by Jay Stringer
What Is Unwanted Sexual Behavior?
Unwanted sexual behavior is any sexual behavior that continues to persist in our lives despite our best efforts to change it. This could be pornography use, affairs, using hookup apps, or buying sex. Our behavior could meet the criteria for hypersexual or compulsive sexual behavior, but it could also involve infrequent struggles that keep us from a life of sexual integrity. The longer our unwanted sexual behavior persists unaddressed, the more likely it is that we will feel unwanted as well.
You might be able to relate to Jeffrey in some way. Maybe you find yourself involved in sexual behavior that is unwanted. Or maybe you have loved ones struggling with unwanted sexual behavior and are trying to understand why they indulge in behavior that so clearly damages the relationships they claim to care about most.
The Crisis of Unwanted Sexual Behavior
The statistics associated with unwanted sexual behavior in our world are staggering. The Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health conservatively estimates that between 3 percent and 5 percent of all Americans can be classified as addicted to sex.[1] This represents an alarming nine to sixteen million people. Additionally, 64 percent of thirteen- to twenty-four-year-olds intentionally watch pornography at least once a week.[2] By the time children become teens and young adults, 62 percent of them will have received a sext (sexually explicit image via text), and 41 percent will have sent one.[3] And if all that were not enough, the average age of initial involvement in prostitution for girls is estimated between fourteen and eighteen years of age.[4]
Pornography is the most predominant form of unwanted sexual behavior, infiltrating every aspect of the places we live, work, and worship. Consider these statistics:
Porn use will nearly double the probability of a couple’s getting divorced.[5]
Approximately 35 percent of all Internet downloads are porn related.[6]
Porn sites receive more monthly traffic than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined.[7]
Porn is a $97 billion industry, with as much as $12 billion of that coming from the US.[8]
About 57 percent of our pastors and 64 percent of our youth pastors struggle or have struggled with pornography.[9]
It should be clear that what Jeffrey is experiencing is not a unique or isolated case.
Lust-Centered Approaches Are Ineffective
The overwhelmingly standard evangelical response to sexual brokenness has been to address it through the lens of “lust management,” even declaring war against it. This approach has oversimplified and trivialized a far more complex issue within human sexuality. Efforts to eliminate lust will set us up to manage our sexual lives with a tourniquet. We spend the best years of our lives attempting to stop the flow of lust through darting our eyes from beautiful people, slapping rubber bands around our wrists when we have sexual thoughts, and asking accountability partners, in an attempt to stay vulnerable in community, to keep account of what erotic websites we’ve visited. I think we can all agree this cannot be what God had in mind for sex and community. The reality that more than half our faith leaders and the great majority of Christians view pornography should indicate that our strategies have proven ineffective.
Our inability to succeed in purity only compounds our pain. And then, in our pain, we default to the same ineffective treatment plan. We spend time in prayer, fast, pursue accountability, and hope that God might change us. The complexity is that the underlying issues that drive our sexual lust and anger do not get examined.
How many of us have ever asked God to help us understand our lust? This book is an invitation to heal, but to do so, your current framework for understanding and treating your problems will likely need to be abandoned.
Fantasies Are Road Maps
Despite the overwhelming grip of shame and guilt, I do not believe that sexual fantasies are something to condemn. Sexual arousal is one of the greatest gifts God has given us, and we do not need to spend a lifetime annihilating it. And although some sexual behavior is abhorrent and should be discontinued, addressing sexual struggles through the lens of abhorrent behavior intensifies shame, and shames drives us deeper into the very behavior we wish to stop.
There is another approach. It begins by listening to our lust.
Sexual failures, Internet searches, and browser histories expose our sin, but far more, they are road maps. Sexual brokenness pinpoints the location of our past harm and highlights the current roadblocks that keep us from the freedom we desire. If we are willing to listen, our sexual struggles will have so much to teach us.
You may not like the “map” you’ve been given, but to navigate your way out of unwanted sexual behavior, you will need to pay closer attention to what it desires to show you. One evening of deliberate curiosity for your sexual fantasies will take you further into transformation than a thousand nights of prayerful despair.
Sexual Brokenness: The Geography of God’s Arrival
Scripture is clear that God moves into human struggle, rather than teleporting us out of it. At the beginning of the Gospel of John, God moves so much into human struggle that he takes on our sarx—the New Testament word for the vulnerable, prone-to-sin form of flesh—and “move[s] into the neighborhood” (1:14, MSG). Our sexual brokenness is the geography of God’s arrival.
It is my conviction that the God of the universe is neither surprised by nor ashamed of the sexual behavior we participate in. Instead, he understands it to be the very stage through which the work of redemption will be played out in our lives. Present sin is the doorway to the wider work of the gospel to bring healing to the wounds of the past and comfort, even power, to the difficulties of the present. Therefore, the sooner we assume a posture of curiosity for our sexual brokenness, the more we will prepare our hearts for the redemptive work ahead.
