Dr. James Harper
Cyber Secrets 2003
“Secret Shame: Isolation from Self”

The following is a transcript of a live presentation given at the Cyber Secrets Conference on Pornography at Brigham Young University on February 18, 2003.

            As I listened to Dr. Valentine and Dr. Fischer’s presentation about “Awake My Soul,” and Dr. Valentine’s comments about arising from the dust, it reminded me of a story that I heard recently.   A young child came to his mother and said, “Is it true, Mother, that we come from dust, and when we leave this earth we’ll go to dust?”  And she said, “Yes, son, that’s true: ‘from dust we came and unto dust we’ll go.’  That’s what the Bible said.  Well, he accepted that, and a few days later he came to her again and he said, “Mother, there’s someone under my bed, and I don’t know if they’re coming or if they’re leaving.”  As I think about that, if we’re supposed to arise from the dust, I hope that’s what you’re all really doing today and that you’re not taking the alternative. 

I’m going to talk to you about shame and its involvement in pornography.  Shame is always a negative evaluation of oneself.  Sometimes it’s just a feeling.  Everyone has probably experienced the feeling of shame; we sometimes refer to it as ashamed, embarrassed, humiliated.  And if it’s a feeling, it passes with time.  However, in relationships where an individuals feelings are not seen as valid, that individual concludes that emotion is bad, may come to the conclusion that they are flawed, and they seek to compartmentalize the emotional part of them.  In other words, they become isolated from their whole person, the one who was genetically wired with a God-given system to experience emotion.  When this happens, they enter into what I’m going to call a shame state.  This occurs after frequent shaming experiences, and it causes people to split off feelings as flawed parts of themselves so that they become increasingly numb, increasingly afraid of feelings that are associated with daily living. 

I want to contrast that with guilt.  Sometimes you’ll hear in the public that guilt is a bad thing.  However, I believe that guilt can be healthy when it’s a recognition that my behavior has valued a standard important to me.  When I’m young it may be recognition that my behavior has violated a standard that’s important to somebody in my life, like my parents, and over time I learn to internalize that so the standard becomes important to me.  Contrasted with a shame state, the focus in guilt is on the behavior rather than on a negative evaluation of self.  In other words, if I feel guilty for something I’ve done that’s violated a standard, I can see it as a mistake.  I might feel momentary feelings of shame, but I will change my behavior because I’m a child of God of goodness.  Contrasted with someone in a shame state, often behavior change doesn’t make any difference because it does not change their negative evaluation of self.  They still feel flawed, even when they change the behavior.  And people in a shame state excessively use guilt to create more shame. 

In a book that I wrote some time ago with Margaret Hoops, we contrasted healthy functioning of a person who would feel transitory shame, feelings of shame, contrasted that with a person who had developed a shame state.  They would view themselves first of all for the healthy person as a good person, a child of God with limits and acceptance of boundaries but capable of doing many good things and influencing many people.  A person in a shame state sees themselves as flawed, something in them doesn’t work quite right, it’s broken, and regardless of what they try to do it continues to feel broken.  In terms of emotion, a healthy person experiences a wide range of emotion – yes, even some of the negative ones.  Sometimes life is lonely.  Sometimes things are scary.  Sometimes we’re sad.  Those are appropriate emotions if they match the context in which we live, and to be alive is to experience them.  Experiencing emotion is not a bad thing.  It’s how we act on it that sometimes becomes bad.  A person in a shame state has a limited range of emotion.  Oftentimes they’ve been so afraid of the emotions they experience that they always try to escape from them.  They may get stuck in the extremes, either extreme intensity which becomes unbearable to them, or not feeling at all and being dead and desensitized.  In terms of beliefs, a healthy person believes, “I’m a good person who sometimes violates standards and makes mistakes.”  And they also believe that others will like me if they take the time to get to know me. 

A person by contrast in a shame state believes, “I’m flawed emotionally.  If others discover how bad I am, they will reject me.  And even when they say nice things, other do not know the real me.  If they did, they would see me as flawed, as I view myself.”  Socially, healthy people are fairly self-disclosing.  They give information to others about themselves and they’re generally friendly.  A person in a shame state is always guarded, reluctant to let their true self become evident to others for fear they’ll be discovered, and so therefore they’re isolating, always living in a fear of others discovering who they really are inside.  They use guilt in different ways. 

