Dann Aungst, President and Founder of Road to Purity, turns to the audience and begins to tell his story:
“It was roughly eight years after my affair, and in some ways things with my wife had gotten back to normal. Yet there was very little intimacy, and she still seemed to resent everything I did. There was still anger and pain over what had happened. Time had moved on, but we never completely dealt with my actions. And now it was starting again. I had fallen back into looking at pornography and acting out. In the recent years and months, it had become more and more frequent. To this point I have been able to withstand going any further than this, but then one day I drove by a massage parlor and stopped. I went in and let’s just say I experienced more than a massage. Afterward I felt so disgusted with myself, which was unusual compared to the way I used to feel after acting out sexually.”
“This time, I somehow recognized that my behavior wasn’t actually about sex; rather I knew that I was seeking to fill a void that could never be filled by this behavior. I felt so horrible that I drove immediately to a church looking for a priest to hear my confession. I was in a panic and knew I had to do this right now. I went to our usual church, but no one was available, so I drove from church to church until I found a priest who could listen to my confession.”
“After I had finished, I told myself that it was over – I can’t do this again. Several months later, my wife learned that she had a sexually transmitted disease, evidence that I had strayed from our marriage yet again. She became completely unglued, and this time was talking divorce. My world was collapsing around me. I knew that Roxane was justified in every emotion she had and whatever action she took. What I couldn’t believe was that I had done this again. I finally started to realize that, maybe, I have a problem.”
The Problem Starts with Self‑Image
How did this happen? And more importantly, how did His redemption happen for a porn/sex/love addict?
“The basic thing I’ve learned, the root of how I help others, is, like all addicts, I had a problem with self-image, you know, feeling that you’re not good enough, that you’re unlovable,” says Dann. “It’s basically the shame and the personal identity of not being worthy.”
Dann acknowledges that while we all experience that to some level in our lives, “Mine was rooted in not feeling that my mother loved me. I thought she loved me because she was supposed to love me—not because I deserved it,” he says.
He likens it to a search for needing to be loved, wanted, and accepted – understood. “So often, when sex comes up, it represents that to us—we turn to that as being the thing that we were missing, thinking, “Oh, that’s what I really want,” he says.
The Course of Addiction
At the age of 10 he had his first exposure to porn. Like most kids, he stumbled into pornography in magazines, etc., and found it very intriguing. He went through his school years, watching porn videos in high school and college. He had his first girlfriend in college, but he said, “Porn was the perfect girlfriend—one who would never reject me.”
“It immediately created a craving of something I wanted. And I think it’s just from the innate sexuality that God created us with, but not having the education and the understanding and the foundation, you learn the perverted form that the world offers through pornography in the initial exposure to it. That was the interest, that was the desire, that was the want—to have someone want me and have the pleasure of, you know, through the experience of looking at pornography and masturbation—and then it’s “Off to the Races.” And that’s just where the typical story goes for most men, and sadly, for more women nowadays, too.”
For Dann, this desire just grew and grew till it reached the point where, as addiction naturally grows, visual stimulation wasn’t enough, leading him to seek out massage parlors and prostitution because he wanted the physical acceptance.
Marriage and the Porn Addict
He got married at 25, and he thought it would get better, but instead it got worse.
“One of the common misconceptions people have when they get married, is they think, “I’ll be able to have all the sex I want – then I won’t have to look at porn any more. But the opposite actually turns out to be true.”
“The reason we look at porn is to soothe or medicate our feelings of rejection and being unwanted and unloved. Well, after the honeymoon period, your wife knows all of your faults and you know hers, of course, but now suddenly you’re exposed and vulnerable in all your woundedness, and she’s able to point it out and tell you what you did wrong and all that kind of stuff. So now you’re living with a person who sees all this negative stuff that you have, so then your desire to escape and medicate returns, and many times is even worse than before. That’s very common,” says Dann.
“Both of us were broken, and we brought that into our marriage,” says Dann.
The Spiritual Component
“Well, if we know the Theology of the Body, we learn that God designed sex for a husband and wife to give to each other selflessly, completely, basically emptying of oneself to each other, and that’s where we experience that love in human form. And then we have the love of God—if we have that relationship with Him.”
But Dann admits he didn’t have a relationship with God growing up.
