Are you ready to step up and take control of your sexual integrity? This episode will equip you with a blueprint to do just that.
We journey into the first leg of this process - managing patterns and creating boundaries to shield ourselves from behaviors that lead us astray. From identifying your triggers to setting up filters, blocks, and time limits, we’ll guide you through creating yellow line and guardrail boundaries - a potent double barrier to ward off temptation.
Then we take a deep dive into the art of engaging in healthy relationships, the second leg of your journey to sexual integrity. We share invaluable insights on regulating your emotions and addressing pain in healthier ways instead of retreating to old sexual behaviors.
This conversation is more than just about sexual integrity; it's a call to engage life as an adult, leaving behind the wounded child within. This episode is a transformative exploration into creating healthy boundaries, understanding behavioral patterns, and achieving sexual integrity.
Want us to talk about a specific topic? Change up the format, or just tell us the podcast rocks! We want your feedback on Becoming Whole. You can leave your feedback here
If you are in the Baltimore Area, Regeneration is happy to invite you to our 2024 Dessert Fundraiser, Spark: One Small Thing Leads to So Much More. This annual gathering is a highlight for so many as we gather for tasty desserts, heartfelt worship, vulnerable and powerful stories, and an opportunity to partner with what Jesus is doing through Regeneration. Click Here for more info or to register.
Are you ready to step up and take control of your sexual integrity? This episode will equip you with a blueprint to do just that.
We journey into the first leg of this process - managing patterns and creating boundaries to shield ourselves from behaviors that lead us astray. From identifying your triggers to setting up filters, blocks, and time limits, we’ll guide you through creating yellow line and guardrail boundaries - a potent double barrier to ward off temptation.
Then we take a deep dive into the art of engaging in healthy relationships, the second leg of your journey to sexual integrity. We share invaluable insights on regulating your emotions and addressing pain in healthier ways instead of retreating to old sexual behaviors.
This conversation is more than just about sexual integrity; it's a call to engage life as an adult, leaving behind the wounded child within. This episode is a transformative exploration into creating healthy boundaries, understanding behavioral patterns, and achieving sexual integrity.
Want us to talk about a specific topic? Change up the format, or just tell us the podcast rocks! We want your feedback on Becoming Whole. You can leave your feedback here
If you are in the Baltimore Area, Regeneration is happy to invite you to our 2024 Dessert Fundraiser, Spark: One Small Thing Leads to So Much More. This annual gathering is a highlight for so many as we gather for tasty desserts, heartfelt worship, vulnerable and powerful stories, and an opportunity to partner with what Jesus is doing through Regeneration. Click Here for more info or to register.
Speaker 1:
Hey everybody, today I wanna offer you kind of the three parts of a typical journey towards sexual integrity. Three parts, kind of three legs of the journey, if you will, and you can think about these both descriptively, like this is just my observation of path that a lot of people take, but also you can think about it prescriptively, in the sense of you know, consider where you are on the path and which part of the leg, which part of the journey, which leg of the journey, and then go from there. Kind of help it, let this help you to figure out where you are and where you may need to go next. So, with that said, let me start with the leg one of the journey.
Speaker 1:
Leg one of the journey is for the person who's struggled with habitual sexual sin for some length of time and they've learned to depend on sexual sin as a crutch, as a go to in navigating life, and so they experience some kind of challenge in life, some type of pain point. It usually taps into some deeper part of their story, some historic wound or weakness in their life, and they find themselves unable to navigate, unable to work through the relational conflict, unable to regulate their emotions, unable to sort through how they're thinking about themselves or other people, and so they run to pornography or they run to sexually acting out in some way, and they may not even understand fully. Like what's happening, like I don't you know. It just feels like this switch gets flipped and I felt like I was doing well and then suddenly I was really, really overwhelmed with temptation and I felt like I needed to go act out. So if this is the leg that you're on in the journey, what you need to do is really practical management of what your patterns are, so that you can create some healthy boundaries to keep you away from your sin. What I mean by that is not that you're going to figure out some kind of practical, all-inclusive way to add filters and blocks and things like that so that you never have the opportunity to sin again, but rather this part of the journey is about creating space from the behavior, creating some distance from the sinful behavior, so that you can begin to move into some of the deeper work of the second leg of the journey. So how do you create space?
Speaker 1:
Well, we get as practical as we can, and what we recommend here is beginning by just thinking back and giving some honest assessment, and you probably need some help with this, some honest, kind assessment about, like, well, when am I typically tempted? What are some of the reasons I get tempted? What are some of the emotions that I'm experiencing when I'm tempted? Are there certain places where I typically feel temptation, certain relationships that seem to spawn temptation, like every time I spend time with this coworker or with my brother or my mother or whatever. These are typically times that I experience temptation afterwards.