A healthy person emphasizes changing the behavior and uses guilt to do that, because they see themselves as good inside.  A person in a shame state feels excessively guilty.  They may come constantly telling people what they’ve done wrong, but they use it in such a way that it furthers the feeling of being flawed, and even if they change the behavior, they may still see themselves as bad inside.  Often they eventually get to the state where it doesn’t matter whether they change behavior anymore because changing behavior doesn’t seem to make them feel better. 

There are several emotional types of triggers which are elements or symptoms of being in a shame state.  First of all, not allowing yourself to have feelings of boredom, loneliness, hurt, anger, sadness, or guilt.  Perhaps shame over past life history that things haven’t gone exactly who you hoped.  Feeling lonely or unloved, feeling abandoned, feeling inadequate about what you do, not being perfect but trying to act like it, needing to make a good impression at all costs, be an imposter.  One man described this imposter syndrome in this way: “I hide who I really am from others.  In secret I am someone different from who I am in public.  If others discovered who I really am, they would be disgusted, so I have to hide my flaws and only show a small part of myself that I think others will accept.”  Other things like anger or rage are often symptoms of a shame state, great stress and anxiety, particularly over social relationships, and of course all of this leads to not dealing directly with feelings.  Well, how do we learn to regulate our emotional experience? 

Well, first of all our brains are geared by our very nature to help us regulate this.  However, it is true that in early life, our brains are still developing, as is our whole nervous system, and interaction in our environment, what we’ve learned from our parents and other loving caretakers, influences a great deal the way our brains develop and the ways in which we learn to regulate our emotional experience.  It’s a co-regulation, if you will.  You’ve all seen it probably as a mother seeks to soothe and calm a baby who’s distressed in some way.  The baby calms.  You may have noticed if you’ve had the experience that you calm as well.  There’s something innately soothing and regulating of emotion to be able to hold a young infant and stroke their back in a calming, appropriate way.  Our brains are naturally geared to seek regulation of stress, discomfort, and negative emotion.  It’s not something that the brain likes you to stay in for long periods of time.  An infant quickly discovers that their emotions are often regulated through deliverance of food and touch.  A soothing influence appears from the world outside oneself, or so it appears to the infant, and suddenly I feel better.  All of this happens for the small cost of rapid breathing, a few tears, and several whining and screams.  Infants also discover eventually, sometimes even before they’re born, that a measure of tension can be regulated through self-stimulation, primarily sucking your thumb.  As adults, we repeatedly seek passage into the infant’s heavenly retreat of thumb sucking.  Many find soothing relief through surrogate parents of TV or video games, some through other means. 

Listen to this story of one woman in her advice to another: “Listen, Carol,” she said, “Don’t get yourself into the kind of trouble I did.  One day I watched a soap opera just for fun; within a week I was mainlining.  I was doing four hours of soaps a day.  Then I really flipped out and started to mix soaps and game shows.  Finally I had to quit cold turkey.  It was awful.  Do you know I still get occasional flashbacks from General Hospital.”  Well, growing up consists of finding the right substitutes for your thumb.  Some of these receive social approval and add to our well-being.  Others are highly disdained.  Though they provide short-term relief, they add to the tension in the long run.  The diverse substitutes for your tongue for learning also tend to trigger changes in neurotransmission in our brains, and this leads to alteration of mood. 

Well, let’s look a minute at men’s brain functioning and what we know from some research on the brain and contrast that with women.  Mark Castleman, in his book Pornography: The Drug of the New Millennium, describes it this way: “Women think contextually while men are good at compartmentalizing their attention.  It’s a more channeled thinking process.  Men are able to separate information, the stimulus, the emotions, the relationships, while women’s brains tend to link everything together.  These both serve their purposes and bring strengths for both men and women.  Men’s dominant perceptual sense is vision, where women’s sense is more integrated and more contextual.”  Pornography tends to target primarily men.  However, women are becoming more involved and often enter the world of pornography through chat rooms, relationships that appear to be loving at first and soothing, but eventually turn sexual, sometimes violent and even lead to death.  The pornography industry knows this about men and women; they provide visual stimulation at the highest level possible, and focusing on this channeled thinking process, they show focused parts of the body rather than the whole.  In addition, testosterone, a hormone predominant in men, has been shown to have significant effect on the male brain.  And the way it affects it is it increases the ability to focus intensely and narrowly on specific issues and interests for long periods of time without tiring.  Anyone who’s talking to a pornography addict has heard the story of how they only intended to sit down in front of a computer for a short period of time.  And hours later when they look at their watch, they’re surprised by how much time their mind has consumed and focused in.  What neuroscientists have learned in recent years is that experiences and brain functioning interact.  Certainly emotional patterns can be conditioned in the brain.  We’re finding through recent neurological research that even some of the emotional patterns that exist in marriage have been patterned by our early life experience.  It’s like pouring water down a hill: initially the water takes several different paths; but as more water is poured, certain channels are engraved into the hillside, and as more water is poured it consistently follows a set path.  As pornography is used to escape from anxiety, boredom, fear, loneliness, sadness, hurt, anger, or shame, it’s like pouring water down the consistent path, so the automatic escape route from these feelings is an activity that channels the brain even further.  Cellular memory groups where images are stored will always be there to beckon back to the computer screen.  And they further constrain the brain’s ability to consider alternative actions and paths. 

