How to Stop Masturbating: Breaking Free From the Prison of Self

Let's talk about something most men have wrestled with and almost no one preaches on directly: masturbation, self-pleasuring for the purpose of orgasm without your wife.

This is common. It's not some rare, freakish struggle unique to you. Paul tells us no temptation has overtaken us except what is common to man. This is common to man. So let's talk about it.

I'm going to put it right up front: I want to challenge you to completely abstain from masturbation for the rest of this program.

What it actually costs you

Masturbation feels good and provides real release. That's not in question. But here's what almost nobody tells you: the physical release is short-lived, and it never actually touches the deeper thing driving it. That deeper thing is usually loneliness rooted in selfishness, a longing to be known, to be close to someone, to be seen. God built that longing into you on purpose. Sexual desire was designed to draw you out toward another person, not toward yourself. It was meant for a covenant, for a marriage, for two people giving themselves to each other. That's the design.

C.S. Lewis wrote about exactly what's at stake here, decades ago, better than almost anything I've read. He described the real damage of masturbation as what it does to an appetite meant to lead a man out of himself (toward a wife, toward children, toward a family) and instead turns it backward, sending him back into himself, where, as Lewis put it, he comes to "keep a harem of imaginary brides."

That harem, once let in, works against you ever actually uniting with a real woman. It asks nothing of you: no sacrifice, no adjustment, no patience through a hard season. It doesn't care that the dishes aren't done, or that you've been emotionally distant. It isn't real, but it's always ready, dressed up in whatever fantasy appeals to you most, in ways no real woman ever could compete with.

In that imaginary world, you're always wanted. Always the perfect lover. Nothing is ever asked of your character. Nothing ever humbles your pride. You never have to adjust. They do. And slowly, those imagined partners stop being about anyone else at all. They become a mirror you use to admire yourself.

Lewis's larger point, as I understand it, is this: nearly the entire work of a man's life is coming out of himself, out of a kind of small, dark prison he was born into. Practices like this one keep a man locked in that prison. And the deepest danger isn't the habit itself. It's coming to actually love the prison.

This isn't ultimately about a rule

It's about what you're becoming. Every time you retreat into an imagined version of intimacy instead of doing the harder work of real relationship (real vulnerability, real self-giving love), you're practicing a version of yourself that only knows how to take, never to give. A man who's only practiced taking will struggle to actually give himself to a wife when the time comes, because he's spent years training in the opposite direction.

What to do with this

Start with honesty, not performance. Ask yourself real questions:

• What's my actual history with this?
• Is it fueling lust toward people who aren't my wife?
• If I'm married, is it quietly replacing real intimacy with my wife instead of driving me toward her?

If this has become compulsive (if you're doing it even when you don't want to), that's worth naming honestly. Scripture says whatever masters you, you become its slave. That's not a guilt trip. That's just what's true, and truth is where freedom starts.

Take real steps:

• Remove what feeds it: the apps, the late-night scrolling, the private moments where no one else knows what you're doing.
• Get an accountability partner and tell him the truth, especially when you find a workaround.
• Guard your bedtime.
• If you're married, pursue your wife: not as someone to extract relief from, but as someone to actually know and be known by, which is the very thing your body was designed for in the first place.

You were not made for the prison. You were made to come out of yourself: into love, into a real person, into the very image of a God who is Himself three persons giving themselves eternally to one another. Don't settle for the harem when you were made for the real thing.

This is Day 9 of Victory Over Pornography. Continue to Day 10 →