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A Leadership Magazine Article
The War Within: An Anatomy Of Lust -- Section 3
Battle Strategy: Some Practical Advice
In the account of my personal pilgrimage, I resisted giving "practical advice" on lust. There are no ten easy steps to overcome temptation.At times the power of obsession overwhelms all reason or common sense. And yet, throughout the war within, I did learn some valuable strategy, which I will add in hopes of preventing needless scars.
1. Recognize and name the problem. If it's lust, call it lust. you must admit your condition before it can be treated. Much of my earlier rationalizations were blatant attempts to shirk the name lust - I tried to redefine it.2. Stop feeding lust. Killing fantasies is like trying not to think of a pink elephant, and there is no "magic bullet" solution to this problem. But cutting off desires through diversion, not dwelling on them when they begin, and trying to eliminate some of the mystery can help in the early stages of lust. The farther down the road you travel through books, magazines, films, and personal contacts, the more steps you must one day retrace.
3. Demythologize it. Sexual stimulations promise a lie. Cheryl Tiegs is not going to bed with you - in fact, photo sessions that create sexy photos are tiresome and mechanical, not at all erotic. Recognize that Playboy centerfolds are touched up in the miracle of dye transfer printing, that they represent an unrealizable ideal of sexuality that does not include feelings of impotence, awkwardness, monthly menstrual periods, and many other reminders of humanity. Life is far different from what soft porn portrays it to be.
4. Confess its real price. I learned the ultimate price just in time, by watching my pastor friend who went beyond the point of no return and is today as miserable a man as I have ever met. All the time lust was demanding its tribute from me, in the form of irritation with my wife and in the subtle and progressive loss of intimacy with my wife and with God. My own self-respect was gradually deteriorating also.
5. Trace its history. Professional counselors have proven very helpful in pointing out the root causes of my obsession that began in my sexually repressed childhood. For some people, lust comes from trying to win back the love of a distant parent, or earning vengeance against a disappointing God, or overcoming feelings of physical inadequacy by feeding myths. Friends and sometimes professional counselors can help you identify the cycle of lust by exploring its history with you.
6. Study sex in perspective. The church has unwittingly caused many of the problems with sexuality by elevating it to a singular status as heinous sin. A general term, immorality, comes to focus on merely one sin, sexual sin. From God's perspective, sex is a powerful dimension of humanity, but it was never meant to preoccupy or gain dominion over the creation. Getting an idea of what God had in mind won't tame the obsession but can be a picture to remember when the obsession flares, a counterpoint, a balance leading to alignment.
7. Build fantasies on God's ideal. It may help to channel your fantasy life toward your spouse. As you become creative and loving and healthful when thinking about sex, the obsession lessens. When a fantasy pops into mind, try to direct it and control it.
8. Work on some positive addictions. Tennis, maybe, or scuba diving or hang-gliding. I've found that even video games like Pac-Man preoccupy me for a time, especially when I am traveling. When I'm tempted to go to a sexually explicit movie, now I seek out a safe, constructive film to occupy my evening. The obsession fades, at least temporarily.
9. Recognize the humanity of your victims. A friend of mine told me that he had regularly picked up Playboy and Penthouse until his daughter turned eighteen. Then for the first time he realized those "Girls from Kokomo" or "Girls from the Southwest Conference" were real human beings, daughters of parents like himself. Who can know what subtle destruction occurred inside them as they were coaxed to use their bodies to entice male America? As long as the obsession can make you blind enough to care about satisfying only your needs, you will continue. But once you realize what you are doing to others, including the objects of your lust and your own family, obsession becomes more difficult.
10. Obsession comes out of a legitimate set of anxieties; follow them to their authentic source. I need God. I need a father. I need female friendship. I need to be hugged. I need to be loved, and to love. I need to feel worthwhile, attractive to someone. Those are my real needs, not the three-minute rush of voyeurism inside a twenty-five cent booth. Let these real needs be met when the obsession arises, and the sexually based substitute may lose its grip.
