| << | Contents | >> |
Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
<page 207>In mining, the term “mother lode” refers to the main vein of gold or silver that runs through a mine site. I believe God has led me into the mother lode of feelings that have fueled my fetish.
In this series of books, I have done my best to tell my story as it truly happened rather than as I thought it should have happened. I decided early on not to spin the facts to fit into commonly accepted ideas about recovery. I would be honest about my experiences.
Most of the risks associated with this were related to how people would treat me and my family if they learned about my sexual difficulties. There was one risk, however, that concerned me for a different reason. It was related to the fact that a number of my important breakthroughs have come as I have intentionally exposed myself to limited temptation. Among sex addicts, the counsel is generally to avoid temptation. I have been concerned that my example might encourage others to try to walk in a level of freedom they are not yet ready to handle (1 Corinthians 8:9).
I do have a few rules I follow to simplify my life and keep me safe. The first is what I call the bikini rule; I automatically turn my eyes away from any woman who has less than a bikini on. (Of course, to make my life easier I almost always turn away from tempting scenes involving more clothes, but I don’t have a hard and fast rule for that.) My second rule is that I don’t watch scenes of lovemaking, even if the participants have some clothes on. A third rule is that I do my best to avoid spending time alone with any woman who isn’t a relative.
Aside from those three commonsense boundaries, I just try to love Jesus and obey His word. I have no filter on my computer, I watch whatever movie I want that isn’t pornography, and my accountability to others is based on friendship, not on a structured system of checks and balances.
You might wonder, “If the author doesn’t want to cause others to stumble, why is he even mentioning this?” I do so because I must now share a testimony that came as I allowed myself to be tempted in ways that many would discourage. It wasn’t a big temptation for me. Remember, I first learned to overcome a smoking fetish in a world where I knew almost nothing about what I was facing and where I was surrounded by smokers. What I am about to describe is nothing compared to that. And to be honest, what I am about to describe was about removing the unhealthy panic-charged inner walls I had built to protect myself during my initial overcoming. Nevertheless, I know that some will object because I chose not to flee in every way possible.
Late in 2009, I watched a mediocre horror movie. It was fairly tame, so I didn’t expect much trouble, but then a young woman in it briefly smoked a cigarette. Since my mind is capable of turning this sort of sight into a pornographic experience, I considered looking away. God had spoken to me so many times when I had watched similar scenes in the past, however, that I decided to see if He would do so again.
I was tempted by what I saw, but I also sensed the Holy Spirit working. I rewound the movie and watched the scene several times to try to discern what He was saying. I don’t normally do this, but something was stirring in my spirit, and I was trying to work with it.
<page 208>Of course, I wondered if this was a good idea. A part of me said, “Maybe you are indulging in sick lusts in the name of listening to God. Even if you aren’t, you are a leader among His people who has admitted you have a problem in this area. What would someone think if they caught you replaying this scene? You need to stop right now and block this image from your mind.”
I understood the concern, but I would rather be healed than to unwisely hold onto my reputation. I have found that one of the best ways to learn about my temptations is to listen to God while I experience them. This is an extension of how I live my entire life. I not only try to discern His voice in obvious ways like meditating on scriptures, worshipping, praying, going to church, fasting, listening to Bible teachings, and interpreting dreams – I also try to discern it in less obvious ways. For example, I look for His input while watching horror movies or experiencing sexual temptations.
As I considered the young woman in the movie, I was struck by the fact that my emotions were painting her as competent, wise, and caring. She seemed like an ideal wife and mother. This was in stark contrast to the way the movie portrayed her. She was risking her unborn child’s health by smoking while pregnant, and she was pregnant outside of marriage. The scene was intended to show her in a negative light, yet I saw her as a picture of grace, beauty, and stability. I sensed there must be some message for me in the contradiction.
She began to change in my mind. Where at first I saw her only as a temptation, she transformed into a reminder of all the good I had received over the years from smokers. I remembered my mother’s care, the encouragement of coaches, and the mentoring of a friend’s father. They had taught me how to be responsible and considerate – all with a cigarette between their fingers and smoke coming out of their airways.
I realized that the woman in the movie was a sexualized picture of those positive experiences from my childhood. My interactions with parental authority figures had formed the basic emotions and images that were foundational to my developing internal Parent. They were key parts of my emotional sanity, yet I was unable to feel them without also feeling a sexual association with smoking.
