The following is an abbreviated version of a presentation by Jay Stringer from the 2021 S.A. Lifeline conference. Jay Stringer is the author of Unwanted: How Sexual Brokennes Reveals Our Way To Healing. View the entire video presentation in our Digital Recovery Library.
I want to talk about the stories that you and I don’t want to tell. The simple assumption here is that each of us have a story or stories that we wish we could have erased from our lives. That could be an unwanted sexual behavior, like use of pornography. It could be an affair that your marriage went through during a particularly low point in your marriage.
But also, it could be a story from long ago. One that you have concluded that it’s just too unspeakable. You know that you’re getting close to these types of stories when you think about sharing them and that severe voice of shame warns you like a police officer to remain silent. That every word you say will be used against you.
What I want to propose is that your untold stories, the stories of your self-contempt actually, contain the keys to the freedom that you have been waiting your entire life to find. Therefore one of the greatest and biggest gifts that you could give yourself and your recovery community is to suspend the belief that you know what your broken story reveals about you.
All behavior is a form of communication, and the question that I’d invite you to consider is this. What message is my sexual story attempting to communicate to me? And to give you a brief answer, it’s not just that you are an addict. I want you to begin saying, “What does my sexual story want me to know?”
As a general rule, nothing ever tends to go away until it has taught us what we need to know. To guide us on this journey of learning from unwanted sexual behaviors, I’m going to recommend four actions that we can all take to do so.
Jonathan- Facing Problems
I want to introduce you now to “Jonathan” who I worked with in intensive settings to get a sense of what his journey was like and what can we learn from his journey. How did Jonathan begin to face his problems?
Jonathan came to see me just before the pandemic after a business trip ended ended in him doing something that he swore that he would never do: He received a massage that he knew would end in an orgasm. In my first session with Jonathan, I learned that his marriage had become increasingly sexless.
Five years ago he said is where it all started. He made a bid to his wife for sex. She rebuffed him, and he was pretty upset by that. A conflict ensued. He was angry and couldn’t go to sleep. Then about an hour or two later, after tossing and turning, he eventually went down into his home office and started looking at porn. His wife woke up in the middle of the night, realized that her husband was not in bed with her and started going downstairs. She then caught him looking at porn and masturbating in the family office.
She walked in and essentially said, “Jonathan, until you figure this sick stuff out, we’re not having sex again.” And so their life went on as it normally did. They went to church, attended fundraisers, went to their children’s events, but emotionally they were drifting further and further apart.
And it was during this season where Jonathan was on a business trip in another city when a client of Jonathan’s offered to buy him a massage, and he accepted the offer.
Jonathan- Facing Fantasies
The late Dr. Mark Laaser taught that our fantasies are nothing to be ashamed of. They are in fact our greatest teachers. What we have to begin to understand is that our sexual lives and our fantasies are always trying to communicate something to us. And that’s part of the task that we need to have is what is the meaning embedded within the sexual fantasy that I have not been able to pursue or that I have not been able to stop.
When clients like “Jonathan” tell me about the problems that they’re facing, one of the questions that I begin to ask them is, “Can you tell me a little bit about the sexual fantasies that you are pursuing, whether porn or in an affair partner or even just in your fantasies as you have sex?”
And when I asked Jonathan this question, I wish I could have taken a picture of his face. It was kind of like, “What in the world are you just asking?”
He said, “I don’t know, I guess I’ve never really thought about it. Why is that even important?” And so what I told him about was what Dr. Patrick Carnes had said regarding the arousal template. The arousal template is a constellation of images, thoughts, sensations, and relational archetypes that we all find sexually desirable. What my research found is that all of those sexual fantasies in the porn searches that we make actually have very, very important clues about our healing.
While the average session for viewing porn is around 7-8 minutes, for Jonathan, he said that he could scroll the internet for at least a half hour to two hours, just trying to find a woman with the right eyes. And he said that he would just scroll, and scroll, and scroll. And he said that he was highly selective about which eyes he wanted to merge with.
