Part Two: Fifty Shades of Grey: Sexual Abuse All Grown Up

Part Two: Fifty Shades of Grey: Sexual Abuse All Grown Up

I suggested there’s a good reason she felt uncomfortable.  Your actions speak louder than words.  The actions proposed in Fifty Shades of Grey imitate imprisonment and death.  I called this the Sexuality of Death and contrasted it with the Sexuality of Life.  Marriage creates an environment where the Sexuality of Life can flourish, but if you aren’t careful, you can easily introduce the Sexuality of Death into your marriage.  Marriage is a boundary that provides a safe place for the connection of sexuality between a husband and wife to grow.  The message behind BDSM is NOT protection and is anything, but.  If you flirt with these behaviors your can literally traumatize your spouse, which can leave your spouse terrorized and fearful of you.

Gina Ogden, the modern priestess that anything sexual is fine as long as there’s a spiritual element (the spiritual she’s preaching about is not with the LORD Almighty.  Her sexual cocktail includes any gender, even alone, as long as it’s “spiritual”), was interviewed about her view of this Fifty Shades series and why (some!) women over 40 are so (supposedly!) interested in it and she is quoted on Yahoo as saying,

An extremely titillating book like this slows you down and gives you a fantasy from the reality of your life, from taking care of the kids, parents, working…Because of physiological changes and the fact that our focus has shifted to all these other responsibilities, it takes longer to warm up to sex. We need to be led into it, whether it’s through reading erotica, a massage from your partner, or being romanced.

It’s difficult to read Ogden because you have to sift out the truth from error. Some of her advice is very helpful.  Yet, she says “partner,” not husband or wife or spouse.  She includes reading erotica in the same category as a massage or being romanced.  Just as there are not too many women out there who appreciate their husbands getting off on naked, nubile 20-year olds in pornography, there are not too many husbands, who are thrilled if their wives need to fantasize about someone else to be sexual with them.  For Ogden sexuality is not the connection between a husband and a wife; it’s the sexual spiritual experience in any context apart from abuse.

But I would argue that BDSM IS ABUSE, child abuse all grown up.  With the clients I’ve seen on this issue there is one partner (usually a husband steeped in porn.  If it’s the wife, she was usually sexually abused as a child) who is trying to talk his wife into this type of behavior.  He uses all manner of persuasion, including quoting the Bible (Satan is really good at quoting the Bible.  He used it on Jesus in the temptations in the wilderness. He’s still using it.  Beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing.).  The same arguments Uncle Bob+ uses to convince little Billy or Sally that it is fine and honorable and good for little girls and/or boys to do these fun little acts with Uncle Bob (“See how happy the little girl is when she does this to her uncle?” as he shows her pictures or videos of smiling children being tormented by some self-worshipping adult), so, too, Uncle Bob comes to his wife or her husband with pictures of smiling, happy people assaulting, asphyxiating, tying up, humiliating, choking, or imprisoning other seemingly happy people:  “See the pretty knots?  See how happy they all are?  You want to make me happy, don’t you?”

That’s the trick.  The perpetrator makes it the victim’s fault.  It’s called “grooming” amongst those who work with sex-offenders.  The sex-offender grooms the child to think it is the child’s idea and the child’s desire to be vandalized by this perp.  Of course, the child doesn’t know the child is being preyed upon and Uncle Bob is a sleazy, selfish criminal about to destroy this child’s life for years to come.  Which plays, of course, on the victim’s brain.  It wasn’t all pain, right?  The plumbing works, right?  So we have terror mixed with pleasure.  The child thinks, “It can’t be wrong, because Uncle Bob is such a nice guy and he loves me and he says it’s fine and it feels good.  But I’m confused.  It feels wrong, too.  I’m think I’m going crazy.”

