Types of Sexual Addiction

Dr. Mark Laaser

Sometimes Christian sex addicts who go through cycles where they they act out a lot and then they, they get convicted and maybe even punish themselves somehow. It's almost a form of, of evangelical Christian sexual. But then on the other side, and this is the point I wanted to get to. I think a lot of people don't realize that there is such a thing as sexual anorexia, meaning that you've made an attempt to turn off your sexuality, and this is, in fact, something we see in the Christian community under the guise of being more sexually pure, being more spiritually aware and whatever.

Dr. Mark Laaser

We're going to turn our sexuality off as a as a sign to God that, you know, we're more spiritual people. Now, what we've discovered along the way is a lot of people who come to sexual anorexia have been sexually abused in the past, and one of the ways they're protecting themselves from their memories of that harm is to, is to try to avoid sexuality.

Randy Evert

Welcome to the Faithful and True Podcast R&D every year co-host. And today we are here to offer you a new podcast that is actually a legacy podcast featuring Doctor Marc Lazar. The subject of today's podcast is the Types of Sex Addiction. Doctor Lazar in his many, many years of experience. Brings this great content to you, and we hope that you'll enjoy today's podcast.

Randy Evert

For you now is Doctor Marc Lazar and the Faithful and True podcast types of Sex addiction.

Dr. Mark Laaser

We are going to continue our journey through the Faithful and True Workbook, and we are now on unit seven. We've arrived there, which is our unit that gets us more deeply into sex addiction 101. Last week we talked about some of the characteristics of sex addiction. Today we're going to move on Randy, to at least lessons two and three perhaps.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Well, I think that.

Randy Evert

It's a good.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Timing there.

Randy Evert

Because it shows the depth of what sexual addiction can indeed involve in today's as we look to the types of addictive sexual activity, there are three building blocks for those behaviors that you list in the workbook fantasy, pornography, and masturbation. This week we do have another verse of Scripture that is relevant to this comes from Matthew 528. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Dr. Mark Laaser

That's a tough one to basically is that that really classic section in Matthew chapter five, where Jesus, in a way, is introducing us to what we around here at Faithful and True called the ampersand. You know, he talks about the Old Testament view of things. You know, you've heard that it was said, though not commit adultery. That's just basically a recitation of the commandment.

Dr. Mark Laaser

And Jesus said, and I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully in his heart, so he's expanding the letter of the law to the spirit of the law there. And there's a number of other places in that chapter where he does the very same thing. It's a tough one, because then guys start to wonder, well, if I'm having lustful thoughts, you know, am I sober?

Dr. Mark Laaser

The distinction I've always made is that it's one thing to be sexually tempted that happens every day in our current culture, for sure. But if you run with that thought, if you play it out in your mind, if you linger on it, then that's what we would refer to as lust. So there's a there's a difference between being tempted and lusting.

Dr. Mark Laaser

So I think that's important to keep in mind. And I do think Jesus is just expanding on the spirit of it. You know, some guys can be awfully proud. Well, I've never crossed the flesh line. Well, they've crossed the flesh line a million times in their mind, so we don't need to get into that one too extensively today.

Dr. Mark Laaser

We're not here to increase anyone's guilt or shame. We're we're just here to increase people's awareness. And this whole first lesson is a typology, really. It's basically just classifying certain kinds of sexual behaviors. And I would add a disclaimer here for any of those of our listeners. And many of them I know have read some of Doctor Kahn's more recent work, in which he has taken some of these older typologies that he first created in his first book, out of the shadows.

Dr. Mark Laaser

And re shuffled the deck in terms of adding some typology here to the various kinds of sexual activity. The belief there is that, given whatever it is, is your primary acting out behavior that may dictate the kind of treatment or the kind of approach you bring to that particular kind of behavior. Now, having taught the original system with him and knowing full well what the new system is, for whatever reason, I still like the old system, you know, which he used to talk about that there were three categories, three levels, and like a lot of authors do, with his permission, by the way, at the time, I did in my first book, Healing the Wounds

Dr. Mark Laaser

of Sexual Addiction, relabel those categories or those levels. And I did call the first level building block, because I do think that it's a rare man struggling with addiction that doesn't have the building blocks of the first three things and this particular level. And those are.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Masturbation and fantasy.