God approaches us for our joy, not due to his disappointment in us. His heart is to exchange beauty for ashes, joy for mourning, and praise for despair (see Isaiah 61:3). There is no depth of shame that the love of God cannot reach. There is no story he cannot redeem. The paradox of the gospel is that our failures do not condemn us; they connect us.
In writing this book, I wanted to understand the key drivers of unwanted sexual behavior. Why do we choose some sexual behavior and fantasies and not others? In preparation, I read books, listened to podcasts, and met with leaders and organizations pioneering the fight against pornography. Some brought accountability where there was isolation. A number of organizations introduced software to block the ubiquity of erotic content. And others offered a message of love to those experiencing despair. Although I support each of these endeavors, I knew from my work with clients that there was more going on in their sexual behavior, and therefore more was needed to unlock the doors to freedom.
As a licensed mental-health counselor and ordained minister, I help men and women who tend to have two distinct story lines. For one, they disclose a conscious decision to counteract their current unwanted emotions and experiences. Some feel that their needs are not met and seek out affairs to give them surrogate but shameful experiences of connection. Others struggle with a baseline level of misery and discover that pornography use offers them a temporary reprieve from the difficulties of life.
After I hear my clients’ present-day struggles, a second story line often emerges rooted in the formative years of their childhood. They consistently tell stories of unwanted experiences of abandonment or bullying, vague references to “awkward” or “weird” sexual moments with people trusted within their families, experimenting with neighborhood friends, finding family members’ porn stashes in “hidden” yet completely obvious locations, and dynamics with mothers or fathers that required deep emotional enmeshment. These two converging story lines unfolding in my clients’ stories revealed the foundational premise of this book: The formative experiences of our childhood (loneliness, pain, sexual arousal, secrecy, and relational ambivalence) are all being repeated in our unwanted sexual behavior as adults.
My
work with clients and conversations with leaders in the field led me to the conviction that comprehensive research was needed to get to the root of what is driving unwanted sexual behavior. To do this, I designed an instrument containing more than one hundred questions to collect primary data from individuals who were struggling with sexual behavior they wished to stop. (The survey tables can be found at the back of this book in the appendix.)
More than 3,800 people participated in my study, one of the largest of its kind. The respondents were men and women who sought out nationally and internationally known organizations for guidance in the midst of their sexual brokenness. Their collective courage to discuss some of the most intimate portions of their stories is now revealing insights that will change the course of how we understand and treat unwanted sexual behavior in the decades to come. Throughout this book, I will reveal the key drivers of unwanted sexual behavior I learned from the research. What I can tell you from the outset is that the research shows that our sexual struggles are not random or capricious. There are always reasons. If you want to find freedom, it begins by identifying your specific reasons.
The research findings frame the three parts to this book. Part 1 explores the question “How Did I Get Here?” This section will take you on a journey into the most formative years of your life. You will learn the key childhood events and relational dynamics that most predicted a lifetime of unwanted sexual behavior. Part 2 addresses the question “Why Do I Stay?” This section will explore the present-day difficulties in your life that are most common with thousands of men and women remaining trapped in sexual brokenness. Until these specific drivers are transformed, the use of unwanted sexual behavior is often necessitated. And finally, part 3 answers the question “How Do I Get Out of Here?” My hope is that by the time you arrive at this question, parts 1 and 2 will have more or less convinced you that until you understand the reasons for your unwanted sexual behavior, attempts to get away from its grip are futile. You will learn how to get out, but each step is rooted in the wisdom gained in the previous two sections.
My Story
We are more likely to be ashamed of our unwanted sexual behavior when we do not understand it. Recognizing the meaning of my fantasies has been one of the most significant aspects of my journey into sexual wholeness.
Several years ago, I found myself on a therapist’s couch exploring sexual fantasies I had been troubled by and ashamed of for more than a decade. Before I named the specifics of my unwanted sexual behavior, I told my therapist that I considered never talking about it in therapy. I, like many of my professional colleagues, had a deep fear that my sexual brokenness would be grounds for disqualification within ministry. She asked me how I had come to this conclusion and noted how odd it would be for me to be involved with the population of men and women I work with without addressing a great deal of my own sexual life. Her words to me were liberating because she located me in my life story, not in my perceived failure.
I went on to tell her some of the unique aspects of my fantasy life and how they had been present with me since I was an early teen. I put my head down and paused. She waited to speak until after I looked back up. “Jay, tell me again about where you come from. What was your role in your family?”
I am a therapist, and I was annoyed at her question. I would have preferred her condemnation. I did not want to talk about my family. I wanted her to be troubled by my confession, even to imply that I should second-guess my desire to be a therapist and minister. She did not do this. Instead, she stood by her question and waited about twenty seconds for me to respond. She was inviting me to know and therefore come to love my story.
I told her that my parents and siblings used to tell me their problems with one another and how I served as a container for their resentment and concerns.
“If only that were all!” she said playfully. “Anything else?”
