In this segment of the podcast, host SPEAKER A, Bob, and Nick Stumbo discuss how many Christians misunderstand sexual addiction by equating it solely with physical sex outside marriage. They argue that the issue is a neurochemical process driven by the desire to avoid pain and fear, which can manifest in solo behaviors like pornography, masturbation, or fantasy, as well as in marital contexts. The conversation highlights how church teachings often create a hierarchy that labels only extramarital sex as sinful, silencing discussion of other sexualized behaviors. This hierarchy leads believers to minimize or justify actions such as masturbation or porn use, missing the deeper psychological and relational impacts. They explore how these behaviors affect intimacy with a spouse, using personal anecdotes to illustrate that even solo sexual activity can rob marital intimacy. Biblical metaphors (e.g., cutting off an eye or hand) are critiqued as superficial solutions that avoid addressing underlying mental and emotional patterns. Overall, the dialogue calls for a more holistic understanding of sexual addiction that integrates neurobiology, personal identity, and relational intimacy, urging Christians to confront the full spectrum of sexualized behavior rather than focusing only on overt sexual acts.
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Some who hear this might think, well, I've never had sex outside of marriage. So this doesn't apply to me. How might we still be falling into this trap if our issue is with pornography or lust or another solo struggle?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes, I think, you know, this brain bug that we're talking about, that sexual addiction is just about sex. Right. And so I think in this, then, okay, well, if I'm not having sex outside of my marriage, then, you know, as a Christian, my worldview is that sex in marriage is always healthy sex, right? So I think that's something that gets in the way of it, that they don't have— they haven't stopped to think through or been aware of maybe some unhealthy patterns that are happening sexually within the marriage that they have just kind of whitewashed because it's within the marriage. But I think also for the people that aren't married or haven't had sex outside of marriage, this reminder that this is not about sexual intercourse. Right. I mean, that's kind of what we're talking about from the beginning of this podcast. This is not about sexual intercourse and this is not about our sexual organs, right? This is not about our genitals. Um, and like that, this is actually a neurochemical process, uh, and that we're not trying, that we're not pursuing pleasure, but that we're trying to avoid pain and fear. And so, you know, it's, I remember, um, early in my recovery talking to somebody where, you know, I had been paying for sex. And I remember someone said to me, well, can't you just masturbate more? All right, like, this is a solution, just do this more.
Yeah.
And so I think there's times where even people will look at, well, masturbation is a better option than like going outside my marriage, or, you know, I'm masturbating but I'm fantasizing about my spouse, or, you know, etc., etc. And I think in that perspective, it's still saying what's about the sex and it's not about the underlying things that are there, right? It's not about the neurochemical that's— that process that's happening when we engage in any of these sexual behaviors or sexualized behaviors. Um, and so yeah, I think that, that we, we kind of put a hierarchy of worse and better when it comes to, you know, to behaviors, and we minimize the behaviors that aren't as bad Um, you know, but we're missing the whole point that we're still having a neurochemical process that is leading to not just anesthetizing pain and fear in life, but now creating a neural pathway that says when you feel anything stress, fear, anxiety, discomfort related, that neural pathway says go to this now and do this thing.
Yeah.
And so we're, we're missing the whole brain process that's happening.
Yeah. Yeah, that, that's what I was thinking, Bob, is the connectivity of our being in our sexuality, that, that we've made this hierarchy of, well, physical sex outside of marriage, or even in marriage, like that's what it's about, and everything else we just don't really know what to do with. And, and for those of us that grew up in religious environments, sometimes that was inadvertently reinforced because the only time the church talked about sex was in relation to sex is for marriage, and everything outside of that there was kind of silence. And that could lead, which I feel like it did in some ways for me, leading me to believe like, well, all those other things are kind of secondary and don't matter as much. So the choices I make, I mean, yeah, it'd be better if I didn't lust, but you know, it's not sex outside of marriage, or it's not about physical sex. So, ah, there's really not that much the Bible has to say about it, or I shouldn't worry about it that much. And what we miss in that is seeing that, that it's all connected.
It—
whether we're talking about masturbation or having affairs or paying for sex, it's be— it's coming from some of those same places of where we find our worth, our value, identity, where we go for comfort, how we deal with pain in life, how we identify ourselves as a man or a woman, what, what, where we find purpose and meaning in life. Like, all of that contributes whether we're doing something on our own or in a physical, you know, relationship outside of marriage. And if we only see it as a problem when it goes to that hierarchical level, we're going to miss the deep learning that can come, um, because it's, it's present there even if it's only happening in our, in our thought life or in something like internet pornography.
Mm, yeah, I just think about my own story in this one, and, uh, there were moments where, like, sexually acting out with masturbation and then my wife pursuing me intimately, like, in the— like, could have been an hour later, that immediately drew me away from that intimacy with my wife. And so even though it wasn't external and going out there, it was still— I was robbing her of that intimacy. And what I think what we all try to do is, especially as we're in recovery and hearing stories, uh, I would want to justify the behavior, like, well, at least I didn't do this, or at least I wasn't doing this. And just coming back and taking ownership of saying, hey, was it drawing me closer to my wife or was it leading me away from intimacy? And when we look at just the simplicity of that question, like, is it making you more or less intimate with your wife? Like, can we get an answer on just that question alone?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, I think similar to what you're saying, Nick, of some of these perspectives we grew up with in the church, like the scriptures around, like, if your eye causes you to sin, right? If your hand causes you to sin, we've just been out there gouging out eyes and cutting off hands, right? As if this was the solution, as opposed to like, what's going on here that is connected to the eye, right? That is connected to the hand. And, um, it's a lot easier to just, yeah, pluck out an eye and cut off a hand than it is to do the deep work, uh, of seeing what's actually going on internally in our minds.