This is the BDMS cocktail: pain and pleasure and I’ll take you right up to the edge until you say “Red” and when you say “Red” I know to stop and everything will be fine.  Of course, if you say, “Red” it makes it your fault if we quit and you won’t make me happy, but I’ll never say that.  It’s really important you make ME happy and do what I want and if you don’t, I’ll subtly make you feel like you are a prude and Miss Goody Two-Shoes and a puritan and a fundamentalist Christian and a naysayer and fun killer.  You’ll just have to figure that out with your therapist five years from now.

It’s not fine and people are hurt and traumatized and devastated and feel violated because “they defiled themselves by what they did; by their deeds they prostituted themselves.”**  The potential victim should have said “Red” the minute her boyfriend, or whoever, started bringing out his little pictures (or in the case of Christian Grey in Fifty Shades, his titillating comments of Anastasia Steel “biting” her “lip” or the tease he gives her of his “secret” room and the tempting signing of his forbidden contract or his phony deprecation that he needs to initiate her to real love-making first, because she’s a virgin, before he totally humiliates her with his hardware store) of imprisoned, smiling, glamorous models all tied-up like they are being offered for sacrifice to Baal, which if you think of it, is just what is going on.

Perpetrators, who sexually abuse children, use secrets and very subtle manipulation to make their victims think the victim wants what the abuser wants (“It’s our little secret.”).  The Bible says Satan comes as an angel of light** and sexual predators do the same thing.  On the surface it seems fine, but there’s just something creepy about the whole thing.  This is the allure of temptation: “Ignore the bad side; look at all the benefits of selling your soul to the devil.  Mooheehee.”  Christian Grey comes across as all glamorous and handsome and winsome and mysterious and tempting and alluring (and, of course, he’s RICH!).  Anastasia Steel can’t resist.  And, porn being porn, everyone’s happy and gets happier the more perverted their behavior becomes.  There’s always a happy ending in porn.  Everyone’s always smiling.  It can’t be wrong if they’re smiling, right?***

Just because a victim is 24-years old instead of 8, does that make it any less abusive?  Just because your victim is your spouse, does that make it any less wrong?  You can’t abuse your date if she’s over 17-years old?  You can’t violate your wife because she’s your wife and she’s an adult and she says it’s Okay?  You’ve told her your lies about everything’s fine and we’ll stop when “you” want to?

Stop when you want to?  All sexual predators have said that phrase to their victims from time immemorial.  Let me count the ways I’ve heard that phrase dressed up as a delectable feast only to discover its excrement with a caviar pate.

Perps go so far as to even say its a way for spiritual enlightenment.  Isn’t that what the Serpent said to Eve?****  And today, Gina Ogden is saying it, and Christian Grey is saying it and, sadly, too many folks are saying it to themselves or their spouses only to wake up to discover they’ve been playing with fire and someone was burned.  Uncle Bob is everywhere.

There is some spiritual crap going on, alright.  If you change the “f” in “defiled” to a “v” you get “deviled,” which is not far off.

The wise can tell the egg that nourishes from the imposter feces that kills.  Just because they both come out of the back-end of a chicken, doesn’t make them the same thing.

_____

+ I’ve used the “Uncle Bob” metaphor before.  Check out Uncle Bob in two podcasts here.

*Psalm 106:39

**2 Corinthians 11:14

***On a very curious side note, my wife told me last night she wasn’t reading these blogs on this subject because they were “creepy” and then she told me her first patient on the psych floor for her nursing rotation during her nursing school was a swinging adult male who’d flipped out and gone crazy.  Hmmm.  The perp perping on himself?  You not only run the risk of traumatizing your spouse, but traumatizing yourself.  It would be funny, if it weren’t so tragic.

****Check it our for yourself in Genesis 3.

Part Two: Fifty Shades of Grey: Sexual Abuse All Grown Up

Dr. Bing Weighs in on “Fifty Shades of Grey”: Death Vs. Life

Recently a reader of this blog sent me the following question:

“Do you have any thoughts regarding the book Fifty Shades of Grey that’s all the buzz right now?”

