Self-Image

As far back as I can remember, I have had problems with my self-image. I think most people (and particularly teenagers) experience insecurities about their body and the way they appear to others at some point. For some reason, perhaps because of my very self-conscious personality, I started developing insecurities from a very young age.

Now, I think I was a fairly normal-looking kid. In fact, I think I was actually pretty darned cute, and I have photos to prove it! I had golden, wavy hair and I always had a smirk on my face. I love looking at photos of me when I was a kid, because I looked so innocent and happy. Looking back, however, I remember being as young as five or six years old and having a strong sense of shame about my body.

I remember thinking that I was “fat”. Photographic evidence proves I was definitely not fat. I may have had a slight pot-belly, as many kids do, but I was certainly not fat. But I remember feeling shame at my belly and chest, to the point that I would refuse to take my top off in front of anyone, even my mother.

My childhood is filled with memories of trying to hide my “ugly” body from people. I hated swimming because so much of my flesh was revealed. I always thought that everyone must be looking at me and laughing at my body. I always tried to hide my body by staying neck-deep under the water or keeping a towel hung around my neck. When I played soccer, the coach would divide us into “shirts” and “skins” for training. I would pray to God that I would not be in the “skins” group. At sleep-overs I would always be surprised when other boys would sleep with unbuttoned shirts, or even topless. Weren’t they ashamed of their bodies? Apparently not. Being naked or semi-naked around other people was a source of deep anxiety for me.

The origin and extent of all these insecurities still puzzle me. No one, as far as I can remember, ever actually laughed at my body or called me fat when I was a kid. And yet somehow, I got the notion in my head that my body was ugly and had to be hidden. That such a shame should be present in a child for no obvious external reason seems rather odd to me. Perhaps it is some throwback to the shame Adam and Eve had at their nakedness after sinning against God. Why it affected me so deeply as a child, I have no idea.

When I started going through puberty, my attitude toward my body became a little more extreme. I had real trouble accepting the changes happening to my body. The hair growing in my armpits and on my legs and groin disturbed me. I didn’t want hair there! How repulsive! I found a disposable razor in the bathroom and shaved it off, hoping to solve the problem. I had been to sex-ed classes before, but somehow I still didn’t quite understand that these things were a normal part of growing up.

Physically, my body was turning into a man. But emotionally, I was far from it. I couldn’t understand or accept what was happening and I didn’t know how to cope with it. Strangely, at this time when a boy particularly needs the support and direction of his father, my father seemed even more distant from me than ever. We never talked or did anything together. He was busy with his own projects. I was just left to my own devices.

I think this was a critical point in my development. Around the age of 13-14, many factors conspired to produce a kind of trauma deep in my psyche. My body was changing, and I was convinced there was something defective about it. My father was emotionally absent, and I had lost all the friends of my childhood. I was completely alone. I think it is understandable that in such a situation, a young kid might think there is something wrong with himself. I believed I was somehow inferior to other people and that no one could possibly like or accept me.

Given this context, it makes sense to me that when other boys were starting to take an interest in girls, I began taking an interest in boys. Why would I be curious about girls when I couldn’t even understand or accept myself and my body? Intellectually I knew I was a boy but emotionally I wasn’t sure who or what I was. And yet my sexuality was developing, and it needed an object. The boys around me that I started showing sexual interest in represented to me all the things I perceived I wasn’t myself. Whereas I was ugly and awkward, they were beautiful and athletic. In a sense, you could say I began to worship the physical form of the male.

I think this is why pornography took such a hold on me. I became obsessed with finding the images that represented to my mind the “perfect” male. In masturbation, I could possess that image and for a brief instant get a “shot” of that beautiful masculinity that I didn’t believe I possessed myself. I have noticed a lot of other same-sex attracted guys out there often talk about the emotional side of their attractions (i.e. just wanting to “be close” to another guy, hug him, be intimate, feel loved etc.) For me, this has not so much been the case. It has always been a mainly physical attraction, and in my sinfulness, it became very lustful. I’m not sure what happened to the emotional stuff, because it really should be there somewhere. Perhaps I just did a good job of suppressing that side of things. I won’t deny there were some times I felt a deep emotional need for “male love”, but mainly my feelings and behaviour focussed on a lust for the male body.

Over time, I have become a lot more comfortable with myself and accepting of my physical body. For most of my teenage years I thought no girl could possibly be attracted to me, and I was shocked on the few occasions that certain girls did express an attraction to me. I will not venture here to make any generalisations about other people, but personally, I believe that much of my own homosexually-oriented feelings are a result of deep-seated insecurities about my self-perception as a boy and as a man, both physically and emotionally.

