Unwanted

by Jay Stringer

  One evening, we were up late drinking Islay Scotch and sharing portions of our lives that have seldom been told. As Brent talked about the ache and implications of singleness, I could tell that shame was a much less powerful force in his life than in mine. As he spoke, my mind was busy with thoughts: Did he really just say that? How could he be so honest? I have been in that too, but I never would have told anyone!

  As we conversed, two things became apparent. First, I deeply longed for the freedom to be vulnerable. Second, I was far more guarded than I’d ever realized. Because of Brent’s self-honesty and kindness, the barriers in my heart were simultaneously highlighted and crumbling. His vulnerability had opened the door to my own.

  The following morning, I was rudely woken up by a stereo system booming throughout my house, joined by a rhythmic pounding on the floors beneath me. I was groggy and curiously opened my bedroom door to find Brent getting dressed in front of the hallway mirror. His right foot pounded the floor, and his right arm pumped with passion to Arcade Fire’s latest album. For a moment, it felt as though I were at the zoo trying to understand the mannerisms of a species so beyond my comprehension. He turned to see me, and we both erupted in laughter. I returned to my room, reflecting on this odd, remarkable man. It struck me that someone who knows vulnerability is someone not afraid to dance. Vulnerability reduces shame and leads to freedom. The contrast to my own life at the time was not lost on me. Rather than filling me with contempt for how far I had to go in learning vulnerability, Brent’s presence gave me hopeful imagination for what my life could become.

  Practicing Vulnerability

  Vulnerability requires risk, but it never bullies you to get there. The key to vulnerability is a movement toward personal integrity. You can wait for crisis to require vulnerability, or you can choose the vulnerability of integrity today. Your life experiences led you to believe you needed to be secretive in your quest for survival. But there is also something in you that recognizes that you could hide behind these defenses for the foreseeable future. Vulnerability honors your defenses, but it also challenges you to lay them down to receive the gift of being known by others.

  Jeffrey, whom you met in the introduction (riding his bicycle around town as a child), would often discuss the sadness of being in a marriage in which his wife did not want a lot of time with him. Her job at a concert venue connected her with many people in their city’s music community, and she sought them out routinely after the painful disclosure of Jeffrey’s involvement with prostitution. Jeffrey said at the close of one session, “It’s a constant bind. I know I’m supposed to be strong and give her space, but the distance is even more painful than it was before. It’s as if she is indulging in life outside me, and now I’m the one who gets to feel betrayed. I hate feeling this. It makes me want to act out again.”

  Clayton, who was abused by his uncle in the tent at his family reunion (see chapter 7), experienced increased difficulty knowing how to relate to his friends as therapy progressed. He wanted to share his story with friends but was scared about how it might be received. “Men talk about sex all the time but rarely about how much difficulty it brings into our lives.” He wanted vulnerability but did not believe that his friends would be able to connect to his story of abuse.

  One year into therapy, Clayton was experiencing depression and found himself intoxicated at a friend’s holiday party. His friend observed his unusual binge drinking and invited him to the front porch to check in. Clayton made a rash decision to vent everything. “I’m miserable, man. I am a sex addict. I was abused by my uncle. I’m a perpetrator and a victim. No woman will ever want me.” He left the party five minutes later, feeling exposed and ashamed.

  As you can see, Jeffrey and Clayton are struggling to allow vulnerability to form the basis of their relationships. Jeffrey did not believe that his parents cared for him and unconsciously married a woman who would give him what he was accustomed to. Rather than sharing his desire for his wife, he remained guarded and surmised he would be more alone than ever before. Clayton too believed he needed to protect himself from others’ learning his story, setting him up instead to carelessly vent the most vulnerable details of his life not in vulnerability but in desperation. When he did purge his story, he was drunk, sabotaging his ability to receive the care he deserved.

  As Jeffrey and I explored the relational templates of his life, he recognized that to write a different story, he would have to let his needs and feelings be known to others. This started small. It began in therapy and then spread to his recovery group. Previously he would have buried his feelings of abandonment, setting him up to buy sex again. Now he is allowing his feelings to connect him to others. Vulnerability does not guarantee a change to our external situations, but it provides pathways for others to offer us empathy.

  The more Jeffrey practiced vulnerability with others, the more strength he gained to practice it with those who mattered most to him. He asked his wife one weekend if they could talk, and before he even got a word out, he was sweating profusely. He regrouped and told her how much he desired her and how little he felt he deserved to have her, because of his failures. He went on to share two stories of abandonment that left him to conclude that the significant people in his life would never stay around for very long. He acknowledged how this fear kept him from taking genuine interest in his wife and how lonely she must have felt in the marriage too.

  Jeffrey’s wife cried, never having realized how much he desired her. She was shocked by his confessed fear of departure, as it always seemed he was disinterested in who she was. She told him that one of the reasons she got a weekend job was that weekends were so painfully barren in their relationship. As their relationship leaned more into vulnerability, they began to address the patterns in their marriage that kept disconnection in place. His wife eventually stopped working on the weekends, and Jeffrey joined her in the things that brought her life. She eventually got into therapy as well after realizing how much easier it had been for her to live on her own than in a relationship with needs, vulnerabilities, and desires.

