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Becoming Whole
Relationships and sexuality are areas of life that can be beautiful or confusing, life-giving, or painful. Becoming Whole is a conversational podcast for men, women, and families seeking to draw nearer to Jesus as they navigate topics like sexual integrity, relational healing, spiritual health, and so much more.
Becoming Whole
Anger and Unwanted Sexual Behavior
Join Josh Glaser, executive director, and James Craig, spiritual coach, as they dive into a mini-series on anger and its link to unwanted sexual behavior. This episode explores how unprocessed anger can drive sexual sin and how recognizing and addressing it can bring about healing. With the holidays approaching and family gatherings on the horizon, understanding and managing anger becomes even more crucial.
Our hope is that this series serves as a guide for anyone navigating the turbulent waters of family gatherings or personal struggles, offering insights and tools to manage anger healthily and embrace spiritual growth. We encourage you to reflect on your journey and consider the transformative power of understanding the anger within.
ReMember: a night full of worship, art, dessert, stories of God’s goodness, and an opportunity to partner with Regeneration. We invite you to join us for our annual dessert Regeneration fundraiser. We’d love for you to join us, It will not be the same without you. RSVP here!
👉Men's Overcoming Lust & Temptation Devotional
👉Women 21-Day Prayer Journal & Devotional - (Women overcoming unwanted sexual Behavior)
👉Compass 21-Day Prayer Journal & Devotional - (Wives who are or have been impacted by partner betrayal)
Do you want to find out why you're so compelled to pursue unwanted sexual behavior? Figure out what's made you so angry, friends. That's a quote from Unwanted by Jay Stringer. We use Unwanted a lot at Regen. We love that book, and Josh and I are here Josh Glazer, who runs our ministry executive director, and me. James Craig, spiritual coach and Awaken coordinator. We're here for the next.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll be hosting a mini series for the next three weeks on the topic of anger. We actually think this is a pretty appropriate timing because family gatherings are coming up. For some of us, anger is often simmering under the surface. The election just happened. I mean there's just a lot of things that can bring anger into the context of family gathering. So, as Thanksgiving and Christmas come up, we want to talk about anger and we want to talk about the surprising connection between anger and unwanted sexual behavior. So, josh, when you think about this idea of anger, I don't know, it doesn't feel very intuitive to me. I found it to be true. It doesn't feel intuitive, though. This idea that anger is one of the deepest connected kind of drivers of unwanted sexual behavior, of habitual sexual brokenness. Does that resonate with you or clients you've worked with over the years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, let me first say I'm angry that we're doing this series. It really is ticking me off. Yeah, jay Strier says actually lust and anger are at the heart of it. I mean, he talks about many core drivers but he emphasizes lust and anger and their relationship with each other. And no, it does not feel intuitive to me and I don't think it feels intuitive to most of the men and women who come to regeneration for help. And I'd say, just personally, my relationship with anger growing up was very ambivalent, like I did not like anger. We talk more about that later, I think as a Christian, I felt very ambivalent about anger in the sense of you know, do good Christians get angry?
Speaker 2:What does it look like when good Christians get angry? So there's a whole like, even apart from the sexual behavior, there's all sorts of like, discomfort, struggle with this anger in general. Then, when you throw it into the, into the mix of wait a minute, this has something to do with driving my unwanted sexual behavior. This is part of the reason that I keep going back to whatever my unwanted sexual behavior is. Now I'm in a quandary because what does that mean and where do I even start? So, yeah, I'm with you as far as it not feeling very intuitive, but I'm with you in the sense of like, yes, it absolutely is, and as we understand what Jay's teaching and as we dug into this, like it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and his book Unwanted, which again, we utilize a lot in our coaching and we do unwanted intensives. We probably have one coming up in spring of 2025. Coaching and we do unwanted intensives. We probably have one coming up in spring of 2025.
Speaker 1:Unwanted talks about through the research Jay did as a licensed therapist. He researched over 4,000 men and women, or around 4,000 men and women, and what drives them to their sexual sin or their unwanted sexual behavior. And outside of shame, maybe shame. I bet shame. What he would say is number one. But anger is the most significant driver that he found in connection to unwanted sexual behavior. He says at one point this is another quote he says that lust is important to address.
