Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series (28 page)

I married Tina when I was twenty. I
thought that maybe this would break my pornography habit. I did okay at first,
but then I found the Internet. The Internet turned out to be my “crack
cocaine.” I could look at anything I wanted, and it was virtually free.
Plus I no longer had to face the store clerks again.

Tina could
always tell when I was looking, since I’d withdraw from her. Before long,
we hardly ever had sex, and when we did there was never any true intimacy. At
times I would open up and tell her about my struggle. I always told her just
enough so that she’d know what was wrong, but I would never tell her how
much I looked or how it truly affected me.

In April one year, my
brother and I came up with this crazy idea. We were going to start our own
pornography company. I wanted to make videos and start my own Internet site. I
asked my wife what she thought, and she said, “I really don’t care
anymore.” So my brother and I went to work. After a few weeks, however,
Tina threatened to leave me. I told her I’d quit, but deep inside I was
mad that she made me quit my business.

My anger grew, but that
didn’t stop me from looking at Internet porn every chance I got. Tina and
I grew apart, and she started seeing another man and was thinking of leaving
me. After two months, I found out about their relationship, and I was never
more scared in my life. I really didn’t want to lose Tina and my two
children. We went to counseling, but I still looked at Internet porn. Can you
believe it? Even in all this mess, I was still drawn to my sin.

A
few months later, I purchased a copy of
Every Man’s Battle,
and
I began to put the ideas into practice. I memorized Job 31:1. I starved my eyes
and began having a daily prayer time. I focused on being obedient to Christ. My
mind started to clear, and I no longer heard the double sexual meanings in so
many simple statements. I can remember the first time someone said something
that had a double meaning and laughed. I asked, “Why are you
laughing?” When they told me, I praised God because I didn’t get
the joke until they told me. My mind was thinking purely for the very first
time.

I’ve maintained the habit of bouncing the eyes. When
I get really tempted, I look for what it is in my life that is not right.
I’ve begun filling my needs in a healthy, God-pleasing way, and
it’s turned my marriage around. In fact, it’s better than it has
ever been. Tina says she’s never been happier, and that the marriage is
what she always dreamed of.

I later attended an Every Man’s
Battle Conference, where I met men just like me who’d been struggling.
For some reason, I always thought I was all alone in this battle. I began to
talk more about the topic, and when I did, I found out that six out of my seven
brothers have the same problem. I’m going to share my story with each one
to show them they don’t have to live in bondage anymore.

The ironic thing about all this is that I’ve used my Web
experience to start a site to
help
struggling men free themselves from
pornography. Now isn’t that something?

Thanks, Aaron, for
sharing your incredible story. You decided that it was time, and you slew that
monster of pornography. You changed the direction of your life, saved your
marriage, and became a godly parent to your children. Now that’s what we
call a turnaround.

What about you?

Isn’t it
time?

PART VII

We’ve been talking about
sexual attraction to women. But as you read
Every
Young
Man’s Battle
you may have been thinking of how its themes might
apply to your feelings for men. If that’s true, we’re fairly
confident there haven’t been many people for you to talk to regarding
this same-sex attraction. And the fear of being discovered or rejected has no
doubt kept you silent.

But the attraction is there. You didn’t
choose to be attracted to men, but you are. You may have been molested when you
were younger, and that started the feelings. Even though it was abuse, you
couldn’t figure out why it made you feel the way it did. And when it came
to anything related to church, perhaps all you heard was condemnation.

There are many theories about why you have the feelings you do. Some of
them seem to make sense, and some don’t. But let us share with you what
we believe makes the most sense. We want to help you understand why you feel
the way you do and provide some hope for you.

From the time
you were born, your development unfolded in relationship to your mom and dad.
Even if one of them wasn’t there, that fact was part of your
developmental process. When childhood development occurs in a healthy home,
where a young boy feels balanced love flowing from a father and a mother, the
foundation is laid for heterosexuality. If your father was there for you and
acted as role model while expressing his love for you, then that gave you a
sense of security in your manhood and total identity.

As far as
maleness goes, then, you felt complete. The area in which you felt
incompleteness would be in femaleness. In a mode of experiencing completeness,
you would be attracted to the thing you didn’t have, the thing that would
complete you—and that would be someone of the opposite sex. This is an
oversimplification, of course, but an accurate explanation of male attraction
to females.

If you were raised by an emotionally distant father, or a
male who was cruel, abusive, or absent, you might have developed a different
sense of who you are. You may not have experienced a secure sense of identity
and manhood. If no other man in your life was able to provide that, such as an
uncle or a grandfather or a coach, then you were left with a sense of
incompleteness that you probably didn’t even know was there. The result
was for you to be attracted to what would provide that sense of completeness,
and that was another male.