Speaker 1:
Are there specific times that you typically feel temptation before? Is it Sunday night before you go to work? Is it every day before you go to work? Is it every week before you go to church? These are just clues. These are just clues to help you assess. Like, okay, this is where I feel temptation and so I can. What kinds of boundaries or practical tools can I set up in those times and in those places and with those emotions, so that I can create some space, some distance from the sexual behavior? So some practical things you might decide on are I typically feel temptation on my smartphone or on my laptop, and so I'm going to put some filters and some accountability software on my phone and on my laptop. I've got a good friend who felt temptation, often at work on his work computer, and so he taking this very seriously, wanting to create some space, he went to his HR department and said hey, I need to put a filter on my computer because I get distracted at work, and I think he even got an ADHD diagnosis to help him do this. So he was really clever, really crafting, figuring out a way away from this. You might need to turn your computer or your desk in such a way that your screen is always visible to other people, set up some time limits on your devices so you can't access the internet after certain times. Other practical examples of what you might do here you might get rid of a smartphone or get rid of your laptop. I know that sounds really radical and counter cultural, but there are people who do it and that's saying you need to do that necessarily forever, but maybe for a while you need to get rid of your smartphone, maybe you just need to get rid of social media for a while, or something else that, whatever the inroads are for this behavior, as you do that for a time, for a season, you'll have to create some space so you can do the deeper work ahead.
Speaker 1:
One a couple categories to think about. In this. We talk about yellow line boundaries and those are maybe just decisions that you make that I'm not going to cross this line, like, okay, I typically notice that I look at porn after 9pm, so I'm not going to be on my device after 9pm. There's nothing keeping you from doing that, just as there's nothing keeping you from driving across the double yellow line on the highway into oncoming traffic. But it's the decision you make for your own safety and for your own welfare. In contrast to that, the other kind of boundary would be we call it guardrail boundary, so that's like the guardrails on the side of the road if you're driving a steep mountain road or things like that. And those kinds of boundaries are not as easy to move. They're really concrete, so they'll keep you even if you try to cross them. So when you get rid of your device, for example, that's a pretty solid boundary and even though you might feel temptation to get on a device, if you don't have a device you can't do that. Or if you put a filter on your device and you don't know how to work around the filter, then you can't access those things. And I love here to think about the difference between that.
Speaker 1:
The grace and earning are opposed to each other. Dallas Willard points out that grace and earning are opposed to each other. So you're not trying to earn anything by doing this, but grace and effort actually work together. So you are putting some effort into your recovery by setting up these practical boundaries so that you can create space for God's grace to help you with the rest. Okay, so that's the first leg of the journey. That's the second leg of the journey is for somebody who's got some of that space in place, they can abstain from some sexual behavior for at least some time. The reason it's important to have some abstinence before you do some of this deeper work is because the deeper work is, in a way, going to be facing some of the hard places that pornography has been leading you away from, and so having some abstinence in place gives you some room to breathe and some practice. So as you begin addressing those deeper issues, then you're able to actually see them for what they are.
Speaker 1:
So when I say the deeper issues here, I mean you're beginning to unpack your story, you're beginning to look at your family of origin. You're beginning to track back when did my sexual behavior begin and what was happening for me maybe a year before the sexual behavior began and what was happening for me right around the time the sexual behavior began and what happened in my life maybe a year or two after the sexual behavior began. Usually, even beginning there you can recognize maybe some family dysfunction, maybe there were some really significant wounding experiences, maybe there was abuse that took place somewhere in there and maybe it wasn't right in that kind of year to two year around when your behavior began. But nonetheless, looking honestly at your family of origin, looking honestly at your history, is going to help you. So one author I've read recommended even mapping out your life in five-year increments, so from zero to five, from six to 10, from 11 to 15, on to the present day, and in each of those five-year segments write down what was good in that five-year segment, what was bad that happened in your life in that five-year segment, what was ugly that happened in that five-year segment and what was beautiful that happened in that five-year segment. And then map those out and then chart also your sexual behaviors, where they began and when you first noticed them and what form they took.
Speaker 1:
And you'll often find some correlations between when those things began and some deeper, harder things that you're going through in your life. Again, you'll probably need some help with this because we often have blind spots to some of our own story and some blind spots to things that actually matter, especially men. In my years working with men I've noticed that many men are not aware that they've been sexually abused, even if they have been sexually abused. If the shoe were under their foot and we heard about a young woman going through something that we went through, we'd recognize that might be sexual abuse. But for a young man, typically, things well, no, that wasn't abuse. I've heard way too many stories about that where they think it was maybe awkward or uncomfortable or weird, but they didn't recognize that it was abuse. So that's leg number two.