In some ways, it made sense that smoking would be associated with emotional sanity in my heart. From the time I came from the womb, my newly opened eyes saw my mother’s nurture in the context of this habit. Then a string of helpful adults modeled it for me while leading me to maturity. Unfortunately, the fetish had taken these experiences and linked them to sex in my heart. Once it had, the memories of much of my childhood were reshaped into temptations.
Because of this, my conscience had banned them from my heart, but the woman in the movie had now brought them back. As I considered what I was feeling, I gained an insight I had never before seen. I realized that when I had first become offended by smoking, my heart hadn’t known what to do with much of anything associated with it, including my good memories of those who had practiced it. My young mind couldn’t make sense of the conflict between the wisdom they were offering and the stupidity they were modeling, so I closed my developing internal Parent to their influence.
This had robbed me of the warmth, wisdom, and stability they had offered. A book I had read shortly before this insight, Breaking Free: Understanding sexual addiction and the Healing Power <page 209>of Jesus by Russell Willingham,[88] helped me to understand the significance of what had happened. The book told me that a large part of sexual addiction is unmet childhood needs that have become sexualized. In my case, my childhood anger over smoking had created intense needs by cutting me off from my connection to my parents and mentors.
The smoking fetish had been my way of reconnecting and returning to a measure of stability. Unfortunately, it did so by warping the connection into “smoking fetish form.” From that point on, my past and future experiences with many of the adults in my life would lead me into temptation.
It occurred to me that my fetish was more than a typical addiction in which I sought to use pleasure to mask pain. It was also an attempt to restore a loving and open perspective toward the early parental authority figures that had shaped my life. I was trying to reconnect with them so I could once again benefit from the warm memories and emotions I had lost.
Smoking had become a symbol of the life the adults around me enjoyed, and sex had become the power that energized my emotions to grab hold of that life. The fetish allowed me to feel the nurture, acceptance, security, competence, independence, and impact I perceived to be a part of my parent’s world. It was my attempt to restore my mental and emotional health.[89]
In the Introduction to this book, I mentioned that I didn’t believe the draw of my fetish was based on a desire to recreate the circumstances of my youth.[90] I came to that conclusion because I assumed the only reason I would want to do so would be to do for another woman what I had failed to do for my mother – to help her stop smoking.
I was looking at the wrong motive. I didn’t want to recreate my past to save my mother, or any other woman; I wanted to do it to save myself. I needed to feel the emotions that are necessary parts of knowing that we are loved, cared for, and on the path to our destiny, and the fetish was the easiest way for me to do that.
This observation gave me new insight into something I had learned through experience: Many times when I had run from the fetish in my heart, I found myself falling into emotional instability. On the other hand, moving toward it, as long as I relied on the Lord, had almost always led to growth. This was because running separated me from the memories and feelings that were foundational to my internal Parent. Though they had become fused with the fetish, they were still key ingredients for my mental health.
As has often happened in my recovery, I was discovering a new area in which something good had become twisted by sin. Sex is good, and it has a way of turning our perceptions of love, family, and life into an emotionally charged view of what will make us happy. It fuses our childhood expectations into a vision of fulfillment with the person of our dreams. This is a blessing when our vision reflects reality. Our fairytale-like desires join with a real-life person to create a fulfilling relationship that builds a family.
When our expectations are distorted by sin, however, sex can turn that wonderful process into a grim fairytale that leads to destruction. My sexuality had formed during a time of such emotional <page 210>turmoil that I was cutting myself with razor blades. I had built my vision of happiness out of my experiences in a culture of addiction, glorification of outward image, and performance-based materialism. The fetish transformed those experiences into a dark fairytale that felt beautiful but left me dysfunctional.
I had tried to run from the resulting inner contradiction, but I couldn’t. The dark fairytale was built out of pieces of my heart that I needed. Those pieces were never going to be fully healed until I allowed them to surface so God could fix the fairytale. I had to stop running from my past and work through the misled emotions that had been formed during it.
I knew from the Scriptures that if I tried to do this by giving into the fetish, any mental health I might gain would be offset by the destruction of sin. What I instead needed to do was to regain the memories and emotions through obedience by God’s grace.
I sensed the Holy Spirit showing me the next step to take in that process. In order to more fully forgive the adults who had confused me, I needed to appreciate the kindness and wisdom they had shown, even if that kindness and wisdom tempted me toward the fetish. My conscience had mistakenly banned their input because my emotions tended to transform it into “smoking fetish form.” Now I had to return to it so God could take me back to the point where I had gone off track and help me to grow up in the right way from there.
This was not going to be easy. My memories were deeply intertwined with the fetish. It was going to require a good deal of Self-Control to let myself feel them and yet keep my actions godly. I would also need to hold my conscience steady so it wouldn’t overreact to the depth of the fetish-related feelings that would show up.