Jonathan- Facing the Pain
Big T traumas might be 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, being raped. At a certain depth lies the realization as expressed by Brené Brown when she says, “Everyone has a story or a struggle that will break your heart. And if we’re really paying attention, most people have a story that will bring us to our knees.” These are some of those big T traumas. When you think about someone meaningful passing away or some level of violence against you or your family, those are the big T traumas.
But for Jonathan, he went through a lot of small T traumas. He began to describe his earliest memory, which was being in a crib about two years old and crying. He wanted someone to come and find him. It’s dark and his experience was that no one came to him that night.
The second story that he shared was being around six or seven years old and he had the flu or chicken pox. He really wanted his mom or his dad to stay home with him. But what he began to recognize was that his nanny was going to be with him throughout that day. He said, that just kind of seared into him as a foundational experience of his life in moments of a lot of need. He could not rely on his parents.
His parents stopped getting him the nanny but got him a Schwinn bicycle. He said, “Jay, I loved that bike.” And I said, “Jonathan, tell me why you loved it.” And he said, “I would get home from school and I would hop on the bike. I would just cruise around the neighborhood trying to lock eyes with my friend’s moms and my other classmates.”
I said, “That’s a very curious phrase that you just used. You cruised around your neighborhood trying to lock eyes with someone.” When he made that connection between his cruising behavior and the lack of eye connection that he had with his mother and his father, well I have not seen a man weep like that in a long time. For Jonathan, that was the beginning of change for him: to recognize that this current unwanted sexual behavior that was wreaking havoc in his life and in his marriage. It was actually a clarion call to attend to a boy and to traumas that he had never engaged before.
Jonathan- Facing the Shame
Neuroscientists by the names of Dr. Allan Shore and Dr. Dan Siegel refer to shame almost like a manual transmission for a car.
The three parts for a manual transmission are: You have your accelerator, brake, and clutch. If you’ve ever learned how to drive a manual transmission car, you know that once you begin to try and accelerate, when you begin to try and brake, you have to begin to engage the clutch. If you don’t engage the clutch, you’re going to have a very rude awakening. The car slams forward. What Allan Shore says is that the shearing-off effect is really what we begin to experience as shame, right?
Part of our job as children is to be curious, to touch everything, to want everything. Toddlers want to taste everything. They put the worm and the dirt in their mouth. It’s all exploration.
We have that accelerator that is telling us: Go through the world. Explore everything that you can. But inevitably we have to have a break in our lives. We have to have someone that’s going to say, “No, don’t eat that. You’re going to get poisoned,” or “Wait a minute.”
That’s the break. But what Allan Shore says is that good parents apply the break with a clutch. What ends up happening for people who experience toxic shame is that the break, the “no”, the stop! is applied without any sense of the clutch of kindness being applied.
Conclusion
When you begin to heal and you begin to get a sense of, “I want kindness even more than I want sobriety,” something in your heart will begin to change. That sense of play, that sense of delight, and far more that sense of I do not want to sabotage this feeling, this relationship that begins to emerge.
Kintsugi is a Japanese form of pottery. The premise of Kintsugi is that a beautiful clay pot or piece of pottery breaks, and then you have to figure out what to do with it.
(Note: the following images are from the S.A. Lifeline 2023 Women’s Workshop where we enjoyed the art of Kintsugi.)
Most of the time when something breaks in our lives, we rush to get rid of it. We’re ready for a new one, but central to Kintsugi is that they see the brokenness of the pottery as an essential component to its beauty.
What they actually do is put the pieces of the pottery back together again, and then bring this beautiful gold filament.
If there is anything that I’ve learned from being a psychotherapist it’s that this is what I see my clients become. It’s not brand-new pots. It’s not throwing out the old and trying to turn over a new leaf.
It’s that they’re able to talk about their addiction the way that we saw Steven and Rhyll talk about it today. It’s that this was a moment of heartache. This was a moment of loss. A moment of destruction and trauma within our family, but somehow in the cracks of what I have been through, something beautiful is emerging that I have no idea how to explain.
