CASTIMONIA

Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

Affairs

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Men and Women

Male attachment needs are somewhat different from women’s. Men generally do not need verbal communication about feelings or “talks” about the relationship. Nor do they need direct, verbal validation of their feelings or needs. Men have a natural, biological proclivity toward interaction with the environment, more so than the verbally based interactions that women desire. They do need to know they are appreciated, respected and loved. And men are often quite satisfied by having these needs met with direct, physically nurturing behaviors by women. Many adult men feel a basic sense of security and even love simply by the very presence of the significant women in their lives. Men also experience sexual connection as a form of nurturance, acceptance, love, and even emotional security. Sex for men is a primary attachment need – compared to women, who need verbal communication and validation. Men also tend to have fewer friends than women, and when they do, they tend to focus on activities rather than verbal interactions (watching sports, hunting and fishing are examples). Recent findings from modern neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology show there are unique aspects of the male brain (also endocrine and other systems) – quite different from female brains. This includes analytical brain structures (not emotional) designed to solve problems. Men have an inborn, biologically based competitive instinct. They also have an area of the brain designed for sexual pursuit that is more than 2 times larger than females (Brizendine, 2010). The brain circuits for fear, aggression and defense are far more prominent in men than in women. In comparison, women have more prominent mirror neuron systems for emotional empathy. There are no male-specific diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The most common diagnoses for men are addictions, personality disorders such as narcissism, avoidant, and anti-social personality disorders, intermittent explosive disorder, conduct disorder, and ADHD. Depression, however, is very common in men. Men also experience complicating medical issues such as stress-related heart and digestive disorders, and they may also present with a variety of sexual disorders. Other medical concerns may result from drug and alcohol addiction.

“I would suggest that just as women who make it in the world of business need male business mentors, perhaps men who make it in the world of emotions will need female emotional mentors.” – Warren Farrell

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Adultery, Abuse, and Addiction

http://affaircare.com/2013/11/12/adultery-abuse-and-addiction/

I’ve read three articles recently about the topic of pro-marriage, church and pastors not addressing the issue of difficult marriages well:

1.  “Help!” by elisabeth klein corcoran

2. “Enough with the Divorce Shame” by Chump Lady

3. “Pastors: Send a Different Message to Struggling Wives” on Crosswalk (also by elisabeth klein corcoran)

All three articles are written about one overall theme: the pro-marriage community…the Christian community…is not dealing with adultery, addiction or abuse in marriages.  The messages perceived by those who are hurting are “Pay me $199.99 and you can save your marriage all by yourself!”,  “If you tell anyone what’s really going on, you’ll be judged for it”, “Asking for help results in you being blamed for your spouse’s choices”, and “If you only ____ more (fill in the blank with prayed, submitted, cooked, had sex, or forgave) then your spouse wouldn’t ____.”

As a nouthetic counselor, I wanted to look at these articles and ask myself two things.  First, I want to do an honest assessment: Do we–the Christian, pro-marriage community–do an injustice to those who come to us, hurting and in a difficult marriage?  How do we need to change?  What do we need to learn?  I want to take an honest look in the mirror and see what we need to do differently … and better!  But second and MOST IMPORTANTLY, I want to look at the Bible and what God says in the Bible, because I am duty-bound to obey God and encourage others to do the same.  It has been my experience that obeying God and doing what He wants is not always easy and is not always painless, nor is it usually what we want to hear!

The first thing that I’d like to address is the pastor himself.  I’ve heard many times of people going to their pastor or their counselor as if the person is a mind-reader and can magically tell what is “the truth” and what is a lie!  So I want to remind everyone who does go to a pastor, preacher, minister, or spiritual leader…they are a human being with the same human limitations that you have.  Can you just “detect” what is the truth and what is a lie?  No.  And neither can they.  Furthermore, they often only have one side of the story, and my guess would be that your version of what has occurred differs GREATLY from your spouse’s version of what has occurred.  Even in strong, godly marriages, each individual in the marriage has a different personality, different personal strengths and weaknesses, and the way they view things is entirely different–so it is just common sense that in a painful marriage that differing point of view is even more different!  Finally, any pastor or church is an imperfect, SINFUL representation of what God intends His bride, The Church, to be.  Pastors can have their own (sinful) agendas; churches can be anything but Christian and just be basically social action committees, and sometimes people are afraid to stand up strongly against a sin because they don’t want to be accused of being judgmental–especially if the sin is a popular one!  So part of the issue here is that we expect “the pastor” to be a lie detector and then basically scold the cheating spouse (and come down on your side) — and those expectations are unrealistic.