I read the first 125 pages of the first book.  Prior to this book I’ve read a few spiritually based books, great reads, very uplifting, not to mention that I’ve focused on growing in my faith and spirituality over the last two years.  50 Shades has been all the buzz, I wanted to see what it was about.  Reading the book felt wrong.  I enjoyed the positive and uplifting feelings I experienced with the last couple books I read, this book however made me feel like I was taking 2 steps back in my faith and spirituality.  Something about it wasn’t right.  It’s not a very good book.  It’s unfortunate that it’s getting so much attention.

May I get your thoughts on it?

Thanks for your question.  I’ve been thinking about this issue more and more of late, not just because of its popularity in the common press, but because it keeps coming up in therapy.  It keeps coming up in therapy, not because clients are touting its praises, but because they are traumatized by the behavior.  The joy ride isn’t all the sound bytes say.  Too many people try on for size things recommended in the media only to find them wanting later.

I’m glad you listened to your conscience and quit reading.   There’s no sense in tempting ourselves.  There is such a thing as discernment.  You aren’t a prude for feeling something was amiss. Something is.

In brief, Fifty Shades of Grey* is all the rage right now in the press, supposedly secretly being read by sexually bored or unfulfilled 40-something plus year old women on their Kindles so no one will know they are reading erotica, er, ah, pornography.

Gina Ogden, who happens to have the same counseling license I have, keeps being interviewed about it and is even the keynote speaker at the AAMFT annual convention this fall. She says as women age (men, too) they need a little excitement to keep the embers burning.  She’s quoted in a recent article on Yahoo: “An extremely titillating book like this slows you down and gives you a fantasy from the reality of your life, from taking care of the kids, parents, working.”**

According to Wikipedia it’s sold 20 million copies worldwide in a matter of months.  The plot is a young single woman being seduced by a young, very wealthy and successful (he has his own helicopter) businessman, who has a very secret room with things he buys at the hardware store to use on his latest girlfriend.

If a leading sexologist and marriage therapist recommends it and millions of people are reading it and it’s all the rage, it can’t hurt, (sorry, a pun intended) can it?

We live in a day where boundaries are blurred or non-existent (abortion = freedom and does not = death, cohabitation = marriage, feelings = love, same-sex is the same as what’s going on between a husband and wife), so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that tying your wife up should be equated with love.  Er, not even your wife.  Your girlfriend.  Er, not even your girlfriend.  An acquaintance you met in the course of your work whom you manipulate to sign a contract subtly making her an accomplice: since she signed it, she can’t say she never asked for it, right?

The problem is there is real content here and the real content conveys a real non-verbal message and the non-verbal message is not tenderness and caring.

For example, your wedding ring symbolizes your commitment to each other until death you do part.  It is an unbroken circle.  I have had many people in therapy because their spouse took his or her wedding ring off.  The act of removing your wedding ring is highly symbolic and filled with meaning.  The act of tying your spouse up for the purposes of making yourself happy is highly symbolic as well.  I’ve had many clients in therapy where the symbolism behind the actions of bondage and sadomasochism (abbreviated BDSM) have terrorized, traumatized and stripped any sense of safety and protection away in the relationship.  You were supposed to protect me and you threw me to the wolves instead…and enjoyed it!  Folks, this is creepy.

The BDSM fan would say, “Well, we make sure we have permission first.”  This is all a ruse, making the other a victim and putting the blame on the person who supposedly can say when to stop.  “But if I stop you won’t be happy.”  Victims try to make their perpetrators’ happy.  Boundaries are blurred.  Right = wrong.  Confusion reigns.

Fundamentally, protection is the essence of marriage.  Marriage between a husband and wife is the building block of society.  A husband protects his wife.  A wife protects her husband.  This instinct (I call it the Mother Bear Instinct) happens the moment you get married.  To counter this instinct and to symbolically convey domination, imprisonment, and sacrificial death is to invite devastation into your life, your spouse’s life and yields a trail of unintended consequences.

