by Jay Stringer
A study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research showed that mothers who had early-life maltreatment became mothers with a lower sensitivity to the emotions and needs of their children.[101] To use language from a previous section, these are mothers who did not have attunement as children and, as such, became mothers who did not offer good enough attunement to their children. As you can imagine, children in these homes are at significant risk for repeating this generational cycle with their own children. If you know that your attachments with your parents were lacking or broken, you must assess the cost, lest you repeat these generational cycles. When you endure pain, abuse, and neglect but do not have supportive community around you, the likelihood of leaning on and eventually becoming addicted to a substance or unhealthy behavior will skyrocket. Our God-given need is to be oriented around attuned caregivers, but if those are absent, we turn toward surrogates, such as unhealthy people, premature sexual experiences, or devices.
The second environmental factor that is compromising our ability to offer empathy and curiosity to others is a dependence on technology such as video games, television, computers, and mobile phones. In a study published in the European Journal of Radiology, video-game addicts showed significant atrophy in parts of the brain’s gray matter (insula and frontal lobes).[102] In other words, addiction to a device leads to atrophy in the parts of our brains that we most need in order to connect with others. The tragedy for many children is that once they get closer to puberty, the neural networks established for video-game or online-gaming addiction (OGA) leave them vulnerable to addiction to pornographic material. The neurological grooves created for video games then get filled by the next addictive process. The very parts of our brains that are supposed to connect us to others end up shriveling and are used to keep us from others.
Learning to Grow Empathy
The good news is that you can grow the gray matter in your brain by becoming aware of your own body and emotions. Your brain has a sympathetic nervous system and a parasympathetic nervous system. The general function of your sympathetic nervous system is to mobilize your body’s fight, flight, or freeze responses. When you are under threat, your sympathetic nervous system is devoted to keeping you alive. The general function of the parasympathetic nervous system is to control homeostasis and the body’s rest-and-digest response. Your parasympathetic nervous system is what tells your body that it is okay to relax, take a deep breath, and connect with others.
The sympathetic nervous system can save your life when it is working well, but when your body is dysregulated by stress or trauma, it can obstruct your ability to connect with others. When the sympathetic nervous system takes over, it’s not concerned with your reputation or retirement; its focus is on survival, and it will seek to eliminate anything that might present danger. When the sympathetic nervous system is taking over your life, you might find yourself invasively moving into someone’s life (fight), retreating from difficulty (flight), or experiencing paralysis when you encounter difficulty (freeze). The first step to growing empathy for others is recognizing your primary barrier to connection with others: fight, flight, or freeze.
We grow our capacity to offer empathy to others through learning to engage our parasympathetic nervous systems. Prayer, meditation, and yoga will help us to do this. These activities help us cue into our emotional states, slow our heart rates down, take deeper breaths, and eventually send signals to our bodies to rest. When our bodies are safe, we are much more likely to be attuned to the emotional needs of others. In doing this, we grow the gray matter in our insula, the very material that atrophied during our addictions.
Empathic Conversations
To avoid having your fight-or-flight impulses stop you from showing empathy, you can actually practice connections of empathy before you attempt them. By writing out conversations that shape your empathy, you can begin to recognize what empathy sounds like coming out of your mouth and feels like in your body. More so, you can identify areas where fight-or-flight instincts might lure you from empathy. The following table offers some examples that distinguish empathic responses from reflexive responses.
Expression of pain or difficulty from another
Empathic response
Flight response
Fight response
I had the most frustrating conversation with my mom today.
Those can be the worst. I am so sorry to hear that. What did she say?
I am sure she didn’t mean to be that frustrating. So how’s your job going?
You think your mom is bad? You should meet my mother. She makes yours look like a saint.
No matter what good thing I tell her, she has to find fault in everything.
It’s so sad she can’t offer any delight in you. What were you trying to tell her about?
What mother isn’t like that? I wouldn’t let it bother you.
Don’t let her pull that crap. Let her know how badly she’s messed you up!
I really wanted her to be proud of this new job, but she just dismissed me.
I can only imagine how good her affirmation would have felt. It’s so hard to hold both celebration and the silence of those closest to us.
Well, she probably just didn’t know what else to say.
Why do you let her walk all over you? You need to stand up for yourself or she’s never going to change.
German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Our relationship with God is a new life in ‘being there for others.’”[103] Offering empathy is one of the primary ways we practice this new life of being there for others. Through empathy, we learn to attune to others rather than feel as if we need to solve their heartaches or distance ourselves from their difficulties. When we are connected to others, isolation is reduced. Without isolation, shame cannot flourish, thus cutting off the most significant tributaries into the swift rapids of sexually compulsive behavior. As you train your body to rest, you find that your ache for belonging has more substance than your drives for entitlement and counterfeit pleasure.
