Those who produce this wretched stuff like to say that it is harmless and it's just a source of pleasure. They're lying to you. I'm telling you that it destroys lives, it devastates marriage, and it causes all kinds of difficulty. Pornography unleashes powerful forces, I can't state that strongly enough, especially in men, that is like a raging fire that consumes those who give free rein to it in their lives.
The addictive nature of pornography is like heroin in some ways, or cocaine, because it captures the mind and the body, and it can grab a boy as young as 13, and in a span of just a few months, enslave him for the rest of his life. That's not an overstatement. It happens over and over again. I don't know any force in human nature that can take control of the mind and body as effectively as obscenity, and as difficult to treat as it is. It can bankrupt a family, it can lead to child abuse, and often does, and to womanizing, and infidelity, and solicitation of prostitution. It can lead to murder, as it did with Ted Bundy, whom I knew. He was convicted of killing two women, but he admitted to killing 28, and probably more than 100 women. He was a serial murderer who got addicted to pornography very, very young. Exactly what I was just talking about.
If you read about violent sexual abuse on victims of any age, and it can be babyhood to the elderly, I guarantee you that the authorities will find pornography on the perpetrator's computer, or published material in his house or garage. It is always there, complicit in those kinds of crimes.
Now, I have heard about this from thousands of families through the years, usually women who contact us, and whose lives have been devastated by obscenity. I'm almost reluctant to talk about it here on the air, frankly, because our ministry doesn't have the resources to counsel thousands of people. It's impossible. And yet we care about those who are victimized by this evil, and the best I can do is come here and talk about it on the air, and to give solace to those who are captured by it, and to talk about the danger, and how to avoid it, and offer some suggestions and hope.
Toward that end, I have a guest here with me today that I care about a great deal. Her name is Nancy Blake, and she has been through this tragedy, and it is a very courageous thing that she has been willing to come here today. Shirley and I have known Nancy for more than 40 years, although we didn't know all that she was going through from the beginning, and I'm not sure she even understood it all. But she has come here today. She's written her own book, it's called Betrayed, by Nancy Blake, and she tells her story here. I want to tell you, it takes guts to lay out an experience like this, that has so much pain attached to it.
Nancy, thank you for being with us here today. What I just found out a few minutes ago is that instead of allowing us to fly you here for this purpose, you drove more than 1,000 miles to be here today alone. You are a gutsy lady.
Nancy Blake: I know lots of people that would have done that to come and see you.
Dr. James Dobson: Oh, goodness.
Nancy Blake: The reason I came is because I wrote a book called Betrayed, and my pen name is Nancy Blake. I have another name, but I've changed all the names in the book, because I wanted to protect my family.
Dr. James Dobson: I understand.
Nancy Blake: So I am Nancy, and I have a story to tell. I want other women to come alongside other women, and help them to realize that it's not about them. I suffered for so many years wondering why my husband wasn't home at night, and we had so many employees that he always had an excuse.
Dr. James Dobson: You didn't really know what he was into.
Nancy Blake: I had no idea for 25 years. So I'll start at the beginning, because I think this part's kind of interesting. We both graduated from college, and he was two years older, and we got married, and I started teaching. And a man named Ray Kroc, who started McDonald's restaurant, approached us and said, "I'd like to help you get started in a McDonald's franchise."
Dr. James Dobson: This is the founder of McDonald's restaurants?
Nancy Blake: Right. Ray Kroc. He was a wonderful man. And I was 21, and my husband was 23. And so my parents had saved for years to send me to college and to be a teacher, not to make hamburgers, and they were kind of upset about it, but we took a gamble and decided we had a surfboard and a stereo, and we thought, "Why not?" Anyway, and he provided the financing for us to start our first McDonald's, and we ended up with five of them, and we were very grateful. He was very colorful and very committed to the restaurant business, and paid a fortune for what he bought from the McDonald brothers.
Dr. James Dobson: He actually loaned you $60,000 for that first McDonald's?
Nancy Blake: He did.
