Rethinking Fantasy
Redefining how I look at sex has been a major part of my recovery from porn addiction. Honestly my first step of redefining sex started when I read Marcie Aikens book “The Crooked Stick” and in the book it had a paragraph that said “God made sex to bring two people closer together than anything else could”. In many ways that phrase was the start of my recovery from porn.
Part of my recovery has been redefining intimacy to mean so much more than sex. There are intellectual, emotional, spiritual and physical parts of intimacy. As a single I felt so much freedom realizing I can practice three fourths of intimacy.
Part of my recovery has been sitting down and talking with my pastor and finding out that there is an emotional/spiritual aspect of sex.
Part of my recovery was going through the Bible and realizing that God uses the word know instead of sex because God made sex so that two people can know one another better than anyone else in the world.
Some of the most major parts of my recovery has been about redefining sex.
Before I started my recovery I only viewed sex as a physical act. It is has been really shocking to me how that not looking at sex (as found in porn) has expanded my definition of sex so much.
This week I had two very vivid fantasies attack my mind and I was very frustrated because I had gone about a week without any fantasy bothering me. It must have been God because at the same time I noticed that both fantasies had legitimate not wrong parts to them, right alongside very wicked terrible sinful evil parts.
It got me thinking. Why is it that so many of my fantasies have “not wrong parts” mixed with terrible sinful parts? Looking back time and time again I struggled with some sort of fantasy for a while and then God would give me an epiphany about that fantasy I was struggling with and afterwards I would be healthier for it. I always figured things would just be better if I did not struggle with fantasy at all. But perhaps there is a blessing within this struggle with fantasy.
Consider this, I grew up in a Christian home, went to church all my life, even went to a Christian high school and in all these places they tried to teach my about purity. At the same time growing up I watched Hollywood movies, listened to dirty jokes, and at the age of 14 got involved in porn, and all these things tried to teach me about well sexual hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure and self indulgence). Well I was naturally combining the teachings of purity and hedonism into my belief about sex.
The Bible says in James 1:8 “ A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”
Combining the teachings of purity (which demanded self discipline) with the teachings of hedonism (which screams for self indulgence) made me a double minded man. Yes I was 14 when I started looking at porn but the reality is that I was probably combining hedonism with purity since I was 5. Combining the two made me double minded, and I combined the two for more than two decades. Its going to take more than just a day or two to unravel this double mindedness.
And this is my point, perhaps God is allowing me to struggle with fantasy to unwrap hedonism, from purity and God’s teaching on sex.
I haven’t looked at porn for nearly three years now, and in all honesty I often struggle with fantasy, and some of these fantasies have been series battles, but looking back more often than not I got victory over particularly hard fantasies when I was able to separate the bad sinful part of the fantasy with well the not bad part of the fantasy.
It got me thinking that perhaps fantasy is a necessary part of recovery so that God can unravel our double mindedness.
There is a story in Matthew 13:24 about a man who had a field and he sowed that field with wheat. At night his enemies came and sowed the field with tares. When harvest time came he had to separate the wheat from the tares.
The reality of the situation is that in my mind I sowed wheat and tares together, and I am reaping them both. When I struggle with my fantasy I am reaping exactly what I sowed, BUT God in his grace is allowing me to separate the wheat from the tares.
I know if you are like me you wish the fantasies would just go away. But consider this, right now you have a lot of wrong ideas about sex, and some right ideas about sex, if you get married those wrong ideas will be bad for your marriage. Those bad ideas have to go away for you to have a healthy marriage. So would you rather reap what you sow while you are a single person even if this means struggling with terrible fantasies as God separates sinful terrible thoughts on sex from ,not wrong, thoughts on sex? Or would you rather wait until you get married for you to reap what you sowed and now your wife has to suffer through what you reap?
Perhaps God is showing us incredible mercy and grace by allowing us to struggle with fantasy now, so that the tares we sowed into our mind will not harm whomever we marry.
Personally for me this process started at day 110 when I came to the conclusion everything I was ever told about sex was a lie. Maybe that seems extreme but at the time, in all honesty looking back, I had combined every right thing I knew about sex with a lot of sinful wrong things so I needed to restart my thinking on sex. My double mindedness needed to be unraveled.
