by Jay Stringer
This fear can change, I promise. Your life story set you up to experience the bondage of unwanted sexual behavior, and owning this story with a heart of curiosity and agency will provide the way out. Your sexual behavior is unwanted because you intuitively know it does not bear the beauty you were made for. God is not ashamed of us. He wants you to know a beauty you never could have conceived of at the height of your despair. I have seen this beauty transform Jeffrey’s life and have no doubt you will see it transform your own.
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.
Similarly, if you want to understand why sexual struggles exist in your life, you have to understand the tributaries that make the struggles possible. Part 1 of this book will address the primary tributary: the formative stories of your childhood.
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?
[11] Dan B. Allender, Healing the Wounded Heart: The Heartache of Sexual Abuse and the Hope of Transformation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2016), 36. Allender wrote, “Evil hates what God reveals in and through the creation of humanity, especially with regard to gender and sexuality. Nothing brings evil greater delight or power than to foul our joy in being a man or a woman through sexual harm or gender confusion on the one hand or dogmatism on the other.”
[12] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), ix.
[13] Billy Baker, “The Biggest Threat Facing Middle-Age Men Isn’t Smoking or Obesity. It’s Loneliness,” Boston Globe, March 9, 2017, https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/03/09/the-biggest-threat-facing-middle-age-men-isn-smoking-obesity-loneliness/k6saC9FnnHQCUbf5mJ8okL/story.html.
[14] Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: Dell, 1969), 72–74.
[15] Serene Jones, Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World (Louisville, KY: John Knox, 2009), 102.
[16] Jones, Trauma, 102.
[17] Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Sin: Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be (Christ on Campus Initiative, 2010), 11. His book Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995) is an excellent study of the nature of sin, including corruption, deceit, folly, addiction, attacks on God, and flight from God.
[18] Plantinga, Sin, 11.
[19] Plantinga, Sin, 11.
[20] Plantinga, Sin, 11.
[21] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (repr., New York: Macmillan, 1977), 49.
[22] Plantinga, Sin, 12. Lebensraum translates literally as “living space” and was regularly referenced as the rationale for Nazi Germany’s imperial ambitions.
[23] Allender, Healing, chapter 2. Allender addressed his conviction that evil receives an enormous return on investment through sexual abuse.
[24] James Alison, Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-In (New York: Continuum, 2006), 166–72.
[25] Romans 5:20 says that as people sinned more, God’s grace became more abundant. Two verses later in Romans 6:1, the question is raised, Should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more of this abundant grace? Romans 6:2 answers it: “Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it?” (NLT).
[26] Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 2010), 136.
[27] Maté, Realm, 145.
[28] Maté, Realm, 142.
[29] Maté, Realm, 142.
[30] U2, “Every Breaking Wave,” Songs of Innocence (Island, Interscope, 2014).
[31] Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor, 2004), appendix.
[32] Applebaum, Gulag, 391. While reading Gabor Maté’s reference to this story in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Jeffrey was reminded of having read Gulag in college.
CHAPTER TWO
SETTING THE COURSE OF UNWANTED SEXUAL BEHAVIOR
ON A RAINY DAY IN MARCH, a client named Lindsay entered my office, sat down, and said, “In all honesty, I don’t feel as if I should even be in therapy. I should be able to get over my need for porn, but I’m here so that I can find out what is wrong with me.” A week prior to her first appointment, Lindsay asked for her boyfriend’s help to get rid of a virus her computer developed. Her boyfriend tried to isolate the problem and looked into her Internet history. He was shocked to find a massive amount of pornography. When he asked Lindsay about the porn on her computer, she had a mild panic attack and eventually told him she had been struggling with pornography since middle school. Lindsay had always wanted to get help but had felt as though pornography were such a man’s issue. As a woman, she felt uniquely ashamed. She was not aware that one survey found that one in three women watches porn at least once a week.[33] Another study found that 56 percent of women twenty-five years old and younger and 27 percent of women older than twenty-five years old seek out porn.[34]
Whether it is pornography, buying sex, extramarital affairs, or promiscuity, your unwanted behavior has likely left you with a sentiment similar to Lindsay’s. 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.
