Dr. William Struthers is Professor of Psychology at Wheaton College.
What do we understand about addiction, and what do we have wrong about addiction? One of the hallmarks of addiction, according to Dr. William Struthers, is that you’re craving something that doesn’t give you what you need, and you’ve lost your ability to make your own decisions. There is, however, a difference between dependency and addiction; we can be dependent on something, but not addicted to it.
There’s a generation coming up, says Struthers, who’ve come of age with the Internet in their homes and have a dependency to pornography—it’s a self-medication. If we use a medical model, the young people today have almost an inoculation to pornography, it’s like a dead sexuality. They get little bits of it and it makes it difficult to enjoy true, embodied sexuality.
How does pornography serve as a contrast to God’s intent for sexuality? We’ve taken sex and intimacy and made them synonymous with a very specific kind of emotional and physical experience, says Struthers. But sexuality, instead, plays itself out in a lot of different ways across the human experience. We need to change the conversation and instead start to ask the question about what it means to be a sister or a brother.
Struthers says that for many people, we can’t conceptualize sexuality without it having an erotic component to it. But the goal, he says, is not to keep ourselves immune to all things of sexuality; we want, for example, to appreciate the beauty in others, in our husbands or our wives.
We need to step back, instead, and take a serious look at the issue of sin and purity. Although our children, for example, may be inexperienced, they are not pure, Struthers explains. We need to help our …
