What should I do with my sexual desires—my attractions, urges, impulses, cravings, fantasies, aches, longings, and yearnings? I've been on a quest to answer this question for 15 years and finally found an answer worth sharing...
Download the worksheet for this episode with 35 desires and 4 directions for each one:
https://www.husbandmaterial.com/35-desires-and-4-directions
P.S. Don't forget to sign up for the upcoming Husband Material Virtual Retreat!
Take the Husband Material Journey...
Thanks for listening!
What should I do with my sexual desires—my attractions, urges, impulses, cravings, fantasies, aches, longings, and yearnings? I've been on a quest to answer this question for 15 years and finally found an answer worth sharing...
Download the worksheet for this episode with 35 desires and 4 directions for each one:
https://www.husbandmaterial.com/35-desires-and-4-directions
P.S. Don't forget to sign up for the upcoming Husband Material Virtual Retreat!
Take the Husband Material Journey...
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to the husband material podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, kill your heart and save your relationship. My name is drew boa, and I'm here to show you how let's go.
Speaker 2:Hey, we are talking about one question answering one question, and it's a big question. And the question is what should I do with my sexual desires? And before scheduling this episode, I asked many of you, what specific sexual desires would you like me to address? And here's what you all said. Some of you who are single said, I have a lot of sexual energy, but I'm single. And I have nowhere for it to go, or I want to enjoy sex within marriage someday, but I'm only attracted to men. You know, when I felt single, I felt the same way. I felt cursed and hopeless specifically because all throughout growing up, it felt like every time I started to like someone, every time I started to like a girl, either one of our families moved away or she rejected me. And then in college I got rejected four times in a row. And with my first girlfriend who I dated for nine months, she broke up with me on Christmas morning, over email, over email on Christmas morning, 2012, needless to say my hopelessness about getting married ever was very real. It was very serious. I literally doubted whether I would ever be able to enjoy sex with another person. And when people would encourage me saying, oh, the right
Speaker 3:Person will come around. Don't worry. One day you'll get married. I just wanted to punch
Speaker 2:Them in the face. And I was so frustrated because I had these sexual desires. I had these romantic
Speaker 3:Desires and I felt like I had nowhere for them to go.
Speaker 2:And I had no indication that this would ever change for me. So I had very little hope when I was single. And that's when I began asking this question. So what can I do with my sexual desires? If I'm single, if I'm a Christian, if I believe that sex is reserved for marriage, where can I put all of this energy? Some of you who are married. So things like I want to have sex with my wife, but while we are in bed together, porn keeps coming into my mind. Somebody else said, I want to try oral sex with my wife, but I'm not sure how she feels about it. And I'm not sure what's permissible. You know, when I first got married, I had some big questions too. I actually felt conflicted and kind of gross about the things that I wanted to do sexually with my wife. For me, specifically, having a sexual fetish orthodontics meant that, Hey, we could actually maybe try some stuff that she still had a retainer from when she was little girl. So I had to ask that question, should I ask her to wear it? Would that even satisfy me? What should I do with my sexual desires? Some of you are also in a different situation. If you're married, someone said, I have a high desire for sex, but my wife has a much lower desire for sex. Or in some cases, your wife might not be able to have sexual intercourse at all. And that has been my story for the last few months, having an infant. And actually my wife has been pregnant three times in the last three and a half years. So at this point, honestly, sometimes there's a part of me that feels disappointed and discontent because I do have a lot of sexual desire. Where do I put it? Where does it go? Should I do with my sexual desires? This is the question.
