"Girl After Girl Pulled Me Aside to Share That She Was Battling Pornography Addiction"

Mark Shea brings us to this revealing, and redemptive, interview of Audrey Assad by Matt Fradd:

Matt: Audrey, on a scale from 1 to stepping on lego barefoot, how much does it hurt you when you hear someone say, “girls don’t struggle with porn. Porn is a guy’s issue.”

Audrey: It’s certainly a little stab to my heart when I overhear something like that, especially when it’s spoken from a platform. Whenever I heard this as a teenager it isolated me even more in my battle against pornography addiction, because it reinforced my assumption that I should never tell anyone about it.

I thought that I was the only woman in the world going through it—and this was Satan’s greatest foothold in my heart and mind while I was in bondage to pornography.

As long as I thought I couldn’t tell anyone, it was virtually impossible for me to experience deliverance.
Hearing things like this from the platform of ministry only reinforced the deception.

Matt: I know you’ve had the opportunity to share your story of porn addiction and recovery with young women all over the country. What’s their reaction?

Audrey: It’s pretty incredible how many girls will share the truth about their addictions with you if you just speak up about yours.

A few years back I spoke at a conference for high-school students and shared (briefly) my testimony at a girls’ session; and then for the rest of the week girl after girl pulled me aside to share that she was battling pornography addiction.

I probably talked to fifty girls. And their youth leaders were pulling me aside as well–some to share their own struggles and some telling me about their uncertainty about what to do with the students who had suddenly been confessing to them. One told me that a girl in her group shared that she’d been compulsively viewing pornography since the age of eight.

It’s a lot more common than anyone would like to believe, and the sooner we learn how to address it, the sooner more and more young women can find freedom in community.

There's more at the link. It all makes this song, my favorite by Ms. Assad, all the more powerful: