Finally, I am committed to working on more deeply accepting that this problem happened—to allow this to be a process that will take time. I accept that this problem occurred as much as I can today, and I will try to accept it a little bit more tomorrow. I hope someday that I will have come to accept this problem completely, but I will be content to take small steps to get there.
By working to accept that life is difficult, you have become more realistic. In becoming more realistic, you have become more emotionally and spiritually healthy. As a former coach of mine used to say, “Ya done good!”
14
YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW
Who is man’s chief enemy?
Each man is his own.
—Anacharsis
More than a few of us hope that this truth, “you reap what you sow,” isn’t true. But true it is.
We eat a large bowl of our favorite ice cream each night for a week while watching television and then hope the scales won’t reflect it. We spend money as if there is no tomorrow and hope the charge card people will forget to bill us at the end of the month. We don’t exercise, yet we expect our bodies to remain healthy and firm throughout our lives. We ignore our kids and hope they will grow up to be healthy adults. We race down the highway at breakneck speed and hope there will be no police officers around.
In dozens of different ways we hope that we can avoid the consequences that accompany our actions.
The sad truth is that sometimes we seem to get away with certain actions and it doesn’t appear that we are reaping in accordance to what we have sown. People often speed without getting caught by the police. People sometimes cheat on their taxes and don’t get audited by the IRS. Some people even commit murder and do not end up in prison.
It appears that people can violate the reap/sow principle at times, that they can beat their fate, that they can fool themselves and others if they are just crafty enough. Yes, it seems that way. But I believe we always reap what we sow, even if it doesn’t appear that way.
I believe everything we do contributes, for better or for worse, to who we are. Every action adds another stitch to the fabric of our character. We never actually get away with anything because whatever we do leaves its impression on our memories, our consciences, and our souls.
Take the highway speeder. He may speed down the interstate at ninety miles per hour and not get a ticket. Yet he has sown something into who he is. His “self”—his personality, his value system, his innate sense of right and wrong—has been affected in a negative and self-degrading way. He has added another stitch into the part of his being that disrespects rules, that rebels against authority, that treats other people’s safety with indifference, and that shows a callous hostility toward society. He may reach his destination that day in record time, much to his delight, but he will have done so at the expense of his soul. Most regrettably of all, he will probably have done all this without even realizing it.
The sowing we do each day in small ways shows up sooner or later in several significant ways. Years may go by before the more public signs show up, but they ultimately appear. We may be shocked when we see the final fruits of what we have sown, but that just reflects how naive we have been. Most of us assume that the small, seemingly unimportant things we do each day aren’t shaping us. But shape us they do.
When you stop to think about real-life incidents such as the demise of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Pete Rose’s baseball career, Donald Trump’s financial empire, Leona Helmsley’s hotel wealth, Rock Hudson’s movie legacy, Jessica Savitch’s news career, Elvis Presley’s entertainment impact, and Jim Bakker’s religious ministry, I think you can start to understand the point I am making. Those people seemed to be doing fine—even fantastic—on the surface. But in retrospect, we can see clearly the seeds of their downfall were sown all along the way to reach fruition in the banner headlines that shocked us all. Each downfall began with a small, seemingly innocuous action here, an apparently unimportant behavior there. Small seeds of moral carelessness sown along life’s way turned into weeds of destruction later on.
I see the “you reap what you sow” truth all the time in the lives of my patients. Let me take you into my counseling office to illustrate the point.
As the Twig Is Bent
Hank came to see me because of a problem with pornography. He frequently rented videos with strong sexual content and bought “adult” magazines. He would often do this when his wife was going to be gone from the house all day or for a weekend. Hank’s compulsion to rent pornographic videos and to buy lewd magazines was strong, and he felt that he couldn’t stop himself from turning to pornography whenever an opportunity arose.
Because of strong religious values, Hank felt a tremendous amount of guilt and shame about his problem with pornography. He kept it hidden from his wife and friends. He experienced a great deal of anxiety about being seen renting or buying pornography. Even when that went “smoothly,” Hank felt “like a scumbag” about doing it. He had lost self-respect because of the problem. He came to counseling, hoping to find a way out of the struggle. During one of our early sessions, Hank and I traced the origins of his problem.
“Hank, tell me if you can how far back your struggle with pornography goes.”
“Well, I remember when I was really young that some of the older kids in our neighborhood had some adult magazines they were showing to everyone,” Hank recalled. “I didn’t really know what was going on, so I just looked at the pictures too.”
“About how old were you at the time?” I asked.
“Somewhere about seven or eight, not any older I’m sure.”
“What else do you remember?” I prodded.