PART 2
The War Within Continues
An update on a Christian leader's struggle with lust.Five years ago LEADERSHIP published "The War Within" (Fall 1982), a candid description of one Christian leader's fierce, protracted battle with pornography and lust. The article generated more mail than any single article, before or since, in the history of LEADERSHIP. Though responses were diverse, their sheer volume showed how troublesome the problem is for many Christian leaders. Since then, much has happened.
Pornography became the focus of national attention with the Attorney General's Commission and its landmark report last year, which among other things, documented the rapid spread of porn in recent years.
The VCR, barely known five years ago, has made sexually-oriented material much more easily available and brought it into many homes for the first time. Sales of hard-core porn videos, for example, more than doubled from 1983 to 1986.
This trend has not spared pastors, according to a LEADERSHIP survey (see the special report on page 12). Of the pastor responding to the survey, 20 percent said they look at sexually oriented media (in print, video, or movies) at least once a month. And 38 percent said they find themselves fantasizing about sex with someone other than their spouse at least once a month.
All this prompted us to seek out a pastor who knows how intensely difficult the war against lust can be - yet also knows God's grace and strength applied in that situation. Who better than the author of the previous article? Here then, is an update from the anonymous writer of "The War Within," and the lessons he has learned in the intervening five years.
I was sitting in an aisle seat on a cross-country flight when the passenger across the aisle, one row ahead, pulled out a magazine from his briefcase. I recognized something familiar in the furtive way he looked around, nervously adjusted his posture, and opened the magazine. He held the pages open just far enough to see inside, but from my angle I had a clear view of various women spreading their legs for the camera.
It seemed incongruous, even bizarre, for a man dressed in a business suit to be studying some anonymous woman's private parts in the artificial setting of jammed-together airplane seats and plastic folding trays. But after the sense of the bizarre had passed, I felt another twinge, this one a mixture of pain and sadness. Five years ago, I was that man in the business suit, addicted to lust. I wrote about my struggle in the Fall 1982 edition of LEADERSHIP, in an article called "the war within." After the sadness had passed, I felt an enormous sense o relief, for I realized that my initial sense of bizarreness was a sign of the healing God has accomplished so far.
Not long after the airplane trip, an editor from LEADERSHIP asked if I would do another article, recounting what I had learned about lust in the five intervening years. At first, I didn't like the idea. It seemed an unnecessary probing of old wounds. The article had been for me a means of catharsis, a deliverance. Why dredge up the past? Finally, however, I agreed to consider the request.
I reread the original article for the first time in five years. Its passionate tone startled me. I had forgotten how completely sex had dominated my life. I found myself feeling compassion for the author of the article, momentarily forgetting his identity! Again, I breathed a prayer of thanks for God's healing. In the same file folder as the article, I also found an envelope from LEADERSHIP containing several dozen letters from readers, and I proceeded to read each one.
Some readers felt a sense of shock and betrayal. They criticized the article for being prurient and disgusting. The author had been far too explicit, they said; he dwelt on lurid details as if he still enjoyed his memories of lust.
"The author cannot possibly be considered a Christian," concluded one reader (I hope this person never encounters Augustine's Confessions). Others claimed the article had caused them to distrust their pastor and all Christian leaders: 'Who knows what might be going on in their minds.'
I pray and hope that my article did not lead anyone astray. I must admit that, at a distance of five years, the article seemed somewhat overwrought. Does the issue of lust merit such a long, involved treatment? But I also know that the article was true, every word of it. I lived it. War raged within me for a decade.
Five years ago some people were scandalized that a Christian magazine would print such a blunt, realistic confession by a Christian leader. But in recent days we have read far more explicit accounts of Christian leaders' immorality in Time and Newsweek.
