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A heart with an ounce of kindness for your life story will accomplish so much more for you than a mind filled to the brim with strategies to combat lust.
While many religious leaders have recommended prayer, Scripture reading, and other spiritual practices to overcome sexual temptation, very few have encouraged their faith communities to explore the traumas beneath their struggles. Even fewer have recognized the ways their strategies collude with sexual shame.
life? What themes of pornography or unwanted sexual behavior appeal to you? How might these themes be an attempt to reverse or repeat formative traumas in your life?
“I felt so aroused and so disgusted with myself, almost simultaneously.”
Male respondents were more likely to be abused as children when their fathers were not involved in their lives; female respondents were more likely to be abused as children when their mothers were not involved in their lives.
Parental abandonment makes children vulnerable to sexual violation. Children who have been sexually violated go on to be exceedingly vulnerable to pursuing unwanted sexual behavior as adults.
sexual reenactment is when we return to the sexual blueprint of our abuse in adulthood. Reenactments occur in our pursuit of pornography, a secretive affair, sexual fantasies, and buying sex. We think we have some control of our sexual desire, but our behavior and fantasies ensure that we return to our original sexual shame.
Addressing the subtle abuse of pornography is important because of the role reenactment is likely playing in your life.
Rather than trying to stop your unwanted sexual behavior, ponder for a moment how unwanted sexual behavior has come to serve you. What would you do on a business trip without pornography? When your spouse is distant or angry, where else would you direct your anger? When you are cornered with the lack of purpose in your life, where else would you flee to? One man who was under immense financial distress said to me, “I go to sex because it’s better than the feeling I have not going to sex.” Liberation is possible, but leaving unwanted sexual behavior will put you in difficult terrain, without
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A desire to stop pursuing unwanted sexual behavior will be only as effective as your ability to identify and dismantle the underlying infrastructure that creates your need for it. Let’s take a look at the cycle.
Unwanted sexual behavior forms when six core life experiences are linked together: deprivation, dissociation, unconscious arousal, futility, lust, and anger.
When the six experiences bind together, the cycle of unwanted sexual behavior begins. To disrupt this cycle, the six experiences must be addressed holistically and simultaneously because they rarely exist on a linear continuum. For instance, you could be having a terrible week at work (futility) and come home to watch four random hours of Netflix (dissociation). You are upset with yourself for how unproductive you are (anger) and then find yourself scrolling through a porn site (lust and anger) to offer yourself a momentary reprieve from disappointment. The next evening, a friend invites you
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Those who deprive themselves of meaningful relationships and self-care are more likely to require other people or things to offer what they are lacking, even if they are destructive forms of the real need.
The more the individuals act out, the more likely they are to deprive themselves of meaningful relationships and self-care because they do not feel as if they deserve them.
In my research, when women and men perceived they had unmet needs—meaning they did not believe that their needs were important or they felt they needed to be secretive to get their needs met—they we...
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Ignoring your needs is not virtuous; it is dangerously irresponsible.
The catch-22 of deprivation is that it promotes entitlement while requiring that one sink even deeper into deprivation.
My research showed that only 27 percent of pornography users had a solid pattern of self-care (exercise, eating well, and time with friends). The majority of those who struggle with unwanted sexual behavior choose passivity over against asking for what they need or being honest about what they are experiencing. They roam through life feeling overworked or underappreciated, which sets up entitlement for experiences they believe they deserve.
They commonly report feeling as though they are behind on something, such
as work projects or cleaning out their cars.
If your life is full of failures, lack of motivation, guilt, feelings of being overwhelmed, and anxiety, you are clearly going to want to flee reality. This flight from reality is known as dissociation. Dissociation depressurizes the difficult work required for us to become mature and competent adults.
Dissociation seduces us out of the present moment and into a meaningless world of distraction.
we eventually begin to talk about the particulars of their sex lives, from the initial moments of arousal to the restful moments post orgasm. What happens between couples in these moments reveals and predicts the quality of their sexual lives.
Most often, men resort to hiding and blaming to avoid the necessity for change. Men who have demanding or overly intimate mothers are likely to perceive their spouses in a similar fashion.
is that he insists on creating a relationship in which he can use blame to aid him in avoiding the need for maturity.
