Sathiya Sam discusses the impacts of pornography use and how developing healthy relationships is crucial to recovery

Sathiya Sam is a coach, speaker, and creator of DeepClean—a research-based approach to overcoming porn addiction that’s rooted in the Bible. A recovered addict himself, he’s now author of The Last Relapse. He has worked with everyone from college students to medical doctors, helping them walk in greater levels of freedom from porn. Based out of Toronto, Ont., Sam is happily married and a die-hard basketball fan. 

DeepClean’s resources present a sense of challenge, prompting listeners to begin a process of recovery and form new habits of sexual integrity. Could you talk about why that element of urgency is so important, and why you think it resonates with your audience?

When I was younger, I told a mentor I couldn’t wait until I was married one day. I thought having sex would fix my struggle with pornography. He almost reached across the table and smacked me. He was like, “Marriage is a magnifier. If it’s a problem now, it’s a problem later.”

I think the reason there’s an urgency when you’re young to address these kinds of issues is because everything that might happen later on in life, like marriage, having more money—any issues that exist now become bigger later if we don’t address them. Often, a vice that many people fall into is we think that things just magically change themselves. But they actually dig deeper roots as time goes on.

Speaking of your audience, DeepClean is centred on men’s recovery. Of course, we know both genders use pornography. Are there differences in porn use between men and women? 

Historically in the church, if you are going to talk about something as taboo and private as sexual sin, the conversation immediately gravitates toward the men. It’s centered around them. I think there’s good reason for that. Men have been predominantly the ones who struggle with sexual misbehaviour. They’re a lot more responsible for sexual crimes.

The problem is, any stereotype immediately feels like another layer of shame for those who don’t fit the mold—even if that mold is something shameful such as sexual sin.

I really feel for women in the church because the numbers are pretty clear now that the ratio is about two to one for porn consumption of men to women. Not only do they have nowhere to turn to, but they have a whole other layer of stigma to hurdle.

Do men and women watch pornography for the same reason? Yes and no. Men are much more visually stimulated than women are. Women are also visually stimulated too, but on average, women are a lot more drawn to narratives and storylines.

Those are maybe some of the differences. But at the core of it, porn addiction is an intimacy disorder. Whether you’re a man or a woman, we’re all wired for intimacy. I think that drives people to things like pornography much more than anything else. And I think that’s what keeps people stuck as well. It’s a fundamental need that we cannot avoid. We will meet it one way or another. The question is whether it’s healthy.

Intimacy is really about being known and seeing, and reciprocally knowing and seeing others. Vulnerability is at the core. The Latin word for vulnerability translates as woundable.  To be intimate is to be in positions within our relationships where we’re woundable because we’re so tender and we’re so transparent. And there’s a myriad of ways you can experience that kind of closeness beyond romantic relationships.

So, part of the process of healing is learning to develop greater vulnerability and intimacy with others.

Yeah. There’s a British journalist, Johann Hari, who had a viral TED Talk about 10 years ago on addiction. And the summation of the TED Talk in one sentence is that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it’s connection. Learning to foster meaningful connection goes a really long way in healing the human heart.

And the cool thing is, we’re talking about relationships with other people, but actually intimacy with God is paramount in all of this. Relationships with God and others go a long way for people who are in recovery from sexual misbehaviour.

What are some of the common barriers that prevent people from seeking help with quitting porn?

The first is probably thinking you’re the only one and that nobody understands you and therefore nobody can help you. I think the second big one among Christians is the fear of consequences, whether that’s being judged, whether that is losing a position of leadership or some responsibility, maybe losing a relationship.

Those are the two big ones. The other one would just be a lack of resources or a lack of knowledge on even what to do. Collectively, that can make it really hard for people to get the help they deserve.

What are some of the common impacts of porn use?

We know relationships are dramatically affected by pornography—satisfaction, quality, and longevity, those three areas have all been shown to be negatively affected. Some studies suggest porn use lowers your ability to empathize and form healthy attachments with another person. It can also contribute to a lack of confidence and diminished productivity. There can also be physical ramifications, such as erectile dysfunction, eating disorders, or difficulty engaging in sex.

The other big category is the spiritual life. I work with men who sense they have a purpose or calling from God, but they feel their pornography addiction is disqualifying them from stepping into it. So, you get a lot of people feeling like they’re not good enough.

Are you seeing an increase in research on the effects of pornography use? What are some weaknesses or strengths in that research?

There’s a divide among academics about porn addiction for several reasons. Porn addiction is not in the DSM (which is kind of the Bible on mental illness diagnoses for psychiatrists). But there was a very strong push for the most recent version to include it. They ultimately determined that porn addiction does not follow the typical symptom mechanisms that other addictions do and so therefore, it’s not an addiction. So, they’re saying they don’t know exactly how to categorize it.