Though the adults I remembered weren’t directly connected with strong Triggers (none were pretty young women), they were a large part of the subconscious distortion that led to Triggers. Now I had to endure that distortion for long enough for God to rescue from it my perceptions of childlikeness, belonging, family, love, safety, growth, responsibility, authority, confidence, identity, and normalness. I simply did not know how to feel like a child embracing life and learning to live in the world without my feelings being colored by fetish-related images.
My condition was like an emotional version of the AIDS virus, which infects a person’s immune system. My emotional immune system was my internal Parent, which God had given to guide and protect my childlike experience of life. Unfortunately, my internal Parent’s foundational impressions had been shaped in a way that made it unhealthy in itself. Any attempt to use it for the tasks of life tended to spread the fetish throughout my personality. The part of me that should have protected me had become the carrier of a spiritual disease.
As a Christian, I had often tried to fix this problem by returning my internal Parent to its abusive form, the one that had led me to cut myself with razor blades. I became fearful, over-controlling, and downhearted, because that was better than being a pervert.
Perhaps it was the confusion brought by the two fallen forms of my internal Parent that motivated God to so often bypass my internal Parent when He spoke to me. Most notably, I consistently heard Him as a result of watching horror movies[91] or scenes of women smoking. Exposing myself to these sorts of images was such an “unparental” activity that it required me to <page 211>quiet the well-meaning objections of my conscience, nurturing emotions, and judgmental emotions. I knew that most people would be highly skeptical of what I was doing, and some would outright condemn me for it. This made me want to play it safe …but I was finding Jesus, so I decided to accept the risks. If He was showing up when I engaged in these borderline activities (which I didn’t believe were forbidden by Scripture, though they seemed unwise), I didn’t want to turn back out of fear of what others might think.
In the process, I learned that even my conscience could stand in the way of God’s work. My inner moral compass had mistakenly been offended more times than I could number by the craziness of the journey I have shared in these books. My life didn’t turn out according to the nice neat “Christian” expectations of my heart. The unorthodox nature of what was happening forced me to search the Bible and make careful theological distinctions in order to separate the voice of God from the voice of my internal Parent.
I eventually realized that my conscience hadn’t understood who God had made me to be. It looked at my impulsive and compulsive emotions, which often went in the wrong direction, and it said in effect, “This is so far from what the inner life of a Christian should be that I have to clamp down on myself and squash my emotions.” It couldn’t believe that anyone who was serious about God could be having as much trouble as I did. I wondered why I couldn’t “be like everyone else?”
It was only when God had taught me about my Brokenness for many years that I saw what was really happening. He had made my impulsive and compulsive emotions strong and unorthodox because He had a purpose for them. I wasn’t “like everyone else” because I was designed for a plan that was unique to me. God wanted to meet me in the middle of my impulsiveness and turn it into a childlike joy that would sustain me even when those around me became discouraged. He wanted to meet me in the middle of my compulsiveness and turn it into a sense of responsibility that wouldn’t compromise in the face of adversity. I had been given an assignment from Him that required a godly form of the emotions my conscience feared were too dangerous to manage.
The process of transformation, however, called for me to face these emotions while they seemed insane. I had to learn that God could speak to me in the presence of the difficult choices, horror, and the temptations my inner life created. Amazingly, this lesson came to me as I watched TV shows that many Christians would wisely avoid. For me, however, the untraditional nature of what was happening fit perfectly with my personality. It allowed me to spread my wings and fly to Jesus in a in a way that no one, including me, expected to work – and I love that sort of experience! He met me and brought healing as He moved me from the TV screen to the far more dangerous choices, horror, and temptations brought by my own heart. The Holy Spirit empowered me with the wisdom to find the answers I had sought for decades.
I learned that freedom required me to explore my seemingly forbidden world of emotion – to cautiously, with the Holy Spirit’s help, let down the panic-charged inner walls I had erected to protect myself from sexual disaster. Experiencing my feelings was a huge part of how God healed them.
The name of a movie I heard about in college sometimes came back to me as I did this: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. It tells the story of a schizophrenic young woman who a therapist helped to leave her fantasy world and accept reality. When the young woman complained about the difficulties in the real world, the therapist responded, “I never promised you a rose garden.”
<page 212>I have sometimes felt as if I was leaving a hormone charged rose garden for a distasteful place of harsh realities and disturbing facts. I identify with Solomon’s words in Ecclesiastes:
And I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven; this burdensome task God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be numbered.
