Overcoming the Passion of Lust - A Comprehensive Guide to overcoming pornography use

Effective Recovery approaches you can use to help you in the battle.

Battling the Demon of Fornication - according to Chat-GTP

I occasionally hang out on some Orthodox discord servers and on the prayer-requests channel there is a common theme of people asking for help overcoming the passion of lust. The requests typically look something like this:

Please Pray for <me|a friend>. <I|he> stumbled in the war against lust again… the fight is so brutal and <I am|he is> so weak.

I did try to post suggestions on Discord, but most Orthodox servers have very strict rules, so I could not successfully post anything meaningful. Having battled this myself many times, and recently having re-stacked an excellent article from

Porn Free Millennial

who has also successfully overcome this passion, I felt like we could put our heads together to publish something that offered a helpful, prescriptive approach. I say approach b/c there is no singular trick, no one thing, that can free you from this form of enslavement.

Defining Lust -

Porn Free Millennial

Lust isn't just a desire, it is an all-consuming force. If I were to capture it in a single word, it would be Devour. When I think back on my compulsive use of porn throughout my youth, teen years, and early adulthood, I think about a shark, its eyes turning into a black abyss before it devours its prey - a powerful creature drawn by the scent of blood, knowing only the need to feed, to consume, to grasp onto it and to try to use it to fill a hole in my heart and soul.

Looking back at that time, my lust overpowered my ability to see pornstars, movie stars, or any attractive woman, on-screen or off, as an actual person with a soul and life of her own. They were no longer children of God in my eyes, only fleeting satisfactions. This relationship of being the hungry shark began when I was just 10 years old and continued, more or less unchecked, for nearly two decades.

There were periods of sobriety throughout those years, but they were always short-lived because I didn’t know how to shake that scent or understand why it was so hard to stop devouring. Instead of stopping to consider the consequences of my next action, I would jolt ahead toward my feast, almost as if programmed to do so. I would devour and devour until the meat was off the bone, thinking that this would finally fill me with what I was looking for. But each time, after stripping the meat off the bone, I was left empty, hungrier than before, trapped in a cycle I didn’t know how to break. This feeling of contentment was always temporary; the hunger would always return. For many years, without realizing it, this Lust for the flesh was truly a way to escape and to numb feelings of regret, shame, and uselessness. The desire to devour was, at its core, a desire to deny the truth - keeping me preoccupied to avoid the pain of knowing I was not the man I thought I was.

I chose to lean into Lust and away from the values I’d been taught through church, family, and community. In choosing to feast on the flesh, I rejected the Bread of Life, neglecting the values instilled in me. I chose to consume the bodies of others, both online and in reality, instead of accepting the body of Christ in my life.

I hope that this article can help you in the examination of your relationship with Lust and how to break free of it. I know that for me, it took hitting rock-bottom in my past marriage to finally wake up to the fact that while I was in a feeding frenzy, I was destroying my sense of identity and leaving a wake of blood behind. 

Defining the Passion of Lust-

Lee

I'm not going to call the Passion of Lust an addiction because I think that it is unhelpful to internalize that belief. Instead, I’ll refer to it as a demon or a passion. To overcome this issue, however, you do need to approach it as if it is a serious addiction, including the understanding that once an addict, always an addict. So be ever vigilant, even if you think you've beaten it. You don’t have to be a junkie.

Lust (porneia, Greek) is man's pathological use of his sexuality. Like all passions, it is a misuse or abuse of the natural function.¹

The Demon of Fornication-

Lee

What is behind the passion of Lust? The demon of Fornication. A Demon? Isn't that a bit much? you might ask? (Surely you mean this in abstract? no sane educated person believes in such superstitions anymore, right?) No, not at all. Call me crazy, but since listening to The Demonology lectures from Patristic Nectar, the exorcist files podcast, plus reflecting on my own demonic encounters (see Demonic Warfare below), I have come to fully accept that the demonic is real and that demonic forces are constantly at work in the world seeking to enslave mankind and darken the souls of all men by moving them away from the Image of God.

Demonic Warfare

I do find it helpful to view my adversary as something external to me that Christ has already shown he has full dominion and power over, and like an exorcist would tell you, the battle over the demonic has already been won, but God has a divine purpose in having us fight the good fight. Also, an exorcist will tell you that demonic affliction can only be overcome by shutting the doors to the demonic and establishing a strong and permanent connection to Christ. I'm not saying that people with this challenge are possessed, but it is certainly a tool of the demonic that works very well for them and serves their purposes.

Why am I writing about this? Because I want to help those out there who are suffering. It is a terrible suffering that I have also lived through, and I believe I have an approach that works - or at least can work if you take it seriously. I have not written about this topic before, not wanting to bring shame and condemnation to myself or my family. Also, I'm very cautious of feeding into the Mormon trope that all Mormon apostates are apostates because they were involved in grave sin and, hence, are in the thrall of the devil - Which is patently untrue - but which any TBM will seize on and say “Aha, See! I knew it; he's left Mormonism because he's in sin.” - This is absurd and so far off the mark as to be an accusation rooted in sin itself. I, like most other modern men (including most LDS men) have fought against the passion of Lust on and off throughout my life. I've conquered it for long periods of time, only to grow complacent and fall off the wagon again at some point. Since becoming Orthodox, I believe that I've finally put this issue to rest. Dead with the old man. I hope if you are reading this and you know who I am, that you have compassion and recognize that it has taken a lot of courage and vulnerability to publish this.

I grew up before the Internet (my first exposure to the Internet was at University.) Pornography was not what first began this battle for me. (One of my uncles always had a stack of Playboys in his bathroom, so I had seen them at a young age, but that wasn't the origin of my struggles.)

I was introduced to lust and sex at a young age as a result of being molested. This abuse warped all of my perceptions and led to my battle with this demon. I do firmly believe that my being neurodiverse (AuDHD, ADHD + High functioning autism) played a significant part in my attachment to this passion, as it quickly became a compulsion used to soothe anxiety, deal with unprocessed emotions, and provide a flood of dopamine (apparently my brain does not make enough dopamine, so it is chronically deficient.)

According to lectures by Fr. Josiah Trenham, Lust is a passion that is closely related to Gluttony. It’s about consuming and devouring to fill some emptiness or need inside ourselves. One insidious part of this is that the more you feed it, the more it needs to devour until it has wholly devoured us and our lives. (Just like a Demon would.) We are what that the demons of lust/fornication seek to devour and devour us they will, should we allow ourselves to continue to be the meals upon which they feast.