If you’ve read other of my blogs on sexuality, you’ve noted I’ve discussed from time to time the difference between the Sexuality of Life and the Sexuality of Death.  The Sexuality of Life is the life-giving, mutual and meaningful sexuality between a husband and wife.  Everything else creates or simulates death and depravity (rape, sexual abuse, sodomy, abortion, and pornography, to name a few, including BDSM).  Some people believe that if you are married you can do whatever you want in your marriage bed.  I do not hold this belief.  Just because you are married, this does not take away the meaning of your actions.  Your actions speak louder than words.  You can be selfish and hurtful about sexuality just like you can be hurtful and selfish about anything else.  The problem with hurt in the sexual arena it that is it so traumatic.  You can bring the Sexuality of Death into your marriage if you are not careful.

You think bondage is fine?  Check out this short list of some of the practices, words and phrases of the BDSM crowd as listed in Wikipedia:

  • bondage
  • dominance and submission
  • inflict pain
  • exercise control over others
  • consensual use of restraint
  • hot wax
  • blindfolds
  • unequal roles
  • sadists
  • controlled by their partners

And that’s just from the introduction in Wikipedia.  The list goes on and on: chained to a wall, handcuffed, humiliated, tapegagged, cuffed, lashing, fastening with chains, punishment, caned, immobilization, flogging, whipping, to name a few.  There is real content here.  A message is being conveyed.  You can’t do these things without consequences.

The words and terms themselves convey and imitate death, ancient pagan sacrificial rituals, imprisonment, slavery, and even murder.

Compare this to what should be (!) conveyed between a husband and wife when they are sexual with each other (The Sexuality of Life):

  • connection
  • tenderness
  • reaching out
  • making love with each other
  • fondly looking into each others’ eyes
  • knowing each other
  • patience
  • not seeking your own
  • not rejoicing in evil
  • kindness
  • protection
  • caring
  • babies and connection to the next generation (!)

The contrast is startling.  Death and life are not the same.***  You aren’t going to get life by living on the edge of death.  You can introduce death into your marriage by dabbling in this stuff.

When I told my wife what I was writing about she asked, “What’s that?”  I’m really fortunate I have a wife who is innocent enough to not know about Fifty Shades.  When I described it she said, “Why would women want to put themselves back into slavery all over again?”  Which is my point, exactly.  But not just women.  Men, too.

If you are wise you wouldn’t be reading and inviting the Fifty Shades lifestyle into your life or your marriage.

Stay away.  Stay very far away.

_____

*For the purposes of this review I read a few chapters of the book on Google Books.

** If you are bored in your sex life with your spouse there’s a really good chance your marriage needs a major tune-up.  Sexuality in marriage is often a picture of how well the marriage is doing, like the oil light on the dashboard of your car.  When the oil light goes on it tells you there’s a problem in the engine, like you need oil.  Likewise, if there is a problem in sexuality most of the time it means there’s something amiss in the marriage.  Trying to spruce up sexuality without dealing with the real problem is like hooking up a loud speaker to a fire alarm without dealing with the fire: it’s just going to make the problem worse.

***This is one of the recurring themes of the Bible.  See, for example, Deuteronomy 30:19 “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.”  See also Jeremiah 21:8 and John 5:24.

Part Two: Fifty Shades of Grey: Sexual Abuse All Grown Up

Fighting the Vampires of the Sexuality of Death

I’ve discussed it in other blogs and podcasts, but briefly:

-if a child is molested, the child thinks he’s going to die

-if a lady is raped, she thinks she’s going to die

-if a baby is unwanted he is too often aborted and he dies

-masturbating to porn, a guy’s seed (life, you know) is spilled onto the ground or spilled into a kleenex and flushed down the toilet: death

-the pornography itself: turn off the electricity and it’s gone.  Poof.

-two men expose themselves to excrement, which the body is trying to extricate so you don’t die

-two men or two women can never make life, despite governmental or public sanction.  In our society it doesn’t matter.  As long as you FEEL like you love the person you are doing the rituals of death with.  Feelings become the god of the age.  Still: not life.  Smiles, maybe.  But underneath?

