DAVID REECE
“I could have come out and said, ‘I’m going to live a homosexual lifestyle,’ but I didn’t want it.”
From the time I was age three to seventeen, my life was marked by addiction to pornography, same-sex porn, unhealthy relationships, confused identity and sexual abuse. I lived a duplicitous life with a lot of behind-closed-doors behavior. I seemed like a great kid. No one suspected I was in pain, but I was lonely and confused.
My cousin molested me from age three to sixteen. From the age of four, I was attracted to other boys. In high school, I was addicted to porn and had encounters with other boys, so I thought maybe I was gay. But when a close friend came out, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted and made a conscious decision not to go down that path.
In college, I didn’t act out in homosexual behavior but used pornography to comfort myself in my loneliness and brokenness. When I met my wife in 2008, she was the first person I was honest with about my lifelong addiction to porn and same-sex attraction. I was very attracted to her, but I didn't know how to reconcile that with the conflict raging within me.
In 2010 we married, and I took my porn addiction into our marriage. By the second year of marriage things got really rough. I knew I desperately needed help. One night a friend told me about a program he was in that was helping him to experience healing and to understand his sexuality; and he encouraged me to check it out. That was the turning point for me. Right away I started counseling sessions that helped me get out of pain and confusion and understand that just because I was molested at three didn’t mean I was gay. Then I went through a 21-week program directed at sexual brokenness and relational trauma. In 2015, through counseling and the 21-week program, I got freedom and healing from the roots that had been causing all my pain and sexual confusion, and it's been an acceleration ever since.
Before I walked out of same-sex attraction, I only knew fake happiness. Today my life is crazy good and full of joy. For the first time in my life, I have freedom and clarity, and things keep getting clearer every day. I’m finally genuinely connected to myself and others, I have confidence in relationships and in myself, and everything is so much clearer now.
There is no doubt in my mind that if I had not had access to the counseling, books, and programs I went through, it would have been soul-crushing. I could have come out and said, “I'm going to go live a homosexual lifestyle,” but I didn’t want it. I didn’t know what to do, and I was in despair. I had so many thoughts of suicide and so much darkness surrounding my life because it was so lonely and depressing. If I had not had the opportunity to pursue the healing and wholeness I was longing for, I would be dead today.