When I set out on my voyage as a parent almost 15 years ago now, I held one goal above all: With everything in me I wanted to keep my children’s hearts alive. I wanted to raise humans who lived from desire, who flourished in the truest human sense, and who had a rich and meaningful story to live within. Three sons and many disorienting d…

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I saw porn for the first time the summer before 8th grade. In the lazy breezy days of school break, my friend Matt and I roamed my neighborhood for hours looking for discarded pop cans and beer bottles. In Michigan, you can get a 10-cent refund for every one you return to a grocery store—a perfect way to fund the shenanigans of two junior highers. We ended our scavenge at the convenience store up the street, the one right next to the barbershop where I got my haircut ever since I could remember, in the same parking lot as the pizza joint my family only sorta liked. In other words, this was a familiar place.

We had our hearts set on buying one thing: the 4th-of-July fireworks at the stand out front. The clerk counted our cans and bottles and then told us to put them in a bin in the back of the store by the “Employees Only” door. I snaked my way to the back and unloaded our bag. And while doing so, I looked up and locked eyes with a glossy woman in scandalous repose staring back at me from a hidden rack of magazines. Apparently, this is where they hid the pornos.

I don’t ever remember a conversation with anyone about pornography. But somehow I had absorbed that these magazines had naked people in them. My body filled with wild curiosity and great fear. And in that moment, I picked one up and flipped it open to see the first naked woman ever in my life. My eyes saucered and my heart just about thumped out of my chest. I certainly got my fireworks.

And just as quickly as I picked it up, I put it down. My friend Matt looked at me with eyes as big as mine and exclaimed, “What did you just do?!” or something like that. I had no words because I did not know what I’d just done. I had no idea why I reached out and looked. But his reaction and my own heart told me I must be really messed up. And for the next several decades, I buried this story in my own fear and self hatred and never told another soul. I felt sure it indicted me as perverted. I could weep over this story now.

So understand that as I write today, I have my younger 13-year-old self in my heart. This is what I want him to know.

We are all guinea pigs in a giant human sex experiment

Porn is ubiquitous in our culture. Porn is a veritable plague. Those print picture magazines now sound primitive compared to the near infinite videos accessible from every phone everywhere. One popular porn website has over 700 years worth of video content. That is insane. We are living one giant human sex experiment where porn of every type is available this readily and privately. What will this do to our lives? Our culture? Our romances and eroticism and sexuality?

Writer Freya India laments this very thing:

“The impact is not only on individual children; this is doing something to our societies. What does growing up with limitless online porn do to our ability to love, to form lasting relationships? To our desire to start families? To our capacity to see people as people, instead of objects? My generation was taught to see each other not only as content to consume, and products to shop through, but as categories, sex objects, things to get pleasure from. We grew up watching what were often sex trafficking victims, likely seeing rape and abuse — and are somehow expected to file that away, to fall in love in the real world, to have romantic experiences just the same as previous generations did, to be tender and gentle and loyal, to know how.”

The best stats I’ve read say the average age of first viewing porn is around 12-13 years old (from here and here). (Thankfully, the quotes saying it’s 8 yrs old appear to be wrong. Even still, that any 8-yr-old would see porn this early is tragic). But research also says that by 18 years old, 73% of teens have seen porn. It feels inevitable in our culture. I hate this. And worse, less than half (43%) of these teenagers have talked with a trusted adult about porn.

So… deep breath… we need to talk to our kids about porn. We need to warn them this stuff is (not so) out there and it’s likely to come across their path.

How do you do this? How do you start this conversation?

A disclaimer: This is not an exhaustive list of what to say. You will surely be left with questions and binds and what-ifs. But I hope to give you a few guide posts to bolster your courage.

First: Don’t start with porn

Begin without bringing up porn. Start instead with talking about the goodness of bodies and casting an inspiring vision for sexuality. From birth, narrate to your children the story of their bodies. Bodies are the artwork of God. “The Lord God formed the man from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:4). The Hebrew word for formed refers to an artist designing and shaping clay. Our bodies are powerful and beautiful expressions of the glory of God. They are meant to awe us!

But we are more than clay statues. How we “…live and move and have our being…” (Acts 17:28) in animated bodies is truly amazing. We explore and play and run and jump. “The beauty of the human body reaches its zenith in play,” said Johan Huizinga. It’s why we love sports and the olympics and watching our kids learn to ride a bike or swing or jump off a tree limb. The body is also beautiful for how it can give and receive pleasure. From the simple affection of hugs to the sensual experience of the world at large (tastes and touch and smells and sights and sounds) to the passion of sex. Yes, bodies are engaging and enthralling.

For so many young children, being naked is pure innocent joy. Our boys often wiggled away from us at bath time to streak the house before bed. It’s like they just needed to remember their Eden origins, naked and unashamed. And at every chance, we taught our boys that bodies are sacred. And curiosity about bodies is natural, too. I recommend using the proper anatomy names for sex organs as a way to properly bless their goodness.

We wear clothes because our bodies are sacred works of art. We taught our boys that we cover our genitals because they are special parts of our bodies. They are made for sex. There is a false belief that we cover our bodies because they are shameful. It seems to stem from an interpretation of the Fall narrative that God had to cover Adam and Eve because of their shame. But it’s actually glorious things in the Bible that get covered. Nakedness is too glorious for our fallen world to handle. Outside of Eden, God empowered us to decide when we disrobe and unveil ourselves.

All of this builds to a discussion with your children about sex. Somewhere (usually around 7-11 years old) most children’s natural curiosity about babies and bodies leads them to the question of sex. Honor your child’s curiosity as much as possible. Tell them how babies are made. Tell them the mechanics of sex. But don’t stop at the mechanics alone. Cast a vision for the beauty and goodness of sex. It is vital to tell your children sex was made to be the overflow of love, a place couples play together in their love, that it feels really good and their bodies were made to enjoy it with pleasure. Share with them that it’s so special, it’s made only for covenant married lovers.

Do you talk with your kids about bodies and sex? Let me reiterate: porn is not the first conversation to have with them. Set a precedent for healthy and positive conversation first.

Second: Regulate your fear

Why does it matter that you start with the goodness of bodies and sexuality (awe and play) before the porn talk?

As Sheila Gregoire points out, sexuality is best taught from a values-focus and not a fear-focus. If you only share the scary stuff without casting a vision for the good, then you cut your children off from a wealth of intrinsic motivation for healthy sexuality.

Which brings up a very important point: Talking about porn with our children can bring out a lot of fear. I know it does for me. I deeply want my sons’ sexual innocence protected and thriving. I want them to know sexuality full of only joy and awe and play and discovery and aliveness. And it breaks my heart that porn exists to mock all of this, hijack their arousal scripts, and manipulate their hearts.

It’s really important to manage your fear. Attachment nerd Eli Harwood recommends you come to this conversation with your own emotions regulated, calm enough, grounded enough to speak without reactive fear. This means: Breath. And work through enough of your own history with porn to not over react.

Eli also recommends planning this conversation with your child’s well being (and nervous system) in mind. What time will be best for your child to hear about this? Don’t do it when they are exhausted or overwhelmed, like after school. She suggests saving it for the weekend or the summer. Consider a car ride with less face-to-face intensity for you and them. Or you may want to be more focused and attentive to their face. For our sons, we’ve talked both in the car and at bedtime because it fit each son best.

The point is: Don’t scare them into compliance. Invite them to goodness. Don’t create a threat; cast a vision. Values over fear.

Third: Be clear on what is bad

Okay but what about the actual conversation about the actual porn?

Here’s what I said: Some people put naked pictures and videos on the internet for money or attention or because someone else forced them or did it without them knowing. And some show people having sex. This stuff is called pornography. I paused here. It’s a heavy moment. Empathize with this. I shared too about sexting as another way people share these pictures and videos.

Then we moved from fear to values: Your naked body is only for you and God and the women you love and marry (yes, I explained the exception of parents, doctors, and locker rooms). God wants sex to be special for married couples. Our nakedness and sexuality are made for love, not for money or attention or power.

Because anyone can look, pornography does not treat sex and bodies as sacred . Which is sad. Porn manipulates the artwork of God for something other than love. I told them the bodies are often altered or chosen with bigger body parts and made to perform differently than normal bodies. The sex in porn is often fake and always inaccurate. Sex was not made to be watched. And most people in porn don’t love each other and even hurt each other.

There is a book written to help you talk about porn with kids that describes these photos and videos as “bad pictures.” I find that language problematic. Yes, the intent of the pictures is bad and they can shape our sexuality for harm. But porn is only abusing what God has made good. It’s only manipulating the glory of God for evil gain. It’s more complex than simply saying these are bad pictures. I did not use this language because I don’t want to cast shame on nakedness and sexuality. Instead, we called the intent behind porn bad.

One of the absolute most important things you do as a parent for your children’s sexuality is to fight against shame. Discussing sin does not have to involve shaming. I do not believe God uses shame to change us, ever. Conviction is different than shame. Shame is animated by evil and leads to silence and secrets. And that is the last thing we want for our children’s sexuality.

Fourth: Honor arousal

When someone sees porn, it is very normal to feel mixed and complex feelings. You might feel terrified and curious at the same time. You might feel excitement while also feeling that something is wrong. This is the difference between arousal and desire. Arousal is our bodies radar for sexual things. This is not bad. It’s not wrong. Your body is wired by God to respond to sexually relevant things and even be curious about them, even while your heart feels other things. Which means, porn can make someone feel very confused inside.

If you don’t honor arousal, your child might begin to equate arousal with sin and feel wrong. We don’t want our children repenting of having a body. We want them only repenting of sin. This is exactly what plagued me as a junior higher. I felt perverted for that split-second look in the magazine and all my body felt. Yes, porn is dangerous. But my curiosity and body response were not.

Many (maybe even most?) people’s first exposure to porn is a form of harm. Often, porn gets introduced to children by someone else. They get invited to watch a video on someone’s screen without any idea what is coming. I know it is strong to say it but this is violating. This is sexualization without consent (children cannot consent). I am not saying these are all sexual predators. But we must recognize it is a moment of harm.

Even if your children stumble on it on their own, they don’t really know what is coming. And even if they were the one who clicked, that first experience can be traumatizing. The porn industry becomes the abuser. When I grabbed that magazine, I had no idea what was coming. Children need comfort and care for what they have seen.

Fifth: Protection over punishishment

Which brings us to my last piece of advice: honor your children for telling you if they ever see porn. Do not, I repeat, do not punish them for telling you they saw it. Again, they simply do not know the full weight of what they are doing. As Dan Allender points out, “response-ability” is just that: the ability to respond. Children do not have the full awareness and foreknowledge to make an informed, moral choice about porn. That comes with maturity and age.

We let our sons know that we want them to share if anything about sex comes up at school or with their friends. Things said, jokes, things shown them, things done to them or others, things they have questions about. Anything. And we reward them every time they share. We’ve made some very important ice cream trips. It’s still hard for them to share. It’s still awkward. But man, we do not want them stuck in silence and secrets and shame.

Does that mean we never put boundaries up with them? Of course not. We work like hawks to know their media consumption and prevent access to porn on our family screens and devices. We also monitor contact with friends. But we do all this in the name of protection not punishment. Unrestricted internet access is a weight too heavy for a child to bear.

Sixth: Innocence is their destiny

What happens if you find out your child struggles with a more ongoing or chronic use of porn? Please see this as a cry for help, not simply a sin to be punished. It’s so important not to shame them while also still intervening and helping them. People get stuck in patterns of compulsive sexual behavior not from raw lust as much as for anxiety soothing. There is always a story to it. Yes, patterns of objectification are sinful. But if it’s treated as “just lust” and a purity issue, then you set your child up for further shame when they struggle again. Get them help for the pain they are soothing.

I know it can feel like the most precious and important thing in the world is at stake here: our children’s innocence. It can feel like porn will forever alter their sexuality. Porn can shape and manipulate their sexuality and their own sense of self. But I do not believe porn has the power to ruin us forever.

In fact, I am one million percent convinced that God can restore our innocence, including our sexual innocence. This is what he most wants to do for us! I have said it many, many times. Childlike innocence is an essential core virtue in the kingdom of God (Mark 10:15). This why I believe the moral bedrock for our sexuality is not purity but innocence. Purity and cleansing in the Bible always served innocence and awe. And as Dan Allender has said, “Innocence is the ability to be in awe.” Awe and wonder and joy and play are exactly what God wants to restore in us. He does not simply free us from sin. He wants to rid us of shame.

Innocence too is the redemptive artwork of God.

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I want to talk to you about this post! Every month, a group of us talk about these posts. And I love it every time! Join us Thursday, June 4, at 6:30pm MT/8:30pm ET, for a video conversation exclusively for paid subscribers. I’ll teach a little and then we discuss this post. To join us, upgrade your membership (see below) for $5 a month (cancel any time). The video link will be found here soon.

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I returned last night from a speaking gig in DC full hearted and reminded again why I love to teach live like that. Right away I get to see the response of the audience both from their faces and their questions at the end. It’s so different than writing. And this is why I love sharing these conversations with you, my Substack people! Thank you f…

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That bullet pierced his helmet while he was shaving on the front lines. A helmet, when flipped over and filled with canteen water, made a handy wash basin. The bullet drained the water all over his boots and ended his shave but not his life. The depression proved a far worse foe for him. Most every fall, the ever darkening days pinned him lifeless in his bed.

My grandmother grew broad shoulders in those days by pure necessity. I mean she literally got up when my grandfather could not and ran his garbage route alongside his hired hand. Mind you, back then trash was stored in 55 gallon steel drums. Heavy stuff. She dragged those trash cans and the weight of life with four children while her husband suffered his Bermuda triangle of grief.

My grandparents attended a little church down the street from their house for their whole lives. But there were days, those dark days, when they simply could not make it. In the middle of this season, on an evening when the kids had come home from school and the family sat eating the rare treat of restaurant fried chicken someone knocked on the door. She opened it to two elders from the church, who filed in and sat down.

They had noticed the children weren’t in Sunday school class as of late and they came to talk. Somewhere amidst the crunch of that delicious crispy chicken and the lecture about the importance of church, my grandmother had enough. She lost it—or found it. And she put the fear of God back in two grown men as she chased them out of her house.

This was the clearing of the temple. This was my grandmother channeling Jesus’ own fury against empty religion. But my grandmother, I doubt she thought about that. She’d just had enough. And she was tired—oh, was she tired. You can’t stomach much bullsh*t when you’re suffering like so. She wasn’t keeping heart to waste it on a cheap god.

We could take this conversation in a lot of directions here. But I want to point out what my grandmother taught me about beauty. I wouldn’t blame you for wondering how stories of brawny grit in a woman could ever teach a lesson on beauty. Which is why we need this lesson. Stay with me.

I never thought much about my grandmother as a boy. She gave me the kiss and hug hello when I entered her house and laughed a belly laugh that overflowed the room. She was there the way gravity or the moon were there—unassuming in the background.

But when I heard these stories as a grown man, I felt like I finally saw her. She was a beautiful woman in appearance, yes. But even more stunning was how she lived. Picturing her like this still moves me; I shed tears writing this. She persevered. She did what she had to do to pay the bills, support her husband, and keep her children alive. She showed up to the challenges of her life with heart. And she did it all in the name of love. That is a thing of awe.