I think it is important for everyone who is attracted to members of their own sex to be honest and reflective about their sexual feelings, and to think about why and how these feelings arose and developed; if not because we necessarily seek change, then at least to try to understand ourselves better.

My Story

In this post, I will be relating an outline of the events of my life, or at least the parts that seem most relevant to the topic of my blog. There are many little episodes and facts from my life that I’ve been thinking about lately, and I find some of them highly interesting as I try to puzzle together a coherent understanding of who I am, where I came from, and where I’m going. I don’t think I have a very remarkable story; in many ways I’ve led a very normal life and I’m sure many people could identify with at least some parts of it. Nonetheless, I find it helpful to relate it here as a starting point for the rest of my blog. I intend to delve a little more deeply into specific experiences and how I interpret them in future posts.

My Childhood
I was born into a committed Christian family. My parents, while having their faults, loved, disciplined and cared for me as best they knew how. We went to church every Sunday, and although I didn’t really know Christ as Saviour until my teenage years, as far back as I can remember I always had a profound sense of God and the need to act righteously.

My father was a good man, but a good man with a few serious shortcomings. He was very silent and undemonstrative at home. I recall how, whenever there were visitors, he would act all folksy and smile and he would love to tell jokes and stories. When there were no visitors, however, he said barely a word to anyone. In particular, he said very little to me. He certainly never told me he loved me (although I know many men seem to struggle making that utterance to their sons). Once a year he would tell me he was “proud” of me when I showed him my straight-A report card, and I’d get a firm, masculine handshake from him on birthdays. He was not a bad father, but he always seemed a rather distant and fearful figure, and he gave me very little of the encouragement and support that a boy needs on the path to becoming a man. He seemed more concerned about conforming to outward expressions of “masculinity”, such as showing some interest in sport, avoiding physical contact with other people, and not showing any signs of weakness such as crying.

I was fairly shy as a boy, happy for the most part, but terribly sensitive and introspective. I had a few friends, but I remember that in general, I was more than content just to be in my own company, playing in the sand or with my building blocks and other toys. Like many other people who end up having same-sex attractions, I remember feeling very “different” as a child. I’ve never interpreted this as being somehow intrinsically related to my sexuality, however, but rather just a fact of my personality.

I’ve always been somewhat of an “observer”. As a child, I very rarely involved myself in the activities of other children. I would just kind of hang around on the fringes, never quite knowing what to do, or how to be part of the group. In spite of this, I think I was a pretty good-natured kid, always smiling, and trying to be as kind to others as I could. I was always pondering things in my mind, about myself and the strange world I found myself in. I was never very good at sports, and I didn’t particularly enjoy them, but sometimes I feel that was because nobody ever took the time to actually teach me how to play. As I got older, my inability to fit in with other boys and play sports led to a great deal of social isolation and a lot of insecurity inside.

The Teen Years
The general happiness and cheerful optimism of my childhood began to change drastically when I started at high school. At high school I barely had any friends. The few friends I did have belonged to the various cliques that exist in high schools, and since I was not a “group” person, I more or less only related to my friends when no-one else was around. So I mostly just trudged around school on my lonesome.

Around the age of 14, I began to “notice” some of the boys around me. I found them strangely attractive, and I’d find myself surreptitiously “sneaking peeks” at them (or at least, the most good looking of them), whenever occasion permitted. Girls, for some reason, didn’t seem to have the same effect on me. Having discovered masturbation a couple of years previously while in the bathtub, it wasn’t long before I was having sexual fantasies involving my male classmates.

It was around this time that the Internet was starting to make an appearance in many people’s homes, and it wasn’t long before my family was hooked up. It also wasn’t long before I discovered online pornography. I would wait until everybody was in bed, then I’d go online and look for images, and later videos, of naked men, and of men having sex. This was the beginning of years of addiction to pornography, and the entrenchment of homoerotic feelings in my mind.

I would spend hours and hours searching for pornography, looking for the perfect image that would cause the maximum arousal and evoke the deepest lust in me. When I eventually got an Internet connection in my bedroom, it got even worse. Sometimes I would start looking for porn at 8pm and keeping looking right through to 6am the next morning.

Naturally, as a Christian, this became a huge source of guilt for me. I would continue the pattern of downloading and using porn, deleting it in shame from the computer, confessing my sin to God, and then finding myself looking at porn again within a matter of days. I think these years, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, were the worst and darkest of my life. The guilt, shame and self-loathing that my homosexual feelings and porn addiction caused in me were almost unbearable. The fact that I believed in Jesus and could even spout a lot of sayings about God’s grace, love and forgiveness seemed to do very little to comfort my heavy heart or change my behaviour.

