Terry Crews is happy to have overcome his former porn addiction, recalling how things had gotten so bad that he was convinced his marriage to wife Rebecca King would collapse if he didn’t get the help he needed. In an episode of Steven Bartlett’s podcast, The Diary Of A CEO, Terry expressed he had been suffering from trauma since his childhood years, having grown up in an abusive household. And while some people would turn to alcohol or drugs to mend their pain or suffering, his choice was to watch pornographic tapes.
“Drinking is a way of numbing your pain – for me, it was pornography. Pornography numbed my pain. I’ve never been drunk or high but porn was something that took me out,” the 53-year-old gushed. “I first discovered it at about nine or ten years old, I was at my uncle’s house and he had a chest full of it. You never find it as an adult. I don’t know anyone who only found porn as an adult. You always find it as a child.”
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Terry went on to say that while he had no clue what sex was when he found his uncle’s stash of adult videos, he remembered feeling like all of his problems had disappeared, claiming that the issues that had plagued his life at the time vanished the moment he began to watch the raunchy clips. As Terry got older, he remembered spending up to 12 hours a day watching people have intercourse on TV. “If I got a day off from a set and I could watch porn from 10am to 11pm at night. And I wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. It was a splurge. I knew I had a problem, but when you tell yourself that you will stop, you just go right back.”
Terry said his addiction caused him to feel a lot of guilt, which later left him feeling shameful of his actions, mainly as this was still a problem after marrying Rebecca in 1990. The Everybody Hates Chris star wasn’t able to get a hold of his situation until 2010, when he made it his mission to control his bad habit to save his then-ailing relationship with his wife.
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“I would start arguments so she would stop talking because one lie turns into two, turns into 100. Over 10 years, you forget which lie you told and the pornography never stopped,” Terry added. “It all culminated in February of 2010 – she asked ‘What is it I don’t know about you, Terry Crews?'”
He knew at that point that continuing to live in shame was not the way forward, prompting Rebecca to help Terry find professional help from a therapist. In 2010, the two began to rebuild their marriage “from the ground up,” and they’ve been happy ever since.