Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

by Jay Stringer

We cannot walk with Jesus into healing if we remain loyal to protecting the people and communities that most contributed to our harm.

This section is not about locating blame in others; it is about pondering the ways that the harm of others has influenced you toward behavior that has cornered you with shame.

Therefore, sexuality is much more comprehensive than what we choose to do with our genitals or wedding rings. God designed us with the ability to

Sexuality will flourish in your life to the degree to which you

develop your identity and build meaningful relationships with those around you. Identity and relationships interanimate each other: The more you know yourself, the more intimate connection you can have with others, and the more connected you are to others, the more you will discover who you truly are.

It is vital for us to address our sexual brokenness from a standpoint of the dignity of self and the dignity of our longing for connection.

This is just as true for an infant as it is for a man when he leaves a hotel room after buying sex or watching pornography.

In the book of Genesis, God creates the world and looks out over all that has been made and calls it “good” (1:31). The one thing, however, that is not good? Adam’s being alone.

But sexuality is never complete if it remains inwardly focused.

Cruelty, abandonment, and divorce divide us from our parents. Bullying, abuse, and humiliation divide us from our peers.

Sexual brokenness is not a life sentence; it is an invitation to heal our wounds and learn who we want to become.

Many families and faith communities have embraced the lie that if we are honest, we could not truly honor, and if we honored someone, it would certainly come at the cost of honesty.

The reality is that Somalian pirates used to be fishermen—that is, until foreign fishing vessels stole their fish. The United Nations estimated that almost $300 million worth of seafood was stolen each year from their coastline.[8] If you combine this theft with a country oppressed by violent warlords,

what would you expect these men to do in order to survive? Their pirate behavior is not random; it reveals the wounds of the past and highlights the present problems that need to be transformed.

We look to the past not to find excuses for reprehensible behavior but because narrative holds the key to unlocking destructive patter...

One of the most difficult things about working with people is that we are more comfortable talking about how screwed up we are than carefully studying the why behind our unwanted sexual behavior.

five key childhood drivers of unwanted sexual behavior: rigid and/or disengaged family systems, abandonment, parents who were emotionally enmeshed with their children, a history of trauma, and sexual abuse (both overt and subtle forms of it).

THE FIRST KEY CHILDHOOD DRIVER of unwanted sexual behavior is having a family system that was characterized as rigid and/or disengaged. Dr. Patrick Carnes, one of the leading researchers on sexual compulsivity, found that 77 percent of those who struggle with sexual addiction report coming from a rigid family, and 87 percent report coming from a disengaged family.[1]

but the recovery process of the black sheep is far easier than the golden child’s journey out of a life of self-righteousness and hiding.

Although he may be struggling with depression or pornography, he correctly discerns that revealing these struggles would be far too costly. He defaults to presenting a perfect public self and elects to keep the painful and troubled dimensions of who he is beyond detection.

The need a child feels to be “good” rather than honest creates a relational template that has ruined many marriages.

Rigid family systems shape the particular sexual fantasies and behavior men and women pursue. Fifty-three percent of my survey respondents said their fathers were too strict and focused on rules. Men who grew up with strict fathers were more likely to develop fantasies of power over women in the type of pornography they pursued. This included women who were

younger, with smaller body types, and women from another race who appeared, to them, submissive. The implication was that sons who were powered over tended to grow up to be men who desired power over others.

About 50 percent of my survey respondents said their mothers were too strict and focused on rules. Women who wanted to be used or have harm done to them in their sexual fantasies were two and a half times more likely to have had a strict mother. The implication was that daughters who were powered over tended to grow up to be women who pursued fantasies where harm and cruelty were reinforced. In men and women alike, family systems o...

Anger escalates in any system that does not tell the truth.

Pornography appeals to powerless people precisely because it gives their anger an arena to be on full display. In reality you may feel powerless, but in the world of the Internet, you can have whatever you want. This is the razor edge of recovery: Your unwanted sexual behavior must change, but it also needs to be honored as a symbol of all the unprocessed anger of living in a dysfunctional system.

