by Jay Stringer
Looking back now, I see that it was entitlement from a decade of deprivation and training. I had just finished the most rigorous feat I could imagine and now had money and power. I had decent friends in undergrad, but by the time I finished med school, I didn’t have one close relationship. I remember thinking that even if I wanted to get married, I didn’t have a single friend who could be a groomsman. This made it easy to continue what I was doing.
The catch-22 of deprivation is that it promotes entitlement while requiring that one sink even deeper into deprivation.
One of the primary reasons men and women stay in a place of unwanted sexual behavior for decades is that they have not addressed the areas of self-deprivation in their lives. My research showed that only 27 percent of pornography users had a solid pattern of self-care (exercise, eating well, and time with friends). The majority of those who struggle with unwanted sexual behavior choose passivity over against asking for what they need or being honest about what they are experiencing. They roam through life feeling overworked or underappreciated, which sets up entitlement for experiences they believe they deserve.
Deprivation occurs in both overt and subtle ways. It may appear superficially noble, such as always deferring to others to decide where to go to dinner because of the fear of making the wrong choice, or taking on extra projects at work because of preferring exhaustion and stress over rest and meaningful relationships. For others, it is a neglect of basic physical care. When I ask my clients about sleep or the last time they visited a doctor or dentist, the answers are often alarming. They commonly report feeling as though they are behind on something, such as work projects or cleaning out their cars. One client told me that his company owed him more than $125,000 and in the same session told me that a yoga membership and eating more healthful foods would be too expensive.
The painful discovery many people make is that they never noticed how deep the roots of deprivation were until they found themselves trapped in unwanted sexual behavior. Suspending the impulse to condemn this behavior will allow curiosity about the ways addiction purports to nourish legitimate needs. It is difficult to see how far we have wandered in search of these legitimate needs, but it is our lament that gives us the courage to return home. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the younger brother discovers his deprivation through feeling the hunger in his belly and the shame in his soul. Paradoxically, it is the awareness of this deprivation and squandering behavior that fills him with the longing to return to the comfort of his father’s home.
Experience 2: Dissociation: The Great Escape
Unwanted sexual behavior is an escape but also a return to a familiar poison. What exactly are we trying to escape from? My research findings offer some perspective:
If your life is full of failures, lack of motivation, guilt, feelings of being overwhelmed, and anxiety, you are clearly going to want to flee reality. This flight from reality is known as dissociation. Dissociation depressurizes the difficult work required for us to become mature and competent adults.
Dissociation is a psychological term used to describe disconnecting from full engagement with your body and the relationships around you. Dissociation is likely something you have been doing since childhood. Think about the hours of TV, video games, and Internet you consumed growing up. For many individuals, the distractions of technology were more consistent than a deep, loving engagement with meaningful relationships.
We experience these dissociative moments every day and in almost any context. I remember lying on the floor next to my children when they were infants. One moment I was staring into their eyes, mirroring their smiles and echoing their coos. Seconds later, I was looking at the cell phone I had placed behind their heads, checking my e-mail, scrolling through my Instagram account, and seeing how many likes a recent Facebook post had brought in. Dissociation seduces us out of the present moment and into a meaningless world of distraction.
Dissociation becomes more complex when it is woven into sexual arousal. When I work with couples attempting to rebuild their marriages after the negative effects of an affair, pornography addiction, or buying sex, we eventually begin to talk about the particulars of their sex lives, from the initial moments of arousal to the restful moments post orgasm. What happens between couples in these moments reveals and predicts the quality of their sexual lives. For most couples, although their bodies are woven together, the dramas unfolding in their minds could not be further apart.
Many men express anger at their wives for their apparent fickleness with desire, but beneath the surface is intimidation. A man intuitively recognizes that a woman’s desire is far deeper and more complex than his own. Although she may have ebbs and flows of sexual desire, the holistic longing she has for intimacy will often far surpass his own. Confronted with this reality, a husband can see it as an invitation for personal and relational growth, or he will default to an angry disappointment that his wife’s arousal does not function in the same masculine manner. For men to change, they must exchange blame for the opportunity to grow.
Most often, men resort to hiding and blaming to avoid the necessity for change. Men who have demanding or overly intimate mothers are likely to perceive their spouses in a similar fashion. Cognitively, you may know that your wife is not your mother, but emotionally you have a harder time telling the difference. Men who have experienced abandonment or disengagement may constantly project these dynamics onto their wives. The issue here, though, is not that the man is wounded by a parent figure; it is that he insists on creating a relationship in which he can use blame to aid him in avoiding the need for maturity.
