Healthy Sexuality: Personal Dimension 2

Mark Laaser

Now, the last lesson in this particular unit on personal dimension has to do with being alone and not feeling alone. I think one of the problems with the average addict is they don't like alone time. They don't like downtime, they are easily bored. They need lots of stimulation. If they don't have something to do, that's when their mind will find something for them to do.

Mark Laaser

And if sexual activity has been one of the ways they've coped historically, that's probably going to be one of their major temptations and inclinations. So it does become important in our recovery to know how to be alone and okay with being alone. And one of the things that we're teaching more and more, it seems to me, is how to how to have a quiet time, how to journal, how to pray.

Mark Laaser

How to have a meditation.

Randy Evert

Welcome to the Faithful and True podcast. I'm Randy Everett, your co-host. And today we'd like to bring for you a new episode. This is a legacy presentation featuring doctor Mark laser. And today's subject is Healthy Sexuality series. Today's episode is The Personal Dimensions Part two. This series has been a very popular one and we hope that you will enjoy today's presentation.

Randy Evert

Here now is doctor Mark Laaser and the Healthy Sexuality series Personal Dimension, part two.

Mark Laaser

Randy, today we're going to be talking about unit five again, the personal dimension. We're going to complete the last two sections of that chapter in the workbook. Well, Mark, I'm.

Randy Evert

Very excited to continue this study of healthy sexuality. But before we go any further, I need to congratulate you. Today is the one year anniversary of the Men of Valor program. This is our 52nd program that we're recording today. And so God continues to bless us with this opportunity.

Mark Laaser

That's exciting. I if you hadn't told me, I wouldn't have realized that. But it it doesn't seem like it's been a year, does it?

Randy Evert

It's gone very quickly, hasn't it?

Mark Laaser

Yeah, but this is the 52nd.

Randy Evert

This is the 52nd show. And by the way, all of our shows are available for downloads as as podcasts at Faithful and True. Com. You just click on the Men of Valor button. You can also find us on iTunes. And you can also find this at Pod medic.com. So that out of the way, it feels great to be launching into show number 52.

Randy Evert

And you're right. We are taking a look at the last several key points. The lessons are under the Personal Dimension unit.

Mark Laaser

The title of the fourth lesson in the existing workbook is your Sexual Identity. For those of you that have it and are looking at it, I think if I were to retire that lesson today, I would call it your sexual messages that you grew up with.

Randy Evert

As we take a close look at this, these sexual messages. I'm interested to hear what you've got to tell us about the development of that.

Mark Laaser

Well, I think our sexual messages go back a lot farther than the average person thinks they do. I think our sexual messages start when we're small. They start, actually, before we ever go to school. And these are the kind of memories that I would encourage those who listen to think about. There are any number of times and our broadcasts where we we ask the the people listening to turn it off for a moment.

Mark Laaser

Take a moment to think, journal, reflect. For those that are listening to this as a group, and we know that there are those groups out there that are listening to this collectively. Pause the broadcast for a moment and have a conversation about these things. By the way, I think it's a it can be a very fun conversation at times.

Mark Laaser

It can be, moving because you might remember stuff that is painful at points also. But the key thing here is that we're we're always interested in the messages that we have inside ourselves, about ourselves, about others, about God, about relationship, and certainly about sexuality. One of the things we've always said is that given the fact that our parents probably did not talk to us later on in our lives about sexuality very directly, the information about sexuality that we picked up was probably more from our friends at school.

Mark Laaser

Our teachers, some of us, depending on how old we are, had a sexual education class at school, for example. Those are all kinds of things to be thinking about. Then, of course, there are the the messages from cultural outlets like magazines and movies and television shows and music. But let's just start at the beginning and just go over some of the things to think about.

Randy Evert

Okay, that would be great in most people's experiences. What have you found to be the average age in which these messages start to formulate?

Mark Laaser

Well, you know, developmentally, the psychologist would tell us that one of the earliest developmental tasks that we have is to understand the differences between being male and female. Okay. And those are hard things to remember, really, in terms of, you know, you were 2 or 3 years old when you were aware of the fact that there were two categories of people.

Mark Laaser

There were males and females. There were girls, there were boys. Some of you out there grew up with siblings. Some of you men had sisters. Some of you women had brothers. And how did your parents handle the dissemination of information about the differences between girls and boys? Between men and women? How did they let you know about gender differences?

Mark Laaser

Now, that can be handled in a lot of different ways. I know any number of men that, you know, at this early age with their siblings, you know, both males and females. It wasn't uncommon for them to take, you know, baths.

Randy Evert

Saturday night baths, but.

