The 5 Major Reasons People Struggle
Why men struggle with pornography for years despite real effort. Most help treats one domain and calls it the whole problem. Here are all five of them.
Article
Why men struggle with pornography for years
Why men struggle with pornography despite genuine effort usually comes down to partial treatment. Most help addresses one cause and calls it the whole thing. Paul prays for the whole person, spirit and soul and body together (1 Thessalonians 5:23), and anything less leaves most of the problem untouched.
Being treated for a fifth of the problem
This was the first episode I ever recorded, and I opened with the thing that had frustrated me for two decades.
There are broadly two places men go for help, and both of them tend to fail in the same way.
The non-Christian route hands you tools that are insufficient for what is actually happening. At worst, it hands you a counselor who works to persuade you that this is fine as long as nobody is getting hurt.
The Christian route fails differently, and this is the one that cost me years. Different streams of the church each pick one cause and build everything on it. One tradition says it is spiritual warfare. Another says it is a discipline problem. Another says it is trauma.
Each of them is describing something real. Each of them is describing about twenty percent of it.
So a man does the work he is told to do, faithfully, and gets nowhere, and concludes he is fighting a losing battle. He is not. He is being treated for a fifth of his condition and measuring himself against a full recovery.
I want to be honest about where this framework came from, because I did not invent it. I stumbled into most of it while God was healing me and had no vocabulary for what was happening. Years later I was working through a biblical counseling certification, and Josh Henderson’s Equipped to Counsel laid the whole thing out in a single diagram. Men and women had been trained in this for a long time while I was working it out the hard way.
One. Who rules your heart
Start here, because everything else routes through it.
Every man is going to suffer. What differs is how he thinks, feels and acts about it, and that is downstream of who is actually on the throne.
There are two options. Either you are enthroned, pursuing fulfillment on your own terms by whatever means will get it, or Christ is, and you have handed over your will.
Now, a caution I want to give immediately, because this is where men misuse it. Surrendering the throne does not make the struggle evaporate. It settles who is in charge. That is necessary and it is not sufficient, which is the entire reason there are four more domains.
Underneath this sits the idol question, and here is the definition I use. An idol is usually something good that has become the ultimate thing.
Sex is good. It is a gift. Lust is that same gift pursued outside the design, on my schedule and my terms, without the cost of covenant.
Which is why I keep saying pornography is a symptom. Men come to me having gone thirty, sixty, ninety days without it and believing the thing is dealt with. It is not. If lust itself was never addressed, it does not leave. It relocates.
Solomon’s instruction covers exactly this: keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life (Proverbs 4:23). Ezekiel is blunter, describing men who have set up idols in their hearts and then come to the prophet for a word (Ezekiel 14:3). You can be sincerely asking for help while something else is still on the throne.
Two. Physically embodied
You are a body, and the body votes.
If you are ill, you are easier to tempt. If you are exhausted, you are easier to tempt. That is not a spiritual failure, it is a fact about creatures.
And if you have been in this a long time, something more specific has happened. The pathways are worn. Your brain has learned this route so thoroughly that it feels like the natural one, and part of the work ahead is genuinely physical: those grooves have to be broken and new ones laid down.
We are strange about this in the church. Paul had no trouble telling Timothy to take something for his stomach while writing letters about holiness. Your body was bought at a price and is meant to glorify God (1 Corinthians 6:19-20), which means how you sleep and eat is not adjacent to your sanctification.
Three. Socially embedded
Sin never stays private. You sin against God and against people, and people sin against you, and the damage runs along relationships in both directions.
A lot of men are not primarily chasing sex. They are chasing affirmation.
I have sat with man after man who traces it back to a parent whose approval never came, or never came in a form he could feel. That leaves a real wound, and a wound wants attending to. So instead of taking it to God, he takes it to whatever answers fastest.
I have heard it said almost word for word: I am chasing women because I have felt alone my entire life.
My own version is abuse. It left wounds that took years to work through, and it also produced physical consequences, including stress symptoms and PTSD. Which is the point I most want you to catch here. The social damage caused physical damage. These domains are not filed separately.
Four. Spiritually embattled
You have a soul, whatever the culture says about neurons, and there is an enemy who comes to steal and kill and destroy (John 10:10).
He knows where you are weak. But notice how he usually works, because men expect the dramatic version and miss the real one. It is rarely a lurid opportunity dropped in your path. It is small things arranged nearby. A second look. A feed that keeps serving one kind of image. Seeds planted repeatedly.
And sometimes you get a day where a wave of it arrives with no obvious trigger and you cannot work out why. In my experience that is often exactly what it looks like.
