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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
God’s wisdom grew in me. I came to believe that a good deal of what I thought were “fetish related feelings” were simply my sexual emotions showing up in the form they had learned in my youth.
For most of my life, I was so confused by my Trigger Mechanism that I had little idea what to do with it. When it expressed itself with my wife, it was beautiful and moving. When it showed up unwanted with the fetish, it was terrifying and embarrassing. It seemed impossible to figure out this part of my personality.
Once I realized I needed to nurture my Trigger Mechanism, I did my best to learn how to work with it rather than against it. The steps I found most helpful were:
Relationship with God – this is the foundation for everything.
2. Self-control – the ability to face my Triggers without giving into them was essential for understanding my Trigger Mechanism. If I fell to sinful actions when I was tempted, that would have undermined my ability to learn as I experienced temptation. I had to choose to suffer. It hurt to make good decisions when I was sexually triggered, but I wouldn’t be able to grow if I was not willing to do so.
Affirmation – rather than scolding myself for Triggers and the difficulty of handling them, I affirmed the part of me that produced them. I treasured what God had created while seeking His way to express it.
Wisdom – I gently counseled myself while I studied and experimented to learn what a healthy Trigger Mechanism should look like. God gave me the grace, courage, and patience to slowly discover His design and road to change. The lessons of a lifetime came together for me as I made my way into His answers.
Love – Our trigger mechanism was created for marriage, and marriages should be based in love.
That road has been tough at times. When we give up misguided Triggers, we can feel as if we are giving up sex altogether. We may find that a change that seems to limit unwanted Triggers has the unintended side effect of limiting all Triggers, even those with our spouses. This can be extremely distressing and can lead to much temptation to run back toward sin.
In my case, the difficulty of dealing with orientation problems sometimes even led me to question my faith in God. When changes in my orientation proved to be extremely difficult, I was tempted to conclude that the Bible’s promises were false. Fortunately, the Holy Spirit was with me, and the tough times became opportunities for growth. I saw the weaknesses of my own ability to find solutions and more fully surrendered to God and His abilities (2 Corinthians 1:9).
I gradually learned that dealing with an orientation change can be many times more difficult than dealing with sexual addiction. Sometimes I feared I was meddling with a part of my personality that was too delicate for my amateur clumsiness, and I was somewhat terrified by the thought that I might break it beyond repair. I didn’t like messing with a piece of my heart that meant so much to me …but what other good choice did have? If I tried to run back to where I came from, I would experience lifelong bondage to a smoking fetish. If I tried to run from my sexuality altogether, it would go underground and become like a subconscious terrorist, rising up unpredictably to inflict pain on my life. So I chose to humbly walk with Jesus, doing my best to follow His leading. I was concerned that doing so might mess my sexuality up even worse than it was, but I cautiously decided to take the risk with Him.
I found that a wide variety of problems can occur as God is teaches us what to do with this intimate part of our being. We may make mistakes that upset our libido for a time. Even when we are making solid progress, bouts of impotency may occur as we adjust to significant emotional breakthroughs. Fortunately, I didn’t really face this problem when I was young; it only showed up as I grew older and my sexual desires were no longer as strong. I am not sure how much of the difficulty was due to age, how much was due to the disease, and how much was due to emotional changes. Whatever the cause, I needed to work through what was happening.
God gave me grace, and I have had more than thirty years of sexual fulfilment in marriage as a result. I will share a couple of analogies that sum up some of the trigger-related lessons I have learned along the way:
The first analogy is one of a city where a large number of roads intersected in the food district. The roads came from many different directions, and there were so many of them that it was just about impossible to go anywhere in the city without passing through the food district several times a day. The enticing scent of food coming from the restaurants and markets was enough to tempt even the most diligent of dieters to stop for a bite to eat.
One man found himself so overcome with temptation that he stopped many times a day, and this left him severely overweight. The doctors told him he would die if he didn’t control his appetite, so he worked hard to develop a set of conscious and subconscious protection mechanisms to keep him away from food. For example, he avoided the food district whenever possible. And when he was in the food district, he reminded himself regularly about the consequences of overeating. Gradually, he gained control of his eating.
Then one day, the city put in place a rebuilding campaign that rerouted most of the roads that passed through the food district. The man soon found that he rarely entered that part of the city. Not only did he lose weight more quickly, but after he had reached his goal, he kept losing until he became dangerously thin. He could no longer seem to motivate himself to eat.
As he considered what was wrong, he realized that the conscious and subconscious protection mechanisms he had developed in an environment of great temptation no longer matched his needs. He no longer lived in that environment, so he had to find a new mindset to match his new circumstances.
Applying this analogy to myself, the temptation to food is symbolic for the temptation toward sexual activity. The roads represent my emotions. When my fetish was firmly in place, a large number of my non-sexual emotions led through my sexuality to the fetish. As a result, my hormones were being stirred regularly.
In order to bring my sexuality under control, I developed conscious and subconscious protection mechanisms. I avoided situations that might stir my desires. I also embraced a willingness to suffer that allowed me to stare temptation in the face and refuse it no matter how many of my hormones were stirred. In these and many other ways I fought for purity.
Just as the roads in the analogy were rerouted, God gradually rerouted my emotions away from the fetish. As a result, the level of sexual hormones circulating in my body dropped greatly, and I suddenly found that I had trouble functioning sexually. This was especially true when significant emotional healing occurred. God’s work produced changes in how I experienced my life, and I found myself losing my desire for sex.