And that is beautiful.

We Need Help

I’m gonna take a risk here and say we are all messed up about human beauty. Our culture sucks at defining beauty and therefore we all have an emaciated view of it. We tend to think of beautiful people as hot people. Sexy people. The ones with all the glam! But appearance is but one narrow glimpse into the depth of human beauty. That sounds really poetic and yet I imagine it might make you skeptical.

Every epoch in history has had its beauty standards for men and women. Ours is the age of pornified beauty, where every inch of the body can be augmented or medically manipulated for greatest sex appeal. Writer Gail Dines calls this the Gonzo look for how exaggerated it makes the human body. Its an appearance “…bled dry of soul, personality, history, and future, as life in the porn world is about the hear and now.”1 As a young man, I lost my capacity for seeing beauty because of my porn use and it took a lot to recover it (read about that here).

While the Manosphere™ is working overtime to plunge men into these same hyperbolic body alterations (from eyebrow botox injections to leg bone lengthening to jaw line enhancement surgery), women still bear this pressure way more than us men. Their standards are mainstream, not isolated to incel forums. We make beauty a women’s burden to bear in romantic relationships too. She needs to be the constant source of titillation and sexual turn-on, not the man. Author and podcaster Sheila Gregoire and her husband Keith pointed out recently how little pressure men feel to keep up even basic hygiene, let alone appearance, let alone the relational work necessary for healthy sex and romance. Men would do well to reflect on how they self care their bodies and relationships.

Which begs the question: is any of this “beauty work” actually good self care? Do these standards and rituals having anything to do with cultivating real beauty?

I think we want to believe our sense of beauty is just innate taste. But more than we know, we marinate in our cultures values. These beauty standards osmose into our aesthetic appreciation below our consciousness—for better or worse, but so often for worse.

“There is No Beauty Here”

Journalist Jessica Defino spent a decade writing inside the beauty industry (Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Allure, et al) before she had to get out for one very haunting reason. “After years in the belly of the beauty industry beast, I realized: There is no beauty here.” She goes on, “Appearance, cosmetics, attractiveness, health, hygiene, wellbeing, wealth, power, class, and status are separate (sometimes overlapping) things. The beauty industry refers to them as the same thing: beauty. None of these are actually beauty.” Let that sink in. All our aesthetic obsession is not actually what makes us beautiful.

Some might say, what about studies on human beauty being innate in infants? And yes, studies have shown that some beauty standards are biologically determined across cultures. For example, infants preferred looking at more attractive faces, defined as those possessing symmetrical and normal features. But research also shows infants care a great deal about what that face is saying (being fixated on still and fearful faces). Dove Beauty performed a similar experiment on men (you’ve got to watch the video). They showed them pictures of airbrushed models versus pictures of the women they loved and then recorded their heart rates and subjective feedback. Though the men could openly acknowledge the beauty of the models, their bodies remained unmoved. Yet, when shown pictures of the women they loved, their heart rates spiked and they gushed with affection.

What could there possibly be to see about a person if not their appearance?

So what is beauty?

I believe the answer lies in how Jessica Defino came to define beauty. She calls it, “The force that fuels the human spirit. The stuff of sunsets and sunflowers and paintings and poetry. An ‘occasion for un-selfing.’ The ‘pact of aliveness.’ Beauty as in Beauty, Freedom, Truth, Love. That cannot be ported into products and industrialized! This is (part of) why we’re so messed up about ‘beauty.’”

There, she said it too. We are all messed up about beauty these days. I don’t say that with any shade. I hope it actually makes you feel relieved and intrigued. She is describing a totally different way of seeing beauty. And we all need this help. It’s not simply the thrill of the aesthetic, of a good make-up job or a trim, obsessively-primped physique. It’s not sex appeal, rooted in what thrills the loins. There is more and more and more and deeper and less articulate things about people that we can behold, more than what simply sits on the surface at first glance.

Seeing someone is about far more than just looking at them. No one likes to be stared at or, worse, ogled. But we all want to be seen. We want people to see us living our story. We want people to witness our joys and sorrows, victories and defeats, hard work and risk. We want to be known and “I felt so seen” is how we talk about feeling known and loved. Some of you may say you don’t want all that attention. But if someone really truly witnessed your life and affirmed it, I wonder if you’d feel differently.

Jessica Defino described aliveness and un-selfing as two forms of beauty. She linked to a study which found when people practice kindness and selfless prosocial activities, they actually become more physically attractive to others. In the words of study author Natalia Kononov, “Beautiful acts do, indeed, lead us to see people as more beautiful.” The light of your truest, virtuous self can literally shine through your skin. Researcher Dacher Keltner names this inner virtue—of kindness, courage, and overcoming—“moral beauty.” He found that it invokes more awe in fellow humans than the most beautiful sights in nature.2

Real People, Real Love

This is all so ethereal and fun to wax eloquent about. But what does this have to do with us real people in marriages, in romance, in life, with the people we love and the people we share a world with? Well, I think it’s the absolute best way to actually see and love everyone. For their beauty.

Let’s talk about marriage for a minute. People so often say degrading and depressing things about how marriage inevitably erodes attraction, even calling it natural and normal. I think it’s hogwash and assaults what it means to be in love. Sex writer Esther Perel says actually the greatest enemy to erotic attraction in marriage is familiarity. Emotional safety and intimacy is built on the known of a person. But if we only stay in the predictable and comfortable, we can take our partner for granted. We risk enmeshment, sameness, merger, forgetfulness about them. We need the “otherness” of our partner—the mystery, the independence, the inherent separateness—to see them for all they are. That space between is where awe and the erotic thrive. Here she is in her own words:

“Faced with the irrefutable otherness of our partner, we can respond with fear or with curiosity. We can try to reduce the other to a knowable entity, or we can embrace her persistent mystery. When we resist the urge to control, when we keep ourselves open, we preserve the possibility of discovery. Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination.”

I also appreciate the writings of sex expert Emily Nagoski for her focus on research. But her consent-only sexual ethic always leaves something missing. Which is why I was surprised in her most recent book that she added another virtue to the list: Admiration! Admiration is just another word for wonder and awe. Here she is her own words:

“You can have sex with someone you don’t admire, of course you can. But if you want to sustain a multi-decade sexual connection with someone... why connect over and over with someone you don’t admire? Won’t you just feel more and more alone, as you reinforce the lack of emotional engagement between you? Admiration is a great benchmark for choosing a partner in the first place.”

To fall in love with a person is to fall in love with someone who can endlessly enthrall you, if you do the work to pursue and see them. As Nagoski says in my favorite quote from her: “Your partner is not an animal to be hunted for sustenance but a secret keeper who’s hidden depths are infinite.” You will never run out of things to explore in your partner.

For those that are dating or interested in dating, take this all to heart. I still remember advice I heard from the guys at And Sons magazine. Beyond simply dating for looks or personality or checked boxes, they encouraged asking: What kind of life has this person create around them? Does it feel alive and meaningful? What relationships have they cultivated? How do they invest themselves in the greater good? This helps attraction extends beyond charm or ideals to character.

I just popped over to Threads will writing this (did the algorithm read this?) and saw a post by an unknown-to-me woman who said: “As a heterosexual woman, the hottest, most ‘alpha,’ masculine thing a man can do is stand up and advocate for the marginalized and vulnerable. And not just in words but in actions.” That’s the deep, whole person attraction. Contrast this with what podcaster Bridgett Blood said recently about sexual objectification, “Lust removes someone from the context of their story and acts like it’s no big deal.” In other words, it’s seeing superficial sex appeal devoid of a person’s history, dreams, life, and values.

Awe for everyone

Obviously awe and beauty expand well beyond sex and romance. In myriad ways, we can be in awe of anyone and everyone. And should! What does it mean to see people? We need to turn people watching into story witnessing. See people in their story or use your imagination if you must to guess at what it means to be them. Where do you see people living kind, alive, courageous, bold, selfless, and gritty? Pause and notice. That is the stuff of awe. And yes, that is beautiful.

Thanks for reading! Know anyone who needs to hear this? I am working hard to grow this community and would love your help. Forward this email to someone or click the share button below.

I want to talk to you about this post! Every month, a group of us talk about these posts. And I love it every time! Join us Thursday, May 7, at 6:30pm MT/8:30pm ET, for a video conversation exclusively for paid subscribers. I’ll teach a little and then we just talk. To join us, upgrade your membership (see below) for $5 a month (cancel any time). The video link will be found here soon.

Just so we are clear, I will never use AI to write these articles. I hate that I even need to mention it. But other than spellcheck or grammar autocorrect, this is fully human-powered actual writing and not the fake stuff. So enjoy real human connection!

Come hear me speak! I’ll be in Washington, DC THIS SUNDAY, May 3rd, 5-7 pm speaking in person at National Community Church for their The Sex Talk(s) series. This one is for all men and women and it’s free! Here is the link.

I just saw my book go to the lowest price ever on Amazon. You can get The Sex Talk You Never Got paperback for 50% off or $9.97 (Click here) and for one day more the Audible version is 70% off or $6.99 (Click here).

Besides buying their book, a book review is the second best gift you can give an author. I would be so grateful for one for The Sex Talk You Never Got. Even one sentence is enough. Here’s a short tutorial video if you need it. And write the review here: Amazon| Goodreads

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Thursday, April 9th, 6:30 pm MT/8:30 pm ET

You can just use the same Google Meet link below for Thursday.

And on behalf…

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“And by his wounds we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5

“Goodness will shine on you like the sun, with healing in its rays. You will jump around, like calves from the stall.” Malachi 4:2 (Expanded Bible)

What gets you through your doubts? I don’t know how often you question the existence of God or the story of Jesus, but I’ve come to terms with head-scratching doubt as a regular part of my spiritual life. It ebbs and flows for many reasons and I stopped trying to rush through it. But one thing that often “re-marvels” me and stirs belief again is Post-Resurrection Jesus. No, it’s not the miracles or eye witness accounts or some such heady evidence. It’s the way Jesus keeps acting around people. He gets weird (almost annoying?) in the best sort of way. And I think it has a lot to show us about our own healing.

Think of the first person he sees post-resurrection. After Mary Magdalene found the tomb empty, she paced around in tears convinced grave robbers had taken Jesus’ body in the night. She turned to see the gardener and begged him to tell her if it was him. “Mary,” he says but it may as well have been, “Boo!” and a belly laugh. Because it’s Jesus. Mary melts into a hug so strong he has to tell her to stop clinging so tight. He has more people to see.

Jesus pulls this same Jedi veiling trick with two more disciples on the Road to Emmaus. Engrossed in a discussion about his murder, Jesus sneaks up to them and plays dumb, “What are you talking about?” They’re aghast. “Have you been living under a rock? They just killed Jesus. We thought he was it, the messiah, the hero, the one who would set us free from this all. But it’s over.” He slowly schools them on how this is all just a part of the plot. They are absolutely enthralled by it all and invite him to dinner. And as soon as Jesus starts in on his bread, déjà vu strikes them both. And poof! He disappears.

He’s enjoying this new post-resurrection skill way too much. Next he finds the disciples huddled up behind a locked door, disoriented and fearing for their lives. With their leader executed, if the bloodlust continues, they’ll be next. And suddenly Jesus shows up. No knock. No door open. Just boom. They are of course wildly shocked. And deadpan, he looks at them and says, “You got anything to eat around here?” Apparently, resurrection made him a little hungry. It’s total dry humor.

On a roll, he goes to find Peter and a few others. In the wake of their devastation, they fell back to what they knew before—fishing. But they spend a whole night at sea and catch nothing. It’s salt in the worst wound. And it’s all the build-up to the biggest punch line of another joke from Jesus. He again veils himself and stands on the shore and yells, “No fish yet?” Any fisherman who’s been skunked before will tell you this is a ribbing. “Maybe try the other side of the boat?” Jesus says. Which is dumb because of course they’d tried the other side. Good fishermen try everything. But they do it anyway and haul in the biggest catch ever. It’s abundant joy in the worst of sorrow. And Peter, getting the joke, leaps into the water to swim ashore knowing it’s Jesus

Jesus, Read the Room

I just chuckle and shake my head. Jesus just goes on playing and playing and playing like he can’t help himself. Never stops to read the room. No easing into it. He’s getting the party started. Post-Resurrection Jesus comes back looking to play with everyone he meets. And it’s that irreverent playfulness that gets me. He’s not pious or somber, not brazen and victorious. He’s really not trying to be someone or act the conqueror. He’s not even acting all that religious. He’s just being human in all its playfulness. Of all the ways someone might fake this story, if it were fiction, making Jesus a jokester would not be it. It’s almost weird.

Unless you’ve ever sat with someone who’s recovering from trauma and abuse and starts coming back alive. Then it makes sense. And this is why it speaks to me and encourages my faith. I sit with people in therapy every day. Jesus bounced back the same way people come back from trauma and brokenness. All that sorrowful handwork, all the grief and growth, all that maturing begin to make one buoyant again. Jesus is living like a whole and free man, expressed in innocent playfulness. And all this after facing death, utter evil, the sin of the world, and hell itself.

Jesus’ Battle with Shame

But Jesus suffered even more than this. And I believe it has a lot to speak to victims of sexual abuse. The writer of Hebrews says Jesus scorned the shame of the cross. It sounds so religious, it’s an almost forgettable line. But what was the shame in his execution?

There is little doubt that the cross was intended not simply to kill Jesus, but also to humiliate him. Historians tell us that Rome relished in making public spectacles of its victory over its enemies, to gloat and accentuate domination. And they often used sexually violent means to do this. Sexual assault was one means of subordinating slaves or enemies or anyone in their domain. Crucifixion was another means. This was more than just execution. People were intentionally crucified naked for this same reason, to experience pure sexual humiliation as they died. If ever we needed evidence that sexual lust and abuse are about power, here it is in pure form.

Jesus’ arrest and execution involved sexual abuse and humiliating shame.

The Sexual Abuse of Jesus

Walk with me through his last 24 hours.

It begins the night before they kill him. As Jesus sits with his best friends, he knows he will soon die alone. Yet, he says, “I have longed to eat this meal with you before my suffering begins” (Luke 22:15). Even though the night turns to betrayal upon betrayal, it’s a tender meal and he soaks up this moment of connection and closeness.

As Judas leaves, Jesus says, “Do what you are about to do swiftly.” Kept from sleep, Jesus roams the Garden of Gethsemane praying and agonizing. He is desperately sad. He turns to his remaining friends for comfort and support but they can’t help falling asleep. It only magnifies his pain. Not only is he terrified, he’s also alone.

And right in the height of this lonely night, Judas comes and offers him a kiss and embrace. Remember what we’ve learned: people who abuse read hunger. Imagine Jesus sleepless and lonely receiving affection and comfort finally from a friend. He no doubt felt the confusion of this moment—his body receiving the calm of affection even while his heart knew this was betrayal. Can you feel the violation in this? No, Jesus is not a child here. But he still suffers the craft of harm.

In that moment, all Jesus’ friends flee. And for the next number of hours, he faces the gloating and fomented bloodlust of his enemies, the same people who days earlier had received him with shouts of hosanna. Now, Rome and the religious leaders together parade him through a mock trial. He stays silent because he knows they will not listen. They disempower his voice. He speaks only to Pilate, who seems intrigued but finally gives in to the pressure of the crowd.