Not all the letters were negative, however. More than half expressed deep gratitude. I have a whole stack of letters that begin like this: "I thought I was the only one with this problem. Thank you so much for having the courage to bring it out into the open." Some go on to describe agonizing personal battles with lust and immorality. At least one reader said the article permanently cured his lust problem by frightening him away from the temptations of bare flesh.
The most moving letters, however, came from people who have not been cured. "Please, tell me how to solve my problem!" they wrote. "You said that God 'came through' for you but he has not come through for me. What can I do?" It was this group of letters that ultimately convinced me to write about what has happened in the past five years.
The Road To Freedom
I begin with humility and gratitude to God for breaking my addiction. I came to see the problem of lust as a true addiction, much like addiction to alcohol or drugs or gambling. And I can truly say that I have been set free of, in Augustine's words, "scratching lust's itchy sore." For those still caught in the web of that addiction, I bring a message of hope.Ironically, I am most grateful for two things I normally try to avoid: guilt and fear. Augustine records rather candidly that, except for the fear of God's judgment in the afterlife, Epicurus would surely have lured him even deeper into carnal pleasures. A similar kind of fear and guilt kept me on edge during my long struggle with lust.
Psychologists use the term "cognitive dissonance" to describe the battle inside a person who believes one way and acts another. For example, a woman will normally feel intense cognitive dissonance if she secretly carries on an affair with another man while pretending to be happily married to her husband. Even if her husband suspects nothing, her own mind will constantly remind her that she is living with contradictions. Because the mind cannot sustain too much cognitive dissonance, it will seek ways to resolve the contradictions.
Perhaps the wife will unconsciously let slip certain clues about her affair, or maybe she will accidentally call her husband by her lover's name. In such unexpected ways the mind will attempt to bring together her two lives.
A sense of cognitive dissonance haunted me during my addiction to lust. I believed one set of things about Christian ethics, the dangers of separating physical appeal from other aspects of sexuality, and the irrationality of an obsession with body parts. But I acted contrarily. From the pulpit I preached that a person's worth is measured internally, and that ugly people and fat people and the physically handicapped can express God's image. But, like much of male America, I spent my time drooling over shapely women with well- formed legs.
Most urgently, I experienced cognitive dissonance in my marriage. I had roped off large areas of my sexuality from my wife, which I cultivated in private, usually on trips, in visits to adult movie theaters and magazine shops. How could I expect to find sexual fulfillment in my marriage when I was nurturing a secret life of sexuality apart from my marriage?
Guilt and fear finally forced me to deal with the cognitive dissonance. Guilt made it feel dissonant in the first place; it constantly reminded me that my actions did not coincide with my beliefs. And fear, especially the fear I experienced after I learned how sex had utterly destroyed my Southern pastor friend, forced me to face my own sin. It led me, kicking and protesting all the way, toward repentance.
I mention this because guilt and fear do not often get good press in our liberated society. Had I sought help from a professional counselor, that counselor may well have dealt with the symptoms of guilt and fear rather than with the root problem. I have come to believe that the guilt and fear were wholly appropriate; they were, in fact, the prods that led me to resolve the cognitive dissonance in my life.
Today, I hear cries of outrage against anyone who, like President Reagan or Jerry Falwell, conveys a tone of judgment. President Reagan simply asks that sexual abstinence be taught as an option, possibly the best option, for young people who wish to avoid the health dangers associated with sexual promiscuity. "Don't lay a guilt trip on us!" many people respond. "Don't try to scare us." But I have learned that guilt and fear may serve us well, as warnings against the direct dangers posed by a disease like AIDS, or against the more subtle dangers represented by an addiction to lust.
Yet guilt and fear are such powerful forces that they may also deceive. In my case, they deceived me into seeing God as my enemy. Now as I read "The War Within," it reminds me of a testimony delivered at a revival tent meeting; "For many years I wallowed in the stench and filth of sin until finally I reached the end of my rope and in desperation turned to God." Typically, as I did in the article, the testifier spends most of his time on vivid descriptions of the smells and sights of that sin.
