Hey ladies. Today, I found myself struggling with all kinds of sexual emotion and fighting off the temptation to masturbate. Ironically, this morning, I recieved a letter in the mail thanking me for donating money to xxxchurch after I'd forgotten I'd even donated. While I was trying to work myself out of temptation, I thought about this site and felt inspired to check it out and I've absolutely loved what I've found! I'm soooo glad to know I'm not the only one out there going through this. Here's my story: My parents got divorced when I was 8 and my mom was super lonely and depressed all the time. My older sister, who I considered my role model, was in her rebellious teenage years and boy crazy. We shared a room together at my grandmother's house and she would come home and tell me stuff, never vivid in detail or anything, but that she had gone to a party, etc, etc. This made me curious as a pubescent kid and at the age of probably 11, I started watching late night HBO and Showtime sex shows. I knew close to nothing about sex and this sparked interest and gratified me. Also, before my parents divorced, they would often let my sisters and I watch rated R movies that sometimes involved sex, so my watching HBO was just an extension of this. Needless to say, I began watching it just about every night and I eventually started masturbating. I was very confused about how right it was and one night on one of the shows, one of the ladies said that masturbating was perfectly okay and I held onto that thought for awhile. I had also caught my mom, subtley, in the act and that reinforced my thinking. Very quickly, I started renting porn on satellite and would even rent some movies over and over. My younger sister had previously gotten in trouble for renting something inappropriate on time, so she ended up getting blamed for all my rentings, too. When I entered junior high, I started social networking and that quickly escalated into fanfiction, or basically erotica--I started writing romance stories that immeditely became sexually graffic. These became worse and worse in detail. My masturbating had gotten so bad that I found myself doing it in my sleep (a habit built from my masturbating before I went to sleep every night), involuntarily, and waking up feeling disgusted. When I devoted my life to Christ, I immeditely felt convicted about my actions and pretty quickly stopped writing fanfiction. The masturbating took awhile to quit, but I was determined to not let it take over. I went a good year without and it recently has come back up. I've realized that I tried to just forget it was even happening and focused on God's work for me, which was good, but I never confessed/opened up to anyone--I just thought if I was vague enough about it in telling my testimony to people that it would be fine and I what I was really going through was just between me and God. In a prayer meeting with my spiritual mother that was designed to pray through a bad breakup with my ex, masturbation ended up coming up and I finally confessed and felt some real freedom about it for the first time in my life, as she also struggled with it and told me I was still normal. We discovered, through prayer, that masturbation is a generational curse in the girls in my family because I know that my mom and my sisters have, too. As of now, I'm working through trying to better understand sex and getting rid of all that I've learned through porn, trying to feel through my emotions when temptation or even just sexual desire in general comes up. In that, I usually realize that at the root of it is just a desire to be crazily loved and to crazily love and I almost always remember that I can go straight to God for that. He is soooo good and I know there is deliverance blowing through this place! May God bless you all in your journies, looking forward to hearing more. Praying for you all!