Our fig leaves never work. We cling to them desperately, convinced they will give us a sense of competence and value, showing people we are worth accepting.
But fig leaves of any kind were never meant to give security. They’re just leaves. They aren’t meant to touch the soul.
And when we realize our “fig leaves” aren’t working, that what gave us security is falling apart, we go pursuing things such as erotic, sexual experiences. Author, John Eldredge, calls this “taking it to Eve”:
Why is pornography the most addictive thing in the universe for men? Certainly there’s the fact that a man is visually wired, that pictures and images arouse men much more than they do women. But the deeper reason is because that seductive beauty reaches down inside and touches your desperate hunger for validation as a man you didn’t even know you had, touches it like nothing else most men have ever experienced. You must understand—this is deeper than legs and breasts and good sex. It is mythological. Look at the lengths men will go to find the golden-haired woman. They have fought duels over her beauty; they have fought wars. You see, every man remembers Eve. We are haunted by her. And somehow we believe that if we could find her, get her back, then we’d also recover with her our own lost masculinity. (Wild at Heart)
At the end of the day, we know only God can give what we are looking for. It’s just we don’t have the patience or the confidence or the faith to approach Him when we’re feeling exposed and full of shame. The erotic beauty of a woman appears to be the safer, more immediate route to getting what we feel we need.
“You Don’t Have What It Takes”
When I was a boy, I built a chair. I wanted to paint the chair and give it to Mom. I was proud of it.
Dad and I were out in the garage near the chair. He was looking for something and I was telling him of my plans to paint it, but he ignored me. Maybe he said, “That’s nice son.” But nothing more.
It felt as if the chair was not good enough for him to notice. He wasn’t proud of me for what I had built. My work wasn’t worth his attention and time.
I don’t remember ever painting the chair. In fact, I have a memory of seeing the chair again, in the same spot, when we moved a few years later.
I don’t blame dad for responding that way. He was preoccupied, looking for something he needed to find, and he didn’t intend to hurt me. But something deeper was going on inside me.
The reason it stung so much was because I was looking for him to be proud of me, but he wasn’t. Apparently, I didn’t deserve his delight.
Where Doubt Began
When the serpent first approached Eve back in Eden, his initial question to her was, “Did God really say you can’t eat of any tree in the Garden?” (Gen. 3:1)
But that’s not what God had said, is it? In fact, He said they could eat of any tree—just not the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Whispering between the words of the serpent’s question is, I didn’t realize God was so exclusive.
Eve responded accordingly, adding her own little exaggeration: “We can’t even touch it, or else we’ll die.” (Gen. 3:3) One can almost hear a whisper, This is just how exclusive He is.
“You will not surely die,” rebuts the serpent. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:4-5) And in all technicality, the serpent was right. God said at the end of Genesis 3, “Behold, man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:22)
Furthermore, Adam and Eve didn’t die. Not in an immediate, physical sense, at least. But the validity of the serpent’s postulation is beside the point. His purpose in talking with Eve wasn’t to lie to her about God. Rather, his goal was to merely get humanity to begin questioning whether God had their best in mind.
If he could accomplish that, if he could plant a seed of doubt in their hearts—especially because his accusations were true—he knew mankind would eventually reject God altogether.
Thoughts That Make Us Doubt God’s Goodness
Throughout life, we experience things that whisper to our hearts You’re missing out. Nobody actually cares about you. In fact, you aren’t worth caring about. With quiet, yet voluminous force, these thoughts send a blow to the core of our soul.
Your work isn’t good enough.
I can’t stand spending time with you.
You will never amount to anything.
Nobody wants to be around you.
See everyone else? They’re better than you.
Go mess-up someone else’s life.
And with each new blow, our sense of belonging, worthiness, and competence completely melts away. Slowly, these subtle ideas begin inviting us to explore alternative ways we might feel security, significance, self-worth.
The enemy of our souls never attacks us like an army marching out to battle. He attacks by getting inside the camp, first—quietly wounding our confidence by gently unraveling the very fabric of trust deep in our hearts.
Then, when we’re most vulnerable, most unable to stand against his power, he holds up the big guns with an offer to lay them down as long as we do things his way. The most logical response in our disillusioned minds is to obey.
So, we do.
Erotic Sexual Fulfillment Soothes Our Wounds
When we use pornography or erotic fantasies to fulfill our sexual desires, we are likely doing so because we are trying to fill a void. A void we have because of a seed of doubt planted in our hearts about the One who made us.