I now view my pilgrimage differently. I believe God was with me at each stage of my struggle with lust. It wasn't that I had to climb toward a state of repentance to earn God's approval; that would be a religion of works. Rather, God was present with me even as I fled from him. At the moment when I was most aware of my own inadequacy and failure, at that moment I was probably closest to God. That is a religion of grace.
The title of one book on my shelf, "He Came Down from Heaven", summarizes the gospel pretty well. Immanuel: God is with us, no matter what. He calls us to heaven but descends to earth to rescue us.
I wish we in the church did a better job of conveying God's love for sinners. From the church, I feel mainly judgment. I cannot bring my sin to the church until it has been neatly resolved into a warm, uplifting testimony. For example, if I had come to the church in the midst of my addiction to lust, I would have been harshly judged. That, in fact, is why I had to write my article anonymously. Even after the complete cycle of confession and forgiveness, people still wrote in comments like, "The author cannot possibly be considered a Christian."
Having said that, however, I also recognize that many people who struggle with addictions have been greatly helped by counselors or other mature Christians to whom they have made themselves accountable. They testify that knowing there is someone to whom they have to report honestly and regularly has been a key factor in resisting temptation.
I have attended a few meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, and they convinced me that we in the church have something to learn from that group. Somehow they require accountability and communicate the "Immanuel-ness" of God. He is with you when you succeed and when you fail. He does not wait with folded arms form you to pick yourself out of the gutter. His hands are stretched out toward you, eager to help.
Where are the hands of the church?
Bearing Scars
So far I have given mostly good news: the good news that an addiction can be broken, that God's love extends to the uttermost, that even guilt and fear can work for our good. But in honesty I must bring bad news as well.In Sunday school we learn simple illustrations about the long-term effects of sin: "God will forgive you for the sin of smoking, but you'll always have spots on your lungs." Damage from sexual sins is rarely so easy to detect, but such sins do indeed have consequences.
I bear scars from my addiction to lust, even though the addiction seems broken. First there is the scar of "spoiled innocence." Sex has a certain "you can't go back again" quality. Pornographers understand this well: They know that what titillates this month will only bore next month, and they must constantly search for new and exciting sexual variety in order to hold a viewer's attention. Pornography feeds on our fascination with the forbidden, but as the rules of what is forbidden change, our fascination changes as well. We want more.
I don't know exactly how to describe this long-term effect, but I definitely feel a sense of spoiled innocence. My sexual fantasy life far outstripped my sexual experience within marriage, and I have not been able to bring the two together. I was a voyeur, experiencing sex in loneliness and isolation. But sex is meant to be shared. To the degree that I indulged my voyeurism, I drifted away from my wife and our shared experiences.
And of course my years of deception undermined trust. Eventually I told my wife everything about my addiction to lust, and she accepted it with astonishing grace and forgiveness. Still, though, she must wonder: When I travel without her, am I trustworthy? I sometimes wonder if I can even trust myself. By living in a state of cognitive dissonance for a number of years, I developed a great ability to live falsely. As I ignored the early warning signs of guilt, I opened up even greater possibilities of self-deception. Perhaps I have seared my own conscience. I continue to pray for the Holy Spirit's healing of my receptivity to him.
These are some of the long-term effects from my experience with lust. Surely similar scars form as a result of adultery, divorce, or a decision to abort a child. God will forgive such actions and grant repentance and restoration. But healing does not come free of long- term cost.
How do I respond to sexual pressures now? I am still a sexual being, a male. That has not changed. I still experience the same magnetic force of sexual desire that used to pull me toward pornography. What do I do with those urges? What do any of us do? As I see it, we can respond in three possible ways: indulgence, repression, or reconnection.
