My story begins in a small town in Oklahoma. I grew up on thirty acres where friends and I played war in dry creek beds. I was eleven and the guys I played with were older by a couple of years. One day, after jumping into our fort and foxholes during an imaginative war game, I saw something unlike anything I had ever seen before. One of my friends had a hardcore pornographic magazine and began flipping through the pages, showing me pictures I had no category for.
I remember experiencing two distinct feelings simultaneously. First, excitement. Those pictures were electric, and somehow a switch flipped inside me when I saw them. They awakened something within me. Second, guilt. I sensed that what we were looking at was a secret and that no one should know about it. Later, at times when more magazines were shared between my friends and me, I felt like I should peek over my shoulder to be sure nobody was watching us.
Shortly after being introduced to pornography, I stumbled across it on television. I don’t remember the circumstance, but late one night, while channel surfing, I found a channel with people acting out what I’d seen in the magazines. It was also around that time that I discovered masturbation and realized that it felt good when you put the two together.
Throughout my teenage years I became heavily involved with pornography and also became sexually active. When I was sixteen, the girl I was dating and her family were Christians. They talked to me often about Jesus. At the time I put up with it because I wanted to date her. I even went to a cheesy Christian youth convention where, of course, I had no interest in being except for the fact that I got to spend the weekend with her. Little did I know that God had a different plan. He spoke to me in a profound way that weekend, and I gave my life to Christ. I’ll be forever grateful to my girlfriend and her family, because their prompting helped alter the course of my life. Unfortunately, becoming a Christian did not curb my sexual integrity issues. And it sure brought a new level of guilt and shame.
By the time I landed in college, I had multiple sex partners, was party to a teenage pregnancy, and habitually used pornography. I was sexually addicted. I didn’t know it as that, and I would never have identified myself as such, but in retrospect I hated what I was doing and swore each time would be the last. But I couldn’t stop.
I met Shelley at school, and by our sophomore year, I knew she was the one. She was amazing, and I saw in her a purity, authenticity, and naiveté like no one else before. None compared to her. Our relationship progressed, and we eventually got engaged. We both did a victory lap and stayed at the University of Oklahoma for five years.
During our last semester of college, Shelley lived a couple of hours away, where she was finishing an internship. I was living alone, and most of my friends had graduated the year before. I spent quite a bit of time by myself and spent ridiculous amounts of time online looking at porn. I discovered chat rooms, and in a binge episode, I engaged a woman in a lengthy conversation and we agreed to meet. But I freaked out as soon as she appeared. It took only minutes for me to swear I had made a mistake and usher her away. I told myself this was simply a close call, and that marriage would probably fix me. Besides, everyone knows that once you’re married, you can have all the sex you want all the time, right?
Shelley and I graduated and got married in the same month. Things were good for about three months, but then I went back online. I picked up exactly where I left off: porn, chat rooms, and another arranged meeting. By the end of our first year of marriage, I’d met three women through the Internet. The cycle of swearing it off, doing it again, hating myself, and swearing it off again was becoming all too familiar.
At the time I was working for Arthur Andersen, an accounting and consulting firm, in Denver. And then we moved to Dallas, hoping for a fresh start. Our marriage was a wreck, and Shelley had no idea why. Shortly after the move, I was fired from Andersen because I basically stopped going to work. Instead of showing up at a client site, I would stay at home, online and acting out.
Next I worked at a mortgage company, but I had to leave that job because I was caught having an affair with a coworker. Shelley sensed that something sketchy was happening, so she asked me about it. I made up a lame story to explain why I was unreachable and lied about the affair. I told her I had “almost cheated” and then blamed her for our marital issues. I suggested that my near miss with straying was because of her—that she needed to initiate more sex, have different sex, and essentially become a different woman. She unfortunately believed me.
I took a job as a regional manager with another company, and it involved my traveling for a few weeks a month. I was a train wreck. My addiction owned me. There came a point after I took this job that things changed. Instead of trying to fit my addiction into my life, I began trying to fit my life into my addiction. Acting out became my top priority, and I scheduled flights, planned meetings, slept, awakened, and ate around opportunities to get a hit of my addiction.
Anytime I tell my story I use the same example to describe what the bottom looked like for me. It helps me to stay in touch with the absurdity of my addiction, and it reminds me that I’m not the best CEO of my life.
I would fly into a city at 7 a.m., spend the day and have dinner with the client, then check into my hotel. As I would walk in the door, I would toss my suitcase to the side, grab my computer bag, and open up my laptop. I would get online and start surfing through pornography and chatting. Around midnight or 1 a.m., I would go out and meet up with someone I had connected with over the web. At 3 or 4 a.m. I would return to my hotel, open my laptop, and start looking at porn and chatting. When the sun came up, I’d take a shower, throw on some clothes, and head back to the client’s office.
