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calculatingly execute their plans.
Your first experiences with resignation may not be overtly sexual. Instead, they come in the form of a third drink, binge watching your favorite shows, and gradually falling behind at work. These experiences are often the gateway drugs that either lower our defenses or increase our frustration. Unaddressed, they propel us into unwanted sexual behavior. Within a study of 932 people struggling with compulsive sexual behavior, 42 percent reported chemical dependency, and 38 percent reported an eating disorder.[2]
Explicit pornography is the tip of the iceberg for our collective lust for content that allows us to escape our lives and deadens our desire.
Porn is porn, no matter what form it comes in.[3]
do not believe that the kingdom of darkness cares terribly much whether futility starts with our sexual behavior or our careers or our families. It knows that when we resign in one area, our defenses in all other areas will follow suit. When the pattern of resignation is established, we find ourselves conceding to sexual stories we never would have wanted. The advancement is brutal and yet so simple.
Strip responsibility and reciprocity from sex, and you have pornography.
Their grief is the fire that thaws the frozen sea within.
Those who struggle the most to transform their sexual lives, however, are not those who have fallen the hardest; it is those who have learned how to resign to small doses of unwanted sexual behavior over a lifetime. They have resigned not to sexual extremity but to the occasional sexual struggle. Most often, they curate sexual struggles that likely will not cost them relationships or careers. The point is not to explode their lives but to slowly deaden their hearts’ ability to believe that meaningful change could ever come. If you want to know why you’ve resigned to unwanted sexual behavior,
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Resignation derails you from the necessary work of maturity. I do not believe the kingdom of darkness cares terribly much whether you drift off to pornography yearly, monthly, or nightly. It knows that once you’ve resigned to small doses of toxins in your...
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The word perversion is taken from the Latin word pervertere, meaning to turn around.[4] When we talk about sexual perversion, we are referring to forms of sex and fantasy that have been turned around, spoiled from the original goodness God created.
Think about what happens in our culture and marriages when sex is considered to be a man’s right, when it’s used without ensuring that all forms of sexual touch are pleasurable, or when it is used in anger or self-interest. Used in these ways, sex enters the spectrum of perversion; it turns sex away from intimacy in favor of entitlement.
Dr. Robert Stoller, who was a psychiatry professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, believed that perversion was “the result of an essential interplay between hostility and sexual desire.”[5] Stoller theorized that pornography and other sexual fantasies are vehicles that allow childhood trauma to be transformed symbolically into sexual power. He says that “at [pornography’s] heart is a fantasied act of revenge, condensing in itself the subject’s sexual life history—his memories and fantasies, traumas, frustrations, and joys. There is always a victim, no matter how disguised: no
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Perversion occurs through associating sexual lust with the anger embedded in our hearts.
According to popular pornography sites, each time men log on to the sites, they spend on average about nine minutes using pornography. Nine minutes. Women spend about a minute more. It strikes me that if we truly longed
If you wish to stop your perversion, learn to listen to your lust.
The heartbeat of the pornographic world is to seduce men through their lust in order to offer them the ability to deface the beauty and life-giving power of women.
One of the most surprising findings in my research was that women sought out more aggressive, violent, and degrading forms of pornography. Women pursued porn that featured bondage and rough or aggressive sex at a higher rate than men.
“If there is a genre of porn in which violence is perpetrated against a woman, my analysis of the data shows that it almost always appeals disproportionately to women.”[9]
Whereas men tend to pursue pornography to find power over their shame and harm, women tend to pursue violent pornography to repeat their shame and harm. Our choice of pornography reveals the stories not only of the harm we endured but of the ways we attempt to reverse or repeat these dynamics in the present. The tragedy is that either pursuit ends in the degradation of women.
Both pornography and Jesus appeal to the deepest longings in our hearts. Only one offers freedom.
I spent more time on Facebook, reading blogs, really anything to distract myself from where I was in life” (dissociation).
To only address one dimension leaves you vulnerable to the other.
Before we dive in, let’s quickly recognize that the sex industry is so alluring because of what the addiction treatment community refers to as the 3 As: Anonymity Affordability Availability
Let me be clear that the sex industry is never ultimately to blame for your involvement with unwanted sexual behavior. Instead, it functions much like a squatter in a vacant home. If you are not committed to taking responsibility for the integrity of your life, there are many squatters who will be glad to take over.
Pornography use is more prevalent in Christian circles than buying sex.