I want to be clear that your stance toward what we will travel through in part 1 may be one of resistance. I have never met a client who at some level has not minimized the role their family and community of origin played in the development of their behavior. After I had given a lecture to men in Seattle who had been arrested for soliciting women in prostitution and explained the role their families of origin had played, one man said, “I hear what you are saying, but my parents were great people and have never really disappointed me.” He then went on, in the same breath, to say that his father left his mother for another woman and that his mom now asks him to take her to all her doctor appointments and church meetings. “She always tells me it’s great that I am still single, so that I can be available to spend so much time with her. I am glad I can love her so well. What I am trying to figure out, though, is why I always need to have a prostitute in my car after I get done spending time with my mom.” It should be clear at some level that this man has known harm and that the role he is being asked to play for his mother since the breakdown of his parents’ marriage is contributing to his acting out. The choice of unwanted sexual behavior is never accidental. There is always a reason. Your path to freedom from unwanted sexual behavior begins with finding the unique reasons behind yours.
The vast majority of men and women I’ve worked with tend to condemn themselves for their initial involvement with unwanted sexual behavior. This is like indicting yourself for a cancer diagnosis when you grew up next to a leaking nuclear waste facility. We tend to blame ourselves rather than study the conditions and relationships that most inform our sexual struggles. I am asking you to consider the possibility that your sexual struggle is not random. Could there be dynamics in your family, community, and culture that contributed to your contamination? 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.
Before we address the specific family systems and childhood events that drive unwanted sexual behavior for adults, let’s briefly explore three central tenets that will frame our discussion:
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.
We Are Born with Dignity
The word sex is taken from the Latin word secare, which means to sever, to amputate, or to disconnect from the whole. A major dimension of our relational and sexual lives, then, is the awareness of how severed we are from one another and the way we go about reconnecting.[35] Therefore, sexuality is much more comprehensive than what we choose to do with our genitals or wedding rings. God designed us with the ability to develop a sense of self (identity) and establish joyful and meaningful connection with others (relationships). Sexuality will flourish in your life to the degree to which you develop your identity and build meaningful relationships with those around you. Identity and relationships interanimate each other: 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.
Our earliest life lessons are secare experiences. We are born so dependent on relationships that our heartbeats and body temperatures are regulated in reference to our caregivers. But we are also born able to increasingly self-soothe. Researchers found that when parents were taught to encourage their infants to self-soothe (putting them down awake and waiting a few minutes to respond to their distress), their infants slept longer and woke up less.[36]
Early one morning, I awoke to my son crying. Knowing he was sufficiently fed and had been sleeping through the night for months, I was surprised to hear his sobbing. I stumbled out of bed and walked across the cold floors to his room. I greeted him gently and checked for the evidence of wet or soiled clothing. Nothing. “Up,” he said as clearly as any twenty-month-old could muster. I told him it was still very early and he needed to go back to sleep. “Up,” he said again, with greater gusto. I picked him up, and he immediately wrapped his little strong arms around my neck and pulled his body close. I held him for a few moments and sang his favorite song. He interrupted my tone-deaf singing with an abrupt “No. Down!” Again I was surprised. He had rejected me for many things, but never for my singing. “You want to go back to your crib?” I replied. “Yes. Down,” he said as his body reached for the crib. I lowered him back down, and he immediately turned over to his stomach to fall asleep.
My son’s early-morning crying was an expression of his experience of secare. He woke up in distress and cried out with a desire to be reconnected with those who love him. He knew at a primal level what his needs were, and once he was reconnected with love, he was able to calm himself and choose rest. In this respect, our sexuality is about how we express our desire to know and be known in all the fear and beauty of what it means to be human.
It is vital for us to address our sexual brokenness from a standpoint of the dignity of self and the dignity of our longing for connection. No person, no matter how troubled or vile, can ever escape the reality of being made to grow in maturity and simultaneously receive care, gentleness, and rest in the context of relationships. This is just as true for an infant as it is for a man when he leaves a hotel room after buying sex or watching pornography.
In the book of Genesis, God creates the world and looks out over all that has been made and calls it “good” (1:31). The one thing, however, that is not good? Adam’s being alone. In Genesis 2:20, Adam names all the livestock, the birds in the sky, and the wild animals, and you have to guess he observes the animals engaging in some serious mating rituals. You can almost see Adam scratching his head and asking God, “Well, what about me? Is that type of mating behavior for only the animals? God, do you realize there is no one suitable for me?”[37] It is a hilarious verse. God sees Adam’s aloneness and maybe even his befuddlement and begins his crowning act of creation: the formation of Eve.