That night, after dinner, I’d do the same thing all over again. I was staying up for days on end and acting out every night. By this point I was suicidal. I had prayed too many times for God to help, and too many times he seemed silent. One night I almost drove my truck off a highway. I figured it was the best way to make the horror stop. Everyone would wonder what had happened to me. Shelley would be better off without me. And no one would have to know the truth. Thank the Lord I skidded to a stop in the middle of the road. I was in shock.
Only a few weeks later I had an epiphany. I was in the shower and reflecting on my life. I saw myself through a crystal-clear lens and began to acknowledge my brokenness. My life was a wreck. My marriage was crumbling. I had lost jobs and was on track to lose another one. I hated myself. And God was a million miles away. I cried out yet again for God to show up, and in the strangest way I heard him say, “Okay.” I didn’t know it at the time, but he began laying a breadcrumb trail for Shelley to find out the truth.
I came home from a business trip around 10 p.m. one night, entered through the back door, greeted our lab, Astro, and made my way toward the kitchen. Within a few steps I saw Shelley sitting in the living room, and I absently said, “Hey, babe.” It had become the normal play-off-any-wrongdoing comment that typified our relationship.
She responded sternly, “Sit down in that chair! You’re a f—— alien to me!”
I was clueless as to what was happening. As I sat down, she asked what had happened with the woman at the mortgage company. I quickly downplayed it and lied. She demanded the truth. I found myself trying to scrounge up a vague recollection of the story I had told nine months earlier when she had confronted me then. A third time she inquired and insisted it was my last chance. In true addict fashion, I lied.
Shelley told me she had spent two hours on the phone with the woman and knew the whole story. She went into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
I fell facedown on the tile floor in the kitchen. I was stunned, in tears, confused, and wondering what she actually knew. I ended up sleeping on the couch that night.
I was awakened the next morning when Shelley threw a book at me, hitting me in the chest. What to Do When Your Spouse Says “I Don’t Love You Anymore” by David Clarke is a tough-love approach to restoring a relationship after infidelity. (It helped save our marriage.)
Shelley said, “If you want to fix things, you’ll have read this by the time I get home.”
My speed-reading skills improved that morning, as you might imagine.
After a couple of stressful, painful, befuddled days, we decided to see the pastor who had married us. It required a six-and-a-half-hour drive to Amarillo from Dallas. That’s where I came clean. During that ride I confessed to everything I could possibly think of having done, from as far back as I could remember and into my childhood.
We met with the pastor, told him my sordid story, and he labeled me a sex addict.
Strangely, I was conflicted. On the one hand, it sounded weird and deviant. On the other, it meant there was a category for monsters like me. I thought I was the only one.
Shelley heard the label as an excuse and justification.
The pastor went on to prescribe a plan for me that included accountability, church attendance, counseling, support groups, book reading, and more.
We headed back to Dallas, and I began to work the plan.
While there was relief in having a plan, it was short-lived. We were at the beginning of a really painful journey. For several months we had conversations that lasted all night. Screaming and yelling were normal for her, not me, during these all-night talks. The questions that came at me, often rapid-fire, were like questions from a test that was impossible to pass. Everything seemed hopeless.
We were in counseling twice a week during that time. It felt like the counselor was also beating me up in most of our sessions. Yet there were insights that helped me to find freedom and instructions to help me engage Shelley’s pain.
The first major milestone came thirteen months later. Shelley finally decided to stay in the marriage and to forgive me. Before that, it was a coin toss. I didn’t know if I would wake up to divorce papers or not. And the roller coaster of emotions that never seemed to end was so unpredictable I had no real barometer of our progress. Her commitment to the marriage and to ongoing forgiveness was huge.
Shortly after our forgiveness moment, though, it all went back to what felt like ground zero. Years later I realized the pattern and accepted that two steps forward and several steps back was normal. We dealt with and continued to deal with triggers when my past came up. It necessitated intimate conversations about past pain, reassurance, and the future.
A couple of years after this all began, I received a random phone call from Paul Scott (a guy I hardly knew then but have the privilege of working alongside now). We had met at a church home group and talked maybe twice. He told me God had put it on his heart to invite me to interview for a job at a ministry called Every Man’s Battle. It worked out, and I left corporate America. That’s a story in itself that I won’t go into here. And I accepted the job without consulting Shelley. Yeah, I’m a slow learner!
Fast-forward to today. It’s been an incredible ride. It took the better part of five years to feel like we were stabilized. It took seven years for Shelley to say she actually respected me. It took eight years for her to say that if we had to go through it all over again, she would still choose me. It took nine years for her to say that my sexual addiction was one of the best things that ever happened to her. My jaw hit the floor when she said that. Today, as I write this, it’s a little over ten years since the mocha hit the fan. We have seen God’s amazing redemption play out, and our marriage is special. We’re still trying to figure out intimacy, still working through painful memories of the past, still leaning into conflict. And trust, well, trust has been and is still being restored. It’s an ongoing thing, which is exactly what prompted my penning this book. This book is in so many ways a “don’t do what I did” manuscript. It is the culmination of a decade of trial and error. My hope is that it will give you the courage you need to lean into the trials and make fewer errors than I did.