Tag Archives: leaders

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 4

April 9, 2021Awaken Blog12 Steps, accountability, addiction, adultery, awaken, betrayal, brokenness, cheating, church, confession, connection, counseling, forgiveness, friendship, God's love, gospel, grace, Greg Oliver, healing, leaders, pastors, pornography, recovery, restoration, sex addiction, sexual addiction, sobriety, Stacey Oliver, support, Twelve StepsGreg

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 4

This is the third in a series of posts on helping people through sexual brokenness. CLICK HERE to read Part 1. CLICK HERE to read Part 2. CLICK HERE to read Part 3.

In this series of posts, we’ve sought to give needed context to people who provide help and counsel to men and women who walk through sexual brokenness situations. This work is grueling. It isn’t for the faint of heart. If you’re involved in this kind of work, God bless you. Our desire is to help you feel a greater sense of confidence that you’re noticing and remembering important factors in play.

So far, we’ve talked about two very important principles:

What presents on the surface isn’t the whole story.

Trauma is an incredibly powerful influence in people’s sexual brokenness.

In this post, we want to talk about a third principle:

Helping both the “offender” AND the “offended” can be a mine field, but it’s worth it.

If you are a pastor or caring/helping professional, it’s likely you’ve experienced situations where there’s a couple like the one from our previous posts. Remember the couple? The wife has caught her husband multiple times looking at porn; he’s defensive and denies the gravity of the problem, even though it has escalated to addictive porn use and affairs.

Trying to determine the help EACH spouse needs is difficult. Trying to provide the help EACH spouse needs is more difficult. Trying to provide that help while working with BOTH spouses can feel pretty near impossible! So how can it work? CAN it work?

I believe it is possible to help both parties, even when one fits more in the “offender” role while the other fits more as having been “offended.” So what would it take to make this a reality? First…

1. A lot of the work needs to be done separately (at least initially).

Each spouse has their own specific needs. Sometimes they need the same things, but it is difficult to focus on one’s need while the other is sitting in the room. It’s very difficult to make much headway empathizing with the life events that contributed to a husband’s sexual addiction and betrayal when the person most wounded by his behavior is sitting in the next chair. Your compassion and empathy for him can seem like all new trauma to her. “How could you be nice to him?! Why don’t you nail him to the wall for what he did to me?”

It makes a lot of sense for you to work with each spouse separately, or to determine which one you can more effectively work with and then connect the other to another helper you trust. It doesn’t change their needs, but it allows a more undistracted and a less confusing environment for them to do the necessary work to heal (and hopefully begin to move toward each other in a healthy way). Another necessary step in working with both spouses is…

2. Build a team to support the different needs of both people.

The old phrase most of us know is “It takes a village to raise a child.” This principle holds true when working with complex hurt/sin/trauma situations. There are few (maybe none) of these that you are equipped to handle completely on your own. This is not a reflection on you…no one can bear the full burden for complex and complicated situations like this.

The key need is to build a connected team in which you identify the relational needs of each spouse, and make sure there are people in place who understand their specific role. Many churches have built care teams for situations like this. In the case of a husband and wife with sexual brokenness struggles, there will be a primary counselor for each spouse, an ally/peer for each spouse, and a pastor/elder to oversee communication and the process. No one gets overwhelmed. Each helper has been given appropriate permission to interact with one another for the shared goal of providing great care for both hurting people. (*Note: If such a process does not yet exist in your church/ministry, Awaken can help you. Click here to connect with us to find out how.) One more really important thing to remember when trying to help both parties is…

3. Expect criticism when showing grace to an offender.

The sad truth is that there are people who don’t respond to sexual brokenness…they react. When they hear of a person’s betrayal of their spouse, the reaction is a call for the swift hammer of justice to fall. If you take a posture of empathy, curiosity, and compassion for the “offender,” there is a good chance that some people (beginning with the spouse) aren’t going to like it. You very well may be criticized or even attacked for this approach. I’ve seen it many times.