Speaker 1:We all we're listening to this podcast. We're dealing with unwanted sexual behavior. Lust is pretty obvious. I'm here because I'm lusting, but Jay says it's like a car battery. Lust is pretty obvious. I'm here because I'm lusting, but Jay says it's like a car battery. It starts the engine, but we actually need anger to fuel our drive through unwanted sexual behavior. So lust is like the starter of an engine, but anger is the fuel. Anger is the gasoline that keeps it going. Here's the problem, though, that I see, josh, the problem is that anger can be hard to find. Some anger is very obvious. Some anger is like, okay, dad's blowing up again or I'm yelling at so and so that's pretty obvious. But for most people coming to regen that might not be their biggest thing like hey, I'm blowing up all the time, kind of anger. It's actually something more hidden. So why, why do you think anger is so hard to find for most of us?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about this too. So two things come to mind for me. One is what we were, what we started with, which is we've been so programmed, or by ourselves or others, to think about lust as something that's happening all on its own, that we've that, we've just never. And and lust and sexual desire and sexual pleasure, these are so powerful that it can be easy just to just to imagine or believe that that's all that's present with our unwanted sexual behavior. So anger is, is hidden in that, in the process. For us, like we just you know, for that reason we're not recognized that it's a part of the addictive cycle or our addictive patterns sexually.
Speaker 2:I think the other is that, like in my story, both in my home growing up and in my understanding at least, of Christianity in my understanding at least of Christianity I wasn't supposed to get angry, like good people don't get angry. And I don't mean that I never saw people angry growing up, I did, but it was never. We never viewed it. Even when my parents were angry, like I never. I never heard from them or learn from them that anger can be good, like like anger in my house was, and I think they would agree with this it was either off or turned way up and when it was turned way up it was hurtful, like it would be. You know it would come out of the blue. It felt like it would. It would snap at people, it hurt people's feelings, it would push people away and so for a kid growing up in that like I, I wanted to hide anger.
Speaker 2:Even those who kind of acknowledge they've got an anger problem, like one of the reasons it can feel like it comes out of the blue is because when someone starts to feel angry, they hide it. So I think there's this misnomer that anger is, is necessarily a bad thing or is something that is, should be. You know, just calm down, you know, just. You know Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers. Okay, we're going to be peacemakers, we're gonna be nice, we're gonna be kind, like we even imagine Jesus, I think mostly kind, even tempered, peaceful, like we don't imagine Jesus angry much, although the gospel certainly give us reason to to recognize that he in fact did get angry and did express anger. So but what do you think? What's in your experience personally with others, like, why would you say anger gets hidden or is hard to find?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're reminding me first of Tim Keller's sermon on anger. Actually, he's one of the pastors I've loved to listen to sermons over the years of and he says that the translation of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus, when it says, you know the shortest verse, jesus wept. Right before that there's a good, exactly how it's translated. But he says in the original Greek there's, there's this connotation of Jesus got angry, and Keller's saying Jesus was angry at death.
Speaker 2:So there's something not inherently bad about anger.
Speaker 1:We'll talk about that a little bit more in a sec. But I think in my own life again, just like you experienced, anger was often this blowing up thing and everyone was afraid of that, and so we all learn to kind of push it down and in. And I think I'm the older child, I think I really sought to be the peacemaker in certain ways, and I would often take anger and not express it in a healthy or holy way. I would push it inward and what I have come to believe is that, in line with what Jay Stringer is saying, in Unwanted it was almost like so much compression on the anger that it started coming out sideways through my unwanted sexual behavior, and so there's something about just learning that this is not a safe emotion. It's almost like we've only seen it either stuffed or exploding and so we don't know what does it look like for it to be expressed in a good way, literally.