Speaker 3:This is the question
Speaker 2:That didn't get answered for us when we were little kids. The question that didn't even get answered for us, because you know what I've been trying to research and reading all the psychology and theology and spiritual formation that I can over the last 10 years. And in the end, I have not found an answer that has been emotionally satisfying and spiritually satisfying at the same time. Here's some common answers to the question. What should I do with my sexual desires? Borne says, release them. That relationship that you want to have that you know, would be unhealthy, that you know, would go against God's design, just to have it that weird, the thing that you want to do with your wife, or maybe something that she's not fully comfortable with, just go for it, release it. Our pornographic culture says release your sexual desires and do whatever you want. Who cares? On the other hand, purity culture says, oh, you have these sexual desires, repress them, or say that it'll sound something more like, you know, deny yourself and take up your cross. But the implication is attack your desires, fight against them with as much spiritual firepower as possible. Use the Bible to repress, to shut down those desires, either attack, avoid or ignore. Maybe you're going to avoid those desires through accountability, software, and restrictions, and trying to get away from them as much as possible, or just ignore them, tend like they're not there and be one person, a spiritual person on Sunday, and then the very sexual person on Monday and have them completely separate. And just ignore, just ignore that these desires even exist, attack, avoid, ignore. That's what purity culture has said. I believe purity culture is the biggest hindrance in the way of freedom from pornography, because it's answering this question the wrong. Is there a better way than releasing our sexuality than repressing our sexuality? Yes. And it's called redeemed sexuality. And here's how it starts. It starts with accessing your desire. If you want to know what should I do with my sexual desires first, let's identify what those desires really are. Most of you might be thinking, oh, I already know what my desire is. I already know what my very specific sexual desire is, but really you're probably just thinking about the surface level. Sexual desire includes many categories. There's the surface level, and then there's the soul level. So the first place that we have to start with this is getting down to the soul level of our deeper desires. Here's some of the categories that we include when we talk about sexual desire, one is attractions and cravings, for example, same sex attraction, or for example, my sexual fetish for braces and orthodontics or someone else's attraction to power and domination, or to submission someone else's attraction to something different, fill in the blank for you. What are you attracted to? That is a surface level sexual desire. And when we're attracted something, we basically say, I want that. I had a student who showed me an article lately that suggests that at the core of dopamine, which is the chemical, which gets released when we use porn or when we have some kind of other satisfying experience, it's not primarily about pleasure. It's about desire. It's about what we want. And I want to make it clear that what we are attracted to and what we crave is not necessarily something that brings us pleasure. It's not necessarily something that we like we're attracted to it. We feel magnetically pulled in by it. We crave it and attraction. And a craving is probably what you're thinking about when we're talking about what should I do with my desires. You're probably thinking, what should I do with my attractions? What should I do with my cravings? There are also urges and impulses, which are very similar, except instead of I want that. It's like, I want to do that. I want to do that thing. I have the urge to use porn. I have the impulse to act out also very surface level. Still just at the level of trigger. I want that trigger. I want to do that. Now there's a little bit more of a developed kind of sexual desire, which we call sexual fantasies. A sexual fantasy is something that has a story attached to it. It's a type of sexual stimulation where something happens. And that is really exciting. That is very desirable. So it's not just, I want that. Or I want to do that. It's I want that thing to happen. Maybe I want that thing to happen to me, that's what a sexual fantasy. There's always a story. Something happens. And then something else happens. That story reels a scent. That's what we talk about with sexual fantasies. So you see within this category of desire, there are attractions, cravings, urges, impulses, fantasies, and then here's the deepest level. Okay? Here's what I want you to get down to the aches, the longings and the yearnings,
Speaker 3:Not just, I want that. I want to do that. I want that
Speaker 2:To happen. What is it that you deeply desire in your soul, that you, a core that you long for, that you yearn for? And when you get down to that level, you might find that it's something as simple as a hug, something as simple as human touch and embrace something as simple, as feeling safe or connected or known a desire to experience life as God intended, those deeper longings, those are divine. And this episode is actually a bit of a preview of unit nine of husband material academy, where we talk about your divine desires. So here's my question. Have you identified what your desires really are? Have you been able to access those deeper longings and yearnings those aches that you feel in your core? Because they are far deeper. They're way down below the surface. On the surface, we have an attraction, we have a craving, we have an urge and impulse, maybe even a fantasy, but deep down, that is where our desires truly exists. That's where we need to get to. So underneath that symptoms on the surface of our sexuality, there are these soul level desires, these divine desire. So here's what I want you to do right now. I want you to think about one of your very specific sexual urges or impulses or attractions. You got it, you thinking of it. What is the divine desire, energizing that urge? What is it that you really want as Greg Oliver said on our recent episode, what do I really want? I can boil it down to three words, know your heart. Do you know your heart? Do you know what you want? If not, that's totally okay. I actually made a worksheet for you with 35 options, 35 divine desires that you may have that are good. That are holy, that are pure. That are what we are created for, that are sacred. So to help you discover what your divine desires are, I created a list of 35 and these are not just random. These are the ones that I see most frequently with my private clients and within myself, divine desires. Let me list some of them for you. In fact, I will list them all. Acceptance, adventure, affirmation, authenticity, beauty, being desired, being known, being pursued, being noticed, belonging, certainty, community connection, control, delight, escape, friendship, honesty, honor inclusion, intimacy, love, peace, play pleasure, power protection, purpose, a lot of peace relief, rest safety, significance, strength, thrill, and worth. Which one of those resonates with you most deeply that you deeply desire that you long
Speaker 3:For, that you yearn for, that you ache for.
