by Jay Stringer
This is why past sexual abuse is so important to address, especially if you’ve been involved in recovery for long periods of time with no significant healing. Many recovery approaches invite you to stop or declare war on your lust, which is often appealing because it emulates an approach you developed in the aftermath of abuse. But inevitably you are going to feel pulled to act out. If the only interventions you have are to annihilate desire or phone a friend, the sexual current is going to feel too strong and the interventions will feel too impotent. The reality has to be stated: You are far more likely to be seduced into recreating the dynamics of your sexual abuse than into the mere pursuit of sexual pleasure.
A sexual reenactment occurs when, as an adult, you remix the sexual, thematic, and emotional dramas of your childhood abuse. Clayton’s reenactment occurred in the context of his affair. He would later remark, “It was as if I became my uncle Frank. I took the best attributes of who I was and used them to take sexual advantage of someone in need, just as he did with me.” Although a single woman’s home in Seattle was a world away from a tent in the mountains of Virginia, the sexual, thematic, and emotional story line was strikingly similar.
Clayton’s recovery began when he chose to listen to what his reenactments were communicating. He recognized three key discoveries that are important for each of us with histories of past sexual abuse:
Abuse influenced him to despise his God-given desires to give and receive pleasure. In blessing his desires, he was able to take authority over them, which allowed them to mature beyond the prison walls of abuse.
His heart to serve others had become compromised by seduction. The temptation in most recovery circles would be to bury one’s love of others for the fear of sexualizing future relationships. Clayton instead saw that he needed to outgrow this adolescent sexuality that kept his life small and predictable. The more he owned the shallow patterns of his arousal, the less satisfying they became.
Sexual arousal was not a random issue of lust. The fantasy Clayton had to help and seduce women was a predictable story line, straight out of the mountains of Shenandoah. Instead of berating fantasy as abhorrent behavior, he offered kindness and understanding to himself. The less he hated himself, the less power the fantasy held.
Introduction to Pornography as (Subtle) Sexual Abuse
The average age of exposure to pornography is nine for boys and eleven for girls. The tragedy is that this is now considered a normal developmental passage. For a small minority, the exposure is accidental: Maybe they were walking on a trail near their house and stumbled upon a magazine, or they were using the computer and accidentally typed in the wrong website. For most children and adolescents, however, their first exposure to pornography was not a discovery but an introduction.
Overwhelmingly, our first exposure to pornography is in the context of relationships. As we discussed earlier, my research showed that significant percentages of people struggling with unwanted sexual behavior were introduced to pornography “to little extent” or greater by peers (50 percent) or someone older (32 percent). This reveals that more than likely, someone made a deliberate choice to expose you to pornography. It could have been an older child in your neighborhood who wanted to show you a magazine, a father who left pornography inside his bedside nightstand or closet for you to inevitably discover, a group of friends showing you a celebrity sex tape, or a boyfriend showing you a porn video with the suggestion that you both try something similar.
Samuel grew up in a modest Christian family. When he was ten years old, his parents got a desktop computer and decided his bedroom was the best spot because it was the only room that had enough space in their small apartment. Samuel’s parents warned him about the dangers of pornography, and in the evenings, they would even occasionally knock on his door and say, “You aren’t messing around in there, are you?”
Nolan’s discovery of pornography came when he was searching through his father’s home office. He found a stack of magazines in the bottom right drawer of the desk when his dad was out shoveling snow. Nolan was mesmerized and didn’t realize his father had walked back in the house until he heard him say, “Nolan, put that stuff away.” His dad walked back outside to finish shoveling the driveway but came in a half hour later, tossed Nolan the keys to the family Suburban, and said, “It’s about time you learn how to drive a truck.”
Crystal was in sixth grade when she discovered pornography in the guest bathroom at her grandparents’ house. Crystal and her siblings would spend long weekends there whenever her parents needed time away. While she was there, her grandfather would designate chores for the grandchildren. Her brothers tended to have outdoor tasks, such as mowing the grass or raking leaves. Crystal was assigned to clean the guest bathroom and vacuum the bedrooms. Under the bathroom sink, next to the glass cleaner, was her grandfather’s pornography stash. Her grandmother once saw her looking through a porn magazine as she cleaned and scolded her for looking at “that trash.” Until Crystal began attending a pornography recovery group, it never occurred to her that her grandfather was encouraging her involvement with pornography. One group member said to her, “You don’t send your granddaughter to clean the mirrors and not expect her to find your porn next to where you store the glass cleaner.”
