Porn in the Pews: SRI Therapist Rob Weiss Talks Addiction With The Daily Beast
Eighty percent of church-going men are “struggling with viewing porn,” says a Florida pastor who has made it his mission to get men around the world to say good-bye to smut.
Baptist Pastor Jay Dennis of the Church of the Mall in Lakeland, Florida, has launched the website One Million Men, seeking signatures on a virtual wall of men who have pledged to live life porn-free. Dennis told The Daily Beast that he never thought he’d find himself talking about sex addiction in church, but after a rash of reports from wives who’d caught their husbands with porn and moms worried about their sons, he said he knew in his heart that church was “the very place to deal with it.”
Therapists have been preaching the dangers of sex addiction for years. Rob Weiss, senior vice president of clinical development with Elements Behavioral Health, likens the addictive potential of porn to that of alcohol, gambling and chocolate-chip cookies.
“All of these are pleasurable, arousing, exciting experiences to various degrees to various people,” Weiss tells the Daily Beast. “For some people, they will lead to escalation, abuse and the eventual need for you to say, ‘I can’t do this any more.”
Weiss, a licensed UCLA MSW graduate who has developed clinical programs for The Ranch outside Nashville, Tennessee, Promises Treatment Centers in Malibu and The Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles, says porn becomes a relationship substitute for addicts. Weiss says he has clients who are 25 years old and have never dated anyone. They tell him, “All I’ve ever done is look at porn.”
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