Dr. Mark Laaser knows both sides of sexual addiction. For
25 years, beginning as a college student and continuing
through his career as a pastor and counselor, he lived a
secret life that included pornography, affairs, and encounters
with prostitutes. Today, 12 years into recovery and a healed
marriage, Laaser heads the Christian Alliance for Sexual
Recovery, lecturing and conducting workshops around the world.
He has worked with hundreds of addicts and their families and
has consulted with many church congregations and pastors after
their clerics' sexual sins were exposed.
Laaser received his doctorate in religion and psychology
from the University of Iowa. He serves on several boards,
including the Inter faith Sexual Trauma Institute and the
National Council on Sexual Addiction/Compulsivity. His books
include, Faithful and True: Healing the Wounds of Sexual
Addictions (Zondervan), Before the Fall: Preventing Pastoral
Sexual Abuse (Liturgical Press), and Talking to Your Kids
about Sex (WaterBrook).
He first published Faithful and True in 1992, when the
Internet was still in its infancy. Since then, he has watched
"cybersex"—pictures, videos, chat rooms, clubs, and
more—become the number one issue in sexual addiction.
You have referred to pornography as a building block to
sexual addiction. Obviously the Internet fits very well with
that. The scary part about the Internet is, first, there
are forms of perversion available there that almost defy
description. The second and the most powerful problem with the
Internet is that it's available in the privacy of your home.
In the "old days," you had to go to various red-light areas.
You had to drive; you had to expose yourself to public
humiliation.
Would you call Internet sex an appetizer for the more
public expressions? I think your average person who gets
hooked into it will be on a downward spiral. It's going to
feed the appetite for sexual expression. If you're left
untreated, left unhealed of a pornography addiction,
eventually your mind is going to want to express sexuality in
some fashion.
Does the Internet attract and make sex addicts out of
people who otherwise might not have been addicts? There
might be some people who have kind of drifted along at a very
low level that have the vulnerability factors, but then the
immediate access of the Internet comes along and hooks a lot
of people who might not otherwise have degenerated so rapidly.
We tend to think of this as a male problem. Are women at
risk, too? We're seeing a dramatic increase in the number
of women who are hooked into pornography and other more
behavioral ways of acting out. Historically we would have said
women are addicted to romance novels or women are addicted to
chat rooms. That's still somewhat the case, but it's changing.
If you look at women 30 to 35, in that age range and under,
they're getting more visual. They're getting more aggressive
and they're acting out in direct ways, like with masturbation.
Culture is rewiring the female brain. And I literally mean
rewiring—neurochemically, neuroanatomically, women are getting
rewired to be more visual and aggressive.
How does that happen? Just from repeated exposure?
Your brain does not create new brain cells, but it does have
the ability to create new connections. So neurochemically, you
literally can rewire the connections in your brain. There's
good news and bad news to that. The bad news is you can rewire
your brain toward sin, but Romans 12:1-2 ["… be transformed by
the renewing of your mind"] says you can rewire your brain for
good things as well.
So, someone with a pornography habit will actually
physically need it? Your brain after a while will adjust
to that, and it will want more of that to achieve the same
effect. That's why we see sex addicts who deteriorate over
time.
You wrote in Faithful and True that our culture
abuses us sexually by bombarding us with unhealthy sexual
images. As a recovering addict, how do you deal with that?
If you're aware of it and you acknowledge it as a bombardment,
then you know it's something you've got to deal with. If you
are not acknowledging it, just letting it in on a daily basis
while being desensitized to what's happening, then all of
these things are kind of getting into your mind unconsciously.
We have a program that we follow in terms of calling, reaching
out, talking to people about what's going on.
So a key is not isolating yourself? One of our
teaching principles is that fellowship equals freedom from
lust. We feel that if you're in fellowship in your marriage,
in your church, in your community of friends and if you're
experiencing fellowship, love, healthy touch, and nurture in
those ways, you're not nearly as vulnerable to these stimuli.
So if you're getting bombarded and you're feeling tempted,
you need to back up and look at the larger picture. Where am I
in my marriage? Where am I in my relationships?
The phrase I've heard is that as you feed one side you
starve the other. Sex in its many forms is a substitute
for healthy love and healthy nurturing. If an addict is in the
depths of temptation it's generally because he or she is
starved for friendship, love, healthy touch, and so on.
You just said "sex in its many forms." Do you mean
extramarital sex? Or are you saying sex within a marriage can
be a problem too? I think one of the huge problems in some
marriages is that the sex is not based on spiritual intimacy.