While this is an understandable emotion (wanting someone to pay, who has hurt someone deeply), this is not the Gospel. Christ’s heart for us, when we continue to betray him even after coming into his family, is not to kick us out of the family or even to punish us. Christ remembers that every sin committed by every one of his children has already been punished. He remembers this because he’s the one who took the punishment. God cannot punish the same sin twice. If he did, he would not be just, and would not be God.

Although in some cases you may find yourself in a position where loving, restorative discipline becomes necessary, it ought never resemble punishment. The goal of discipline is healing, building, restoring, calling a person back to his/her true self and to the abundant life offered. Discipline ought to wind up being an attractive process. If it comes to that, I pray you lead through it with the heart of Christ. In the meantime, accept criticism you may receive for being gracious as a badge of honor that reminds you that you follow Christ, not the approval of men.

So, helping and caring friend, as you seek to do whatever you can to help people who have been caught up in sin and brokenness, we are for you. We want to help if we can. Reach out to us to find out what that can look like. God bless you as you shepherd your people well.

Greg Oliver is the Executive Director of Awaken, a faith-based recovery ministry that provides Gospel-based and therapeutically sound help for individuals, couples, and ministry leaders who have been impacted by sexual brokenness. Awaken offers in-person and online recovery meetings for men & women who struggle, and for women whose partners struggle. We also offer 1-on-1 and couple’s coaching, recovery intensives/ workshops, and training/equipping for church leaders. For more info on any of our resources, check out the rest of our site or CLICK HERE.

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 3

April 7, 2021Awaken Blog12 Steps, accountability, addiction, adultery, awaken, betrayal, brokenness, cheating, church, confession, connection, counseling, forgiveness, friendship, God's love, gospel, grace, Greg Oliver, healing, leaders, pastors, pornography, recovery, restoration, sex addiction, sexual addiction, sobriety, Stacey Oliver, support, Twelve StepsGreg

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 3

This is the third in a series of posts on helping people through sexual brokenness. CLICK HERE to read Part 1. CLICK HERE to read Part 2.

In this series of posts, we’re talking about the difficulty of leaders helping people navigate through sexual brokenness. In Part 2, we talked about the important realization that what presents on the surface isn’t the whole story. We need to recognize that actions are influenced by experiences that might not be obvious, but with curiosity we can learn how to draw these experiences out so that we don’t inadvertently make a difficult situation worse through our assumptions.

In this post I want to talk about those experiences themselves. The descriptor I am going to use in referring to them all is trauma.

Trauma is an incredibly powerful influence in people’s sexual brokenness.

People have many different reactions when they hear the word trauma. Think for a second about what you thought when you read that word. What came to mind?

Someone in a life-threatening situation (hostage/kidnapping/wild animal attack)?

Someone who underwent severe abuse (rape/molestation/being beaten)?

Someone who witnessed the sudden death of a loved one in an accident?

Someone who served in the military in a combat zone?

If you thought about situations like that, you’re right. All those experiences are traumatic. However, it’s important to realize that even if the people you counsel never went through the kind of trauma described above (at least to your knowledge), that doesn’t mean they did not experience trauma of some sort. The first important observation for this post is…

1. Everyone carries trauma, even if they don’t know it.

It’s important at this point to establish what I mean when I use the word trauma. I like to quote my good friend, therapist James Horne’s definition of trauma. For purposes of this post, we’re going to say that trauma is “any experience in my life that was less than safe and nurturing.” In other words, I had a need, and that need was not met. When that lacking is ongoing, through abuse, neglect, etc., the child begins to adapt, learning how to meet needs on his/her own. We learn lessons, even ones we cannot name. Those lessons translate into beliefs, then into actions, and these actions are intended to meet a need.

Here’s an example. A child grows up with an emotionally distant father and a mother who struggles with alcoholism. His existence is filled with neglect from his dad, and emotional abuse and abandonment from his mom. Often this child has to get himself ready for school, fix his own lunch, etc. He lives with a constant anxiety, fearing that his dad will leave or that his mom will snap. When he hits puberty, he learns that through masturbating he can alleviate that anxiety for a time. This behavior seems normal…everyone does it, so it seems harmless. But when it’s being done not out of curiosity but out of anxiety, this is a trauma response. What begins as using masturbation to calm anxiety eventually graduates to a full-blown porn & sex addiction that presents in your office after he’s been caught cheating on his wife again. (Does this sound anything like the couple in the example in the last post?)