  Clayton’s depressive fog lifted when he determined he was going to reverse the crippling script of silence that marked his life. His passion extended outside his personal healing, and he wondered if his friends might also need to heal. He presumed they were living unreflectively in a male culture that ignores the reality of male sexual abuse and disguises male violence against women as innocent fantasies that are not hurting anyone.

  I referred him to my friend Peter, who runs “‘Stopping Sexual Exploitation: a Program for Men,’ a ten-week transformative justice program for court and self-referred sex buyers based on principles of social justice and personal transformation.”[97] Clayton invited a number of friends to join him at a meeting, and two of them accepted. A few months later, the three of them were invited to address ways male students can be part of combatting sexual assaults on behalf of a local university. Clayton later said, “My wounds are now healing and protecting others. That’s pretty cool.”

  I have given you examples of people persevering through the course of their unwanted sexual behavior. They have let their walls come down and received a compassionate response. Sometimes this is not how it goes. There are many who will get divorced, many who will need to step down from leadership positions, and many who will experience painful severing in relationships they would do anything to keep intact. You must remember that your behavior has brought harm, and therefore it is appropriate to anticipate anger and distance as a response. Your healing is not predicated on receiving the ideal response but on becoming a person of strength and vulnerability with your honesty.

  How to Practice Strength and Vulnerability

  Speak up for your dignity and the welfare of others. Where do you need to use your voice to stand up for your needs? There may be allergy-inducing animals in your home, unhealthy work schedules, demeaning coworkers, nasty landlords, obnoxious neighbors, or complicated friends. There is no glory in endur
ing foolish suffering. And where do you need to use your voice to stand up for the welfare of your partner, your colleagues, or immigrants in your neighborhood or city? How will you use your strength and gifts for good?

  Tell your story and listen to others tell theirs. Novelist and political activist Anne Lamott said that the most powerful sermon in the world is two words: “Me, too.” On July 7, 2015, she posted this entry to Facebook to provide a background to this quote and her struggle with alcoholism:

  On July 7, 1986, 29 years ago, I woke up sick, shamed, hungover, and in deep animal confusion. . . .

  I was 32, with three published books, and the huge local love of my family and life-long friends. I was loved out of all sense of proportion. I gave talks and readings that hundreds of people came to. I had won a Guggenheim Fellowship, although, like many fabulous writers, I was drunk as a skunk every day. I was penniless and bulimic, but adorable, and cherished.

  But there was one tiny problem. I was dying. Oh, also, my soul was rotted out from mental illness and physical abuse. My insides felt like Swiss cheese, until I had that first cool, refreshing drink. . . .

  So I showed up [to the meeting]. Before I turned on Woody Allen, he said that 80% of life is just showing up. And I did. There were all these other women who had what I had, who’d thought what I’d thought, who’d done what I’d done, who had betrayed their families and deepest values, who sat with me that day, and said “Guess what? Me, too! I have that too. Let me get you a glass of water.” Those are the words of salvation: Guess what? Me, too.[98]

  Your struggle with unwanted sexual behavior is the bridge that connects you to the compassion of others, and your courageous choice to know your story will blaze a trail of liberation to those caught in bondage.

  BENEFITS OF STRENGTH AND VULNERABILITY

  The union of strength and vulnerability in relationships will make you one of the most remarkable people on the planet. Your strength does not allow you to be used, nor does it bring harm to others. Vulnerability invites you to the possibility of care and deals a brutal blow to the power of shame. Fight or flight in relationships is reduced, and you experience rest with those you love.

  [97] “Peter Qualliotine: Co-founder, Organization for Prostitution Survivors,” World Without Exploitation, accessed March 8, 2018, https://www.worldwithoutexploitation.org/co-chairs/peter-qualliotine.

  [98] Anne Lamott, Facebook, July 7, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/AnneLamott/posts/699854196810893.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LEARNING TO INVEST IN COMMUNITY

  IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS, we discovered how relationships are intended to be contexts for mutual formation and care. In these final chapters, we will explore how these relationships are applied in the context of community. Choosing to invest in a community is an important yet frightening choice. You might even wonder if asking you to invest in a community may be the most foolish request I have offered so far. You know better than anyone that the places of belonging (family, friendships, and faith communities) have been somewhere on the spectrum between egregiously unhealthy and nonexistent. A community setting is the very place where you experienced the painful realities of shame, abuse, hypocrisy, and abandonment. So what is the point of investing in community?

  Community transforms us through growing our capacity to receive and offer love. Your relational life is the primary root of all past trauma, and for this story to change, you need your paradigm of relationships to be reimagined. For community to reach its full potential in your life, you must

  Experience structure and accountability.

  Learn to have your story held by others.

  Offer empathy and curiosity for the stories of others.