And so, he faces the fate of Roman domination rituals. A whole company of Roman soldiers, roughly 400-500 men, strip him naked and whip him. Then they dress him up in a robe and crown of thorns to be taunted and mocked as the failed ‘King of the Jews.’ On top of the raw physical pain, notice the sexual violation and humiliation in this moment. His body has become a toy for play.

After this round of mockery, they put his clothes back on and force him to carry his cross to the site of his execution. Once there, they strip him again of all his clothes and divvy it up between them, rolling dice to see who gets the last piece (John 19:23,24). Notice, it’s his undergarment. That means everything has been divided. Jesus is naked.

I have never seen a crucifix depict a naked Jesus. He is always clothed with a loin cloth, as a means to make this more modest. But we must grapple with the humiliation of this moment. Remember, shame at its heart is the feeling of exposure. And Jesus is naked and exposed in the most utter sense, with loss of autonomy, loss of body control, in the vulnerable torture of his pain. Shame feels deadly. And in this moment Jesus is literally dying in exposure.

Because the Bible is written as meditation literature with layers of meaning buried intentionally by the writers, this scene should make us think of the first mention of nakedness in the Bible. “Adam and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame” (Genesis 2:25). Jesus experienced the utter reverse of what nakedness was meant to feel like. We weren’t supposed to feel any shame around our bodies. It’s why God asks them, “Who told you that you were naked?” Our bodies are the artwork of God.

Every week when I take communion in my Anglican church, I hear, “The body of Jesus broken for you.” And I’ve always heard that in metaphor, as sacrifice for sin. But now I hear it in the literal sense too. Jesus suffered my sin and death, yes, but also literal abuse and shame and all the attending struggles in his body on my behalf.

It breaks my heart and it comforts me.

“For the joy set before him…”

“When you find yourselves flagging in your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of hostility he plowed through” (Hebrews 12:3 MSG). This is how Eugene Peterson reimagines the well worn words from the writer of Hebrews. “For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” It’s not a fail-safe antidote to doubt or losing heart. But it’s something.

I sit in awe of Jesus’ transformation—from enduring betrayal, abuse, shame, and death to being uncontrollably playful. And it reminds me again and again: Jesus doesn’t just want to save us from sin. He wants to heal our wounds and free us from shame. He wants to play with us again. In a word, as you know I love, he wants to give us all back our innocence.

We often associate innocence with naivety. We believe once you grow up and learn about the world, your innocence fades. Or we see innocence in legal terms as being “guilt-free,” which is none of us anymore. We are the guilty. We are the jaded. We are the disheartened. And so maybe we accept that God can save us from our sin. But restoring our innocence? That’s impossible. We’ve seen too much, we know too much, we’ve done too much to ever be truly innocent again. Especially in the face of our abuse. But in the words of Dan Allender, “Innocence is the ability to be in awe.” And I would add, innocence is the ability to play.

When Jesus raged against the abuse of children (Matthew 18:6), it turns out it wasn’t simply an expression of pity for them. Children actually embody an essential virtue in the kingdom of God. “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). You get to decide what it means to “…become like little children.” But I believe it means recovering our humble awe and unfettered play. If left unbothered, children spend nearly every waking moment in either play or wonder. That’s what God wants to restore in you. He won’t stop at anything but your full return to play and awe. He is giving you back your innocence.

As we honor this Passion Week of Jesus, may you know that the “…joy set before him” as he suffered was getting to play and awe with you again.

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Forgive me that this is late in getting to you. My family endured a few waves of all the nasty sicknesses going around this winter. We are on the mend now. But I’m sorry we had to bump this conversation into March.

Nevertheless, I am glad we get to continue our talks on the healing of sexual abuse. I will be so curious to hear your thoughts and…

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“We were talking about you on Monday. For a long time actually.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. My gut tightened even more than it already was from the plank I was doing.

Matt and Ashley are fellow regulars at my 6 am CrossFit class. We are a ragtag group of folks just trying to work out our health and mental health. And though everyone’s half awake with little to say at that hour, we’ve bonded. None of us picked each other, per se. But sweating out our stress and struggles and coming to the end of ourselves in every workout has led to truly meaningful connections.

Ashley continued, “Yeah, we both agreed you work so hard and so consistently here. It’s really impressive to watch.”

“Wow, thank you!” I said. But my body screamed the exact opposite. I wanted to run. Vulnerable compliments can be hard no matter what. But I knew this familiar bracing inside me. It was my defense structure, my guard against goodness, the part of me that never wants to be manipulated by pleasure or flattery again. It’s the part of me trying to never get abused again. And for the rest of the workout, I fought that urge to run.

Finally, at a stoplight on the drive home, I let down enough to enjoy the compliment. I felt like some squirrel retreating to the safety of a tree limb to finally eat the nut. It took my body that long to actually relax into the compliment. And believe it or not, that was progress for me.

The moment that is sure to come

Recovering from sexual abuse is not for the faint of heart. There are many, many hard and painful parts. But I find the hardest part by far is opening back up to goodness.

I know that doesn’t make sense. It seems like the hardest part would be stepping into the pain. And yes, facing the reality of your abuse is for sure a deeply difficult moment. That transition out of numbness and shame can actually make things feel worse. The story feels bigger at first. And certainly, it is bigger than you’ve held it. That doesn’t mean you’re making too much of it. It means you were making too little of it and now you right-sized it.

But even this movement isn’t the hardest. Sadly, most victims are used to enduring pain. And even though it changes reality to finally call it sexual abuse, it’s only giving a name to pain they already know and survived. And people can endure a lot of suffering when freedom and healing finally seem possible. We intuitively understand redemptive suffering as the path to growth.

When we risk our voice and begin to tell our story, the story gets clearer and thereby safer to sit with. Once heard, our inner screaming begins to quiet down. As our pain gets the honor and kindness it deserves, we start to get containment and calm back. We actually heal. And then the most surprising thing happens: we begin to come back alive to desire and love and goodness and joy.

That’s the hard part.

We are so trained to survive. It’s all we’ve known for years. It’s not that victims are shut off to all goodness. But we lock down in very specific ways connected to our abuse. It makes it hard to imagine: Could we actually start to relax? Can we actually feel alive again in the places once thought dead? Can we trust our body and return to play? Can we actually open to joy and pleasure and love again?

Goodness never demands a response. It’s the opposite of our abuse. Goodness strolls into our lives to its own unforced rhythm. It always arrives as an invitation, an opportunity, a possibility. And in this way, it may feel like goodness confronts us, challenges us, even corners us. Oh yes, and in many ways we are being confronted. It asks, “What will you do with me now? Will you come alive again?”

Why would this be hard?

You might say, how hard could it be to hate bad things and trust good things? Sexual abuse—bad. Love and joy and play—good. Don’t people like good things? Ah, but we forget where this whole hell of abuse began. Before the grooming, before the predator prowling and the violation and threats to keep us silent and isolated, before the torture of our own pain, before it all went dark, there was desire. And there was trust of another human being, who offered something that seemed good.

And as we’ve named, that blending of care and abuse is so crazy-making. It’s so hard to sort out when the bait and switch happened. When did what we wanted (care) and what we received (abuse) change? Most times there is not a black-and-white moment. And often the abuse switched back to care and support (or at least the appearance of it) and then back to abuse. Back and forth. Back and forth.

That nauseating rollercoaster makes us feel very ambivalent (feeling two opposite things at the same time) about our abuser. One man told me, “No one saw my father hunger better than my abuser. Still to this day I would say that, even after acknowledging his abuse. Make that make sense to my body.” Another woman said, “My dad is still the one I want to hear from when I get a job promotion or need advice. We haven’t talked in years. Tell that to my heart.” Another man said, “My babysitter became the body type I was attracted to in every girl I dated for the next decade. You know how gross I feel about that?” Another man said, in the midst of his sobs, “Why do I want to punch my cousin and have him hug me all at the same time?”

Can you hear the madness? Desire and anger, pleasure and disgust, longing and repulsion. It’s truly unreconcilable. How could we feel anything positive toward someone who hurt us?

In this way, abuse victims often feel betrayed by their own hearts, their own desire, even their own bodies. It’s possible for a victim to experience arousal and pleasure during the very sexual abuse that traumatized them. This is because arousal and desire are different, called arousal non-concordance, which I wrote about here. But any hint of a positive feeling about our abuser can feel like the ultimate betrayal.

To acknowledge that the person who harmed us won our trust, drew out our desire, or even comforted us can feel like confessing foolery and admitting defeat. I’ve heard it countless times in therapy: “I feel like an idiot.” “I was a fool because I fell for it.” “I feel like I betrayed myself.” “If only I hadn’t wanted [blank], I could have stopped it.” These are all statements aimed at their own innocent trust or desire. It seems like desire is the problem. We may say our abuser is at fault, but desire feels like the real villain.

Can you begin to see why desire and goodness are so difficult after abuse? How can we ever trust others or ourselves again? So we don’t. We slam the door in the face of goodness. We cling to our survivor self and only trust our hyper-vigilance to get us through life.

The beginning steps

As I’ve said, at first we need this shrewdness and vigilance to figure out what the hell just happened to us. It helps us listen to our gut, reclaim our voice, and tell our story. This is essential work. To finally make sense of what felt so foggy and confusing and chaotic and recover the empowerment of our gut is true liberation. I cannot emphasize this enough.

And not trusting is actually an okay step in this process. If you never learned to listen to your gut or if you were told to doubt your feelings or otherwise pitted against your own intuition, then you need the space to tune into it. You may need permission to not trust right now in order to get your bearings again. This is good work.

When I told a client, “Maybe you need to not trust men for a while,” she sat in shock. “Are you serious? I can do that?” She was taught to always give her abusive stepdad the benefit of the doubt. And it left her gut so out of whack she couldn’t figure out the good men from the bad or tune into the red flags. She needed some time to learn her gut.

But if our healing stops here, if we only recover our wits, our voice, our gut, we risk ending up in the ditch on the other side of the road. We may escape shame and silence and shut down only to lock ourselves in a hyper-vigilant prison. That’s not life. We must ride the momentum of our healing to reclaim again our desire.

Dipping toes in goodness

Often the first place we feel the invitation of goodness is in trusting someone’s kindness toward our story. It may not be the first person we tell or the second or the tenth. But you will find someone who will get it. You will see a face wince in pain for you when you tell your story. Someone will sigh in grief or grasp in shock or otherwise validate the pain. And it will feel unbelievable—no, like actually unbelievable. Compassion will feel very foreign. And you will think it’s therefore manipulative.

But it’s this very compassion that, when trusted, becomes the basis of our own self-compassion for our abuse. It’s often the love of another that helps us love ourselves. When we see ourselves, our story, through the eyes and face and reaction of another, we start to realize we are worthy of care and comfort and healing and empathy.

And self compassion in turn helps us into the next frontier of goodness: to bless the very hunger or desire or goodness within us that our abuser preyed upon.

Wading into the water

The Epstein files are where our culture is having the conversation on sexual abuse right now, as we should. But beyond the “who did what” is the question of why. Why would such powerful, wealthy men who seem to have it all be interested in sexually abusing minors? What in the world do they have to offer?

Because wealth rarely coexists with innocence. On their path to wealth and power, most of these men lost their innocence, aliveness, and childlike wonder. I believe sexual abuse is an attempt to cannibalize innocence in a child. Rather than humble themselves and recover their own childlike hearts, these abusive men tried to buy and consume it in another person, in a child. They wanted to momentarily experience it again and feel power over it. I am serious.

That should absolutely boil your rage. It boiled Jesus’ rage too. “It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble” (Luke 17:2). Children are wildly valuable to Jesus (Matthew 18:4) and their childlike wonder and innocence is an essential virtue in his Kingdom (Mark 10:15).

You must grapple with the fact that your aliveness, your innocence, your beauty and glory moved, even aroused your abuser. And rather, than treat you with the awe—the respect, the reverence, the sacredness—you deserved, they tried to rob you of it instead.

But we fight back, not by hating our own aliveness or glory, not by shutting down our innocence or desire or playfulness or sexuality, but by reclaiming it. In truth, no one can actually cannibalize another person’s innocence. They cannot take it from you. You have been wounded, even profoundly traumatized, but they do not own your glory. They do not own your heart or desire or sexuality or dignity. God does not let someone have that power. No one can actually destroy the glory of God in us. Not in the world. And not in you. Your innocence is held by God. At best, the realm of evil can get you to hide it or disown it. That’s it.

When we begin to see that our abuser did not actually take our heart from us, did not actually rob our innocence, it’s wildly empowering. No doubt, it is difficult work to reclaim and re-own our desire. But when we do, life opens back up to us. Our aliveness begins to be restored and buoyant again. That’s the desire we must learn to name and bless.

How the hell do we do that?

We walk right into the heart of our ambivalence and sit with it. We let our hearts speak to what we really wanted and what we did not want. We start to discern: “I wanted this but not that.” We honor both the pain and the desire. Despite what your abuser did with it, you brought genuinely good desire to him or her. And this desire, this aliveness, is not your shame but actually your glory.

You don’t have to cannonball

I remember Dan Allender saying, even in the lives of people with the worst of stories, goodness always finds cracks to grow in. And that can feel maddening. How do we honor both suffering and goodness in the same life, even the same moment? That is not easy. We must train the ears of our intuition to hear not only the alarm bells of danger but the song of goodness.

In her book on recovering from sexual harm, Tabitha Westbrook tells a very personal story of risking on a moment of goodness.

I made a quick right-hand turn into a familiar gas station. I stepped out by the pump under a clear sky that was a brilliant Carolina blue. I was enjoying the gentle breeze that carried little humidity—a rarity in the Southern summer—when I noticed a fellow next to me who was filling up his Jeep. He smiled at me as I pumped gas. I smiled back. We made small talk as we filled our vehicles. This was nothing strange for me. Those who know me would tell you that I can basically talk to a brick wall. I will talk to nearly anyone because I really like people. This guy seemed nice, and he was handsome with a good sense of humor. After our tanks were full, he and I stood and chatted for a few more minutes. Then he asked for my phone number. I felt my pulse quicken and my palms begin to sweat. I panicked. I agreed but gave him a fake number. I felt suddenly disoriented, though I’d been to this gas station many times. We got in our vehicles and drove away.

I felt nauseated and even forgot where I was headed. I pulled into a neighborhood nearby and parked, my whole body trembling, sweat pouring off me. What was happening? I had enjoyed the conversation; what was the harm in giving this man my phone number? Images flashed through my mind of my ex-husband’s treatment of me. My body shook harder as I was flooded with horrific memories. I sat in my SUV until the flashback passed. As my body and mind settled, I cried. I felt hated, broken, used, and destroyed. No way could I think about having another relationship. Ever.

You may think this story ends with the opposite message of what I am saying, back in lockdown and distrust. But did you notice the way she honored her pleasure in the breeze and that Carolina blue sky? And did you notice the blessing she gave her outgoing relational heart and the space she made for her attraction to this man? And even in the midst of her flashback and panic attack, she gave her body the time it needed to feel afraid. She honored the pain. And this story is in a book she wrote on abuse recovery because that’s not where her story ended.

Folks, this is how we do it. She has my compassion and my respect. We take risks here and there, feel the pull back to defense, but find the kindness to help our bodies through its fear. We never do it unwisely but we often do it scared. There’s no other way to be brave.

