Is Your Sexual Baggage Affecting Your Marriage? // Hump Day Q&A

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You know what time it is, sweetie?

It's Hump Day Q and A time.

Hump day Q and A. Hump day Q and A. Welcome to the Naked Marriage Podcast. Hump Day Q and A. We love answering your questions, so every Wednesday we're dropping a special podcast episode focused on one of your questions. You can submit your own marriage related question online@nakedmarriagepodcast.com or by sending us a message on Instagram aveandashleywillis. We've got a great question today, so let's dive in. All right, this one says, I just listened to your summer Quickie podcast episode about sexual baggage. Episode 93 My husband had a consensual sexual relationship with someone else before we got married. I find myself dealing with fears that my husband still harbors feelings for the girl who broke his heart. I among other fears of inadequacy. I'm wondering how to put away these harmful thoughts permanently. Yeah, that's a very, very vulnerable question. Thank you for writing it. And just like that entire podcast episode addressed, I think so many people carry these same kinds of, you know, same kind of wounds of just wondering, like, is my spouse, are they measuring me up against people from their sexual past, or am I potentially doing the same toward them? And that kind of sexual baggage.

It.

Can be so hard. And that's part of why God gave us such a clear roadmap for sex, that he intended it exclusively for a man and a woman within the covenant of marriage and never outside that. And when we follow his plan for sex, it protects our hearts and it protects our marriages from some of the wounds of the sexual baggage. But we also know we live in a broken world where almost everybody has some form of. Of sexual baggage, whether it's from sexual sins they themselves committed, sexual sins that were inflicted on them through the form of abuse. The inadequacy or fears of knowing that your spouse has a sexual past and how to deal with that, or even the mindsets that we carry into marriage about sex, just mindsets in and of themselves, even if there was no sexual sin involved, can create baggage. It can create feelings of inadequacy. You know, pornography, where. Which is so rampant and is part of what gave me baggage, is part of the story so often because it plants these toxic images in our minds. So, yeah. All that to say for the courageous woman who wrote this question. First off, you're not alone. I think every honest person deals with some level of sexual baggage in some form or another because of their thought life, because of their past, because of a million different reasons. And so in this particular situation, which I do think is a very common form, how do you deal with that? Sweetie, what are some of your thoughts?

You know, I think, first of all, and I don't know their entire story, we only have a little bit of the situation here. But I think that if, you know, I would ask this wife, is there something that your husband has either said or done that has brought this on? And if there is, I would go to him and in the most loving way possible, tell him about it and say, you know, you probably didn't intend to do this, you know, or make me feel this way, but this particular thing you're doing or this thing that you said makes me feel this way. It makes me feel inadequate, and I'm having a hard time dealing with that. And so if that is the case, you know, I would definitely go to him about those issues. Now, if that's not the case, and you just feel like it's something that you like, it's something you think about, you know, when maybe you guys are being intimate and it's like these thoughts that you're fighting. That's a case where you gotta ask the Lord to renew your mind. Because our thought life, we talk about this all the time. That, you know, sex, it really starts in our minds. It starts with what we think about ourselves, our spouse, about sex in general, the conversations we're having with our spouse, and then it eventually leads to the bedroom. And so if we have this mental block of constantly feeling like we're not good enough or is our husband, you know, comparing us to this other person, then it kind of, you know, keeps. It keeps this. This wife from enjoying sex and from really experiencing that connection. And so that's. That's a thing where it talks about in the word where we need to ask the Lord to renew our mind. And that takes prayer. And so I would say that, you know, pray about your sex life and really go to God with it. He already knows, but go to him and say, listen, Lord, help me. Help me to overcome these thoughts of insecurity, these thoughts of inadequacy because I want to have an amazing, you know, marriage with my husband. And I want sex to not be this thing that I dread, but this thing that I really enjoy. And if your husband is doing something that makes you feel this way, pray about that as well. But also, you know, go ahead and address that. Don't act like it's, you know, don't think it's just gonna get better on its own, because odds are he doesn't even realize he's doing it. And I'm sure that once you tell him that he's doing something that is making you feel that way, I'm sure he would be very concerned and he'd want to do whatever he could to reassure you that he loves you and he adores you. Thank you all so much for listening to today's episode of Hump Day Q and A. We love getting your questions, and we want to answer your question. So if you go to nakedmarriagepodcast.com you can submit your question right there. Or you can follow us on Instagram avanashleywillis and you can us your questions right there by giving us a dm. So we'll catch you next time on Hump Day Q and A.