‘A counterfeit of biblical sexuality’: Meet the counselor on a mission to help women overcome porn addiction
Crystal Renaud Day is on a transformational mission to help women who struggle with pornography and sexual addiction, calling the former a “counterfeit of biblical sexuality.”
Day, founder of SheRecovery.com, recently shared her story on the “Politely Rude With Abby Johnson” podcast, explaining how she stumbled upon her powerful mission.
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“I started doing this ministry out of my own struggle with it, and I didn’t expect to do this ministry,” she told Johnson. “It became my reality and it’s become my vocation.”
Day warned about the pervasiveness of pornography, calling it “100 percent, first and foremost, a counterfeit of biblical sexuality” — one that she said teaches a deeply skewed view of reality.
Listen to Day break down porn addiction and the ways in which people can overcome it:
The solution to porn addiction, she said, involves a plethora of components, including: accountability, community, and openly talking about people’s struggles.
And she knows this paradigm all too well from her own personal experience. Day said she was first exposed to pornography at age 10 when she saw an adult magazine, which was the spark that set off what soon became an addiction.
“At that point, I really hadn’t had a great conversation about sex … for me pornography almost became sex education and instead of turning away from that magazine … I engaged in it, opened the pages and just became consumed by the imagery,” she said. “I wanted to watch it more … [I] just really became consumed by this pornography.”
Day struggled for nearly 10 years, with her addiction causing her to place herself in troubling situations. By the time Day was 19, she said she had come to the “very end” of herself.
“I … had put myself in increasingly dangerous situations in order to get the hit, the high from this material,” she explained.
Despite Day’s desperation, things started to turn around when she encountered a woman at her church who had a similar testimony. Day was able to enter into accountability with this woman, and then started to seek counseling to discern the underlying causes of her addiction.
As time went on and Day experienced healing, she started helping other women who also struggle with pornography and sexual addiction; later, she launched her ministry.
“Thirteen years ago, I started leading my first recovery group,” Day said. “This thing they struggle with doesn’t have to be a life sentence and ... there’s hope and there’s healing.”
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She said many women who experience porn addiction “feel dirty” or as though something is wrong with them, but she offered a message of hope to those struggling.
“They’re cloaked in so much shame, because they’ve never told a soul about it,” she said, noting that they assume only men experience these issues. “They feel like they’re the only ones.”
But Day’s work lets these women know that they are, indeed, not alone. Find out more about her work here, and be sure to listen to more episodes of “Politely Rude” on the Edifi Podcast Network.