So, Brave One, where is goodness inviting you to dance?

Thanks for reading! Know anyone who needs to hear this? I am working hard to grow this community and would love your help. Forward this on to anyone or click the share button below.

I want to talk to you about this post! Every month, a group of us talk about these posts. And I love it every time! Join us Monday, March 2nd, at 6:30pm MT/8:30pm ET, for a Zoom conversation exclusively for paid subscribers. I’ll teach a little and then we just talk. To join us, upgrade your membership (see below) for $5 a month (cancel any time). The Zoom link will be found here soon.

It just keeps rolling! My book is STILL on sale on Amazon! They just keep running The Sex Talk You Never Got in an awesome sale. You can get the paperback for 40% off or less than $12. Click here.

I enjoyed another amazing podcast interview with Bridgett Blood and Lauren Mathues on the Dating and Desire Podcast. We discussed how to bless sexual arousal and discern what it’s speaking to us in marriage and dating.

Next to buying their book, a book review is the second best gift you can give an author. I would be so grateful for one for The Sex Talk You Never Got. Even one sentence is enough. Here’s a short tutorial video if you need it. And write the review here: Amazon | Goodreads

As a subscriber, you get a FREE Study Guide for my book. Click here. New subscribers will get it in the welcome email.

Find me on: Instagram | Facebook | Threads

Follow my author pages: Amazon | Goodreads

Here’s my chance to wish you a happy new year and yet this wild year has already held so much. I hesitate to say happy. But truly may this year be blessed for you and us all.

This month we made a really welcomed shift towards the healing process of sexual abuse. Sorry if the title gave you a case of pop-psych hives. I assure you I don’t inte…

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“You cannot heal what you don’t reveal” Jay Z channeling Dan Allender

“The truth will set you free.” Jesus

“But the Spirit intercedes along with our groans that cannot be expressed in words.” Paul

Here’s a little story that has nothing to do with sexual abuse, I assure you, but everything to do with how we heal.

A few years ago, I hauled all three of my young boys to their favorite place in the world at the time—the iPad store! While an Apple genius hunched over my broken phone, they played in the best arcade ever. Because it never needed a single quarter.

I watched as a girl came over to my four-year-old son, looked at what he was playing, and brute force ripped the iPad out of his hands. He stood stunned, trying to make sense of what happened. She interpreted the moment for him and said, “Mine!” and turned her body away. I tried to sort of correct her as well as one can—her parents never came to help broker the situation. And then my phone was ready and we finished and left.

Kids do this sorta thing to each other. I get it. Chalk that up to childhood normalcy, right? Who hasn’t had a toy ripped out of his or her hand a bazillion times as a kid? We all know the wounds of childhood can be so much worse. I am writing this article on sexual abuse after all and this was not that, for sure.

But that night as I tucked him and his five million matchbox cars into bed, he said, “Remember girl at iPad store?” I said, Yes, I remember. “She took iPad.” Yes she did. “She hurt me.” Oh, buddy, I am sorry. Yes, that was not right of her. And I can see why it hurt you. I had no idea it landed for him as pain. I rubbed his back, comforted him and he rolled over, seemingly relieved to be heard. I prayed and kissed his forehead and he went to bed.

For the next couple weeks, while putting him to bed, he brought up the story again. And we would have a little conversation about it. Sometimes I would ask if he had more he wanted to tell me, but mostly he just wanted to say it again. And once it was validated, he let it go.

The sheer volume of times he was telling this story made the nervous parent in me wonder if something was off, if we were making too much of it, or failing to build resilience in him. But when it stopped a few weeks later, I realized the opposite was true. This was his resilience. He was teaching me what healing looks like.

To Heal, We Must Start Here

Today we talk about the healing of sexual abuse. And the absolute first step to healing sexual abuse—or any healing really—begins with speaking up. We must name the problem, the harm, the trauma, the pain. You don’t have to say everything right away. You don’t have to give all the official names or have a prepared speech with evidence. You don’t have to be eloquent or polished or even very clear to start. You do not need to sort it all out or even get it all right. And it does not matter how much time has passed. Healing is possible no matter how long it has been. You can say almost anything at any time, even just “Help!”, to start. Just speak.

Our voice breaks the dam of silence that traps us in our suffering and shame. Speaking up is a form of attention. And attention is how we start to attend to something or care for someone—that someone here being you! It all has to start with giving it the focused attention of our voice and our words. That is the power of your voice. Your voice is your first hero.

Why People Go Silent

To anyone else, this step seems like the easiest thing in the world to do. It’s just speaking right? How hard could that be? It’s a common retort for people to say to victims, “Well why didn’t you scream or yell or try to run while it was happening? Why did you wait [insert length of days, months, years] to actually tell anyone?” And they hold this as evidence that you must be lying and fabricating the abuse story.

But this is naive about trauma’s impact on our ability to speak up. Trauma stresses our nervous system to the brink. In order to focus all its resources on survival, our brain limits systems it finds unnecessary. Complex reasoning and reflection (in the neocortex) give way to more primal quick, reactive thinking (in the amygdala). The nuanced meaning of life and relationships reduces to a very black and white reality: “Do I need to hit or run or play dead until it is over?” (fight, flight, freeze). Along with this, our ability to speak (in the Broca’s area of the brain) gets truncated or stops altogether. We can at best (from subcortical, primitive brain systems) blurt out blunt, instinctive, emotional sounds, but not always words.

And this posture also assumes that the victim did not try to speak up. Victims often do resist abuse in the moment and say no or appeal to their perpetrator to stop only to have that resistance overrun or manipulated away. Sometimes the very people who could care for a victim and hear their pleas for help are the people harming them. That’s the power they abuse—the power of a victim’s trust and need.

Which brings us back to the prowl of predators and the craft of abuse. The “Why didn’t you speak up?” response also naively misses that by the time a victim could speak up or run or yell, the relational trap has snapped. Again, most abuse does not happen when someone is physically jumped and held against their will, but within a relational power differential, where the social pressure and emotional coercion is too strong to resist outright. The craft of abuse leaves a victim in doubt about what is even happening or feeling to blame for it. And as we’ve mentioned, the external threats by the abuser (to life, relationship, something or someone important to you or your community) or the implicit silencing of a whole community can also render a victim mute with fear and isolated within.

Speaking as Courage

Even still, some victims do speak up. The fact that victims try at all is a testament to their courage. One study found that about 42% of childhood sexual abuse victims never attempt to tell anyone at all. That just breaks my heart. Another study found that for documented cases of abuse where a social worker investigated and confirmed that abuse did occur, still only 64% of girls could acknowledge it happened. Boys were four times more silent with only 16% able to acknowledge the truth. This is not cowardice, but further evidence that silence is a very powerful foe.

Dan Allender has said that often abuse victims will make one attempt to tell someone about their abuse. The vast majority of those that speak up (86%) tell a close family member or friend—a person they trust to care for them. And here is the wild part: how they are treated when they speak up can be just as impactful as the abuse itself—either for healing or for harm. It’s a truism that we are wounded in relationships and we heal in relationships. Again, the fact that victims risk trust is a testament to their enduring spirit.

Some victims are dismissed outright with overt denial. “He would never do that.” Some are overtly shamed or blamed for getting themselves in the situation. “Well, what did you do?” One daughter remembers being dismissed because she snuck out and got drunk. “What did you expect?” Victims may be ignored or the abuse minimized. I know some parents who thought their child was too young to remember and therefore couldn’t be affected.

Sometimes this is truly ill-intended by the parent or caregiver. Sometimes things just seem to get lost in translation (or maybe actively sabotaged by the realm of evil). One man remembered the day as a 10 year old driving home from a sleepover, when he told his father one of the boys had done something to him. His dad replied, “Do I need to do something about that?” He didn’t know what to say. He felt overwhelmed by the burden of figuring out if it was a big deal. So the conversation stopped there.

I cannot overstate how damaging these moments are for victims. Victims remember these moments with the same searing clarity with which they remember their abuse. Trauma is not simply about the pain of the moment but the absence of care afterward. I have heard horror stories about this. And if it goes poorly, it will often be at least a decade if not more before they try again, if they ever try again.

But hear me, I have also witnessed responses to abuse that would make you weep with relief. Clients have shared stories of how their parents listened and rose up with righteous anger and compassion for them, even helping put abusers in jail for their crimes. And it’s never too late to speak up. Clients have brought adult parents to my office to disclose abuse decades late. And though it’s excruciating to watch these parents’ hearts break, it’s glorious joy to see repair happen so many years later. Healing is still possible no matter when you choose to tell. Love heals beyond the barriers of time.

Internal Battles

Of course, it’s not simply what a victim faces in the outside world that leaves them silent. They often battle themselves as well and face internal barriers to speak. Top of the list here would be their own inner doubt or confusion about the event itself. Almost no one comes to counseling saying, “I have a story of sexual abuse and want to heal it.” For so many, the story is buried in their own confusion and guilt and acting-out behavior. The presence of sexuality in a relationship where it did not belong or in a way they never asked for is jarring. And often at an age when they didn’t know how to name it. So it became “that weird thing that happened when I was a kid.” The weirdness becomes evidence of their own perversion or twistedness. And the ambiguity in the event a sign they caused it.

We must remember that victims do not bury sexual trauma primarily because of the pain but because of the shame. It just feels like something they’ve done wrong. Something got me in trouble and I have to hide that part of me. This is why a caring person is so essential to our recovery. We must find someone to help us sort out and discern the story.

Some people can acknowledge their harm but deeply resist the idea of calling themselves a victim whatsoever. To even acknowledge they were victimized feels too threatening or overwhelming. “I don’t want to fall into a victim mentality,” they say, like it’s some virus of the brain. To them, to be a victim feels inherently shameful, an admission of weakness or defeat, like being cursed with powerlessness for the rest of their lives.

This thinking conflates compassion with self-pity. They are not the same. The opposite of self-pity or a “victim mindset” is not “being tough” and acting like it doesn’t affect you. Denying suffering is self-hatred, which actually heightens your pain and leaves you further bound to it. The opposite of self-pity is actually self-compassion, as I wrote here. Self-compassion says your abuse may not be your fault but it is your responsibility. Healing requires taking responsibility for the story we’ve lived, even the parts we suffered without our choice. Victim can be a statement of fact about your story without becoming your identity. Milking a victim mentality involves play-acting your pain, not bravely addressing it.

How To Be a Victim But Not a “Victim”

Once you decide it’s time to speak up, what do you say? How do you do this right? Well, banish the idea that there is a perfect way to do this. There is not and you must leave room for this to feel messy. Again, you start by telling the truth, telling the story, anything at all, somewhere. I find that for most people, their bodies speak up for them first. This could be chronic symptoms like depression or panic or a flashback feeling of dread or anger or fear in a certain area of life. It could be they just feel broken inside. Something prompts the remembering.

Just this week while cooling down after CrossFit, a man in the class told me about his work as a physical therapist. He said it’s fairly common while stretching or massaging certain areas of the body for grown men to experience flashback traumatic memories and weep out of nowhere. That is so wild to me. Simple kind human touch on an area tied to trauma lets the body remember.

When the story returns, it shows up as flashbacks or snippets or memory fragments. One man woke up from a dream in the night with a memory of abuse—something he had almost entirely forgotten. And in the light of day, it all started returning. Maybe you can only describe strange out of place images. It’s the nature of trauma to fragment stories, to chop them up so they don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end linear progression. That doesn’t matter yet. As you heal, the story will organize and get clear. You start with what you’ve got.

Do these sensations and flashbacks alone prove you’ve been abused? No, not always. Which is why you need to fact check and eventually invite others into the journey. You may decide to start speaking alone to yourself—in a journal, the sanctuary of your car, or your bed in those 0-dark-30 prayers. And then you find a safe person, preferably someone with trauma training. At least find a kind and honoring person who will not dismiss you.

So I Spoke. Now What?

Here’s the wild confusing part: Once you’ve spoken, the next step is to do it again and again and again. Remember the lesson my son taught me? You don’t just say it once. You say it over and over, with greater detail and more emotional depth, until one day you feel done.

I love CS Lewis’ way of putting it: “Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, ‘with backward mutters of dissevering power’—or else not.” Healing is a circle of deeper and deeper passes at the same story. Healing is always iterative. We tell the same stories in the presence of someone kind again and again. And it heals us. It unwinds the story.

No, the facts don’t change. They will prevail. But the meaning changes. As I wrote in my book Story Formed (which you can get here), neuroscience research shows that every time we tell a story, we don’t read it from a script in our brains. We relive that story a little bit—we see the visuals and feel the feelings and put that experience to words. And when we do that, it opens the experience of that story back up in our brains to be altered. Whatever happens when we tell the story gets imprinted back into the original story. As Dan Allender explains, we don’t just remember our stories. We also remember what it felt like the last time we told it.

Again, if that goes poorly, it’s doubly worse. But if we are treated with kindness, the story meaning literally feels different. It’s not just that the pain dissipates. Both pain and shame release. Ann Voskamp says, “Shame dies when stories are told in safe places.” Others help us metabolize them through their kind witness.

I know I am saying almost nothing about what happens after you speak, other than healing. I am not addressing if you should go to authorities with your story or if you confront your abuser to his/her face or if you choose to cut this person out of your life. Those are vital questions in the journey and the answers will reveal themselves along the way. In other words, trust the process. You do not have to decide it all right away.

But all of that flows from the very first and most vital choice. Whatever you do, speak. Your voice is your first hero.

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Well, well, our final conversation of the year! It has been such a great year with you all. I am so grateful for your financial support of my writing and these discussions together.

We are making our way through this series on sexual abuse. And we just finished the hardest part, the abuse cycle itself. Deep exhale! The next two posts will cov…

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“Streetwise people are smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens. They are on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits. I want you to be smart in the same way—but for what is right—using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you’ll live, really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior.” Luke 16:8,9 MSG

We need to talk about wolves. This whole post will be about wolves actually. Because lo and behold, abusers act a lot like wolves. I know, I already told you seeing abusers this way was a bad idea. I am not trying to make you crazy. This is the madness of abuse. Because they literally do not look like wolves and you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to spot them in a crowd of people. But minus the beady eyes and big fuzzy ears, in the later stages of abuse, abusers act very much like predators. There’s a reason they get that name. So today we talk about those late stages. Because if you don’t stay alert for wolves and learn from the ones you’ve met already, you set yourself up to be their prey.

I also blame Jesus for making this confusing.

Right before Jesus sent out his disciples to announce his kingdom, he prepared a speech—you know, like any good military leader staging an invasion. What did Jesus say to his troops? “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves” (Matthew 10:16). Hardly encouraging.

But maybe the point here was to level with them. Jesus is known for this sort of sober talk about life outside Eden. Later, in his very last speech before the wolves kill him, Jesus tells his disciples, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” But for now, here, he says in this world, you will meet wolves in human flesh that want to devour you like sheep. People who abuse are like that.

Jesus did not end his speech here. He went on to charge them to arm up with two specific weapons. “Be shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” Wax on. Wax off. The only things that can combat wolves are innocence and shrewdness. And I believe they must be our weapons too. We best listen to Jesus here. We confront and recover from abuse with our innocence and shrewdness.

