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The less he hated himself, the less power the fantasy held.
Whether we find porn with no one else around or are introduced to it in the presence of others, we associate it not only with erotic content but also with the one who originally collected it.
I am not telling you that you must draw hard conclusions from these stories, but instead I am inviting you to be curious about any scenes that may have flashed through your mind. These scenes are instrumental in helping us understand where we come from and why we remain bound to similar dynamics in the present.
I hope that as this section comes to a close, you have found a gentler and more informed understanding of the reasons your life has become hijacked by sexual struggle. The totality of your childhood experiences served as your functional map of the world. To your detriment, the stories you sought to bury or avoid became the foundations of your unwanted sexual behavior.
Knowing the origins of your behavior is central to the recovery process, but it does not cure you. You will also need to address why unwanted sexual behavior is an essential component in your present life. Your unwanted sexual behavior reveals the wounds of your past, but it also highlights the specific day-to-day experiences you will need to transform in order to find freedom.
“Here I am again. Why am I such an idiot? Why do I stay in this stupid cycle? I keep going back to the thing I know is ruining my life.”
Rather than trying to stop your unwanted sexual behavior, ponder for a moment how unwanted sexual behavior has come to serve you.
When you are cornered with the lack of purpose in your life, where else would you flee to?
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 does not happen out of thin air. There is always a context.
The compulsive choices provoke their counterparts: 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.
Ignoring your needs is not virtuous; it is dangerously irresponsible. Your spouse, parents, and friends are not responsible for meeting your needs—you are.
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.
Unwanted sexual behavior is an escape but also a return to a familiar poison. What exactly are we trying to escape from?
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.
For men to change, they must exchange blame for the opportunity to grow.
The issue here, though, is not that the man is wounded by a parent figure; it is that he insists on creating a relationship in which he can use blame to aid him in avoiding the need for maturity.
Dissociation in marriage seduces you to leave the difficult relational realities of the present and escape to a fantasy arousal where you are in control, appreciated, and entitled.
Marriage will expose that our minds are far more broken than we could have ever conceived. But more importantly, it gives us opportunities to renew our minds. 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.
To understand why your sexual brokenness is part of your story, you need to identify the blueprints of your sexual and relational stories.
your task is to understand how your unique fantasies may be revealing portions of your story. 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.
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.
You cannot change your relationship to pornography if you do not have an effective plan for engaging the lack of purpose in your life. Pornography is not an isolated struggle; it is a symptom of a much larger issue of futility. Men who do not have strategies to transform their futility inevitably begin to lean on something to assuage the powerlessness they feel.
It’s when all the efforts we take to change our lives leave us only more discouraged.
Watching provides men a world without futility—that is, until they attempt to get out.
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.
The madness of unwanted sexual behavior is that the very thing we develop to assuage a lack of power ends up becoming a powerful master over us. Futility is never content with ruining one aspect of someone’s life; it wants to reproduce, infiltrating every aspect. This is pornography’s seduction to men: Bring me your weary and defeated heart, and I will give you a world where it will all go away. In the end, pornography confiscates not only your purpose but also your heart.
Lust points to a great desire for a good thing, like beauty or belonging. Anger aims at our longing for justice and restoration. Sin enters when lust is hijacked by covetousness or demand and when anger is hijacked by entitlement, contempt, or dogmatic control.
desire, if not satisfied, will often give birth to anger.
Lust is important to address, but it is like a car battery: It starts the engine, but we need anger to fuel our drive through unwanted sexual behavior.
We can lust for sex; we can lust for food; we can lust for virtually any dimension of life. 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. These paradigms contain dangerous “partial truths” that set people up to continue to sexually fail because the other half of the equation is left to fester in hiding.
I am convinced that one of the reasons we have not seen more progress in the reduction of pornography is that it seems very few people outside of Jesus and pornographers seem to understand that the heart is seduced by behaviors that allow lust and anger to be indulged. Pornography traces the human heart’s trajectory from lust to a demand to control beauty and, if you stay long enough, to a desire to see the body and face of a woman degraded.
The six core experiences of deprivation, dissociation, unconscious arousal, futility, lust, and anger reveal the why behind your current unwanted sexual behavior. These are the stories that await your engagement. Although sexual brokenness may have long seemed like an impediment to cultivating a spiritual life, it can be the very means God uses to transform you into the person you’ve always wanted to be.
futility is hijacked by resignation, lust is hijacked by perversion, and anger is hijacked by degradation.
What I trust that you will find is that you do not need to manufacture hope to get out of this quagmire; rather, hope exists in the very dregs of your heartache. The honesty and courage that have carried you this far have prepared you for the hardest part of our journey together.
Our lives are hijacked each time we choose indifference with the things that matter.
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.
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 heart, your potential to enjoy the fullness of life is compromised.
“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 victim, no pornography.”[6]
Perversion occurs through associating sexual lust with the anger embedded in our hearts.
We pursue pornography not because we are pursuing beauty but precisely because we prefer to consume and control it. With time, pornography will become a form of restitution in which we demand that the object of our lust suffer the loneliness, anger, and confusion we do not know how to suffer.
If you wish to stop your perversion, learn to listen to your lust. When you pay attention to it at a deeper level, sexual perversion can become your road map to healing. Studying the specifics of your perversion will help you gain a sense of what you are truly seeking. For example, men like Danny who develop sexual fantasies in which women hold the power—be that an attractive mother figure, an employer, or someone older—tend to have a fairly predictable story.
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.
Evil seduces us to degradation to eclipse the greater God-given longings in our hearts. Pornography offers us an imitation version of the justice and rest found in Jesus alone. In pornography, a victim is chosen to suffer violation in order to offer the porn user revenge and escape. In the gospel, humanity chooses an innocent victim to suffer death. In Jesus’ atonement, we are paradoxically offered the justice and rest we most desire. Both pornography and Jesus appeal to the deepest longings in our hearts. Only one offers freedom.
Rather than accepting the willing self-sacrifice of a God who offers to atone for our sins, we seek out an alternative sacrifice—a victim both unwilling and inadequate—and bring our lust and anger there instead. Rather than submit ourselves to a loving God, we have submitted ourselves to (and implicated ourselves in) evil.
My hope is that reading Chandler’s story prompts a more honest and courageous engagement of your own experiences, in which you annotate and name aspects you’ve long avoided. These six experiences and their hijacked forms are the constructs that answer the question “Why do I stay?” The work required to dismantle the experiences is intensely unrelenting. Though it pains me to say this, they are only part of the battle. But these elements within you are not merely self-perpetuating; they are influenced by the systems that surround you.
Transformation requires that you hold the rope taut between knowing your story and anticipating the influence of these systems. To only address one dimension leaves you vulnerable to the other.
