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[This post is excerpted from Chapter 3 of From Heartache to Healing: Finding Power in Christ to Deal with a Loved One’s Sexual Addiction by Colleen C. & Philip A. Harrison.]
When a home has been invaded by pornography or other sexual sin, the very foundations of a marriage can be shaken. Both partners look at the other as the source of their pain and suffering. She looks at him and says, “How could you bring such trash into our home, into our lives?” And he only sees her words as yet another source of shame, often another reason to turn to his addiction. Love in the home is replaced by fights and recrimination. Both people begin to wonder if their marriage will survive this dreadful division between them.
Satan has established a beachhead in the family, a frontline within the home.
In the spiritual realm—just as the Savior taught—there is a legion of evil spirits in league with Satan who desire not only your husband’s destruction, but yours as well. He is the one who is doing all he can to turn you against each other—blaming and accusing and shaming each other. He is the one who would drown your husband in lust and you in despair. He is the one who would destroy your potential as individual children of God. He is the one who would like to see you become so despondent that you develop addictions of your own as you try to cope with your fear and pain. He is the one who hopes the effects of your unhappiness will drive your children to resort to some kind of addictive behavior.
And when the addiction is revealed and recovery has a chance to begin, he often intensifies his efforts.
Of all the people alive today, we, as Latter-day Saints, are potentially among the most fortunate, even when the battle with pornography has entered our home. Why? Because of the eternal perspective on life provided to us by the doctrines of the Restoration. We say “potentially” because our doctrines do us no good if we either don’t learn them or if knowing them, we don’t apply them in the “trenches” of our real lives. This is a spiritual war, being fought in the spiritual depths of men’s and women’s souls. We must be willing to step back from the immediate heartache in order to see the big picture of what’s really going on and to recognize our common enemy.
[Continued tomorrow]
~Colleen H.
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