Last post, I fought hard to convince you that your innocent trust does not make you a fool. It makes you amazing. At the end of the day, though this person betrayed you, you trusted a human and nothing could be more innocent and Eden-like than that. We need to see abusers as the real fools. Recovering from abuse must involve blessing your innocent trust as your most primal good instinct. It makes you most human. Blessing this innocence inoculates shame.

But you must also take up another weapon: Shrewdness. “Shrewd as a snake” actually, by which Jesus intended for you to flash back to the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. In fact, the Septuagint, an ancient Greek translation of the Bible, uses the exact same phrase in Jesus’ speech as it does for the scene in Eden. Jesus is saying, “Be as crafty and clever and cunning and wily as evil.” Stir up your inner ninja. Channel your sly warrior self. Click on the bullish*t detector. Here navy seal meets CIA agent. Find whatever picture of cunning most resonates and be it.

We need that person now. Because the final stages of abuse are where the wolves bare their sharp teeth and clawed hands. They become far more crafty and manipulative and the care erodes into confusion and harm. Here is where abuse stands alone as a dark craft.

The Final Stages of Abuse

Most often, an abusing person does not transition from trust and care to abuse all of a sudden. That would expose the craft too openly. Instead, they deploy a transition act or two—often in the form of some seemingly minor boundary crossing. This is the first predator-like behavior. It’s something more innocuous on the surface, almost easy to dismiss or ignore, but wrong enough that it impacts you. It can be positive or negative, a privilege or a punishment. It’s designed to wear you down and test your resolve. Will you speak up or will you let your boundaries be eroded? And by leaving you unsure what to do, it subtly makes you feel that you are participating somehow in your own abuse.

Maybe a neighbor friend invites you to sneak more video game time even when you know you aren’t supposed to. Maybe your stepfather buys you alcohol as a teenager and says it’s our little secret. Or your mother gets you all the expensive clothes you wanted but says not to tell your father. Your friend walks out of the gas station and pulls two stolen candy bars from his pocket—one for him and one for you. What do you do? These can feel like privileges but in a confusing way because they also cross a line.

The boundary violation may be negative too. Your uncle cracks a sexual joke about your body and the more angry you get, the more he laughs and says, “It’s just a joke!” Maybe your father catches you getting home past curfew and in the ensuing argument slaps you. It’s an obvious violation but he apologizes quickly and says not to tell anyone. Maybe your stepfather drinks and drives but you see your mother roll her eyes and so you don’t say anything either. Maybe your older cousin always beats you up at family gatherings but then says, “You gonna go tell on me and be a wuss?” That one kid at school is your friend one day and the next day mocks you. But you put up with it because you both know you have so few other friends.

These seemingly small boundary crossings are wildly confusing because every relationship suffers little moments where we need to give each other grace. We all walk the broken road of love. We must bear with each other’s shortcomings and struggles. Someone may hurt you without the intent to go further. These small boundary crossings are not proof that someone is planning to abuse.

The major difference here is what happens when you speak up. Someone who loves you will be open to a conversation on these things. It’s not that you always have to speak up about every single little issue. But you can if you need to or want to. A person who abuses will rebuff these conversations—minimize the issue or mock you or maybe apologize before repeating the pattern again and again.

All of this is buildup for the ultimate act of abuse. At some point this person decides to take the violation further and do something that brings them sexual gratification at your expense. You’d think here the abuse would finally be obvious, so out in the open that you’d be left with no doubt. You could finally cry wolf for real. But there is no howl announcing sexual abuse.

It may be an overt sexual act or it could be relational or emotional in nature without any touch at all (I gave examples here). Sometimes recognizing sexual intent is very clear because it’s selfish and indulgent. Other times it’s only noticed much later upon reflection. Most often, the sexual intent and act of gratification are scripted so masterfully by the abusive person that you are dumbfounded by with what is happening. Perpetrators learn how to manipulate both their victim’s nervous systems and arousal structures to their advantage. The smokescreen of shock and body confusion lets them strike then cover their tracks.

Which brings us to the last stage of abuse. To get away with their abuse, perpetrators need to accomplish one ultimate thing: To shut you up.

An abuser may threaten to take your life or just outright punish or injury you. They may manipulate your heart by threatening someone or something else important to you. Your stepdad may beat your mom or sibling if you don’t comply, dividing you between your love and your own pain. A coach says he’ll end your starting position on the team if you speak up. It could be a threat to shame you publicly and blame the abuse on you. It could be a threat to remove some privilege like seeing your friends or beloved grandmother or take away a car or phone or some other extracurricular activity, like dance lessons or basketball camp. And because they’ve already read you, this person knows what will hurt you. They know what is important to you.

But the threat can also be covert. Sometimes an abuser threatens to take their own life, manipulating your sense of care, making you feel like blood is on your hands. They may express remorse and apologize but plead with you to not tell. The overwhelming urge to talk about the harm and get help might falsely feel like you haven’t forgiven. The threat may simply be the communal cost to you. Maybe the perpetrator is the star football player or the beloved pastor. Your story might feel like the grenade that could blow up a whole community. Maybe the threat is an appeal to pity. You know your troubled cousin or unstable sister or depressed father is hurting. You might fear ruining that person’s life if you speak up. Sometimes the threat is just a silent haunting. I have known several abuse victims who said they just carried an unexplained feeling that speaking up would bring destruction.

The agony here is that in the very moment when a victim is experiencing the most shock, confusion, pain, fear, and nausea, he or she will feel pressure to bear the weight alone, to keep it in, to avoid further harm or loss or take care of their abuser in some way. All of this is part of the craft of the wolf, an elaborate act to get away with it.

That’s the abuse cycle: What starts as being seen moves to feeling special moves to little boundary crossings and compromises moves to being sexually violated moves to being threatened to shut up. And round and round this cycle can go. It’s a dizzying, nauseating horrifying spin.

Shrewdness as a Weapon

What can we really do about any of this? How do we pluck a firebrand from the fire and fight off the wolves? Of course all of this is helpful upfront, if you’re still in the early stages of abuse when you can catch on and get away. But what do you do after the fact, where most of us sit, when the damage is done and the suffering is the greatest?

I believe the answer is the same no matter where you are in the cycle of abuse or how long it’s been since. “Be innocent. Be shrewd. I am with you.” You bless the innocent trust and hunger for love that got you here, as I’ve said. And you rally all your inner cunning to name the abuse and tell your story. And the single greatest weapon you have to do that is your shrewdness. And shrewdness begins in your gut.

What does that mean?

Your gut is your intuition, your inner compass of wisdom, your Spidey-sense that something just feels off even before you can explain it. We are made to sense nonverbal, preconscious, even spiritual realm things about people and experiences to help us navigate life. It’s rooted in your actual gut, your body, where feeling states begin. Even your sexual arousal is a form of radar, as I said before. We often think wisdom resides in the mind, in logic, but fail to remember that our whole bodies and beings are sensing instruments that tune into the world and relationships around us. Sure, your gut is not perfect. Your gut is not fail safe. But God gave you this essential tool to discern life.

God’s Spirit even speaks to people via intuition. Remember, in those first days of the early church in the book of Acts, they made massive decisions about the direction and practice of Christianity based solely on “…it seemed good to us and the Holy Spirit” (Acts 15:28). Which sounds so shaky. But they trusted their guts in communion with God and others and went for it.

Some religious communities teach we can’t trust ourselves and our inner feelings or experience because we are sinful. They often manipulate a section of Jeremiah where he calls the heart “desperately wicked” (17:9). But this falsely equates total depravity, the idea that all have fallen short of God’s glory, with utter depravity, the idea that any and all of God’s original design within us, his image, has been completely obliterated. That is not true. Yes, we need God. But no, we haven’t lost our original design, nor the ability of God to bless our intuition.

In the throes of my own doubt and uncertainty and second guessing about my story, I once saw a therapist named Lottie, a spitfire of a woman, who told me, “What are you going to do if you keep doubting your gut like this? You have to start with trusting your gut no matter what. Sure check it against the facts and discernment with community. But if you start with questioning it and doubting it, you’re closing your eyes, turning off your radar, and flying blind through life.” That changed my life and certainly my healing.

Evil wants to drive a wedge between you and your body, especially the inner wisdom of your intuition because it’s the basis of your shrewdness. So here we fight fire with fire. Not evil for evil, but cunning for cunning. To be wise is to be as wily as evil. Things are not always as they seem. You have to find your inner mafia crime lord. You have to find your inner savvy and shrewd self. She or he is in there. Trust me.

Brave Truth Telling

Here’s your first assignment: It can feel like once the abuse has happened, it’s too late. The damage is done. But in many ways, the war has just begun. The realm of evil would love to convince you there is nothing you can do anymore, and then let trauma and shame slowly erode more and more of your relatedness and aliveness.

For example, men and women who have experienced childhood sexual abuse are 4.3 times more likely to suffer sexual assault in adulthood. That is an awful reality. Why would this happen? I would seem that people with a history of abuse tend to tune out red flags and distrust their own intuition more than those without abuse. Victims downplay the value of their own felt experience and tune out their gut.

So, your mission: No matter how long it’s been, when you suspect you might have a story of abuse, you must let yourself explore the truth. You must employ your gut to speak your experience. You must risk your curiosities and suspicions to recreate the fuzzy scenes in your memory. You must let your intuition tell the story.

This can be brutal work. But there is no expiration date on telling your story or the healing it can bring. At literally any point, speaking up and naming harm reverses the silencing of abuse. It will absolutely set you free and help you heal and recover. We walk the terrain of our story with our inner shrewdness to reclaim our innocence, to heal the wound, and come alive again. More on that next time.

Thanks for reading! Know anyone who needs to hear this? I am working hard to grow this community and would love your help. Forward this on to anyone or click the share button below.

Don’t miss our Zoom conversation on this post! These are always amazing discussions. Join us Tuesday, December 30th, at 6:30pm MT/8:30pm ET, for a Zoom conversation exclusively for paid subscribers. I’ll teach a little and answer all your questions. To join us, upgrade your membership (see below) for $5 a month (cancel anytime). The Zoom link will be found here soon.

I’ll say it again because it’s so cool. My book is on a HUGE sale right now! Amazon included The Sex Talk You Never Got in its holiday sale and it’s still going. You can get the paperback for 40% off or less than $12. Click here.

Let’s meet in person! I’ve got two more speaking gigs coming up in early 2026 and would love to meet you there. This first one is not fully in person. On Jan 9 & 10, I’ll be at the Porn Free Man Virtual Conference to teach an experiential session on “Sex Addiction and the Divided Self.” And best of all, it’s free! And on Jan 23 & 24, I’ll be fully in person in Annapolis, MD, leading the Rewire Desire Conference. I would love to see you at both!

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I hope this finds you warm and well fed today with love and your favorite fixins’. I raise my plate full of green bean casserole in honor of you all. I am so grateful for you and our regular conversations on such tender and important topics.

This month is no different with a continued conversation on the harm and healing of …

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While walking out of our local grocery store awhile back, I ran into a neighbor. I gave him the customary wave and head tip, but it was clear he wanted to talk. I pulled my cart over and we chatted awhile, but I kept wondering if he had something else he wanted to talk about. “Hey, I just got all my moose meat back from my hunt this fall. Ever had a moose steak? You’ve gotta come try one.” He sweetened the deal (back before I gave up alcohol) by offering me some rare fandangled beer. I thought how nice it felt to be pursued. Who doesn’t want friends as neighbors?

Of course I said yes.

A few days later, as I made my way across the street, I could already smell the steaks going. He welcomed me into his home with music playing, his family gone, and a whole spread of food. We popped our beers and caught up on his deck while he manned the grill. I heard the story of his moose kill—a rare tag here in Colorado. And conversation flowed into life and work while we devoured his wild game.

Moose meat is delicious by the way. And about the time we both leaned back with full bellies, he piped up. “Did you hear there’s supposed to be another housing market collapse?” Hm, I thought, I had not heard that. He continued. “Yeah, they say it’s supposed to trigger a real bad recession. Scary Stuff.” A wave of fear washed over me. This is turning ominous, I thought. Which is when he said, “Man, I’m so glad I have my side business to keep my income stable.”

And suddenly the whole scene spun on its head. I realized I’d been lured into a set up. This was a multi level marketing sign-up meeting. My gut dropped. I chugged the rest of my beer, thanked him for the meat, and within mere minutes, I was out the door.

I walked back feeling gross and slimed. What had appeared as a genuine offer of friendship turned into a sales pitch. He had been plotting it the whole time. I felt like the biggest fool. Am I that needy for friendship that I fell for his trap?

What Actually is Grooming?

This whole experience played out for me in a snapshot way what grooming is like for an abuse victim. Grooming is what we call the first stage of abuse. No, my neighbor was not abusing me but he did have financial gain in mind at my expense and its what drove his pursuit of me. And he worked the the craft of manipulation to do it.

This early stage of sexual abuse is madness for one big reason: Grooming mimics care. Grooming is indistinguishable from real care. Grooming in fact is care to our bodies and hearts, at least in the moment. It’s not just a mind game. There is no special technique called grooming. The only difference is the heart behind the care—the plotted selfishness instead of selfless love. But that heart is almost totally hidden at this stage.

Victims of abuse often feel that their abuser really saw them at first and read their needs—sometimes better than anyone else in their lives. They noticed that shy insecurity or recognized that lonely downcast quiet or saw that father hunger. And feeling seen is exactly what being loved feels like to us—to be noticed, appreciated, comforted, celebrated, heard. That attention alone is caring.

The second early step of abuse is equally crazy making: What begins as attention and empathy moves to an offer of help. The person abusing offers themselves not simply as a listening ear now, but as the source of the solution. They pitch themselves as the hero, the rescuer, the educator, the provider. They do not simply listen to the story anymore. They insert themselves into the story as a rescuer. They seek to create a special relationship in which the victim depends on them.

So the coach offers himself as the surrogate father figure and spends special time with you. The youth pastor speaks affirming words about your beauty as “the voice of God’s love” in your life. The grandfather offers to pay for your college and be the hero. Attention from that popular classmate rescues your social standing. The boyfriend becomes your alternate home. The mother promises to leave the deadbeat dad and save you from your shared villain. The babysitter becomes your source of fun and information about the world your parents never tell you about.

That special relationship can often be cloaked as our little secret. “Let’s keep this just between you and me.” Since it’s a special favor, it makes one feel indebted and abundantly grateful. We will have more on this later.

I cannot overstate how much this pulls on the very thing we were created for.

We all need love and crave love. We all want to feel special to someone, to have people who are heroes in our lives. We need this. And here is the not-so-wild part: there are people who offer these things from a good heart and genuinely give us this without any underlying plan to use us. They truly just want to give love. I have known mentors and family and therapists and pastors and professors and friends who did this in genuine love for me. And it changed my life! But I have also known the twist of harm too. And the only difference is what was held secretly in their heart.

My neighbor read my loneliness so well (empathy) and he offered friendship in it (rescue). Can you see how to that point he is no different from simply being a caring person? I took him up on it. He never acted on his hidden plot because I called his bluff. To be fair, he showed his cards really fast. And like most Americans, this was far from my first rodeo with an MLM pitch. So thank God I could walk before I was too deep in the rabbit hole.

