Growing up in the shadow of my parents' divorce, I found myself seeking validation in all the wrong places. As we unravel the threads of childhood wounds and their influence on adult behaviors, particularly sexual integrity, this episode is a candid reflection on the often unconscious quest for self-worth.
We discuss the intricate process of healing memories and the profound impact this journey can have on our lives, looking closely at how negative experiences and familial relationships can lead to sexual compulsions. I open up about my personal battles and how the false comfort of pornography briefly masked a deeper need for love and acceptance, emphasizing the importance of addressing these underlying issues for a healthier, more authentic self.
This series culminates with a powerful invitation to bless our past hurts with the Lord's presence. We talk about the importance of replacing the harmful voices of yesterday with the truth and blessing of our Creator, and how this shift can lead to a revolutionary change in the way we see ourselves and our relationship with God.
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.
Growing up in the shadow of my parents' divorce, I found myself seeking validation in all the wrong places. As we unravel the threads of childhood wounds and their influence on adult behaviors, particularly sexual integrity, this episode is a candid reflection on the often unconscious quest for self-worth.
We discuss the intricate process of healing memories and the profound impact this journey can have on our lives, looking closely at how negative experiences and familial relationships can lead to sexual compulsions. I open up about my personal battles and how the false comfort of pornography briefly masked a deeper need for love and acceptance, emphasizing the importance of addressing these underlying issues for a healthier, more authentic self.
This series culminates with a powerful invitation to bless our past hurts with the Lord's presence. We talk about the importance of replacing the harmful voices of yesterday with the truth and blessing of our Creator, and how this shift can lead to a revolutionary change in the way we see ourselves and our relationship with God.
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:
What is healing of memories and what part does that play in your progress towards sexual integrity? Let's try to unpack that in the next 10 minutes or so in this podcast. Small order, smaller, that's really easy to do. No, I'm kidding.
Speaker 1:
Healing of memories is a big deal and when I first started learning about it, I was a little bit skeptical, honestly, because I was like healing of memories, what does that mean? Or inner healing prayer, what does that mean? Well, it means this God, who is outside of time, is a healer. He's a redeemer, a reclaimer of that which has lost, a restore of life where there's been death. And since he's outside of time, he is not constrained by the time that you and I are living in to bring healing to places in our lives that have been wounded. So it often works like this Somewhere in our lives, multiple places in our lives, we've been wounded, and that's just a fact of life. It is a reality of living in a fallen world, so none of us are exempt from that.
Speaker 1:
Most often, the most formidable wounds we've experienced happened in our families growing up A mom or dad who left or who passed away, a broken marriage or a violent marriage, a dad or mom who had a temper and would lash out with accusation or condemnation at a son or daughter, calling son or daughter names. Or maybe it wasn't quite that overt. Maybe it was the relationship between the mother and father, where the father would demean the mother and a little girl growing up at that home had a sense that it wasn't safe or wasn't good to be a woman, or where the mother would disrespect the father and a little boy growing up would have a sense that it's not good to be a man. Maybe it was a parent who had an addiction of their own, a sexual addiction, an addiction to alcohol or drugs or work, and so a son or daughter grew up in that environment. So whatever the wound was and I'm mentioning family of origin it could also be with peers growing up. A lot of people are bullied, called names by their kids, punched, hit, spat upon whatever growing up.
Speaker 1:
Those are wounds that a kid experiences, and usually when a wound comes, as John Eldridge pointed out long ago, when a wound like that comes, the enemy is quick to come and offer an interpretation of that wound. In other words, the enemy is quick to come and to accuse you when you are wounded, to offer you an accusation that fits the wound. And so, where you felt hurt that your mother or father yelled at you after they had a rough day, the enemy comes with an accusation saying you're too much, you're annoying, you should know better, you're stupid, you're dumb, you're, you know, filling the blank. And so the wound comes. The enemy comes with accusation to follow up and to reinforce the wound, which is followed by, and the purpose of his accusations are to bring about shame, that deep seated sense that you are bad or unworthy, you are uniquely defective, dirty or different from everybody else. Shame does not say you did something wrong, you made a mistake. Shame says there's something inherently immutably wrong with you. It is just a part of who you are. And that cocktail of wound and accusation and shame leads a person towards all manner of unhealthy thinking, unhealthy beliefs about themselves and about relationships. And oftentimes we find that men and women who deal with sexual integrity issues, repeated, compulsive sexual behaviors they want to stop and don't are actually trying to work out those old wounds, those old accusations and that persistent shame through their sexual acting out. Now, that was a lot. I threw it at you fast. So let me slow that down for a moment. So let me just give an example that might help to express this.