Speaker 1:In this section Jay says that healthy anger is about justice and restoration, seeking what is right and restoring. I've also heard it said anger is fundamentally about protection and destruction and everything related to that. You know nature, things like that. But then we're supposed to destroy that which is destroying people or other things. So we're supposed to destroy the kingdom of darkness and I know that word destroy just sounds so intense for our very nice Western culture that we live in. But to not recognize that there's actually things worth destroying is to not realize, like there's seriousness to sin, there's seriousness to our fallen nature, and so I think that there's actually this fundamental thing of like anger is not purely bad. So in your mind, how do we sort through some of that? Like, how do we sort through righteous anger versus sinful anger and the kind of anger that Jay's talking about that leads to unwanted sexual behavior?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a few things. I mean I love what you're saying and I love that. I love Jay's frame up of anger is really aimed at our desire for justice and restoration. And I think about, like World War II, maybe a good example, like what Hitler was doing it was right to be angry at the violence of the Nazis, it was right to be angry at the concentration camps and all his abuses, and it but anger by itself. So so anger drove, I think, the allies towards and including drove the U? S into the war. It was a part of why the U? S came to fight. But it drove the allies to to do what they did with great courage, great valor, great honor, to destroy the what Hitler was doing and a great cost. And that's, that's a part of the good valor, beauty, of the justice and restoration anger desires.
Speaker 2:The problem, I think, it comes when we we get kind of sloppy with the destruction. Part of that, or maybe one of two things, one is, is that when we turn the kind of justice towards that, a bit of that sense of like'm not supposed to be angry, you know like, and so we we kind of get twisted up in our justice piece and then we we do kind of like I mean, many of us have even heard this like somebody gets angry and somebody else in the room says, look, just calm down, like properly dealing with anger. That's not, that's not the way to do it. You don't just calm down. I mean if, if by that you mean like just breathe and like get rid of the emotion, the intensity of the anger, because that's not really resolving the desire for justice and restoration, it's just trying to remove the intensity of of, you know, the, the danger of anger, if you will. And the other side, like the other approach, is just kind of just letting it out. You know, just get it out, just get your anger out, which doesn't work. I mean it does work, but it doesn't. It doesn't make the anger go down, it like just inflames it and it and just letting it out can be is what some of us have experienced, where where we get so hurt by anger and I think one of the reasons that we hide it ourselves, cause we don't want to just let it out because we know we're going to hurt somebody, we don't want to ruin relationships, and yada, yada, yada.
Speaker 2:So all that to say, like the, the, the anger rightly directed during world war II, for example, was a good thing to stop Hitler, but it wasn't enough to bring about full justice and restoration. We we needed more than that. I mean one example that I think is even the allies ended up turning their backs on Poland and Poland then was invaded by Russia, who was one of the allies. So I mean it was. It was just this. It wasn't enough to bring the full gambit Like we need to pay, kind of attuned to in our anger. We need to attune to where are we desiring justice, where are we desiring restoration? It's not just about feeling and expressing the anger, it is about like getting under. So if you think about anger as a second level, emotion, the first level is something, something that's seeking restoration and justice, and so getting underneath the anger to find out like what, what is my anger really? What is the good my anger is really wanting to do here? Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's something God given about, like, you know, a kid experiencing harm and being angry about it, and if there's no healthy way to deal with that, it can then become this like inward or, you know, stuck thing that we're talking about, but the kid actually should have been protected and not harmed. And so there's something that, like God, has wired into us and it does say God gets angry, not probably as most human anger looks more often than not, but God gets angry because he cares about the protection of his beloved. He cares about the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, the poor. He cares about children. He says very harsh things to people who, would you know, significantly harm children.
Speaker 1:And so there's something about this like and I almost want to speak to the men and women who are wrestling with unwanted sexual behavior I wonder in your own life what your anger might be trying to say should have been protected. And even for those who are listening, who are trying to parent sexual sexuality like sexually disciple their kids, or have experienced betrayal trauma, anger is trying to send a certain kind of message. It doesn't mean again, we should stuff it or fully let it out in the way we maybe naturally think. There's probably somewhere in the middle. We'll keep exploring that. But your anger is trying to say something should not have happened.