But walking across that street, I still felt like a fool. And this was only about an offer of friendship turned into a silly pyramid scheme. Now imagine a child, with little familiarity or training or adult awareness around manipulation, in the sights of a person abusing, where the stakes are wildly higher because it’s sexual abuse. That trauma can haunt the lives of victims in far deeper ways and for much longer than just a walk back home.

Are You a Fool?

Eventually a victim finds out there is a deeply hidden ulterior motive behind the care. One day the care vaporizes before their eyes and the hidden agenda to abuse gets revealed. This is pure betrayal. But that may not feel obvious at first. Most victims describe feeling shock and confusion and a seasick disorientation. It’s hard to know what is even happening. Its madness. But even without words yet to name it, their bodies know a truth that something shifted in a deep and painful way.

This is so important to recognize because very quickly the crazy-making disorientation congeals into a belief that you are crazy. You got it wrong or missed the clues or maybe even invited it. Something is wrong with you and your radar. You are the problem. Because how else could you fall for it? How could you not recognize an abuser?

And here’s the answer I believe you must give yourself: There are no abusers. Only humans. You risked on a fellow human and he or she turned on you. Before you rage quit this article and call me a fool, let me explain because it’s the only way we find freedom from shame.

So What is an Abuser?

Naming someone an abuser can be a very helpful way to tell your story and label their role in your harm. As a character in certain plots, they absolutely exist. But despite how grotesque some people act in a story, an abuser is not some genetic mutation or a distinct breed of human. God made only one form of people—those that bear his image, primarily express in love. Some invest their glory to learn the art of loving well. “Abusers” are simply humans who use their God-given glory to learn the craft of evil.

CS Lewis told us, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal…immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” But I’ve yet to see someone sprout horns or angel wings. People just look like people—the good, the bad, the ugly. I feel this every time I see a police mugshot after a horrible crime. They just look like ordinary people. It’s in the heart we become more or less given over to evil, more or less surrendered to God.

Why in the world does this matter? Because by categorizing abusive people into a separate sub-breed of humans, we subtly blame victims for not spotting them.

Again, shame and contempt pounce on victims almost instantly after abuse, finding anyway to blame them for the whole deal. And a big one is: How did you not see it? How could you fall for it? How did you ever let yourself trust an abuser? We think abuse plays out like “Little Red Riding Hood,” where victims should spot grandma’s pointy ears and beady eyes and sharp teeth and turn to run. But abusers just look like humans, not wolves. They don’t smell or talk and present any different. Yes, there are red flags and gut checks, which we will talk about. But even those are not fail safe and can be counter-acted by the best of actors.

God spoke the most scandalous sentence at creation when he said the “very good” (Genesis 1:31) Garden of Eden had something “not good” (Genesis 2:18). He was naming Adam’s human loneliness and in kind a fundamental human instinct wired in us all: to need and trust people. In your deepest and truest and most glorious human self you were made to be open to and risk on and depend on and live in relationship with other humans. You were created to trust and crave love. And even more, you were created to feel special and long for heroes in your life. Those are not faults inside you.

Trust is your most fundamental and glorious instinct. Your first nature.

Never let that be taken from you. Never let an expert or anyone in your life convince you that “you fell for abuse.” Nope. You risked on a human. You followed your heart in your original glorious instinct. You trusted a human. And that person betrayed you. You cannot live your life believing you missed your abusers sharp teeth and pointy ears peaking out behind a grandmother’s bonnet. The sin of abuse is squarely on that person who betrayed your trust and turned their own glory to shame. Shame on them, not you.

Gut Training Second

There is a fine line here. Obviously, I am writing an article that describers common tactics of people who abuse. And I do that to educate you and help you learn to spot these red flags. But this is not my main goal. Because if you believe you can get so educated that you’ll never fall prey to abuse, you risk harming yourself. You risk locking yourself in a hypervigilant state and override your original first nature to risk and trust. Education is good but it’s second nature stuff. And it is not fail safe. And then what?

Maybe the most agonizing part of life is this: We all must accept a world in which love is uncertain. And so we must bless our risk to trust no matter the outcome. Sure, the outcome may compel us to take action to create safety for ourselves and others. But beware of the shame that follows. Everything in your defense system as a victim will want to accept that you could have stopped it. That you did something wrong.

Educating your gut must never, ever, ever be a replacement for the kindness you need for trusting in the first place. In fact, if you do not learn to bless your courage to trust, you keep yourself stuck in self hatred, which only sets you up to be manipulated again. Our pain needs care and curiosity not correction and critique. And the more we fight that care, the more we reject your own humanness. You trusted. And someone broke your trust to harm you. And I am actually inviting you to love that you trusted. It is your bravery. You risked outside of Eden. Well done!

Seeing Humans

I know in making the example of my neighbor I’ve risked making too much of him. Bless him. I see the human in him now. I am sure he learned his tactics from his multi level marketing organization and got five stars for his performance. And I’m not the first to acknowledge that MLM businesses function in cultish ways, often abusing the people like my neighbor the most. I hope it doesn’t cost him more of his humanness. He certainly gave me a chance to bless the friend-loving hungry human heart of my own.

Thanks for reading! Know anyone who needs to hear this? Forward this on to them by clicking the share button below. This does so much to help others and grows this community!

Want to talk with me about this post? Join us Sunday, November 30th, at 6:30pm MT/8:30pm ET, for a Zoom conversation exclusively for paid subscribers. I’ll teach a little and answer all your questions. To join us, upgrade your membership (see below) for $5 a month (cancel anytime). The Zoom link will soon be found here.

I’ll say it again because it’s so cool. My book is on a HUGE sale right now! Amazon included The Sex Talk You Never Got in its Black Friday sale and it already started. You can get the paperback for 40% off or less than $12. And the Kindle edition is only $1.99. So good! Click here.

Let’s meet in person! I’ve got two more speaking gigs coming up in early 2026 and would love to meet you there. This first one is not fully in person. On Jan 9 & 10, I’ll be at the Porn Free Man Virtual Conference to teach an experiential session on “Sex Addiction and the Divided Self.” And best of all, it’s free! And on Jan 23 & 24, I’ll be fully in person in Annapolis, MD, leading the Rewire Desire Conference. I would love to see you at both!

A reminder that as a subscriber, you get a FREE Study Guide for my book. Click here. New subscribers will get it in your welcome email. As always, book reviews make great gifts to authors. Even one sentence is enough. Here’s a short tutorial video should you need it. And write the review here: Amazon | Goodreads

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Let’s be clear: sexual abuse takes immense courage to talk about. That may sound like a counselor one liner. Cute language but over baked. But I would say you misunderstand the cost of vulnerability. In the words of Brene Brown, “Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage.” She’s describing the risk of the unknown. When we get vu…

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I live in a suburb called Rockrimmon, which sounds so innocent. That name—sorta rocky mountain vibes meets Lord of the Rings—always left me proud and grateful to the city planners of old. And then one day while reading the book of Judges, I found its origin. And it annihilated any affection I’ve held for it.

The last three chapters of Judges make up one long story, which begins and ends with “In those days, Israel had no king” with the final word “Each did as he saw fit.” The story goes that a man acquired a concubine from Bethlehem. A concubine functioned as a sex slave, existing for a man’s sexual pleasure and progeny dreams, but never treated with enough value to be his wife. Okay, right there, we’ve already fallen so far from Eden. Instead of her being his “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh” equal, he degrades her to sexual property. Not surprising, she gets angry at him and flees to her father. And the man goes to sweet talk her back.

After staying with her father, the man takes her on the trek back home. Along the way they set up camp for the night in a town called Gibeah. But a stranger takes them in because he’s real twitchy about something. Sometime in the night, that something shows up. A band of men come to sexually assault the traveler. Talk about predators prowling in the night. What horrid darkness!

And the story only gets worse. Like throwing raw meat to lions to get them to back off, the owner of the house decides to offer his daughter and the traveler’s concubine to these men to do with them as they wish. That absolutely guts me. After the horror of being raped all night, the concubine stumbles back to the doorstep and dies.

Whew. Let’s take a breath.

Trauma is the unthinkable, the unimaginable, and thereby, the unbearable. There is such a thing as awe for the awful which leaves one speechless for its horror. This is it.

Upon discovering his concubine dead, the traveling man goes into a rage. He divides her body up and sends it to the entire nation of Israel as a judgment against the men of Benjamin. And the entire nation rises up in fury and goes to war. Finally! You think, Finally someone is pissed off enough to care and we may get some justice. And after several battles, they wipe out almost the entire Benjaminite clan. But 600 men survive and flee to a rocky outcropping in the hill country. Wanna guess the name of that rocky place?

The Rock of Rimmon. Or, maybe for short, Rockrimmon.

My suburb is named after a refuge for rapists. Somewhere someone read this story (for morning devotions?) and showed up to a city planning meeting with a “great idea for a name.” And everyone bobbled their heads in agreement. It’s a living metaphor. A horrible story of sexual abuse hiding in plain sight.

I won’t even finish the story in Judges because it goes back off the cliff into some seventh layer of broken masculine sexual hell. It ends where it begins, with even more sex trafficking. No closure. No redemption. The writer leaves us to see how men have failed to rule the earth or even themselves. He wants us in the pain and groaning for redemption.

The Real Story

I want to talk with you about sexual trauma because it impacts every single one of our lives in one way or another. You read that right. You may already know this deeply in your own life because you suffered direct sexual harm and know the wreckage left in its wake. Or you may have no awareness of any sexual harm in your story or the lives of those you love. Trust me, whether aware or not, you know many, many people who have been sexually abused. It’s ubiquitous in our world.

Statistics would say somewhere around 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men suffer sexual abuse before the age of 18—a massive tragedy in itself. And yet, these statistics are almost guaranteed to be a low estimate. They only cover direct physical sexual molestation and not sexualization in other forms.

Add to this the fact that sexual abuse victims are notoriously silent about their abuse. One study found that for documented cases of abuse (where a social worker had investigated and corroborated the abuse took place), only 64% of girls could admit it happened. For boys, it was much worse, with only 16% able to acknowledge it. That is a staggering reality to me.

Sexual abuse gets hidden in plain sight, buried under the thin veneer of a victim’s silence, turned face, deadened eyes, or muted life. You may think, “But if they’re in pain, why don’t they just speak up?” Because traumatic stress takes away our ability to speak in the moment. And afterward, most victims believe their abuse is somehow their fault. None of this may make sense yet but most bury their abuse not simply for the pain but for the shame.

Never Stagnant

But these stories don’t just stay stagnant and dormant in the lives of victims. Like an injury that festers, abuse can go on robbing a victim of two very important things: Relatedness and Aliveness. That pain-shame cocktail can poison a victim with ongoing bouts of isolation and deadness. And though we call it sexual abuse, its impact ripples throughout their lives—spiritual faith, body health, career choices, relationships, etc. Nothing is safe from its shrapnel. The fact that victims go on risking toward love and desire is a testament to their courage and tenacity.

But the bomb blast can travel beyond just the victim. Buried stories of abuse can shape whole communities. Statistics would say 90% of people who perpetrate abuse are known to the victim—a mentor, friend, babysitter, teacher, or family member—someone who has earned the victim’s trust. The idea of a scary anonymous attacker is the minority experience. Abuse happens within families and churches and schools and sports teams and communities. Wherever there is connection, people can abuse those connections for selfish sexual ends.

Think of that: The very places we are made to feel safe and loved become places where victims experience terror and violation. And if abuse is not named and handled well there, it further erodes corporate trust and cripples the whole community’s relatedness and aliveness. And stories are often not handled well. Because abuse starts as a misuse of power, it’s often the power holders that lead the community and get protected most. They can work to bury stories and silence victims, creating a culture that only further fosters abuse.

And so a family may outright deny what a grandfather did because he’s the wealthy patriarch. A charismatic pastor may get all the “grace” because his ministry is “so effective.” A nation’s politicians may hide the Epstein files for decades because they call out the powerful in both parties. And a group of city planners may carelessly name a suburb Rockrimmon. Stories buried in shallow graves.

We Don’t Need to Dig

It may surprise you that I am not proposing we go digging for fossils. As my friend Jan Proett says, digging is rarely a helpful way to approach our stories. We don’t need to hold every person and community in our lives in suspicion and hunt down all the dirt. Why? Because these stories have a way of rising from their graves of silence and showing up to us and our communities. They want to be found. The victims are already talking. Most times these stories are already with us. We just need the right posture and a little skill to welcome them home: Be open. Listen. Be curious. Be kind. This ain’t rocket science.

But because we are so used to these stories being silenced and ignored, I want to arm you with a little awareness and wisdom to recognize a story of abuse in your own life or another’s. So for the next several posts, I will describe how abuse happens (the setup and stages), its impact, and how we heal. This is for your story but also those you live with and love. Healing our stories will benefit us all.

But for now let’s begin with a very basic definition.

What Is Sexual Abuse?

So what even is sexual abuse? Sexual abuse happens anytime someone uses their power over another person for their own sexual gratification without the other person’s consent. Sex was meant to be a gift committed lovers give and receive from each other in the name of love and for the glory of God. Sexual abuse is the dark opposite: stolen selfish sexual gratification driven by sexualized power. The power is just as much the pleasure as anything sexual.

That power may be a difference of physical size or muscle strength. But it could be age or status, as in an older sibling or a more popular school kid. It can be relational power, as in a mentor, a youth pastor, or the stepfather you looked to for help. It could also be positional power, a boss, a babysitter, the sibling who is more favored in the family. Or it may simply be situational power, as in the person who caught you in a vulnerable moment—when you passed out drunk or when the crowd made you the object of hazing.

Power in itself is not bad. It’s indeed what lets us feel loved. Love is a form of receiving good power as an act of service and care. This is the bind of most sexual abuse: somewhere care suddenly turns cold of love causing deep betrayal.

We often think of sexual abuse as involving direct molestation or some sort of physical sexual contact. But sexualization can involve visual contact, as in someone who is a voyeur to you. It may be verbal assault through sexual commentary, conversation, questions, or disclosure (like cat calls or comments on your body, even sex jokes). It could be emotional sexualization as in a mother who uses her son to vent about her bad marriage or a youth pastor who flirts with a student to build up his ego.

Even physical sexual contact can be confusing. It could be a teacher who’s too handsy or may involve hugs that linger too long or brief touches of private areas that could pass as accidental but have a pattern to them. It could be a doctor who seemed to be doing his job. It could be a parent who invited you to give a hug or massage but it felt off. Proving sexual intent will drive you mad. It’s a process of pattern observation, reality checking with others, and ultimately trusting your gut, which can be difficult as a victim of abuse, because it’s your body you stop trusting.

And sexual abuse always violates a person’s will—what we call consent. As I wrote in my book, sex in its essence is a form of play, one place where married couples get to play in the name of love. And play, by definition, must always be freely chosen. Play that is forced is not play. Same with sex. Sex requires permission and invitation. Abuse coerces and manipulates around this, violating the will and breaking the rules of sex in its essence.

Let’s be clear: Children cannot fundamentally consent to sexual experience. They simply do not understand the full reality of sexuality in all its nuance nor the implications of sexual experience. They are not even fully sexually developed, with the late stages of puberty continuing into the late teens. To honor this, we’ve drawn a legal line of age 18 for consent.

But we must honor again that no matter the age, consent requires someone’s full informed permission motivated by will and desire. Yes, means yes. Silence does not imply consent. And as we will learn, the absolute wild and tricky part about abuse is that often something is wanted from the person abusing. It could be attention or affection or care or comfort or play or friendship or relationship. Just not abusive sexual experience. No one wants sexual harm.