Hank’s eyes narrowed and he rubbed his chin. “Uh, we had a neighborhood drugstore that had a magazine rack. A lot of the magazines had provocative pictures on the covers of scantily clad women. I’d go in there and pretend I was checking out the sports magazines, but really I was looking at the adult magazines. Sometimes when the clerk was busy with a customer, I’d grab one of the magazines and quickly leaf through the pages and look at all the pictures.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, yeah,” said Hank, “there was temptation at home. My father kept a stack of men’s magazines in his closet. Whenever my folks would be out of the house for any reason, I’d sneak into their room and look at those magazines. I’d always make sure I put them back exactly the way they were when I found them. I was scared to death that my dad might suspect I’d been looking at them. He never mentioned it, however, so I just figured I had gotten away with something.”
“Did this go on a long time?” I asked.
“Oh, sure, for years,” Hank admitted. “I’d think about those magazines pretty often. When I got older and my folks would go out for a night together, it meant I would be home alone for hours with those magazines. I was pretty obsessed with them even then.”
“What age were you?”
“I discovered the magazines when I was about eleven or twelve,” said Hank, “and I kept sneaking into the closet to look at them into my teenage years. When I hit puberty, it felt like I had lost my mind over sex. I couldn’t seem to think about anything except sex. I was involved in sports and that helped a little bit, but once practice or a game was over, my mind would often revert to thoughts about sex.”
“Did you ever consider talking to your father about this problem you were having?”
Hank flinched. “My dad? Are you kidding? My dad never once had a man-to-man talk with me about sex or girls or dating or anything like that. No, neither one of us ever brought up the subject.”
“It appears that you and your father had a similar problem with pornography but never disclosed it openly,” I replied. “You became a chip off the old block in a sense.”
“Since getting older, I have come to see that about me and my dad, but not when I was still a kid,” Hank answered. “In those days, the guys at school would talk about girls. You know, we’d say t
hings in the locker room to make other guys think we knew a lot about sex. After we got our drivers’ licenses, we’d go to R-rated movies. It seemed like we talked about sex all the time. Most of us had steady girlfriends by then, and we were all into heavy petting. We’d brag a lot, but the fact was, we didn’t know as much as we pretended we did.”
“What about after high school? Did it continue?”
“Definitely,” said Hank. “I went to college, and I was in a dorm with guys who would buy porno magazines and pass them around. I bought some too.
This was back in the days before videos.”
“You were of legal age by then, right?”
“Yeah. I could buy anything I wanted. My buddies and I would sometimes go to X-rated films at a sleazy theater in a town thirty miles from the college campus. Back then they still had drive-ins, too, and some of them would run double-feature R-rated movies on the weekends. I knew I was hooked on this stuff when I couldn’t find anyone to go with me one weekend and I drove out to the drive-in by myself.”
“That must have been pretty lonely,” I suggested.
“Yes, it was,” said Hank. “But the sad part about it was, I liked to be by myself whenever I looked at pornography. I would fantasize that I was the guy that all those girls wanted. It was exciting, an escape of sorts. It actually helped me feel less lonely at times. At least for a couple of hours.”
“Did these fantasies ever spill over into real life?”
“Little by little, they did,” Hank admitted. “I’d find myself looking at the girls who were in class with me or who were walking across campus, and I’d carry this secret lust for them. Sometimes when I was on a date with a nice girl, I’d let a suggestive remark come out. It usually didn’t go over very well. I even got my face slapped one time. You know, as I look back on that now, I can see how some women get the notion that the only thing men ever think about is sex. With a guy like me, that isn’t too far from the truth.”
“Once college was over, what was the struggle like?”
“I got a job that brought me here to Texas,” Hank explained, “but I didn’t know a single person other than the people at work. My nights were lonely, and my weekends were pure torture. So I fell back on the one cure for loneliness and boredom that had always seemed to help before. I bought adult magazines. Also, there were X-rated home videos available by then. I’d sometimes spend my whole day at work just marking time until I could go to the video store and rent some more porno movies. The anticipation was always really strong, but later that night, after I watched the videos, the sense of loneliness would come over me again. I felt empty.”
“What about after you met some new people here?” I asked. “Did getting closer to people help you with your struggle with pornography?”
“Somewhat. Especially after I met some girls and started going out on dates. That gave me something other than videos and magazines to think about. But it wasn’t a cure-all. There still were times when no dates were available, so I’d turn again to the pornography. It became a compulsion I couldn’t seem to control, much less overcome.”
“Eventually, you got married, though. How much did being married help?”
Hank lowered his head slightly. “I thought it would help a lot, but maybe I expected too much. I mean, my wife and I have an okay sex life and all, but my mind seems filled with pictures of other women I’ve looked at in magazines or on videos. That’s distracting to me, and it’s unfair to her. I find myself wanting variety, but one woman can’t possibly be as versatile as a store filled with sexually explicit videos. So I find myself turning to pornography whenever I want variety, and that only compounds the problem. It makes sex with my wife less desirable. I know she must feel that I don’t love her and that I don’t find her sexually attractive. She tries to talk to me, but I just can’t bring myself to tell her what’s been going on behind her back.”
“You’re afraid that she’ll be hurt and angry,” I said.