Randy Evert

And is it not true that fantasy is really the cornerstone, if you will, of these building block behaviors?

Dr. Mark Laaser

Very true, because it all starts with the thought. Everything starts with the thought. We don't proceed anywhere in life without thinking about it first. So that's the cornerstone, meaning that the foundation of sexual addiction is usually based on thought life. Then we pursue that thought life. Many of us do by by looking at images of that thought life or, and sometimes, you know, that's a vicious cycle and that the pornography creates new thought life or new fantasies.

Dr. Mark Laaser

And then, of course, for 90 plus percent of the men, when they are fantasizing and looking at pornography, for most of them, that coincides in their adolescent development with when they just normally learned how to masturbate. Interestingly enough, the majority of the men that we work with discovered masturbation at some point on their own. It just happened, you know, one night or in the shower or whenever it was.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Some some of our men, you know, experienced kind of a form in some cases of sexual abuse in that someone else showed them how to do it, demonstrated it to them, perhaps did it to them. That would definitely be abusive. Whatever the case was, those three things become then the the part of the foundation of how sexual addiction develops from that point forward.

Randy Evert

And for any of our listeners who have a strong interest in learning more about the fantasy sector of the building block behaviors. Doctor Lasers book Taking Every Thought Captive really addresses this subject.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Well, we always like to think, Randi, that you would start at the beginning in order to try to heal a problem. And so if we could interrupt the thought life and figure out strategies for dealing with that effectively, then when prevent everything else that comes after it. That book is my attempt, more recently, in the last several years, to come up with a productive strategy to deal with unwanted thoughts.

Randy Evert

The next section of the workbook addresses the sexual addiction behaviors.

Dr. Mark Laaser

I call them that there are other places when we do professional training, when I label them the way one of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association with label them the paraphilias. And I know we have some clinicians that are listening to us. So they would recognize that even the the new DSM five has some classifications in it that would really belong in this category.

Dr. Mark Laaser

And these behaviors are about things that become a little bit more advanced in the sense that they are sometimes referred to as more deviant, more bizarre, more extraordinary, when in fact most of them are quite common exhibitionism, voyeurism. I was just talking to a guy yesterday who was 12 and his dad wanted him to work, you know, with the work ethic going.

Dr. Mark Laaser

So he had a paper route. How many of the men that have come here had paper routes? Well, when he was on his paper route, he discovered that there were several bedroom windows that he could look into and watch women getting dressed. So he learned early on he had that sexual arousal, that initial excitement, and that kind of got cemented in his brain about doing voyeuristic activity.

Dr. Mark Laaser

So those are the kinds of things that are in this category. Some of the fetishes that are out there are really too bizarre to whatever to get into. And in this particular short explanation. But I would like, you know, the listeners to know who have ever done any of these kinds of things, that they are a lot more common than you realize they are.

Randy Evert

And just to make that clear to the listeners, because you have spoken, you know, touching on a few of them without us saying the eight that you list in the workbook, which are prostitution, sex with a consenting partner, addicted sex in marriage, voyeurism, exhibitionism, phone sex, indecent liberties and bestiality.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Indecent liberties is touching people, even giving them a hug and getting a sense of sexual excitement from it. It's what, you know, we used to call back in our day, Randy, copying a feel, being on a crowded elevator, touching somebody. We had a missionary who was in a town that had a subway system, and he used to bribe the subway system at rush hour just to press up against women.

Dr. Mark Laaser

There's all kinds of examples of this. And but again, the message here is that there is no sin. According to Paul, that is not common to man. There's there's a lot of people that do these kind of things. You're tempted to have a shame attack because you've done some of these things. I think one of the ones that is in that list that is worthy of pausing over is the one about marital sexual addiction and that, you know, is the most easily defined by saying that if you're having sex with your wife and it's purely a biological experience, she is not a person you haven't spent any time connecting emotionally or spiritually.

