whenever she suggests something, or whenever she lets me know that I’m doing something wrong. I don’t get angry with her. I just accept it. I realize, hey, she loves me. She’s not trying to critique me. She’s not trying to bring me down. She’s just saying this because she loves me.

And that’s been huge. That was a very big problem in our relationship early on. And I’m glad that we’ve been able to put that behind us. And as I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of trust between us now.

I didn’t really realize until after I stopped just how much of an impediment this was to me being fully honest with her. Because once I started being truly honest with her about this, even in the simple things like, ‘hey honey, I’m really struggling with cravings today, can you, can you take my phone,’ or just something like that, or ‘hey honey, I’m really struggling today. I know you’re at work and I’m along with technology, but I’m just letting you know before it gets out of hand.’ Just simple stuff like that. Just being open with her about that allowed me to be open with her about a lot of other things. Just in general, you know, if I have a bad day, I find it easier to open up to her about it. If things haven’t gone well at work, it’s so much easier to open up to her about it. And it’s definitely easier for her to open up to me.

I know that she trusts me now a whole lot more than she did back then. She’s a lot better about opening up to me ever since we’ve gone through this together. So it’s definitely something that’s gone both ways and something that I would say has eased the tension between us. We definitely have a lot more trust between us now as a couple.

Personally, I’ve noticed a lot of positive changes in myself as well. I find joy just in the simple things. Now, I don’t require a lot of stimulation to be happy.

One habit I started recently was me and my wife meal prep and while I’m heating it up in the microwave at work, just sit there sometimes and I think just how thankful I am for this food. And that’s not something I always did. That’s certainly not something I did whenever I was consuming pornography compulsively. But I don’t require intense stimulation to be satisfied, to be happy anymore. I feel like I have a lot more peace in my mind. I’m a lot more present. I don’t have a lot of intrusive sexual thoughts anymore, things like that. Just overall, my well-being has definitely gone up for the better.

Fight the New Drug (41:12)
So glad to hear that. I’m excited to ask you this next question, because I just want to thank you for your honesty. It’s, it’s so clear that you’ve, you’ve done a lot of work, and you’ve come a long way on your healing journey. You know, you mentioned earlier, that kind of your immediate reaction when your wife found out was shame, your initial reaction was kind of shame, which is very common. And it’s, it’s clear in the way that you’ve been able to talk about this today and share your story to help others feel less alone in this and better understand what this experience can look like, ⁓ it’s apparent that you’ve broken through a lot of that shame. I just want to ask you, what would you say to someone who’s maybe kind of sitting in that shame with a struggle with pornography right now?

Jeremiah (41:51)
Yeah. The first thing I would say is to be kind to yourself and to still love yourself through this. At least in my experience, the shame and the self-doubt and self-loathing really fed into it. In a way, I didn’t really believe I deserved better. I didn’t really believe I was worthy of this. So I would just say this to the person who’s going through that. If one of your best friends, let’s say, came to you and said that they were struggling with pornography, you wouldn’t beat them up, you wouldn’t shame them, you would realize they’re human, they’re worthy of love and respect and I want to help them. And I would just say turn that attitude around onto yourself and start to treat yourself as a human. You’ve, certainly you’ve gotten into this position but this isn’t who you are, it doesn’t have to define who you will be. You’re still a human, you’re worthy of love and respect and you deserve better for yourself. So that would be the first thing I would say is to have a positive view of yourself and learn to even forgive yourself for everything that you feel guilty for that has gotten you to this position. So that would be the first thing I would say. And the second thing I would say is that focus on what you can control now. You can’t go back in time, unfortunately, as I previously mentioned and change everything that you did, but you do have the present moment now and that’s what you need to worry about. need to focus on the moment that you have now and, the present moment is under your control and you can still use that in a very meaningful way to take the step that you need to take and be content with small gains. first, my transformation wasn’t one day I’m addicted to pornography and then the next day everything’s fine. I’m clean. you need to be content with small gains. Sometimes a win looks like I went one week without watching. I went a few days without watching when previously I couldn’t even go an hour without watching. You need to be content with small steps. It is going to be difficult starting out, but those small wins are such a confidence booster and being proud of those even are things that can help you in your journey.

Fight the New Drug (44:23)
That’s really beautiful advice. And I just want to ask you, what are you most proud of in your recovery journey?

Jeremiah (44:34)
I’m proud that I didn’t let this define me in a way it would have been very easy for me to really just identify with porn and just accept that it had done this to me and stay the same. But I never would have chosen it to come about in this way, but I would say pornography and my recovery from pornography is what made me the person that I am today. And I’m very proud that I’ve been able to do that. was able to take this addiction and everything that he had taken from me and come out on the other end a much better and even more authentic version of myself. I started out really at ground zero. I wasn’t doing any hobbies. I wasn’t doing anything for myself. My marriage was falling apart. And here I am now and me and my wife are doing great. I have a lot more friends and closer relationships that I had when I started this out. And I’m a much more authentic version of myself. I’m pursuing my hobbies. I’m going to the gym. I’m eating healthy again. I’m taking care of myself. I started writing, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. So in a way, I built the life that I wanted as I recovered through this, and I’m very proud of that.

Fight the New Drug (45:55)
And I just want to congratulate you also on your journey and your progress moving forward. And it is so clear in the way you’re able to sit here and share this, again, how much work you’ve done.

I just want to thank you for joining me on the Consider Report Consuming podcast today. For our listeners, if you would like to hear more episodes like this, more stories like Jeremiah’s, please remember to like and subscribe. ⁓ And for anyone out there who may be struggling with a pornography addiction or know someone who is, know, know that this is something many people have experienced and recovery is very possible. And there are so many resources out there available to help. We will link some in our show notes and direct you to some on our site. But no, you are not alone in this and there is always hope.