Most men have an intuitive sense that more attunement and delight with their partners would improve their sex lives dramatically. Instead, they fall into the trap of feeling powerless or angry. Many wives, through many headaches, know it will cost too much to ask their husbands to offer something different—to engage, to honor, and to stay connected. A woman knows that what is likely to follow is either her husband’s cowardly departure or toxic blaming because she resists giving herself over to his linear pleasure. When a couple will not engage with delight, affection, and individual passion, both will be tempted to escape into private arousal narratives.
Therefore, a husband or wife may be physically joined with his or her spouse but emotionally and spiritually fused with someone else in a fantasy. Men and women may play out a fantasy with an ex-lover or a person from the office. And if one partner is involved with pornography, he or she may recall the most recent content. Most people are not proud of these fantasies, but at some level, they feel justified because their spouses are not the lovers they desire. Dissociation in marriage seduces you to leave the difficult relational realities of the present and escape to a fantasy arousal where you are in control, appreciated, and entitled.
Forms of dissociation (such as adulterous fantasy), to some degree, are present in every marriage. This is not something to be condemned by or ashamed of. Dissociation is an opportunity for what Jesus refers to as metanoia, which my theologian friends say is unfortunately translated as “repentance.” The better definition would be a turning or revolution (meta-) in the mind or consciousness (nous). The climax of Paul’s theology in Romans 12 (verse 2) is a call to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (again, the word nous).
Marriage will expose that our minds are far more broken than we could have ever conceived. But more importantly, it gives us opportunities to renew our minds. Marital faithfulness is not predicated on the absence of failure but on the persistent commitment to renewing our minds. The choice to repent creates the possibility for personal integrity and relational growth to occur. The more we recognize our need for Jesus, the more we will grow.
Experience 3: Unconscious Sexual Arousal: Understanding Seduction
Sexual arousal, and the pleasure we derive from it, was God’s intention. As we learned, sexual arousal can be distorted only through being a parasite of how God designed our erotic lives to function.
Sexual arousal is a road map to our unprocessed lives and one of the primary dimensions God will use to aid our redemption. The more we understand what our sexual fantasies symbolize, the more we can allow them to show us the road to redemption.
“Every part of my day is full of sexual arousal,” Joseph said with exasperation. “I get on the bus and wait to see if the most attractive woman will notice me. I walk into work and can’t keep from noticing what the women in my office want me to notice. And when I get online, pop-up ads and clickbait with beautiful women come up. All. Day. Long.” Joseph would then freeze-frame the images and scenes until later in the day or week, when he would masturbate or have sex with his wife.
Joseph found himself fantasizing about being sexual with his colleagues late in the evening after his coworkers left work or leaving on a lunch break to go to a hotel a few blocks from his office. The only way he knew to stop his arousal was to imagine his wife discovering him in the hotel. Joseph’s fantasies were largely about creating a repetitive and familiar world of arousal. Arousal may, at first glance, seem as self-explanatory as a desire to be with an attractive partner (and, yes, it may be just that), but it is rarely that stagnant. It moves forward, constructing a story, complete with a plot, themes, characters, and dialogue. Even though Joseph knew his fantasies, the meaning remained unconscious.
So how does Joseph filter through the barrage of images and story lines to decide which ones to act upon or fantasize about? This will primarily involve the process of narrative as we take pictures and scenes and, like a film director, allow them to tell a story.
The Arousal Cocktail
The story lines and themes of our arousal reveal the imprints of our emotional and sexual histories. This could be repeating situations we have known in the past, as we will come to see in Joseph’s case. Or it could be a counter story line, such as a woman who begins opening herself up to an affair because she finds her husband emotionally vacant. Rather than allow this fantasy to invite her to greater integrity in fighting for her marriage, she finds excitement and revenge in seeking out an affair. To understand why your sexual brokenness is part of your story, you need to identify the blueprints of your sexual and relational stories.
When I ask clients about the particulars of their arousal, they are either embarrassed or offended, but the main response is something along the lines of “That is strange to talk about. I’ve never really thought about it, much less been asked. Why is that important?” I respond by saying that all of us have an arousal map or cocktail, which is a constellation of thoughts, images, fantasies, objects, and situations that sexually arouse us. For some, this could be the anonymity of a business trip; a wallet full of cash, symbolizing to them power and possibility; an empty house, where their behavior will not be interfered with; or a guys’ trip to Vegas, where excess of money and alcohol gives way to sexual risks.
Your Fantasies (May) Reveal Your Stories
Joseph had an arousal map that was shaped by the season of his father’s affair when Joseph was ten years old. His father was a banker. The summer before Joseph began sixth grade, his mother came into the living room, where he was playing Nintendo 64, and disclosed that his dad was likely cheating on her. She told him to accompany her for an investigation. For about two weeks, they would leave the house around 11:30 a.m. and sit in the parking lot across from the bank, waiting for his dad to take a lunch break. When he finally left the bank, they would follow him across town as he dined at various restaurants.
