(LifeSiteNews) — We live in a pornified society. Everywhere we look, advertisements, television, the internet, you name it, we come across sexually charged imagery. Indeed, porn addiction is so rampant in our society as to be ubiquitous.

My guest on today’s episode of The John-Henry Westen Show is Jim O’Day, executive director of Integrity Restored, a Catholic initiative that seeks to help people affected by porn and porn addiction.

According to O’Day, the devil uses porn addiction because he is lazy. While other addictions such as alcoholism and regular drug use involve introducing a foreign substance to the body, the human body itself produces addictive chemicals when one watches porn.

“[The] chemicals that are released when we are aroused, when we are intimate, are powerful, powerful chemicals, that become addicting,” O’Day explains. “With pornography addiction, we are carrying our own source of supply in our brains 24 hours a day.”

He also maintains that sex itself is not shameful, but a good thing, since God made the human body, including its sexual function. Rather, O’Day continues, what pornography has done is propagate a “lie” whereby one starts “bonding to those pixels, to those images on the screen,” the first sign of which is shame for our falling into sexual sin, indicating that the action is not of God.

O’Day, however, recommends the three steps used by Integrity Restored to help overcome porn addiction: overcoming shame and seeking counseling, an intense spiritual life with frequent reception of the sacraments and spiritual direction, and community accountability.

Describing the first step in the process, O’Day admits that the shame in having a porn addiction is something that must be overcome. Describing the different reactions that people would have to porn addiction as opposed to any other kind of addiction, O’Day notes that most people would immediately seek to help those suffering from alcoholism; not so with pornography.

“If that same person comes up [in church] and says, ‘Hey, I’m struggling with a pornography addiction or a sex addiction,’ well, everybody drops their eyes and quietly walks away,” he states. “That has to stop. This is the biggest threat to our Church today.”

O’Day also stresses mercy towards those dealing with the addiction. “One of the core beliefs of the addict is that if anybody knew them, they couldn’t love them, even God,” he relates. “And so you can’t just work … on the brain chemical science trauma part of it without including that mercy and forgiveness and love that you get from the spiritual part.”

“The first thing I would say is … reach out to a therapist or a counselor or a coach,” he continues. “Reach out to your confessor, your priest, another priest if you’re too embarrassed, doesn’t matter. Get a priest on your team.” He also recommends finding a group of people of the same sex also suffering with porn addiction to help recover, stressing “we need community to recover; you can’t do this alone.” He also stressed that “the definition of not being an addict is not sobriety, it’s community, because when you’re an addict, you’re isolated. You are alone.”

Discussing counseling, O’Day stresses that the best possible counselor ought to have two credentials. “The first one is S.A.T.P. – sexual addiction treatment provider,” he explains. “The second is C.S.A.T.P. – certified sexual addiction treatment provider.”

He also stressed that the counselor should be Catholic. If a Catholic counselor cannot be found, O’Day recommends finding a Christian one, and if not that than a secular counselor that will incorporate one’s faith into recovery. O’Day also stresses that if people have difficulty finding counselors in their local area, that they should contact Integrity Restored, asking for help to find one, or visit websites of organizations like the Catholic Psychiatry Institute.

Later in the episode, O’Day addressed the issue of modesty in the clothes that women wear.  

According to O’Day, many young girls and their parents have “fallen for the lies that in order to be popular or successful, they have to dress immodestly and show their, quote unquote, ‘assets’ … to be attractive.”

“How can we as fathers … allow our daughters to be distilled down to just the sum of their body parts and physical attributes, how they look,” O’Day asked. “Women need to be modest, there’s no question,” he added, maintaining that modesty is better for women’s well-being and self-esteem. 

O’Day closed the episode stressing the ubiquity of the porn problem. “I can almost make this promise. … If you yourself are not struggling today, you absolutely know and love someone who is,” O’Day said, adding that studies have shown that between 80 and 90 percent of men between 18 and 65 use porn in the last week, with the statistic being 40 percent of women in the same age group.

He also stressed that there is hope for those suffering from porn addiction. “God will allow us to go through this struggle; but boy, He has something so much better in mind for us,” O’Day tells me. “And once we get to that other side, the gifts are incredible in our own lives and in our relationships.”

For more from Jim O’Day on the topic of porn addiction and Integrity Restored, tune in to this episode of The John-Henry Westen Show.

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