You have another camp of people who would say that if you remove the morality components and all the guilt-tripping, then there’s not really much of a conversation to be had. But what’s emerged in the last three years is a lot of neutral researchers who are not religiously biased or biased in any other way. And they are observing that actually when we do compare people who view pornography to those who don’t, there’s a lot of differences, whether you’re looking at the neurochemistry, or whether you’re looking more clinically at their behaviour and how they interact with other people.

Good research always controls for all the variables that could interfere with the results. But it’s very hard to find control groups because so many people have been exposed to pornography and are watching it regularly. And so more long-term effects on those control groups can be really difficult to study.

But there are hundreds of journal publications that demonstrate some sort of harmful effect of pornography on the individual or society at large. So that field is growing. From when I started five years ago, everything is going in the right direction, and in another five or ten years from now, this field will have emerged quite a bit more.

There has also been a growing awareness of the harms of pornography in recent years, including scrutiny directed at Pornhub for its exploitative and illegal content. The Canadian government is developing an online harms bill meant to address some of these issues, particularly to protect children. Do you find there’s a growing awareness of this other, exploitative layer to porn?

Lack of awareness and education are still huge problems. A lot of people will justify porn addiction because they think it only affects them. I find people don’t really understand how intertwined pornography and sex trafficking are.

For five years, Exodus Cry studied sex trafficking, trying to understand the mechanics of how these industries function and operate. They had two main conclusions when they did their research—this was after five years of studying red light districts around the world. Their first conclusion was that the majority of people who go to brothels and pay for sex were exposed to pornography at a young age.

And the second thing they discovered is that the porn industry is the marketing department for sex traffickers. Porn is used often for trafficking and trafficking is often used for porn. A lot of videos that are uploaded are actually of people who are being trafficked.

But even with pornography where there aren’t minors involved and no one is being trafficked, a lot happens off-camera which is pretty disturbing.

I’ve rubbed shoulders with some people who were porn stars who have now escaped and remade their lives quite impressively, like Brittni De La Mora and Joshua Broome. And they’ll tell you all kinds of stories of signing a contract that says, you’re agreeing to do XYZ in the film and then once they’re recording, they ask you to do something that’s very clearly stated as not appropriate in the contract.

And you either get paid and do what they’re asking you to do or can walk off set. There is a lot of coercion, a lot of manipulation, not to mention drug abuse.

We now have access to pornographic content with an ease and volume that’s unprecedented. What is your advice for parents with young kids looking for help and guidance?

Parents are in a very powerful position in this conversation, even though at times it can feel very powerless because you don’t know what your kids are watching or what they’re getting exposed to. But the best thing a parent can provide is a safe place to talk about these things.

That is a very fluid statement that’s actually very hard to execute in real life. But the people I’ve seen do this well is where their kids are getting exposed to pornography, but then they’re letting their parents know and they’re choosing to not watch as they mature and go through teenage stages and then eventually become adults.

The commonality in all these stories is that you have parents who were talking to their kids early and often about sex—age appropriately, obviously. And they never shamed them. They were never in trouble. They were having open conversations and trying to make it easy for the kids to approach them and have the dialogue without them being judged or reprimanded.

That goes a very long way for kids to feel safe and be able to ask questions. Historically, a lot of parents feel ill-equipped to have the conversation because they don’t know what they can say and what they can’t say. But creating that safe environment for conversation both reduces shame and destigmatizes actually talking about it, while at the same time raising the bar of integrity.

Sexual sin can come with so much shame and pain, and I think we often focus on that and on the need to change, which is crucial. But when we begin to change our hearts and behaviours, what’s the good vision we can hope for? Why is it worth the work and sacrifice?

I was challenged in my own recovery to ask that same question: Why is pornography such a problem?

The first thing I would say is if God instructs us to avoid something, he always has our best interests in mind. It’s not a test. He’s not saying, Hey, don’t do this, and let’s see what kind of character you’re really made of.

There are a few things we seem to observe [at DeepClean] about guys as they quit pornography. Number one is they get more confidence. Number two is they take more healthy risks in their lives. Maybe it’s that single guy who finally musters up the courage to ask out that girl that he always loved or maybe there’s that business he wants to start and he finally decides to quit his job and try it.

And the other thing is that we just see people invest more in their relationships. If you look at the main messages of Jesus, it’s about seeking first the Kingdom of God. It’s about healthy relationships, loving the Lord with all your heart and mind and strength, and loving others as you love yourself.

And that’s what is on the other side of this: you become more like the person God made you to be, you step more into that new creation that Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 5. Proverbs 10:9 says, “Whoever walks in integrity walks securely.” And that ability to walk knowing that there’s nothing in you to hide is a feeling you cannot describe. But I think when people experience it, that’s when they really set the world on fire.

So for someone who’s reading this, and they feel hopeless and like they don’t know if they can even figure this out, I think that’s what it’s all about. It’s finding that inner peace and that deep sense of security that there’s nothing within you to hide.

That’s way God made us to live. Adam and Eve are the classic example, right? They walked naked in the garden, they had nothing to hide. It was a shameless life. That’s what we’re designed for. And when we walk in integrity and freedom and purity, we get a greater taste of that.