We Support
John Glisson, founder of Pure Community Ministries and The Purity Report, shares his story of drug and pornography addiction, and God’s saving grace.
He is also open and honest about continued struggles with pornography after coming to Christ. The journey of faith is not perfect, but it continues to blossom as we follow God’s lead and rest in His grace!
If you are struggling, you don’t have to languish in the dark. There is hope! Sign up on The Purity Report and start letting God into those dark places in your heart where He can forgive and heal you!
My mind is always blown on Easter. Just the thought of a dead man being raised back to life after three days is mind boggling. Of course, that is exactly what we celebrate today. Jesus has conquered sin and death and lives forever as a testament to God that the price for our rebellion against Him has been paid.
Jesus invites us into his resurrected life. However, the way to that life is to follow his example. If we are to experience the joy of his resurrected life, we must also endure death at the cross. It is not a physical death, but surrendering to the reality that Jesus suffered on our behalf.
There are a lot of areas of my life where I want to experience Jesus’ life – my relationships are first on the list. Even my sex life makes the list. But I am reminded on Easter that in order for something to be resurrected, it first must die. Am I surrendering my life and all that it is about to Jesus so that it is his resurrected life that makes it live rather than my dead, sinful “life?”
Bottom line:
For something to be resurrected, it first has to die!
Leave a commentWe created a quick screen-cast to give an overview of The Purity Report and the 40 Day Challenge. Take a look!
Note: It’s best to watch the video in full-screen HD mode to see all of the details.
Leave a comment
I picked up this chip last Tuesday at Celebrate Recovery.
It was fourteen years ago this week that I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. It was also fourteen years ago this week that I last used any illegal drugs. Needless to say, I am incredibly grateful to God for the grace he has given me to stay away from drugs.
Struggling with pornography, however, was a part of my life before I began using drugs and persisted long after. It is this struggle that God used to bring me into recovery. He chose to remove drugs from me without journeying through recovery. But, he chose to use porn addiction to humble me and teach me how to depend upon him for freedom.
What a long, strange, and wonderful trip it’s been! I look forward to what God is going to do in the future. Thanks for sharing this with me! Merry Christmas!
Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy. Blessed is the man who always fears the LORD, but he who hardens his heart falls into trouble.
Proverbs 28:13-14 NLT
“My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love – outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.” -Thomas Merton
Admitting to God
Getting honest about the details of our lives is the most powerful thing we can do to strengthen our intimate connection with God. Honesty puts us on the same page with Him. Knowing that He knows everything about us, there is no reason to hide what is inside of us anymore. When we get honest with God, we “cash the check” so to speak; we open ourselves up and receive the grace that He has already provided for us, through Christ.
Step Five is not a religious exercise so it’s important that we don’t over -spiritualize this aspect of our recovery. We are just admitting, with as much detail as we can, what God already knows. We acknowledge that we have never benefited from minimizing our weaknesses and shortcomings. We admit our pride and our stubbornness, with as much clarity as possible, most notably all of our silly attempts to solve our spiritual and emotional problems. We confess that we have been self righteousness in covert and creative ways. We admit that we have never fooled God and that we rarely fooled anyone else, only ourselves. We tell the details about how we have judged other people and, with as much humility as possible, we admit how our religiosity has kept God, and the goodness that He intends for us, at arm’s length.
God has known us in a deep way. Now we will begin to know ourselves in a deep way, too. As we are willing to admit the exact nature of our wrongs to God, we will be able to accept the acceptance that He gives. As we accept the acceptance that He gives, we will begin to accept ourselves in the same way; even the worst about us. The more we admit our shortcomings to God, the more we slice away at the fears that have ruled us from the inside. We will learn to be at peace with the mysterious ways of God. Accepting His deep acceptance, we will no longer be obsessed with trying to figure out the hidden streams and currents of God. We will lose our inhibitions. We will want to strip down, reveal ourselves completely and swim in the power of goodness that God offers to us. We will never sink or get lost when we are honest with God. He’ll do the navigating for us. Knowing that we are known by God in this intimate way, we can live at rest. We will be buoyed in His grace forever, floating and moving with the currents of His guidance and care. There is no need to fear the oceanic mystery of God anymore. No matter where His currents lead our lives, the ultimate destination for us is more than very, very good.
