By most accounts, compulsive sexual behavior is rampant in our culture presently. Given our current culture's proclivities for things like MTV, Jerry Springer, Beyonce Knowles, "girls gone wild" and, of course, the recent tremendous increase in the volume and accessability of pornography via the internet, this does not seem surprising. What has been surprising though, over the past two decades, is the dramatic increase in volume of spiritual caregivers who have been exposed as sexual predators, or at the least sexually compulsive.
I remember working with a client, Doug, who was a senior pastor at a "mega-church," one of those gigantic metropolitan churches with membership numbers in the tens of thousands. Dougcame into treatment for his struggles with pornography. "I'm a Christian," he said, "that means loving my neighbor as myself and being kind to others. Using porn is doing neither of those things. What's more, I know the impact this has had on my marriage and my wife, and if it gets out, I know the impact it will have on my congregation." He noted that he had dismissed several junior pastors who struggled with the same issues, often with very little sympathy. He'd come to treatment after his wife had installed spy software on his computer, confirmed he had returned to using pornography for hours at a time, and told him she was likely ending their marriage and would be providing the adminestrative oversight committee at the church the evidence she had accumulated.
After sitting in on a discussion spirituality and addiction Doug approached me, face ashen, and asked if we could talk privately. "I'm afraid my life's been a lie," he said simply. "I thought I loved God and had a relationship with him, but I'm starting to see how selfish I've been."
Anger, which is the inward feeling associated with the thought, "this is not fair," does not always need to be expressed, but it does need to be acknowledged. In suppressing his anger, which we later came to understand was quite considerable, Doug is anything but out of the ordinary. Sex addiction is typically an expression of repressed anger, which is something that runs rampant in the Christian community. Unfortunately we Christians teach one another to be "nice" instead of whole.
Jesus was a lot of things, but biblically speaking "nice" wasn't one of them. This is a man who went into the temple with a cat-of-9-tails (that is, a whip that ended with a piece of leather broken into 9 strands or strips which were traditionally adorned with jagged rocks and sharp, broken pieces of glass or clay) and drove out merchants. Ever been driven with a cat of 9 tails? NOT nice. At all.
Yet modern Christians tend to expect "nice" from both their peers and, perhaps more importantly, themselves. Firm ideas are entrenched within Christianity with regard to what it means to behave in a "Christ-like" fashion, and often we will judge those in our community who fall outside of those guidelines as harshly as we judge ourselves when when do.
When we live in a culture that demands we be "nice" instead of authentic, what's going to happen is individuals are simply going to suppress their anger, rather than dealing with it appropriately. I'll learn to put on a mask of "nice," where instead of showing you my authentic self, i show you the self I think you (and perhaps our church or religious community) think I should be. The problem is that over time I'll start to believe that I really am a "nice" person, and compartmentalize that anger.
Anger that is ignored becomes depression (that is, anger turned inwards), rage or addiction. Show me a people-pleaser (always a "nice" guy) and I'll show you someone who is depressed, rages periodically, or struggles with active addiction. 100% of the time.
The challenge is NOT that we as Christians don't understand the idea that we're angry and pretend not to be. The difficulty here is that we have forgotten or perhaps never learned the tools to express our anger appropriately.
More on that another day...
Greg Struve
Family Counselor
The Meadows
800.632.3697
