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saying no to sexual perversion is not an adequate paradigm for recovery. In Romans 12:2, the apostle Paul offered a fuller vision for how our hearts and minds change. We are instructed not to be conformed to the ways of the world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Renewing our minds is not about turning off our minds. It is about turning to pursue the deepest affections God has given us.
God approaches us for our joy, not due to his disappointment in us. His heart is to exchange beauty for ashes, joy for mourning, and praise for despair (see Isaiah 61:3). There is no depth of shame that the love of God cannot reach. There is no story he cannot redeem. The paradox of the gospel is that our failures do not condemn us; they connect us.
The formative experiences of our childhood (loneliness, pain, sexual arousal, secrecy, and relational ambivalence) are all being repeated in our unwanted sexual behavior as adults.
“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.
The presence of God finds this pregnant teenager and asks her the 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).
What I want to underscore is that the voice of the Lord is never filled with accusation or frustration. God’s presence invites us to greater reflection as to how our unwanted lives became the way they are today.
As we begin this journey, ask yourself, Where is it that I come from? And where is it that I am going? May your heart be curious as you study the great tragedy and beauty that your story reveals.
If you were to set out to attack the image of God, you would need to do more than ridicule how worthless a human pinky toe appears. Instead, you would plot after the most vulnerable, beautiful, and powerful dimension of who we are: our sexuality. This is the mind of evil.
Evil’s tactics are diverse, but the wreckage of shame often looks the same.
When we see the power of sex at work in the world, we often hear about it destroying society, not creating thriving societies. But sex is about the flourishing of creation, not the release of tension, the medication of pain, or the power to control another.
The creation-forming power of erotic love highlights the Achilles’ heel of evil. Evil cannot create anything out of nothing. It can’t clothe a tree with an abundance of beautiful leaves, it can’t make hops or grain for beer or spirits, and it can’t create the beauty of a human life. But what it can do is promote deforestation, seduce us to drink to the point of alcoholism, and through the production of pornography degrade women and dissolve the integrity of men and women.
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. We know the beauty and power of sex, but we also know when we are pursuing a deviant imitation of a beautiful erotic life. It is not possible to become too sexual for God. It is possible, however, to grow increasingly trapped in anti-sexual behavior.
The compounding interest that evil earns from anti-sexual behavior makes it the most profitable enterprise of all time.[13]
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 my view, our self-contempt is not a by-product of unwanted sexual behavior; it is the very aim of it. Through this lens, unwanted sexual behavior is not primarily an attempt to remedy or self-soothe the pain of a wounded child. It is attempting to reenact the formative stories of trauma, abuse, and shame that convinced us we were unwanted to begin with. 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.
You should have been able to fix the issue by now, and if you can’t, you assume there is something deeply flawed in you. This is the language of self-hatred. What I’d like you to consider is that your contempt for your failure is the very thing that blinds you from seeing the factors that set you on an inevitable trajectory toward unwanted sexual behavior.
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.
We look to the past not to find excuses for reprehensible behavior but because narrative holds the key to unlocking destructive patterns and implementing all future change.
The golden child’s strategy is to deny the truth of a rigid family through presenting a perfect image to the world at the cost of his soul. He learns that compliance and competence allow him to maneuver as a saint within the rigid borders of the family. 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 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. Here, we double down our bet on lust and end up bankrupt.
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
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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]
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.
Where parents and faith communities will not educate, pornography will.
“Who am I? I am a worthless woman who is addicted to porn. I’ve never been able to connect with anyone my whole life, and my whole career field just makes me the oddball anywhere I go. I hate myself for everything I am not. I’ve started using hookup apps when I am drunk, and I’m putting myself in situations I swore I would never be in. It just reinforces that no one wants anything to do with me except to use me. Now I am a damaged scientist. Who would ever want me?”
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.
For far too many like Tom, this is the extent to which their struggles will be engaged. This is a tragedy. 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. Sexual cessation will be prescribed, encouragement to tell his or her spouse will be given, and the client will be asked to join an accountability group.