Dr. Mark Laaser

You're just basically using your spouse as a vehicle to have a sexual orgasm that, biologically speaking, can be very addictive. And we've certainly had couples that that argue over frequency issues. And the truth of it is, is that biological sex drive, if you're an addict, is never really satisfied biologically because of the neurochemical tolerance factor we talked about last week.

Dr. Mark Laaser

For an addict, the more sex you have, the more you're going to want. So marital sexual addiction you know these these guys can sometimes be rather self-righteous. I've never crossed the line. I've never acted out outside of my marriage. Even when I masturbate. I only think about my wife. Well, you know, it's still using her as a sexual object rather than as a soul mate, a companion, your spiritual friend, and all of that kind of stuff.

Dr. Mark Laaser

It's a hard one to think about, but it is definitely one worth considering, because there's a whole lot of marital conflict that can come out of that one. So many of the things in this category are shameful. The one is so much more common than I ever imagined when I first got in the field, but there are millions of people who have engaged in that one.

Dr. Mark Laaser

The last category, sometimes called level three in the old system, is any behavior that involves the inappropriate use of power to gain sexual access to someone. So we could use physical force or physical violence that we would call rape. We could we could use biological force or I'm your father, I'm your grandfather, I'm your uncle, I'm your older brother, whatever it is.

Dr. Mark Laaser

And if we use that biological force, we would call that incest. We could use age difference, and it could be not a biological relative. And if if it's an older person having sex with a younger person, we would call that being molested or child molestation. And then finally, the one that I think causes people the greatest pause is what we have generally referred to as authority rape.

Dr. Mark Laaser

It's it's the use of your professional power, your work power to gain sexual access. So if a doctor, a medical doctor were to have sex with a patient, you know, or a teacher with a student, an employer with an employee, we would call that a matter of sexual harassment these days, certainly in the state of Minnesota and a few other states, for a pastor to have sex, even with an adult member of his congregation, that is a criminal felony here in the state of Minnesota.

Dr. Mark Laaser

It's it's the assumption that the authority of the pastor is going to make you less likely to say no, or even your yes is not really consensual because you're still under the influence of the.

Randy Evert

Position.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Someone else's position, or.

Randy Evert

Well, as we move on from this section, like we mentioned last week, you in the workbook, you left us with an affirmation that as we've been putting a bit of an emphasis on the importance of meditation, you have set the table for us by a, you know, giving us some affirmations to repeat as you recommend five times. And this week's says, no matter what sexual sin I have committed, I can become sexually whole again through Jesus Christ and saying that five times over as a meditative theme, right can can really bring you to a new place.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Well, a lot of the shame that we feel is based on lies, that we are bad and worthless people. And so some of these affirmations remind us that there is hope, you know, that we can be free, and that whatever our sins, God forgives them well.

Randy Evert

And that is a strong underlying theme of really everything that we do here at Faithful and True is that when a man walks in the door here, or the spouse comes in the door to counsel with Debbie, the theme of there is hope. That's right. And there is recovery and healing. Just awaiting.

Dr. Mark Laaser

When Pat Kerns encouraged me and held me accountable to writing my very first book, he said every book that's written as a theme verse or a theme sentence, and I know that that one of the theme sentences is not the main one. In my first book, Healing the Wounds of Sexual Addiction, upon which this workbook is based, is that there is hope.

Dr. Mark Laaser

No matter what you've done, there is hope that you can be free.

Randy Evert

Let's move on then, to a lesson three from the workbook, which is the extremes of sexual addiction.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Yeah. And one of the things that's always fascinated me, Randy, is that people inevitably will compare addictions. So the granddaddy of all addictions is alcoholism. In the first 12 step, groups around addiction recovery happened because of alcoholism. You know, since that time, you know, any number of of groups have jumped on the 12 steps in terms of other addictive substances, narcotics and cigarette smoking or whatever.