Paul is clear that our struggle is not finally against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12).
But here is the caution, and I will aim it at my own tradition first. Some streams reach for the spiritual explanation every single time. Every struggle becomes oppression, and every solution becomes a deliverance session. Meanwhile the man in front of you has an unaddressed wound, or a sleep problem, or an idol nobody has named.
The reverse error is just as common, in churches that will discuss anything except the possibility of an enemy.
The discipline this framework asks for is refusing to reach for your favorite explanation before you have checked the others.
If you want a plan that works across the domains rather than one of them. The Porn Exit Plan maps your actual triggers and builds accountability that holds. It is $37 and private. See the Porn Exit Plan
Five. God sovereignly enthroned
The last one is about your view of God, and it is the one most men have never examined.
Two things go wrong here.
The first is simply a small view of God. You have lost sight of how good, how large, how genuinely fatherly he is, and a man who is not enjoying God will go looking for enjoyment somewhere reachable.
The second is a bad account of why God permits suffering and temptation at all. This one comes out sideways as blame. I have heard versions of it many times. God gave me this drive, he knows what I am carrying, and he has not removed it, so what did he expect.
Scripture will not let that stand. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man, and God is faithful and will provide the way of escape (1 Corinthians 10:13). And James is careful to say each person is tempted when he is lured by his own desire (James 1:14), not by God.
How they interlock
Here is a small example, and it is deliberately unremarkable.
I get sick. That is domain two.
Being sick, I am short with people, and someone is short back. I take offense, feel sorry for myself, and a root of bitterness goes in. That is domains one and three.
Now I am tired, resentful and isolated, which is the exact condition an enemy would choose to work with. Domain four.
And underneath all of it a question is forming: God, why are you letting this happen, I need some relief. Domain five, and relief is now available in about four seconds.
One head cold, and all five are live. That interlocking is why men struggle with pornography for decades while doing genuine work on one part of it.
That is why treating any single one and expecting resolution does not work. It is also why I refuse to hand anyone a checklist to tick off in ten days. This took me years. Sanctification has a pace and it is not yours.
What this costs
It costs you the simple explanation.
There is real comfort in a single-cause account, whichever one you have adopted. It tells you exactly what to do, and it lets you stop looking.
Working all five means holding several things at once, most of which cannot be finished quickly, and some of which require other people to help you see. That is slower and considerably less satisfying than a formula.
It also costs you the deadline. Men want to know how long. I do not know how long. I know it is longer than you hoped and shorter than it feels.
What I’d have you do this week
Do not fix anything. Diagnose.
Take the five and write one honest sentence under each.
Who is actually on the throne this month, and what good thing has quietly become ultimate.
What is true of my body right now. Sleep, illness, exhaustion, how worn the pathway is.
Who hurt me, and who am I hurting, and what am I actually going hungry for.
Where is the pressure showing up in a way that does not match my circumstances.
And what do I currently, functionally, believe God is like.
You will probably find one of them is obviously loud and two of them you have never once considered. Those two are usually where the years went.
Then take the loudest one to somebody. A pastor, a counselor, a friend who can hold weight. Not all five. One.
Paul’s prayer is that the God of peace would sanctify you completely, and that your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Whole. He is not going to work on the part you find most respectable and leave the rest.
The better you understand who God is, who you are, and how sin reaches into every part of a life, the more of his healing you will actually be able to see.
Kill shame. Stand strong in Christ. Live on mission.
Take the free 5 Hidden Desires assessment. Five honest questions that surface what you are actually reaching for underneath the behavior. It is free, it is private, and it ends with a specific next step instead of a generic score. Start the assessment
About the host
Ken Freire holds a Master of Divinity and serves as a lay pastor. He trained through the Association of Biblical Counselors and has spent roughly two decades coming out of this himself and walking other men through it. He hosts the Shame(less) Podcast, of which this was the first episode.
Sources named in this article
- Ken Freire, on the Shame(less) Podcast
- Josh Henderson, Equipped to Counsel, the source of the five-domain framework
Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 5:23; Proverbs 4:23; Ezekiel 14:3; 1 Corinthians 6:19-20; John 10:10; Ephesians 6:12; 1 Corinthians 10:13; James 1:14.
Show Description
Over the last 2 decades of overcoming this addiction and helping other men I found a major problem with the how people were getting help.
From a non-christian perspective they try to use insufficient means to heal you or actually try to convince to keep doing it as long as it’s not hurting anyone.
From a christian perspective, denominational streams focused on only one domain of how people struggle. This still lead to people feeling like they are fighting a losing battle.