  Discover purpose, living for a bigger story.

  My research found that community was a beneficial yet tremendously underpursued aspect of life for people facing their own sexual brokenness:

  This data shows that it is extremely likely that you believe you do not have someone to talk to. This may be due to the shame you bear for your behavior or for the ways you have isolated yourself from meaningful relationships. Overcoming this isolation will require intentional risk to weave yourself into a community of people. The best communities to look for are those that deeply understand the underlying issues associated with unwanted sexual behavior and have a large understanding that recovery is ultimately not about combatting the singular issues of lust but rather cultivating a deeper understanding of the desires, talents, and ambitions God wove into your heart.

  As the graphic above showed, only 20 percent of people struggling with unwanted sexual behavior diligently pursued someone to talk to. Those who did saw considerable reduction in the amount of pornography they viewed:

  As you can see, there was a 22 percent reduction in heavy porn viewing when respondents had someone to talk to.[99] The good news is that having the classic accountability partner helps some people significantly. But for many, even though they were diligent in pursuing someone to talk to, they continued to struggle with significant pornography viewing. This reveals that the current framework of accountability may reduce some shame and isolation but is inadequate in providing pathways to lasting freedom.

  One of the reasons accountability fails to produce our desired results is that it becomes exclusively focused on lust and pornography. This is true whether you are about to take your first step into community or whether you have been doing it for years. The sentiment I routinely hear from millennial males goes something like this: “I am tired of talking about porn! I’ve got subject fatigue. We’ve all been talking about porn since middle school. Everyone knows we all use it, and no one really knows how to change it.” For community to be effective, we certainly have to address our sexual struggles. But we must do so through the lens that our sexual brokenness is simultaneously using to show us the way to healing. Community is where we gather to understand and participate in one another’s stories and together shape the destiny of our collective future.

  Before we dive in, please take a moment to ponder your motivation to pursue community. Another reason that pursuits of accountability or intentional community fail is because many people feel pressure to “give back” or “pay it forward” too early. This is a natural experience, as some of the initial benefits we receive from an open and vulnerable life feel so liberating. We leave a meeting or a coffee with a friend and feel so much lighter after sharing a secret that has plagued us for decades.

  The complexity is that the initial relief, gained through vulnerability, soon shifts to a familiar burden to care for others or present a “changed” version of ourselves far earlier than we should. This ushers us back to one of the core experiences of unwanted sexual behavior from part 2: deprivation. We begin to deprive ourselves of what is beneficial in order to give back to churches or communities what we think they want to see. Please know there is no obligation to give any of your time, story, or resources away because of what you learn. It may be that what you need more than anything is a place to belong, a place to discover purpose, not a place to lead.

  [99] How to read this graph: 67 percent of people who “to no extent” pursued someone to talk to significantly used pornography, compared to 63 percent of people who “to little extent” pursued someone to talk to, 55 percent of people who “to some extent” pursued someone, 47 percent of people who “to great extent” pursued someone, and 45 percent of people who “to very great extent” pursued someone.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  COMMUNITY AS A PLACE TO EXPERIENCE STRUCTURE AND MUTUAL SUPPORT

  WHEN WE ARE ENTRENCHED IN the ruts of our unwanted behavior, our motivation to change is rooted in a desire to be free from our behavior. Many people live their lives attempting to be free from difficulties such as sin, addiction, anxiety, and depression. This approach sets us up to toil in endless battles, measure our success based upon our win-and-loss record, and ultimately live like prey to the predatory difficulties of life. This method is exhausti
ng and increasingly foolish, as it is rooted in an effort to “manage” sin.

  The alternative to a freedom-from approach is to ask yourself, What might freedom be for? Consider a few questions for yourself. Why do you want to be free? Who are you doing all of this for? What hope and accomplishments might you be free to pursue if they weren’t undermined by your unwanted sexual behavior? Pondering what freedom is for invites you to shift your focus from fixing yourself to an ability to dream redemption for a soul steeped in shame. If your hope is not moving your story into greater passion and comfort, your desire for freedom is too small.

  A freedom-for approach challenges you to dream redemption for the most glorious and ruined layers of your desire. Evil baited your heart with counterfeits to satisfy these holy longings. Healing demands that you reclaim them as your own. Remember back to previous sections: Sabotage occurs when you allow squatters to infiltrate your house of desire, and healing occurs when you fortify your protection of this beauty so that you are free to pursue joy.

  The terrain of desire is where evil and God are most at work in your life. The kingdom of darkness works primarily to deaden and corrupt your desire. It wants your heart checked out in dissociative activities and the little desire left in your heart corrupted through perversion. When you resist these ploys, you become a very dangerous person to the kingdom of darkness because your existence shines a bright light in a boring and perverse world. Evil would rather you despise yourself in endless struggles. It wants you to exploit people in your emptiness. It wants your effectiveness in the world compromised. Therefore, healing is never fulfilled through the cessation of sin; even evil would agree to that armistice.