The Purity Project of OKC

I think we all know that we act out on our sexual compulsions because we have an addiction; but, there are four main layers to our addiction and sublayers underneath them.  The four layers of our addiction are: psychological, emotional, physical and spiritual.  If we try and self-treat our addiction we will find that it is more complex and complicated that we realized and our chances for success are very limited.  Even if we do seek help, if we don’t seek to understand and treat all four layers of the addiction, we won’t succeed.  Our lack of understanding of these layers is one of the reasons that most addicts have tried and failed so many times.  Every addict I have known had quit a million times only to start back up another million times.  Quitting was not the problem; staying stopped was.  The purpose of this article is to overview each of these four layers.

Overview

We have an addiction because we once made a choice to turn to pornography or other sexual behaviors because it felt good and gave us something we needed at the time whether it be excitement, sexual pleasure, connection, comfort–whatever!  What we sought, and the reasons we sought it, became ingrained habits over time that had a psychological, emotional, physical, and yes, a spiritual control over us.  Psychologically we use the addiction as a coping mechanism.  Emotionally we use it to numb the pain of the anger and resentment we feel for not having our needs met.  Physically we turn to our sexual addiction because it is pleasurable (at least in the beginning) and eventually we become chemically addicted to the opiates the brain produces–which some researchers claim is more addictive than crack cocaine!  Spiritually, we use the addiction to fill a great longing to be connected to something or someone that’s not in our life–it is part of our spiritual search to look for things that fill this great longing. 

Our sexual addictions and compulsions are powerful drivers that enslave us.  At a rational level we come to realize that our addictions do not fulfill any of our psychological, emotional, physical or spiritual needs; yet, we find an unexplained drive within us to keep doing what we are doing and increasing the dosage so that we might have the relief we once had–even if it is short termed.

The psychological component. 

We have a psychological addiction because our thinking has become skewed and we used our addiction as part of our self-defense mechanisms to cope with a life we believed was unfair at some level.  We all have our reasons for believing that our needs were/not being met, within our personal relationships, and we rationalized our inappropriate sexual behaviors as compensating for those needs that weren’t met.

The emotional component.

We use our sexual addiction to compensate for our emotionally needs for connection and comfort that we think were not adequately met.  Behind our emotional needs is a great anger and resentment to those “someones” who we think have failed us. 

There is usually a great anger in sexually compulsive people and those about us sense this–even if we don’t say it.  Some describe the feeling of being around us as having to overly watch what they say–or “walking on egg shells.”  Others find us as passively agressive while others describe us a explosive and rageaholics.  Our anger comes out at inappropriate times because of the resentments we harbor.  The more we become involved in our addiction, the greater our anger and rage becomes.  We long to have the things we “think we have” when we participate in our addictions in our everyday relationships.  Some of us try and get our spouses to participate in our addictions hoping that they will see the thing that is missing and hoping that they will try and supply it.

The physical component

As we participate in our sexual addiction, our bodies become accustomed to more sex and we begin to have physical cravings.  Our sexual stimulation makes us hypersexual.  We become adjusted to the brain chemicals released by the constant sexual thoughts and the self-stimulation of the body.  Should we continue this over a period of years, we will go to great lengths to find ways to give the body what it craves.  What used to take only a few minutes takes longer.  Of course, the longer we participate in our addiction we find the intensity of the stimulation must be increase as our nerve endings become “shot” and our need for more brain chemicals increase. 

The addictive high doesn’t last long.  The pornography and sexual experiences we once had doesn’t bring about the euphoria it once did and as the body begins to lose its physical sensitivity, due to age and overstimulation, we turn to harder, and more frequent, experiences to compensate for these loses.  At some point we max out.  We cannot stimulate ourselves any futher, nor produce any greater amount of chemicals; yet or bodies still crave more.

The spiritual component. 

What those of us in the Purity Project came to realize was that our physical, emotional and psychological needs were are all driven by a greater  inward need to find something greater than ourselves.  We longed to feel wholeness, connection, peace, tranquility and all of us wanted lives with more meaning than we had at the depths of our addiction. 

At the time we were so addicted, we all probably would have argued against the notion that we were seeking spiritual fulfillment because many of us could see little or no connection between what we were doing and our spiritual needs.  Some of us believed that we were meeting our spiritual needs through our Churches and religious traditions.  However, what we found was that all of us had a huge misunderstanding of who God was and what He could mean to our lives. 

We had compartmentalized our religion, like we did all things, while claiming that our spiritual needs were being met.  All of us had very skewed views of God.  As we began the journey to wholeness, we came to admit that the God we had created had not delivered us from our sexual compulsions and addictions.  We were encouraged to FIRE the God we had created and start all over once more.  When we did this, things begin to change–slowly at first. 

We came to realize that there are two Gods: the God we had created and used to justify who we thought we were and what we were doing, and the real God who tells us who we are and what we should be doing.  We discovered that these two Gods are radically different. 

We found that we were assuming the role of God in our lives, which is to say that we essentially were worshiping ourselves.  When we humbled ourselves to start from the beginning, learn about who God really is, turn our lives over to Him (not ourselves) and humbled ourselves to make him the center of our lives, and humbled ourselves to obey in everything that we could–We found deliverance.

Being delivered from sexual addictions is just as much a spiritual problem as it is a physical, emotional or psychological one.  If we try to address the other three needs without paying attention to our great spiritual need, our progress will be very minimal and we will find it hard to “stay stopped.”

We here at the Purity Project hope that you will contact us so that we can connect you with those who have a full understanding of your sexual addiction–including the spiritual.  We stand ready to help you.