Trauma often ends up manifesting in unwanted sexual behaviors. Author Jay Stringer reminds us that, “These behaviors that you’re very ashamed of have origin stories, often in the family in which you grew up.” Statements like this are, again, not designed to remove personal responsibility. On the contrary, by recognizing how our past experiences influenced our present behavior, we are better able to understand and take healthy responsibility for those actions, and to move forward in repentance and healing. To move forward, however, we must understand how trauma specifically connects to the choices we make, which brings up the next point:

2. Trauma causes people to develop strategies to survive.

Think again about the example above, of the man whose sexual addiction – which manifested in repeated sinful and hurtful behavior – began by using masturbation to cope with adolescent anxiety. As a helper who is trying to do right by both this man and his wounded wife, it would be very easy to focus only on the here and now, which would result in a narrative that only focuses on how bad his actions were. It’s true that his actions were bad, and that they were sinful, and that they cannot continue if he wishes to keep and heal his marriage and become a healthy person.

But what would it look like to begin with a different approach, one of curiosity? Curiosity understands that, like we said in the last post, there is always more to the story than what presents on the surface. What if we were able to hold a space in which two things are true at the same time: First, that this man’s actions are wrong, sinful, hurtful, and must be addressed. Second, that this man’s actions probably were the culmination of a survival strategy he developed years ago in an immature attempt to get his needs met. These two truths present tension for anyone walking through the situation with this man, but they are not contradictory or mutually exclusive.

Recognizing that bad actions don’t automatically represent the character of the person doing them is important. It allows the caregiver/helper to approach the person with curiosity and compassion, and with a desire to uncover what may have caused them to develop this survival strategy in the first place. Then, by the time the behavior itself is addressed, the tone is less confrontational or punitive, and better represents the heart of Christ for restoration. Think of how it would look for a church to graciously and lovingly live out what the writer to the Hebrews talked about in 12:11: “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” Training indicates we’re seeking to learn something through the process of discipline, and we can’t learn unless we’re curious. A curious helper will inspire curiosity and will help reduce self-shaming on the part of the person who has caused the harm. One more thought for this post regarding trauma:

3. The sinful actions that result from a person’s survival strategies shouldn’t surprise us.

This isn’t really a new thought, but more of a restatement. It’s important for all of us who help others to remember something. Those we seek to help are watching us for our reactions. They have often been shaming themselves for a very long time, and they expect others’ reactions to be shaming as well. They often come in bracing for impact, expecting punishment, rejection, condemnation. They have learned to prepare for and protect themselves from these experiences, and so it’s critically important for us to think about our responses.

Rather than responding with, “How could you?!” what if our responses when hearing their stories was more like, “Well, of course.” When we better understand what trauma does to people, and the choices they make out of that trauma, we get to the point where very little surprises us. From this place, we can be purposeful about responding to people in ways that makes them feel less defective and more hopeful. They then will hopefully let their guard down and trust a process that leads them toward repentance, restoration, forgiveness, and healing.

You might be thinking, “That sounds great, but I’m imagining what the wife is going to feel if I start sounding all compassionate toward the person who betrayed her!” And that’s a very good point. Helping both the “offender” and the “offended” can be a mine field, and that is going to be the subject of our fourth and final post. Check back for that…

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 2

April 5, 2021Awaken Blog12 Steps, accountability, addiction, adultery, awaken, betrayal, brokenness, cheating, church, confession, connection, counseling, forgiveness, friendship, God's love, gospel, grace, Greg Oliver, healing, leaders, pastors, pornography, recovery, restoration, sex addiction, sexual addiction, sobriety, Stacey Oliver, support, Twelve StepsGreg

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 2

This is the second in a series of posts on helping people through sexual brokenness. CLICK HERE to read Part 1.

In the last post, I talked about how helping sexually broken people is a blessing and privilege, AND that it’s an extraordinarily hard thing to do. The situations that lead to sexual brokenness in people’s lives are not complex, not simple. The path to healing is difficult, not easy. For pastors and church leaders who take on the role of helping, it’s important to deepen understanding about sexual brokenness.

