A former reality TV star has revealed that she's been 'free' from masturbation for around a decade after becoming 'enslaved' to it.
Madison Prewett, who shot to fame after appearing on season 24 of the US dating show The Bachelor, has opened up about her complicated relationship with self-pleasure.
The 29-year-old, from Alabama, explained that she has 'struggled' with her feelings towards masturbation - which she refers to as 'sexual sin' - since she was in middle school.
She explained she first began exploring her body after watching an 'extremely inappropriate' show where 'everyone was naked' at one of her friend's houses when she was about 13 years old.
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From there, her obsession with masturbation began to spiral.
"I had never watched anything like that before, and my body started feeling things that I had never felt before and I started, you know, wondering things that I’d never wondered before, and then desiring it," Prewett said during the latest episode of her Stay True podcast.
The reality star said both music and TV shows introduced her to 'sex and hooking up', which are topics she'd largely been sheltered from during her childhood.
Prewett was 'taught the importance of following Jesus from a young age', according to her website, as her family were heavily involved with her local church.
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However, her 'faith in God started becoming more about rules and reputation' as she hit her teen years, as her 'faith wasn’t her own, it was her parents or her church’s'.
Her website goes onto explain that she 'started feeling pressures and temptations like never before' when she began attending Auburn University and was 'living the college life'.
But the devout Christian eventually found a local church and became reacquainted with her faith - and after her stint on The Bachelor, she went on to get hitched to pastor Grant Troutt in 2022.
The mother-of-one has now revealed that she's not masturbated or watched porn in at least 10 years.
"This has been a struggle," Prewett said on her podcast. "This has been a huge part of my testimony, something I’ve struggled with since middle school. And thankfully, by the grace of God, and by the power of Godly community and people around me, I have been free from porn and masturbation for...I don’t even know, 10 years?
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"That was something that enslaved me and marked me for so long. That was something I felt like I could not break free from. No matter how much I loved Jesus, I could not shake that sin.
"I could not break free from porn and masturbation," Prewett said. "And I would beat myself up and I would be bound by shame."
She recalled how she was under the illusion that this was a problem 'only guys struggle with', which made her even more embarrassed about her secret habit.
"This continued for a long time, and then this bled into relationships," Prewett went on, saying that she was 'letting the enemy run my life with living in secrecy and living in isolation'.
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"This bled into then, when I would start dating someone, I pushed so many boundaries physically," she added.
Explaining how her stance on self-pleasure has changed over the years, the Made for This Moment author said: "It's not about just sex - it's anytime you orgasm, it's anytime you get worked up, it's anytime you lust.
"Any time I gave into sexual sin, it never ever ever gave me what I was looking for. But every single time I resisted sexual sin and I pursued God with all of my heart, it always delivered everything my heart desired.
"Sin is sin, and the enemy is crafty and he wants to destroy your life.
"And so he will use whatever he has to to take your soul - so many of us are stuck in sexual sin because we're dealing with the fruit and not the root.
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"He's not keeping you from pleasure, he is protecting you from the things that want to rob you of the life that he died to give you."
Prewett said that 'confessing to God and confessing to other believers' is ultimately what led to her denouncing masturbation, or in her words, 'set her free from the addiction to sexual sin'.
"As soon as I said the thing that I was so scared to say, I immediately felt free," the podcast host continued. "Immediately, something shifted. Something happened when I spoke what was in the dark, and I brought it into the light. "Something shifted, something happened. Obviously that doesn't mean I went from that moment and never struggled again - absolutely not. I continued to struggle.
"But as I brought it into the light and I brought other people into it, I then created an atmosphere where my sin was brought into the light, people were aware of it, and they then could hold me accountable."
So yeah...happy ten years, I guess.
Topics: Religion, Sex and Relationships, TV, US News, Mental Health
Olivia Burke