Therefore, a husband or wife may be physically joined with his or her spouse but emotionally and spiritually fused with someone else in a fantasy. Men and women may play out a fantasy with an ex-lover or a person from the office. And if one partner is involved with pornography, he or she may recall the most recent content. Most people are not proud of these fantasies, but at some level, they feel justified because their spouses are not the lovers they desire. Dissociation in marriage seduces you to leave the difficult relational realities of the present and escape to a fantasy arousal where
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Marital faithfulness is not predicated on the absence of failure but on the persistent commitment to renewing our minds. The choice to repent creates the possibility for personal integrity and relational growth to occur. The more we recognize our need for Jesus, the more we will grow.
The more we understand what our sexual fantasies symbolize, the more we can allow them to show us the road to redemption.
Joseph’s fantasies were largely about creating a repetitive and familiar world of arousal.
It moves forward, constructing a story, complete with a plot, themes, characters, and dialogue. Even though Joseph knew his fantasies, the meaning remained unconscious.
constellation of thoughts, images, fantasies, objects, and situations
Many people continue to act out in similar ways over a lifetime because they have never taken time to think about the symbols and stories inherent within their arousal and fantasies.
Your desire for an affair may be revealing the stories that most need your involvement.
The greater a man’s futility, the more likely he was to increase his pornography use. In fact, men were seven times more likely to escalate their pornography use if they lacked purpose in their lives. These men felt as if the work they did were meaningless, struggled to find a sense of purpose, looked back over their lives and saw many failures, and often felt unmotivated.
It is crucial to understand the implication of this finding: You cannot change your relationship to pornography if you do not have an effective plan for engaging the lack of purpose in your life.
One of the fascinating trends with Google Analytics is that we can now track porn data to specific cultural events. One example of this would be the 2017 NBA Finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors. According to a popular porn site, when the San Francisco Bay Area knew that the Warriors were about to win the championship in game 5, porn traffic in the city was 21 percent below average. Once the game was over, porn traffic in
the Bay Area returned to normal. But residents of Cleveland? The city’s porn use increased 34 percent, from -6 percent during the game to a staggering +28 percent after the game was over.[1] The role of futility in our work, our relationships, and even our favorite pastimes cannot be underestimated in shaping our attraction to pornography.
A lack of purpose will eventually lead to behavior where very little risk or imagination is required. This is one of the reasons men are drawn, magnetically, to watching others, whether it’s through porn, sports, or television. Nothing is required except consumption. In watching the drama of characters unfold on a screen, there is no personal crucible for change. In watching others play sports, there is no physical commitment required to experience victory. In watching pornography, there is no relational maturity required to reach orgasm.
Rather than fighting lust or shame, let your sexual brokenness motivate you to find greater meaning in life. If you want to fight, don’t fight to eliminate desire; fight to discover meaning.
More than 50 percent of men who buy sex have a current sexual partner.[3] These statistics seem to imply that there is something other than loneliness or an absence of sex that is contributing to these men’s entitled demand of sexual exploitation. Much like viewing pornography, soliciting sex allows a man to enter a world that exists above the fray of futility.
Max and many men are bound to compulsive behavior because they do not metabolize their futility without turning toward a sexualized
anger.
I have never met someone who struggles deeply with lust who is not also battling with unaddressed anger.
Unequivocally, I believe male anger to be at the heart of much of the sexual brokenness and violation in our world.
But when we do not get what we desire, we find our hearts full of anger and we demand to be filled. This is why treatment paradigms that exclusively focus on lust management (blocking software, accountability groups) and trauma-focused therapy (attachment theory, EMDR) will only go so far in maturing people.
Want to find out why you’re so compelled to pursue unwanted sexual behavior? Figure out what’s made you so angry.
The most common sexual fantasy men had was the desire for power over women. Men who wanted power over women tended to fantasize about teen, petite, and college-aged women from another race and pursued fantasies in which women were portrayed as submissive. What predicted this type of sexual fantasy in men? As it turned out, there were three main factors: their relationships to shame, their sense of futility, and the strictness of their fathers.
The writing on the wall was that men found power over women arousing precisely because it gave them an arena to find dominance amidst the difficulties they were facing in life.
If you want to see your unwanted sexual behavior transformed, name anger and lust as the partners in crime they are.
What we will explore now is how terrorists of resignation, perversion, and degradation