-a man and a woman who are not married, but are cohabiting and pretending to be married.  They have the guise of marriage.  It looks like marriages, but it isn’t.  They are only fooling themselves.  They are posers.  Then they wonder why they have problems.  Then they think I can’t be with a person who’s so selfish, little realizing they themselves are selfish for thinking you can have a marriage without sacrificing yourself and your life and your future and the relationship ends up in death.  Cohabiting couples are more likely to break up, have abortions and sexual abuse, both child and partnership violence and breakups.  They are fraught with conflict, sexual problems (duh?) and money problems.  But see?  We’re smiling, so everything must be Okay.  Little do they know the vampire has struck and they are, in fact, dying.

-BDSM roleplays sacrificial rituals of death that go back at least to the Biblical Canaanites, if not further.  Here: let’s romanticize me taking away your soul with your permission.  See?  Isn’t that fun?  Now let’s dress it up and tout it as the new female erotica.  Who can we seduce now?  Isn’t being manipulated fun?  Let’s make movies about this and seduce our whole society that sex between a husband and wife is boring and we need these things from Ace Hardware to spruce up our love life (Ace Hardware?  What does Ace Hardware have to do with love?).  We just wanna have fun.

Death is fun?

At least in China they do their Sexuality of Death without all the glamour.   Yesterday it was reported Chinese family planning officials forced a woman to abort her daughter when she was seven months pregnant.  Her crime?  She already had a child:

According to reports, Jianmei was beaten and dragged into vehicle on June 2 by family planning officials while her husband, Deng Jiyuan, was at work. Jiyuan told Ling of All Girls Allowed that five men had abducted his wife and taken her to a hospital where they held her down.

“They covered her head with a pillowcase. She couldn’t do anything because they were restraining her,” the husband stated.

The officials asked her to pay fines worth more than $6,000 but when the money wasn’t given, they forced Jianmei to sign an abortion “consent” form. They inked her thumb and pressed it forcibly against the form.

Toxins were then injected into the brain of her unborn daughter.

“I could feel the baby jumping around inside me all the time, but then she went still,” the mother recounted to Ling.

The forced abortion took place on June 3. After enduring painful contractions, she gave birth on June 4 to her deceased child.

Still, occasionally, in our society, the hurt of the Sexuality of Death can be seen.  There’s evidence.  But it’s getting scarcer and rarer.  You can see it in the report of what the 18-year old man testified yesterday day in the Penn State Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal.  CBS reported:

“I spaced,” the alleged victim said. “I didn’t know what to do with all the thoughts running through my head, I just kind of blacked out and didn’t want it to happen. I froze.”

He testified that after he broke off contact with Sandusky, the former coach came to his home and yelled at him for not spending more time with him. He told the court that the argument got heated and that eventually hid behind a bush to avoid Sandusky.

“I got extremely, extremely scared,” testified the man. “With all the connections he had if he really thought I would say what happened that he could hurt me or someone close to me.”

Hid behind a bush?  Good for him.  At least someone is getting it.

-Your boyfriend or girlfriend wants to move in with you?  Run away.

-A same-sex friend want’s to do what?  Run away.

-The porn vampires come out at night and say “click here,”  “click here.”  Run away.

-Your partner wants to tie you up?  Are you kidding me?  Tie me up?  And then he’s showing you porn pictures of happy women with dog collars around their necks and says, see all the happy faces?  Run.  Run away.

Somehow in our culture we still identify child abuse as something sick and dirty and wrong and hurtful and deserving of punishment so that we do not promote it in the public sphere.  But everywhere else, the Sexuality of Death is just fine.

This day, chose life, the Bible says, over and over. But no.  We like our death, all dressed up, with celebratory parades and dances and loud, pulsing music, and beautiful gowns and bodies and grinning faces, ear to ear on the celebrity pages giving the pretense of life, but imposters all.

