by Jay Stringer
BENEFITS OF SEXUAL HEALING
The open wound of unwanted sexual behavior begins to heal through grief and anger. Your pain decreases, and you find the pursuit of unhealthy sexual behavior to be less desirable. You discover newfound joy in leaving the burden of a shameful life behind. You find yourself in hard but healing conversations with your spouse, children, and friends. You may also find yourself in conversations in which you must extend forgiveness and grace to those who inflicted harm or were silent bystanders to it. These conversations may take place literally or figuratively. In the process of reconciliation, your heart is set free.
Pursuing a New Sexual Story
In the eighties, the famous “Just Say No” campaign was intended to discourage children and adolescents from using drugs. The initiative was not effective and ironically may have increased alcohol and cigarette use among drug users.[85] The synopsis of the failure was that saying no is not an effective solution to destructive behavior; one must pursue something generative. The same thing is true of sex. Many recovery programs fail because they are preoccupied with telling people what behavior to avoid. True recovery is not about quarantine of the body but about its restoration. A new sexual story is about inviting your body, heart, and soul into the fullness of nurture, sensuality, and eroticism. Healing is about a passionate holiness, setting apart your body to experience lovely, passionate, and restful experiences. God invites us into a new sexual story through inviting us to receive nurture, soliciting our sensuality, and alluring our eroticism.
God Invites Us to Receive Nurture
Nurture is the first integral dimension of writing a new sexual story. As you recall, sex, at its most basic level, is about a longing for connection. Nurture is the means through which we give and receive this desire for connection. It may include genital sex, but it also exists outside it. One of the things I find is that many people do not know how to pursue holistic nurture. When they are happy, they want sex. When they are sad, they want sex. When they are confused, they want sex. This might highlight their love for sex, but it also reveals their limitations in pursuing nurture.
I have yet to meet someone in my counseling office who is fluent in the language of nurture. Very few know how to self-soothe without an orgasm or a chemical, and very few pursue relationships to receive nurture so that they might grow into more self-aware, independent, and loving adults.
One of the intriguing things we’ve learned from our rat mammal counterparts is that when a mother rat does not lick her ratlets, the babies do not develop opioid receptors in their brains. On a human level, the parallels would be that if a mother or father did not hug, kiss, delight in, and offer curiosity to his or her baby, the child’s brain would not develop the necessary receptors to receive and give human care later in life.
Sexually broken people tend to avoid experiences where they risk the chance of being found incompetent or embarrassed, so they often miss the opportunities to experience nurture. To mature, we must allow our needs for guidance and care to be known. In my marriage, I am constantly surprised by how often my wife recognizes that I am not breathing consistently. It is a telltale sign that I am feeling anxious or ashamed. Her nurture invites me back to my breathing and into the vulnerability to share my inner world. Nurture invites us to share our anxious and ashamed thoughts with those who care for us.
Of all the stories I get to hear of transformation in people’s lives and marriages, some of the best are when the individuals pursue forms of nurture. Jennifer was a client who was told throughout her life that she was clumsy. Defiantly, she signed up for rock-climbing lessons. The following week, I asked her how it went. She replied, “I am part spider. Who knew!” Asher always wanted to learn about wine but could never admit, even to a grocery store clerk, that he knew next to nothing about it. For his birthday, he scheduled a reservation for his dinner party at Canlis—one of Seattle’s best restaurants—and asked the sommelier to order two bottles of wine from regions he was curious about. The most agonizing but redemptive part of the evening for Asher was inviting the sommelier to stay an extra three minutes at the table to give Asher guidance on how to smell and taste each vintage. And David, who struggled with obesity his whole life, asked me, after committing to a yoga practice for more than a year, if I wanted to see him do a headstand. These stories are remarkable not because they are going to make news headlines but because each of the people pursued care for a part of themselves that had been wounded. In pursuing nurture, Jennifer, Asher, and David received the empowerment they were seeking.
God Solicits Our Sensuality
Sensuality is the second component to pursuing new sexual stories for ourselves. Like nurture, if you struggle with having sensuality in your day-to-day life, you should not expect it to magically show up in your sex life. The following questions are asked in order to assess how sensual you allow yourself to be:
When you cook your favorite dish, do you savor the sights and smells along the way?
When you see a hummingbird, do you marvel at its flight?
When you watch an Olympian, do you experience awe for their ability and dedication?
Every day, if we pay attention, God solicits us to simple experiences of sensuality.
One of my jobs I’ve held over the years is being a lecturer at the city of Seattle’s john school. This is a program for men who have been arrested for soliciting women in prostitution. For almost a decade, I have started each class by asking each of them to pay attention to what their bodies are feeling. Most of them report feeling tired or stressed from a long day of class. I hand out fresh mint to them and ask them to smell it and pay attention to any shifts that occur in their bodies or energy. Smiles often fill the room. Of all the men I’ve invited to smell mint, only one has reacted with anything other than delight. (He had spent much of his life working in mint fields. He was, perhaps understandably, visibly repulsed.)