The reactions of other boys may have
complicated this sense of “lacking” for you. For example, if you
weren’t into competitive sports and preferred art and drama, you may have
felt as though you were an outcast. Boys your age may not have connected with
you, and in fact they may have rejected you in order to secure their own sense
of manhood.

Some boys like to play with dolls rather than army men. If
that was you, it was a setup for experiencing rejection by other boys and later
by men. So it was only natural that you would long for what you didn’t
have, which is a feeling of maleness and a connection to other men. If someone
who was experienced in homosexual behavior came along and seduced you, then you
probably felt at least some of the acceptance and connection that you’d
been longing for.

Attraction to men can also be intensified by a
repulsion to women. If you had a mother or other female caretaker who was
unhealthy and either smothered you out of her own selfishness or was cruel to
you out of her own depravity, it would interrupt the development of an
attraction to women. The last thing you would want to have would be a
relationship with anyone who was anything like the woman you despised. Your
comfort level with women would be minimal. That foundation made you an easy
target if you were approached by another man.

If these things ring true
in your life, you’re one of thousands of confused and searching men who
long to know what’s normal and how to experience it. This is where your
choices come in, because there’s much hope for you, if you choose
it.

The world
will tell you that you must act on your feelings—sexualize them—and
only then will you feel whole. They’ll tell you that while your family or
church will reject you, you’ll find completion in a world where
homosexual sex is good and the attention you’ve always craved is
available. You can listen to the world, or you can hear another voice that
appears fainter but grows stronger everyday.

In the 1970s the growing
gay movement, along with liberal psychiatry establishments, was part of a major
shift in the thinking about homosexuality. They were successful in having
homosexuality deleted from the American Psychological Society’s list of
mental disorders. Dr. Robert Spitzer helped lead that campaign, which made him
a hero of the homosexual community at the time. Recently, however, Spitzer has
published the results of his latest research—results that have made him
less than popular with those who used to praise him.

“Contrary to
conventional wisdom,” he wrote, “some highly motivated individuals,
using a variety of change efforts, can make substantial change in multiple
indicators of sexual orientation.” Essentially Spitzer wrote that if you
have feelings for the same sex, and you’re highly motivated to change,
you really do have a choice in who you are, who you become, and how you feel
about yourself. His conclusions are based on interviews with two hundred men
and women who shifted from homosexual to heterosexual attraction and stayed
straight for five years. The reasons they were motivated to change were due to
being burned out over a highly promiscuous lifestyle, unstable relationships,
the desire to marry, and matters of their faith. Three-fourths of the men and
half the women were married after giving up a life of homosexual
relationships.
1

What this
should mean to you is that while you didn’t choose to have the feelings
you have, you can choose what you do with them. While many voices in the world
tell you there’s no choice in the matter, there’s plenty of
evidence that you
do
have a choice and you can make changes in how you
feel about yourself and others. So if your dreams consist of sexual interludes
with men, if you fantasize about having sex with men, and if you long to be
with and lust after a man, you can change all of that, just as a man lusting
after a woman can change his mind and his heart. It won’t be easy, but it
can be done.

Our thoughts on this topic aren’t very popular. But
neither are many of the other ideas we’ve presented here and in the
original book,
Every Man’s Battle.
In that book, we published
our e-mail addresses, just as we’ve done in this book. Why? Because we
wanted to know whether men were doing what we suggested. We wanted to know
whether they were successful in experiencing victory over sexual sin.

We would have never been asked to write this book for younger single men if
the results of publishing
Every Man’s Battle
hadn’t been
so profound. Every day we’re reading e-mails from men, young adults, and
teenagers who have struggled for years and found hope for the first
time—heterosexual
and
homosexual. Gays and straights are doing
the things we suggested, and they’re finding a victory that had escaped
them before.

You can trust us when we tell you there’s a way out.
You do have a choice, and that choice will lead you to what God wants for you
and to the relationships He has prepared for you.

The path you choose
is your decision, and we hope that this book’s content will motivate you.
You can do what many other men with the same feelings as you have done. You can
change and be successful in developing a new life.

____________________________________________

If you would like further information and support
with regard to your feelings, please call Exodus International toll-free at
1-888-264-0877 or visit their Web site at
http://www.exodusintl.org.

____________________

Steve can be
reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Fred can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

____________________

every man’s
battle
workshop

n
ew Life Ministries
receives hundreds of calls every month from Christian men who are struggling to
stay pure in the midst of daily challenges to their sexual integrity. We are
committed to helping men win this battle for sexual purity.

In
our Every Man’s Battle Workshops, we offer a biblically based program for
men who are seeking God’s wisdom for keeping themselves pure. In four
days of teaching and group counseling, participants gear up for battle as they
learn a practical, no-nonsense approach for overcoming the destructive effects
of sexual temptation. Our goal is to equip each man who attends with the tools
necessary to maintain sexual integrity and enjoy healthy, productive
relationships.