Speaker 2:That did happen and so there's there's some, there's someone worth protecting behind that anger and there might be some deep sadness or other primary emotions that are kind of fueling that sense of anger james, like one of the things that I've been learning a little bit about and I'm I'm not a therapist, I'm not an expert at this at all, but is internal family systems, which this can be a very blunt like or caveman-esque version of it, because I, again, I'm not trained in this, but one of the one of the themes in internal family systems is is getting in touch with the various parts of you and so, when anger rises up or we become aware of there's a part of me that feels really angry in this situation, assuming that that part has some good intention and beginning to ask it what is your good intention toward me or towards this situation, rather than vilifying it and thinking, well, I'm not supposed to be angry at my mom or my dad, or they did the best they could, or I shouldn't be angry at my you know, my pastor, because he's a godly man, or or my spouse, because good husbands don't get angry at their wives, or or my kids, or whatever, like. What's? What are you trying to do? What's the like? Asking anger, the part of you that's angry, what's the? What's the good intention that you have towards me in this, in this space? It's been a it's been a powerful question to entertain for me, just as a place to begin, and that's what makes me. What you're sharing made me think of that I want. But I do want to ask you a question.
Speaker 2:I'm not because I'm not sure, before we go any further. I'm not sure that we've done a great job of connecting the dots for people between unwanted sexual behavior and anger, like. So I'm just thinking about the person who's listening, going like, hey, I'm, I'm tuned in because I'm I'm struggling with pornography, or I've been hooking up with other guys or other girls, or like where, what is I mean? Maybe it would just be good for us to tease out a little bit or noodle on a little bit, like how is it? Why did their anger turn towards that or how is anger turning them in those directions?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean a couple more places from this section of unwanted. This is from chapter eight that we're pulling some of this from, but he describes Jay describes his son at one point and how you can see unmet desire, even in his son, often giving birth to anger, even from that young age. He literally says at one point desire which is kind of the essence of what lust can twist right the essential good is desire, and it can get twisted toward desiring things that God wouldn't want us to desire or whatever. Desire, if not fully satisfied, often gives birth to anger, and so part of what I'm seeing as a connection is like the harm that has happened to us. There was a desire for wholeness and shalom and peace, and so that desire wasn't met, and that was actually a really good desire. And then later on or in in other ways, like you know, I want second dessert. Dad, I'm a five-year-old screaming for dessert before dinner, whatever it is that can create this temper, tantrum or this anger, because this thing that would actually be bad for the kid is being withheld, that desire, for you know, dessert before dinner is leading to anger, and so I think what Jay's trying to do here is show that, like desire and anger often go very much together, and he goes so far as to say, on that same page, he says rarely do I meet men who are consciously aware of their eroticized anger. Instead, they see the drive for sex as a mashup of emotions such as loneliness, frustration and disappointment.
Speaker 1:And what Jay's trying to point out is that often what we're doing with our anger because we haven't figured out how to deal with it well, because it's been bottled up and we just don't really know what to do with it we've actually. It has to go somewhere. It's like it's like, you know, the electrons creating a lightning bolt. Like that, energy has to be released somewhere, and often where we're releasing it without realizing it, is on the men and women in pornography or on other people in our lives. We're not seeing them as the full person. We're mad at this or that injustice from our past or whatever, and we're taking that out to whatever degree on the men or women in pornography.
Speaker 1:One of the interesting things and sad things about pornography is that it doesn't demonstrate. More often than not it doesn't demonstrate mutual, loving sexual relations. It demonstrates something that is much more fueled by anger. More often than not, pornographers know how to like set things up or set the scene like there is. There's anger inherent in that, but there's also just the ways we're taking our unprocessed anger and releasing it there.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, I mean it's. I think the lightning thing is a good illustration. It pornography, lust in general is a lightning rod. It is, or we use it that way and anything from on the extreme end. There's so much violent pornography where literally somebody is being abused, tied up, even sexually violated, and then they're being abused for men's arousal. Less extreme is is our themes of of dominance and control over another person and then maybe less extreme, but still there is pornography itself is an expression of controlling another person, even if it's just I get to choose who I'm looking at and when I'm looking at them.
Speaker 2:Every relationship you don't. You don't get that kind of control. If you're in a real healthy you brought up the healthy, loving relationship, there's a give and take, there's a. You don't get to treat somebody, you don't get to disregard somebody all day long. You're, you know your wife all day long and then that night say, hey, let's, you know, let's have sex like in a healthy relationship. No, no, we, we actually need to connect. There needs to be like an intimacy connection, vulnerability.
