Unwanted

by Jay Stringer

  When a child is triangulated, the relationship with the parent is accompanied by a great deal of ambivalence. On one hand, the child has powerful access to conversations and intimacy that his or her siblings and the other parent are not privy to. The privilege of being your parent’s idol is remarkable and allows you to take unlimited draws of power and delight from the bank of this relationship. The cost of membership, though, is that your parent tends to determine what your life ought to look like. You may agree to their vision of your life for a time, but the moment you want something different, conflict ensues.

  Triangulation and Sexual Development

  Triangulation affects the sexual development of children. Although emotional enmeshment may never involve a parent touching a child’s genitals, your sexual development is influenced by the emotional burdens you undergo. Alex consistently felt that his mom was using his body to give her body a rush of connection. Another client reported that her mother was often emasculating and flippant around the house. She and her father developed a code word that would let one another know that the mother/spouse was being “crazy.” They would meet up in the garage and get in her father’s car to head out for an afternoon of shopping, movies, or ice cream. “I really loved our time, but it always seemed as if we were on dates. I knew he adored me far more than he adored my mom. I loved that feeling, but it also made me really uncomfortable around my mom.”

  American novelist Pat Conroy’s book The Prince of Tides offers a gripping and uncomfortable view of how triangulation is experienced as a child:[44]

  A portion of guilt is standard issue for southern boys; our whole lives are convoluted, egregious apologies to our mothers because our fathers have made such flawed husbands. No boy can endure for long the weight and magnitude of his own mother’s displaced passion. Yet few boys can resist their mothers’ solitary and innocently seductive advances. There is such forbidden sweetness in becoming the chaste and secret lover of the father’s woman, such triumph in becoming the demon rival who receives the unbearably tender love of fragile women in the shadows of the father’s house. There is nothing more erotic on earth than a boy in love with the shape and touch of his mother. It is the most exquisite, most proscribed lust. It is also the most natural and damaging.[45]

  Although Conroy’s words may seem hyperbolic to some, this dynamic between mothers and sons, as well as fathers and daughters, is a sad reality, especially in many faith-based homes. For many men I have worked with, there is an unspoken rule that they must be loyal to their mothers up until their wedding days. This will often set them up to offer their lives and emotions for their mothers’ well-being, while the husbands are largely distant, if not cowardly, in their engagement with their spouses. As Conroy noted, the triangulated son knows all too well how flawed of a spouse his father is.

  Women, too, are set up for triangulation, and the results are no less damaging. A little girl grows up being called “Daddy’s little girl” or “princess.” It may appear innocent, but this language often becomes grounds for her father’s voyeuristic surveillance on her life. She grows up feeling the tension between becoming her own person and learning that her identity is derived from being a balm to the needs of others. My research showed there was an association between a father’s confiding in his daughter and the strictness or rigidity of her mother. The data seems to suggest that when a father finds more life and connection with his daughter than with his spouse, the wife will respond with anger and rigidity toward their daughter.

  Separation Leads to Conflict

  A parent who is triangulated with a child does not want independence; the parent wants the child to feed the parent’s emotional emptiness. A triangulated child will often feel a parent’s disapproval when he expresses interest in dating, learning about his body, or differentiating his identity from family norms. A parent recognizes these attempts at differentiation as a threat rather than normal parts of the developmental process. Healthy parents may experience heartfelt tension as their children mature, but far more, they recognize the privilege in helping shape, not control, their child’s development.

  To get out alive, a triangulated child will need to find a way to escape this relational maze throughout adolescence. Enter pornography. In this way, he gives in to the requirements of his family and culture but also chooses prodigal behavior that gives a false but satisfactory experience of freedom. This child intuitively knows that his behavior is compromised but concurrently feels entitled to these desires.

  If a parent discovers his or her child’s pornography use or premarital sexuality, the parent will use this as an opportunity to reinforce the triangulated family system. The parent’s solution is for the child to have less independence and earn back the trust of the parent through enmeshed relationship and even accountability. What an adolescent may actually need is for both parents to be present in his life and free him to pursue a type of life that fills him with meaning. When this does not happen, the enmeshed parent will inevitably set up another round of rebellion for the child.

  Childhood Triangulation Damages Marriages

  Jesus tells us that unless we leave our fathers and mothers, we cannot follow him. Additionally, Scripture is clear that a husband and wife must leave their families of origin so they can weave and cleave with one another. One of the reasons many marriages fail or exist in perpetual conflict is that the husband or wife remains exceedingly loyal to his or her parents instead of to his or her spouse. A general rule of thumb is that if there is ongoing conflict with a mother-in-law or father-in-law, the presence of triangulation should be explored.

