Before you read this post, you need to know two things:
1) I love football.
2) My wife watches “Chelsea Lately.”
These are a few of the many points that led me to watching Terry Crews, former model and NFL football player turned actor, pitching his new book Manhood on Chelsea Handler’s talk show.
That’s just a short clip, but they spent the whole interview talking about pornography—specifically about Terry fighting his addiction to it—so I bought the book that night and read the whole thing on a recent flight.
You can click here to purchase MANHOOD.
The book tells an incredible story of this guy’s life: his journey to the NFL, his struggle and dedication to become an actor, and the one dark secret that nearly destroyed everything for him:
“I had no idea what I was doing as an actor, but I couldn’t afford to lose the job, not only because we needed the money, but also because this was my Hollywood dream, finally coming true, and I was determined that I wasn’t going to do anything to mess it up. And so I acted out, as I’d been doing when I was under stress since I was ten years old. But because this was the worst anxiety I’d ever experienced, I acted out in the most extreme way I ever had. I didn’t sleep with another woman, but what happened was just as bad, perhaps even sleazier. It was like my porn addiction had stepped out of a magazine and come to life.
As soon as it was over, I regretted it immediately, just like I had with losing my virginity in college. I couldn’t believe I’d actually let it go that far. How did this happen? How did this happen? How did this happen?
As I paced my hotel room as the rest of the day, I made a decision: There was no way I could ever tell my wife what happened because she would definitely leave me. And so I would have to take my secret to my grave.
That was a dark time and it got darker. Although acting out had alleviated my stress in the movement, it did nothing to help me in the long term, and my guilt and shame only made me feel more terrible.”
Terry finally did tell his wife, though, with predictable results. Then he mentioned all of this to a friend of his. This is their exchange:
“What are you doing man? Why did you tell your wife?“
“Dude, I had to be honest. I had to be real.”
“Man, never. What is your problem? That’s ‘man code’ brother. You don’t tell!”
“We’ll, if that’s ‘man code,’ I’m not a man, then, because I’m not living that way anymore. I can’t do it. How could I be a man if I lived that way?”
Terry also writes about going on a sexual fast for 90 days:
“It was probably one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. I didn’t realize until then that, as men, we see our wives as sexual beings, and sometimes this means we don’t see them as people or value them as real human beings beyond the bedroom. [My wife and I] had long talks, and I came to know her in a deeper way, and to love her even more.
When a person knows everything about you, and she still loves you, that the closest you can be to another human.”
Terry also shares a familiar theme when it comes to raising his son:
“I know the day is coming when it will be time to talk to him about what it means to be a man. I’m just working on creating trust and really building our relationship, so he knows he can say anything to me. When I was a young man, I could never get any questions answered. And I want him to know that no question is off-limits or wrong. I want to be able to explain sex and love and life to him without shock or shame.“
I was really impressed with Manhood and found a lot of encouragement there, not just for myself, but also for our ministry. It’s yet another reminder that we’re talking about something that touches far more people than care to admit it, and that there’s a whole upcoming generation that needs to know about this more than ever.
Oh, and Terry: whenever you’re ready to have that talk with your son, we have just the thing to help you out.
Impressions on a TV Star Talking Openly About His Porn Problem by XXXchurch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.