Inevitably, these men share stories of why they like mint: mojitos, mint tea, mint gum, and peppermint essential oils. I continue to invite them to pay attention to their bodies as they take olfactory dimensions of the mint. When they do so, they say their bodies feel calmer, safer, and more enjoyable. What I am inviting them into is how to be sensual men without needing to be erotic. I want them to behold the goodness of their sensual abilities. I want them to see that sensuality is about opening our bodies to being present, aroused, and influenced by the world around us. If we do not feel wonder at the flight of a hummingbird or eagle or at the scent of mint, how will we even begin to feel the stunning sensuality of sex?
One of the standard treatment recommendations for those who struggle with unwanted sexual behavior is to have sixty to ninety days of abstinence from sexual behavior. The reason for this is that the neural pathways of attention and motivation in our brains need to be rewired. What research about the eating disorder bulimia (binging on food followed by a purge of the food through vomiting or significant exercise) has shown is that a great majority of a bulimic’s eating has nothing to do with hunger. Rather than hunger, these individuals experience stress, anger, anxiety, and depression and use food to alter these unpleasant emotions. Pornography and sexual behavior can be used in similar ways. In committing to two to three months of abstinence, you learn how to read your body and bring sensuality to it. There will be times when you need to teach your body how to be calm, and other times when you can bring it into passionate, sensual, and non-orgasmic activities. It is crucial for you to learn sensual activities that care for your body and arouse it in non-erotic ways.
God Allures Us to Eroticism
Most men and women who have a disordered relationship with sex believe they are very erotic individuals, perhaps too erotic for their own good. Therefore, to be invited to pursue eroticism may seem redundant or even terrifying, particularly if you are trying to rein in your sexual desire. Recall, however, that the original Greek meaning of eros has to do with a creative force capable of transforming the world (see chapter 1)
. Psychologist and author Rollo May wrote, “Eros is the center of the vitality of a culture—its heart and soul. And when release of tension takes the place of creative eros, the downfall of the civilization is assured.”[86]
Eros, properly pursued, is one of the primary ways God allures us to redemption. He is not holding our sexual sins against us, waiting for our cultural downfall. Rather, he is doing what he always does: offering us a way out of slavery, through inviting us to a land we have longed for but have yet to find. Through eros, God is alluring us to be far more sexual than we could have ever conceived at the height of our unwanted sexual behavior.
We experience the firstfruits of this promised land when our relationships give and receive nurture, our senses become engulfed with laughter and delight, and our bodies experience ecstasy so beyond our comprehension that the most probable explanation is that the Author of this pleasure is the most wildly sexual being we could ever search for. In this way, eroticism reveals that our cultural sexual desires are not too strong but too weak.[87]
Encounters with Eros
You encounter eros when your body experiences rest after sex and your eyes fill with tears, knowing there are no more secrets, no more double life you must cover. Eros greets you when you watch your daughter get married and marvel that somehow even the painful and broken years of marriage with your spouse are part of the blessedness of the day. You participate in eros in your body when you imagine what it will be like to be joined with a spouse and lover in the sacred nakedness of your bodies. Eros is discovered each time your body experiences the dovetailing of desire and gratitude. In this way, eroticism, properly understood, is always unifying you to your body, your lover, and seemingly all of creation.
Bestselling author Christopher West, in his book Fill These Hearts, said that our hearts know we were made for bliss and ecstasy. This blissful ecstasy, West said, is our eternal destiny. He wrote, “The Latin destinare is an archer’s term that means ‘to aim at.’ Desire has a trajectory. Wherever we aim it, that’s where we will ultimately arrive.”[88] The holy uniqueness of eros is that in no other dimension of life are God and man so mutually committed to finding one another. Through eros, God aims for the heart of man. And man, through eros, aims for the heart of God.
God invites us to the renewal of our minds, not the reining in of desire. The distinction is of paramount importance in our understanding of eroticism. Left to ourselves, we attempt to manage our arousal for the fear of it’s getting out of hand. When we do, we inadvertently install short ceilings on our sexual lives. God, however, wants us to exchange our hovels for cathedrals. Healing is not found in condemning desire but in liberating it to pursue sexual stories that soar to new heights of glory, honor, and worship.
Through eros, God bridges the beauty of bodily pleasure and the awe of heaven. When these worlds collide, we connect to worship. Worship is the experience of things being simultaneously exactly the way they are supposed to be and yet far too good to be true. Our hearts know we were made to live in cathedrals of worship, not hovels of sexual shame. Until we find worship, our hearts are restless.[89]
In your unwanted sexual behavior, you were pursuing a knockoff version of worship. The behavior baited you, but when you bit the fruit, your soul knew it had been duped. Therefore, the greatest risk you will take in sexual healing is to allow your heart to be released to be seduced again. If you use sex to escape life or pursue pleasure apart from relationship, you will wither. But if you allow sex to bridge you to worship, you will discover the deepest longings of your heart. God exchanges our unwanted ashes for beauty, sexual silence for discovery, and shame for erotic pleasure.