Connor was in seventh grade when an eighth-grade neighbor named Derek introduced him to pornography on a cell phone on the bus. A few weeks later, Connor was at a sleepover with several of his friends, including Derek, when a few of them started showing each other their favorite porn videos. Sensing Connor’s timidity, Derek took him over to the corner of the room, told him to relax, and then showed him how to masturbate.
What should be clear from these four examples is that most people’s first encounters with pornography are set up by someone older or with more sexual experience. In this way, many children’s and adolescents’ introduction to pornography is a form of sexual abuse. Prominent Christian psychologist Dr. Dan Allender wrote, “As difficult as it is to face, the presence of pornography binds the heart of children not merely to the pictures but also to the one who is clearly aroused by those images.”[53] 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.
Present Sexual Brokenness as Reenactment
Addressing the subtle abuse of pornography is important because of the role reenactment is likely playing in your life. For Samuel, this pattern continued to play out with his wife. He would often scroll through various hashtags on Tumblr and Instagram in the living room. His wife would see him transfixed by his screen and say, “What are you looking at? It always seems as if you are looking at porn.”
For Nolan, reenactment happened with his fifteen-year-old son. Nolan and his son sat down to watch a movie, when a pornography film appeared under the “Continue Watching” section of Netflix. Nolan knew he had been caught and commented, “Well, sometimes you have to do what you have to do.” He went to the fridge and grabbed two beers, one for himself and one for his son. Nolan felt ashamed, but attempting to normalize the behavior for his son gave him great relief. He understood exactly what his father must have felt as he came in from shoveling snow.
Crystal’s reenactment started early in high school when she was asked to feed a neighbor’s cat for a week while the family was on vacation. Inside the neighbor’s house, she felt a rush of arousal and intrigue. As the cat ate, Crystal searched through the bathrooms and bedrooms to try to find porn, which she eventually found in the master bedroom closet. In college, the pattern continued. Hired as a nanny for a family, one night Crystal got the children to sleep and began roaming through the house, trying to find pornography or sex toys. She was unable to find anything, but much to her surprise, she was fired the next day. The family had a nanny cam installed and thought she was trying to steal money or jewelry. She was ashamed but especially relieved that her true intentions were not discovered.
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br /> Connor’s reenactment occurred when he joined a senior partner in his firm on a trip to Tampa, Florida. On their taxi ride to the hotel, the partner saw Connor looking at a billboard of a strip club and said to him, “If you’ve never been, Tampa is the place to go. How about we go tonight? We’ll make it a company party. I’ll show you the ropes.” Inside the club, the senior partner paid for private rooms and ordered lap dances for both of them.
It is important to underscore that when each of these individuals entered therapy, none of these connections between their present sexual behavior and past sexual abuse (or in Samuel’s case, setting up the high probability of pornography use) were apparent to them. What this likely means for you is that there are stories of your own subtle abuse that you have dismissed as irrelevant to your sexual struggle. 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.
The stunning relational bonds children build are precisely what makes them so vulnerable to being bound to erotic shame with those who introduce them to pornography. Pornography wires the brain and transforms the heart with detrimental consequences. Its introduction to the lives of children and adolescents is rarely neutral. Instead, it is a form of abuse that shapes the trajectory of millions of lives. The introduction to pornography is the left jab that sets up the right hook of a lifetime of unwanted sexual behavior.
No doubt if you have read to this point, the stories and concepts may have been disruptive and painful in ways you did not expect. My hope is that you are now pondering the formative events that have shaped your sexual brokenness. As this happens, you will become acutely aware of the stories where God feels particularly absent and the moments you made vows never to tell anyone what you did or what was done to you. As you courageously start to engage your petri dish of sorrow and confusion, you have my sincere admiration and compassion. Keep going. The work you have done to explore the past is preparing you to write a new story of freedom from unwanted sexual behavior.
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.
In the following section, we address another major tributary to the river of unwanted sexual behavior: your present-day difficulties. This section will highlight the ongoing struggles in intimate relationships as well as the unresolved struggles you face on a daily basis. Your childhood experiences set the trajectory of your behavior and remain self-reinforcing for you as an adult. Unwanted behavior can be disrupted only when the engine that sustains it is exposed and dismantled. That is the work you will begin in part 2: “Why Do I Stay?”
FOR REFLECTION:
When and how did you first view pornography? Do you continue to pursue similar pornographic themes to this day?