“I felt so much pressure. I needed to be really caring for my mom because my dad left us, be a godly example for my siblings, lead my peers to the Lord, do well in school to get a scholarship, and somehow, on top of all that, serve God alone. I was angry at how much was expected of me.”
“With porn, I am served. In real life, it’s as if I am the one on my knees, subservient to what everyone is requiring of me. I got tired of being the only one who has to sacrifice his life. When my dad left my mom, no one asked me how I was doing. They just told me I needed to be there for my mom and siblings. I am recognizing what I am searching for—even in a woman’s body type—is someone smaller, with fewer needs than I have.”
He also learned to ask others for what he needed and encouraged them to do the difficult work of transformation rather than venting to him about their problems. The more he brought the fullness of his needs and anger to the present, the less pornography appealed to him.
Abandonment is dangerous because it tempts us to lose faith (or never find it) in the most foundational levels of what it means to be human: individual maturity and a loving bond with others.
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. Healing involves making conscious decisions about the data of sexual brokenness in one’s life. 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, and anger in your life.
Triangulation, or emotional enmeshment, occurs when there is a breakdown in a marriage relationship and a child is brought in to fill the emotional emptiness.
In the growing marital distance, the wife brings her emotional life—its joys and sorrows—to a child instead.
Triangulation is a form of emotional incest and has profound effects on the development of one’s individual and relational self. In marriage, our parents make vows to commit their loyalty, affection, and hearts to their spouses. Children do not make these vows. If you have been triangulated, it is likely your parents did not consider how the heartache and loneliness of their marriage would eventually affect you.
To get out alive, a triangulated child will need to find a way to escape this relational maze throughout adolescence. Enter pornography. In this way, he gives in to the requirements of his family and culture but also chooses prodigal behavior that gives a false but satisfactory experience of freedom. This child intuitively knows that his behavior is compromised but concurrently feels entitled to these desires.
One of the reasons many marriages fail or exist in perpetual conflict is that the husband or wife remains exceedingly loyal to his or her parents instead of to his or her spouse.
If you’re experiencing this, be on high alert as to how you use your past enmeshment as an excuse for not learning the difficult work of maturity in relationships.
Whereas scars reveal external wounds, unwanted sexual behavior often reveals internal ones.
We tend to focus on the apparent defects because it gives us something to blame, something to control. But what happens when we have nothing left to blame and no “silver bullet” to pursue? We are left with our pain.
Collectively, we prefer to blame our defects in understanding or lack of willpower for our unwanted sexual behavior. The solution is to find the latest and greatest strategy to combat lust. You can spend all your time and money trying to develop strategies to treat bad behavior and forget that the solution to your problem may be evident in the sexual brokenness itself. The more you look for strategies to combat lust or fortify your willpower against unwanted sexual behavior, the further you are from the traumas in your story.
God looks beyond the outward appearance of unwanted sexual behavior and into the heart of what is driving men and women into captivity.
The result of our cultural sexual silence is that the door is wide open for pornography to be the most prominent sex educator of our day.
Traumatized people feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. Thereafter, a sense of alienation, of disconnection, pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community and religion. When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.[4]
Trust is the paradoxical foundation of sexual abuse.
The madness of abuse is that we are often offered what our hearts are hungry to experience: attention, touch, and delight.
I wish I could say that this hatred is effective in healing unwanted sexual behavior, but the evidence is that contempt is gasoline on a fire.
Freedom is an often paradoxical and unexpected path that is found through kindness and curiosity. What would it mean for you to bless instead of curse your body for experiencing what it felt? Will you cry out with agony for how your desire was misused instead of remaining silent in your shame? Honesty and kindness change the human heart. Contempt for arousal and silence in our shame lead to continual pursuit of unwanted sexual behavior.
The more he owned the shallow patterns of his arousal, the less satisfying they became.