  Childhood triangulation that continues into a marriage is a form of emotional infidelity. If you are a spouse more committed to rescuing your parent, your faithfulness to your own marriage is compromised. Examples of this might include receiving “perfectly timed” communications from your mother or father that leave you ambivalent and anxious. It could be a text about a sibling struggling with his or her faith, a phone call that your dad’s health is not doing well, or an e-mail that finances are really stressful for the family. The unsaid expectation is that you need to step up to resolve this problem and offer care so the peace of the family can be restored.

  The other way childhood triangulation affects marriage is when you have separated from your parent but then find yourself incapable of creating an intimate, lasting connection with your spouse. In this example, you find yourself resistant to deep connection, fearing you will be trapped or used all over again. You project onto your spouse that he or she is asking you to play the same enmeshed role your parent did. Once this projection is made, you feel justified,once more, to pursue unwanted sexual behavior. If you’re experiencing this, be on high alert as to how you use your past enmeshment as an excuse for not learning the difficult work of maturity in relationships.

  FOR REFLECTION:

  Do you see any evidence of emotional enmeshment or triangulation with one or both of your parents? If so, it is likely your parents knew the role they were asking you to play. Recall a time when this occurred and notice what you see.

  If your mother or father triangulated you, how do you think they felt about the role they asked you to play?

  If you were your parent’s favorite, how did that impact your relationship with the other parent or your siblings?

  [43] Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters (Boston: Dutton, 2009), xiv.

  [44] See chapter 5 in Dr. Dan Allender’s Healing the Wounded Heart: The Heartache of Sexual Abuse and the Hope of Transformation for an excellent engagement of Conroy’s quote and the topic of covert abuse.

  [45] Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides: A Novel (New York: Bantam, 1986), 110.

  CHAPTER SIX

  TRAUMA AS SOUL LOSS

  WE TEND TO RESERVE THE WORD trauma for those who have experienced the horrors of war, a natural disaster, or a particularly cruel event. We think of Vietnam, 9/11, and Hurricane
s Katrina and Harvey. Although these examples are certainly traumatic, trauma also occurs in subtle ways. The word trauma comes from the Greek word for “wound.”

  The perilous nature of emotional trauma in our lives is how it evades detection. We become so fixated on stopping our unwanted behavior that we forget to look around for other explanations of its arrival. This chapter is about recognizing how the presence of sexual brokenness reveals portions of your life that have yet to heal. Whereas scars reveal external wounds, unwanted sexual behavior often reveals internal ones.

  Trauma is like a master magician when you are struggling with sexual brokenness. You may have thought that your unwanted sexual behavior magically appears, like a rabbit, out of thin air. In reality, the magician had put the rabbit behind his table before you arrived. The magician draws your attention to the hat on the table, and this is all that is needed to distract you from the presence of the rabbit.

  For our discussion, there are three features of trauma that should be highlighted. First, as Bessel van der Kolk, a pioneer in the field of trauma, wrote, “We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.”[46] For example, if you were called stupid as a child, the imprint of the wound may be revealed in your relentless attempts to be competent or the toxic shame you feel when someone realizes you do not know how to do something.

  Second, trauma affects not only your mind but also your body. This is why you might hear people say, “I was completely traumatized and couldn’t say anything” or “I was scared stiff after the bang” or “My knees started shaking after I heard that my dad had been hospitalized.”

  Third, trauma is a type of soul loss. When the indigenous people of South America and Mesoamerica were colonized by the Portuguese, they borrowed the Portuguese word susto to describe what happened to them in trauma: “fright paralysis” and a “soul loss.”[47]

  Emotional Abuse as Trauma

  James was one of the first clients I worked with. During his therapy, I recognized how a collection of “minor” experiences of emotional and physical abuse throughout his life compounded into trauma. He described a sleepover where his neighborhood friends put cayenne pepper on his lips and fingers after he fell asleep. He woke up disoriented, in pain, and surrounded by cackling laughter. He remembered the ambivalence of the moment: “If I left the sleepover, my friends would have laughed even more. And if I would have called my mom, I would have been a mama’s boy and my mom would never let me leave the house again.”

  James felt trapped, and despite having his mouth and eyes on fire, he decided instead to join their laughter. This scene was repeated in similar ways throughout middle school and high school: He would be the object of humiliation and abuse and would choose to laugh rather than become defiant against the perpetrators. There was the time his towel, underwear, and gym bag were thrown out of the locker room for him to have to retrieve in between classes. Another time, he was dared by his classmates to steal candy from a convenience shop, only to have the same students rat him out. In adulthood, when James was a history teacher at a private school, a parent whose son had done poorly in his class saw James drinking at a bar one night and e-mailed a video of his alcohol consumption to the principal, asking for him to be fired since he was a poor example of what the school represented.