One of the first things to understand when working with sexually broken people is:

What presents on the surface isn’t the whole story.

By that I mean this. Many situations can seem cut and dried, black and white, and uncomplicated on the surface. For example: A couple comes into your office in crisis. Through tears and anger, the wife tells a story of her husband’s unfaithfulness with pornography, lies, and an eventual affair. He’s never been open about the things he struggles with; she’s always caught him. When she confronts him he is angry and defensive.

It would be easy, as the pastor listening to this story, to conclude some things about this man. “This guys is self-absorbed, narcissistic, and doesn’t care about anyone except himself. He obviously loves the he’s committing because he’s never asked for help. I wonder if he’s really a Christian.” All compassion and empathy is pointed at this man’s wife, and he is painted as the villain. He quits coming to counseling with you, and quits coming to church. Eventually he leaves his family. It seems your initial conclusions were correct, based on his actions. It seems this guy is just choosing his sin and doesn’t care about the consequences. But could it be there’s more to the story?

When we realize that what presents on the surface isn’t the whole story, it opens us to understanding something important. By the time sexual brokenness situations have made their way to our offices, the elements beneath the surface that drive these situations have been building for years. Unraveling the stories behind what shows up in your office takes time and a commitment to pursue the entire truth, not just what is obvious. As a caring helper, it can be very easy to get sucked into the impact of the offender’s behavior, forgetting that there are many other elements that drive that behavior. Recognizing this doesn’t excuse anything, it simply gives us needed context to help us know how to best help everyone involved.

Here are a few observations I think give helpful context to the fact that there’s more to the story than what presents on the surface:

1. Actions are black and white, but the things that influence actions are not.

Take the example I used above. Here is a man who has lied to his wife, become addicted to porn, and whose behavior has escalated to the point where he had a physical affair. Is there anything vague about the rightness or wrongness of his actions? Of course not. If you come from a Biblical perspective, lying is wrong. Using porn is wrong. Having an affair is wrong. All these actions are sinful, and there is no ambiguity. But could there be influences, contributing factors and experiences in this man’s story that give some context into the actions he chose? This is a question worth asking (and one that we will explore more in the next post). Asking the question does not mean you are lessening, glossing over, or excusing his sin; it simply means you understand there are additional parts of the story that need to be understood.

2. Not everyone does the same things for the same reasons.

It can be easy to make a judgment on why a person would do the things he or she does. “He did that because he’s a selfish jerk.” “She did that because she’s emotionally unstable.” I’m sure these and other stereotypical “explanations” have crossed through many of our minds when dealing with volatile situations. But it’s important to understand that while actions can tell a pretty loud story of their own, they also can give some insight into a person’s back story (if we pay attention). Some people choose certain behaviors because they learned early in life they were on their own to get their needs met, and in their immaturity chose unhealthy behaviors to try to meet those needs. As the person ages and grows, the versions of these coping behaviors age as well. Often the method in which people act out can give some insights into formative and difficult early life experiences. (One of the best resources to understand how experience affects behavior is Jay Stringer’s excellent book Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing.) While there is no excuse or justification for sinful/hurtful behavior, there is very often an explanation.

3. Curiosity about (not judgment of) a person’s actions is a better path to lasting change.

By the time someone ends up in your office, there’s usually not a lot of arguing over whether or not the actions are harmful or sinful. Even if there is some difference of opinion, though, I’ve become more convinced that our best solution isn’t to try and win that argument through forcing someone to feel “appropriately shameful” for what they’ve done. Instead, a very helpful thread of conversation could begin with, “I’m curious about why that is…” Judgment over a person’s sin, that often manifests in the form of anger and harshness, rarely produces the change everyone is looking for (including the person who has committed the sin). Curiosity often allows us to get to the deeper heart of the matter, and God will use this curiosity to reveal important information that helps in processing and ultimately repenting of sin in a healthy way. Judgment is easy, and curiosity is difficult and less clear-cut, which is why many of us have a hard time with an approach of curiosity. But in the end it’s so worth it.