Dr. James Dobson: Wonder what it costs today. Millions, wouldn't it?
Nancy Blake: Yeah. A lot.
Dr. James Dobson: But he got you started.
Nancy Blake: He got us started, and we worked really hard, and he knew we'd be good workers. So the reason that I share that part is that people from the outside would come into our house, and we had three sons, and we had this affluent lifestyle, and we were able to give to different ministries, and we had it all. My husband was on three Christian boards, he served communion, and we had a bible study that met in our house on a regular basis. So my friends, the world would come into our house. Not the world, but other people, and they would say, "You've got it all." And I would just say, "I'm so thankful. Got great kids. We've got ..." I had no idea.
Dr. James Dobson: He was not only into pornography, but a lot of other things.
Nancy Blake: He came into our marriage-
Dr. James Dobson: Kind of like what I just described it leads to.
Nancy Blake: Exactly. It's ditto everything that Dr. Dobson said. He had this other life that I never knew about. I thought we were okay, except that there were signs I didn't see, but I didn't know, I was young, that he didn't come home until really late at night, or he'd come home and have dinner with our family, and then go back out, always with the excuse we had so many employees that he was always helping somebody.
Dr. James Dobson: Yeah. You eventually had five McDonald's.
Nancy Blake: Yes.
Dr. James Dobson: Was he caring for you? Did he show love to you? Did he give you time? What was your relationship?
Nancy Blake: I probably got flowers at least once or twice a week for 25 years, and he wrote me poems. And I mean, when the music was playing, he was always the first one on the dance floor to twirl me around. But when the doors closed, he was kind of distant. He was tired, or-
Dr. James Dobson: Your physical relationship. So there was something lacking there, obviously.
Nancy Blake: But I didn't know. I didn't know. I was in my twenties. I didn't have anybody to-
Dr. James Dobson: You were a virgin when you got married.
Nancy Blake: Yes, and I assumed he was. I never asked him. But you don't ask those kind of questions, or I wouldn't. But what happened, part of his story is so sad, and you kind of alluded to it in your introduction, that this is what he told me, is that he was 12, and was walking along the side of the road, and saw pictures. At that time, there were no computers. And he picked up the magazine and looked at the pictures, and it was pornography. And he said, "And then it led to women." So he came into our marriage having had lots of experience with other women.
Dr. James Dobson: See, I didn't know that part of the story, but that's exactly what-
Nancy Blake: You said.
Dr. James Dobson: ... Ted Bundy described. He was 13, he was at a dump, he saw detective stories, which marries violence with sex, what a cocktail that is, and it grabbed him, and he got farther and farther into pornography. Pornography has a way of leading you. It does not stay in the same place. What excites one day does not be enough the next day, and it walks you down a road of terrible things. In his case, to murder. It didn't for your husband, but-
Nancy Blake: No. Thankfully he wasn't like that. But as you said, it escalates. It doesn't just stay, at least in what I've heard or what I've read about it. But I also feel like there was an emotional vacuum in my former husband's life. His name in the book is Bob, so I'll call him Bob. Because his parents were going through a divorce, and his mother was dating somebody, and so he had a lot of turmoil probably going on at home, and so this filled a vacuum. This filled a need, maybe. He was a preteen, and that part of the story is so sad, but what he chose to do with it led from the pictures into pornography, into having affairs with several different women. And then I met him in college. At school, he was Mr. Clean Cut, and it was not the other life that has now been revealed.
Dr. James Dobson: Yeah. Well, you would never have known it from looking at him. I knew Bob, and he was a really good-looking, nice guy. Became a friend to me. I had no clue, just like you really didn't, although you should have been asking more questions than you were asking, shouldn't you?
Nancy Blake: Well, probably, except I wasn't aware of that. I was raised in a home where my parents protected me, and for them to allow me to go away to college must have been a huge gift to me, because I was protected. I wasn't allowed to go to a funeral or a hospital until I was 21. So I wasn't very worldly at all, to say the least.
Dr. James Dobson: Yeah.