The second thing that comes to my mind is that when one spouse goes to any kind of professional–whether they are a coach, minister, counselor or therapist–people who are professionally-trained are going to address the person in the room with them.  Your spouse is not there; you are.  Your spouse didn’t make the effort to make the appointment, figure out childcare, and get their behind end to the office; you did.  And the professional person (who is not a lie detector and can not just tell “the truth”) is not going to tell you “how to get your spouse to do it your way” or scold them if they don’t.  Again, that is an unrealistic expectation.  On this same topic, it is just one of those universal truths that no one can control another person.  Period.  The only person at the appointment is YOU and the only person you can control is YOU.  So the professional is going to help you look at and address YOUR issues…not your spouse’s.  What I’m trying to say is that as a pro-marriage Christian coach, when I have a loyal spouse in session with me whose disloyal spouse is wantonly flaunting adultery in their face, I can show the Loyal in the room how a loving spouse “should” act according to the Bible, but there are no magic words to MAKE the Disloyal do that.  We may be in complete agreement that a godly spouse would not do X, Y or Z, but if their Disloyal is bound and determined to sin–I can’t stop them and neither can the Loyal who took the time to come talk to me!  I can’t even change the spouse who came to me!  The only person who can change is the person who came can change themselves and even then it’s with God working in them, not through sheer will.  Thus, I can maybe confirm for the Loyal “Well, when your Disloyal expects to be able to sin with no natural consequence, that’s unrealistic, so you are okay in acting in a way that allows consequences.” But otherwise my options are limited to addressing the person in front of me: what ways they may have contributed (if any), how they handle it, how they decide to act, tools they can use to understand, and what they do to grow as a person due to this circumstance.

Soooo…we’ve addressed two unrealistic expectations: 1) Pastors/professionals can tell “the truth” and will do a perfect job doing the godly thing, and 2) Pastors will come down on my side when I tell them the sin my spouse is committing, and they will tell me how to get my spouse to stop it.

Next, let’s address some major errors I think the Christian community is making, and what we can do differently.

One of the MAJOR mistakes I see is when a hurting spouse comes to their pastor/priest/minister and reveals that there is adultery, abuse or addiction, and the pastoral response is basically a cliché…something like “Well you go right on back there and just submit more.”  Yes, as I said above, when you go to a professional they realize you can not change your spouse, so they may focus on you and what you can change, but it’s my experience that by the time someone gathers the courage to say “Ummm…I think something is wrong here” they are usually hurt so badly you better react as if you’re in the emergency room and they just came in with a gunshot to the head.  When it’s just “somewhat bad” people keep trying, keep their mouths shut, wonder if it’s just them, and try to just bear it (of course, not EVERYONE is that way, but many/most).  And when someone makes all the effort to set up an appointment and get to the office and says “It’s not going very well” that really means much, MUCH more.  Sending someone back into a home that is harming them via mental, emotional, spiritual or physical abuse is cruelty, frankly…and both adulterers and addicts DEFINITELY employ abuse!

