I'm Ashamed of My Desire

In last week’s episode, Chris and Scott discussed the interplay of shame and desire. How desire arises, why it matters, what happens when shame entangles and corrupts desire, and the role that free will plays in our choices to act upon or resist a behavior.

Desire is often talked about on WGB for good reason. Desire is what we long for, and what we long for is often buried underneath layers of wounds and pain that are manifested in our behaviors, which we confuse for our true desires. In Unwanted, Jay Stringer writes the following, citing his research and the correlation between a lack of purpose and viewing porn:

"...men were seven times more likely to escalate their pornography use if they lacked purpose in their lives. These men felt as if the work they did was meaningless, struggled to find a sense of purpose, looked back over their lives and saw many failures, and often felt unmotivated. It is crucial to understand the implications of this finding: You cannot change your relationship to pornography if you do not have an effective plan for engaging the lack of purpose in your life.”

This is why “just stop it” behavior modification doesn’t work in the long-term. Behavior is the last rung in a long chain of events, many of which are taking place at the subconscious level. It’s why Jay Stringer also writes that “desire isn’t an enemy to conquer or a craving to chase. It is information. Every longing points to a story about who we are and what we value.”

What Our Fantasies Tell Us

Many of us come to WGB because we want help stopping our unwanted sexual behavior. We think if I could just stop watching porn, my life would be fixed. If I could just stop swiping dating apps for hookups, I could get on to the business of living and feeling acceptable to God. What if we have it backwards? What if watching porn, meaningless hookups, and going to strip clubs are, when questioned, the truest things about us? What if they are symptoms of pain and unhealed wounds, “the cracks where the light gets in?” 

Scott states in Episode #111, My Wildest Sexual Fantasy, that “Sexual fantasies are probably the truest parts of our lives… Fantasies serve a purpose in our lives to help us process our emotions about hurtful or painful experiences and imagine what the world would be like if everything would’ve went as it should’ve or we hoped it would.” He continues, “If I have circumstances in my life that make me feel powerless, I’m going to come up with fantasies that make me feel powerful. I repeat my past in a way that reverses it. I transform my pain into pleasure to imagine my current reality as different from the unpleasantness of my current reality.”

He concludes by saying that fantasy is one of the truest parts of our lives because it reveals our hurt. Fantasy will show us where we’ve been harmed in the past and what we need in the present to get those needs met now.

What If Your Symptoms Aren't Your Biggest Problem?

If you have a history of trauma or you have symptoms and survival strategies that accompany pain (addiction, depression, anxiety, dissociation, OCD, etc.), you have likely operated from a lens of self-contempt (in the form of implicit memory, often occurring as pre-verbal, developmental trauma) for so long that considering that something could be more true of your behavior than you being a bad, dirty person simply feels wrong. The surprise for many of us is that our unwanted sexual behavior traces our wounds, leaving tracks that we follow upstream to the source: To healing.

I’m going to quote Jay Stringer and Curt Thompson a couple more times:

“The more you look for strategies to combat lust or fortify your willpower against unwanted sexual behavior, the further you are from the traumas in your story. Some of my clients lust not only for sexual behavior but also for the right therapist, the right book, and the right software. They will do almost anything—anything except to slow down to study how the debris of their sexual behavior is telling a story about the unresolved traumas of their lives.” From Unwanted.

“To be seen, soothed, safe, and secure are necessary states of mind in our discovery of desire and in the setting of limits that channel desire into patterns of beauty and goodness. But the unhealed tracts of our soul’s landscape, those that still wait to experience one or more of the four s’s, distract us from or blind us to our longing. Our desire can become muted under the fear of relational affliction or misdirected in our attempt to cope with the pain of trauma. We do not nullify desire; we merely regulate it. We may try to redirect its course or seek to contain it, but we cannot extinguish it. For God has made us with desire for connection that ultimately leads to the co-creation of objects of goodness and beauty with him and others with whom we have difference, be it great or small. This is as powerful and inevitable as gravity or the pull of the tides. We cannot overcome it. But in our pain that leads to avoiding desire, or in our haste to cope with unmet desire through an infinite array of addictions, we ultimately find ourselves in places of great desolation—and then in my office.” From Curt Thompson’s The Soul of Desire.

The invitation in all this is to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the healing God wants to do in our lives is about more than porn. That maybe God is more than a rule-keeper who counts our sins, giving those with secure attachment and healthy upbringings a far more acceptable Christian life. They walk with a regulated nervous system and healthy relationships, free from addiction and compulsion, while we drive "wretched machines" in a rigged, pointlessly disadvantaged rule-based religion. Maybe there’s an unexplored story and person inside, one who God is already in the process of redeeming. Maybe there’s a person that God is restoring and giving a true authenticity and purpose, the kind of which can only be given when one has truly suffered. Maybe underneath what we call our desires now are still the holy desires waiting to be redeemed, incorruptible and pure. Maybe God is different than we think.

Maybe.