Reproduced with the permission of Operation Integrity
Fear of intimacy
Intimacy-aversive (sometimes called “sexual anorexic”) addicts have more trouble with “acting-in” than acting-out in the context of a relationship. This can be evidenced by behaviors that tend to sabotage or erode the intimacy in that primary romantic relationship: withdraw, withholding, blaming, shaming, avoiding, hiding, controlling, etc. Sound familiar? Nearly 40% of all sexual addicts also deal with Intimacy-aversion. There are 3 common roots of Intimacy-aversion: 1) attachment disorder with one or both parents, 2) sexual trauma and 3) reflexive/reaction to the sexually-addictive behaviors.
While I don’t think I personally deal with this type at a significant level, I can see that I was a prime candidate: my relationship with my mother growing up was volatile and with my dad it was shallow; I was sexually traumatized to a significant level as described earlier; and I experienced overwhelming shame guilt and fear towards my wife early on in our marriage because I was still walking in the addiction and acting out. Even today, I have to be on guard for ways that I can tend to subconsciously sabotage the intimacy in our relationship through blaming and controlling, behaviors common amongst those of us dealing with same-gender attractions.
You may learn more about Jayson Graves and his excellent counseling ministry, Healing for the Soul by visiting their website – www.healingforthesoul.org.
The Trauma factor
The third most common type of sexual addiction is called Trauma-Induced and is the result of sexual trauma. sexual trauma means “any event that alters or damages a person’s self-perception or understanding of healthy sexuality.” This can range from normal childhood experiences like “playing doctor” or exploring to actual acts of rape, incest or molestation. Something can become traumatic when there is either a power differential or emotional distress in the experience: either someone else initiated it, they were bigger or stronger or older or simply more experienced than you or you felt scared, guilty or shameful during or as a result. The addiction lies in the compulsion to repeat the trauma so if you can look at your “acting-out” behaviors and see patterns that are similar to sexual or quasi-sexual experiences in your younger, more impressionable years (often into early adulthood), there may be some trauma to address.
I can see this in my own story in that not only was I molested by a male scout leader and a female babysitter around 8-10 years old but I began being sexual with boys and girls in the neighborhood shortly thereafter on a daily basis until I was about 15 or 16. This tapered down in late high school and early college (sounds ironic, huh?) but while the behaviors became more sporadic, I was still trying to recreate the same things from childhood as an adult in an attempt to feel like I was in control or to give me the illusion of power, affirmation and value.
You may learn more about Jayson Graves and his excellent counseling ministry, Healing for the Soul by visiting their website – www.healingforthesoul.org.
Psychological deficits
The second most common type of addiction-psychological-is created when sex is used to “medicate” against painful memories or relational experiences from childhood in adulthood. In other words, we all have emotional/relational needs that must be met developmentally: affirmation, attachment/bonding, gender affiliation, trust, responsibility, honesty, and others. When these needs are not met or when we develop scarring as a result of abuse or neglect, the result is pain. You could call this “soul pain” and a soul in pain will seek medication. So, the addict has chosen sex as his “poison” to cover up the effects of this psychological pain instead of facing the pain and growing through it.
For me, the main sources of pain were my relationships with parents and peers. My parents loved me and I knew that, however, they were limited in what they could give me and sometimes what they gave me was harmful. My dad was a bit relationally stunted and passive: he was very fun and likeable but unable to connect on a heart-to-heart level with me or show me how that was done as a male. My mother, also fun-loving and caring, had an anger issue and would sometimes get controlling and violent. My peers were merciless from 6th grade through 10th when I was bullied and called names that were terribly feminizing and confusing.
The net effect was that I had a love-hate relationship with men, looking for them to rescue me, while waning in my ability to respect them. When it came to women, I was not interested in anything other than friendships because that felt like healing and not something that would consume or violate me. And as far as peers were concerned, I’ve had to work through trust issues and take risks to be “fully-known and fully accepted” (the very definition of intimacy).