Speaker 2:That is your true desire. That is what God has placed within you. That is what porn is promising to your heart and failing to deliver. And in the end, it's just reinforcing the story of suffering that has brought you to that desire because here's the reality. Our deepest divine desires also have roots in our specific stories. So if you look at this worksheet that I've shared with you, you will see that for every divine desire. There's also a story of suffering. So if you deeply desire, acceptance like me, that's probably my strongest divine desire behind that. I will be looking for stories of rejection. When we look at your sexual urge or your sexual craving or your fantasy, and we try to discover, okay, your divine desire. Well, how does that make you feel? If you were to have that fantasy, if you were to get that thing that you want, how would it make you feel accepted? What would make you feel like you belong? Would it make you feel peaceful? Would it give you play pleasure, connection, delight. When have you felt the opposite? One of you felt ugly, lonely stuck. One of you felt pain. One of you felt unprotected insignificant. When have you felt weak? When you look at this worksheet, you'll see that our desires are very connected to our pain. That's the way we are. As humans, we will sometimes go to lengths to pursue pleasure, but we will do anything to avoid pain. And the reason why so many of us have pursued porn is because it promised a solution for that pain. And that solution was just a cheap pale, pathetic imitation of the true divine desire that we were created for. It's not so simple as just getting the divine desire. I'm going to get to that in a moment, but for now, I just want to invite you to access the divine desire below your specific sexual surface symptoms, access to desire, and then ask, why, why do I want this so bad? What is the story of suffering, which has led me to desire this thing so deeply? And we could spend a lot of time on our stories of suffering, and we will spend a lot of time on that at the upcoming husband material, virtual retreat. I hope many of you will join me for that. This is also what we talk about in husband material academy, but for now, I want to show you an example of some of the connections between stories of suffering, divine desires and specific sexual cravings and urges. One is a sexual attraction to so-called naughty porn. Well, how does that make you feel a sense of thrill adventure relief? Well, that really would make sense if you were a pastor's kid sitting through multiple church services on end, totally bored in the back of the pews with your phone, it makes sense that naughty porn would do something for you that it would give you a, just a glimmer, just a little bit of that thrill and adventure and relief. While at the same time, reinforcing the pain of your boredom and the complete neglect, the under stimulation and the heaviness that you carried, even in church, which is supposed to lift you up. Let's say you have a sexual urge to act out with animals. And for you, this feels intimate. It feels tender. Feels like there's a little bit of touch, even though you would never admit that to yourself. Well, that would make sense if you never felt connected to another human being. If human beings never felt comfortable or safe, of course an animal would seem less risky and maybe more approachable. So do you see how something, which seems strange on the outside once you see the story of suffering behind it? All of a sudden it makes sense. I remember in my peace app training, one of my professors told the story of a boy who faced a craving to cover himself with feces. And he would do this repeatedly, turns out he was gang raped in prison. So covering himself with feces, gave him a sense of safety and protection and maybe feeling a little bit of and power and control over his body. And
Speaker 3:Does all God given that's all good
Speaker 2:Covering himself with feces was
Speaker 3:Never about that. It was about safety. It was about protection because he was harmed violated because he was in a world of danger where he was powerless.