Dr. Mark Laaser

And certain people with behavioral problems, behavioral addictions have also jumped on that bandwagon, including those of us in the in the field of sex addiction. So inevitably, those of us who go to 12 step meetings for a variety of different kinds of addictions, we're going to compare addictions. In some ways, it's okay to compare sexual addiction to alcoholism because of the neurochemical dependency factor.

Dr. Mark Laaser

In another way. It's not because alcoholism is not a substance that the brain was created to desire. So the brain is born and developed until it discovers alcoholism has no desire to consume alcohol. So when you get sober from alcohol, your brain reverts back to its original condition and won't inherently or naturally desire to drink alcohol. You may still have a social with drinking alcohol, but biologically you won't desire it.

Dr. Mark Laaser

So when we compare addictions, we have to compare addictions that more likely do involve a natural desire. And there's really the two main ones that we think about. And that's eating addiction or eating disorder and sexual addiction. Both involve natural desires that God has created in our brain. We we obviously need to eat in order to survive. And we also, in order to survive, need to be sexual.

Dr. Mark Laaser

So many have spent some time comparing these two. And it brings us to a very important point, which I'll get to here in just a second. But before we get to that point in the workbook there, if you can visualize as you're listening, there is a continuum created. So there's a left side and a right side and a straight line.

Dr. Mark Laaser

On the top of this, we look at eating disorder and say, on one side of this continuum, there are those people who overeat, sometimes binge eating, and sometimes, you know, go through cycles. And then there are those people on that still that side of the equation who overeat and then do something to purge themselves of that. And we call that bulimia.

Dr. Mark Laaser

So that's one side on eating disorder. But on the other side is the people who starve themselves to death, and we call them anorexics. In the early days, one of his first books, Contrary to Love, Kerns took a look at this and said, there's really a comparison here with sexual addiction. And then on one side of the equation, there are those sex addict who are acting out all the time and just, you know, unbridled, ongoing escalation, just doing a lot of sexual things.

Dr. Mark Laaser

There are also those sex addicts who particularly, I think sometimes Christian sex addicts who go through cycles where they they act out a lot and then they, they get convicted and maybe even punish themselves somehow. It's almost a form of, of evangelical Christian sexual bulimia. But then on the other side, and this is the point I wanted to get to, I think a lot of people don't realize that there is such a thing as sexual anorexia, meaning that you've made an attempt to turn off your sexuality, and this is, in fact, something we see in the Christian community under the guise of being more sexually pure, being more spiritually aware and whatever.

Dr. Mark Laaser

We're going to turn our sexuality off as a as a sign to God that, you know, we're more spiritual people now. What we've discovered along the way is a lot of people who come to sexual anorexia have been sexually abused in the past, and one of the ways they're protecting themselves from their memories of that harm is to, is to try to avoid sexuality.

Dr. Mark Laaser

In our community of men, we we have a fairly actually large percentage of them that act out outside the marriage, but inside the marriage are avoidant. They're anorexic with their spouse. And a lot of spouses come in here, for example, and wonder, you know, he hasn't approached me sexually. We had a spouse yesterday, say, for 20 years. Yet all the time he was acting out in other ways with someone he really actually loves and is married to.

Dr. Mark Laaser

He's sexually anorexic. While, you know, in the rest of the world, he's on the other extreme. And I think it's good to know that whether you're on that more acting out or bulimic side of things, or whether you're on the anorexic side of things, there's usually some common reasons for it underneath, and they can all be found in your history going back to your earlier earliest sexual experiences.

Randy Evert

In the last few sentences there, you use the term acting out right 3 or 4 times. And to make that clear to our listeners, we refer to any form of practicing and addictive behavior as quote unquote acting.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Out, acting out. Right. In the old parlance, this continuum that I've been describing on the one side where you're doing lots of sexual things, that's acting out on the other side, where there's the anorexia, the oldest term for this is acting in. So you're not acting out, you're acting in, you're not you're not being sexual.