BENEFITS OF PURSUING NURTURE, SENSUALITY, AND EROTICISM
In pursuing nurture, sensuality, and eroticism, you teach your unwanted shame that it does not have the final word. This is the Good News of the gospel: You’ve been harmed and you’ve done harm, but the antidote is not quarantine; it is greater participation in the goodness of your body. Pursuing a new sexual story shifts the focus from your brokenness to a renewed imagination of how lovely that erotic passion can become.
Conclusion: A Life of Serenity
One of the most extraordinary dimensions of the botany world is a rhizome. A rhizome is a continually growing horizontal stem that puts out roots and shoots at random intervals. If you have ever picked up fresh ginger at a grocer or come across an aspen tree grove, you’ve seen an example of a rhizome. Above ground, an aspen grove appears to have individual trees, but below, their roots are all connected in a rhizome. I find two characteristics of rhizomes remarkable: First, they can flourish in almost any environment, and second, if they are separated into pieces, each piece can give rise to a new rhizome.
A rhizome is a good example of what the experience of serenity is meant to be. Serenity is the ability to remain whole in the various environments and shifting conditions of life. Serenity is what the psalmist was getting at when he said, “I have calmed and quieted my soul, . . . like a weaned child is my soul within me” (Psalm 131:2, ESV).
In my work with clients, I have noticed that around year two of treatment, they seem to comment more and more about this experience of serenity. Serenity occurs mostly in the small, subtle moments of life: the breeze on a beautiful day, the coolness of the sheets and the warmth of a blanket when you go to bed, the desire to get coffee with a friend and tell him or her some of the shame you’ve been carrying, and having your spouse or housemates out of town and feeling okay in your body. Life does not always have to be epic or wild or extraordinary; it is enough to feel centered, calm, and enjoyable.
I had the privilege of interviewing Craig Gross, founder of xxxchurch.com, who told me that one of the complaints his ministry receives from those who sign up for their signature product, X3watch (which monitors online activity and sends reports to your accountability partner in order to spur on open and honest conversations), is the limitations of their software monitoring. Craig told me that users want surveillance on all their app usage, such as Tinder, and even GPS tracking on their cars, to discourage them from going to strip clubs. What Craig astutely pointed out was “what people often want is restriction, but that’s not freedom.”[90] Surveillance constructs a prison, but serenity opens the gates for play and true freedom. Surveillance is a counterfeit.
As a rabbi, Jesus instructed his followers to be perfect as he was perfect, meaning “whole” or “mature.” In a sense, Jesus was saying, “Be perfect, like a ripe piece of fruit,” not “Be perfect, like flawless grammar.” In society, particularly in faith communities, you have likely felt the pressure to look and think in a perfect, grammatical way with your sexual life. This is an unhelpful invitation to bury your lust at the cost of listening to it and transforming your longings. God wants maturity not just for your holiness but also for your delight.
The good news is that God loves all people, especially those not accepted by society. The healing path is not about trying to conform to this demand for perfection through avoiding mistakes, darting your eyes, or killing sexual desire. Healing occurs through the integrity of becoming nurturing, sensual, and erotic with your body and soul. Your sexual story may not presently look at all as you think it should, but it is becoming whole. Measure your growth not by perfection but by outgrowing your need for unwanted sexual behavior. When you find yourself more seduced by beauty and holiness, you will know something within you is being transformed from the inside out.
[84] Becky Allender, “Tilling Forgiveness through Love,” Allender Center (blog), March 24, 2016, https://theallendercenter.org/2016/03/tilling-forgiveness/.
[85] Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz, “Why ‘Just Say No’ Doesn’t Work,” Scientific American, January 1, 2014, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-just-say-no-doesnt-work/.
[86] Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: Dell, 1969), 98.
[87] C. S. Lewis, in The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), said, “We are half-hearted creatures, f
ooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased” (26).
[88] Christopher West, Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing (New York: Image, 2013), xiii.
[89] Augustine of Hippo, Confessions: “Our hearts are restless until they can find rest in you.”
[90] Craig Gross, in discussion with the author, February 2016, Pasadena, CA.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EXERCISE ATTUNEMENT AND CONTAINMENT IN YOUR RELATIONSHIPS
THE PARADOX OF RELATIONSHIPS is that they are the context of our greatest harm but also of our deepest healing. Author Harville Hendrix said it this way: “We are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, and we can be healed in relationship.”[91] When I explore the broken relational templates of my clients’ lives, they often give me befuddled looks and say, “That isn’t normal? What are relationships supposed to look like?”
The alternative to unhealthy relational patterns is learning to invest in transformative relationships characterized by “attunement and containment,” “conflict and repair,” and “vulnerability and strength.” These characteristics are paradoxes that every healthy relationship has to hold in tension. In the same way that you would need to adjust the treble and bass on your stereo to find the best sound quality, you need to learn how to correctly moderate these relational tensions in your life. Relationships are messy containers of tension that mature the more you allow the dialectical and paradoxical elements to exist.