Speaker 2:So guys, even for the craziest, strangest, weirdest, sexual urges and desires and cravings, there's a story of suffering that helps. It makes sense and a divine desire, which needs to be accessed and identified for you to have your path forward into redeemed sexuality, into holy sexuality, into sacred sexuality, into healthy sexual adulthood. We have to get to the root. We have to get to those desires because that's what we really want. And if we're continuing to struggle with porn and we have to ask ourselves, was it really the urge or the attraction that I wanted in the end? Cause I keep coming back to it. And the urges and attractions are still there when we can have a corrective experience and the desire is completed, or the desire is satisfied, not fully necessarily, but significantly the need for porn slowly, surely does OSS. It's amazing. This is what I have seen in my own life. This is what I see in my clients. This is the hope we have for freedom, not just from sexual behavior, but from the oppression of feeling constantly at war, with our desires of fighting them or fleeing from them or freezing in the middle of them. This is the foundation for what I want to say about what we should do with our sexual desires. We have to identify, okay, what is that desire? And then the story of suffering behind it can help us make sense. Why do I want that thing so badly? Now here's the best part? What should you do with that desire? Once you figured out what it is, and this is what I have spent over a decade researching and wrestling and writing and talking and listening to understand, okay, now I will finally answer the question. What should I do with my sexual desires? And the answer is on page two of that worksheet that I shared with you, four things, four things, number one, get it from God. Number two, find it with others. Number three, give it to yourself. And number four, overflow to others. There are some spiritual writers who will say, once you find out what it is that you really want, acceptance, love, belonging, power, pleasure. Get it from God. And that's so true. That's the foundation of everything else here. God has created us for himself and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in him until we direct our desire towards him. Nothing else is going to work in the end. Nothing else is going to fully give us the deep satisfaction that we all create. We need to get it from God. So our sexual desires are spiritual because God has created us as sexual beings for himself to be sexual is in a way to be incomplete. It's to be severed it's to be cut off it's to have that engine for intimacy and connection, which primarily needs to be met by God. So think about that attraction, that urge that you named before and the desire below that urge, maybe it's for delight, for inclusion, for community, for affirmation. What would it look like for you to be affirmed by God, to be delighted in by God, to delight in God, to be honored by God, to have peace with God, to find your significance and your strength and your security in God. That's our starting point. That's not the end. That's our starting point. Because even if you have a really strong relationship with God, it doesn't mean that you're going to be sexually whole, that you're going to be free from pornography. It also has a social dimension to it. The spiritual dimension is getting that desire from God. The social dimension is finding it with others and notice how I'm not saying get it from others. That would be clingy. That would be insecure. That would be codependent. Find it with others, that together with other people in community, we can share beauty. We can share a sense of delight. We can protect one another. We can love one another. The new Testament is so full of one another's we can relieve one another. In terms of carrying each other's burdens, we can have community with one another, that divine desire that you named, what would it look like for you to find it with other people? This is the second answer to what should I do with my sexual desires. Once you find out what that desire is, it's going to be risky. It's going to courage to find it with others, especially since there's a story of suffering here, it's going to be incredibly difficult for you to pursue delight in a story of misery, for you to pursue community and a story of isolation for you to pursue play in a story of oppressive, seriousness, and overfunctioning for you to pursue strength in the story of weakness and powerlessness for you to pursue a holy sense of adventure and thrill. When your life has been full of boredom and it's been bleak. So get it from God, find it with others. And then this is the deepest one. Give it to yourself. What do I mean by that? If you've been following husband material, you know that it's not men who get hooked on porn, it's Boyce and most healing I've ever experienced has come. When I have been able to give myself to give little drew the acceptance that he never got as a kid. It's one thing to receive that from guy that's foundational, that is our starting point. It's another thing to find it with other people. And that can be so beautiful. But the biggest barrier I find is giving it to myself. Does this make sense to you? Have you done this? Have you been able to engage in healthy play? Have you been able to take yourself on an adventure to spend time with yourself? Not just spending time by yourself. This is something we talked about in a recent episode, being with yourself, being with the boy who was harmed, whose story of suffering is searching for a solution. And porn seems like it's the easiest thing to settle for guys. We need to learn how to give these things to ourselves. And this can seem selfish. This can seem self-centered. This can seem unchristian like, what is loving myself, affirming myself? What are you talking about? Sounds like psychological mumbo jumbo. Well, it is psychological. Getting the desire from God is spiritual. Finding it with others is social, giving it to myself as psychological. And if you haven't done that yet, maybe that's your next step. Maybe that's the final frontier. Maybe that's been the missing piece is to in your imagination, in heart and your emotions to approach that boy who was first exploited by pornography. And to affirm him, to see his beauty, his strength, to honor him,
Speaker 3:To give him friendship, to give him everything that he should have had to show him his worth, to give him relief, to give him an escape from the hell that he was living in to show him that he is desired, known, pursued notice by you.