The Most Important Thing

May I suggest you take another deep breath and tune into your body as we end. This is heavy stuff. Sexual abuse is a dark evil in our world most especially because it attacks what is most core to us as humans: our capacity for intimacy, sensuality, and play. Sexuality announces like a billboard that we were all made for pleasure and connection. Aliveness and relatedness. Intimacy and adventure. And evil hates that because those things can lead us to love God.

No matter your story, may you feel emboldened to fight for the sacredness of your own wild design, your relatedness and aliveness, and that of those you love.

Thanks for reading! Know anyone who needs to hear this? Forward this on to them by clicking the share button below. This does so much to help others and grows this community!

Want to talk with me about this post? Join us Thursday, October 30, at 6:30pm MT/8:30pm ET, for a Zoom conversation exclusively for paid subscribers. I’ll teach a little and answer all your questions. To join us, upgrade your membership (see below) for $5 a month (cancel anytime). The Zoom link will be found here.

Know any good podcast hosts? Some space has opened up in my schedule this fall and I’d welcome a chance to talk more on healthy male sexuality, trauma work, etc. Just reply to this email or reach out through my website.

Let’s meet in person! I’ve got two more speaking gigs coming up in early 2026 and would love to meet you there. This first one is not fully in person. On Jan 9 &10, I’ll be at the Porn Free Man Virtual Conference to teach an experiential session on “Sex Addiction and the Divided Self.” And best of all, it’s free! And on Jan 23 & 24, I’ll be fully in person in Annapolis, MD, leading the Rewire Desire Conference. I would love to see you at both!

A reminder that as a subscriber, you get a FREE Study Guide for my book. Click here. New subscribers will get it in your welcome email. But let me know if you did not get it. As always, book reviews make great gifts to authors. Even one sentence is enough. Here’s a short tutorial video should you need it. And write the review here: Amazon | Goodreads

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Follow my author pages: Amazon | Goodreads

My family and I spent yesterday “beauty soaking” in the mountains taking in the gold rush of aspen leaves here in Colorado. They come and go so fast. But man, that immersive beauty reminded me God is so committed to our pleasure in this world.

I wrote this article at the direct request of many of you—some dads wanting guidance with sons and …

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“‘Everything is permissible,’ but not everything is beneficial. ‘Everything is permissible,’ but not everything builds up.” 1 Corinthians 10:23 CSB

“Blessed are those who don’t feel guilty for doing something they have decided is right.” Romans 14:22 NLT

Ben heard the knock on his bedroom door and opened it to see his father, the man who never came up to his room. And his dad looked angry. “You need to stop masturbating. We can’t keep wasting water washing all these sheets,” he said. The blood drained from Ben’s face and he lost all ability to talk. He had no idea anyone knew, especially his father. But his father did not see his reaction. Not one for conversation, he had already left.

It’s true. Ben had been masturbating. He’d discovered it quite by curious surprise. While trying to fall asleep one night, he soothed himself by rubbing his sheets. And because it felt good, he kept going and…Eureka! Like some explorer of old, he struck gold. Only later from a book did he learn what it was called.

I have heard a version of this story many, many times—men who in the innocent sensual exploration of their bodies as boys or teenagers discovered orgasm and masturbation quite by surprise. For many of them, it’s actually an unnerving or scary experience. One mother shared with me that her son ran to her terrified one night afraid he had injured himself. What a gift that he felt safe enough to talk with her. I remember asking my older brother if I was okay. He reassured me the plumbing was working as normal. I too am grateful I had a safe place to go.

What every single one of these men who were once boys needs to know is that this discovery is normal. Sensual exploration of our bodies is one million percent innocent. But it rarely feels that way

Sensual what?

Children are natural-born explorers. Nothing could be truer about them. It is how they discover and learn about the world around them—from mud puddles to electric sockets and everything in between. And the primary scientific tools they use are their senses. So they mush their hands in a puddle to feel the joy of squishy mud. They put that stick or toy or dead fly in their mouth to learn tastes. They bang pots together to discover the limits of their eardrums (and ours!). Our senses are given to us to know the world. We think of knowledge as academic and textbook. We forget that we all learned the world first by touching, tasting, smelling, seeing, and hearing our way around.

Call it sensual exploration.

It’s how children discover their own bodies too. We put our toes in our mouths. We screamed loudly to know our voice. We pulled our ears and picked our noses. And via curious exploration, most of us probably found our own genitals too. Especially for us boys, they are so out there waiting to be befriended. “What are these round balls for under my penis?” Totally normal question I’ve heard as a dad. “Why does my penis get hard?” Great curious question. “It feels tickly to touch it.” Sounds like an explorer’s field notes. Touching your own genitalia as a kid arises from pure, innocent curiosity. And because we all have about 8-10k nerve endings there, it may even feel good and soothing.

Though the average age of discovery is 13-15, it is not uncommon for children in their sensual exploration to discover masturbation earlier. This is not sexually motivated. Children are sensual, but they are not sexual (meaning they are not sexually awakened yet). Sexual awakening happens when we hit puberty and our hormones turn our sexual circuitry on. Sexuality then coexists with our sensuality in the body. Before that, we may have tons of curiosity about sex but not a sexually awakened felt experience of hormones, per se. We often equate sexuality and sensuality but they are very different.

Our sensual exploration actually begins in the world of the womb. Researchers have observed babies in utero that learn to suck their thumbs. What starts as random arm flailing slowly organizes around early comfort from the sucking reflex. Separate ultrasound studies on male and female babies in the womb also observed what researchers called masturbation-like “gratification behavior.” No joke. Again, this is not sexual. It’s simply soothing or comforting behavior, similar to thumb sucking. It just feels good.

The point I want to make here is that masturbation most often begins as innocent sensual curiosity and soothing.

Not just child’s play

When the topic of masturbation gets brought up, most of the men I work with respond with the flinch trained in them from childhood—the boyish bad thing I’m not supposed to do. They flash right back to the boy buried under mountains of shame who felt bad, sinful, perverted for touching himself.

But it’s not only the boy in us that struggles against this shame Masturbation can become a part of mature exploration and our ongoing sexual journey as adults. Research says a majority of adults (78% worldwide) practice masturbation in their lifetime. Certainly not everyone struggles with shame over it. But for many, questions about it remain into adulthood: Is this a good or bad thing to do? Can it be integrated into a healthy sexual journey? And where does the behavior cross into sin?

Most of us come by our shame honestly. For centuries, culture has scripted masturbation as a dangerous and sinful act. An 18^th century medical pamphlet once warned without evidence that masturbation could lead to blindness and the weakening of other faculties. Several 19^th century doctors tried to convince the world it would make you insane. These myths spread like wildfire and expanded to include other malformities, even death.

The church has done little better for many years, almost wholesale seeing masturbation as grievous sin. Fascinatingly, among the very early church fathers, historians can find only a single reference to masturbation. Some take this to mean they saw the act as trivial.

But somewhere that changed and changed drastically. Thomas Aquinas implied there are ways masturbation is worse than rape. Augustine considered even nocturnal emissions accompanied with lustful dreams as sinful. We’ve carried our fear of the body, especially sex, right through to our recent wave of purity culture. It condemned so much of our bodies’ design for arousal and pleasure, seeing it as lustful and dangerous. For some this fear was so strict in their purity driven homes, penis and vagina were considered swear words.

Still, though cultural shame can osmose into our felt experience, most of our sexual shame comes from moments in our story where we felt caught or exposed by our curiosity to the people that mattered to us—like Ben at the door frozen in front of his father.

Andrew remembers one particular bath time as a young boy when his curiosity lead him to play with his penis. His mother noticed and gasped, chiding him to stop. “That’s wrong to do.” But being a little boy, his curiosity got the better of him and he continued. His mother’s anger boiled now. “I said stop. I’ll spank you if you don’t quit.” Her angry face confused him and haunted him. The message was clear. Touching his penis was bad. Was his mother evil for this? No. I imagine her son’s free and innocent play provoked something of her own sexual shame. But rather than getting curious about it, she simply lashed out in contempt. And shame got passed to the next generation.

So is it good or bad?

It’s so easy to want a black and white answer about masturbation. But that answer does not exist and I wouldn’t trust anyone who gives it to you. Search the Bible for a verse to tell you the answer and you won’t find it. I think God did this on purpose. We want the good boy rule book and God wants to grow us up into mature men.

Some look to Genesis 38:9 when Onan “spilled his seed” in the act of sex with his new wife, the widow of his brother. This is a complex story. But lo and behold, it’s not simply the behavior itself of spilling his seed; it’s the fact that he was charged to provide children to his brother’s widow. And he selfishly refused. It’s his heart behind his behavior that matters most to the story.

Jesus certainly had strong words in the sermon on the mount for lust (Matthew 5:27-30), clarifying that the sin of adultery happens even in the heart. I’ve always found his solution enigmatic. He follows up the description of adultery with the charge to gouge out one’s eye if it causes you to sin. And then goes on to mention cutting of your hand as well. It’s pure speculation on my part, but I’ve wondered if he might be addressing lust driven masturbation. The mention of the hand just seems so out of place otherwise.

But notice that in both stories, the behavior always has a context, a story, and it’s the story that seems to be the point of discernment. The story scripts the sin, not simply the isolated behavior.

The one clear thing (well, two actually)

I think one thing is clear. The actual act of touching yourself—of physically exploring your body, including genitals, and feeling pleasure and soothing as a result—is not fundamentally wrong. Sensual exploration of your body is normal and even healthy curiosity. I see no reason to condemn the actual physical act of masturbation as something inherently wrong or sinful or harmful. We fail to remember that bodies are the very artwork of God and wired for pleasure. And we do well to bless this design, even be curious about it.

And even into adulthood, it can be sensual exploration. A version of this called sensate focus therapy is prescribed for couples, especially when past sexual abuse or trauma has made sex feel dangerous. It invites the partners to give and receive slow, safe sensual touch of each other’s bodies. This can calm the body, slow down the “fast drive to orgasm” version of sex, and return the pleasure of sensuality and being in the moment together.

Self-sensate focused therapy is also prescribed for treating premature ejaculation in men. It’s an attempt to disentangle anxiety from being wired to sex and pleasure. Some men were once boys that felt the need to rush masturbation to get quick anxiety relief or avoid being caught. Or as a isolating game of one, it left them dissociated and not connected to their bodies. I have also heard sensate focused exploration recommended to women for anorgasmia. One purity-culture-surviving couple told me for the first eight years of their marriage, they did not even know the wife could orgasm. Because fear and shame infused so many talks on modesty, she had never become familiar with her own body or pleasure centers. Sensate focused therapy actually let her discover her body and the heart of a God who made sex for women too, not just men like the church had implied.

So does that mean masturbation is all good and fine?

If only it were that simple. But there is more to the story.

We left Ben standing at his bedroom door. What froze him was not only that his father knew he masturbated, but that he knew he did it often. After that first night when Ben discovered masturbation, he slept better. All those terrible fits of anxiety that jumped him nearly every night since starting junior high eased just enough to fall asleep. It became his night time anti-anxiety. But what he really wanted most was for his parents to notice his anxiety and talk to him about it. He froze at his door not simply with shame, but the desire and hope that his father had come to actually talk.

Like everything in our sexual lives, masturbation always has a story to it. It can be the story of innocence. But it can also be the story of unmet needs that get acted out in reactive ways. In other words, the simple act itself is not inherently wrong. But what is animating it? What is driving or motivating it? This is the second clear thing: I believe the value and impact of the entire act rests solely on the story that scripts it. And that desire, that script, that story can determine if masturbation is a sign of a deeper issue. The act itself must be weighed and discerned by its story.

One study linked excessive childhood masturbation to two different things beyond normal exploration. This is by no means exhaustive nor proof of causation. First, it found that for some children the behavior increased when there was a change in the amount of affection, attention, or connection being given to a child. This could be during weening or when another sibling is born. Or something abrupt happens in the child’s life and the level of connection to parents changes. Masturbation became the substitute for physical affection and comfort and connection.

That’s Ben’s story. It is not sin. But it is also not an adequate substitute for parental love. He needed help and care and support. He needed relationship. He needed his father to stay at that door and talk. The story mattered.

This study also linked excessive masturbation to being sexualized through sexual abuse. Our sexuality was not meant to be awakened until puberty. God scripted our bodies to release hormones to click on our sexuality. This was meant to be joyful and exciting and welcomed with innocence and curiosity and conversation and awe and most of all love.

When someone sexualizes a child early, they awaken the body to sexual pleasure in the terror of harm and the curse of shame. Trauma brings enormous confusion and pain. Our bodies and our hearts can feel at odds and split. And worse it pushes our bodies into an early sexual awakening, not in love or innocence, but pain and shame and confusion. Research has shown for example that on average girls who’ve been sexually abused begin menstruation and even breast development earlier. Masturbation can also be a sign of traumatic sexualization (via direct molestation or indirect sexualization). This is not a smoking gun for abuse. But our bodies can awaken to the sexual arousal cycle before we come of age and even know what is going on. And the trauma in the body can lead us to reenact this abuse sexually, especially the body/heart split between arousal and shame. We act out when we cannot speak out.

Can you see how much the story around masturbation matters most?

Both of these realities break my heart—a child trying to cope with the withdrawal of comfort and touch and affection using masturbation to self soothe. And a child, in the wake of sexual trauma, trying to cope with an awakened body and shattered heart and stolen innocence. And for neither of these stories do I see the masturbation as sinful. It’s a furious attempt at self soothing. It’s survival.

We can carry that wounded boy inside us well into adulthood and keep reenacting his abuse and neglect with our masturbation scripts. And here is where things get messier. Your culpability as an adult to perpetuate an abuse script is self harm. I don’t believe masturbation is a healthy ongoing solution for neglect, anxiety, depression, stress, loneliness, or trauma symptoms. It is maladaptive, not really what you need.

And it can often involve hiding and betrayal and self-hatred and defensiveness and lying. Because we now have more resources and agency, we are responsible as an adult for how we handle our pain through porn use or compulsive sexual behavior. Masturbation can become a part of sinful self gratification. It’s not the masturbation itself, but the heart’s desire to take, to consume, to hold power over and against, to hide from ourselves and our community. That could be porn rituals. That could be a ritual of abuse. The script you keep writing with your masturbation matters.

“He never wants sex anymore,” Tonya said. She had begged her husband to come to counseling to address their near sexless and affection-less marriage “He won’t even touch me most times. I try to initiate with him and he lays like a dead fish. Even holding his hand feels like touching a corpse. But then I caught him looking at porn the other night after refusing me.” Her anger turned to tears. “It’s a knife to the heart. I just thought he didn’t like sex.” Ryan had been using masturbation with porn to refuse and avoid his wife. He deprived her selfishly so as not to risk with her. In this way, masturbation that takes your heart away from your partner is sinful.

But even when sin is in the script, we must move deeper beyond the behavior itself. I do not believe Jesus wants you to literally maim your body to stop. It would not work anyway. The whole point he is making is that adultery is not simply the behavior, but what happens in the heart. It’s a failure to treat another human, a woman, with awe instead of objectification.

