Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

by Jay Stringer

The specifics of your sexual brokenness can reveal your unique way to healing.

The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. BRUCE MARSHALL, THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND FATHER SMITH

Unwanted sexual behavior is any sexual behavior that continues to persist in our lives despite our best efforts to change it.

Sexual brokenness pinpoints the location of our past harm and highlights the current roadblocks that keep us from the freedom we desire.

Our sexual brokenness is the geography of God’s arrival.

enmeshment.

my story. I told her that my parents and siblings used to tell me their problems with one another and how I served as a container for their resentment and

concerns.

I left the session and wrote down this sentence: “If we fail to engage the ways we were sexualized in the past, we leave open the high probability that these patterns will become more pronounced in the future.” Sexual struggles reveal the truth of our stories in ways that will

constantly surprise us.

two best questions any one of us can be asked when we are in distress: “Where have you come from?” and “Where are you going?” (verse 8).

As we begin this journey, ask yourself, Where is it that I come from? And where is it that I am going?

I am asking you to consider the possibility that evil has been plotting against your sexuality throughout your life.

According to John 10:10, the intention of the evil one is to “steal and kill and destroy.” If this is true, I think it is safe to assume that evil would be working deliberately to ruin our sexuality with this threefold approach.

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.[2]

I believe we need a model that integrates sin and addiction.

the more I understand what the Bible says about sin, the more I understand the nature of addiction, and the more I understand what science reveals about addiction, the more I understand the nature of sin.

Sin is anti-law, anti-righteousness, anti-spirit, anti-life, essentially anything against the regime of God.

The irony of sinful sexual behavior is that it is actually against sex. It is not that we want too much sex; it is that we want too much anti-sexual behavior.

If you want to understand why you are addicted to something, you have to understand the conditions that keep your addiction in place.

Addicts know that indulging in their unwanted sexual behavior will result in self-contempt. Every time.

In other words, we are not addicted primarily to sex or even a disordered intimacy; instead, we are bonded to feelings of shame and judgment.

From here, we turn to part 1 of this book, which will explore the question “How did I get here?” One way of thinking about unwanted sexual behavior is to see it as the convergence of two rivers: your past and the difficulties you face in the present. The place where two rivers converge is called a conflux and is where you will find the strongest current. For example, the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join together in Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania, to form the Ohio River. If you want to understand the Ohio River, you need to take a look at the Allegheny and the Monongahela, as well as their conflux.

FOR REFLECTION: Have you ever sensed the work of evil in your life? When? What dimensions of your life do you think

it was trying to impact? Think of a time when you felt the beauty of your body or sexuality. What images or scenes emerge for you?

The choice of unwanted sexual behavior is never accidental. There is always a reason.

I am asking you to consider the possibility that your sexual struggle is not random.

Jesus says that unless you leave your family—your mother, your father—you cannot follow him. We cannot walk with Jesus into healing if we remain loyal to protecting the people and communities that most contributed to our harm. As we proceed, I ask that you be attentive to what you are feeling. Where do you feel uneasy? When do you feel disloyal to your family? When do you feel self-contempt? When do you feel the need to universalize your struggle? Where are you deeply curious? 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.

We are born with dignity. Honor and honesty (not blaming or minimizing) both must be addressed within our family systems. Our sexual brokenness is not random.

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.

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. This will require us to survey landscapes that many of us hold as sacred, if not off limits: family and community.

Do you find yourself bent more toward honor or honesty with your family? If you are bent more

toward honor, what did you experience that you feel a need to be dishonest about?

At this point in your journey, what past stories or present dynamics do you think most influence your involvem...

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

Rigidity puts you in a bind. On one hand, you are powerless, and on the other hand, you have so much

evidence against your dysfunctional family system. If you speak, you will be exiled and orphaned. If you don’t speak, you...

When you are powerless, you should be on high alert for anger. Feeling anger at the hypocrisy of others is like a tropical storm entering the warm waters of t...

and you will wreck either your family, your own life, or both. 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 ra...

needs to be honored as a symbol of all the unprocessed anger of living in ...

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

d...

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 rec...

In their book Rising to Power, Ron Carucci and Eric Hansen made a fascinating observation: The abdication of power does more damage in an organization than coercive leadership. Leaders certainly wreck organizations when they are forceful, but they are most destructive when they fail to fully own the power of their positions.[1] The same is true for parents

Your behavior can be an invitation to become an adult and heal the pain driving your decisions, or it will inevitably be irrefutable evidence that proves how pathetic you have become.

To write a new sexual story

for yourself, something must shift in your commitment to hiding the anxiety, shame...