Just as Adam and Eve ate the fruit because of a wound to their soul (doubting God truly had their best in mind), we become addicted to sexual fulfillment because of similar wounds to our souls.
Sexual fulfillment seems to promise, in a most compelling way, that we could feel secure and belong without God.
All wounds send the same message: God isn’t good. And the offer for something else, something outside His design, is so compelling in the moment, we believe such a message to be true.
And that offer, the one given in the time of oscillating between what we were told by God and what we now think or feel about Him offers to fulfill the thirst deep in our hearts. A thirst we have because we’re no longer in Eden in the first place, where we fully and perfectly experience God’s love and acceptance.
The serpent may never offer us a piece of fruit, but he will offer alternative sexual fulfillments. Finding sexual fulfillment in the way he offers to give it to us only further separates us from God, the One who can heal our gaping wound to begin with.
Defining Wounds
Wounds are anything that suggest we don’t belong, we don’t have worth, or we’re not competent. At the core, they question God’s motives toward us. At the surface, they take on many forms.
Some wounds are obvious, such as physical or verbal abuse. Some are subtler, such as being ignored or never being told “I love you.” They most often, although not always, come from dad. He’s a powerful man in our psyche, the one created to call us forth and prepare us for life.
A good father isn’t necessarily perfect. He is open about his humanity and the ways he fails to accurately display God. But he doesn’t let his humanity keep him from growing in oneness with God or from connecting his children to God.
Most fathers are good, but broken. They do not intend to hurt their sons. But because they (like all people) stumble through life searching for Eden, for the water that quenches their thirst, they are broken.
Father Wounds
Now that I am a father, I see myself responding to my sons in similar ways my dad responded to me. And I know, inside my heart, whenever I feel frustration it has nothing to do with my boys. I love them deeply; it’s not that I don’t.
But something inside of me grabs my emotions, my patience, and I snap at them. I expect them to do things certain ways, and if they don’t, I feel the same feeling I had as a young boy when I told dad about my chair—I’m a failure. I can’t do it good enough.
And while I know my heart is healing, I have not yet been fully restored. I am still in search of Eden. So, instead of wearing my writing skills as fig leaves, I can, unknowingly, begin to wear my parenting. As if being a good parent, one that gets my kids to act just right, proves to the world I am worth accepting.
Throughout all of life, we are looking for that perfect security Adam and Eve enjoyed in Eden. Because we no longer have that perfect relationship with God, each of us are broken.
Fathers are broken. And we, as sons, are affected by their brokenness. It’s not that they don’t care about us, but that they are too broken to always know how to communicate their love.
Instead, they sometimes communicate pain. And when they do, it goes deep.
Discovering the Connection Between Emotional Wounds and Sexual Sin
I never realized the connection between my pain and my sexual addictions until I had broken up from my first dating relationship. The breakup was rough! All breakups are, I suppose. But this one was mine and it was complex. I was devastated.
I don’t recall ever feeling so broken-hearted before, as well as depressed. It seemed to me, my life may as well have ended. So, my Dad suggested I meet with Don.
Don is a family friend of ours. He and his wife, Marilyn, were professional counselors. He still is, but Marilyn has since gone to be with Jesus. She died from cancer, which she was fighting at the time I met with him.
At Dad’s request, he invited me to come spend three days with them before Thanksgiving. I thought we would get together and talk about my recently broken-off relationship. And we did, for a bit. But soon Don began exploring my relationship with different family members of mine.
I trusted Don. He was gentle, friendly, and had a beautiful desk with comfortable leather chairs in his office. Plus, he gave me coffee to drink while we talked. Anyone is more trustworthy when they offer you coffee.
He wrote things down on a legal note pad as I answered different questions he asked, but it didn’t feel like an interrogation. It felt like a man who wanted to truly understand me. He wanted to learn how I tick, how I view life, and how I’ve become the way I am.
And I didn’t get the impression he was asking me all these questions so he could blow me away with some kind of rebuke at the end. His eyes, his smile, the way he’d talk about different projects he was working on around the house—it all said to me that for the first time in my life, that I could remember, another man cared about how I felt.
Men aren’t known for their feelings—women tend to get that label. But men do care, like women, about how they feel. We just usually don’t realize it until we meet people that also care about how we feel. And because I felt Don cared about how I feel, I trusted him when he began exploring my relationship with Dad.
I had never told anybody about those painful events. The chair, the snowmobile, the roofing project—I didn’t feel I could tell anyone. Dad was a pastor and well-respected. Highly respectable people respected Dad and Mom. How could I speak negatively of either of them to anyone? How could I ever tell anyone the fact that I wanted nothing to do with my father?
