Sexual Disintegrity – My Journey Toward Sexual Wholeness #1

I am closing out the year by wrapping up the sexual healing and wholeness series with the story of my own journey toward sexual wholeness. Today I am writing about the sexual brokenness that I brought into our marriage bed. Next week I’ll look at the sense of sexual stewardship that carried me through much of the healing of our marriage. Then I will share how these things were redeemed by God.

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Like many women, my journey toward healthy, holy, and whole sexuality includes a long stretch of sexual brokenness.

My own story of finding sexual wholeness begins far outside the bedroom, long before I was aware that there was such a thing as sexuality.

A yearning

My story begins in a yearning for God, only I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time.

I can’t remember a time in my life when I felt lovable. I suppose I knew on some level that my parents loved me, but I always felt not good enough. I was either “too” or “not enough”—too shy, not friendly enough, read too much, didn’t make friends easily enough, too smart or not smart enough, not pretty enough, not girly enough, and too sensitive.

I always tried to do what I was supposed to, and it always felt unfair when someone who didn’t follow the rules somehow had more friends, more accomplishment, or more of anything than I did.

In my mind, there was some ideal for which I was supposed to strive. I didn’t understand what it was, but I was always aware that I fell short. I wanted to be considered worthy and lovable, and the only way I knew to measure that was in the way I was recognized and valued by others. I wanted to be valued and to belong.

Like the prodigal son, I expected that following the rules would result in the love for which I yearned. Unfortunately, I never really understood what the rules were. Even when I got something right, I still felt unloved and not enough.

My yearning to be loved and to belong wove itself into the fiber of who I was. Everything I did grew out of a deep need to be loved and to belong.

“God doesn’t love you.”

When I think of my emerging sexuality as a teen and young adult, the word “integrity” comes to mind—not because I had integrity, but because I lacked it.

Integrity has two main definitions: 1) adherence to moral and ethical principles, and 2) the state of being whole.

My disintegrity fell into both areas.

I never got around to making a decision about my sexual ethics. I didn’t grow up in a church that talked about sex at all, including any messages about premarital sex. I don’t remember conversations with my parents about sex or sexuality other than the basic biology of reproduction.

I didn’t know what was right or wrong with sex, but I did have a sense that I should make a decision about what I thought was right before I faced it.

As a high school senior, I finally had a boyfriend. So convinced of my unlovability and inability to attract a guy, I thought this might be my one and only chance to ever have sex. Instead of making a decision about what was right, I made a decision based on a heart-breaking belief that I would never find anyone else who would be interested in having sex with me.

Afterward, I regretted it. I realized that I hadn’t decided for myself what was right regarding sex, and I had a pretty clear sense that I’d disappointed God. I decided I wouldn’t have sex again, at least not until I’d made a firm decision about what was right.

Then I attended a Sunday School class at a friend’s church. The message was loud and clear: if you want God to love you, don’t have sex. Hidden in that was another message: if you’ve already had sex, God doesn’t love you.

At that moment, my relationship with God felt irretrievably broken. Any hope I had of fulfilling my deep yearning to belong and be loved came to a crashing halt.

Since following the rules was the way to earn love and I already had lost the chance at God’s love, I thought that any rules about sex had been rendered pointless for me.

Heart-brokenness

My boyfriend and I continued having sex. After we broke up, I moved into a season of casual sex and promiscuity. I had absolutely no sense of sexual morality, furthering my sexual disintegrity.

Sex became transactional—it was a thing I had to offer, the only thing I thought I had to offer, and it was always in hope of getting something in return.

I sought my identity and worth in other people’s perceptions of me as a sexual being. Ironically, while I was desperately seeking validation through sex, others certainly were thinking less of me as a result of my promiscuity.

The negative views invaded my heart, along with the fact that sex never led to the belonging that I sought.

I began to build emotional walls to protect my heart from the hurt that I was bringing on myself.

Much of what I believed about sex can be traced back to that premarital sexual activity. It caused so much of my sexual disintegrity in another way—my sexual brokenness, my lack of sexual wholeness.

At the same time, though, I can see now that my premarital sexual activity was just as much a reflection of my brokenness as it was the cause of more of it.