In my research, 63 percent of the respondents wanted more of their fathers’ involvement, and 39 percent wanted more of their mothers’ involvement. Examples of disengagement are parents’ workaholism, choosing to avoid necessary conversations related to themes every child needs to learn about (self-care, nutrition, sex), or choosing to ignore attunement (being aware and receptive) with children when they are experiencing anxiety, sorrow, or anger. When this happens, children grow up with a profound sense that they are not prepared for the world they are encountering and roam through life never fully knowing they are loved and delighted in. These children learn that life is not found within a family but outside one. In adulthood, this belief remains operative. The adults may be in marriages or committed relationships, but they can never trust them to offer what their hearts so desperately desire. Children who have known disengagement may have some experiences of connection with their parents, but only if they are making good grades,

To survive, disengaged children may grow up to become successful professionals who detach from their families, as their parents before them did. Or they roam through life like nomads, trying to find leaders or lifestyles they can tether themselves to.

Consider the following for women respondents in my survey:

Lust blooms in the soil of disengagement.

The madness that most people find, however, is that the solutions we pursue apart from God and community leave us more alone than we were at the beginning.

Anger and lust are easy to scapegoat due to the harm they produce in our lives. The more generative approach, however, is curiosity. At this point in your journey, lust exposes your demand to be filled. But if you listen to your lust, it will reveal a holy desire for belonging. Anger now exposes your demand for control. But if you study your anger, you will find that it produces a remarkable radar for injustice. The journey out of unwanted sexual behavior begins by recognizing that your struggles may be the most honest dimension of your life. Your sexual struggles reveal your wounds, but they also reveal the trafficked longings of your heart.

Talking about sex solely in the context of prohibition, however, sets a child up for madness.

An overemphasis on negative instruction about sex has the capacity to lead a child to associate sex with silence and shame. By the time the child reaches adulthood, this association becomes ingrained and continues to operate.

In my research study, men and women who struggled with unwanted sexual behavior had parents who were either silent or unhelpful about conversations related to sex.

Where parents and faith communities will not educate, pornography will.

Madison was not a worthless woman because she viewed pornography or used hookup apps. Rather, she felt worthless and therefore was drawn to pornography, a behavior that, for her, would confirm this belief. She knew that her inferior athleticism would lead to a growing distance from her dad because she could not reflect the image her father wanted in a daughter. Her natural, beautiful curiosity for discovery was seen as something second class. Madison’s life shows us something profound: When we condemn our God-given desire to be loved and accepted, we should be on high alert for the ways we will trash this longing through shameful behavior.

When pornography is addressed only through the lens of lust, when the stories that set up pornography use are evaded, an anemic treatment plan will follow.

Pornography searches expose lust, but far more they reveal the dimensions of our lives that await love. In my work with Tom, he began to name the desire for women to be subservient to him. His fantasies had begun with Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and escalated to the need to see women be increasingly violated in their subservience.

The more he brought the fullness of his needs and anger to the present, the less pornography appealed to him.

The type of sexual behavior we pursue is a direct reflection of how highly or poorly we think of ourselves. When abandoned, we are convinced that we were left because of the deep flaws that exist within us. This shame-based identity is then woven into all our choices and eventually becomes the lens through which we see our lives. Our careers, spouses or lack thereof, and sexual behavior all become additional data that reinforces how troubled we are.

I have come to understand that people make bad decisions not because of the potential for pleasure but to add additional evidence to their self-judgment.

To write a new sexual story for yourself, something must shift in your commitment to hiding the anxiety, shame, and anger in your life.

First, as Bessel van der Kolk, a pioneer in the field of trauma, wrote, “We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.”[1]

For example, if you were called stupid as a child, the imprint of the wound may be revealed in your relentless attempts to be competent or the toxic shame you feel when someone realizes you do not know how to do something.

This scene was repeated in similar ways throughout middle school and high school: He would be the object of humiliation and abuse and would choose to laugh rather than become defiant against the perpetrators.

Although there may not have been a single catastrophic form of trauma in James’s life, the accumulated experiences of rejection, humiliation, mockery, and scapegoating collectively served the same purpose. By the time he reached adulthood, his body was full of shame and anger for what had been done to him. This was the imprint of trauma.

Pornography is alluring to most of us, but it is particularly devastating to those suffering with unaddressed trauma.

As you can see, James used pornography to attempt to overturn the bullying and abuse through becoming the powerful one in his fantasy. When his sexual behavior was discovered, he tragically experienced yet another round of painful humiliation.

Pornography often involves themes of humiliation, violence, and emotional enmeshment because the sex industry knows that porn users who have endured these traumas will be aroused by the eroticizing of these traumas later in life. You can imagine the futility of James’s attempting to stop lusting for humiliating pornography without first recognizing his personal experiences of humiliation. The specifics of our sexual brokenness reveal the very stories of trauma we need to heal from.