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I sleepwalked through the morning's lessons with poor Daniel, our 14-year-old, who must have wondered where his mother's mind was. After lunch, with Daniel safely busy practicing piano, I locked myself into the bedroom, turned on the television, and tuned to the channel Brandon had stumbled onto a year earlier. For the first couple of minutes, all I could see were wavy lines with an occasional blue screen.

Then the picture became clear for several seconds. I had seen sex scenes in R-rated movies before, but nothing like what I was now watching. It did not even pretend to be a movie. There was no dialogue, just soft, sensual background music. There was one purpose to this program: to show nude bodies in every imaginable sexual act.

I made myself watch for another ten minutes, though the program distressed me. I wanted to know what kind of images had entered my son's mind. In those ten minutes I saw sexual acts that, in my sheltered existence, I had never dreamed of. The women in these videos were not stunning beauties, either, and I was perplexed at the attraction they held for men. I wondered how they could degrade themselves in such a way. What had happened to them that they had so little self-respect? I turned off the TV in disgust. It was two weeks before I could stop recalling the images on that screen, and I was not an 18-year-old male with testosterone surging through my veins.

Slowly, after constant prayer, we began to form a plan. Brandon had been fighting this war on his own for over a year. He had enlisted our aid, and now it was time to bring in the reinforcements.

After researching this problem and seeing Brandon's struggle, we have discovered that sexual addiction is a more powerful force than the strongest known drug, releasing endorphins many times stronger than morphine. Unlike drug or alcohol addicts, who ingest something from outside the body, pornography addicts have their addictive substance available to be called up at will, or many times against their will.

When people watch pornography, we found, the images become burned into their minds, just as you would burn pictures onto a CD. The younger they are when they see pornography and the longer they are exposed to it, the more imbedded it becomes. Eventually, even when an addict is not looking at pornography, the images continue replaying in his or her mind.

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