Consider the story told in Laurie Hall’s “An Affair of the Mind,” a story about her husband Jack, who for twenty years struggled as a pornography addict.  In her words: “Jack lost his ability to think about anything else.  He lost his common sense and his ability to solve problems.  Sometimes when someone would ask him a question, he would start to answer, only to stop halfway into the reply and then freeze with his mouth open.  His mind had gone completely blank.  Finally the man who was recognized three times as an outstanding employee was fired for being incompetent and lying to his boss.  Years later when he was examined by a psychiatrist, Dr. Ron Miller, Dr. Miller said this after examining Jack: ‘You’ve destroyed your mind.  You’ve dug a deep channel going in one direction.’”  My belief is that as we do more and more brain research, we will find like other addictions that pornography has the potential to not only alter moods but alter the brain chemistry of the mind and to create pathways which are automatic, which are deeply ingrained, as this pathway you view after years of erosion by a stream. 

Mark Castleman also in The Drug of the New Millennium says that it’s like looking through a soda straw.  Imagine that you are standing on the vista of the Grand Canyon and that you had to look at it through a soda straw.  You might hear comments from the others: “What an interesting rock”; “There’s a beautiful patch of blue water,” they would say, “and look at that leaf on the tree.”  That is how men hooked on pornography often see their own life and other people.  It is a very severe form of tunnel vision that has implications for brain functioning and neurochemical processes. 

There’s two ways that shame is related to pornography.  First, people in a shame state have a problem with emotional regulation, and so they may turn to pornography as an escape.  Addiction involves a compulsion to secure something with inherent pleasure-inducing properties with an accompanying loss of control and a continuation despite harmful consequences.  Things like drugs, food, sex, gambling all give prompt and salient short-lasting relief.  However, involvement in these activities leads to alterations in moods, pleasure induction, it has an initial state of euphoria but then it’s followed by a negative emotional state – a high followed by a low, if you will.  This post-euphoric discomfort is further impetus to repetition of the pleasure-inducing activity.  Addiction is evident when one becomes progressively unable to control the beginning or the end of what they see as a supposed need fulfilling activity.  Feelings of shame are always a consequence of involvement with pornography, and people who are trying to escape these may engage in more forms of pornography.  There are sort of two phases.  The release phase, where one’s lost in the addiction – they become self-centered and self-indulgent, they seek to escape from emotional and psychological stress, to escape from temporary loss or fear or anxiety or loneliness or even shame, and they give in to the addiction, and we call it the acting out phase.  The second part is the control phase.  The person who’s using pornography sees his life as unmanageable.  He has to gain control again.  So he leaves a secret self to become a public self.  He may in this control phase try to over-control, and we say that he’s entered into the acting in phase.  Like drugs, pornography can provide temporary relief from feelings of shame, but it is only temporary - the long-term consequences of negative emotion, such as shame, and even with greater intensity.  Long-term consequence of compulsive pleasure seeking is that rewards of that activity diminish, and the suffering begins to surface with even greater intensity.  Even if people don’t enter into pornography in a shame state, continued pornography use has great potential to take them to a shame state. 

