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Sexual Addiction - The Solution |
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Getting free from the lies and bondage
Rev. Dr. Jerry Schmoyer
A 36-year-old woman, the mother of three small children, was raised by a rage filled alcoholic father and a dependent mother. She married a man who also had an alcoholic parent. Over the course of their marriage, he had multiple affairs. She denied the most blatant evidence of his philandering until she at times doubted her own sanity. Although she knew he was having sex with other women, she did not dare deny him sex for fear he would leave.
Frightened of confronting her husband and expressing her anger, she had bouts of depression and periods of overeating. During her second pregnancy, she contracted gonorrhea from her husband. Although she felt intense guilt about risking her fetus's health, she continued having sex with her husband. She expressed intense shame when she disclosed her home situation to her physician.
She became progressively obsessed with her husband's infidelity and would drive around town at night, with her three small children, looking for her husband's car. When she found his car-at a girlfriend's house-she would send one of the children to ring the doorbell and ask daddy to come home. Despite her recognition of how hurtful this behavior was to her children, she was unable to stop.
Now HE had problems – probably sexual addiction among them. But she had a problem, too. She was an enabler, co-dependent with her husband. Both of them need to get healthy emotionally, only he won’t face and work through his issues until she changes her patterns. As long as she keeps enabling his addictions he won’t have to change.
In this section of this paper we will consider how she can become free from her harmful patterns. Then we will talk about how he can also have victory and growth to maturity.
As seen before, there are lies that underline what this wife is doing. These lies must be recognized and the truth substituted in order for positive actions to replace her current unhealthy responses. ”They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator — who is forever praised. Amen.” (Romans 1:25)
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