Nancy Blake: And so I wasn't aware, I wasn't questioning, and I had nobody to talk to. In the very beginning, in McDonald's, we had basements, and so we had potato sacks in the bottom of the basement. And so he would tell me that he slept on the potato sacks, and we would bring a sack of potatoes up every day, or a crew member would, and he'd slice the potatoes fresh. Now, they have frozen, but they're just as good as they were then. Anyway, so he would say that he was working so hard that he would sleep on the potato sacks at night many times. And I thought, "Gosh, he's such a good worker. He's working so hard, and I'm teaching during the day, and-"
Dr. James Dobson: You now know that he had another life, a complete other life-
Nancy Blake: Yeah. Yes.
Dr. James Dobson: ... that's out there.
Nancy Blake: Exactly.
Dr. James Dobson: How tragic.
Nancy Blake: It's sad.
Dr. James Dobson: Nancy, how tragic.
Nancy Blake: I don't want other people to go through it. And if they do, I want them to know that there's not shame and embarrassment, and everything that I felt when I found out everything. I thought that I wasn't a good enough wife for him, and what was wrong with me? And-
Dr. James Dobson: So you blamed yourself.
Nancy Blake: I blamed myself, and I must be speaking to somebody right now who's going through that. And so I'm just saying, it's not about you. It's about an addiction.
Dr. James Dobson: Yeah. But it is about you. You have tears in your eyes now, too.
Nancy Blake: You said that. So anyway, the church that I attend has a class called Sexual Addiction, and I think it's high time the church brought that to the forefront, because it's out there, and it's real, and we can't put it underneath the covers anymore. But anyway, so I meet with the wives on a one-to-one basis, and I don't have any answers for them, but I point them to the one who does have an answer, and that's the Lord.
Dr. James Dobson: So you're seeing evidence of this in the middle class that you live in, among the women, homemakers, or working ladies around you. It's everywhere, isn't it?
Nancy Blake: It's everywhere. It has no class.
Dr. James Dobson: I described it as being a raging fire throughout Western civilization. You're seeing evidence of that?
Nancy Blake: I am. And it's really sad. The last lady that I met with, she was so sweet, and I think she was probably in her thirties, and she was pregnant, seven and a half months pregnant, and she had a one-and-a-half-year-old little boy in the other room, and she said, "I don't know what to do. He's in the Sexual Addiction class, and he's trying, but it's gone to another level now, and I don't know what to do." Here, she's expecting a baby and everything, and I said, "I can't answer that for you. I can just come alongside of you." And I asked her if she had family close by, which she did.
So there's two different ways you can look at it. You can go ahead and divorce somebody who's not faithful, and then you don't know where your children, what they're going to be exposed to every other weekend when they go with their father, or you can live with it, with certain boundaries.
Dr. James Dobson: Well, it's Satan's tool. It's one of the most effective tools he has for destroying the family.
Nancy Blake: Yeah, that's true.
Dr. James Dobson: Which is where I come in, because I'm in the business of trying to preserve families. And he takes this desire, and sets it on fire, and it becomes an addiction that's every bit as difficult as heroin or one of the other addictions, and it's just about that hard to treat as well. And you mentioned the Church. I hate to admit it, but frequently the Church will not talk about this, but there are an awful lot of pastors who are doing everything they can. They are overwhelmed by it, just like I am. When you consider the scope of it in the culture, it is very difficult to try to deal with, but many pastors just don't want to touch it. And there are two reasons why not.
One, they look on Sunday morning at that audience in front of them, the congregation, and they know many of those men, maybe the majority, maybe the big majority of them are at least toying with it or have been addicted to it. It is everywhere. I'm telling you, you look around at the men around you, it's out there. I hate to overstate that, and I don't think I am. I served on the pornography commission for Ronald Reagan for 18 months, and I know a lot about this subject. More than I wanted to know when I was studying it, but it is there.