Speaker 1:
Leg number three is now beginning to connect pieces of that story some of the wounds, some of the weaknesses, some of the hard times, some of the ugly places in your story with what you struggle with specifically. And so not just that there's a correlation between when you were abused or when your parents got divorced or when you moved as a child in your sexual behavior, but also the kinds of sexual behavior that you've typically been drawn to, the kinds of fantasies that you've gone to, the kinds of pornography that you typically seek out. And here we can thank the work of both Drew Boa and Jay Stringer, also Dr Mark Laser. These are people who have done some good good work in helping us understand their connections between what's called our sexual arousal template those things that we didn't necessarily choose to be drawn to but we find ourselves drawn to and the actual wounds and story lines of our lives. So, for example, one guy I was working with way back had an abuse scenario where he was abused by a stronger boy when he was younger and the sexual fantasies he went to mirrored his experience of a young boy when he was a kid and so as an adult he was going to and even googling certain pornographic kind of story lines without realizing how similar they were to his experience when he was abused as a boy. And there's so many other examples of that.
Speaker 1:
Here you will almost definitely need some additional help, because for two reasons. One, because when we're thinking about our fantasies or our sexual arousal template, it can be, quite frankly, arousing, it can stir things up, and so just have somebody else who's helping to walk through those things with us and helping us to connect the dots between our story and our struggle can be tremendously helpful. And it's such valuable work because part of what happens when we begin to connect the wounds and storyline of our life with our specific types of struggle first thing that happens is it begins to remove some of the stigma and shame of the things that we've been drawn to. So maybe you've just felt incredibly embarrassed that there's a certain kind of pornography that you typically are drawn to, or a body part or a kind of person you're drawn to, and you just think what is wrong with me? Why am I not just interested in my wife or why do I like this kind of kinky behavior? And as we begin to connect those things to our story, we recognize wait a minute, this isn't random. This actually connects to a wound in my life. It connects to part of my story. Something got twisted, but I wasn't the one who twisted it. Something else twisted it early on and in that way my sexuality got twisted too.
Speaker 1:
And as we begin to, then we can go back and seek healing, seek to grow in the areas of our storyline, our wounds, and invite Jesus into those places and as he begins to bring his orders, holy order and holy healing into those places, then not only the shame of our sexual behavior, but also the intensity, the frequency, sometimes even just the presence of the temptation also, is diminished. It begins to change too. This is a beautiful, powerful thing. One of the things I want to point out here is that sometimes we just focus on the behavior so much, not realizing that the behaviors are often a symptom of a deeper problem. And so all of our prayers that God would take away our sinful behaviors, all of our unanswered prayers that he would do that is actually a sign of his mercy, that there's something deeper that he cares about. He wants to do a deeper work and bring healing to a long forgotten wound or maybe a long untended place in our story.
Speaker 1:
So that's leg number three. And then the fourth leg, which is really just a part of Christian discipleship in general, is beginning to walk now as upright men and women. And so beginning I said three legs of the journey, and the reason I did that instead of four is because the fourth leg of the journey is just the Christian life. It is becoming more involved and engaged in the body of Christ. It is taking our rightful place as sons and daughters of God in the body of Christ.
Speaker 1:
Now, that doesn't mean that we haven't done that before we do that before but now we step into it in a new way, not retreating to our old sexual behaviors when things get difficult, but learning and practicing engaging in relational conflict in healthy ways. Learning to regulate our emotions in healthy ways, learning to address pains and hurts and recognize when we're being triggered by something that happened in our past. But learning to do that healthy ways, even after all the healing we've been through, even after abstaining from our sexual sin and finding growth in the area of our life now, our ongoing relationships that we've never had to learn to do. In this way, we have to learn to do Regulating our emotions, which we never had to learn to do before, we never learned to do before. Now we have to learn to do so. In other words, we get an opportunity to grow up. We get an opportunity to engage life as an adult, human person rather than a kid who's wounded and running to sexual sin, because that's all they need to do.
Speaker 1:
I know I've covered a lot of ground in this podcast, but I hope it's been encouraging you. I hope that you can place yourself in one of those legs of the journey and have a little bit more to go with. As far as, where do you go from here? As always, if one of our regeneration coaches can be helpful for you, please just reach out to us and schedule a cost-free initial appointment. We'd be happy, happy, happy to walk with you.