I restarted my thinking on sex with this “God made sex to bring two people closer together than anything else can”. So my understanding of sex started being built around intimacy instead of the physical act of sex. As God started unraveling my double mindedness the things that agreed with my new understanding of sex was put next to it, the sinful things more often than not were cast aside. Honestly I just went through the my story section of my website and I saw battle after battle where I cannot remember the thing that troubled me but I remember the blessing ,in understanding, that God gave to me out of the battle.
One of the things I decided to do, this week, when I realized that God was using these fantasies to unravel my double mindedness was to sit down and write out my expectations for sex inside of marriage.
It is no secret that if one day I get engaged that I plan on telling my fiancé about the struggles I had with pornography. I plan on telling her all the stuff that led me into pornography, what it was like while I was addicted to porn, what my recovery process has been, and the steps I have taken to stay away from porn. In fact the my story section of my website is very much designed to give her all that. I think its right for her to know all that stuff. If she still decides to marry me after processing all of that there will come a day where it will be the right thing to talk about our expectations when it comes to sex inside of marriage.
Before I stopped looking at porn my expectations for sex inside of marriage would not have been more than two sentences. I am constantly amazed at how much more I understand about sex due to not looking at porn, than looking at porn for 14 years!!!!!! In unraveling my double mindedness my understanding has shot through the roof, and in a very real way that’s a blessing.
I will not post what my expectations of sex inside of marriage are, I feel that is private and should only be discussed between an engaged or married couple, but I will say this I wrote over 4,000 words so far on what my expectations are. The reality is that none of these expectations are graphic. Some of these expectations deal with how I expect my porn addiction will harm our relationship. Others deal with how I expect my body to react to sexual intimacy, and I honestly don’t know if its natural or a result of 14 years of porn addiction, but because I expect it to happen I wrote about it. Much of what I wrote about is stuff I have a little bit of knowledge on followed by many “I don’t knows”.
I wrote all this stuff out, and went back through it and none of the stuff I wrote about is sinful or selfish in nature. The way I wrote my expectations I wrote it to a fiancé, and I wrote it with the idea that when we talk about sexual expectations it will be weeks or months before we get married, so that we have time to process each others expectations. If your expectations don’t line up you should know about it before your wedding night, and try to line up your expectations as best as you can before you say I do.
I understand that I am talking to a group of people who likely despise sexual fantasy, and if you are like me you don’t even want to dwell on sex inside your future marriage, or even your wedding night. But in truth what I am putting together is not a list of things to do on my wedding night but a conversation to have with some future fiancé. Although it does mention the wedding night some, that is not the point of writing out my list of sexual expectations.
First of all a list on your sexual expectations cannot be a list on all the stuff you want to do sexually, because once you are married you both have to agree on what you do. The person you marry can boycott any decision you make. A list of sexual expectations is a list on what you logically expect to happen sexually once you are married. If you expect that in your marriage you will DESIRE to do something put that on your list as a desire. This gives the other person an easy way to veto something that goes totally contrary to their expectations.
One of the reasons why you should right out this list is because it will give you an opportunity to consider and address any problems porn addiction may bring into your life. Acknowledging that porn may cause some issues in your marriage sexually, even after years of not looking at porn is a reasonable use for this list.
Another reason to write this list is to enjoy that sex is a mystery to you. Honestly it is nice to write about all the things I don’t know about sex. We live in a very sexualized culture, so we here all sorts of things about sex all the time, just coming to terms that we don’t really know all that much about sex is rather nice. Just writing out how you expect to unravel this mystery with your wife is encouraging, especially when you understand that your wife’s expectations will be different than yours and this is part of the mystery.
As I have written down what my expectations are I have felt a freedom to move on not and not dwell on them because now I can say I already wrote that down, I don’t have to think about it. My expectations are to the best of my knowledge not wrong, and that’s very encouraging to me. My expectations for the most part do very little to feed any fantasy I might have because whomever I marry can veto or boycott my decisions.
As God continues to unravel my doublemindedness I expect my expectations will continue to increase. So I guess I am here today to say that perhaps we should rethink fantasy. Instead of thinking of it as something that is totally evil and wrong and hurtful, maybe we should see it as an unraveling of double mindedness and that God intends to produce some good fruit out of this evil.