PRACTICING EMPATHY
Write down your strongest wing of empathy and think about a time when your kindness or honesty changed those around you. Write down your weakest wing of empathy and think about a time when your kindness or honesty was ignored or treated with contempt.
Start or join a group or book club addressing early childhood trauma and its interplay with addiction. Two excellent resources are Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. Books like these will help shape your perspective on addiction and trauma.
Commit to practicing prayer, meditation, or yoga for one month. I recommend trying to start your day out with one of these activities if possible. There are several good apps out there for meditation/mindfulness. One I recommend to many clients is Headspace: Guided Meditation and Mindfulness. It is free for the first ten uses.
Practice consistent hospitality. Invite friends into your home and learn to share life through the sharing of a meal.
[100] Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (New York: Penguin, 2015), 81.
[101] Emilia L. Mielke et al., “Maternal Sensitivity and the Empathic Brain: Influences of Early Life Maltreatment,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 77 (June 2016): 59–66, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395616300280.
[102] Chuan-Bo Weng et al., “Gray Matter and White Matter Abnormalities in Online Game Addiction,” European Journal of Radiology 82, no. 8 (August 2013): 1308–12.
[103] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 2010), 25.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
COMMUNITY AS A PLACE TO DISCOVER PURPOSE
Living for a Bigger Story
COMMUNITY IS ABOUT asking one another, “What do you really want? What is your purpose in this one, beautiful life you have been given?”[104] Throughout this book, you have been invited to see that
the map of the world you were given was insufficient for finding the answers to these holy questions. As your life went on, unwanted sexual behavior and the systems you were part of set up further roadblocks to discovering your purpose. At this precipice in life, you need a new map for where to find purpose and a community of people hungry for the same journey.
The concept of an accountability partner can go only so far before you begin to experience “subject fatigue” around the topics of porn and masturbation. Accountability often fails because it is specifically focused on one dimension of your life. As you may recall, lack of purpose can increase a man’s involvement with pornography by a factor of seven. If you have a good friend you meet with regularly, it would be far more profitable to scheme together about the dreams and desires you have for your lives. When you meet, do so to see how you can partner with one another in living for a bigger story.
The joy set before you is to heal the wounds of your sexual brokenness, recognize they do not have the final word in your life, and open a new map to travel to the places you’ve always wanted to go. Paradoxically, you will find that your wounds and struggles are the very things that have most prepared you for the journey ahead. The ultimate defeat of evil is not the ability to bury your past; it is to allow wisdom to form within your wounds in order to guide you to a land you have yet to find. In God’s economy, nothing is lost. Everything, even your sexual brokenness, belongs.
A Lesson from Poachers
In the nineties, the African country of Namibia was in a decades-long struggle to save their wildlife from aggressive poachers. A meeting was convened where government officials posed the question “Whom do we need to get to protect these animals?” The government needed a workforce with an intimate knowledge of the animals, a vast knowledge of the bush, and an astute understanding of the black market contributing to the devastating poaching. At the meeting, one official presented a counterintuitive and risky idea: “The poachers! They should lead our conservation efforts.” Years later this idea became a reality, and today the notorious poachers of Namibia are at the forefront of the country’s conservation efforts.[105]
Long before any Namibian took up poaching, they were exiled from their own wildlife reserves and forced into small plots of land to farm. This occurred in the sixties, when the apartheid government of South Africa controlled Namibia. In 1966, the United Nations told the apartheid to leave,[106] but before they finally departed, they gave ownership of the Namibian wildlife to predominantly white landowners. Exiled from their native lands, the Namibians worked small farms that did not provide for their basic needs. In the face of sweeping injustice, they took to their former game lands for food and profit.
As is the case with so many problematic behaviors, their poaching was rooted in their country’s wounds and injustice. What ultimately brought transformation was the opportunity to take ownership of the land and fauna that had been stolen. Their healing was not in punishment but in the opportunity to find a new, generative purpose.
Remembering Where You Come From
Justin was an only child born to two Boeing engineers. He did well in school and excelled in soccer. Justin came to see me because his wife felt conflicted about his viewing pornography. He reported having used pornography since high school. He did not feel particularly bad about his behavior and thought his wife was being overdramatic. “It’s just something I do when I’m bored. We all have our ways to unwind, and I found one that works for me.”
We got to talking about his childhood, and I asked Justin to tell me about a typical evening in his family. “I’d get back from soccer practice, drop my soccer bag in the laundry room, say hi to my mom, take a shower, and then walk back upstairs, when I would hear the garage door open, signaling my dad was home. My dad and I would nod hello, and the three of us would sit down for dinner. Usually my mom would talk about her day or the latest stuff going on with her sisters. We would put our dishes in the sink, and my dad would go watch the news. My parents would tidy up for a bit and then say good night to me. From about eight o’clock on, I’d just be downstairs working on homework or in the basement watching TV.”