We don’t like our Christians pointing these things out.  You can be a Christian as long as you smile and either keep your mouth shut or agree that indeed, death is to be preferred to life.  Christians are judgmental, you know.  You don’t want mommy or daddy telling you to not put your hand on the stove or to drink that poison.  So let’s shut them up.  Eventually it’ll be lock them up.  See how tolerant we are?  Or we could throw them to the lions like the Roman’s did.  At least get some entertainment out of the deal.

Rome: Hey, there’s a society steeped in death.  We’ve been down this road before?

Series Part Two: Is Perversion in the Marital Bed Ok?  The Four Aspects of Sex

Series Part Two: Is Perversion in the Marital Bed Ok? The Four Aspects of Sex

If we know what God intended sexuality to be we can spot the counterfeit right away.  In these first two podcasts in the “Perversion” series I’m giving my explanation of the Sexuality of Life.  In future podcasts I’ll unpack the Sexuality of Death.

In this podcast I review what I covered in the first podcast that marriage is designed by God as the building block of society.  The verse from the Bible (repeated in Genesis, by Jesus in the Gospels and by Paul) gives us the foundation of marriage:

For this cause a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two will become one flesh. Genesis 2:24

This verse lays out for us Three Boundaries that must be respected for marriage (and therefore, sexuality) to thrive:

1. LEAVING: A Boundary of Protection

2. CLEAVING: A Boundary of Exclusivity

3. BECOMING: A Boundary of Life

Marriage provides the context for sexuality to be all it was meant to be.  Marriage is like a precious vessel and sexuality a priceless ointment that must be stored in the precious vessel.  There is only one vessel that can hold this priceless ointment.  To break the vessel (divorce), to say the vessel is unnecessary (cohabitation), to say any vessel will do and the precious vessel is discriminatory (same-sex), to say we should mix in other ingredients into the priceless ointment (S & M, bondage, porn, fantasy, role-play, etc.) or we can have other ointments in the precious vessel (open marriage) all pervert the blessing God intended sexuality to be (the Sexuality of Life).  If we do any of these sexuality doesn’t just become a different flavor.  It becomes the Sexuality of Death and will destroy not only your life but your marriage, your family and society as we know it.

I go on in the introduction to suggest that The Sexuality of Life has FOUR PURPOSES:

1. Birthing and nurturing the next generation with children’s original birth parents.

2. Providing spiritual oneness between a husband and a wife

It might be tempting to stop there, but God gives us way more sexual energy then you can possibly spend on making babies and becoming one with your husband or wife!  This leads to the two other purposes of The Sexuality of Life:

3. Channeling your sexual energy into creativity and work to be a blessing to your family, your community and the world at large and

4. Moving our spirits toward God in worship.

What do we do instead?  Our society shouts from the mountaintops that if you have a sexual desire of whatever stripe or flavor that this is who you are and it is fine to act out on these desires, that these desires entitle you to certain rights and should be blessed by governmental law, that no boundaries are necessary or the boundaries can be redefined until they are absolutely unrecognizable or they can be ignored or scoffed or stretched or thrown away or stomped on in the sewer and to go for all the gusto and do whatever you want and there will be NO BILL TO PAY…EVER.  It’s just you, baby!  Pleasure here we come.  But this takes us directly through the doorway to the Sexuality of Death.

I then introduce in this podcast the nature of marital sexuality, what the Sexuality of Life actually should look and feel like.  I suggest it has FOUR ASPECTS.  You should ask yourself, if you are married, if the sexuality between you and your spouse looks like these things.  If not, something is amiss:

1.  Is it MUTUAL?  I take this from the word for sexuality in the Bible: “know.”  The word “sexuality” doesn’t occur in the Bible (thankfully!) and is in fact a modern term coined in the last hundred years or so.  I refer to the writings and recordings of Christopher West who discusses the origins of “sexuality” as a concept.  The Bible says “Adam KNEW his wife” and I suggest that sexuality is not just about knowing the other person, but also being KNOWN.  For the brief moments of sexuality there is a nakedness and not being ashamed, a reaching back to the Garden of Eden, reminding us what we COULD have been and foreshadowing the unfathomable joys of heaven.

