I heard a teaching recently where a pastor shared that every stronghold in our life starts with an event that we, in our flesh, or Satan, convinces us to distort. We then bite on the lie. I am finally slowing down and asking, what was the lie I bought in to? For me it wasn’t a singular event–at least I don’t think it was. Things happened yes. My biting the bait of a lie was tied to events–plural.

Growing up I never comfortable in my own skin. I felt very comfortable in my own brain. Being touted as “smart” brought misery mixed with pride. Skinny, awkward and not very outwardly self-confident about the opposite sex, my high school years were spent longing for a girl to find me attractive. I had moved from the inner-city to a smaller rural school were the football players were the gods, and my over six foot under 150 pound frame was far from the Zeus, yet I was not a member of the nerd club. I was relatively popular and had friends–just no one that wanted to date me. Inklings of this feeling started in Junior High where I went to a school where there were very few Anglo students. Being a “minority” was a strange experience–making it difficult to naturally connect to others. It wasn’t that I wanted to have sex, as my biblical convictions and upbringing had established guidelines. I just wanted to be found to be sexual–something that never happened (until college, when many things were already shaped in my life).

In order to protect my interior, I became emotionally aloof. I convinced myself that I was bullet proof, that I didn’t need to be wanted, that I could be a  mental robot who was to be always to be even keeled. My upbringing in a family that didn’t express much emotion made this self-protection even easier. But we are created sexual, and as damning as that first self-agreement of aloofness was, the second was all the more. I began a secret life of sexual fantasy. If I couldn’t be sexual in the real world, I could surely be sexual in my own mind. And so I bought the lie that I could be super-human, a performance robot that used his brain but never his heart and the lie of compartmentalization. That my secret life of sexual self-fulfillment could be walled off forever from the rest of my life.

I know see that this was a vain attempt at self-protection. I wanted to avoid emotions that made me very uncomfortable–feeling unwanted. By the time I hit college, an addictive pattern had been set. I did begin dating but had difficulty truly connecting on an emotional level, even though I was a sought after date now. No, it wasn’t as if females were forming a line outside the liberal arts building, but I would hear rumor that so-in-so thinks you’re cute and would say yes if you asked her out. I dated but kept up the aloofness buffer and the compartment of my growing addiction. One date told me I was the closest person she had ever met to a robot. I took that as a compliment. I was unflappable, or so I thought.

I married after college and thought surely this would solve everything. It didn’t. Both the emotional aloofness and sexual addiction continued. Except my wife didn’t know. All she saw was a person who should have been close to her appear to be comfortable in his distance. This was not the way I wanted things to be but is what came most naturally.  (to be continued).