Joseph would sit in the idling car as his mom would discreetly walk by cafés and enter restaurants to confirm that his dad was eating alone.
These times were entirely arousing to me—the search, the anticipation of what we might discover, and the endless curiosity about the type of woman my dad would find attractive. My mom and I were voyeurs, in a way, and I began sexualizing particular women on these stakeouts. I would look at their shoes, their pants, their dresses, and begin to take guesses as to which ones would be more likely to have an affair. It’s so crazy to me that I am still doing this.
The second week of their mother-son investigation (a clear form of triangulation), they followed Joseph’s dad to a local hotel. “My body was pumping with adrenaline. I wanted to catch him, I wanted to know who he was sleeping with, and I also dreaded the outcome because I knew he would leave our family and I’d be stuck with my mom for the rest of my life.” His father checked into the hotel and walked to his room on the second floor. Minutes later, a woman his mother knew from a work party joined his dad in the hotel. “My mom went berserk. She screamed inside the car, opened up the car door, and sprinted to the second floor. She stood outside the hotel room, cursing, screaming, and pounding on the door.”
As counseling progressed, we explored how deeply Joseph’s sexuality was formed the summer of his father’s affair. In his adult life, he repeated these investigations to find candidates for an affair. For Joseph, the prospect of an affair is wildly more arousing than pornography because it is closely aligned with the particular ways his sexuality was formed and harmed.
Although your story may not involve stakeouts with your mother, your task is to understand how your unique fantasies may be revealing portions of your story. Many people continue to act out in similar ways over a lifetime because they have never taken time to think about the symbols and stories inherent within their arousal and fantasies. These sexual reenactments must be named if you have any hope to find freedom. Your arousal map is not a life sentence; it is an opportunity to discover your life and exchange a broken and unconscious map for a redeemed one.
The fantasy to pursue an affair is not a random event for married men and women. The illustration below shows the key drivers of infidelity in men and women. The standardized regression coefficient percentage on the vertical axis shows the strength of the association between the desire for an affair and the other key themes that might be affecting your life. Your desire for an affair may be revealing the stories that most need your involvement.
Experience 4: Futility: A Lack of Purpose Binds Men to Pornography
One of the most powerful, though not entirely surprising, findings in my study was the association between pornography and a lack of purpose. The greater a man’s futility, the more likely he was to increase his pornography use. In fact, men were seven times more likely to escalate their pornography use if they lacked purpose in their lives. These men felt as if the work they did were meaningless, struggled to find a sense of purpose, looked back over their lives and saw many failures, and often felt unmotivated.
It is crucial to understand the implication of this finding: You cannot change your relationship to pornography if you do not have an effective plan for engaging the lack of purpose in your life. Pornography is not an isolated struggle; it is a symptom of a much larger issue of futility. Men who do not have strategies to transform their futility inevitably begin to lean on something to assuage the powerlessness they feel.
One of the fascinating trends with Google Analytics is that we can now track porn data to specific cultural events. One example of this would be the 2017 NBA Finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors. According to a popular porn site, when the San Francisco Bay Area knew that the Warriors were about to win the championship in game 5, porn traffic in the city was 21 percent below average. Once the game was over, porn traffic in the Bay Area returned to normal. But residents of Cleveland? The city’s porn use increased 34 percent, from -6 percent during the game to a staggering +28 percent after the game was over.[54] The role of futility in our work, our relationships, and even our favorite pastimes cannot be underestimated in shaping our attraction to pornography.
Genesis 3 provides a very good starting point for understanding the nature of futility as it relates to a man’s life. In the passage, Adam and Eve have just eaten from the tree they were commanded not to eat from. God is not terribly pleased and begins outlining the curse for Adam:
Cursed is the gro
und because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.
VERSES 17-19, ESV
According to this passage, the curse for a man is that his life will be marked largely by what we would refer to as futility.[55] Everything a man attempts to do in life will eventually be marked with difficulty, pain, and meaninglessness. You can almost hear the taunt of this curse: “Go ahead. Build what you wish. But it’s all going to be surpassed. It’s all going to burn.”
Men find pornography appealing precisely because it allows the “thorns and thistles” of futility to disappear, at least for a moment. Futility is experienced when we work hard to get a promotion at work but are passed up. It’s when student loan debt compounds faster than we can pay it off. It’s when all the efforts we take to change our lives leave us only more discouraged.
A lack of purpose will eventually lead to behavior where very little risk or imagination is required. This is one of the reasons men are drawn, magnetically, to watching others, whether it’s through porn, sports, or television. Nothing is required except consumption. In watching the drama of characters unfold on a screen, there is no personal crucible for change. In watching others play sports, there is no physical commitment required to experience victory. In watching pornography, there is no relational maturity required to reach orgasm. Watching provides men a world without futility—that is, until they attempt to get out.