Mark Laaser

Said, I was just thinking Saturday night baths. Yeah. And so now you're, you know, looking at your sister or your brother and you're seeing different anatomy. And you may have asked your parents what that was about or, you know, what's the deal here? And just think about how that was handled. You know what information was shared. I think it's rather common for the parents to do something that would indicate their discomfort, you know, about the topic.

Mark Laaser

So when you even think about that, you picked up discomfort about nakedness. The Bible of course, talks about the fact that after the fall of Adam and Eve, before the fall, they'd been naked and unashamed after the fall. We have to assume, therefore, that they, they were ashamed. That's when they started putting on fig leaves. So there's something about nakedness or these differences we're talking about that that are not easy for people to talk about.

Randy Evert

No. They lead to a lot of insecurity and, and in some cases, just an embarrassment of even having to talk about the subject itself.

Mark Laaser

That's right. So I think what what happens for some is that they start experimental. They start doing some kind of play investigation. There is the proverbial doctor game, let's play doctor, which basically leads to you. Show me yours and I'll show you mine. That's not an abusive situation. That's really a curiosity situation because we're all naturally curious about what are the differences between boys and girls.

Mark Laaser

So if we asked our sister or our cousin or the girl down the street to show us theirs and we'll show them ours, that's really just a matter of natural curiosity about trying to get educated about about these things. Right? So, of course, you know, we have to add into this category early on about how little boys were treated in your family as opposed to how little girls were treated.

Mark Laaser

That can depend on a lot of different things your birth order and so forth. But boys might have been treated differently than girls. Boys might have been taken out to do things with dad. Mom might have taken the daughters out to do things. Of course, we have to remember that we're observing the role differences between mom and dad.

Mark Laaser

Now, these days, it's, of course, changed quite a bit is there's so many more women working back in my day, when I was this age, in the early 1950s, it was very clear to me that all men went outside the home and worked, and all women stayed inside the home and took care of the home. Whether I like it or not, those are role differences that I learned.

Mark Laaser

And when I got married at age 22, there was a part of me having observed those role differences that, those were the expectations I had, you know, that I was going to go out and work. Debbie was going to stay home, even though a case could have been built very easily, that Debbie was equally intelligent, perhaps more so, and more competent and capable.

Mark Laaser

That was not the expectation. And strangely enough, pretty much she had been raised the same way, and that was her expectation.

Randy Evert

So long. Your sexual identity can be influenced also by a lot of the cultural stereotypes.

Mark Laaser

And the stereotypes are not necessarily just your parents, but the TV shows were watching. There were stereotypes about men and women on television shows. Also in movies, for example, the one that we always talk about is the fact that by Hollywood code, TV shows and movies back in those days, in my day, I mean, they couldn't show a couple who were married sleeping in a double bed or a queen size bed.

Mark Laaser

They all had to be an individual. Beds. Beaver's parents, Ozzie and Harriet. I mean, they all slept in single double beds next to each other.

Randy Evert

Father knows best the Dick Van Dike show. Exactly. You know.

Mark Laaser

All the Mary Tyler Moore, you know all of that stuff. So, you know, that's that's something to think about. And then there's one last rather painful category to think about it, that at these early ages where some of us sexually abused and that is certainly true for me, so that that was a confusion that I, that I had, that I wouldn't have even known that I had because, the activity that happened for me, I wouldn't have known where to put it.

Mark Laaser

I didn't have a category in my brain about healthy boundaries, healthy interactions between parents and their their children. So, you know, the things that happened with me, I just I put them, file them away someplace. And I know it was confusing about roles and sexuality, but it's something I really didn't learn about till I was much, much older.

Mark Laaser

I have one story that's for some reason coming to me in terms of how this can affect you. I remember clearly one of my earlier clients when I was just getting started after getting in recovery myself, came to one of our men's workshops and he talked about the fact that until he went to school. So in other words, he's five.

Mark Laaser

His mother, who had always wanted a daughter but never had one, would dress him in dresses until such time as he was five. So she had always wanted a girl. She already had 2 or 3 sons, and the 2 or 3 sons were dressing in male clothes, but he was forced to wear dresses by his mother. And what was interesting about that is, among other things, was that his father didn't intervene on this till finally, you know, mom figured, well, he's going to go to school and get picked on.

Mark Laaser

So now I'll let him where pants and whatever else. But until that time, he wore dresses. Well, strangely enough, one of the reasons that he came to the workshop was because he was struggling with cross-dressing. Even in his marriage. He wanted to go shopping with his wife for dresses. And you can see that these early life experiences, even before the age of five, can be very powerful.

Mark Laaser

Yeah, and we really kind of started with what a lot of people, I think, don't realize is a, you know, the very early and formative period of our life, 0 to 5, obviously from 5 to 10, 11, 12 when we enter adolescence, you know, there's the same kind of stuff going on. There's the modeling that we're seeing from our parents and other males and females in our culture.