It's based on an escape from intimacy. We're lonely and really
needy, and rather than trying to connect emotionally or
spiritually, we try to escape sexually. If I'm using sex to
escape how I feel, that leads to what I crassly call vaginal
masturbation. You may be fantasizing about something else.
It's sex purely for physical gratification.
That kind of sex could even be a form of addiction.
What are some warning signs that a couple could be on
that road? Whether you feel more distanced as a result of
sex or you feel more connected. Any sense of sexual
dissatisfaction in a marriage needs to be addressed. In a
majority of cases there are emotional and spiritual reasons.
What would you say to someone who knows he or she has a
pornography problem? The number one mistake Christians
make is that they think they have to deal with this alone—that
if they're getting tempted this way, they can battle it on
their own. We need to have an accountability group: healthy
relationships with other Christians where we can honestly talk
about what we're dealing with.
With sexual sin, if loneliness is one of the sources of the
problem, then to think that you can do it alone sometimes
increases the level of that loneliness.
Keeping your marriage in mind would help too, right?
When I see something that tempts me, I need to remind myself
of my commitment to a higher form of marriage and sexuality.
My vision for the one-flesh union is such that the desire of
my heart is to allow myself only to be attracted to my wife
and her body, at whatever age.
And that goes completely against the tide of our
culture, which is obsessed with the physical side of
sexuality. The paradox is, if you focus on your emotional
and spiritual relationship, the physical attraction will
increase.
When should a person who's struggling with sexual sin
seek outside help? If it's something you're stuck on. If
it's a minor thing, you may not need to be in some serious
recovery program. But I still think you need to confess it,
talk about it, get some help, figure out where some of the
loneliness and anger are coming from, and deal with it.
Would you first confess it to your spouse alone? I
would involve more people right away. You need some wise
counsel about how and when to tell your spouse. You don't just
rush in. A lot of guys make the mistake thinking that if they
confess it to their spouse the problem will be over. That's
not what happens.
Never?
It probably happens occasionally. But, even in those cases,
I feel that the people might be kind of white-knuckling what's
underneath.
The main thing to try to remember is that all of these
sexual issues are symptoms. They're not the problem. They're a
symptom of loneliness, feeling disconnected, feeling
depressed, feeling angry. There are deeper emotional and
spiritual issues that need to be addressed.
So, if you're hooked, if this has become a habit, think of
it as a symptom that's telling you there's something in your
life that's on disconnect. Where is that coming from? It could
be that the source of disconnect is with your spouse. So just
telling her that you have a problem with pornography on the
Internet is not necessarily going to help that.
Where should someone turn? You're a little rough on the
church in your book. I guess the bottom-line question
would be: Is the church a safe place to talk about these kinds
of sins? Or are you going to get judgment?
I think all of us in the church need to look at any level
of any kind of sin and say, is our church the kind of place
where we feel safe to talk about our mistakes and still
receive grace? Or are we going to church trying to convince
ourselves and others that we are something that we're really
not?
Is there a perverse positive in all of this, that
because Internet pornography has become so pervasive it's
forcing the church to address sexual issues? Sexuality is
a tremendous gift of marriage. What this whole thing is doing
is forcing Christians to take a look at what God really
intends for the sacred union of two people in marriage, and
what Paul meant when he talked about a one-flesh union, in
light of what the world is teaching about sexuality.
How does your view of sex addiction compare with what
Scripture says? All of the words for lust in the Bible are
somewhat synonymous with the words for selfishness. Healthy
sexuality is not selfish. It's not designed to gratify
biological needs; it's designed to express the fullness of an
emotional and spiritual relationship. As such, I think you
should be more concerned with affirming your partner than
whether you're getting a particular form of sex that day.
You have said many times that sex is not a man's
greatest need. That's contrary to what some other Christian
authors are saying today. I think men are deceived. If you
concede that our human biology is what drives us, then sex is
really important. But, if we men are striving to have a heart
for God, then I think our hunger for God is our biggest need.
As we seek to find Christ in our marriages, then I believe
that is our greatest need.
But for a long time you did pursue illicit sex as if it
were your greatest need. Guys hooked on the pursuit of
pornography today might feel the same way, even though they
know it's sin. And that's the question: What is my
pursuit? What goals, what vision do I set my heart on? We're
teaching men a higher way. God has given us a biology of
desire. There's no question about that. We are going to be
stimulated by the sight of a naked female and want to act on
that. That's part of who we are. But, we can override our
basic human biology with a heart for God, and a heart for a
one-flesh union, and a heart for our wives. If we can't do
that, then God's playing an awfully dirty trick on us by
asking us to be monogamous. Jim Killam teaches journalism at
Northern Illinois University. He and his wife, Lauren, have
three children.