We were a good family. Others made comments about how they hoped to raise a family as good as ours. People admired us, and being admired felt good. It felt like it made up for all the ways our family was unraveled underneath the surface. If anyone ever realized how imperfect and scarred we really were, I was convinced people would reject us and let us alone to rot in our brokenness.
But something about the way Don approached it all caused me to share all these feelings with him. And when I did, it changed my life.
Don was one of those people who respected my Dad. Even more, Dad respected him. Wouldn’t telling him about the way Dad hurt me, the way I hated him and didn’t like being with him make Don lose respect for Dad?
But it was as if Don wasn’t even phased by Dad’s actions toward me. Don’t get me wrong, I felt his compassion. I felt that Don knew exactly why it hurt so much, why I would now want nothing to do with Dad. But I also felt that Don still respected Dad.
In fact, at one point, Don shared with me a window into Dad’s own story I had never known. It helped me see how all along, Dad wasn’t doing these things because of disdain for me. He, himself felt broken. He, too, was wounded. He was driven by something deep within, and wherever his deep sense of shame crossed paths with me and something I was doing, it came out in an angry or impatient or an overall too-busy-to-notice-you sort of way.
Don walked me through the process of forgiving Dad. He never once suggested I needed to “forgive and forget.” To be honest, I don’t even think that’s biblical.
Instead, Don led me to the cross. He showed me how Jesus takes our pain so that He can then pour out His love into our hearts. After my time with Don, I felt loved by God for the first time in my life. The week afterward, I felt as if I was walking in the sky—so light, so free. I had a deep sense of joy I never felt before, and I could look Dad in the eyes without feeling shame.
What I never expected in all of this, was that I also lost all desire to look at porn or masturbate. It’s not that I never felt those desires again, but more that I realized where they come from in the first place.
A Monster in a Cage
Before working through pain from Dad and coming to a deep place of forgiveness towards him in my heart, living in victory felt like keeping a monster in its cage. As long as the monster inside of me was caged, I was free to bounce my eyes, yield to internet filters, “walk in the Spirit,” or whatever I did to discipline myself into purity.
The problem was that every now and then the monster got out of the cage. I couldn’t hold on tight enough, all the time, and when the monster got loose, I couldn’t control what happened inside me.
But after I forgave Dad and experienced the deep healing of Christ, feeling and experiencing God’s love for me, I no longer felt the monster inside.
I no longer needed a cage.
Needing a Dopamine Fix
Author and counselor, Bruce Lengeman, was the first person to put words to my feeling of a monster inside. He calls it a lion.
In his book, To Kill a Lion, he says all addictions have the same root: unhealed emotional wounds. “If you know how to help someone overcome one particular addiction, you likely know how to help others overcome any type of addiction. The servants of addictions are adrenaline and dopamine” (To Kill a Lion, p. 48).
Whenever anyone is aroused, dopamine is released throughout their body and makes them feel “on top of their world.” And what I never realized was that dopamine (through sexual indulgence) soothed the pain I felt from Dad.
I have felt nothing more euphoric than having sex with my wife. It’s an awesome feeling! Profoundly pleasurable. And because our whole emotional framework is fused together with our sexual feelings, when we feel an emptiness emotionally, we try gratifying it sexually (To Kill a Lion, pp. 30 & 48).
I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that all of our senses connect, but I never understood this until I met with Do and realized a much deeper level of freedom. Actually, it was peace I discovered.
For the first time in my life, that I could remember, I felt peace deep in my heart and I no longer needed dopamine to distract me from the pain.
Finding Our Way Through a Broken World
We live in a world of brokenness, a world of people disconnected from God. We all have undeveloped parts of our hearts that inhibit our ability to love well.
Just as the serpent posed a suggestion to Adam and Eve that God can’t be trusted, so he poses the same suggestion to us through each of these wounding experiences. God can’t be trusted.
At the surface, almost all of us will acknowledge He can! But for some reason, deep in our hearts, we are living life as if we believe Lucifer’s crafty lie. Most of us don’t realize we struggle to trust God until we dig a little further. When we do, we usually find a basket of emotions we are not sure what do with.
Too often, we simply shut the basket inside a closet deep in our hearts and vow to never open the door again.
The problem is, our sexuality doesn’t let us forget buried emotions. We are made to feel, made to live from the heart. And when the heart is not free, we can become bondage to all kinds of addictions, including sexual immorality.
Can you see events in your life that have made you wonder if God truly cares, if He really has your best in mind? Share you thoughts in the comments below.