Well, then if I can summarize for a minute what I’ve said about this shame state and channeling.  The sense of being is flawed because emotions keep causing me trouble.  I seek to escape from anxiety, fear, sadness, hurt, anger, and loneliness through any activity that regulates these emotions but rarely in relationships.  I hide a part of myself, the negative emotion part.  I become isolated from that part, less in touch with it.  I seek to escape from it rather than facing it and learning to work through it.  Pornography is a maladaptive regulation of emotion.  It’s not relational.  It produces a me-centeredness rather than a we-centeredness.  Men who are on this slippery slope often fail in significant relationships.  Over time they become less effective, less reliable, less creative, and more prone to meanness and fits of anger.  They waste their time, talents, and resources, caught up in their own secret world of hiding from others and intense shame.  In a marriage, what should be a great sexually intimate experience becomes a me-centered experience for these men.  Sexual intimacy turns into what Castleman called “a one-man show of self-absorption, self-deception, and rationalization with accompanying feelings of shame, needing to hide, feeling flawed emotionally.”  The focus is inward.  It doesn’t share.  It rarely ever knows the verb “to give.”  It’s not interested in connecting with anyone but self.  It’s like hanging a “Do not disturb” sign out for one spouse, dating partner, or others.  The porn industry doesn’t put ads on their sites that say, “Check out this site and then go have a wonderful romantic evening with your wife.”  In a proper context in a marriage relationship, the sexual experience has the potential to be binding, loving, giving, and even a spiritual experience for both men and women.  No such benefits exist with pornography.  When a husband is isolated in a pornography process leading to shame, his attitude will always spill over into his marriage.  Over time he will be less of a soulmate and more of an isolationist.  He will change the way he views his life so that she is a makeup of body parts which deserve his focus to the exclusion of recognizing her as a companion, a helpmate, and a confidante.  Pornography turns intimacy into a totally me and narrow experience.  As I’ve already stated, it’s not an effective emotional regulation; it’s short term at best, but in the long term it leads to more wallowing in shame.  And it also has the potential to alter brain functioning, to develop a maladapted, channeled focus and conditioning. 

Well, the cycle then leads to more intensified shame.  It places men on an emotional roller coaster.  Men who are involved regularly in pornography can be happy one minute and then the next minute they might be sad.  They can be calm and then angry.  They can be kind and then cold.  The moods change without warning.  These moods create stress and pain for wives, children, even friends and neighbors.  Feelings of estrangements eventually ensue, further isolating and alienating them from their loved ones, which often drives them deeper into the self-medicating escape of pornography.  They often develop shame about their body and about sexuality.  For example, one man told me of the great remorse and shame he had after a sexual encounter with his wife.  He recoiled from her touch because he felt filthy and ashamed.  Pornography addicts often say they want to get away from their wives after having sex, and they often report that they take more variety and frequency of sexual activity to bring the same levels of excitement.  A good sexual relationship in marriage requires a deep commitment and occurs I think along three sort of scales.  Yes, there does need to be passion, but there needs to be intimacy and bonding, and there needs to be spirituality as husbands and wives engage in an act that Elder Holland describes “brings them closer to God than at any other time.”  Pornography only emphasizes eroticism.  It disconnects men’s values from believing in the benefit of relationships.  It builds a lack of confidence around others because the secrecy and hiding.  If you’re hiding yourself, you can never be totally confident that even in the most benign of social settings that someone won’t discover who you really are.  And of course, it leads to unworthiness and a spiritual vacuum.  Well, what do you do about all of this? 

People who suffer from shame need to learn to develop relationships that are close and soothing.  They need to develop connections with other people.  My experience as an ecclesiastical leader of those, both men and women, who deal with pornography addiction is they often benefit from having better social relationships, but they need to be relationships where they can be safe, relationships that are naturally soothing.  To give you a metaphor of that, I’m reminded of a recent description of a relationship between a teacher and a young child that was told at an attachment conference recently held in Salt Lake City.  This young child was particularly a problem in the classroom.  He was biting other children and seemed to be emotionally out of control much of the time, a very aggressive seven-year-old.  The teacher would take him at recess time and bring him into her classroom, sit him on her lap, and explain to him that if he needed to bite, that he could bite her finger.  He couldn’t do it very hard, but he could bite it if he needed to.  Well, at times he would.  He would chomp down on her finger, not particularly hard, and then as he would do this, she would talk to him about soothing kinds of things, about good things in his life.  She was teaching him to regulate his emotional experience.  She did this for several months.  Over time, as you might guess, he lost his need to bite anybody.  He became much more in touch with many of the feelings he had, felt that he was more acceptable because a kind and loving teacher in a soothing relationship had taught him that emotions weren’t scary things, that it was how you handled them and acted out on them that was the problem, and they could be accepted as an integrated part of you not to be run away from, but to be worked through and solved.  One of the interventions that I typically use as a stake president with individuals suffering from pornography addiction is to ask them when they’re feeling the urge, you have to catch this early, but rather than isolating and being alone in a bedroom or in an apartment or I guess in the future with mobile, wireless phones – rather than going that direction, which will lead to more shame, to seek out not a heterosexual relationship necessarily but a relationship where they can reach out and really touch someone, where they can make a connection, where they have the potential of discovering that they’re not really flawed inside, that other people can accept what they see as their broken self, and they can become an integrated whole person. 