In time, I realized that the protection mechanisms I had put in place during the times of great temptation were overkill for my new situation. I needed to find God’s grace to remove or modify them. Only in this way could I continue to rejoice in the wife of my youth (Proverbs 5:18-19).
A second analogy brings out an even more relevant aspect of the problem. In this analogy, a man was standing on the top of a hill with many waterslides. A large number of the waterslides followed a dangerous pattern in which they first passed through a beautiful place and then dropped off into a deep pit. The man was often hurt as he first enjoyed the sights in the beautiful place and then plunged into the pit.
The man eventually gained enough control on the slides to study them. He realized that they were damaged, and he sought to have them repaired. One of the main warning signs of damage was when a slide that wasn’t designed to reach the beautiful place did reach it. This meant that he was approaching the pit, and the man worked to redirect the slide away from danger.
The repair process was long and difficult, so the man was greatly relieved whenever a slide was repaired. He enjoyed the freedom the redirected slides offered, and he found himself hesitant to take trips to the beautiful place lest it tempt him to fall into the pit.
There were some slides, however, that were designed to reach the beautiful place, and some of those still moved through it into the pit. Because of the closeness between the beautiful place and the pit, these slides were much more difficult to repair than other slides. As a result, the man chose to play it safe and avoid them whenever possible.
In this analogy, the slides represent emotions in my heart. When I was young, many of those emotions led through my sexuality (the beautiful place) into the fetish (the pit). In time, however, God’s grace repaired those emotions so I could experience them without them turning sexual. I found myself enjoying my newfound distance from the fetish.
The slides that were intended to reach the beautiful place were my sexual emotions. In their case, the beautiful place was the whole purpose for which they were created. I needed to ride on their power into unity with my wife.
Unfortunately, some of those emotions were still tied to the fetish, and I wasn’t sure how to go through a healing process with them. With my other emotions, I would allow myself to have fetish-related thoughts and feelings so that I could study them. It was as if I allowed myself to ride along each slide, studying its progress as it made its way into the beautiful place. Once it got there, I would block its progress, mentally record what I had learned, and pursue God in faith for insight and change.
With my sexual emotions, however, I couldn’t stop once they reached the beautiful place; those emotions existed to help me enjoy the beautiful place. Though I wanted them to be rearranged as so many other emotions had been, any attempt to study them would bring fetish-related thoughts into my relationship with my wife. I found that extremely distressing, and I avoided it. Over time, however, my heart increasingly cried out to experience the same sort of freedom in this area that it had in so many other areas.
Then my sexuality stopped working as well as it had when I was younger. Though age certainly played a large part in that, I had to admit that my attempts to stay away from the fetish were also contributing to the problem.
I sought God about this, and I believe the He helped me to see that it was time for my Trigger Mechanism emotions to go through the same sort of transformation my other emotions were experiencing. I needed to gradually take wise steps of faith in which I carefully opened myself to the parts of my sexuality that were still tied to the fetish.
I, of course, didn’t do any actions related to the fetish, and I also didn’t try to get my wife to do any. I wasn’t trying to bring the fetish into my marriage; I was trying to reclaim the emotions behind it for my marriage. I believed that though they had been warped by sin, they were designed by God for my relationship with my wife. I was willing to continue to avoid them if necessary, but I knew that if I did so there would always be a part of me that didn’t fully belong to her. So I cautiously embraced all of my Trigger Mechanism emotions, even though some of them tended to show up in “smoking fetish form.” I sought to more fully discover God’s purpose for them.
It took years of gradual progress. I only allowed myself to experiment as far as I needed to at each step along the way. I was afraid to allow my mind to drift too far, so I took small risks. I could tell the Holy Spirit was with me, however, and this encouraged me to continue with the journey.
God’s wisdom grew in me. I came to believe that a good deal of what I thought were “fetish related feelings” were simply my sexual emotions showing up in the form they had learned in my youth. When I was a teenager, the fetish had been the way I had expressed my sexuality, so it made sense that my current experience would bring a tendency toward those expressions back. Nevertheless, the truth was that the fetish wasn’t what my sexual emotions were about. It wasn’t a matter of me having a fetish orientation and trying to love my wife in spite of that. It was a matter of me loving my wife and learning to leave behind thought patterns that distorted that love.
For years it had seemed as if all I could do was to passively believe that my fetish-related emotions were “normal” for me, that they were “who I was.” I had protected everyone from that by quarantining them, and that had worked surprisingly well for a long time. Now I was seeking to actively reclaim them by God’s grace.
As I worked with the Holy Spirit, He has gradually changed the wayward parts of my Trigger Mechanism emotions. They have become less and less about smoking and more and more about my wife. As I make my updates for version three of this book, I can no longer honestly say that I have a smoking fetish. I have a set of emotions that previously went in that direction …and they sometimes still do …but on the whole, they have found far better ways to express themselves.
I suspect that the fetish has been broken beyond repair in my heart. I am not sure if I could get it back if I wanted to …and I don’t want to. The power of God has mixed with the exceeding beauty of what I experience with my wife to turn me away from unhealthy triggers. It has been amazingly fulfilling to walk into what I sought to find for decades – a sexual reorientation.
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