Editor’s note: This is part of a special four-part series of Baptist Press stories about Internet porn addiction. For others in the series visit www.bpnews.net and search for “Internet porn addiction” (with the phrase in quotes).
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)–Two women who have dealt with their husbands’ pornography addictions said the key to restoring their marriages was found in their own reliance on God.
Renee Crosse is married to Clay Crosse, who sings the title song for the project “Somebody’s Daughter,” a CD and DVD resource for helping couples heal from the ravages of pornography.
“It was quite shocking to me to find out that this was an issue, a struggle for him, because it was completely hidden. I really didn’t know that this was going on,” Renee told Baptist Press, recounting how she felt when she learned about her husband’s addiction in 1998.
Clay asked Renee to forgive him and to pray for him as he sought restoration and renewed purity, but back then she didn’t know where to turn for help in sorting through her feelings.
“At first I was so self-centered, like all of it was on me,” she said. “I was asking God to help me because I was hurt.”
Then she discovered Stormie Omartian’s book “The Power of a Praying Wife” and was able to shift the focus of her prayers from herself to her husband.
“I prayed for him, that God would make him a man of integrity and purity and that God would guard his eyes and his thought life and that God would make him a strong man of God,” she said. “When I started praying for my husband, it changed something inside of me, and it took away a lot of the bitterness and the anger that I had towards the issue and towards Clay.”
As the process of healing began, Renee had to retrain her mind to stop keeping tabs on whether he was entertaining impure thoughts of other women and instead to pray for him to respond to temptations appropriately.
“It can consume you, and it did me for a while,” she said. “I would think, ‘OK, Clay’s traveling. He’s in an airport. He’s going to see all those magazines.’ And they don’t hide them. Even though they’re not pornography magazines, the men’s magazine covers are so filthy.
“You think, ‘OK, he’s going to see that. Now what’s going to happen?’ Or ‘He’s going to be on an airplane and a supermodel is going to sit down beside him.’
“I would just be consumed with this, but again, prayer,” Renee said. “If we were driving down the street and saw a billboard, instead of getting upset or getting angry at Clay, I would start praying and say, ‘God, just help that be fuzz for him, that he doesn’t even see that,’ and ‘God, when he’s in that airport, help him keep his mind fixed on You, and even though that stuff is out there, Lord, You protect him and let it be like he just doesn’t even see it.'”
Renee said divorce never was an option in her marriage because everyone has issues that they need God’s help with and pornography was just something that she and her husband had to overcome together.
“A lot of us, especially young couples nowadays, go into marriage almost with a renter’s mentality,” she said. “It’s not like they’re going to buy a home but they’re just going to rent a house. If it doesn’t work out, they’ll just go somewhere else, or if there are repairs that need to be done, somebody else is going to fix that.
“Instead, we should go into the marriage with an owner’s mentality of, ‘We are investing in this, and this is something that’s going to be ours. If there are repairs that need to be made, no matter how costly, we’re going to dig in and see this through,'” Renee said.
Shelli Mandeville’s husband John was addicted to pornography, and the Somebody’s Daughter project started when his friend Steve Siler helped him find a way out of the snare. Mandeville and Siler wrote the music for the album, and Shelli sang one of the tracks.
Much like Renee, Shelli’s first reaction was disbelief.
“The first question is ‘Why am I not good enough? What’s wrong with me that you would want to turn to this?'” she told BP. “I felt used, I felt cheap, I felt ugly, I felt all these negative feelings at first. I didn’t want to sleep in the same bed with him, and I was disgusted by him, and I didn’t want him to touch me. I didn’t want to even be near him.
“I felt shame too, and I know he felt shame, and that just made it worse — my anger at first and frustration with it all and feeling so unwanted and unloved,” Shelli said.
Before the pornography addiction was revealed, Shelli considered herself the perfect wife and was prideful, she said. She also tried to control the relationship.
“I tried to wear the pants, so to speak,” Shelli said. “It’s very emasculating for a man, and I didn’t empower him to be strong. I didn’t realize it.”
When he felt belittled by his wife, John turned to pornography where he could fantasize about being whatever he wanted to be, she said. Once she learned about his addiction and realized he wanted to be restored, one of the things she had to do was resist a temptation to blame him for everything.
“I had to realize behaviors and patterns that I was contributing to it and didn’t know it,” she said. “… So God had to walk me through all of that junk in my heart too, and I had to change if I wanted to see change in him because we’re one and we’re relating every day. It has a lot to do with how I treat him and my attitude and my heart in the whole relationship.”
As she drew closer to God, she learned some lessons and implemented some behavior changes that helped her husband find healing.
“I had to shut my mouth a lot when I didn’t want to, and really just handing decisions over to him and not feeling like I needed to make sure he was making the right decision,” Shelli said. “Also not criticizing or waiting for him to change or ‘When are you going to get better?'”
When John saw that Shelli was taking some responsibility for the fractured marriage and that she was accepting him for who he was, he started to change for the better, she said.
Shelli learned to let God fill in the gaps in her marriage where she didn’t think her husband was meeting her needs, and she learned a lot about dying to self.
“You think, ‘I have the right to be angry. I have the right to hate your guts. I have the right to leave. You’ve been unfaithful to me in your heart,'” Shelli recounted. “But the Lord showed me how I needed to give up those rights if I wanted to reconcile and make this marriage work.
“I can stand on my own anger and pain and just get stuck there, and the recovery kind of stops at that place and you don’t get any further. And you’re walking around with bitterness in your heart,” she said.
Shelli said divorce shouldn’t be an option when the spouse who has used pornography wants to leave it behind and save the marriage.
“As many times as I wanted to divorce my husband, I wanted to leave so badly — if they’re on the road and they’re trying to get better, I don’t think it’s an option,” she said.
Renee urges people to visit holyhomes.org, a website she and Clay have launched, and she said she answers e-mails when women write to [email protected].
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Erin Roach is a staff writer for Baptist Press.