Perhaps we should not be upset with God when He doesn’t take the fantasy away, but grateful to God for allowing us an opportunity to heal and prepare.
Part of my recovery has been redefining intimacy to mean so much more than sex. There are intellectual, emotional, spiritual and physical parts of intimacy. As a single I felt so much freedom realizing I can practice three fourths of intimacy.
Part of my recovery has been sitting down and talking with my pastor and finding out that there is an emotional/spiritual aspect of sex.
Part of my recovery was going through the Bible and realizing that God uses the word know instead of sex because God made sex so that two people can know one another better than anyone else in the world.
Some of the most major parts of my recovery has been about redefining sex.
Before I started my recovery I only viewed sex as a physical act. It is has been really shocking to me how that not looking at sex (as found in porn) has expanded my definition of sex so much.
This week I had two very vivid fantasies attack my mind and I was very frustrated because I had gone about a week without any fantasy bothering me. It must have been God because at the same time I noticed that both fantasies had legitimate not wrong parts to them, right alongside very wicked terrible sinful evil parts.
It got me thinking. Why is it that so many of my fantasies have “not wrong parts” mixed with terrible sinful parts? Looking back time and time again I struggled with some sort of fantasy for a while and then God would give me an epiphany about that fantasy I was struggling with and afterwards I would be healthier for it. I always figured things would just be better if I did not struggle with fantasy at all. But perhaps there is a blessing within this struggle with fantasy.
Consider this, I grew up in a Christian home, went to church all my life, even went to a Christian high school and in all these places they tried to teach my about purity. At the same time growing up I watched Hollywood movies, listened to dirty jokes, and at the age of 14 got involved in porn, and all these things tried to teach me about well sexual hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure and self indulgence). Well I was naturally combining the teachings of purity and hedonism into my belief about sex.
The Bible says in James 1:8 “ A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”
Combining the teachings of purity (which demanded self discipline) with the teachings of hedonism (which screams for self indulgence) made me a double minded man. Yes I was 14 when I started looking at porn but the reality is that I was probably combining hedonism with purity since I was 5. Combining the two made me double minded, and I combined the two for more than two decades. Its going to take more than just a day or two to unravel this double mindedness.
And this is my point, perhaps God is allowing me to struggle with fantasy to unwrap hedonism, from purity and God’s teaching on sex.
I haven’t looked at porn for nearly three years now, and in all honesty I often struggle with fantasy, and some of these fantasies have been series battles, but looking back more often than not I got victory over particularly hard fantasies when I was able to separate the bad sinful part of the fantasy with well the not bad part of the fantasy.
It got me thinking that perhaps fantasy is a necessary part of recovery so that God can unravel our double mindedness.
There is a story in Matthew 13:24 about a man who had a field and he sowed that field with wheat. At night his enemies came and sowed the field with tares. When harvest time came he had to separate the wheat from the tares.
The reality of the situation is that in my mind I sowed wheat and tares together, and I am reaping them both. When I struggle with my fantasy I am reaping exactly what I sowed, BUT God in his grace is allowing me to separate the wheat from the tares.
I know if you are like me you wish the fantasies would just go away. But consider this, right now you have a lot of wrong ideas about sex, and some right ideas about sex, if you get married those wrong ideas will be bad for your marriage. Those bad ideas have to go away for you to have a healthy marriage. So would you rather reap what you sow while you are a single person even if this means struggling with terrible fantasies as God separates sinful terrible thoughts on sex from ,not wrong, thoughts on sex? Or would you rather wait until you get married for you to reap what you sowed and now your wife has to suffer through what you reap?
Perhaps God is showing us incredible mercy and grace by allowing us to struggle with fantasy now, so that the tares we sowed into our mind will not harm whomever we marry.
Personally for me this process started at day 110 when I came to the conclusion everything I was ever told about sex was a lie. Maybe that seems extreme but at the time, in all honesty looking back, I had combined every right thing I knew about sex with a lot of sinful wrong things so I needed to restart my thinking on sex. My double mindedness needed to be unraveled.