I inquired, “So it’s possible that you could go weeks without ever being asked how life was going?”
“Yeah,” Justin replied.
I pushed further. “And fair to say you could go months without ever being touched or hugged by either of your parents?”
“That sounds about right,” Justin replied.
When puberty hit, he watched The Howard Stern Show after his parents went to bed. He was drawn toward the sexual content of the show but even more to the commercials. Justin noted, “This was at the height of the Girls Gone Wild popularity. After 10 p.m., there were so many channels to see those ads on. That was always the most intriguing part of my day.”
It struck me that Justin’s adult life was a mirror reenactment of his childhood. As an adult, he would unwind into an alternative reality. I offered this interpretation to him, and he said, “Sure. But that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t see anything wrong with it, and I feel irritated that my wife wants me to get therapy. Of course I wish I had other things to do besides porn. There are days I want something different, but I usually just feel stuck.” What Justin would go on to disclose was that he didn’t see his core issue as pornography but rather a profound sense of emptiness and boredom in life. “I don’t know what I want. I see a couple of my friends who are driven with their careers or seem to like their families. But I don’t feel any of that. I don’t know who I want to become.”
The world is full of people like Justin. He exists in every city across America, using pornography because of having little else to live for. Many men and women I work with pursue pornography because their lives are empty, so they drift off into the strong currents of perversion. When your life is characterized by a marked absence of delight, adventure, and intimacy with those you love, activities that kill time and hope by offering escape become increasingly central to your identity. Activities such as watching pornography, football, NASCAR, video games, TV, or virtual reality are all classic examples. In Justin’s story, you can smell a fundamental deadness in his home that brought about the necessity for an alternative reality. Pornography was available, far more so than a family or community encouraging him to discover an authentic identity.
Three Roadblocks to Purpose
If community is the context of transformation, it must overcome the roadblocks that keep us from discovering purpose. The first roadblock for those who struggle with sexual behavior is a pervasive experience of failure. More than 60 percent of people in my research look back over their lives and see only many failures. When my clients discuss their acute sense of failure, I invite them to survey the terrain we have covered in our work together: broken families, shame, abuse, meaninglessness, and anger. I point out that these experiences construct a very toxic image of who they are. Consequently, they flee to unwanted sexual behavior for relief but far more to reinforce the core false belief that they will never be well. Their failure certainly includes their problematic sexual behavior, but its power is derived from their loyalty to past scripts.
The second roadblock to purpose is a community’s preoccupation with sexual failure.[107] Communities often do a major disservice when they only engage the sexual failures of their members. Sexual addiction is a reality in our world, but I also fully believe that pornography can function as a red herring in many people’s lives. A red herring is something intended to be misleading or distracting from the real issue at hand. Pornography is a prominent red herring of our time. Men live in an endless fight against the ills of pornography, and these battles are reinforced, if not encouraged, by our culture and religious communities. Men are invited to fight for purity but rarely asked who they want to become. Like Justin, when you are invited to only fight against something rather than pursue purpose for something, you are merely caught in the flow of an addiction:
meaninglessness escap
e pain and boredom pursue unwanted sexual behavior as poison, anger, and counterfeit identity feeling unwanted meaninglessness
The cycle repeats until you are invited into a different story.
The third roadblock to purpose is a deafness to your existential cries. In my research, 56 percent of respondents struggled to find purpose, and more than 57 percent felt unmotivated in life. One way of thinking about these statistics is to see watching pornography as a symptom of an unlived life. If we are trying to get rid of the symptom but do not know what we want instead, our efforts will be in vain.
In Western culture, our default engagement with symptoms is to medicate rather than listen to what they are communicating. We feel pain, depression, or anxiety and immediately pursue a pill or drink. This impulse to treat rather than listen to our symptoms is at the root of our cultural pathology.
A French psychoanalyst named Jacques Lacan believed there was no one in the world without a symptom.[108] Lacan did not view a symptom as an outside intruder preventing us from having a normal life. Instead, a symptom was more like a prophet, attempting to get our attention regarding a way of life that was not working and inviting us to find a new way forward. What if your agonizing involvement with pornography is not an alien intruder that must be assassinated but rather a symptom God wants you to bring to your community in order to discover your life purpose?
Jeremiah, a prophet in the Old Testament, compared the people of God to camels in heat, “sniffing . . . for the slightest scent of sex” (Jeremiah 2:23-24, MSG). You can almost imagine him, if he were alive today, heading out to the wilderness of unwanted sexual behavior and calling us Internet search junkies, clicking on any link or image or app with the slightest scent of sex. Prophets expose us to what is most true, but they also awaken us to dreams more beautiful than we would have ever conceived. Unwanted sexual behavior exposes us to our preoccupation with sex, but it also challenges us to hear our cries for purpose beyond the hobbit-sized homes we have constructed.
