How to Defeat Harmful Habits (Counseling Through the Bible Series) (45 page)

Do your sexual fantasies inhibit intimate bonding within your closest relationship?

Do you often want to get away from your sex partner after having sex?

Do you frequently feel guilt, shame, or remorse following a sexual encounter?

Do you hate your body and at times avoid touching it?

Does every new relationship end in the same destructive manner as past relationships?

Does your sexual behavior require more variety and increased frequency to bring the same level of excitement you formerly experienced?

Does your sexual behavior ever put you in danger of being arrested?

Does your sexual behavior compromise your spiritual values and growth?

Does your sexual behavior put you at risk for unwanted pregnancy, violence, or sexually transmitted diseases?

Does your sexual behavior ever leave you feeling lonely, isolated, or alienated from others?

Does your sexual behavior cause you to feel helpless, hopeless, and at times suicidal?

If you have a continual obsession with sex that results in compulsive sexual behavior—despite risking loss of marriage, health, employment, or freedom—you are a sex addict. The Bible gives this vivid description of strugglers entrapped in sexual addiction:

“God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual
impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another…God
gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged
natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also
abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with
lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men
,
and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion”

(R
OMANS
1:24,26-27).

Abandonment
is woven throughout the spiral of sexual addiction. Every single sex addict, a full 100 percent of cases, has experienced some form of abandonment, whether physical, emotional, sexual, spiritual, or a combination of those factors.

Marnie’s abandonment issues began with the death of her mother from colon cancer when she was just three years old. What compounded her sense of abandonment was that her mother was never mentioned or talked about in the family, creating a further disconnect for Marnie.

“I have no category for ‘mom,’ or even for ‘mother,’” Marnie shared. “I had no sense of the person who was my mother, of her likes and dislikes, her hopes and fears, her dreams and disappointments.”

Marnie also experienced abandonment from her father, who traveled extensively and was away from home most of the time. Realizing her own craving for connection, Marnie described sexual addiction as “quieting our spirits’ ache for perfect connection.”

•
Curiosity
is a seemingly harmless temptation to view people as sexual objects. If the sexual temptation is not rejected, but rather continually viewed, then the repeated sexual viewing becomes a habit.