When I first got into sexual addiction recovery, I would go into a group or sit down at a luncheon of sorts. You’re sitting at a table. Inevitably they come around the table. “Well what do you do for a living?” “I’m in sexual addiction recovery.” You talk about making the place drop still. Nobody, they’re afraid to even make a statement. Now in the beginning, I wore that like, “Oh gosh, what do I do?” but now I kind of have fun with it in the respect of, I know it’s serious and nine chances out of ten there’s probably half of them at the table that are affected by it somehow. That’s how steep the statistics are, but it doesn’t wear on me.
It’s getting easier and easier to say, “Hey, I work in sexual addiction recovery,” because we’re recovering. We are all looking to medicate some internal pain of a lack. There’s some pain that’s driving the need. He or they are looking to cope with, “What do I do with those taunting messages that are coming?” This is all going on subliminal. You don’t typically understand the sword fight until much into recovery, but the taunting of the enemy, the accusations that are coming are very complex. They’re undermining our value as a person. What I did to medicate was to go into, “I’ll fix this. I’ll shut you up. I’m going to go myself a better package, and I’m going to prove that I’m valuable and shut you up.”
One other aspect of doing that with pornography, male or female, is that’s just one of the coping methods used to shut up the taunting. “I’m going to go here and escape, and it’s going to be pleasurable for me, and it’s going to be all better for a moment while I’m doing this.” Then that moment passes, and you get this despair. “Crud, I’m doing this now. Now I’m even worse.” More taunting drives you back into the preoccupation of fixing it, drives you back into the acting out which drives you back into despair which brings that whole cycle. Every time you repeat that cycle that addiction gets that much more intense. The pornography is always, well always is an absolute, pretty much always is accompanied by masturbation. That’s the last thing to go, actually second to the last for me.
After the Lord, remember I mentioned that He asked for my sex life, then that was an obvious that you don’t have sex with any guys. Okay, I give that up. They didn’t talk about sex with self. You get this proverbial, “Well, it’s not mentioned anywhere in the Bible.” Well, we could talk for a long time about what I have researched and found what is in the Bible about that. We will get to the point of the Lord took that from me, too. It was an act of self pleasure, and my sexual addiction went to full blown in self-stimulation. It’s a better term for it than masturbation. Masturbation means self-abasement from the fourth century. Self-stimulation is very accurate. We are not addressing that within the body of Christ or anywhere.
You’re meddling in my head now, if you start talking to people about masturbation and self-pleasure, and I can’t do that. Then you really are getting to where what the Lord brought up with me was the very basic form of idolatry. Here’s where it came, again going back to the connection with romance and a partner and feeling loved and my whole motivation of sex and how it was connected to my fixing it and feeling better in my world. He took away having sex with partners and then making it very obvious that sex with self was a stimulation that made me feel good, obviously neuro-chemically but even beyond that. When you get to the point of doing something so frequently you’re compulsive on it, the neuro-chemical and the repetition of that, certain things are numbed from that experience. As addiction is, you have to get the bigger, better, higher and higher because of the tolerance levels, and albeit the stimulation neuro-chemically was a satisfying experience, it never fulfilled the drive, where it was coming from, because what was driving it was the compassionate love of a romance partner.
One, that by this time in my recovery, wanted what God would ordain. I wanted what God would want for me, so I knew that I couldn’t have sex with another partner. Now this sex with self is no longer something that He was going to condone either. The reason for it was to self-pleasure because I wasn’t sure that He was ever going to give me a partner to ever experience sex again. So in my mind, I would masturbate to accomplish that. It was almost like, “Well Lord until you bring me somebody, I’m going to go ahead and take care of this myself.” Not finding it anywhere in scripture, as people say. He brought me (you may or may not want to put this in there) but He brought me to the second commandment, the first and second commandment, not having other gods or idols, nor rulers or judges, not to serve them or please them. I was becoming the ruler and the judge. I was the one who was determining, “Well you’re not going to be providing a partner for me. I’m going to get pleasure out of this, and I’m going to do it for this because you’re not going to.” I became the God, the judge.
The next thing that came after that was the thought, the mind, what drove the act in the first place. That’s where the taunting, you really have to break it down to get it to place. What drove the thoughts life was the taunting, the things that you don’t even hear because it’s so automatic. You hear them all of the time as they are running in the background. “You’re never going to be married. You’re never going to have a husband. You’re never going to be enough.” You’re trying to shut them up by doing something automatically. In order to hold every thought captive, you have to look at that arrow that’s coming in. What is that Lord? Is that the truth or a lie? It’s a lie. Stand on the truth, okay.
It’s hard, over and over and over again. It went from the external having sex with other partners, having sex with self, your fantasy life, the thought processes of it will be better when taking it to the point, now to going, “Lord, you know what? This is yours. You have called me into being. This is your story. You’re going to equip me to do whatever. You know what, you just tell me what to do. I won’t fantasize anymore how this ending is going to work out because you have already got this.”
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