I went on to tell her more about my story. I would be an emotional support for my mom when my dad was unhappy or left to attend to his pastoral duties. I even remembered hearing messages on my home answering machine involving various affairs and sexual crises that were happening in the life of the church. I was gifted at being able to read the angry and pain-ridden faces of my mom and offer my life to her as the caring son.
My therapist nodded and said, “And now tell me what you know about the lives of the women who have entered into your fantasy life. I would imagine you are quite gifted in reading their anger and needs. Might it be possible that your fantasies are playing out a similar drama that you played out with your mom?”
I was speechless but felt as if the matrix of my sexual life were finally integrating and clarifying. Her questions helped inform a great deal of my sexual life, including my fantasies, pornography preferences, and style of relating with women. Blankets of shame and condemnation lifted because my therapist was inviting me not primarily to stop my lust but to engage the sexual story I was set up for.
I left the session and wrote down this sentence: “If we fail to engage the ways we were sexualized in the past, we leave open the high probability that these patterns will become more pronounced in the future.” Sexual struggles reveal the truth of our stories in ways that will constantly surprise us.
God’s Curious Pursuit
There is a story in Genesis 16 about an Egyptian teenager by the name of Hagar. She is brought in as a concubine because Abram and Sarai have been struggling with infertility issues for more than ten years. Hagar, whose name means “stranger” or “sojourner,” successfully conceives a child for Abram and Sarai. But Sarai, the barren wife, turns on Hagar and unleashes mistreatment. Commentators of this story have remarked that this mistreatment has a particularly cruel bent to it, some even suggesting it to be as severe as sexual assault.[10]
In the next scene, Hagar is on the run, heading into the desert, where by all accounts she will die. It is here in the wilderness, the geography of trauma and death, that a miraculous thing happens. The presence of God finds this pregnant teenager and asks her the two best questions any one of us can be asked when we are in distress: “Where have you come from?” and “Where are you going?” (verse 8).
What I want to underscore is that the voice of the Lord is never filled with accusation or frustration. God’s presence invites us to greater reflection as to how our unwanted lives became the way they are today.
Far more than trying to diagnose you as a sinner or addict, I will ask you questions. You will read about individual accounts and research findings from men and women whose stories have remarkable similarities to your own. Your task is not to draw hard-and-fast conclusions but to be intrigued by the data. Our sexual brokenness, if we pay attention, is revealing our way to healing. As we begin this journey, ask yourself, Where is it that I come from? And where is it that I am going? May your heart be curious as you study the great tragedy and beauty that your story reveals.
[1] Stacy Notaras Murphy, “It’s Not about Sex,” Counseling Today, December 1, 2011, http://ct.counseling.org/2011/12/its-not-about-sex/.
[2] Quoted in “18 Shocking Stats about the Porn Industry and Its Underage Consumers,” Fight the New Drug, September 5, 2017, https://fightthenewdrug.org/10-porn-stats-that-will-blow-your-mind/.
[3] David Kinnaman, “The Porn Phenomenon,” Barna (blog), February 5, 2016, http://www.barna.com/the-porn-phenomenon/#.VqZoN_krIdU.
[4] R. Barri Flowers, Sex Crimes: Perpetrators, Predators, Prostitutes, and Victims, 2nd ed. (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 2006), 170.
[5] S. L. Perry and C. Schleifer, “Till Porn Do Us Part? A Longitudinal Examination of Pornography Use and Divorce,” Journal of Sex Research 55, no. 13 (May 12, 2017): 1–3.
[6] “Internet Pornography by the Numbers: A Significant Threat to Society,” Webroot, https://www.webroot.com/us/en/home/resources/tips/digital-family-life/internet-pornography-by-the-numbers.
[7] Alexis Kleinman, “Porn Sites Get More Visitors Each Month Than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter Combi
ned,” Huffington Post, last modified December 6, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/03/internet-porn-stats_n_3187682.html.
[8] “Things Are Looking Up in America’s Porn Industry,” NBC News, January 20, 2015, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/things-are-looking-americas-porn-industry-n289431.
[9] Kinnaman, “Porn Phenomenon.”
[10] Allen Ross, “Genesis,” in The Bible Knowledge Commentary: Old Testament, ed. John F. Walvoord and Roy B. Zuck (Colorado Springs, CO: Victor, 1985), 155; Hemchand Gossai, Power and Marginality in the Abraham Narrative, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010), 13.
CHAPTER ONE
A THEOLOGY OF UNWANTED SEXUAL BEHAVIOR
HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED why God made us so sexual, especially when it often seems to plague us with shame? I’ve wondered the same thing. What I am struck by is the reality that sex was God’s idea. And I have to believe that because he invented it, he knows the power it will render in our lives.
Let’s think about that: God is the designer of erotic pleasure. The clitoris, for example, is the only organ in the human body that serves no other function except for providing an avenue to sexual pleasure. God’s mind, like ours, is sexual. We are made in his image and therefore don’t need to feel ashamed that we are sexual beings.