By Abigail Sanchez Aguilar –
After being addicted to porn for 15 years, Annabelle needed a brain purge to shake the shackles of addiction.
“I realized that my mind wasn’t clean and I had to do a true and real purge of my thoughts,” Annabelle says. And this requires a lot of sacrifice of my desires and truly dying to my flesh.”
Today she’s living free from porn online and porn in the mind.
She grew up in a Christian home with boundaries, protections, restrictions. Everything was fine until she got an iPod for Christmas when she was 10 and discovered porn. It was more than she knew how to handle.
The images elicited a reaction, a thrill, an adrenaline rush that was too much to resist and too much to deny. She went to church but secretly kept indulging.
“I would consider myself a lukewarm Christian,” she says. “I loved God, but I did not fully understand what it meant to have a true relationship with him.”
As she grew, she understood that her dirty secret was sinful and attempted to overcome it with software protections, blockers, accountability strategies.
They never worked, and she resigned herself to a lifelong addiction.
“I felt hopeless and discouraged from being free. I kind of just sat there and accepted this and told God I’m going to continue to fight it, but maybe I’m going to assume I’m going to fight this for the rest of my life.”
She was trapped.
When she turned 21, Annabelle dove deeper into her faith and got a mentor who challenged her to “take her thoughts captive,” a phrase from 2 Corinthians 10:5.
“I noticed that lust starts in the mind. It starts with what you consume, conversations you have,
what you watch, what you listen to in your music,” she says.
“I got to the point where I began submitting my thoughts to God, truly surrendering the desires of my flesh, surrendering every single thought that I had because I wanted to be clean,” Annabelle adds. “I wanted to please God because he is a good God. It’s just out of love. It’s not out of fear, fear of condemnation because we don’t have any of that in Christ.”
For Annabella victory came at the first moment she had a lustful thought, not after she entertained for a while in her mind.
“This fight has to start in our minds because as soon as it’s in our minds, it’s really really hard to say no to our flesh,” she says. “We are fleshly beings. We are humans and it’s really hard for us to say no to our flesh. I never thought I would be free from this. I never ever thought this day would happen. And God truly, truly has saved me from this.”
Related content: Confession helped Aylin get free, Yamilexis Fernandez found freedom in service, Source: Annabella’s YouTube channel. Please note: spelling of her name is uncertain.