When my emotions have shown up in “smoking fetish form” they see the world as an exciting place of enticement and pleasure. It seems far more desirable than Solomon’s burdensome task under the sun. God, however, calls me to see the world as it truly is and to find His grace in the middle of it, so I follow Him into the sometimes-unpleasant feelings associated with embracing reality.
The contrast between the excitement I am forsaking and the pain of this crooked world brings grief. I often remember the girl from I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, and I identify with her hesitancy to move forward. Sometimes life feels too unsafe to step out in faith that God is bringing me into something good. I wonder, “Is this really worth it? This is way more difficult than I expected.”
For example, the most recent years of my recovery have occurred during the Great Recession which started in 2008. I have watched as three Christian friends were laid off from my workplace, and two of them are still unemployed after two years. In an attempt to keep my job, I have worked long hours and given up weeks of vacation, all while coming to grips with fears and insecurities that have tempted me to turn back to the fetish.
I have been forced to face a high-pressure form of the world my earthly father warned me about, the one in which you have to work extremely hard or someone will take your job. Handling that world tends to send me into a state of adrenaline driven hyper-drive, and life begins to look like well-paid slavery.
The fetish was my way of avoiding that. It transformed the world into a less cruel and loveless place, one that I could handle with a few simple activities that sent me into forbidden bliss. In order to leave this false hope, I need to walk through my painful emotions as God teaches me how to find His purpose for them.
It isn’t a rose garden experience, but if I don’t embrace the struggle, my inner being will not grow in the way God wants. Jesus meets me as I learn to live from my whole heart while facing hardships, difficulties, and temptations. He gives me lasting joy as He takes my experience on this planet and transforms it into something beautiful in His time.[92] And though the world can be a scary place, He is bringing me to a better home.
Who needs a fetish that sort of feels like heaven when before long I will experience the real thing? God never promised me a rose garden; He promised something far better!
<page 213> More than two years have passed since I wrote the first part of this chapter. (It is 2012 as I finish this chapter.) I have allowed myself to experience the memories and emotions of my past. For most of my adult life I had treated them as if they were a graveyard of evil ghosts I needed to keep buried. Now I found that many of those “evil ghosts” were actually living parts of my being trying to find their proper expression.
Each memory came back more or less in “smoking fetish form.” Sometimes the association was so strong that I almost had a physical sensation of being able to smell cigarette smoke as the emotions emerged, even though there was none around. I endured the connection as I sought God for the wisdom to know how He wanted to transform my heart into “Jesus-form.”
The messages of this book guided me as I mourned the pain, disciplined myself in truth, and discovered the beauty of God’s plan for my life. The lessons of the previous four chapters were especially helpful. I controlled my Physical Desires, explored my Intimacy Desires, didn’t overreact to Triggers, and counseled my Love Protector to give God time to work.
I gained a new understanding of what it means to be redeemed from the empty way of life that has been passed down to us by our forefathers.
For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers…
(1 Peter 1:18, NIV)
I had previously tried to walk in new life by cutting myself off from the old. Now I re-experienced the old for the sake of discovering the feelings that had become lost in it. I separated the precious from the worthless, appreciated the kindnesses while forgiving the sins, understood my past and integrated it with my present, repented from levels of rebellion I didn’t know existed, discovered how to do that while holding to my desire for a better life than the one I rebelled against, identified demons and sent them scurrying, saw what I needed from my childhood and found its fulfillment in Jesus.
The Holy Spirit was working in me, leading me forward while I barely knew where I was going. My emotions made a large step toward greater sanity. Sound thinking become more their typical state, rather than something my reason enforced on them. I still have to deal with abnormal temptations, but I do so as a natural part of nurturing my emotions rather than by trying to shut them down. It is amazing how my life has changed as I have learned to nurture my heart rather than cut myself off from it.
I have reclaimed feelings that are foundational for peace and Contentment in all of life, and they have, in many ways, replaced the fetish. It makes sense that this would be the case; a significant part of the fetish was these same feelings in a twisted form. In their new form, they motivate me to enjoy life based on purity. Their presence no longer drags me into compulsive sexualized thinking.
In mining, the term “mother lode” refers to the main vein of gold or silver that runs through a mine site. I believe God has led me into the mother lode of feelings that have fueled my fetish. It hasn’t been an easy process, but Jesus has prepared me for it. I am able to mine the treasures that were buried in the previously off-limits caverns of my soul.
Search Comments
This page has been visited 0002 times.
| << | Contents | >> |
10 per page