Mark Laaser

There are our friends, there's schools, movies, TV and so forth. So you really have to look at the 5 to 10, 11, 12 period the same way. Just in terms of what are some of your stories about gender differences, roles and sexual messages that you would have received? So many of the men that come to the workshop have significant experiences of experimentation, even during this period of time.

Mark Laaser

Playful stuff, curious stuff, stuff that they were introduced to by babysitters, by older kids down the street, that kind of thing. So if you have any of those stories in your life, I would just encourage you to talk about them. So many. I can't tell you the number of times men come into my office and they're telling me their history and said, here's a story that I never told anyone.

Mark Laaser

When I was eight, the babysitter came over and wanted me to fondle her breasts one night. Well, you know that. Believe it or not, you know, stuff like that is a very common thing. And they've held it inside all of their lives. They felt a lot of shame about it. And that shame has been driving them into, you know, unhealthy behaviors in their adult life.

Mark Laaser

And part of the problem there is that they've just never talked about, you know, some of the things that that influence them.

Randy Evert

On so many of these early life experiences can lead to some pretty significant scars if if an approach.

Mark Laaser

That's right, and some, some very significant associations between sexuality and gender and expectations and identity is male and female and all of that.

Randy Evert

So from this point, where do we go next?

Mark Laaser

Well, now we enter the phase of time that we would we would usually considered the most important time. So adolescence, adolescence is when we become more sexually aware because of our neurochemistry and our brains, our our bodies are changing. We're going through puberty. You know, things are happening when you think about, by the way, the massive amount of changes that happen to the human body in puberty, one of the questions that has to be asked is, how did your parents handle that?

Mark Laaser

Did they prepare you for this, or did you wake up one morning with hair on your face here in your genital areas? And no one had told you that this was going to happen? Did you wake up one night and recognize that you'd had a nocturnal emission? Sometimes what we call a wet dream and no one prepared you for that?

Mark Laaser

We talked to, you know, the women all the time who were not basically prepared for informed about menstrual cycles, and their mothers may have given them a book and not really explained it to them in any kind of a healthy way. So these, again, are experiences that inform us about shame, about people's comfort with their bodies. We get the idea that certain subjects are taboo and not to be talked about.

Mark Laaser

It leads us into silence. It's a massive neurochemical and biological transition that is going on in our bodies, and we need help being prepared for that and knowing what's going on and what is normal and what is healthy.

Randy Evert

This is probably the thought that was behind your incentive for writing the book that you did, talking to your kids about sex.

Mark Laaser

That's exactly right. That's not a book that I look forward to writing, because it's just not something that I don't know. I look forward to writing, but so many of the people that we were working with who were in recovery now themselves for sexual addiction, their spouses and so forth. You know, they said, how do we talk to our kids about sex now that we're getting healthier about sexuality ourselves?

Mark Laaser

You know, how do we talk to our kids? And, you know, that led to that book that was published now so many years ago. But yes, we're talking about the same kind of things in that book. Each chapter in that book is takes one of the age periods that we're talking about and really helps parents know what are the conversations that need to happen with their kids at various ages.

Randy Evert

That book, of course, can be found at Faithful and True in our bookstore.

Mark Laaser

Well, you know, now, by the way, we're in adolescence. So now we're going to start experimenting with dating or, you know, hooking up. I've always been fascinated about what it means to go together in junior high or middle school. We're now starting to have feelings of attraction to the opposite sex. What does that mean? Passing notes and doing all this kind of thing.

Mark Laaser

Going to parties. These days, of course, the age of sexual interaction between kids is, you know, really shrunk. And, you know, it's not uncommon for kids ten, 11, 12 to be having sexual relationships at that age. But now, basically, we're covering the the whole topic of not only is our parents modeling our parents information beginning to inform us about sexuality, but now we're getting more informed by our friends again, also by culture, by the music that we're listening to, the movies we're seeing, the television shows we're watching, and now it's our own relationships with the opposite sex and the same sex that are starting to inform how we view ourselves, how we view others, our

Mark Laaser

early dating history in terms of how much sexual activity we actually had, is beginning to develop us. And of course, we know that there's a lot of Christians out there that have a great deal of shame about the fact that they didn't wait until marriage to have sexuality and that kind of thing, and I would just take a pause for a moment and speak into that, that, don't beat yourself up about that.

Mark Laaser

The percentages are that about 80% of Christian men and women going into marriage these days have not waited until marriage to have sexuality. So you're in good company. But I also think there's something about the covenant of marriage that makes that whole sexual experience a new thing. So if you if you want to think more about that, there are some things that we've written about that in a number of our books.