Recognizing that there’s always more to the story than what presents on the surface allows us to be curious, patient, gracious, and kind to people who have likely been terrified to talk with anyone about their sin. They’ve expected judgment, and when they experience something else, something kinder, that opens the door to amazing things.

In Part 3, we’ll talk about the incredibly powerful influence of trauma on people’s behaviors.

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 1

These next few posts are specifically written with pastors, church leaders, and other caring/helping professionals in mind. They are for anyone who takes on the role of helping and walking with people in their brokenness. I believe one of the greatest privileges pastors and other leaders/helpers have is the opportunity to help people in their congregations. The Bible talks about the joy and the blessing of helping and walking alongside other people.

“God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.” (Hebrews 6:10)

“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:2)

“A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.” (Proverbs 17:17)

As much of a privilege as it is to help people, it’s important not to confuse privilege with ease. Helping people isn’t EASY (as in, it’s HARD). It’s also not SIMPLE (as in, it’s COMPLICATED).

While there are some situations where helping is easier or simpler, pastors and other leaders are dealing with extraordinarily difficult and complicated issues with people in the congregations they lead. More than ever before, pastors are being inundated with sexual brokenness issues. Christians are struggling with pornography, affairs, and other forms of sexual sin at almost identical levels as those who do not profess Christ.

Many leaders say that sexual brokenness has become the topic that comes up in pastoral counseling more than any other. They also say, when they’re being honest and vulnerable, that they do not feel adequately prepared to address sexual brokenness. They express fear that they aren’t able to understand what’s going on. They say they’re afraid of giving counsel that actually makes things worse.

How can leaders shepherd sexually broken people with greater confidence, and in ways that actually help?

Knowing that this kind of help isn’t EASY or SIMPLE, I want to offer a few posts to give pastors and leaders a bit more perspective and understanding for these situations.

Greater understanding leads to greater empathy.

Greater empathy leads to greater safety.

Greater safety leads to greater honesty.

Greater honesty leads to greater healing and freedom.

With this as a goal, I want to use the next few posts to look at three important things to understand when offering help, support, and counsel to sexually broken people:

1. What presents on the surface isn’t the whole story.

2. Trauma is an incredibly powerful influence in people’s sexual brokenness.

3. Helping both offender AND offended can be a mine field, but it’s worth it.

These posts will only scratch the surface of each of these topics, but will hopefully increase awareness of how important it is to deepen our understanding of complicated issues. When we do the wonderful, critically important, and emotionally volatile work of helping hurting people, this understanding is something God will use on their path to healing.

Check back soon for Part 2!

Tag Archives: leaders

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 4

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 4

Helping both the “offender” AND the “offended” can be a mine field, but it’s worth it.

1. A lot of the work needs to be done separately (at least initially).

2. Build a team to support the different needs of both people.

3. Expect criticism when showing grace to an offender.

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 3

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 3

Trauma is an incredibly powerful influence in people’s sexual brokenness.

1. Everyone carries trauma, even if they don’t know it.

2. Trauma causes people to develop strategies to survive.

3. The sinful actions that result from a person’s survival strategies shouldn’t surprise us.

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 2

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 2

What presents on the surface isn’t the whole story.

1. Actions are black and white, but the things that influence actions are not.

2. Not everyone does the same things for the same reasons.

3. Curiosity about (not judgment of) a person’s actions is a better path to lasting change.

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 1

Helping Isn’t Easy (or Simple), part 1

An Open Letter to Sexually Broken People

An Open Letter to Sexually Broken People

Who Cares What I Think About Kanye?

Who Cares What I Think About Kanye?

The Keys to the Candy Store, Part 2

The Keys to the Candy Store, Part 2

The Keys to the Candy Store, part 1

The Keys to the Candy Store, part 1

Sexual Struggles & The Great Commission

Sexual Struggles & The Great Commission

I Don’t Know What To Do…

I Don’t Know What To Do…

Pastors and Porn: Disqualified?

Pastors and Porn: Disqualified?

Accountability…love the concept, need a better word.

Accountability…love the concept, need a better word.