NOTE: There is nothing here in the Sexuality of Life that is about “getting some” or “giving it up” or “it is my duty.”

2. Is it MEANINGFUL?  Here I refer to Proverbs 5:18-19 (I forget to mention the right chapter in the recording!  Sorry.) where Solomon writes we are to let our spouse be the focus of our sexuality and our spouse ONLY.  We are both to be captivated by our spouse and captivating!  I also refer to the Song of Songs 4:12 and 4:16 where the husband says his wife is a garden locked up and she then invites him into his garden to “to taste it’s choice fruits.”  It is clear from her statement she enjoys that he enjoys exploring her garden.  They explore the garden together.

3. Is it SACRIFICIAL?  Marital sexuality is a great way to learn patience and the nature of sacrificial love!  It will keep you humble and help you grow up!  If you let it!  usually there is a disparity in sexual lovemaking between a husband and wife: one wants it less; one wants it more.  Both parties need to sacrifice for sexuality to be all it is intended to be.  I base this argument on Jesus’ statements about it is more blessed to give than to receive and if you save your life for your own sake you will lose it.  Marital sexuality as it was intended to be makes servants of both of us: we BOTH need to sacrifice.  One of the verses I refer to is 1 Corinthians 7:3-4 where Paul says your body is not your own.  The husband’s body is for the wife and the wife’s body is for the husband.  Sexuality is not about one person giving and the other person taking.  It is about both sacrificing for the other.

4. Is it life-giving?  The Sexuality of Life enhances love and oneness between a husband and a wife.  I believe there is a spiritual battle going on outside of our immediate tactile awareness.  Couples tell me repeatedly that if they are sexual in the types of ways I’m suggesting here (mutual, meaningful, sacrificial and life-giving) they notice they each other more, there’s a lighter spirit, more joy, more laughter, more flirting, more forgiveness, less anger, and less withdrawal for BOTH OF THEM.  I believe that when a husband and wife are sexual with each other in the ways I’m describing here that God literally infuses their relationship with spiritual energy.  This spiritual energy literally brings in the next generation, it protects each of the marital partners from temptation (1 Corinthians 7:2 and 5), it enhances trust and security (Song of Songs 7:10), it promotes interest, confidence and contentment between them (Song of Songs 8:10).

If, however, the nature of the sexuality between them is selfish, sexuality will spread other messages between them, and rather than being a blessing and source of joy, it can be a source of doubt, insecurity and chaos.  These Four Aspects of Sexuality are fundamental to the Sexuality of Life and if you don’t have them you can turn the Sexuality of Life into the Sexuality of Death without even trying!

One time I sat down and thought through my entire current client load, and went through each client in my mind and looking over my notes and asked myself what percentage of my clients have difficulty with sexuality?  Fully 70 percent of them had struggles in this area!  I believe it could well be higher than that.  What is the deal with that?  We live in the most sexualized society in the history of humanity and yet people are fraught with worry, pain and heartache about it?  What has happened?

I believe we’ve lost the precious nature of marital sexuality (what I am calling The Sexuality of Life) and we’ve exchanged it for a counterfeit.  That counterfeit, I will argue going forward in future podcasts, is the Sexuality of Death and it leads to chaos in human relationships, WHETHER OR NOT YOU ARE MARRIED!  I will argue you must avoid it and if you don’t you do so at the expense of your own dignity and the sanctity of your marriage or future marriage and the safety of your own family.  Furthermore, your poison spreads to the rest of us and causes the disintegration of society at large!  YIKES!  A lot is at stake here!  More than you can ever know.  Do yourself, your spouse or future spouse, your children and/or future children and the rest of us a favor and learn to harness the God-give sexual desire you do have for His Glory and His intended purposes.  Ignore it and we all suffer, but most of all you.

In the next podcast I will introduce Uncle Bob, my metaphor for the voice of the Sexuality of Death in our society.  You listen to Uncle Bob to your own peril.  Stay Tuned!