Ryan had confessed his sin so much to God without changing that he assumed he must just be evil. His work to recover from his sexual betrayal to his wife involved repentance and healing with her, yes, but it also involved giving up the “bad behavior” view of his porn use. He finally opened up and got curious about his ritual pattern since childhood of soothing with porn, a habit that began after his own sexual abuse. He was finally taking responsibility for that boy’s trauma and getting the help he needed to stop hurting himself and his wife.

To treat masturbation as a sinful boyish bad behavior on the surface is to foolishly shut our eyes to the deeper story of our lives and our bodies. It’s to be a fool. You must learn to be curious. All masturbation must be weighed by the story that animates it.

Does it bring harm or good?

Masturbation might be the way a husband handles his sexual desire if his wife is disabled or healing from having delivered a baby or working through past trauma and needing a sex fast. Maybe it's the way a widow grieves her husband sexually. What about a single man or woman who imagines healthy future sex? Or what about a person learning to honor the goodness of their sexual design?

Clear as mud?

I am not here to confuse you. But I do want to make masturbation more complex than we have. Most maturity involves leaving our black and white thinking to enter the gray and complex way life comes at us. That is true about masturbation also. I’m going to ask you to sit with God, sit with your body, talk with your partner or safe friends, and discern what is best for you in relationship with God. Paul’s words on our freedom in Christ echo to me here. Masturbation may be permissible, but is it beneficial to you and to your relationships? Is it constructive to your life?

With every sexual experience you choose, you are writing a story for your sexual arousal template (which I mentioned here and here in my last posts). Your arousal is a really precious and sacred part of you. Parts of your sexual script were written without your consent. But where you have agency, you get to shape the script of your arousal. What story are you writing? To dignify yourself and your relationships, you absolutely must know.

Dan Allender once said, “If you can masturbate to the glory of God, go for it.” I hope that lets you take a breath. Paul minced no words on our freedom in God also when he says, “Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself for what he approves.” If you are settled and well in your body about masturbation, then let it be to the glory of God and the design of your body for touch, sensuality, and pleasure. And if you want to free your sexuality from a masturbation ritual of harm, may God be near. And let God be praised.

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I hope this finds you well. When I wrote this article, I thought how simple and short it would be. But as you could tell, it pushed the limits of my longest article to date. It turns out teasing this stuff out just takes time and words. And I wanted lots of stories this month, since I gave you no stories last month. And this topic absolutely ne…

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But there she sat in gorgeous repose. He felt intoxicated by her beauty and he swears it was not the drinks. He felt every bit the arousal of his body in her presence. And yet, though the conversation was pleasant and reconciling, it only confirmed to him they did not have a future together. With such different dreams, goals, perspectives on relationships and the world, she was not the companion, the lover, the mate he could move forward with. He knew again he’d made the right decision.

He listened to her from across the table stuck in the bind of the moment, his body pulling him one way and his heart another. Oh, but the choice was clear and he knew this full well. This was not the time to make his next move. It was the time to walk away and end the evening grateful for peace between them.

He knew he had to let his arousal die.

That probably sounds a little dramatic. Arousal dying? How is that anywhere near a blessing? In reality his body was not at risk for getting injured or damaged. Our sexual arousal is very capable of stopping and fading without reaching its fulfillment. It won’t hurt us at all. More on that in a minute. Calling it a death for himself actually helped Tyler enter into his grief. He was finally and fully letting go of Lauren. He knew his sexuality could only live in one story, that’s the story of love. Arousal and desire were meant to converge together in a good story of romance. This was not that story. And by guiding his body into the reality his lover heart knew (the relationship was over), Tyler was actually blessing his arousal.

So he made his goodbye and left.

Arousal vs Desire

When it comes to sexuality, one of the most revolutionary things you can understand is the difference between arousal and desire. Though they overlap, arousal and desire are distinct processes in the body. Its called Arousal Non-Concordance.

Arousal is a body state that prepares your body (with blood flow to the genitals, lubrication, heart rate increase) for sexual experience and guides it to climax. Researchers Masters and Johnson first named this the sexual response cycle and found it involves four distinct phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm, resolution. It is essentially identical for men and women—only that men have a refractory period, or pause at the end, before they can travel the cycle again where women don’t or at least have it less. So in terms of our response cycle, men and women are equally wired for sex.

Sex researcher Emily Nagoski calls arousal our sexual radar because getting aroused is largely an autonomic process. Our arousal gets triggered when something sexually relevant to us enters our realm of awareness. That could be from touch, a book, a conversation, another person, a show, an article, a dream, a thought, a smell. The source can be almost anything. But arousal only tells us something is sexually relevant to our sexual template—our bodies and our stories. It says nothing about if we want that thing. Here’s Nagoski, “Genital response is an automatic response, unrelated to whether or not we enjoy something.” Want and enjoyment are the realm of desire.

Desire happens in the heart and that’s where we have agency and participation. As Nagoski says, “Arousal tells us if something is sexually relevant to us, but not if it’s sexually appealing.” The appeal is where we can engage with our hearts and our will. Though arousal is more automatic, desire is more malleable and engage-able. We are not slaves to desire. We can make decisions about what we want and don’t want. That makes desire sound so simple. But desire is not an on or off switch we just flip nor a straightforward game of yes or no.

What do we actually want? How much do we want it? Why do we want it? Is it sex we want or something else connected to it like touch or intimacy (desire confusion)? Maybe we want it and don’t want it all at the same time (ambivalence). Maybe we want it but want something else more. Maybe we are willing to try and want it (responsive desire). Or maybe we want it for the wrong reasons (sin). Maybe it only reminds us of something else. Maybe it’s a distraction from what we really want but can’t face. Desire itself is a very complex experience and it takes work to get in touch with our deeper desires, our truer heart. But desire is not arousal and arousal is not desire.

Another way to say this is that arousal tells us something is sexually meaningful to us. It means something to our bodies or our stories. But it makes no statement about what it means. Nor does it tell us if we want that thing. Sexual desire tells us that we feel some appeal some pull towards it. But even that needs discernment. That’s where we enter in to engage it with our hearts and awareness. Which can lead to making a choice of our will. This complex process of arousal (body) and desire (heart) awareness helps us make the complex choice of action (will). And that action can be towards, away, or tangent to the sexually relevant thing.

That may all feel so overwhelming to separate out. But I share this because, if we blur it all together in our felt experience, we can get so confused about our sexuality. The hope is that we learn how to discern what is going on in our bodies and hearts. And even deeper, to know how to bless God’s design of our sexuality and steward it to bring him glory and give ourselves the best thriving life.

And here is the not confusing part. I am convinced there is only one story in which sexuality thrives: romantic love. That’s it. There is one story and I mean only one story in which you arousal and desire can live alive and free and good and safe. Under the guidance of your mature lover heart in genuine love, you not only get physical release but emotional attachment, healthy and safe play, and love. I think here of Paul’s words, “Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:14). Notice I said romance and not simply marriage outright. That was on purpose. Though I do believe that love and romance and thereby sexuality need the commitment of marriage to thrive, sadly some marriages are not built on or cultivated with love and romance, a tragedy in itself.

The only way to bless arousal is always to invite it into the right story, the story of love.

*

Though their naked bodies commingled on a hot summer evening, Andrew could not shake the feeling that Jess just seemed distant. He’d pursued her for sex earlier in the night and she’d agreed to once the kids were in bed. And that’s exactly what happened, as they had done for many years. Jess seemed present and interested and their talking and cuddling transitioned into enjoying the moment. He loved making love with her. He loved her body and he loved these moments of connection and play amidst the hard work of life.

But he started noticing her energy fade. And she was keeping her eyes shut. It felt to him like she had gone away somewhere inside. There was her body fully available to him, but he just didn’t know if he had her heart. He suddenly felt lonely for her. He wanted her, to make love to her, not simply a distant body. And so he stopped and asked, “Are you okay? You seem distant.”

“I’m fine. Just not really here…” she paused. “…But go ahead and finish.” Finish. The invitation stung. Yes, his flag was at full mast and his body well on its way in the arousal cycle. And so, sure, he could get an orgasm. But to divorce it from passion and love and affection? It was not much of a choice. “I don’t want to just finish. I want you. What is going on?” She rolled over away from him.

He clicked on the light on his nightstand. He knew it signaled the end of sex for now, for however long it took to get her heart back. He was calling timeout until he knew her heart was with him. He would let his arousal die in the name of love. He did not want a story of just finishing. That did not bless his sexuality. He wanted the lover story, the one in which sex became love making, not simply release. This was the way Andrew blessed his arousal.

Stewarding Our Arousal

Okay so far I’ve shared two stories in which men interrupted their arousal for a better story and I keep saying they let arousal die. That is misleading. As I alluded to earlier, you will never actually damage your body by stepping out of your arousal cycle. Nothing actually dies. Your body can handle the transition in and out of the play of sex at any point. God made it to be able to regulate up or down.

Oh, it may not feel good. It may feel very disappointing in fact. You will feel the build up of sexual charge in your body. Your body is made to move along an arousal cycle and feel the completion of that cycle. But it’s not a runaway train. You can stop and regulate down anytime. I still remember the client whose husband convinced her men had a physiological point of no return in sex where they could no longer stop. She had endured years of painful sex believing he could not be interrupted. Turns out he was very wrong (maybe lying?). No such thing exists.

Good lovers know how to (and want to!) bring each other along in the journey, as much as possible, to mutual climax. No, it doesn’t happen every time, but men and women’s bodies were equally made to experience the pleasure of sex, both physically and emotionally. This is indeed what it means to make love. As Dan Allender said of all love, “Love is the giving and receiving of pleasure to the glory of God.” Sex is but one unique expression of that.

And thankfully, though arousal triggers automatically, it does not exist in an untouchable realm. We can actually impact our own arousal templates too. We get to participate in writing the story of our arousal over time by the decisions we make with desire. Parts of our sexual stories were written for us. We’ve all suffered harm to our sexuality and the realm evil has worked really hard to join your arousal to shame. It’s a manipulation of our brains wiring, the neuroscience truism, that what fires together wires together.

But we can fight back. We can fight the shame and the alternate story our arousal is trapped in. Often before we can steer our arousal into the right story, we must address the story it’s caught in now. We do that with curiosity.

*

Adam tossed his phone in a chair and flopped on his bed. He had just emerged from a porn binge. So engrossing was the moment, he had lost touch with time. And his body too. He stared at the ceiling, trying to tune in again. He heard birdsong outside his window and a dog barking. He heard himself take a deep breath. His senses were returning.

Porn always put him in a trance of sorts. It was not awe, for porn did not enthrall him much these days. He would even say he hated it. He honestly had no idea how he fell down the rabbit hole of porn today. Boredom? Loneliness? Insecurity? He had not cared to pay attention much to it. He had only wanted the trance, the chance to leave his world. But that was changing now. The spell had broken.

He felt the arousal leaving his body. And he could already feel that familiar nausea. Next would be his anxiety, the sign of shame rising. He knew the temptation to hate himself was sure to follow. He joined his breathing now, as he’d learned to do, trying to calm his body and bring himself back awake. He knew if he didn’t risk being kind to himself, the self hatred would pounce and he would go do something to hurt himself—often an angry run or sometimes punching his own face.

He slowed himself. He prayed a simple, “I need you, God.” He risked on the kindness of God. And then his heart got curious. What had just happened? He thought about his day and the set backs at work. His mind flashed to scenes of the porn he’d watched. It was now the very thing he wanted out of his mind. He used to fear the flash memory of this images. But he now understood the need to be curious about those fantasies. They held the clue to the other story that held his arousal hostage. They were always reenactments of his trauma.

He rolled over, grabbed his journal and pen from the floor, and let God and his curiosity take him down the rabbit hole of his fantasies to his heart. This conversation with God and curiosity about himself was the way to bless his arousal.

Stop Making Arousal an Enemy

We tend to decimate arousal in our body when it seems in the wrong place. When we get aroused where we did not want to or when it felt out of sorts or exposing, we punish it within ourselves. Or conversely, we slavishly follow it. We push our bodies into a story that we don’t want and force it to travel the arousal cycle to give us release. But forcing it to do its job of giving us an orgasm abuses it like some one-trick-pony-circus-animal. Which only leads us back to bludgeoning it for getting us in trouble again.

But arousal should never be our enemy. Let that sink in. Arousal is never the problem.

Arousal is simply sexual radar. It’s giving us data about what is relevant to our sexual stories and bodies (our arousal template). It’s not a sign that you’re a sicko. It’s a sign that you are a human with a body and a story. You might feel aroused by something that goes totally against your morals. You can experience arousal from a story of abuse even while your heart breaks for that same story. It’s why sexual abuse victims can feel betrayed by their bodies. How could their body experience arousal for something they did not want? Because arousal is not desire. It’s your body picking up on sexually relevant material. This is why arousal is never a sign of consent.

The problem comes in how we treat our arousal and how we tune in to desire. It comes in what story we invite our arousal to live in. The way to bless arousal is always to be curious about the story it’s trapped in right now and to invite it into the right story.

*

When I first saw my wife as she walked out of our college’s chapel, I fell headlong into a crush on her. But I thought there was no way it could be from God because I was too attracted to her. My sexuality felt like an enemy inside of me, even though I had felt so much at its mercy. I lived suspicious of it.

And for two years, I walked our campus seeing Amanda but never making a move. She understandably took me to be a creep or a player. I was the uninitiated lover. I did not know how to sit with my virility, my arousal, and be curious about it or bless it to go ask her out. I was in the arousal decimation crowd and trapped in a story that saw male sexuality, especially mine, as an enemy. Finally, a friend seeing me so stuck pushed me to risk with her. And 22 years, three kids, and a dog later, you could say its worked out for me.

And wouldn’t it make a cute story to close the curtain here on our young love? I hear God laughing whenever I think about this journey to sitting here now. Yes, he playfully initiated that young man to be a risk taking lover. But there was another chapter. It took me too many years into marriage to get more curious about that old story my arousal was trapped in. I had found some freedom but it had not gone away. I needed more initiation as a lover through facing own sexual story and getting brave with the work of healing.

*

God wants to initiate the lover in you too. He will give you kindness and curiosity and bravery to face the story you are trapped in and the resolve and innocence and play to find the story of love again.

Thanks for reading! Know anyone who needs to hear this? Forward this on to them by clicking the share button below. Sharing is a huge support to my writing.

Want to talk with me about this post? Join us Thursday, August 28, at 6:30pm MT/8:30pm ET, for a Zoom conversation exclusively for paid subscribers. I’ll teach a little and answer all your questions. To join us, upgrade your membership (see below) for $5 a month (cancel anytime). The Zoom link will be found here.

Come hear me speak! I am super excited to participate this fall in a few speaking events. The first is a virtual experience called The Restorative Manhood Summit on September 25-28. I’m honored to speak alongside these good, deep hearted men. After that on October 3 &4, I’ll be in person at Faith Reformed Church in Pella, IA speaking on Restoring Romance in Marriage and a father/son breakfast. Lastly, I’ll be virtual again for the Porn-Resilient Summit on October 13-15 (link coming soon!).

A reminder that as a subscriber, you get a free Study Guide to my book. New subscribers will get it in your welcome email. But let me know if you did not get it. As always, book reviews make great gifts to authors. Even one sentence is enough. Here’s a short tutorial video should you need it. And write the review here: Amazon | Goodreads

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