I was using sex to seek healing for things that had nothing to do with sex. I was seeking a sense of being worthy. Cherished. Loved. I was using sex to try to belong.

The sexual brokenness that led to the promiscuity was rooted in the heart-brokenness and yearning I’d carried with me from childhood.

A brief addendum

I’m popping in here a few days after publishing this post, to add something that needs to be included here.

I left something out that was important–and I’m not sure what to make of the fact that I didn’t remember to include it.

As I’ve shared in other posts, I am a sexual assault survivor. During my season of promiscuity, I was raped. And then I did something that seems shocking to some folks: I dated the guy for a couple months. It is somewhat common to do this–something about how having a relationship reframes the assault and makes it seem less like an assault. It is an attempt to minimize the trauma. 

Both the rape and the fact that I attempted to have a relationship with the rapist compounded the brokenness that I already had.

It was an experience that had a profound impact on me–yet I didn’t think to include it when I first wrote this post. 

Why not?

To an extent, it is a sign that I’ve found some healing.

For several years, I thought about it every day. When I thought of who I was and what I carried into my life going forward, rape was always right there, front and center. Then it faded away a bit, surfacing occasionally but mostly just staying in the background.

The past few years have been difficult, though. I’ve been inundated practically non-stop by stories of sexual assault: Bill Cosby. Harvey Weinstein. Larry Nassar. Brett Kavanaugh. Pastors. Youth group leaders. #metoo #churchtoo #toomuchtohandle.

These stories tear at me. They show me that no matter how much I have healed, I still have scars that sometimes ache.

Sometimes it is just too much.

Yet sometimes it’s barely there at all.

And that’s why I wanted to add this addendum in here. 

One of the challenges of healing from sexual trauma is that while sometimes it may not seem prominent in your mind and heart, it is still there. And then there are other days that are completely overwhelming.

Two days ago when I published this, my sexual assault was so far on my mental backburner that I didn’t think to include it here, in a story where it definitely belongs.

A few hours later, I read a story about efforts to improve the way the police respond to rape victims. This is a positive story about something I am so thankful to see. Yet I sat at my desk and broke down sobbing.

With some kinds of sexual brokenness, you just don’t know when it’s going to reach up and grab you.

A marriage bed built on brokenness

With the clarity of hindsight, I can look back and see that there were people who reached out to me and offered me a way out of my broken living. Unfortunately, those walls I’d built kept out all the good efforts along with the negative opinions.

These walls made the foundation for the walls I continued to build in our marriage.

My sexual disintegrity invaded my marriage. It shaped my views of what sex is and how it works. It gave me a false sense of what my husband truly valued. It made me believe that I didn’t deserve a good sex life or a good marriage.

My long-time lack of sexual morals and my sexual brokenness—my sexual disintegrity–were what I brought to our marriage bed.

And it was all grounded in the heart-brokenness of a little girl who wanted nothing more to be loved and to belong.

Even after God grabbed me and turned my attention toward my husband and my marriage, I carried that brokenness with me for several years. Despite my own brokenness, though, I began to understand the value of sexual stewardship.

That’s the part of the story I’d like to share next week.

What is your story?

We’ve probably all experienced sexual brokenness. Your own story may be very different from mine, and I want to encourage you to look at your journey. Reflect on your own sexual brokenness. What did you carry into the marriage bed. For what have you yearned the most?

If you’d like to read more of what I’ve written about sexual brokenness, visit these posts:

• The Lie That Hurt My Marriage the Most
• Transforming the Scars from a Premarital Past
• Prodigal Daughter of God: When Past Sin Is Dragging You Down
• Unbearable Lessons
• Enough, Already!
• Lessons Learned from Premarital Sex
• More Than Many Sparrows

My Story of Sexual Healing and Wholeness

• Sexual Healing and Wholeness – Introduction to My Story
• Sexual Disintegrity – My Journey Toward Sexual Wholeness #1
• Sexual Stewardship – My Journey Toward Sexual Wholeness #2
• Sexual Invocation – My Journey Toward Sexual Wholeness #3

Image credit | Greyerbaby at pixabay.com