Furthermore, the confusing attractions towards men came from the need to be affirmed in my own masculinity and have a sense of mastery over life-something that good looks, big muscles, a sense of freedom and adventure and all the other things I was attracted to in males was trying to give me in a false or counterfeit way. Part of this root came also by way of comparison/contrast in my relationship with peers and being a “late-bloomer.” Puberty came later than normal for me and this, coupled with having to shower after gym class every day in 7th and 8th grade, created a sense of inferiority, jealousy and strife around things s_xual and anatomical. The mix of this psychological deficit and the regular practice of masturbation with the images of the other, more developed and endowed boys, made for a very powerful longing for what I didn’t seem to have and an attachment to what they appeared to.
You may learn more about Jayson Graves and his excellent counseling ministry, Healing for the Soul by visiting their website – www.healingforthesoul.org.
“Ring the bell, feed the dog”
First, the most common type, Neurological, can be understood as addiction that’s created behaviorally. This happens primarily as a result of masturbation and fantasy and as the brain is conditioned through ejaculation/orgasm to respond to the images, (imagined or actual pornography) that are in the brain at the moment of chemical impact. This impact, a combination of endorphins and enkephalins not only explains why the release feels so good but represents the highest chemical reward the brain can achieve naturally. This is also why the images that we’ve acted out with in the past can seems so vivid even today-they’ve essentially been “burned on our brain” through this reinforcing process. Remember Pavlov and his dogs?
My own experimentation with masturbation started earlier than normal-the average age to start seems to be around 11 to 14-and it became more pronounced and regular for me at about 11 or 12 and eventually becoming a daily habit through my teens and tapering off in my twenties. I know I looked at a lot of porn and remember focusing mainly on the men in the pictures. I think this was because they were less prevalent than women and I was curious about what they were doing and what I might be expected to do myself. The sense of freedom and adventure they seemed to have been also very alluring to me. So I would go back, sometimes daily to my secret stash and fixate on these pictures, and regularly sealing the images in my brain through masturbation.
This habit continued for me even after being saved at age 21-primarily because no one ever told me how harmful it could be-even though I always somehow (thank you Holy Spirit) felt guilty about it and would try to stop but only with mixed results. Even though the porn and acting-out with others stopped, I still had the images in my fantasy world and this kept me attached.
You may learn more about Jayson Graves and his excellent counseling ministry, Healing for the Soul by visiting their website – www.healingforthesoul.org.
We are beginning a new blog series sharing the story of Jayson Graves, a great friend to our ministry. Jayson will be sharing the 5 Common Types of Sexual Addiction. We will devote a blog post to each type and how Jayson relates it to his own story.
Early Beginnings
I remember the first boy I ever had a “crush” on: his name was Robby and we were both 12 to 13. I just remember noticing him in a different way and wanting to be close to him. I wouldn’t call it necessarily a sexual thing although I’m sure he may have showed up that way in dreams. Rather, the feelings I had towards him were more about wanting what he had: he always seemed to be very positive and confident and was one of the popular kids yet showed kindness to the likes of “nerdy little me.”
Looking back at that today as a counselor who specializes in helping men with sexual addictions and unwanted same-gender attractions, I can see that it was part of the beginnings of the distress I would feel about these feeling over the next 2 decades. The beginnings had roots in more than just feelings, however-they were the result of many factors-understanding these and seeking the road map to God’s grace has been the key to overcoming.
Understanding the Roots
I have come to understand my sexual confusion/disorientation as a form of sexual addiction. From what I have learned treating sex addicts of all sorts for the past 3 years, there are essentially 5 common types of sexual addiction: Neurological, Psychological, Trauma-induced, Intimacy-aversive, and Mood-affective. I will explain these, using my own story to hopefully give you a good grasp at understanding your own and that of those who struggle similarly.
Stay tuned – more to come…
You may learn more about Jayson Graves and his excellent counseling ministry, Healing for the Soul by visiting their website – www.healingforthesoul.org.
Keep In Touch