The second reason pastors don't want to talk about it is that many of them have the problem themselves. When I was at Focus on the Family, we had a hotline just for pastors, associate pastors, youth leaders, and other staff members. And they could call anonymously, doesn't have to say who they were, and they could call us for any subject they wanted to. Month after month, year after year, the number one reason they called was sexual addiction, sexual misbehavior, infidelity, homosexuality, all that range, and pornography was at the top of that list, and that came from the church.
So I'm telling you, I'm not just talking out of school. It is out there. And that's why the church has great difficulty dealing with this, as does everybody else, including spouses like you. And you did it pretty much alone, didn't you?
Nancy Blake: I did. I remember, Dr. Dobson, when our oldest son was in high school, and he came home from school, and he didn't want to eat dinner. And his name's Michael in the book. And I went upstairs and I said, "You love food. What's the matter with you?" And he said, finally he told me, he said, "Well, you know who," and he named the teacher, "is?" And I said, "Yeah, he's the psychology professor, and he's teacher of the year, and you love him." And he goes, "Well," he said he was doing this and that in the classroom. Things that I guess I probably shouldn't talk about, but it was really verbal pornography. So I just got out and walked out. And later, I told him why. He said, "I'm a Christian and it bothers me." And so the teacher said, "You never have to stay in the class during those times. You have my permission to leave whenever."
Dr. James Dobson: Today, that would be different.
Nancy Blake: Well, what happened is, I don't know if you remember, but we were with you that weekend, and we told you the story, and you said, "Would he be willing to come to Colorado and tell his story?" And I've also learned my former husband, Bob, was absolutely furious. He almost had an overreaction, because here he was involved in it, and we didn't know that.
Dr. James Dobson: So he didn't want your son to expose that.
Nancy Blake: I think that you're right. Yeah. We still have the little cassette of when he spoke, anyway, and I went to see the teacher, and I said, "Mr. So-and-so," I said, "You're teacher of the year and everything, but you have two daughters. Would you ever let your girls see this, see a Playboy or something?" And he said, "Absolutely." And I said, "You know what? We're on different wavelengths. This is not right." And I went to the superintendent of the schools, and he said he would give a permission slip for them to have to sign, the parents would have to sign it, so we dubbed out the name of the school district, but he never changed it.
Dr. James Dobson: Was that in the 1980s?
Nancy Blake: Yeah. And you said, "This is just the beginning. You watch." And I thought, "What's he talking about?" You were right.
Dr. James Dobson: I was absolutely right. And now it's in the elementary schools, only it's in the guise of LGBTQ, where they're teaching little children transgender notions, saying to 5, 6, 7, 8 year olds, "You don't have to be a boy. You can be a girl. You just choose it. And then if you don't like what you've chosen, you can change back." And telling people what the medical approaches are to changing from one sex to the other. Telling this to children.
Nancy Blake: It's terrible.
Dr. James Dobson: And talking about homosexuality as though it were a normal thing. "This is another thing that you can choose." Believe me, that's going on not only in California and Massachusetts, but right here in my home state of Colorado, where the entire curriculum has been rewritten to make that possible. Furthermore, parents are not able to intervene.
Nancy Blake: No. There was no permission given.
Dr. James Dobson: All you can do is take your kid out of school, but you can't take them out of a class. So what you experienced was just the beginning, and I saw it then.
Nancy Blake: You did see it. And now that you mentioned the homosexual community, he brought in people that had a different lifestyle, but I said to him, "Why don't you bring in a happily married couple?" But that wasn't what he did.
Dr. James Dobson: Yeah. It wasn't his agenda.
Nancy Blake: He just brought in the alternative. He didn't expose them to everything, just what he wanted them to hear. I guess that was my first introduction to pornography.
Dr. James Dobson: Nancy, I hate to interrupt this conversation, because there are so many components to your story, and some of it is very uplifting. We've been through some tough water so far, but the Lord had a plan for your life, and we're going to talk about that next time, and you've driven all the way out here, 1,000 to be here. I'm not going to let you go. We're going to talk again about the rest of your story. Is that fair?
Nancy Blake: Yes. I would love to. Thank you.
Dr. James Dobson: Thank you so much for being here.