I think it’s important for all of us to have a strong sense of being a child of God.  Shame and shame states I believe are tools of Satan.  Our doctrine teaches that we’re all children of God, that we’re whole, that we have many talents.  We come with bodies that are innately wired to experience emotion, good and bad.  And as children of God, we have great potential.  We know we will make mistakes at times, we hope the mistakes aren’t too grievous and that they don’t hurt others too much.  But children of good change because they are good inside, not because they feel flawed.  Satan would have us believe that we’re all flawed inside and that we’re all broken in some way because it serves his purposes.  We need to allow dependency on God and caring of others. 

At times in my life I have worked with people in shame states who believed that even God would be polluted by their badness.  The thing they didn’t understand is God already knew everything about them, but they assumed that if they hid from him, that somehow their being flawed wouldn’t influence him, and he could still be good in the world.  It’s of interest to me that after Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden partook of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that the first thing that Lucifer said to them was to hide.  I think Lucifer is probably still trying to sell that message to men and women, children of God, ever since that time: to hide yourselves from God as if we really could do that. 

Well, when we allow dependency on God, we find a resource that helps us deal a great deal with feelings of loneliness and of boredom and of sadness and anger.  And carrying others also – good home teachers, good visiting teachers, friends, roommates, spouses, neighbors.  The fact that a shame-based person can reach out to them goes a long ways in helping them deal with those feelings.  All of us need to work at developing more integrity.  I would define that as greater congruence between our public and our secret selves, because I tend to believe that hiding creates an experience of shame in all of us.  And as we take and try to become more congruent, so we are in public who we really are, that we are children of God in public as well as in secret, that the great joy which has been talked about in this conference can be better realized.  What can you do?  If you suffer, even from minimal involvement in pornography use, what can you do? 

Well, first of all you have to develop the spiritual connection where you gain a sense of being a child of God who is worth saving.  That very concept is an anti-shame concept.  The solution that pornography addicts often suffer of “How do I ever restore my mind to what it was before I filled it with all these images?” is only found in my experience in spiritual connection.  I suspect that we may find out like drugs, that pornography addiction and other forms of addiction, such as gambling and others, might have a period of time following our discontinuance of them where we are in great peril for relapsing.  I recently attended a conference in which they’re explaining that we’ve discovered with different drugs that the period of time in which individuals will crave those drugs varies according to the drug they’ve used.  For marijuana, you can expect to have cravings for a period of at least a year following discontinuing its use.  For cocaine, you can expect to have cravings for at least eight years following the discontinuance of its use.  I don’t know if we’ll find such a thing with pornography addiction, but the fact that individuals who are trying to stop have cravings and urges is no news to those who have dealt with addictions for some time.  I don’t know how long the craving might last, but I know that you have to find ways to meet the needs to escape from emotion in a different way than going back to the use.  You see, it’s not really a solution, it’s only short term.  In the long run, you risk channeling of mind to the point where you lose your mind, and more intensified shame, and a never-ending cycle where you’ll be trying to escape from that shame.  Well, I always tell people that in this life, you have to learn to face your stresses, anxieties, your fears, your angers, your sadness without isolating yourself from them.  It’s as though you develop an attitude, “I can feel pain and I can get through pain; it’s a part of this earth life to experience it, and I am glad that I can be alive.”  As I explain to my children when I was grieving for the death of my mother a few years ago, it’s my inherent right to grieve.  I will do it fully, I will experience it because it means that I am alive.  And although it is scary and sometimes feels out of control, what I have learned with dealing like feelings with grief is that you have to feel the pain and get through it.  There are no other ways.  And when you do, then strange grief reactions don’t show up.  And we need to reach out and form relationships, become more social. 