Adam’s aloneness is rescued through the creation and presence of Eve. She is formed not to serve Adam in the traditional sense but to partner with him in cultivating (ruling and subduing) the goodness of earth. Sexuality allows us to turn away from the constant demands of life and turn toward relationships in order to feel less severed, less amputated, and less disconnected in our fragmented world. But sexuality is never complete if it remains inwardly focused. Sexuality turns outward, too, cultivating the world around us with the unique identities God has bestowed within us.
As we journey through life, we inevitably undergo formative experiences of disconnection from those who were most intended to bring us into wholeness. Cruelty, abandonment, and divorce divide us from our parents. Bullying, abuse, and humiliation divide us from our peers. It is in the aftermath of these stories that we live as exiles “east of Eden.”[38] We wander about in search of home but settle for a narcissistic identity reflected back to us from the amount of sex, power, and money we are able to obtain. Sexual brokenness is not a life sentence; it is an invitation to heal our wounds and learn who we want to become.
Honor and Honesty Must Be Addressed
Abraham is the patriarch of many of the major faiths throughout the world. He is revered for his personal faith and obedience to go to the land God was calling him to. What we rarely mention, however, is that Scripture also tells us that our patriarch trafficked his wife, agreed to impregnating a teenage slave named Hagar (whom we discussed in the introduction), and then turned out to be a real bona fide coward when his barren wife and pregnant slave started fighting. The honesty of Scripture is shocking. Scripture writers honored Abraham but were equally honest about his shortcomings.[39]
Many families and faith communities have embraced the lie that if we are honest, we could not truly honor, and if we honored someone, it would certainly come at the cost of honesty. When given the choice between honesty and honor, I find that most of my clients are naturally bent, to some degree, to be dishonest about what they have experienced in their families. They favor a type of pseudo-honor and present a rosier picture to themselves and others. They may do so out of virtue, but more often than not, they do so because they fear what would happen to them if they disclosed the truth about their families or communities.
One client, Christy, told me that disclosing the sexual abuse she suffered from her father felt like the most dishonoring thing she had ever done in her life, even more dishonoring than cheating on her spouse. She remarked, “If my family knew I was talking about my dad’s abuse and if he actually had to address it, our whole family would fall apart. My mom would leave him, and then what would happen to my dad? I think he would be suicidal. The family functions so much better if I just live a lie.” As you can see, honor and honesty are greatly at odds here.
If you are prone to separate honor and honesty, it is worth pondering how this division between the two came to be. A couple of questions you might want to consider: When did you learn to keep honesty and honor separated? Who taught you that it would be better to honor someone than to tell the truth with kindness and strength? Who taught you that it would be better to tell someone a brazen lie than to bring truth with deep respect for the other? What would happen to a family Thanksgiving dinner if you spoke with both honesty and honor? A genuine mark of maturity is the ability to hold two simultaneous truths together at the same time.
The writers of Scripture recognized that honesty and honor should never be separated. In other words, honor and honesty are intended to be married, so far as to say ther
e was a private ceremony that brought them into a covenant together. Until you understand that honor and honesty are two sides of the same coin, you will likely be inclined to separate them.
What I have found in my story and with hundreds of men and women is that our desire to honor others is often a smoke screen that keeps us from entering heartache. It is a brilliant and tragic maneuver we have all learned to make. We swerve to protect others so that we do not have to face the implications of what their harm has brought. What if all this were not so? What if you could live where the streams of honesty and honor could converge? May you enter your story with honor and honesty.
Sexual Brokenness Is Not Random
If you wanted to understand why men from Somalia became notorious for hijacking and terrorizing ships, you would need to study the conditions that set up this behavior. It’s easy to say they “shouldn’t” be doing that, but it is another thing to consider the why behind their piracy.
The reality is that Somalian pirates used to be fishermen—that is, until foreign fishing vessels stole their fish. The United Nations estimated that almost $300 million worth of seafood was stolen each year from their coastline.[40] If you combine this theft with a country oppressed by violent warlords, what would you expect these men to do in order to survive? Their pirate behavior is not random; it reveals the wounds of the past and highlights the present problems that need to be transformed. 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.