My time in South Korea cornered me with the reality that our battle is not solely against the flesh and blood of personal sexual brokenness but against the powers and principalities of this world that delight in seeing God’s gift of sex debased.
As Franciscan priest Richard Rohr said, “‘If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it.’
Researchers have found that men who buy sex have fairly common expectations and fantasies associated with doing so. The researchers remarked, “To varying degrees, the fantasy entails that men should control the sexual encounter entirely and that prostituted women should appear happy, enthusiastic, and insatiable while serving johns’ sexual needs; the women should make men believe they find johns attractive; the women should appear to care about the men; and the women should appreciate and value johns’ economic ‘help.’”[5]
Understanding the individual and systemic reasons that necessitate your unwanted sexual behavior is a crucial precursor to writing a new sexual story.
When people ask me to help them turn their presentations into stories, I begin by asking questions. I kind of psychoanalyze their companies, and amazing dramas pour out. But most companies and executives sweep the dirty laundry, the difficulties, the antagonists, and the struggle under the carpet. They prefer to present a rosy—and boring—picture to the world. But as a storyteller, you want to position the problems in the foreground and then show how you’ve overcome them.[1]
The pain and struggle you have endured will not be wasted; they will become the very wine of blessedness.
My research found that shame was the most consistent key driver of unwanted sexual behavior. Shame convinces us that we are unwanted, and we pursue
behavior that confirms it. To find freedom, disarm the power of shame.
The more you feel shame, the more you purs...
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Men in my sample were nearly 300 times more likely to pursue pornography for each unit of shame they felt about their behavior, and women were 546 times more likely. It has to be s...
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Casagrande was asked what in the world he is supposed to do when a great white shark is swimming right at him. He answered that he must do something counterintuitive: swim directly at the shark with the camera. This action seems to trigger a defense mechanism in the shark. “Now they’re like, ‘Wait a second, everything in the ocean swims away from me.’ The reality is that if you don’t act like prey, they won’t treat you like prey.”
Casagrande’s statement has a lot to teach us about disarming the power of shame: We should face it. The experience of shame is the biggest predator in our lives, and attempting to outmaneuver our “great white” memories comes naturally to most of us. We swim away from shame each time we downplay the significance of pain, embrace theologies that make amnesia or easy forgiveness of past harm virtuous, and pursue addictive behavior in which we punish our bodies a thousand times over for the cruelty originally committed against us.[3] Herein lies the problem: Shame’s power is so often derived from
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The more we swim in the direction of shame, the more we recognize that our current struggles are often smoke screens, distracting us from the presence of more threatening experiences of it. You
Shame is certainly a terrifying beast, but each time we choose not to live as its prey, we find it less powerful than we imagined.
The Hebrews must look at the very thing that is killing them.
The Gospel of John picks up on this story in chapter 3 and recreates the story, but this time it is Jesus who gets placed on a torture stick, and people must look at him in order to be saved.[4]
We are healed to the degree to which we can turn to face and name...
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The ultimate defeat of shame is when the very experiences that attempted to convince you that you were unwanted become the sources of the greatest joy of being loved.
“Our fantasies are not things to be ashamed of; they are in fact our greatest teachers.”[5] Allow your sexual fantasies to teach you about the parts of your story that await healing.
Those who struggle with addictive behavior struggle with deprivation; they tend to ignore issues of self-care. This goes back to your story. If you have known shame and abandonment, you are less likely to believe you deserve good care.
“What you have to do instead is counterintuitive,” the instructor remarked. “If you want to go left, you scoot your butt to the right of your seat and look over your left shoulder. You need to look where you want to go, not where you are.”
The same is true for those who have known lives of addiction. Our natural way of getting through life is to feel chronically behind on tasks, stressed, and ashamed. This is ground we are so accustomed to seeing. What we must learn to do instead is look over our shoulders to find the oxygen we most need. Everything in us will tell us to keep our heads down to the ground of our misery. When we do this, it’s common to hear ourselves say, “I don’t have time” and “I am not worth it.”
For instance, in times that I feel particularly busy, I know that my body needs to surf or hike. But the first thing I hear myself say is “That takes too much time. You are really going to leave your wife behind again? If you are going to be busy, you can’t have that, too.”
Integrity is not about fleeing or burying sexual desire; it is concerned with being unified and honest in pursuing the holistic desires within you.
Unwanted sexual behavior is not the root cause of a lack of integrity but rather one of the many symptoms.