I’m reminded of growing up as a teenager in Ashton, Idaho, and there was a man that all of us delighted to see.  He was probably about 88 years of age, he had lost his companion many years before.  We all delighted to see him on the streets because this particular brother had a talent to make pulled vinegar taffy like no one else that I know.  And in moments of loneliness - he lived alone – he would make a batch of his pulled taffy and he would go out on the streets and he would share it with those he encountered.  It often led to a conversation, to social connection for him.  I’m sure it went a long ways for him to face his feelings of loneliness and to get through them.  But for the rest of us, it was not only a great blessing in the reception of a small piece of candy, it was a great lesson in what to do when we suffer from feelings that disturb us, to reach out, to form a relationship, to give of ourselves.  Satan would have you isolate, to pull inward.  In my experience, rarely have these kinds of feelings been resolved by turning great focus on self, unless it was in small quiet moments of prayer or temple worship where you were listening quietly to what God has to reveal about you.  Well, we need to avoid focus channeling – I would say, in all parts of life.  Video games in some ways are probably just as detrimental to focus channeling for men as are other kinds of things.  Doing too much of one thing with too much focused attention for too long a period of time can lead any of us to be far too channeled.  We lose our balance in life, we fail to experience the wholeness, we look at life through a straw. 

I would encourage anyone to engage in a program of stress reduction.  Learn to breathe more deeply.  Learn to meditate, learn to read the scriptures, the great source of peace and stress reduction.  And if needs be, learn relaxation and meditation.  Exercise.  All of these are forms of reducing stress and the accompanied feelings that go along with stress that are highly acceptable and will help your well being a great deal.  They never lead to more shame.  Change the meanings and beliefs in your life.  Rather than gazing at a woman’s body parts, look her in the eye and say to yourself, “This is someone’s daughter or sister or perhaps a mother, and certainly she is my spiritual sister, a part of an eternal family.”  Visualize the consequences, speed up the time.  If you’re tempted to sit down in front of a computer or purchase a magazine, visualize what will happen as others find out, the disappointment that they will face, the look on your boss’ face as he discovers your secret.  For those of you who are in treatment programs, the look at the members of your twelve-step group as you come to tell them the sad story of your relapse.  One of the consequences of this channeling process that I’ve talked about is that we often disconnect the consequences of our actions from doing them.  We become so focused that we forget about what the behavior does to others, and for those of you who have concluded that this hurts no one but yourself, don’t be deceived, for the attitudes that you gain from being regularly involved with pornography will spill over into all your relationships.  You will not feel as well emotionally, and that is bound to impact others.  You will not be able to do the good in their lives because you will lack true confidence in your own ability to rely on spiritual powers which will help you.  And lastly, when a trigger comes, acknowledge it and let it go.  For example, men, if you view a woman and you find some particular part of her body as attractive, as beautiful, then say something like, “She’s a beautiful woman, but my well being and my emotional health is far more important to me than the fact that I can be attracted to her.”  You acknowledge the triggers rather than not dealing with them, but you are able to say, “I no longer need to act.  I’m beginning to see others through Christ’s eyes, as children of our Father, as having the potential to all live together in an eternal family, and I will work to have Christ’s vision to see others in all relationships I form.”  If you do this, you can acknowledge triggers and see people for who they really are, their wholeness, not just their outward appearance, not just as body parts, but as individuals with many talents, with intellect, with great experience, who can bless your life by the association. 

Well, lastly let me just say, reentering a world of sanity requires the development of an alternative means of meeting your needs for stress reduction and escape from shameful feelings.  Replace your self-talk of “I can’t cope without this” to “I care about maximizing my experience and joy in life.”  You might say at times, “I am tempted by,” and you fill in the blank, “but I value my family relationships and the quality of my life experience more.”  You will have to make decisions if you are involved in this about whether you can manage your problem alone.  Please be open to the possibility that you may not be able to manage it alone.  You will hear other presentations today about treatment.  There are many resources available today.  LDS Family Services offers excellent twelve-step groups.  Psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and other therapists are becoming better trained about how to help you with these emotional problems of shame and with pornography use that only makes shame worse.  I would plead with you to stop hiding from your Heavenly Father, to open up.  Share with him all that you believe is flawed, all of the pain.  His Son, you see, has experienced it all – all of our mistakes, all of our pains, all of our sufferings, and yes, even temptation.  There is no reason to ever hide.  There is no reason to ever say, “No one understands.”  There is One who always understands, for he has experienced it all and even more.  I pray that if you are not able on your own to deal with this, that you will seek help, not only from spiritual sources but from professionals who desire and are waiting to help you be released.  The scriptures tell us that the truth will make us free, and that as we turn to the Lord with all diligence of mind, with full purpose of heart, having trust in him, then through Christ’s good will and pleasure, which I interpret as grace, he will free us from bondage, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.