Speaker 2:Pornography just shoves it all aside and it's like I get who I want when I want them and if you, if you don't fit what I want.
Speaker 2:Then I swipe right and I find something else Like so there's. So even even on that like level if I'm not looking at violent pornography there's still a level of control which betrays the reality that underneath the lust there is some type of anger, there's some type of, you know, I, I want to be the one in charge and power, and I think Jay even mentions that's maybe even a place to begin at the end of the chapter and then some of the work that we do in Unwanted and in coaching addresses, getting after someone's story and even beginning to invite them to examine without judgment, with curiosity and kindness, kind of you know, on the porch, like I think you're gonna talk about that later. But what are the themes in the fantasy of pornography, and where are there themes of control or power over or anger, and what might those reveal about the real anger that you've got to deal with in your life that's happening inside of you?
Speaker 1:fantasies are ways of either repeating or reversing things that have happened to us. Even if we're repeating something really painful that's happened, there's a sense in which we're now gaining a type of control over that situation by entering into the fantasy and repeating or reversing that one's more obvious, like if something has happened to us and now we're seeking fantasies where we feel like the one in charge. We feel like so either way. We're taking this thing that we don't know how to deal with this anger and we're putting it on to pornography. So, josh, maybe it would help too. Have you seen place in your own life like something, like a story or something that would help people connect the dots, maybe in their own stories, connecting unwanted sexual behavior and anger?
Speaker 2:yeah, I was thinking about this beforehand and I can't connect all the dots directly, but especially in the time we've got. But one of my core memories is when I was a young, young teenager, maybe preteen, my parents, who were divorced, decided that each of us, my two brothers and I, would each spend a year living with my dad. So we'd move away from our home, move 2,000 miles across the country or 1500 miles across the country and live with my dad for a year. You can imagine, as a preteen just getting ready to start middle school, junior high, like just how scary that idea would be and how disheartening leaving friends, familiarity and starting a new school.
Speaker 2:When we learned about it, we were at my dad's house, we learned this was going to happen and my two brothers both just got so pissed off, like, like outwardly, like we're sitting in the room with my, my dad, my step-mom and my younger half-sister, who I adored, and and both of them got angry. One of them, you know, like stormed off I'm not going to do it. The other one, you know, yelled something to and, and, you know, stayed in the room but was still like just furious. I remember I was a pretty sensitive kid and I remember sitting there and I had this, this deep conflict inside of me. On the one side, I. What was most present to me was this, this feeling of like oh crap.
Speaker 2:Like I mean, I was just terrified, petrified at this idea and I was also like thinking about my brothers and going like how, how could you say that stuff out loud? That's, you know, our dad loves us and he has wanted us to go live with him. This is going to feel so hurtful to him. My, our half sister sitting here, she's excited about the idea of getting more time with us and you're just yelling like they're going to take it personally. So I was feeling all that and I was also envious and kind of impressed that my brothers could be so explicit about what they were feeling. So I was all like tangled up. I was the classic like stuff your your feelings, stuff your emotions because it's going to hurt somebody. But it was right for them to get angry and it was, and and because we needed some kind of justice and we needed some kind of restoration. It doesn't mean that that what my parents wanted to do was necessarily bad, but it does mean that that we needed some shepherding and some deep care. Through that, and my brothers in their own, you know young way we're, we're, we're letting people know that like, this isn't, this is not good, this hurts.