“I grew up Methodist, and I don’t even I think I remember what the inside of the church looked like. I don’t recall really going to church, so I didn’t have that relationship there and always had that emptiness and feeling unwanted.”
He sought out the physical connection that he needed through massage parlors, prostitution, and affairs. “I was out of control, and the train wreck was just starting. Porn was like a double-edged sword—it kept me safe from my pain, but it made it worse at the same time.”
Although Dann converted to Catholicism, he admits that he merely was going through the motions; meanwhile, although Dann couldn’t see the graces, God was working on him.
At the peak of his addiction, Dann began an affair with a co-worker and had moved out of his house, telling his wife, Roxane, that he didn’t love her anymore.
“Amazingly, she didn’t give up. She fought for me. She is one of the most faith-filled women. If it weren’t for her, I would not be here today,” says Dann. “I owe her my life.”
God Acts
Dann tells of a one-week window of time where God revealed Himself, and changed things rather quickly. Friends had invited him to a men’s retreat that was happening on Friday, which he declined, saying he was very happy with his life. Then on Thursday, he was told by a woman in his office that she had visions of bad things happening to his children and the children of his girlfriend.
It spooked him and his girlfriend, so they left the office to talk, and they ended up praying for God’s protection, asking Him to do whatever He needed to do to protect their children. Dann marvels at the irony: “We’re having an illicit affair, and we’re praying for God’s protection!” But he had basically given God a blank check to act in his life with that prayer, and God acted.
“I had an image of a Stop sign in front of me as I walked back into my office. Then my office manager walked in, saying, ‘Over this past hour I’ve had the strongest feeling that you can’t do this anymore.’ And another employee walked in, shaking, scared that she would be fired, and said, ‘You have to stop what you’re doing.’”
So, within the span of an hour on Thursday, he was told by three women in his office that they were having bad feelings about all that he was doing, and that bad things were going to happen to his children. The woman who had seen the vision then said, “Something is happening. Your decision that you make will affect the rest of your life.”
How did she know that something was happening?
Then his girlfriend came in and said, “It feels like everything is falling apart.”
Dann could see the Stop sign was getting bigger, and he knew what he had to do.
He called his wife and asked if they could talk. She agreed, and Dann came over to tell her that he was going to end the affair, and asked if he could move back home.
He ended up attending that men’s retreat the next day, and the strange events continued.
“As I was walking around at the retreat, a priest walked up to me, looked at my name badge, and said ‘Dann Aungst!’ with exclamations and surprise in his voice. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you.’ He continued, ‘Jesus asked me to give this to you,’ and he handed me an envelope. I opened it to find this letter:”
Dann,
There is so much I would like to tell you if only there were enough time. You are entering a very difficult time, but it is also a time when you’re going to learn a lot about Roxane, about yourself, and about me and my love for you. Please be patient with yourself. This is not going to go away overnight. The wounds are deep but not fatal. There’s much healing that needs to take place for your wife, your friends, yourself, and for our relationship.
The important thing though is that our relationship has begun. Let’s go through this together; give me all of your hurt, your resentment, and your pain. I can take it! And I promise I will continue to love you. There are big plans for you. If only you knew everything that is still ahead. It is so important to begin this healing process. I will be here to help you. Please lean on me; use me. I will give you the strength and courage when you have nothing left. You will discover that true strength comes from humility and true power comes from grace. I will be here to help you, but the work is up to you.
Your friend,
Jesus
“I just about fell on the floor. I turned around and looked for the priest; I wanted to know who gave him this letter and where it came from. But he was nowhere to be seen. My head was spinning. I had decided to come to the retreat at the last minute – no one even knew that I had ended the affair and moved back home except Paul, and he only found out about it on the ride up there for it. I started examining the letter to try to figure out where it could’ve come from. It was just too amazing to have actually come from Jesus, although considering the outrageous events that happened after my prayer and complete surrender just the day before, it almost seemed to make sense. I continued to look at the letter. What I found odd was that my name and Roxane’s name were spelled correctly. I have an extra N in my name, and Roxane’s name is short an N from the traditional spellings. So, whoever wrote this had to have known us. But nobody who knew us could have written this letter. Nobody knew I was coming. And nobody knew that I had ended the affair. I was simply blown away.”
The rest of this article can be found in Signs and Wonders Special Issue Summer 2022. Become a member today!