Thus it seems to me that one area pastors REALLY need to do better, is to take the time to find out if it is a case of adultery, abuse or addiction, and if it is… to protect the spouse who is being abused! Now, this does not mean “end your marriage immediately” or encouraging divorce even–but it does mean taking the time to do true investigation, because often abusers are masters of deception.  And it does mean giving the abused spouse–whether that is a man or a woman–the support of finding safety.  As much as Malachi 2:16 is used to force “God hates divorce” down people’s throats, listen to the WHOLE VERSE: ” ‘The man who hates and divorces his wife,’ says the Lord, the God of Israel,  ‘does violence to the one he should protect,’  says the Lord Almighty.  So be on your guard, and do not be unfaithful. “

One thing that is extremely important–and I mean EXTREMELY–is that the shepherd should “take the time to find out if it is a case of adultery, abuse or addiction”.  The reason that is so important is because there are times when a spouse will claim “abuse” when their spouse disagrees with them…or claim “abuse” as the justification for why they are doing the sin they are doing!  Since pastors are not lie detectors and do not live behind closed doors with you, they can’t “just tell” that one spouse is sitting in their office lying their head off, and outside the office they are a completely different person.  But too often I think one spouse comes in, the pastor hears one side of the story and does not investigate, and just believes whatever is told to them.

I’ll give you one crazy example … and then another the other way.  Once a lady came to her mentor and told him all about how her husband screamed at her last night for THREE HOURS and then threw some china at the wall that smashed it to smithereens.  Naturally the mentor told her the husband was abusive and no way was it acceptable for him to scream for three hours and break things…and the mentor encouraged her to leave him.  Only problem?  The wife didn’t mention that her husband screamed for three hours BECAUSE HE HAD FOUND HER IN THEIR MARITAL BED WITH ANOTHER MAN!!!  She “forgot” that little detail and when asked why she didn’t tell him, she told the mentor she didn’t think it was relevant!

Okay here’s the second example.  A spouse goes to her pastor and tells the pastor her husband has been drinking, been abusive and calls her names.  The pastor calls a meeting with the husband and tells him how wrong he is to be abusive and that calling your wife names is sinful and that he has to stop drinking immediately.  Well obviously “abuse is sinful” and “drinking is sinful,” right?  And they are…but what the wife didn’t tell the pastor was that she was having an affair and finding fault with everything about her husband, telling him he didn’t earn enough money, he wasn’t a good father, he wasn’t a good husband, having him do literally all the housework all the while screaming at him…and to escape the pain of being told how worthless he was, he would drink so he’d feel numb.  Okay not a SMART solution but it was a way to cope.  And finally, after getting abused all night long, he’d tell her, “Leave me alone you witch!” and off she run to the pastor waving the “abuse”word …who then called the husband and told him how wrong he was without ever investigating or dealing with the real issue: the affair.

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Seven Warning Signs of Affairs for Pastors and Other Church Staff

http://thomrainer.com/2014/01/29/seven-warning-signs-of-affairs-for-pastors-and-other-church-staff/
by Thom Rainer

The conversation is always sad, always tragic. The pastor who left his church after a two-year affair with another church member. The student pastor who has been out of vocational ministry since he had a brief sexual encounter with his assistant.

I have spoken with countless numbers of these men and women. And each time I am reminded of how much I need to love God with all my heart, and to be totally devoted to my wife.

Though the conversations are both sad and tragic, I do learn from them. And after dozens, perhaps a few hundred, of these conversations, I see patterns. These patterns become warning signs for any of us, lest we be so naïve to think we have no vulnerabilities.

Because the conversations were informal, I cannot say for certain which among them were the most frequent warning signs. So I provide them in no particular order.