If you were sexually abused, did your abuser have a trusted role in your life or family?
What did your abuser know about what you were hungry to experience or where you were uniquely vulnerable?
[51] Peter Levine, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 2010), 60.
[52] Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin, 2015), 13.
[53] Dr. Dan Allender, Healing the Wounded Heart: The Heartache of Sexual Abuse and the Hope of Transformation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2016), 104.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SIX CORE EXPERIENCES OF UNWANTED SEXUAL BEHAVIOR
EMILY SAT ON MY THERAPY COUCH and burst into tears. She looked up in desperation and said, “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.”
Part 2, “Why Do I Stay?” is about understanding why unwanted sexual behavior remains a prominent feature in our lives, despite the consequences. Most people have a clear understanding of the behavior they wish to stop but have far less clarity regarding the key drivers that inform why they stay involved in unwanted sexual behavior.
Imagine looking out at your lawn on a warm spring day and saying, “That’s it. I am sick of all the weeds! This year, I am committing to annihilating these infidels once and for all!” Then you walk out with a pair of purple scissors you’ve had since kindergarten and start cutting a couple of inches above the soil. It is absurd, but many of us take this approach to recovery.
Rather than trying to stop your unwanted sexual behavior, ponder for a moment how unwanted sexual behavior has come to serve you. What would you do on a business trip without pornography? When your spouse is distant or angry, where else would you direct your anger? When you are cornered with the lack of purpose in your life, where else would you flee to? One man who was under immense financial distress said to me, “I go to sex because it’s better than the feeling I have not going to sex.” Liberation is possible, but leaving unwanted sexual behavior will put you in difficult terrain, without your most dependable getaway vehicle.
As a clinician, I’ve observed six core experiences that together usher someone into unwanted sexual behavior. Although we’d love a linear, formulaic process that simplifies restoration into easy steps, most oversimplified approaches fail because they drive us toward the desired outcome in cruise control. 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.
A Vicious Cycle
Unwanted sexual behavior forms when six core life experiences are linked together: deprivation, dissociation, unconscious arousal, futility, lust, and anger. Any of these experiences on their own are not enough to create pervasive damage. Rather, it is when these experiences link and reinforce one another that the stage is set for unwanted sexual behavior to appear. These experiences usually exist unexamined and therefore lead to a predictable, pernicious cycle that traps the soul over time.
When the six experiences bind together, the cycle of unwanted sexual behavior begins. To disrupt this cycle, the six experiences must be addressed holistically and simultaneously because they rarely exist on a linear continuum. For instance, you could be having a terrible week at work (futility) and come home to watch four random hours of Netflix (dissociation). You are upset with yourself for how unproductive you are (anger) and then find yourself scrolling through a porn site (lust and anger) to offer yourself a momentary reprieve from disappointment. The next evening, a friend invites you over to hang out, but you say no to something good (deprivation) because you feel so disappointed in who you are. Your shame then drives you to even more pornography use. Unwanted sexual behavior does not happen out of thin air. There is always a context.
Experience 1: Deprivation: Addiction’s Seesaw
Although unwanted sexual behavior appears to be a towering tree of self-indulgence, its strength comes from the massive roots of deprivation beneath the surface. Deprivation and addiction share similar architecture, serving one another when the other is absent, much like a seesaw. Those who deprive themselves of meaningful relationships and self-care are more likely to require other people or things to offer what they are lacking, even if they are destructive forms of the real nee
d. 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.
In my research, when women and men perceived they had unmet needs—meaning they did not believe that their needs were important or they felt they needed to be secretive to get their needs met—they were incredibly susceptible to unwanted sexual behavior:
Ignoring your needs is not virtuous; it is dangerously irresponsible. Your spouse, parents, and friends are not responsible for meeting your needs—you are.
Lawrence was two years out of medical school when he sought treatment. He described his residency as
the worst hell since middle school, only now with other people’s lives on the line. I was working ninety hours a week, responsible for saving lives, and at the same time ridiculed by the other doctors for any mistake I made. I was completely exhausted by work and the demands on my life. When I finally had a day off, I would crash. I didn’t eat or sleep well. I was losing touch with people, and the only thing that carried me was what life would be like when I finished. Money and power are in the back of every resident’s mind.
Pornography had been part of Lawrence’s life off and on during medical school, but when he completed his residency, his unwanted sexual behavior amplified. He started using dating apps for hooking up and ended up buying sex several times.