As I started to get healing in this area it seemed like I stumbled into something revolutionary at that time. I didn’t know how to put into words what was happening to me.
Until years later, I was taking a biblical counseling certification and our textbook gave this phenomenal framework.
It encapsulated years of what God was doing in my life into a single diagram. So no, I wasn’t God’s gift to mankind who found this revolutionary way to be healed from this addiction.
In fact, great men and women of the faith have been trained on this type of framework.
The beauty of this framework is that it gives us the 5 major reasons or domains in which people struggle with any addiction.
I’m using it particularly for pornography in this episode but if you are struggling with other addictions you can certainly use this framework to start to diagnose why you’re struggling.
So lets dig into the 5 major reasons people struggle with their addictions.
Transcript
welcome to the Shameless podcast where I help Christian men kill shame stand strong and live on Mission I'm your host Ken P and I'm bringing you real stories practical insights and biblical truths that equip you to break free from your sin shame and live a life of purpose let's step out of the Shadows together and Into the Light of Christ welcome to the first episode of the Shameless podcast where my goal is to help Christian men kill shame stand strong and be on Mission in this first episode and season we are going to focus on the shame that comes from being addicted Po from pornography and struggling with lust now over the last two decades of overcoming this addiction and helping other men I found a major problem with how people were getting help and you may have struggled with this yourself you see there are two ways that people tend to get help they go to a non-Christian perspective or try to go with a Christian perspective from a non-Christian perspective you may have tried to go to a therapist or a counselor but they end up using insufficient means to heal you or really bad ones that I would suggest actually try to convince you that it's okay to keep doing it as long as it's not hurting anyone now from a Christian perspective the other issue that happens is that different denominational streams Focus or only emphasize one domain of how people struggle and what this can lead to and you may have felt this before in the past is feeling like you are just fighting a losing battle and as I started to get healing in this area it seemed like I stumbled into something revolutionary at the time I I didn't know how to put it into words what was happening to me and how God was healing me through it all until years later I was taking a Biblical counseling certification and our textbook gave this phenomenal framework it actually encapsulated years of what God was doing in my life into a single diagram so no I wasn't God's gift to mankind who found this revolution way revolutionary way to be healed from this addiction but what I did realize is that there was great men and women of the faith who have been trained on this type of framework and I just didn't realize it at the time until I found this book so the beauty of this framework is that it gives us the five major reasons or domains if you want to call it that way in which people struggle with any addiction I'm using it specifically for pornography in this episode but if you're struggling with other addictions or know someone who's struggling with any other addiction you can certainly use this framework to start to diagnose why you're struggling now again it's a great diagnostic tool it took me years of counseling and and God healing me to actually see work done in each one of these domains right uh but it's still a great way to start diagnosing exactly where you're at so what I want to do today is D just di in to the five major reasons why you or people that you may know struggle with them their addiction so let's dig into the five major reasons okay the first one if you think about this as a uh Boye right or diagram the first one is the ruler of your heart okay this is a great way to ask is who is the ruler of your heart and the reason why we want to start here is because when we look at this diagram right the way we think feel and act about something is extremely important the reality is that we're all going to suffer we're all going to go through struggle we're all going to go through something but how we think feel and act about it is entirely unto us right so when we're struggling or when we're addicted to something how we think about it is really important the other reason why this is essential to look at who's ruling our heart is that the we got to understand why we got addicted to Something in the first place place right and if you don't know why you're getting addicted to something uh it's really hard to actually Escape it and ultimately there are there are two main categories to why someone gets addicted to something and I know some people are going to be like this is too reductionistic it's it's simplified again we'll unpack this a lot more throughout the podcast I'm just giving you a broader overview but the two main categories is that number one the reason you ultimately get addicted to something is because you are self enthroned right you are the ruler of your life and you want to achieve whatever you can by any means necessary right for fulfillment whether it's peace joy happiness like whatever you want you are deciding I want it in my way and however I can attain it obtain it now the other way the opposing way is that Christ is the ruler of your heart and that you have surrendered your heart and your will to him to say you know what Lord whatever you want it's yours I'm going to obey you I'm going to trust you I'm going to love you okay so I'm going to do what you love and hate what you hate now again some people might be like whoa so if all of a sudden I Just Surrender my life to God this thing is going to go go away no not necessarily what we're trying to figure out is who's ruling when it comes to the addiction Factor right and the first acknowledgement may be that like yeah I'm I'm I'm in the throne right now again just because you're on the throne doesn't mean that that solves the whole problem right there are five different ways to it and then there within the ruling of the heart there's ways that it manifests right for example uh there are Idols that you may have in your heart that you need to uh repent and and get rid of right like so Lust For example may be the idol that