  Although there may not have been a single catastrophic form of trauma in James’s life, the accumulated experiences of rejection, humiliation, mockery, and scapegoating collectively served the same purpose. By the time he reached adulthood, his body was full of shame and anger for what had been done to him. This was the imprint of trauma.

  Trauma Shapes Arousal

  Pornography is alluring to most of us, but it is particularly devastating to those suffering with unaddressed trauma. At this point, you may have only understood pornography as a type of erotic content. But as we continue to dig deeper, we will see that many of the themes of pornography often mirror the impact of trauma: the misuse of power, deception, humiliation, and sexual gain. Pornography streams through our eyes and into the crevasses of our trauma.

  James became hooked on pornography in college. The videos that appealed to him the most essentially had to do with young women being humiliated. The actresses would be called dirty names while pretending as if this degradation were a huge turn-on for them. James’s fantasy life was a tremendous source of shame for him until he began to recognize the significant association between his earliest traumas and his present-day arousal. As therapy progressed, James connected how the trauma he suffered—ongoing humiliation, physical abuse, and loss of soul—directly related to the nature of the pornography he sought out.

  As you can see, James used pornography to attempt to overturn the bullying and abuse through becoming the powerful one in his fantasy. When his sexual behavior was discovered, he tragically experienced yet another round of painful humiliation. Pornography often involves themes of humiliation, violence, and emotional enmeshment because the sex industry knows that porn users who have endured these traumas will be aroused by the eroticizing of these traumas later in life. You can imagine the futility of James’s attempting to stop lusting for humiliating pornography without first recognizing his personal experiences of humiliation. The specifics of our sexual brokenness reveal the very stories of trauma we need to heal from.

  Healing requires you to pivot from condemning your lack of willpower to addressing the role trauma may be playing in your unwanted sexual behavior. A heart with an ounce of kindness for your life story will accomplish so much more for you than a mind filled to the brim with strategies to combat lust. Bessel van der Kolk said, “Very few psychological problems are the result of defects in understanding.”[48] We tend to focus on the apparent defects because it gives us something to blame, something to control. But what happens when we have nothing left to blame and no “silver bullet” to pursue? We are left with our pain.

  Collectively, we prefer to blame our defects in understanding or lack of willpower for our unwanted sexual behavior. The solution is to find the latest and greatest strategy to combat lust. You can spend all your time and money trying to develop strategies to treat bad behavior and forget that the solution to your problem may be evident in the sexual brokenness itself. The more you look for strategies to combat lust or fortify your willpower against unwanted sexual behavior, the further you are from the traumas in your story.

  Some of my clients lust not only for sexual behavior but also for the right therapist, the right book, and the right software. They will do almost anything—anything except to slow down to study how the debris of their sexual behavior is telling a story about the unresolved traumas of their lives.

  If you ceased striving for a lust-free life, what would you be left with? We can be so preoccupied with filling our lives with something to do rather than trusting that God wants to do something within us. Jesus’ invitation to go to him when we are weary and heavy laden is for our sexual failures, but even more so for the trauma beneath those failures. God looks beyond the outward appearance of unwanted sexual behavior and into the heart of what is driving men and women into captivity.

  Faith Communities Collude with Trauma

  Our way out of sexual brokenness begins by healing the wounds within us. What we will likely find is that attempts to live with sexual integrity without owning our trauma require a militant thwarting of desire. While many religious leaders have recommended prayer, Scripture reading, and other spiritual practices to overcome sexual temptation, very few have encouraged their faith communities to explore the traumas beneath their struggles. Even fewer have recognized the ways their strategies collude with sexual shame.

  Through my professional work, I’ve encountered a legion of examples of men and women who have had their sexual shame only further exacerbated within their faith communities. Their premarital sex was compared to offering lollipops or apples to their sexual partners and
leaving only crummy leftovers for their future spouses. They were told not only to refrain from premarital sex but also to bury and run away from all sexual desire at the peak of puberty.

  Additionally, few people receive comprehensive sex education, and most sex education, when it does take place, focuses on what to avoid. Try learning how to cook if the only thing you ever learned about was food poisoning. The result of our cultural sexual silence is that the door is wide open for pornography to be the most prominent sex educator of our day. When a religious community practices shaming, the eradication of desire, and silence, it colludes with the effects of sexual shame and trauma.

  The individuals I’ve met over the years in faith communities and religious institutions will often share frighteningly similar reports of those who have been traumatized through catastrophic events. Psychiatrist and researcher Judith Herman wrote,

  Traumatized people feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. Thereafter, a sense of alienation, of disconnection, pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community and religion. When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.[49]