Please be advised that the the subject of this essay is sensitive and intended for mature readers
March 8, 2012 is a day I will never forget. It was the day I was arrested, and it was one of the worst days of my life. I was not home the evening the S.W.A.T. team raided my house with guns drawn, threatening to knock down the door, and rousing my ten-year-old son from sleep with weapons in their hands. To my mind, this was an excessive display of police force considering I was a 41-year-old C.P.A. with no criminal history, accused of downloading (not creating) child pornography. And it was hurtful to the innocent, because that experience caused my son to suffer nightmares for quite a while. (By the way, this represents just one of the many ways families of felons are caused to suffer for the offenses of their loved ones.)
On the other hand, my arrest was a wake-up call. I was suffering from a pornography addiction, and I was hiding that fact from myself as well as others. Also, I am gay, which I was also hiding from myself and others. My arrest got me walking a different path – one of self-awareness, healing and, finally, redemption. And for that, I am grateful.
My purpose for writing this is to share my experiences and my evolving awareness: The factors that contributed to me committing my crime. How I could have avoided so much pain if I had been supported to have self-acceptance. How long-term shame and fear fed into my painful and destructive behaviors. My views on homosexuality, pornography addiction, and just being human. And, finally, how I am coming to have peace about myself and growing self-love.
One more point: Prior to my arrest, I was clueless about our criminal justice system, as were my family and friends. I assumed it was fair, that sentencing was reasonable, and that the prison’s job was to rehabilitate criminals. I was very wrong on all three accounts. Our system needs a major overhaul, but that won’t happen if people aren’t aware there is a problem.
I am not proud of my path, but I am growing, and I believe that sharing my story with others might help someone avoid going down a similar path. I am getting help now, and I would love to encourage others to get help prior to screwing up their lives. So, I invite you to read this and share it with all who you think would like to understand themselves and others better.
Thank you.
Shame and Fear
Many people carry fear and shame about something that they might have done, thought, said, or even just felt, and they want to hide it. This shame may have started in childhood – jealousy of a sibling, resentment toward a parent, masturbation, anything that we felt was disapproved of and “wrong”. To add to this, many of us were taught shame in our families or by our religions. As a result, we felt that we were bad or worse. Unrevealed and unhealed shame can become toxic to us, causing us to hate ourselves or hide ourselves from real relationships. And that’s what happened to me.
After much introspection and A LOT of counseling, I have realized that not addressing my own shame and fear was the root of my poor relationships, pornography addiction, and the ultimate cause of my incarceration. Just writing about it now, I feel both the fear and shame, but at least now I can acknowledge it, and writing is definitely a healthier outlet than pornography.
My fear and shame really started from two sources. The first was the sexual abuse I suffered when I was four, when my babysitter’s son first forced himself on me. I tried to fight back but he was much bigger and stronger. He pinned me down and was suffocating me with a pillow. When he finally let me breathe again, he told me that if I didn’t do what he told me to, the next time he started suffocating me he would not stop. I spent the next seven months in fear of the next time he would get me alone and what would be the newest form of torture and abuse I would have to endure. As is true of many molested children, I was also full of shame; shame about what was happening to me, and shame that I was not successfully fighting back. I knew what was happening was wrong, but the older boy always had a way of making me feel like it was my fault. After I got a new babysitter, the abuse stopped. My way of dealing with the shame was to pretend nothing ever happened. I never told anyone, and I never got help to deal with the effects, not until now. And this experience and lack of healing around it tainted all of my future relationships.
My second source of fear and shame was the result of the same-sex attractions I have felt ever since I was young. I don’t know if this attraction was an after-effect of the abuse, or if I was just born that way. I’ve tried to figure that out for a while and have come to the conclusion that I’ll never know and, at this point, it really doesn’t matter. When I was growing up in the 1970’s and 80’s, it was not okay to be gay. I was full of shame that I was attracted to other boys and lived in fear that I would be found out. At best I would be ostracized, and there was a good chance I would get beat up as well. I always felt that there was something wrong with me and that I could never risk being myself.
Some people choose drugs or alcohol as a way of escaping reality. I chose pornography. But just like with drugs and alcohol, using pornography just made my problems worse.
