The Purity Project of OKC

Means, P. (2006). Men’s secret wars. Grand Rapids, Mich: Revell.

This Book by Patrick A. Means is meant to help men and women understand the reasons why they act out in inappropriate ways.  It follows a premise that might go something like this: We don’t just act out; we do so for a reason–and those reasons are mostly hidden away and not understood by the one who suffers from sexual compulsions.  Means would have us understand the forces at work in our lives that cause us to seek relief in pornography.  Some of the issues he discusses are:

A culture of hero worship

Society evaluates the worth of men and women by two completely different, but equally unfair, standards.  In our society, women’s worth is judged on the basis of beauty.  Men, on the other hand, are judged on the bais of their success, as measured by money, power, and prestige.  Society even has a special set of pejorative terms it uses exclusively for men who are judged to be unsuccessful; the terms loser, deadbeat, and bum are never used for women.  These terms of derision are reserved exclusively for men–men whom society has judged to have low worth, based on their apparent lack of success. (19)

Men who don’t have adequate models of manhood

The thousands of hours of messages we received growing up exert a much greater influence than almost anything.  Some experts believe more than twenty-five thousand hours of these parental messages are stored in the average adult’s mind.  Together, these messages for the "lifescript" that we carry from childhood into adult life.  This lifescript affects every aspect of our lives: the way we see ourselves, the marriage partners we pick, our workstyle.  As adult men, a major steop in being conformed to the image of Christ occurs when we take responsiility for rewriting our lifescripts instead of blindly following them. Life scripts follow the Three Rs: Rules, Roles and and Recordings. (p.39, 43)

The inability to get in touch with feelings

Perhaps more than anything else, sons need a sense of approval from their fathers.  It is God’s plan that a son receive the "Father’s Blessing" for his father as part of his transition to manhood.  I wanted what adolescent boys have wanted for thousands of years: an opportunity to prove myself as a man, to hear from my father, "Well done. I’m proud of you, Son." and to receive admission into full fellowship with other warriors of the tribe.  But for whatever reasons, Dad’s blessing always seemed to elude me.  Like so many other men of my generation, I carried that wound with me into my adult relationships.  In retrospect, I see that I have operated out of an insecure masculinity for most of my adult life. (p. 57, 59)

You can’t heal what you can’t feel

Learning how to identify and express feelings is a difficult task.  By and large, the inner landscape of my emotions remained an uncharted, frozen territory.  I had even traveled around the country in my previous ministry speaking on The Felling Fallacy.  I warned Christians not to trust their feelings, that their feelings would surely lead them down a path toward disaster.  But it was I who was pulled into disaster.  I see now that if I had paid better attention to my feelings, to the alarm bells that were going off, perhaps some of my own pain could have been avoided.  If we don’t listen to our pain and adddress its causes, we’ll be tempted to simply "stuff" the pain.  Being honest about our feelings–especially our pain, grief and anger–is the first and most important step iin interrupting that downward slide.  But achieving emotional honesty is not an easy task for men in our society.  If we are to succeed, we must confront several myths about what it means to be a man. (p. 59)

Adrenaline Addiction

There is nothing wrong per se with work, ministry, or a satisfying purchase.  But for an adrenaline addict, it’s not that simple or innocent. He continually calls on his adrenal glands to kick in with a turbocharged hormone injection that makes his heart beat faster, his skin perspire, and–not incidentally–a euphoric high to follow.  That is, until theh post adrenaline low kicks in.  Then he feels fatigue and a darkness that can easily turn into depression.  Which leads him to look for another activity that will give an adrenaline hit, whether that involves finding one more crisis to solve or impulsively treating himself to a purchase at the local computer store.  The result is always the same: The high is followed by the low is followed by another high–until finally his adrenal glands and nerves wear out. (p. 105)

Women and Sex

The need for approval from women can be so great that when a man experiences the inevitable conflicts that come with marriage, he looks for another woman who will approve and affirm him.  Even if this outside relationship never becomes sexual, it can easily become an emotional affair, draining time, energy, and iintimacy from the marriage.  Of the married men responding to our Men’s Confidential Survey at our seminars, 19 percent–almost one in five–acknowledge have had an emotional affair with another woman since they’ve become Christians. (p. 130)

Poor interpersonal relationships with our wives

The best-kept secret about men is our deep longing for intimacy.  Women think we’re afraid of intimacy, and they’re right.  We’ve be socialized to look strong, and we’re afraid to look weak.  But what most women don’t know is that we hunger for emotional intimacy as much as they do, that we want to lower the drawbridge of our lives and invite them inside where our fears and dreams and deepest feelings live.  But it is scary, and in most cases we don’t know how because we’ve never seen it modeled. (p. 147)

After fully discussing these dark forces, Means gives some helpful ideas on how one might find their way out of "darkness."

This book is widely available in Christian Bookstores and over the internet.  You might also like to visit his website.