Speaker 2:That's what this is about. That has been the greatest source of healing in my whole life. Those are the moments with clients that I look back on and say, wow, the holy spirit did something because the image of God within you is able to do that. You might feel like, oh, I can't, I can't find it within myself to do that. You know, it's incredibly difficult for us to, to love ourselves. It's incredibly difficult for us to resist temptation deport, but you know who can't be tempted and you know who can't be afforded and you know, who can never be opposed and defeated is Christ in you. The image of God in you, there is nothing that can stand against him and he
Speaker 3:Lives in you. His holy spirit is within you. So what are you waiting for that desire that you've had for so long that you've struggled with for decades and porn has given you some pale imitation of it.
Speaker 2:It's been here all along. When you can give yourself what it is that you deeply desire, not just what you crave, not just what you're attracted to, what you've been aching for and yearning for. See what happens. Don't believe me, try it. And there's one more direction. If that wasn't enough. Finally, what we need to do in the end is not just do things for me, me, me, I'm going to get this thing from God. I'm going to find it with other people. I'm going to give it to myself in the end. That's still a self-contained picture in the end, in the beauty and the mystery of how God has authored us as human beings. That thing that I deeply desire, maybe that thing that I never got actually becomes a gift. You may not know this, but if you desire inclusion, acceptance, belonging like me, you have a unique ability links. That's my guess. My guess is you have a unique ability to give that thing to other people. Many of you know that it's very easy to feel accepted and included by me cause I know what it's like to be rejected and excluded, to not belong, to be unwelcome, to feel unwelcome healing journey is not just to get and to find and to give things to ourselves. It's to overflow it's to find that purpose, that purpose that will allow me to channel this desire into something that will bless others into loving others. As God has loved me, as I have loved myself, as others have come alongside me. Now I have everything I need to give that love, joy, peace, delight, certainty, belonging to others. In fact, in Jay Stringer's book, unwanted, he says that people who struggle to find a sense of purpose are seven times more likely to use porn and something that he doesn't. Something that I do is we really focus on where we see evidence of you coming alive of you lighting up of you, hitting your sweet spot of focusing on what gets you fired up, because that sense of purpose is where you are uniquely equipped to overflow into the lives of others. Sometimes we try to give others a sense of acceptance so that they will accept me. It's coming from a place of lack, a void of needing to be filled up by others, of meeting somebody else to really give this thing to me. So I'm giving it an exchange for something else. That's not what I'm talking about. That's why I didn't say you need to give this thing to others. You need to overflow. That means you already have it to a degree. Your foundation is with God. It's in giving it to yourself in a healthy and mature way. It's in having it in community with other people and then overflowing, overflowing with the thing that you never got, that you always wanted, that you're finally finding in a healthy way. It releases you. It releases you from a self-contained bubble where it's all about me. My spiritual life
Speaker 3:Is about me. My social life is about me. All the psychology and counseling I'm doing is about
Speaker 2:Me. That's not a picture of the gospel. The gospel sends us outward. It, it propels us into the world to be Jesus, to be with Jesus, to go and make disciples of all nations offering what it is that God has for this world. And we are each uniquely created to reflect his image in specific ways. So just as our sexual attractions and urges and cravings and fantasies and desires are specific, our path and our purpose and our calling is specific. So there is not only a spiritual, social and psychological dimension. There is a vocational dimension. There is an aspect of calling. There's an aspect of being created in Christ for good works that he has prepared beforehand for us to do. So what should you do with your sexual desires? When you find out what that desire is, go give it to someone else, go offer it to someone else. And you'll find that it's even more satisfying than whatever the craving or the urge was in the first place for it is in giving that we receive. And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. At least that's how the prayer of St. Francis puts it. So on that second page of the worksheet, I've given you four directions for your divine desires to get them from God, to find them with others, to give them to yourself and to overflow to others. That's the answer that I wish I had. That's the answer that I have been longing for because it's both emotionally satisfying and spiritually satisfying. It's spiritually mature because it's not all about me. Me, me, it's about who am I? What has God made me to do? How can I step into that? That's what I'm going to focus on. Not the surface level sexual symptoms of my life, the deeper desires, the divine desires and directing them to