you have you desire something that you can't have right it brings you some sort of satisfaction because here's the reality pornography is just a symptom of a bigger issue right so sometimes people are like well let's just help you with pornography and like let's just get rid of the pornography or like oh awesome right like you stop watching pornography for 30 60 90 days you've overcome this no you haven't that's superficial there's a deeper level in your life that you're struggling with that you need you haven't overcome yet and it's the lust and many times what I have found is that you may have just gotten rid of the pornography aspect of it but because the lust has never been killed or dealt with it's just moved to something else right so it's really important for us to look at like who's ruling your heart or what is ruling your heart if an idol is enthroned there right and it's it's you saying hey I love this thing then great now let me give you a quick definition of Idols before I move on to the next one is that Idols is something it could be good right it's bad as well but something good that becomes the ultimate thing in your life right so like for example as we we think about uh lust right sex is a good thing it's a gift from God but what ends up happening is that it's we corrupt it or we want it out of the way God had designed it so it draws us into what we call lust right and a corrupted desire that we're like hey how can we get this within our own effort so that we don't have to do it within God's design in marriage right but again that's just one Idol that we have but we could have many Idols uh and unpack that more as the uh podcast goes right the next one as we think through this is physically embedded okay or physically embodied one of the issues one of the other domains of five um of the five main reasons why people struggle is that the reality is there might be some physical stuff that is going on in your life for example you might have some sickness that you are struggling with or dealing with and if you are it's easier for you to get tempt tempted right there's a lot of Temptation that can come from that cuz you're just struggling you're fighting for right another one might just be you're tired right like when you are not alert when you not are of sound mind what can end up just happening is you're exhausted uh the other reason for uh physical that it's important is that especially if you are in an addicted State we have to recognize that your brain has been rewired and physiologically and neurologically you are now just like drawn to that and it feels natural quote unquote right but what we have to actually do is because your brain has been so used to certain Pathways of finding addiction we have to start to break those right and we have to rewire the brain right into a good way but physically physical stuff can cause you right to be more easily tempted and if you're more easily tempted you're going to fall into sin right so that's something that we just have to be mindful of the third uh domain that we have to be mindful of is socially embedded okay what do I mean by socially embedded well when we sin right we sin toward someone or right and especially towards God right we sin against God but our sin affects other people right at the same time people sin against us and those relational aspects cause Ripple effects where relationally right it may hurt us right that may be from abuse that may be from just the way people treated you or hurt you right anything like that can affect us right think about it this way some of us the reason why we struggle with lust again or in pornography is not pornography itself is that at the end of the day we just desired affirmation we desired to be accepted and loved by our parents and again I'm using this as an example but what could end up happening if you never got the affirmation you wanted from your parents or you didn't have parents you have this deep wound in your heart that just longing for something right so instead of going to God for it you go to other things right and you've probably heard this before you're like well why are you chasing after that right I've talked to many guys that they're like man I'm chasing after women just because I just desire affirmation or I just desire to be with someone like I really want to be someone because I've just felt lonely my whole life those are wounds that have happened because of sin fracturing relationships so we have to take that into consideration as we are having these conversations of like well why are you struggling what is it is it that's really happening uh in the next episode you'll start to hear a little bit of my story of of what happened and I go deeper into it but wounds was a a huge one for me where I started to struggle and and and I'll give you the short version right now but it was just because of abuse it left massive wounds in my life that took me years and years to recover from and here's the thing those wounds actually caused some physically embodied situations now if you are looking at this uh um slide deck I wrote physically embedded it should be physically embodied right but it causes physiological damage to you you're stressed out like I had PTSD there was a lot of stuff that I had to struggle with right so all that happens in the socially embedded section now the fourth one is spiritually embattled we have to recognize no matter how much Society tries to tell us that we're just materialistic or or we're just neurons right we are actually Spiritual Beings we have souls right and because of that there is a spiritual warfare that is happening right this is real the devil demons are real and they are attacking and they want to steal kill and destroy you and they know that you have a problem with lust they're just going to incessantly attack you now they are not going to sometimes they're not going to be super aggressive about it like oh here's this naked woman go sleep with her right sometimes they're just going to start to put little things in the way where you start to stumble right you start to check out a girl or you start to scroll through your social media feed and little by little there's just something there where they're like oh I'm going to keep checking this out and they're just planting seeds over and over again right sometimes you may feel like wow I thought I was doing good but have you ever had those days where you just get this overwhelming wave of just lustful desires and you're like what in the world is going on and you can't seem to stop