Pornography – Self-Honesty and Compassion
At work, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. At home, I couldn’t wait to get time alone. I needed my fix. And I deserved it, right? I worked hard, I spent time with my family, I was active in my church. It was just a hobby. It wasn’t hurting anyone. I could stop any time. That was me, a typical addict. My drug of choice: pornography. And my “hobby” is now costing me 15 years of my life in a federal prison, serving time for receipt and transportation of child pornography. After that, I get to spend the rest of my life on supervised release (the Federal Justice Department’s unconstitutional answer to parole) and 10-15 years on the sex offender registry and all of the related restrictions and stigmas that go with it. I also lost my son who no longer talks to me or to the rest of my family. Was it worth it? Absolutely not!!! I strongly believe that all pornography, even so-called “legal” pornography is damaging to the viewers, their families, the models, and society as a whole, and it should be avoided. But pornography is still not the crux of the problem, and I’ll get to that later…
First, I imagine many of you reading this may be thinking, “What are you complaining about? You are just a pervert and got what you deserved. You’re not like me. I (or perhaps my spouse, my child, my friends, etc.) only look at “legal” pornography, so it’s really no big deal.” At one time I felt the same way. In fact, at the time of my arrest, over 99% of the pornography on my computer was completely legal. All it takes is one purposely or accidentally downloaded file (even if subsequently deleted) that is considered to be child pornography – based on a VERY broad legal interpretation – and it’s prison for you. No excuses, no explanations. And if you think any of your computer usage is private, or that you can somehow delete it later, think again. All of your browsing, emails, texts, posts, etc. are saved on some computer server forever and the government has access to it all.
Okay, so am I making the case that pornography should be avoided because it can be legally dangerous? No, because while the legal risks of pornography are a significant and transparent factor against its usage, in my experience there are many other, deeper hazards to viewing pornography that are a lot less obvious. And that’s what I want to talk about next.
Looking just at myself, it is now obvious that I used pornography as a substitute for a healthy marital relationship. Rather than having the difficult conversations and doing the hard work to fix my marriage, or making the even tougher choice of ending that marriage, I escaped into a world of sexual fantasy while letting my real life continue to deteriorate. As it happens, thanks to my arrest, my marriage ended in divorce anyway, but it would have been best for all of us if my wife and I had been honest with one another and ended our relationship consciously. While it may not be common to be arrested because of pornography, I know firsthand that there have been many marriages that have been destroyed, or almost destroyed, due to a pornography addiction linked with the avoidance of confronting the problems it masks.
If pornography allowed me to avoid taking responsibility for my marriage, it also allowed me to avoid taking responsibility for my own sexuality. Using pornography allowed me to indulge in same-sex attractions without having same-sex relationships. I could look at pictures and videos of nude men (and, unfortunately for me, some of those males were not yet legally of age) without having same-sex relationships. In time, I also got involved in online gay chat, sometimes with video (all legal in this case), many times with other married men. None of these chats required real relating. At the time, I rationalized that this was all okay because it was better than acting on my gay feelings with which I had not come to terms. But I still wasn’t dealing with my homosexuality.
As with many addictions, though, I ended up needing a bigger fix to get the same thrill. So online chat led to meeting up with other married men for sexual encounters (all one-night stands); again without developing real relationships. I never thought of myself as a “cheater”, which would have put me in the category of people I despised for being weak and unethical. But in truth, I was, and the one-night stands made me feel cheap and despise myself even more than I already did.
So the story becomes clear. I used pornography to avoid relating – either with my wife or other men. The pornography wasn’t the cause; it was the mechanism I used to avoid. So to sum up so far, here’s what pornography did for me:
- It allowed me the out to skip the hard work of coming to grips with my sexuality.
- It cheapened the same-sex relationships (more like encounters).
- It enabled me to avoid dealing with my marriage, which was not fair to my wife, my family, or myself.
- It enabled me to avoid relating with men.
(My comments so far have been about pornography and same-sex sexuality because that’s what I engaged in, but I strongly suspect that the same applies to pornography addicts attracted to the opposite sex, too.)
Without moralizing, it is also my belief that there’s other damage caused by pornography itself, including the victimization of the porn models, even if they are of legal age. In my view, a person would have to have some issues – financial or emotional – to pose for porn, and we, as the end users, are taking advantage of that instead of supporting them toward greater wellbeing. In addition, I am concerned about the attitudes and behaviors that are being fed in the people who produce and traffic in pornography, as well as the perspectives we are feeding about human sexuality. These, to me, are important questions, but are beyond this essay.
So I will continue, but before leaving the topic of pornography, I would like to reach out to my fellow addicts and users: In my experience, pornography is not a harmless pastime. It hurts us and it hurts those we love. Perhaps now is the time to quit and to use our time to work on ourselves and our relationships with the real people in our lives. If we can’t quit, we can seek professional help and/or a twelve-step program to help us kick the habit. Perhaps my experience will encourage reflection and maybe save someone else from a fate like mine.