where they were always meant to go toward my relationship with God, my relationship with other people, my relationship with myself and my relationship with this world and the work he's given me to do. Daniel says this should be produced to the masses. I'm overwhelmed with this message. Praise God. Steve says, it seems like unless all four are in place, it short circuits or doesn't function as well. Absolutely. This is a diagnostic tool you can use to ask, okay? Which one of these relationships need some Luff needs. Some time needs some work with God, with others, with myself, with my calling, because where there's a deficiency where there is a lack or where something is off, you're going to experience it in your body. You're going to experience it in your brain, whether you realize that's what's happening or not. I believe porn is ultimately a poverty of relationship. It's a poverty, it's a type of poverty in my relationship with God and others and myself and my purpose. And that's part of why I relapsed so hard after college. Because in college I had a really strong relationship with God and my brothers in Christ. And I really liked the person that I was in college. And I had a very clear purpose. And when I left off that got thrown out the window. So of course I went back to poor. Here's the thing about poverty though. It's complex,
Speaker 3:It's multidimensional and you can't just slap a solution on it spiritually, socially, psychologically, or vocationally to try
Speaker 2:It, fix it. It's relational. And it involves all four. When we can have all four fully functional and thriving, you're going to love a good story. You're going to die. And the grateful who had the courage to pursue your desires in a healthy life-giving, we self-giving way and porn was just an interruption. It was just a distraction from that. David says, what is the best way to tap back into that boy that was damaged if it was 50 years ago? And it's hard for you to even admit that the abuse was abuse, the best way is to do some inner child work. That's what we're doing at this virtual retreat. That's what we do at husband material academy. That's what we do in our private small groups. We go back to the boy and get to know him. We learned to love him. We help him grow up. You can do this in therapy. You can do this on your own. To a degree. You can do this in a small group. The most important thing is to have a quality of curiosity and compassion while doing it. That's what we want to facilitate. Curiosity and compassion. I want to answer one question that that really stuck with me, that one of you guys asked, we had a question about sexual attractions and desires that are specific to a certain race. I believe racism has a huge effect on our sexual fantasies and in the future, I'm going to do an episode on the racism of porn. I've had clients who were only attracted to porn, featuring a specific race from one of them. It was white women who represented to him, the girls that he felt like he could never have. When he was a kid, there was racial trauma in his story of suffering, which is very real and needs to be addressed for another one. He said it was specifically Asian women to him. They felt safe, more subservient. And part of his story was being abused by a black woman. And so black women who felt very powerful to him also felt unsafe. And for him specifically, part of his healing involved, pursuing a relationship with a black woman in order to reverse the curse and have a corrective experience and begin to work with his sexual and find that safety and find that feeling of power and control. That is his birthright with his own race, with someone from his background, that was a huge healing experience for him. So I'm no expert on racism. I do acknowledge that there are specific sexual attractions and urges and fantasies that we have, which might be tied to a specific race or ethnic background to people who look like us or different from us. And that's important to talk about too. And we need to grieve those stories of suffering that led us to that place. David asks, how do I pursue escape? That isn't a negative escapism, very important. The technical word for what we think of as escape is dissociation. It's getting some separation from my situation by going to a little place in my head or on a screen or somewhere out of my body where the world is, the way I would like it to be. I grew up with a ton of dissociation moving around between places and my safe place was on screen. It was on my game, boy, it was on a computer or just that little world in my head where I could control what was going on. And I was perfectly happy, entertaining myself. So porn promised me a version of escape that was unhealthy. There actually is a type of healthy escape, which can be described in the following ways. Number one, it's purposeful. I'm not just drifting into dissociation, pulling out my phone and haphazardly scrolling. It's purposeful. I'm going to get on here to listen to some music I'm going to get on here to read a book. Purposeful dissociation can be a very supportive resource when we choose it, rather than having it choose us, then it can be a lot healthier. So yes, escape can be negative. It can also be positive because you know what? Sometimes life is really hard and sometimes work sucks. And sometimes my marriage is really painful
Speaker 3:And I need an escape. I need a relief. I need a release. And that's okay. That's a divine desire.