it man many times I found that that's just spiritual warfare right like it's it's the enemy just trying to tempt you and knows that you have these desires right sometimes it could be physical right it could be just like your testosterone that day is just jacked up for some reason right we have to make sure we take all these things into consideration right but spiritual warfare is one of those important ones now before I move to the last one what I want to address here is just recognizing that like if you think about certain denominations right like the charismatic ones they'll always say it's a spiritual thing right like oh you might there might be demonic influences or you're demonized or your demon possessed and oppression and you're like always cast it out and they'll have like casting out uh sessions and stuff like that when the reality may be it may be a social issue or it may be a physical issue right or it may be a heart issue where you just haven't given your life to the Lord or you haven't repented of it again there's a lot more details to these we're just doing a broad overview right so we have to take every single one of these into consideration and see how does it impact one another which leads to the last one one of the biggest reasons we struggle is because we don't realize that God is sovereignly enthroned and what do I mean by this is that we have a a couple things here we have a wrong view of God we just don't see how good and how big and How Majestic and how fatherly God is to us and because of our relationship is fractured with him it just causes so much damage and we run to other things because we just forget how good God is to us right so we have a wrong view of God again we'll go in deeper into that and then the second one is I think we lack a understanding of why God allows Temptation and suffering to happen if anything one of the things that I have found to be the biggest detriment is that people time and time again especially men have come to me and just like well I don't know why God has allowed this to happen to me he knows that I have this massive sex drive and if you knew this I guess this is the only way to solve it like they they kind of almost blame God or they just have again a wrong view of how Temptation or suffering works right or just the fall of Man so all five of these need to be taken into consider consideration as you're trying to find Healing now here's the good news right and this is what I believe that the Bible is sufficient the Bible does give us beautiful ways to for us to uncover these and there are new studies out there today backed up by science that have that thankfully the Bible has told us is true it's now come alive to us but has given us more detail right that we can utilize today and if we take both of those the science the back the science of how to heal people right that aligns with scripture and you take both of those things you will see immense healing quickly right and also if you just recognize that God and we Are spir Spiritual Beings and we could find healing through those you can find recovery now let me just say a couple final thoughts here before I wrap up as you think about the five major reasons you may just be like well let me just go off this checklist and just be like let me knock out each one 1 2 3 4 5 and then I'm done and in 10 days I'm going to be healed from this hold your horses there is still a sanctification process that we all have to go through it took me years to to do this I have been able to um you know close that Gap a little bit with people if like the Lord wills and their heart is in a right posture and open-minded to it and are willing to start going through certain systems to unlock all five of these domains and get healing in each one but it takes a while the second thing that I want to mention is that each of these are interconnected you can't just do one or the other right as as you think about all five they all play a role together give you a great example like if you got physical issues like sicknesses right uh that one of the tactics of the enemy is going to be to tempt you right like that's his thing but that's a spiritual battle right he's going to throw something at you to see if you could fall especially when you are not in the right mind right uh but then again if you're physically right sick sometimes I don't know about you I've been sick before and when I'm sick I'm I'm like a crab crabby pants like I'm just like frustrated at everyone I don't like talking to people and I'm snarking with someone well if I'm snarking with someone and they're snarky at me then I take offense I'm like well why are they snarky at me don't they know I'm sick and I start to have a self pity part well now I have let another root of bitterness come into my heart cuz now I'm frustrated that this person's mad at me and now I have multiple issues that I'm dealing with that are making me more susceptible to fall into sin right and again who's ruling your heart how you're thinking feeling acting about this and finally Sovereign Sovereign enthroned right you're just like well God why are you allowing this to happen to me I'm sick I need I need some relief this might be the best way that I get some relief is just to watch this or to Escape right so all five of these work in tandem together and we just need to be mindful of that as we move forward okay so it's important for us to look at all five of these to get a clear picture of where the root problem is occurring if we don't do that if we just kind of diminish one or the other it's going to be a problem you need to have a right understanding of each one of these to Tru move forward and finally the last thing that I I'm going to mention is that the more you work to see who God is who you are and how sin affects every domain of Life the better chance you have of seeing God's work in healing you now remember this has just been a broad overview Lord willing through uh experts that I want to bring on stories and testimonies from other believers who come in uh and time right of you listening to podcast I'll be in packing each of these domains in Greater detail right uh so if you found this helpful can you do me a favor and just share it with your friends so that they can kill shame stand strong and be on Mission until next time God bless thanks for joining us today if you found this episode helpful make sure to subscribe and leave a review remember killing shame isn't just about breaking free from the past it's about walking boldly into the future God has for you