Mark Laaser

Okay. Now marital sexuality, I, I, I'm always amazed by how many couples go into marriage expecting to have sex now, maybe some of them for the first time on the on the honeymoon. And they, they, they don't have any information. They don't have any preparation. They and they bring all of their messages from the past. That's that's why it's so important to talk about all these messages from the past.

Mark Laaser

Because if we haven't had some healthy conversations with our future spouses, then then we go off. And even though we may have read some technical information, some biological information, I mean, the marriages that get off to the wrong start with their sexual relationships on the honeymoon are legion. I mean, just legion. I can't begin to describe the pain that a lot of people get off to with, you know, sexuality.

Mark Laaser

And then, you know, who do we talk to at that point? We're so embarrassed, so ashamed and all of that kind of thing. And I just want to pause for a moment of encouragement. You're not alone in this, and it's never too late to get the help that you need to, clean that up and reverse some of those patterns.

Randy Evert

I'm sure many of the couples that you and Debbie work with, that's kind of their life story, isn't it? Where are they? Their their marriage has started off. And because of unaddressed issues from an early age, you know, the sexual experience can be a very negative one if they're not properly prepared.

Mark Laaser

Well, that's right. And even though. Well, if you've had some for sure sexual abuse experiences in your past, then you're going to go off, and try to have a normal regular sexual relationship. And those, those sexual, those sexual abuse histories are profoundly affecting you just in terms of initiating who initiates, who touches what, who touches you where?

Mark Laaser

What do you enjoy or not enjoy? I mean, there's so many things here that are that are powerful. I think we've covered a lot of stuff here. And of course, these these shows continue to remind me of how short the time actually is. There are exercises in the workbook to help you work through some of the questions about some of the periods of time that we talked about today.

Randy Evert

And once again, these discussions are all based upon the Faithful and True workbook that is available again in the bookstore at Faithful and True. Com. And that's why many groups have been ordering this book and following along with these shows.

Mark Laaser

Now, the last lesson in this particular unit on personal dimension has to do with being alone and not feeling alone. I think one of the problems with the average addict is they don't like alone time, they don't like downtime, they are easily bored. They need lots of stimulation. If they don't have something to do, that's when their mind will find something for them to do.

Mark Laaser

And if sexual activity has been one of the ways they've coped historically, that's probably going to be one of their major temptations and inclinations. So it does become important in our recovery to know how to be alone and okay with being alone. And one of the things that we're teaching more and more, it seems to me, is how to how to have a quiet time, how to journal, how to pray, how to, have a meditation.

Mark Laaser

We had Pastor Jay Dennis on and one of our first year shows, and he talked about the powerful importance, even in his local church, of practicing a meditation strategy called Lexia Divina. I would encourage you to go back and listen to that show again, where we talk about that particular meditation strategy. That's the show that is listed as with pastor J.

Mark Laaser

Dennis. But I do think learning how to quiet ourselves and if if we have some level of ADHD or that kind of thing, we don't like sitting still. We have to be distracted by TV or something else, then it's going to take some practice and discipline to get into it. So, you know, a meditation strategy may start with one minute, where you just sit quietly and look at your watch and don't say anything or think anything, or try not to for a minute.

Mark Laaser

Then the next day do two and so forth. But there are plenty of meditation helps and books out there to help you know how to kind of calm yourself. Strategize this, and we don't have time today to get into all of it. But I think one of the things to think about when you're all alone is, you know, what are some of the anxiety messages that you tell yourself about being all alone?

Mark Laaser

And we know, of course, that we could say spiritually that we're never alone. God is always with us. The power of the Holy Spirit guides us and comforts us in all of our things. I love you know, Paul's teaching and Corinthians about the Holy Spirit comforts us with size too deep for words. So but the point of this very brief last section about lesson five here in this unit is there are some, questions and guides in that lesson to perhaps help you set up some quiet times for yourself.

Randy Evert

Well, I'm really glad that you just mentioned this spiritual dimension, because on next week's show, that's going to be the final unit that we will be addressing under the category of healthy sexuality is the spiritual dimension.

Mark Laaser

That is right, and I'm looking forward to that, because it really kind of goes all back to the foundation, you know, of truth. You know, spiritual dimension is about truth. You know, really what is true.

Randy Evert

Thank you for joining us today on the Faithful and True podcast. We hope that today's presentation has been beneficial to you. It's always great to hear the words of doctor Mark Lazar. This healthy sexuality series has been well received and we hope that you're enjoying it as well. We'd like to also invite you to visit our website, Faithful and true.com, where you'll find many available resources to you, as well as all of the online information and registration for our three day intensive workshops.

Randy Evert

The Men's Journey Workshop, which we will offer every month, the Women's Journey Workshop and the two different Couples Journey workshops. All that information is available at Faithful and true.com. In the meantime, thank you for joining us today. We hope that this week will be a week for you, is filled with many blessings and with great vision.