Speaker 1:
So for me growing up, my parents divorced when I was very young and I don't even remember. I have like maybe one or two kind of half memories of my parents living in the same house. But my dad left when I was very, very little and I knew a little bit about the circumstances of his leaving. But I did grow up not with a conscious thought but with a relatively unconscious thought that if I was worth more he would have stuck around, he would have stayed. And there's something wrong with me. It wasn't about my mom and my dad and their relationship. I knew that wasn't perfect, but somewhere inside my little kid brain I had the sense that if I was worth enough he would have stayed. And that's pretty typical for kids. Kids pretty have a pretty narcissistic view of the world, like what happens around them, what they experience is because they did something. You know, either for good or for bad. That's just kind of a normal developmental reality for kids.
Speaker 1:
Well, how does that set me up for healthy relationships with other people as I'm growing up? It doesn't. It sets me up to run away from unhealthy relationships. Now I'm not pointing a finger just at that one thing to say that that all resulted in my sexual sin. But as a part of a larger kind of theme of some of these things in my life, at some point I discovered pornography, and the message that I kind of read in pornography was you are valuable, you are worthwhile. So I'm looking at these pictures of naked women who are, at least in that fictional sense, giving themselves to me, offering themselves to me. The message that God has woven into nakedness and sex is you are worth all of me, I give you all of me, I want you because you are worth so much. And that spoke in a deep way to my heart.
Speaker 1:
Even as an adolescent, I wanted to be wanted like this, and so that old gap in my life and that old accusation, that deep sense of shame that I'm not worth that much, I'm not worth sticking around for Something that's deeply, immutably wrong with me, was, in a way, countered by the pornography that I was looking at, and so I began to go back to it for more, and for more, and for more, and again. This was not a conscious decision on my part. These were not conscious thoughts. All I knew was that it felt good and looked good to me. But as I began to go through my own recovery journey, I was able to begin learning that I had these deep beliefs about myself and I needed healing of memories. I needed the memories of my life healed, my past healed, so that I could stand up under that weight of the shame and stop bringing it to pornography in a futile attempt to reverse that old pain and shame.
Speaker 1:
Okay, I'll give you another example, not for my life, but from a woman. I'll call her Meg. So Meg grew up with a very distant father and an alcoholic mother who was verbally abusive. In her own pain about her inadequate divorce or, sorry, inadequate marriage, she took to drinking, did not know how to resolve that and started to lash out at her kids, including at Meg. So Meg grew up with a distant father, who she loved and adored but who was not there very much, and an overbearing and verbally abusive mother. And so when Meg moved towards adolescence, she began finding herself attracted to other girls in her class. She found herself longing for their attention, longing for their affirmation, and she had a best friend. And that friendship eventually turned sexual and Meg was kind of over the moon. She also had some sexual relationships with boys in her class, longing for that male affirmation. And so, as Meg began doing her own recovery journey, she discovered that some of these wounds from her past, and the corresponding accusations and shame that came with it, resulted in her pursuing these sexual relationships, these romantic relationships with both girls and guys in her high school years and college years as a way to try to fill that deep sense that she was not worth sticking around for or that she was worth verbally abusing. And again, none of this was conscious for Meg, but it was acting under the surface of her lives, of her life.
