Part 3. Glory Into Shame - Early Clues to Sexual Addiction

“How long, oh [my husband], will you turn my glory into shame? 

How long will you love delusions and seek false gods? ” Psalm 4:2 

You may have experience with other addictive behaviors, but I do not.  I have never faced the pain of an alcoholic mother or a drug-addicted brother-in-law.  It would be quite unfair of me to say that being the wife of a sex addict is worse than family relationships with other addicts. I can only testify to my own experience. But while other chemical addictions also cause relational brokenness, it seems that the hidden consequences of sex addiction are concentrated almost entirely on the wife of many years.

Listening to the evangelical preachers on YouTube.com, one learns that heterosexual pornography addiction is quite widespread.  Sexual addiction among married men seems to be downright common in Christian marriages.  What the preachers don't tell you is that the tendrils penetrate deeper and become more devastating and painful with every passing wedding anniversary.

A husband's sexual addiction is established long before a couple goes on their first date. The man sees his new bride as glorious and beautiful; he may falsely also see her as the healing antidote to all his sexual shame and the one who can fill the spiritual hole in his heart. But after marriage, perhaps shortly after the wedding or perhaps after several years of relational struggles, his addiction turns her glory into shame.  I spent many months unpeeling the onion layers around addiction and our broken relationship, and journaling was my chief processing method.  Early on, I penned this diagnostic question: why do I walk around the house with my eyes downcast?  It was the cry of Psalm 4:  why do you turn my glory into shame?

Finding out that your spouse has been unfaithful as a sex addict is a severe trauma. But there are no tell-tale signals of falling off the wagon as in alcoholism or drug abuse. The signs are subtle - gradually building emotional and verbal abuse, objectifying of women or flirting, zoning out and passivity, subtle forms of control, deceit, contempt, blaming and shaming. And responding to sex addiction has a different flavor than other chemical addictions. If my husband were in AA or NA I could insist: “if you come home high you must move out and get help.”  But married to a sex addict I don’t have that luxury. I don’t know when the line has been crossed.  I don’t even know where the line is on most days.

God sent a clue months before my husband's revelations about his sexual "falling off the wagon."  I confess that I utterly missed this clue. We were reading Romans 1  in The Message during family devotions.  Paul writes about the downward progressive cycle of sin and shame:

• "So God said, in effect, 'if that's what you want, that's what you get.' It wasn't long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out. And all this because they traded God for a fake god (sex, for example) ... Refusing to know God, they soon didn't know how to be human either... Sexually confused, they abused and defiled one another... all lust, no love. And then they paid for it, oh, how they paid for it - emptied of God and love, godless and loveless wretches...Those people are on a dark spiral downward." [1] 

Our kids left the room and my husband burst into tears. I comforted him, thinking this was deep guilt from behaviors long past. A few months later I learned that during this time he was engaged with on-line pornographic videos multiple times a day while at work. [Added June18: Several months later I learned the real truth - he had been with a prostitute the week before.] When my husband heard these words from Romans, his shame was too great to contain and despair surfaced, quite uncharacteristically for him.  Although I didn't know it at the time, this was my husband's early heart cry.  But he was not ready to turn from the worship of the false sex-god, or turn from loving the delusion that he could control me and control his behavior.  Shame without repentance is a downward spiral.

Sexual compulsion is a chemical dependency that damages the brain. It involves a severely compromised ability to empathize; at root, it is an intimacy disorder.  And evil is present where there is a profound absence of empathy.[2]  There is no nice way to say this: we wives are bound with heavy cords not only to a normal sinner, but to a foolish sinner who has opened the door to the demonic in his life, marriage, and home.  And if you are “one flesh” with someone who has opened this door, who has studied and ingested pornography, “your spirit, soul, and body are probably also on the critical list.” [3]  

Romans 1 also describes the next step in the downward spiral of worship to the sex god: "Since they didn't bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose, rampant evil...." [4]  

Today we understand the brain chemistry of sexual addiction, but the idea of sexual compulsion as sin has slipped away. Still, while our culture (and some theologians) can pretend that sin is unimportant to the message of the gospel, the wives of sex addicts see the trail of sexual sin as clearly as the path of a spiraling tornado. The path of sex-worship and God-avoidance is described so vividly in Romans 1 and it looks no different 2000 years later. In fact, the modern-day wife of a sex addict could write "The Message - Sexual Addiction Version 2.0" and it would be a spot-on description of her husband's downward spiral that starts before marriage and, without the transforming song of the gospel, ends with rampant evil and all hell breaking loose.

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[1] Romans 1:18-27 - Romans 2:1
[2] Bold Love, p. 234. See generally, People of the Lie, The Hope For Healing Human Evil, M. Scott Peck

[3] Laurie Hall, Affair of the Mind, p. 130.
[4] Romans 1: 28-32