When Chris Brown’s wife found out what he’d been hiding, the couple began to make preparations for divorce. “I asked her if there’s any way we could work through this and … stay married,” he recounted during the Utah Coalition Against Pornography gathering on March 14 in Sandy, Utah.
“No,” she responded. “I can’t stand to be in the same room with you. How could I ever laugh with you again? How could I ever be intimate with you again?”
“There was no possibility in her mind,” Brown said. This began one of the many stories shared at the Saturday conference attended online and in person by hundreds (and available on their website March 31). President Emily Belle Freeman, Young Women general president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also spoke as a closing keynote.
A family reborn
When Brown’s father-in-law requested to see him, he recalled, “I wanted to fall through the floor. I wanted to be anywhere but there. I had to go face this man whose daughter’s heart I had just broken.”
As Brown walked in, his wife’s father sat at their kitchen table. “He stood up, and my head dropped … he started to walk towards me with this kind of emotionless look on his face.”
“As he got closer to me, he opened his arms to me and wrapped me in an embrace. And I lost it. I just started bawling.”
“I love you, Chris,” the father said. “I love you as much as my own two sons. And we’ll get through this.”
“What do you mean you love me?” Brown said. “You just found out everything I’ve done. … If somebody did this to my daughter, I would hate him.”
“It’ll be all right,” the father kept reassuring. “I love you.” But then he sat his son-in-law on the couch and, looking him squarely in the eye, spoke about how much real change needed to happen.
That became a pivot point, Brown said. After years of lies, heaviness and feeling he was “past love” and had “fallen too far,” he said, “I took that feeling and poured everything I had into figuring out how I could move beyond this — put this behind me for good.”
Four years later, Brown and his wife have welcomed their fifth child into the family. “We are happier than we’ve ever been in our marriage,” he told the attendees in a hushed, happy voice.
‘My days would revolve around it’
“It got to where my days would revolve around it,” shared 19-year-old attendee Madi Davis in a video about her struggle, featured Saturday. “It was like, OK, what am I gonna go look up today? Or when am I gonna have the time where I can be alone and view this?’”
“Which is so detrimental because it takes away from the things that bring you real, genuine happiness, like family and friends and being outside and stuff like that,” she added. “When you have that supernormal stimulus, the normal stimulus just doesn’t do much anymore, right?”
Andrea Davis from “Better Screen Time” talked about the “rapid stage of development” children and adolescents experience, which is “why it’s such a poor time to hand over any device that’s using persuasive design” (like infinite scroll, autoplay, personalized recommendations, and intermittent rewards such as likes and notifications).
She shared a video illustrating how impossibly hard this can feel for young people to resist.
‘Not who you are’
Pornography tries to “tell you who you are,” Madi Davis said. Clay Olsen, a founder of Fight the New Drug, described how pornography changes “what we love, how much we love, and how we express that love, or how we think about those that we love.”
Therapist Eve Nigro spoke about the power of “noticing when a lustful image, fantasy or thought enters your mind and labeling it for what it is” — seeing it as “a temptation, not your identity.”
That initial, impulsive thought, she emphasized, is “not defining of who you are.” But when people intentionally redirect their minds, “that second thought is more defining of who you’re choosing to be.”
‘So much hope’
“I don’t remember the last time I felt a need for pornography,” said author Curtis Morley in the morning plenary. “I used to wake up every morning with a pit in my stomach. … day was miserable.”
“Now, I wake up with peace. Now I wake up with joy. Now I wake up without a compulsion. … There’s so much hope. There’s real healing available.”
Nigro emphasized the recovery value of “putting your faith in something bigger than yourself.”
“When we believe in something outside of ourselves, it can help us overcome parts of ourselves that we don’t think we can overcome,” Nigro added. “What I have found is when you take the spiritual path, I see people recovering quicker that way.”
“It was so needless for me to suffer for so long to put that burden on my shoulders when God was ready to remove it,” Brown said about his restored family. “I’m here to stand as a witness that hope is real, that grace is real, and that God’s love stretches far beyond our imagination.”