The Way Of Indulgence
"The War Within" described in detail - some say too much detail - a process of indulgence, of following my sexual desires wherever they might lead. Our society seems strangely schizophrenic on the wisdom of that approach. On the one hand, authors advocating "The New Celibacy" appear on talk shows and Time features articles on the new ethic of intimacy. On the other hand, you need only flip through the advertisements in a magazine like Vogue or Glamour to realize our society's approving attitude toward lust."Lust is back!" heralded an article in Esquire a few years ago. The sexual revolution of the sixties stemmed from an overall assault against tradition and authority. Soon feminism put a damper on anything that treated women as sexual objects. But now it seems perfectly acceptable to treat either women or men as sexual objects. Today's sexual revolution is fueled not so much by a reaction against authority as by the New Paganism that glorifies the human body (witness the incredible boom in body-building, fitness and exercise).
Cable television and video cassettes now make pornography available to nearly everyone. The recent book Vital Signs reports that of Christian households hooked into cable television, 23 percent subscribe to porno channels - the same percentage as the nation as a whole.
What harm is there, after all, in displaying a little skin? Christians tend to be so uptight about sex; why not experiment with pornography to help loosen us up? There are many answers, I suppose, but one especially seems to fit my experience: pornography radically disconnects sex from its intended meaning. Human sexuality, a gift from God, was designed to express a relationship between a man and a woman, but pornography separates out one aspect of that gift - physical appeal - and focuses exclusively on it.
The specialists like to remind us that sexuality reveals our animal nature. It is a matter of biology, they say of glands and hormones and physical maturation. Sex is technique: it can be learned, and mastered, and perfected. And perhaps pornography can assist you in mastering the technique.
But certain facts about human sexuality still puzzle the experts. While it resembles animal sexuality in some ways, it also expresses fundamental differences. Human beings possess disproportionate sexual equipment: Among mammals, only human females develop enlarged breasts before their first pregnancy, and among primates the human male has the largest penis. In contrast to virtually all other animals, human beings engage in sex as a year-round option rather than limiting intercourse to the time of estrus. Behaviorists puzzle over these anomalies. What evolutionary advantage do they offer?
Perhaps the answer does not lie in "evolutionary advantage" at all. Perhaps it lies in the nature of human sexuality as an expression of relationship rather than as an act of instinct for the purpose of reproduction.
The most telling difference between human and animal sexuality is this: all other animals perform sexual acts in the open, without embarrassment. Only human beings see any advantage to privacy "Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to," said Mark Twain. For us, sex is different. It has an aura of mystery about it, and instinctively we want to keep it separate, to experience it in private. We treat it as we treat religion, with an aura of apartness, or "holiness."
As free creatures, human beings can, of course, rebel against these natural tendencies that have characterized all human societies. We can treat sex as an animal function, separating out the physical act from any aspect of relationship. We can tear down all the fences that societies have traditionally erected to protect the mystery surrounding sexuality. That, in fact, is precisely what pornography does. And it does so at our peril.
A few years ago in major cities like San Francisco, you could find certain establishments that catered to the sexual interests of gay men. Some of these reduced sex to its most basic nature. A man could enter a stall and insert his genitals through an opening in the wall at crotch level. He could thus have a sex act performed on him without ever seeing his sexual partner. Such parlors offered efficient and anonymous sex, free from the trammels of relationship. In 1970, at the height of the gay sexual revolution, Kinsey Institute researchers found that 40 percent of white male homosexuals in San Francisco had had at least 500 sexual partners in 28 percent reported over 1,000 partners. (The hysteria over AIDS has greatly reduced those statistics, although now "safe sex" is being touted as a way to enjoy such pleasures without the risk of infection.)
What does all this frenetic sexual activity prove? It demonstrates, of course, the enormous power of the sexual drive in human beings, who are capable of indulgence at a rate without precedent in the animal kingdom. And it also shows that sex can be reduced to an utterly anonymous act, disconnected from relationship. The San Francisco statistics make that point most dramatically, but our society offers many other, more subtle reminders. "What's love got to do with it?" Tina Turner bellows into a microphone. Surely you can have great sex without the complications of love.