  1. “I neglected my family.” Church work can become a deceitful mistress (I struggle to find the male equivalent of the word). We become so consumed with our ministry that we neglect our families. But 1 Timothy 3:5 is clear that our families are our first ministries.
  2.  “I had no system of accountability.” Unfortunately, most churches do not have clear guidelines for accountability. That does not excuse any of us from making sure that we have such self-imposed guidelines, and that our spouses know about them as well.
  3. “It began in counseling.” Sometimes the word “transference” is used to describe what can happen in counseling. The counselor or counselee becomes the object of attraction instead of one’s spouse. One or both of the parties see the other as something his or her spouse should be.
  4. “My co-worker and I began to confide in one another on a deep level.”  The conversations between two people who work together become ones that should be restricted to the marital relationship. At this point, an emotional affair has already begun. Physical intimacy is usually not far away.
  5. “I began neglecting my time in prayer and daily Bible reading.” I am reticent to make a blanket statement, but I have never met a person who was praying and reading his or her Bible daily that became involved in an affair. Prayer and time in the Word are intimacy with God that precludes inappropriate intimacy with someone of the opposite gender.
  6. “He or she made me feel so good about myself.” In marriage, neither party thinks the spouse is perfect; at least it is rare. The danger happens when one becomes a hero to someone of the opposite gender. The good feelings that come with accolades or even adulation can become sexual attractions and traps that end in an affair.
  7. “It began on a trip together.” When a man and woman travel to the same destination for a work event, conference, or a convention, safeguards need to be established at the onset. A system of accountability, whether informal or formal, can break down when a man and woman are out of town together. Call me old fashioned, but I won’t ever travel in the car alone with a woman other than my wife (even at my old age). 

The conversation is always sad, always tragic. And do you know what the most common theme I’ve heard in all of these conversations?

“I never thought this would happen to me.”

Sobering indeed.

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Porn Addiction Study Finds Astounding Results

http://pornproofkids.com/2013/11/14/keep-it-real-thursday-porn-addiction-study-finds-astounding-results/

by: pornproofkids.com

brain-scans1“An alarming number of boys, and now girls, could be a click away from addiction. A new study finds porn can affect your brain as much as drugs and alcohol and a new generation of kids has easier access to it than ever.”

Recently ABC Nightline aired a segment called The Teenage Brain on Porn highlighting the brain-changing (and brain-damaging) effects of consuming pornography. (ABC got some things right, but look for my scathing ninja rebuttal at the end of this post.)

VoonThe study was done by Valerie Voon, a lead researcher at Cambridge University. Twenty young men between the ages of 19 and 34, whose lives were controlled by porn, agreed to have their brains scanned while they viewed explicit pornographic images. A control group of men who did not use porn compulsively were shown the same images. The scans were done to see how their reward centers reacted. When the data was analyzed, the results were “astounding.” The reward centers of the compulsive users were twice as active as those in the control group; similar to the responses of drug and alcohol users.

Porn Preferred Over Real Sex

The Nightline piece interviewed several young people who couldn’t seem to stop their porn addiction. One young man in England admitted that he preferred masturbating to porn over real sex with a woman.

Norman Doidge, M.D., author of The Brain that Changes Itself, found the same thing happening in his clients. As their porn addiction altered their brains, they became less interested in real sex with real partners, even when they were readily available.

“The content of what they found exciting changed as the Web sites introduced themes and scripts that altered their brains without their awareness. Because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images increased as the expense of what had previously attracted them—the reason, I believe, they began to find their girlfriends less of a turn-on.” (Doidge, The Brain the Changes Itself, p 109.)

My Scathing Ninja Rebuttal

This leads us to “the answer” that Nightline came up with for addictions to hard core porn and the damage it does to the impressionable teenage concept of sex. Are you ready for it?

More porn!

Oh, but this is a kinder and gentler porn, showing people actually making love.

Seriously?

Let me de-bunk this right now. When people begin down the slippery slope of porn, especially kids with very vulnerable brains that are still wiring at a very fast pace, it won’t take long for this “Make Love Not Porn” to become boring. That’s just the nature of addiction. Shame on ABC for promoting more porn as the answer to porn addiction!

Again, Doidge sheds some light: “When pornographers boast that they are pushing the envelope by introducing new, harder themes, what they don’t say is that they must, because their customers are building up a tolerance to the content.” (Doidge, p. 105.)

A number of Doidge’s clients who were hooked on porn “reported increasing difficulty in being turned on by their actual sexual partners, spouses or girlfriends, though they still considered them objectively attractive. When I asked if this phenomenon had any relationship to viewing pornography, they answered that it initially helped them get more excited during sex but over time had the opposite effect.”