In concluding this section, I am reaching out with compassion and self-compassion. While it is my belief that pornography is harmful, it is clear that pornography is not the cause of the harm. It just enables the harm. In my life, the harm was caused by my inability to love myself as I was, my avoidance of dealing with my issues, lifelong problems in relating, and the lack of support in my life for the real me. So if you or someone you love uses pornography, let’s be honest with ourselves and them, but be compassionate at the same time.
Redemption
This is the hardest part to write – the part where I talk about the fact that I am redeeming myself. I question whether I have the right to be redeemed and whether I am worthy, and I fear that when I proclaim I have that right and that I’m succeeding, others will further judge me, not only as a “pervert”, but now as an unrepentant one. I think this is probably true for all incarcerated people to some extent, but perhaps particularly so for people with sex offense crimes. Well, I want you to know that all incarcerated people, even people labeled “sex offenders”, can work to redeem themselves, and I am currently in the process of doing so for myself. In fact, we need to redeem ourselves because we are human beings, learning and growing, and hopefully becoming more capable of loving ourselves and others.
So, what is redemption? To me, redemption is about being the best person I can be, the person I was meant to be, a person able to love myself so I can better love and serve others. Imagine if all incarcerated people could achieve this redemption. I suspect that there would be almost no recidivism, our prisons would be a lot emptier, and society as a whole would benefit as there would be more people who could contribute to those around them.
Makes sense, right? So why then do our criminal “justice” system, our prisons, our media, and most of society still hold to the idea that the answer to “crime” is punishing and shaming people instead of helping and healing them? Is it the need for revenge? Is it the desire to separate ourselves from the “bad” people, so that the rest of us can reassure ourselves that we are the “good” guys? Is it the fear that if the “bad” ones aren’t punished, they will come back and hurt us?
Whatever the cause, I believe the record speaks for itself. Punishment doesn’t work and, as a result, prisons are overflowing and recidivism is high. There are very few opportunities for personal growth programs or psychological help in prisons, where the majority of the population seems to be suffering from mental illness or addiction. In my view, most of the programs that are offered are a bureaucratic farce meant to look good on paper but with no real substance. Shame, punishment, and dehumanization, on the other hand, have been honed almost to an art form. It is shameful and not helpful to the incarcerated individual or society in general.
In my case, since my arrest, the message I have been hearing constantly from members of our legal system (particularly some very self-righteous prosecutors), prison staff, some mental health “professionals”, my ex-wife and former friends, and the media is that I am a monster who will always be a threat to society and that I can never improve. Any attempt I make to leave the past behind me and move on is met with the infamous “not accepting responsibility” critique, or some version of “you are different, broken, and will never be like us normal people”. It’s no wonder so many people give up. It feels like we can’t win.
But we can win, and some of us do. I have, because, fortunately, redemption is not about other people’s opinions of me, or even their forgiveness or anything external. It is something that only I can do for myself – my self-compassion, my self-forgiveness, my self-awareness and growth. And while I have to do this for myself, I haven’t done it by myself. In fact, I have been blessed with an amazingly supportive and loving family that I know I can count on. I also have a counselor who challenges me to better understand and accept myself, with compassion for my weaknesses and those of others, and a focus on continued growth and improvement.
And so I AM finding redemption. I am finding the courage to face my fears, working on having stronger and more trusting relationships, ceasing to focus on the negatives in life, and trying to do things of value. I am learning to forgive myself and those who have hurt me (a work in progress), and to stop judging others, and instead start treating them with the respect and compassion with which I would like to be treated. I am fighting my negative conditioning and reprogramming myself with healthier responses to stress and anxiety. And finally, I am posting this essay in the hopes of supporting and encouraging others in similar situations, hoping to foster deeper understanding and compassion towards us all, notwithstanding our faults and failings. Am I perfect? Far from it. But, to me, success is measured in progress, not perfection, and I am light years ahead of where I started. We are all flawed individuals making mistakes while doing the best we can. Imagine how much better our world would be if we treated ourselves and others with love, compassion and help rather than judgment, hatred, and punishment.
So, yes, the day I was arrested appeared to be one of the worst days of my life, but, in fact, it was the beginning of my redemption and the beginning of my life, which is yet unfolding. I hope my sharing this with you has been helpful, and may it support you along your own path toward being the best person you can be.
Blessings.
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