Speaker 2:If we pursue it in a mature way, maybe that escape means I'm going to call my ally and we're going to talk about what's happening right now. Maybe my escape means I'm going to go read the Bible. It doesn't have to be poor. Dissociation does not have to mean distraction. James says I'm using masturbation without porn and being stuck, having to use it. That's where I was at for quite a few years. You know, masturbation is a form of giving something to myself and porn, a version of giving something to myself, but it's ultimately giving myself something harmful. This is something really important. When we choose porn, we are not choosing our divine desire. We think we're pursuing the divine desire, but we're really reinforcing the story of suffering when I'm feeling bored. And I have that urge, that desire for adventure. If I use porn, I'm actually just reinforcing my boredom. I'm making it even more unappealing and difficult for me to get out of this and pursue that adventure. And this is huge at the core of porn is not kindness to myself. It is contempt for myself. It is reenacting that story of suffering. It is staying in that story of suffering because he know what that story of suffering is familiar. And I know what I'm going to get. It's been with me for so long. And in some ways I don't really want to pursue my divine desire because if I do what happens if I don't get it, if I do what happens if it's even more painful than whatever situation I'm in right now. Yeah. This is getting deep. Danielle says when pursuing a corrective experience, I am hurt the same way. That is huge. If you pursue your divine desire, if you take the risk, if you embrace courage to live a bigger life, you will get hurt. You will be disappointed. There will be moments when you feel like you're back in that story of suffering, that will happen. And when it happens, if you have brothers in Christ who are with you on that journey, then even the disappointment can become a corrective experience. Let me give you an example. Let's say I have a deep need for affirmation. And I hang out with an older wiser man of God, hoping that he will affirm me. And in the end, he doesn't. When I come back to my brothers in Christ afterwards in the midst of that disappointment in the midst of that pain, in the midst of that trigger and that story of suffering, I put myself out there and I got even more hurt in the end. In that moment, they affirm you. If they offer you what it is that you wanted and needed, that can still become a corrective experience. If I'm pursuing adventure. And my adventure does not work out in the head, in the middle of that in the middle of that pain and disappointment, I have a choice. Am I going to give up on this adventure and go back to that story of suffering? Or am I going to continue pursuing that divine desire? And in the end, if I get it, then it's just going to be that much more powerful. And it's going to disprove the lies that much more strongly because Hey, even what I thought was certain defeat. Didn't take me down in the end. The story's not over. I hope that's encouraging for you guys, whatever story of suffering you're in, it's not over. Jay says, what does adventure with God look like, man, you are asking the right question. I want to hear more about your story to find out what the lack of adventure has looked like. The shape of that story. Well, we do that becomes a lot clear where that path can go next. Our sexuality is evidence of our incompleteness as human beings, and it's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. It's just this engine that propels us forward and outward. And when we look at our specific yearnings longings desires, cravings aches, we see the ways that our story is pushing towards completion and porn is, is where we get stuck. When we get unstuck in the story, when we can write that next chapter, co-authoring it with God. Then the porn chapter fades into the background and becomes irrelevant in order to move on from the porn chapter of your life, you have to write a new one with God and others and the boy within you and extend that overflow. That is my definition currently of a meaningful life. David says that was the best message I've ever heard. How can we give to your ministry? Keep showing up, come to our virtual retreat, join husband, material academy. Remember that worksheet you can download is in the show notes about the 30th five different divine desires that I have discovered. And then the four directions
Speaker 1:That you can pursue with every sexual inclination that comes up always remember you are God's beloved son and you, he is well-pleased.