Let me end with some more clarity: Not only is porn a sick kind of fantasy; it erodes reality. It impacts the pleasure centers of the brain and alters them. Porn is the opposite of love. It isolates people and harms and destroys relationships.

Let us be clear with our kids: If they want a healthy, loving relationship as adults, they must avoid the lies and addictive nature of porn as kids.

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Human Trafficking in America’s Backyard

January 24, 2014 · by Elisabeth Epstein

Human trafficking occurs in every corner of the globe from the southernmost foothills of Patagonia to the northernmost region of Siberia. Human trafficking is an egregious violation of human rights – one that often strips its victims of self-worth only to refill them with fear, isolation and desperation.

In the United States, a country most may not immediately associate with human trafficking, the U.S. Department of Justice ranks human trafficking as the second fastest growing criminal industry, behind only drug trafficking, with between 14,500 and 17,500 new people trafficked into America each year.

Every hour, 34 people in America are forced into prostitution. 

In 2013, human trafficking made national headlines when Ariel Castro was arrested (and eventually convicted) for kidnapping, raping, and forcibly locking three girls in his basement for a period spanning over ten years. One victim, Amanda Berry, even bore his child, thereby increasing the victim count to four.

As a result of the Castro case and several others like it, the movement to punish traffickers and to end human trafficking in the United States has been gaining speed.

Expanding on previous attempts to end human trafficking, on January 14th the United States government published its first ever Federal Strategic Action Plan on Services for Victims of Human Trafficking in the United States. The Action Plan aims to crack down on traffickers, develop a strategic action plan to strengthen victim services, and strengthen protections against human traffickers in federal contracts. Additionally, U.S. President Barack Obama proclaimed January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. However, the federal government is not the only government entity taking a strong stance against human trafficking.

In August, Polaris Project, an organization dedicated to ending human trafficking in the United States, released its 2013 state ratings on human trafficking laws. In 2013 alone, 39 states passed anti-trafficking laws and 32 ranked in Polaris Project’s top Tier 1 category* – up from 21 states last year.

Over the past year, the momentum among advocates, legislators, and state officials to pass robust laws combatting human trafficking has been inspiring. We’ve witnessed a historic turning point now that all fifty states have passed laws criminalizing human trafficking. However, criminals are trafficking women, men, and children from coast to coast at horrendous rates. In every state, we need to give prosecutors and law enforcement the right tools to stop traffickers, and state agencies must have the ability to protect survivors and help them reclaim their freedom.” – Bradley Myles, CEO of Polaris Project.

Additionally, Polaris Project recently published the report, Human Trafficking Trends in the United States. In it, the organization reveals not only a rising number of human trafficking cases but also an increasing level of community awareness. For example, in the five-year period between 2008 and 2012, the National Trafficking Resource Center (NTRC) hotline received a 259%** increase in reports of human trafficking, a statistic undoubtedly due to the combined increase in cases as well as awareness.

Along with governing bodies and anti-trafficking organizations, the growing amount of national media attention also plays an important role in spreading awareness. For example, in August CNN profiled several victims to learn about their experiences in the sex trade; in December The Kansas City Star wrote a five-part series on human trafficking in America; and just a few days ago USA Today warned of high levels of sex trafficking during the Superbowl.

The Superbowl is the single largest human trafficking incident in the United States.” –  Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott

Even though human trafficking statistics in the United States remain at inexcusable levels, the good news is that awareness is on the rise – and awareness is always the first step.

If you are a victim or suspect a case of human trafficking, please call the NTRC at 1-888-373-7888 or text HELP or INFO to BeFree (233733) for support.

For more information, please visit:

Girls’ Globe Posts on Human Trafficking

GEMS Girls

Not for Sale

UNICEF

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Human Trafficking Program

US Department of Homeland Security’s Blue Campaign

*States in the top Tier 1 have passed “significant [anti-trafficking] laws” while states in the lowest tier, Tier 4, have made “minimal effort.”

**The NTRC hotline received 5,746 calls in 2008 and 20,650 in 2012.