Speaker 1:
So this is where the healing of memories comes in, and I said at the beginning that we'll talk about what healing of memories is. So healing of memories is inviting Jesus, first of all, to expose, to bring up specific memories that need healing. Jesus, where is a specific memory that I have, a specific event in my life that needs your attention? So I experienced a wound and an accusation that went with it and then began to carry some shame. So what's that? What's the specific memory where I could begin getting after these things? So that's step number one is just inviting Jesus to bring his light. Lord, give more light to my life to expose where there's a wound for my past that needs to be healed or where there's accusation I've been living under and shame I've been living under because of something from my past.
Speaker 1:
Step number two is to invite Jesus into that memory. So, again, he is outside of time. And so, jesus, where I encountered that pain, that wound back then, would you speak to that wound? Or would you enter into that memory and show me where you were in it? Or would you speak your words into that memory where I heard the words of my verbally abusive mother? Would you speak your words into that moment? You might also invite Jesus's cross into that moment.
Speaker 1:
So when Jesus died for not only our sins but the sins of the whole world, it meant he also died for the sins of your wounders. And so if somebody wounded you with their sin, instead of you continuing to bear into your body, into your heart, into your memory, the weight of their sin, we invite Jesus's cross between us and the person who wounded us, so that he might bear all the wounds, all the words, all the accusations, all the pain that that person inflicted upon us. And as he bears it on the cross, then we no longer have to. And here the help of somebody else would be really important. Actually, throughout this process but in the healing of memories, having somebody else who's interceding with you and for you to have somebody else interceding for you, to bring the cross of Christ and the full power of his cross and resurrection between you and the person that wounded you would be really important. Also, somebody who, with some discernment, who can listen and help discern whether or not the enemy has a foothold in this area of your life. So there's any way that the enemy's accusation came and you agreed with it and it's taken a foothold in your life. So when you help discern that and intercede for you, it would be tremendously helpful.
Speaker 1:
So, step number one Jesus, bring your light, show me where there's a wound that has a corresponding accusation and shame that comes with it. Secondly, inviting Jesus into that memory. And then, third, once you've experienced, once you've waited and experienced, heard from the Lord there, seen the Lord there, and he's brought some healing the next part is to forgive your wounder, and that's a whole nother podcast, but really important step. You want to forgive the person who wounded you, not because they deserve it, not because they've apologized for it, not because they know about it and understand it, but because they don't have what you need. As much as we wish that everyone who wounded us could give back what they took, the reality is that they don't have it to give, and so, instead of continuing to stay chained to their wounding, we forgive them that we might be released from what they did, from the wound that they did, the words that they spoke, the curse that they spoke. We might be released from them, and that part of us now is open to be reconnected with the one who loves us most.
Speaker 1:
And that leads us to the fourth and final step of the healing memories, which is to invite the Lord to bring his blessing. So he's born into himself the wound, the accusation, the shame, and now we invite him. Lord, would you bring your blessing? I received curses back then, or I received wound and accusation back then. Would you now bring your words of blessing? Would you bring your blessing?
Speaker 1:
And again, having somebody who's praying with you here to listen, for the voice of the Lord is powerful, and oftentimes what we find that the Lord speaks in these moments is not just healing. It is profoundly eye-opening and can actually shift our sense of ourselves and certainly shift our sense of our relationship with him. There's so many ways that this plays into our healing. Trust me, it is so worth it, and I've zipped through this at way too fast a speed, but it just gives you a little bit of a framework and I would say, if you don't know anyone who is skilled at praying into the healing of memories, then reach out to one of our coaches at Regeneration.
Speaker 1:
We would love to pray with you, we'd love to walk with you through this process. It can be incredible, incredible help in your journey towards sexual integrity and sexual wholeness. Jesus, you know the things that have wounded us, you know how sin has harmed us and we pray, jesus, we thank you first of all for your cross we're. You've borne not only our own sin, lord, but also the sins done against us. We pray that you would illumine what's harmed us, you would step in between us and our wonders, you would help us to forgive them and you would speak your new, life-giving blessing over our lives. I pray that for each person listening, lord, I do so in the name of the Father, son, holy Spirit, amen.