I restarted my thinking on sex with this “God made sex to bring two people closer together than anything else can”. So my understanding of sex started being built around intimacy instead of the physical act of sex. As God started unraveling my double mindedness the things that agreed with my new understanding of sex was put next to it, the sinful things more often than not were cast aside. Honestly I just went through the my story section of my website and I saw battle after battle where I cannot remember the thing that troubled me but I remember the blessing ,in understanding, that God gave to me out of the battle.
One of the things I decided to do, this week, when I realized that God was using these fantasies to unravel my double mindedness was to sit down and write out my expectations for sex inside of marriage.
It is no secret that if one day I get engaged that I plan on telling my fiancé about the struggles I had with pornography. I plan on telling her all the stuff that led me into pornography, what it was like while I was addicted to porn, what my recovery process has been, and the steps I have taken to stay away from porn. In fact the my story section of my website is very much designed to give her all that. I think its right for her to know all that stuff. If she still decides to marry me after processing all of that there will come a day where it will be the right thing to talk about our expectations when it comes to sex inside of marriage.
Before I stopped looking at porn my expectations for sex inside of marriage would not have been more than two sentences. I am constantly amazed at how much more I understand about sex due to not looking at porn, than looking at porn for 14 years!!!!!! In unraveling my double mindedness my understanding has shot through the roof, and in a very real way that’s a blessing.
I will not post what my expectations of sex inside of marriage are, I feel that is private and should only be discussed between an engaged or married couple, but I will say this I wrote over 4,000 words so far on what my expectations are. The reality is that none of these expectations are graphic. Some of these expectations deal with how I expect my porn addiction will harm our relationship. Others deal with how I expect my body to react to sexual intimacy, and I honestly don’t know if its natural or a result of 14 years of porn addiction, but because I expect it to happen I wrote about it. Much of what I wrote about is stuff I have a little bit of knowledge on followed by many “I don’t knows”.
I wrote all this stuff out, and went back through it and none of the stuff I wrote about is sinful or selfish in nature. The way I wrote my expectations I wrote it to a fiancé, and I wrote it with the idea that when we talk about sexual expectations it will be weeks or months before we get married, so that we have time to process each others expectations. If your expectations don’t line up you should know about it before your wedding night, and try to line up your expectations as best as you can before you say I do.
I understand that I am talking to a group of people who likely despise sexual fantasy, and if you are like me you don’t even want to dwell on sex inside your future marriage, or even your wedding night. But in truth what I am putting together is not a list of things to do on my wedding night but a conversation to have with some future fiancé. Although it does mention the wedding night some, that is not the point of writing out my list of sexual expectations.
First of all a list on your sexual expectations cannot be a list on all the stuff you want to do sexually, because once you are married you both have to agree on what you do. The person you marry can boycott any decision you make. A list of sexual expectations is a list on what you logically expect to happen sexually once you are married. If you expect that in your marriage you will DESIRE to do something put that on your list as a desire. This gives the other person an easy way to veto something that goes totally contrary to their expectations.
One of the reasons why you should right out this list is because it will give you an opportunity to consider and address any problems porn addiction may bring into your life. Acknowledging that porn may cause some issues in your marriage sexually, even after years of not looking at porn is a reasonable use for this list.
Another reason to write this list is to enjoy that sex is a mystery to you. Honestly it is nice to write about all the things I don’t know about sex. We live in a very sexualized culture, so we here all sorts of things about sex all the time, just coming to terms that we don’t really know all that much about sex is rather nice. Just writing out how you expect to unravel this mystery with your wife is encouraging, especially when you understand that your wife’s expectations will be different than yours and this is part of the mystery.
As I have written down what my expectations are I have felt a freedom to move on not and not dwell on them because now I can say I already wrote that down, I don’t have to think about it. My expectations are to the best of my knowledge not wrong, and that’s very encouraging to me. My expectations for the most part do very little to feed any fantasy I might have because whomever I marry can veto or boycott my decisions.
As God continues to unravel my doublemindedness I expect my expectations will continue to increase. So I guess I am here today to say that perhaps we should rethink fantasy. Instead of thinking of it as something that is totally evil and wrong and hurtful, maybe we should see it as an unraveling of double mindedness and that God intends to produce some good fruit out of this evil.
Perhaps we should not be upset with God when He doesn’t take the fantasy away, but grateful to God for allowing us an opportunity to heal and prepare.