Randy Evert

What would be your explanation when you've got this comparison between normal eating and normal sexuality? What would the sexual bulimia be?

Dr. Mark Laaser

Well, sexual bulimia is like I think I was trying to explain is I act out, I do something sexually sinful, and then I punish myself.

Randy Evert

Okay. So it's the punishment aspect that is the bulimia, because when I saw it on paper, it wasn't. I mean, we.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Wasn't connecting.

Randy Evert

It wasn't connecting like the overeating bulimia aspect was.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Well, it's not like you can purge yourself.

Randy Evert

The sexual. You can't. You write, you can't act out and then purge yourself.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Well, one of the, one of the things that that I, I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday. It's what we call the one day rule, meaning that if, if I've sexually acted out, God has a 24 hour period in which he can punish me. You can.

Randy Evert

Is this like dropping a cookie on the kitchen floor? And it's the five second.

Dr. Mark Laaser

It's the five seconds. Well, no, it's not the five second rule. It's the 24 hour rule, which means God has free reign because terrible consequences in my life. And sometimes we're so expectant of that that will create them for ourselves or will will deny ourselves something. We'll take something away for ourselves. We'll try to self discipline or self punish.

Dr. Mark Laaser

That's sexual.

Randy Evert

God's punishment wasn't becoming clear to me, so I inflicted some of my own. Well.

Dr. Mark Laaser

There's a lot of people who are very good at that, and some of them have, by the way, their own trauma histories where doing abusive things is just kind of normal for them.

Randy Evert

So as we are about to wrap up today's show, if you can possibly look at today's subject matter and and put a bowl around it. How would you do that?

Dr. Mark Laaser

Well, first of all, you know, in terms of understanding the level at which you've acted out, I think the central message there is, again, going back to, you know, Paul's writing that there is there is no sexual sin that you've ever done that separates you from the love of God. That's the main message of that section. So many men that come here have done what they consider to be aberrant, deviant, perverted, extreme, different.

Dr. Mark Laaser

And what that leads to is a sense of shame. I'm different. I'm no good. I'm beyond help. And what I want all of our listeners to hear, whatever their history is, is that there is always hope. There's there's healing possible, and it's possible to stop even, even the worst kind of sexual behaviors. There's a lot of psychologists, by the way, out there, a psychiatrist who would say that there's certain kind of sexual behaviors for which there is no hope to stop.

Dr. Mark Laaser

And I would just like to say I violently disagree with that.

Randy Evert

And as we wrap up today's show and this chapter, you leave us in the workbook with another affirmation to continue to say to yourself in meditation five times I am able to trust and give control to God, and that really applies to virtually every area of our lives.

Dr. Mark Laaser

Virtually every area of our life. And when you apply it to this one, surrendering control of your life and in this case, your sexuality to God is really important piece of the healing journey. But think of the affirmations and think of how much God loves us so much more in many ways, and we have historically loved ourselves.

Randy Evert

And as you recommend here, pray for humility. Thanks for joining us today on the Faithful and True podcast. We hope that you've enjoyed today's show. And as usual, the wise words of wisdom from doctor Mark Lazar are always helpful to guide you on your healing journey. We also would like to invite you to visit our website, Faithful and true.com, where you'll find many available resources to you as well as the online information and registration capabilities.

Randy Evert

With our three day intensive workshops, we offer the Men's Journey Workshop every month here at Faithful and True, and the information about that event is right on the website. And then we also have the information and online registration for the Women's Journey workshops, which we offer on a quarterly basis. Then we also have the information about the two different couples journey workshops.

Randy Evert

Check all of that out at Faithful and True. Com. And we're, we're we're here to help you. And we hope you will reach out to us so that we can guide you and support you as you are on your healing journey. So in the meantime, we hope that this coming week as a week for you that's filled with many blessings and with great vision.