Overcoming Lust

One

The Need to Overcome Lust

Our Lord has made it clear, we cannot indulge lust. We can’t indulge it through the sense of touch, and we can’t indulge it through the sense of sight. We can’t covet our neighbor’s wife. In other words, we can’t indulge in sexual activity or even sexual desire for anyone to whom we’re not married.

And today, that teaching means particularly that if there is any pornography habit in your life, you have to get rid of it right now. 

So how do you do that?

Two

What you’re getting into

The first thing you’d better be aware of, if you decide to fight an addiction, is that it isn’t easy.

Lust is one of the most vivid and exciting of all addictions. And all addictions, but particularly lust, have the pernicious effect of making everything else in life seem dull and boring. Which means when you turn your back on lust, it’s going to feel like all the light and color, all the excitement and vibrancy in your world has just been extinguished.

It’s true of all addictions when you give them up. Ex-smokers, early on, say they feel as though they’ve lost a part of themselves. Ex-gamblers, early on, say they don’t feel like life has anything left to offer them. And ex-pornography users, early on, say they have nothing to look forward to, that there’s nothing of any interest. But of course, it’s not true. When you turn your back on your narrow, ugly little addiction, what actually happens is that the rest of life’s deeper, richer, more continuous joys actually become possible again.

But it takes a while to feel that. And you may be angry, irritable, and depressed.

That’s okay. Just stay the course. Because life gets better. In fact, it will get better than it’s ever been before.

Just stay the course.

Three

Restructure your situation/near occasion of sin

What is the course back to chastity?

The first step is to restructure your environment so that you avoid the near occasion of sin.

That means you have to find the patterns, the routines, the steps, some people even call them the rituals leading up to your falls.

All addicts have these. They don’t decide to sin out of the blue. There’s almost always a pattern that leads up to the sin.

So what is the ritual that begins your descent into lust?

Maybe you just start browsing YouTube, looking for something interesting. Maybe you have a work project due, but you just really don’t want to start it. Maybe you look at your phone after you get the kids to bed, or during your lunch break, or after your wife has said goodnight. Maybe you watch a show or a sports game or a movie, and then when it’s over, you really don’t want to go back to real life, so you start wondering what other entertainment you could look for. Maybe you look at porn every time you’ve had a couple drinks, but you still don’t want to go to bed.

Anyway, you need to figure out: What is the ritual? What is the place? What is the time? What is the device?

And you need to make a change. You need to avoid beginning that ritual, avoid that place, rearrange the furniture, and figure out what time a given device needs to be put beyond your reach. It takes strategy. So put in the thought, make the plan, and then put it into action. 

Because if you don’t, you’ll never get free of this thing.

Four

Accountability/support

No one reaches holiness alone. No one acquires virtue alone. And nobody gets over an addiction alone.

So you’re going to have to tell someone and ask for their help.

It could be a friend you meet with regularly. It could be accountability software, like Covenant Eyes. It could be a support group, like sexaholics anonymous or Exodus 90. You could also try the online program STRIVE. Or it might be enough just to have a regular spiritual director to hold you accountable (and you should probably get a spiritual director anyway).

And of course, it’s embarrassing to have to tell someone that you have a problem. But it makes sense that since, as we said in an earlier meditation, pornography is rooted in pride, the antidote to pornography would involve something humbling.

And remember, one day everybody is going to know about all your sins. All the deeds done in darkness will be proclaimed from the housetops to the entire world at the Last Judgment. So if having one person, or a small group of people, know about your problem, if that helps prevent the entire universe from finding one day out that you were never willing to take the necessary steps to overcome this thing, well, that’s a good deal.

Five

Prayer

Needless to say, Christ is Our Savior from sin, so good luck trying to beat any vice, especially lust, without His help.

In Confession, He forgives sin and gives the grace to start over. In His Mother and His foster-father He gives us the advocates in pursuing the purity their lives so perfectly embodied. And in conversation with Him during prayer, He will show us how to profit from our faults, and how to better strategize in overcoming them.

He has promised that He will heal us if we strive to follow Him and place our trust in Him. It may be difficult, and it may take a while, but it will happen.