Speaker 2:Interestingly enough, and this is where I can't connect the dots in the time we've got. But within the next six months is when my struggle with unwanted sexual behaviors, pornography, masturbation, began in earnest. And then, in the next six months after that, or 12 months after that, those behaviors snowballed into some other things that became a regular part of my life for years and years and years and I never recognized but you think so again. What I was saying before about the on the on the minor end of things, pornography is control. It is I get to control what happens to me, I get to control who I'm looking at, I get to control vulnerability in this situation and my, my jump into that stuff I think was a was a desperate grab, for that's what I needed. Does that? Does that make sense? Connect to your question.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can't stop thinking about just the cross as we're talking, because it just feels like that Hebrew idea of like humans. We need a scapegoat. There was a lamb of atonement every year for the Hebrew people. They needed a place to place their sins. And I just can't help but think about like. You've talked, josh, in Awaken and other places about pressing our wounds into Jesus. And again there's that quote out there that says the pain that we don't transform, we transfer, or something along those lines. It said better than that, yeah. And so there's this idea of like, okay, if I'm not figuring out how to place this into Jesus, who took on the sin of the world, who took on the anger, who took on the brokenness, if I'm not figuring out how to work this out with him and press it into his wounds, like it's going to come out somewhere else. So I know we could talk for probably another hour on just exactly that. I want to give you the final word, josh, and ask you to pray for us in just a moment.
Speaker 1:But let me just read this final quote from chapter eight of Unwanted. It says if you want to see your unwanted sexual behavior transformed, name anger and lust as the partners in crime that they are. Too often, people of faith have been loquacious in discussing purity, lust and even sexual addiction, but largely silent on the issue of anger and power, as it especially relates to male violence against women. Our preoccupation with lust and our avoidance of anger may be central to why many of us have not been able to find freedom, and so in just a moment I'm going to allow Josh to close us out, but I do just want to highlight that another place of profound anger that has different circumstances and perhaps different outlets is in betrayal trauma. If you are in an intimate relationship with a partner, with a spouse especially and there's this hidden life that you've been living and it's come out your spouse has very likely experienced what's called betrayal trauma, and so the anger that comes with that is extremely hard to process.
Speaker 1:So we've created as a team something called the Compass Prayer Journal. You can find that on our website. This is just a 21-day prayer journal to begin helping those, in this case wives. We know husbands have experienced betrayal as well, but in this case, helping wives who have experienced betrayal walk through that with Jesus and impress some of this stuff into Jesus. I just felt like this is an important place to highlight that, because the anger that comes with betrayal is so overwhelming and confusing. So, again, whether you've seen anger begin to connect to your unwanted sexual behavior, or whether you've experienced anger from betrayal, or even anger trying to figure out how do I parent this kid who seems out of control, or whatever, we want to just begin or just continue to help equip you all to deal with anger, and we will be talking about anger in more depth and how to overcome it more in the next couple weeks.
Speaker 2:Josh, any ways, you want to close us yeah, a couple things, but before I do like just shout out to jay stringer. I mean, I think so many of us are so grateful for his insights into this stuff, his research and his insights, like I just get you know, we just reviewing this part of the chapter in his book unwanted has been refreshing, for has been refreshing for me and, I know, for the rest of our team. So if you haven't read that book or not familiar with his work, we encourage that. So, final word, I'd say this One is God gets angry and even as I say it, it's important to acknowledge the kinds of internal reactions that we have to that idea, which probably helped to reveal our own struggles with why we struggle to get angry.
Speaker 2:Anger is a characteristic that originated in God and our capacity for anger is given to us by him as one of the ways we bear his image. You can understand, I think, as we think about anger as meant to aim our desire towards restoration and justice. Unaddressed anger ends up destroying ourselves, our loved ones, the men and women caught in pornography, lost sex trafficking. It is really worthwhile getting after addressing anger, and if you don't know how to do that, team's here the other places that you can do that, but such a key to helping to disconnect hidden anger, suppressed anger, repressed anger, stuffed anger from, from fueling the ongoing unwanted sexual behaviors in our lives. So, yeah, let me let me pray for for us as we end.
Speaker 2:Father, I know that for me and probably many of our listeners, the idea that you get angry is kind of scary, honestly. And so, lord, we recall to mind you, jesus on the cross, and if you, jesus, the one who took the misplaced anger of this world into your body, if you feel anger, lord, it must be good. And so, lord, would you do the hard work, would you disconnect for us anger from what fuels our unwanted sexual behaviors, and would you uncover for us where we're angry. And, lord, teach us how to manage, walk with handle, express, feel anger, as you do, healthy ways and holy ways, good ways, and give us grace, lord, where we are adolescent with our anger. Thank you for your love. We love you too. In the name of the Father, son and Holy Spirit, we pray Amen.
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