My One Thing: Mark Laaser

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Transcript

Steve: Hey guys! Steve here with Belt of Truth Ministries. I’m here with Dr. Mark Laaser, director of Faithful and True, and author of 10 books, including his groundbreaking book Healing the Wounds of Sexual Addiction, and also the 3-book Men of Valor series. Dr. Laaser, if I could ask you, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give to someone struggling with pornography addiction?

Mark: I’ve been thinking about this and it’s really kind of hard to narrow it down but primarily, the average guy that’s struggling with pornography addiction is struggling with it in silence. In other words, they’re not telling anyone if they’re married. They’re certainly not telling their wives. If they’re not married, they really never probably talked to anybody about this. If I had to narrow it down to one piece of advice, I simply say get honest and get honest early. The earlier you can get honest, the sooner you’ll find the help and community you need to get yourself free from this problem. Most of us grew up and we started looking at porn somewhere in our childhood adolescence. We didn’t have anybody to talk to. Our fathers, our mothers weren’t generally talking to us. The church wasn’t talking to us about this kind of stuff. We just kind of learn to keep it to ourselves. We may have been teasing each other about it at school or someplace like that, but we certainly weren’t having intelligent or helpful conversations about it. We kind of learn to stuff this.

I would say the one piece of advice is find someone who you can talk to who at least understands enough about this to direct you to more help. One of the things to think about when you start getting honest is that you’ll find a lot more community and I think one of the main ways out of pornography or any other form of sexual addiction is to be involved in Christian community, men who share the same values that you do, the same vision that you do, the same sense of God’s commandments that you do so that they can be encouragers. I think another thing people don’t understand about getting honest is that I think when you get honest with community, you’re going to want people to hold you accountable to the things you want not to do, but also they’re encouragers. They’re going to be people who push you toward your vision of what is healthy. That’s getting honest because I’ve always said that the greatest enemy of sexual health is silence.

Steve: I think that’s a great advice. I agree fully. Thank you for sharing that with us. Tell people where they can find out more about you online.

Mark: Sure. We have a website here. It’s faithfulandtrue.com. All of our books, resources, we have a weekly radio podcast, that kind of thing. If you want to find out more about that or any of our programs, just go to that website.

Steve: Okay, great. Thanks again Dr. Laaser. I appreciate your time and good luck in your ministry.

Mark: You too. Thank you.

Steve: Thank you.