Nancy Blake: Thank you.
Dr. James Dobson: Took a lot of courage to talk about this.
Nancy Blake: Thank you.
Dr. James Dobson: And I hope that you will talk to a lot of people about it. You don't call yourself a speaker, but you can learn to speak, and you ought to be letting people know what God has done in your life.
Nancy Blake: Thank you.
Dr. James Dobson: Okay. Are you all right?
Nancy Blake: Yes.
Dr. James Dobson: You came here a little scared.
Nancy Blake: Yes.
Dr. James Dobson: But it has not been that bad.
Nancy Blake: Oh, no. Sitting here talking to you, it's like a conversation, because you're so loving and encouraging, and who wouldn't want to sit opposite you and share?
Dr. James Dobson: Oh, goodness. Well, we'll do it again next time.
Nancy Blake: Thank you. Okay.
Roger Marsh: Boy, we are certainly living in some sobering times, aren't we? It was very brave of Nancy Blake to share her story. Many women, as you know, have experienced betrayal, or might even be going through it right now, and some may not even know what their mate is doing. Well, Nancy has more to share with us about how she overcame all the heartache and rebuilt her life. That's coming up tomorrow in part two of her conversation with our own Dr. James Dobson here on Family Talk.
Now, if you missed any part of the program, or if you'd like to share it with someone who needs to hear this very special message, just visit our website at drjamesdobson.org/familytalk. That's drjamesdobson.org/familytalk. Remember, you can also listen to this program or share it easily from the official Family Talk JDFI app, designed especially for the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. If you don't already have it on your smartphone, be sure to download it from your app store today.
Reflecting on what we've just learned here on today's program, sadly, many men can fall into the trap of pornography. Now, granted, this issue can also affect women as well, but I want to focus in just on men for the moment. Now, imagine if men fully stepped up and into their roles of leading their families with God-led principles. The entire family would be greatly changed for the better, wouldn't it? It's never too late to start making positive changes in your life, and men, remember, we were not meant to do life alone. We want you to know that here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we're here for you with an abundance of resources, prayer, and support.
I want you to consider signing up for the 10-day "Straight Talk To Men" email series. It's based on Dr. Dobson's book of the same title, Straight Talk To Men, and it just may be the encouragement and extra bit of support that you need to help pick you up this week. To sign up, simply visit drjamesdobson.org/straighttalk. That's drjamesdobson.org/straighttalk. You'll be glad you did.
Now, to find resources from the JDFI, all you have to do is visit us online at drjamesdobson.org. But keep in mind, you can also reach us by phone. We'd love to hear from you, we would love to connect with you in this way, and we'll be happy to pray with and for you if that's what you need as well. To reach us by phone, simply call 877-732-6825. That's 877-732-6825. I'm Roger Marsh, and you've been listening to Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love.
Announcer: This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
Dr. James Dobson: If we're to believe today's behavioral researchers, extramarital affairs are more common now than ever before. People who ought to know better, such as ministers, physicians, and politicians, are risking marriages, careers, and their children for dalliances of one sort or another. And what happens to those who leave the straight life to chase after exciting new lovers? Well, I've watched such people over the years, and what I've observed is that they eventually have to establish another straight life. The grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but it still has to be mowed. Folks have to get back to work, to cooking and cleaning, and earning a living. Nor can the romantic thrill last forever. Personal flaws and irritants show up, much like those in the former husband or wife. And guess what? The straight life begins to feel confining again.
Then what does that trapped individual do? Some of them hopscotch from one straight life to another in a vain search for something indescribable, something they never seem to find. Lying in their wake are former spouses who feel rejected, bitter, and unloved. They produce vulnerable little children who wonder why Daddy doesn't live here anymore, and why Mommy cries all the time.
Soaps and sitcoms on television tell us every day that infidelity is a marvelous game for two, and it sure does look like fun, but when adultery has run its natural course, it only brings pain and disillusionment.
Roger Marsh: To hear more, visit our broadcast page at drjamesdobson.org.