“No doubt about it,” Hank insisted. “It would shock her and break her heart. She wouldn’t be able to understand. I can’t imagine ever being able to tell her about my ‘secret’ life.”
“You’re afraid of losing her respect, aren’t you? You want to protect the positive image she has of you.”
“Sure. Every husband wants his wife to respect him. She thinks of me as a moral man. I don’t want to shatter that view. But it’s all a false front. And that’s one reason why I’ve come to you. This is more than I can handle alone. I need some help. Big-time help.”
“You’ve taken a positive step,” I reassured Hank. “I know your struggle with pornography has been a tough one. But if your love for your wife was strong enough to motivate you to come here for help, you may be a lot closer to fitting the image she has of you than you think.”
Hank’s face lifted. I could tell he felt encouraged and he was glad he had come for counseling.
“The origin of your struggle goes back to when you were very young,” I told Hank. “By looking at the pictures in the magazines, you became part of the group of onlookers. You weren’t alone. It felt good to be part of the gang.
“Later, when you became old enough to derive sexual stimulation from such pictures, that added a powerful dimension to your desire to make pornography part of your life. You found pleasure and relief in pornography so often that the habit became very strongly rooted in you. Today, the habit is controlling you rather than your controlling it. In the process, your self-respect has taken a real beating.”
Hank weighed my words, then nodded his agreement. “I think that pretty much hits the nail on the head. So what am I going to do about it?”
“I won’t kid you,” I said forthrightly. “You have spent so many years entrenched in this problem, it will be a tough one to overcome. I know that isn’t exactly what you want to hear, but it’s true nevertheless. We all reap what we sow, for better or for worse. In your situation, the sowing of all those thoughts and actions over the years has led to being addicted to sex.”
Hank contemplated that a moment, then said, “I hadn’t thought about my struggle with pornography as the result of reaping what I had sown, but I guess you’re right. Every time I purchased a magazine or rented one of those videos, I was sowing more of the problem. Now I’m reaping all the negative results of that. I really wasn’t getting away with anything all those years I thought people weren’t ‘catching’ me at the porn shops. If I had really wanted to conquer this problem, I should have been catching myself.”
“Well,” I said, “before you beat yourself up too much, I want to point out that you didn’t exactly get a lot of help along the way. Your father, by keeping adult magazines in his closet, was giving approval to pornography. Also, you grew up in a culture that is sex drenched and often treats women as sexual playthings, which was another message to you that it was all right to think of women as pornographic objects.”
I let that sink in, then added, “A number of other elements figure into the equation here, but you understand what I’m getting at. I agree that you made your own choices along the way and that you are responsible for those choices. But you didn’t get much help, either.”
I spent a few minutes trying to explain the fine line between personal responsibility and impressionability—young boys being influenced by externals, such as male role models and cultural attitudes, for example.
“I appreciate what you’re trying to say,” Hank told me. “I know my dad’s attitude toward pornography didn’t help my situation. And growing up in a country that seems as sex-obsessed as America is probably only fanned the fire. Still, I can’t get away from the fact that my choices were really bad.”
“You’re suffering now from the consequences of your previous choices. I hope that you can let that be enough punishment and that you will channel your energy into understanding the problem and fighting it.”
Breaking Free
That is just what Hank has done with some success. He is fighting hi
s problem as best he knows how. We have continued to explore his background and how it has affected his views of women, sex, and love. We also have spent time examining how he used and still uses pornography to run from intimacy. We have further examined how pornography fed his need to be in control, to be powerful, and to be the center of attention.
These efforts have helped Hank see his struggle in a more honest light and have helped him develop more self-control when it comes to buying magazines and renting videos. Hank opened up about his problem to a close friend who was also struggling in this area. Hank and his friend have agreed to discuss their mutual problem regularly and to encourage each other to keep fighting it. Hank made the very wise decision to join a counseling group for sex addicts and to tell his wife about his struggle. The revelation was very upsetting to her, but she has supported him and his efforts to overcome his addiction to sex.
Hank’s story is similar to ones that most of us could tell. Although his struggle was with pornography, it could have been with any number of other things. We are all addicted to something—food, drugs, money, approval, recreation, work, whatever. The point I have been making in this chapter is that most of our current problems are simply the long-term reaping of years of sowing the wrong thoughts and actions. As the quotation opening for this chapter suggests, we are often our own worst enemies in that we sow some unhealthy thoughts and actions in our lives, causing us to reap some pretty painful and destructive results.
The examples of the truth “you reap what you sow” in this chapter have focused on negative reaping and sowing, yet the flip side of this truth is also available to us: each of us can sow positive thoughts and actions and reap the healthy consequences of having done so. For example, a person can sow healthy exercise and nutrition habits for a long enough time that he will reap physical health throughout his adult life. In this light, we can also be our own best friend when it comes to reaping and sowing.
The Lies We Believe Page 22