I was very alone. If it’s bad enough being a somewhat socially-awkward introvert, try adding a porn addiction. Porn pulled me away from other people. As I gave my heart and mind (or was it God giving me over?) to worshipping at the altar of those tyrannous idols, I spent less and less time with other people, and in fact, I even began to feel very edgy and insecure around other people, particularly other guys (although I would always hide it with the façade my good acting skills could produce). I would be at church, or university, or work, and I’d just be thinking about getting back home to look at my precious porn (haha, the image of Gollum just came into my mind. Well, that’s a bit extreme, I wasn’t really that pathetic… or was I? Gollum is a very good exemplar of addiction and idolatry, and what those things do to us).

Since I spent so many late nights looking at porn, I spent far less time studying than I should have and I’d often sleep in till midday, skipping lectures. It’s a wonder I ever graduated. It was in these days that I began to get rather depressed. It wasn’t a debilitating or suicidal depression, but just what I call a dark, slow depression that just kind of permeated everything in my life. When I wasn’t distressed at my sin, I was generally just bored and apathetic towards everything in life.

Tentative Steps Towards “Healing”
After a few years of living like this, I eventually decided I needed to seek help. I had read a couple of books, including John White’s well-known “Eros Defiled” (and later his “Eros Redeemed”) and a book on the self-therapy of homosexuality by a Catholic called Gerard Van den Aardveg. Books are great, but obviously not a substitute for professional and personal help, so I found a local ministry to homosexuals, and had a couple of meetings with the leader, let’s call him Bob. Since I wasn’t really a “practising homosexual”, Bob advised that their group meetings were probably not appropriate for me. We talked a little and he recommended a book by Elizabeth Moberly, “Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic”, which is more or less a psychoanalytical text on the causes and treatment of homosexuality from a Christian counselling perspective. Bob recommended I see a Christian psychiatrist he had some association with, mainly to see if I needed help with my depression.

So, I ended up seeing the psychiatrist for about a year. At the time, I found the sessions very helpful, and I decided very early that I’d prefer just to see the psychiatrist, and not continue with the ministry group. The sessions were very informal, just chatting really. After getting to know me and my story, the psychiatrist told me that he thought I could probably change my sexual orientation, and that, in his words, I had just “gone a little off track”, and it shouldn’t be so hard to get me back on the right path. I will point out here that the psychiatrist, whilst Christian (but of a liberal bent), was in no way insistent that “change” was always necessarily the best option. He told me he had dealt with many cases over the years, and often, where the client was, well, how should I put it, “very gay”, he preferred to just more or less help them come to a place where they could accept themselves and stop struggling with the issue. I think perhaps the main reason he felt I could change was because I had, in fact, had at least one experience previously in which I felt attracted to a girl (which I will describe another time).

I want to emphasise that the “therapy” was by no means controversial. In fact, it was barely “therapy” at all, it was just kind of talking about sexuality and some of the experiences I had had. In the end, my psychiatrist just gave me some very simple advice, that I could “perhaps just start trying to think about girls”.

I will try to cut a long story short, because this entry is getting long, and I will probably go deeper into some of these things later on. But basically, from that point on, I did begin to think about girls. Within a few days of my psychiatrist giving me that advice, I was watching television when a girl in a bikini came on the screen. It was the strangest thing, but suddenly I felt a very strong sexual response to her. From that day (and over many years) I began to increasingly feel sexual attraction toward the opposite sex.

I know it doesn’t sound particularly convincing, and some people may decry the fact that there wasn’t even any prayer involved, or any so-called “reparative therapy”. But the fact is, the simple advice of my psychiatrist that I could just start to think about girls proved amazingly effective. I think that perhaps the reason it worked is that previously, I had never received any affirmation of my masculinity, or affirmation that I could or should be attracted to girls. I came to believe “I must be gay”. Even though I desperately wanted it to be otherwise, I had no real belief in myself that it could be so. All it took was someone, a man whom I respected and trusted, to almost “give me permission”.

Now, at this point, there are many residual problems. First of all, the topic of pornography didn’t come up at all during the sessions with my psychiatrist, and I was still addicted to it. In fact, my addiction to gay pornography actually very quickly turned into an addiction to straight pornography. Secondly, becoming attracted to girls did not mean I stopped being attracted to guys. A very honest assessment might actually say that whilst there was a change, very little healing actually seemed to take place at all. I would concur with such an assessment. My adventure with psychiatry is part of my story and it had its effect on me, but I certainly wouldn’t say it was a crucial part of my story, and I do have some misgivings about it all.

The Truth Shall Set You Free
Perhaps one of the most pivotal experiences in my life was a meeting I had with my pastor a few years ago. I had reached a point of desperation in my life because there was such a deep incongruity between my Christian beliefs and ideals and the kind of life I was living in secret. In fact, I was almost ready to give up my faith, dear as it was to me. The struggle was just getting too great. In a last ditch attempt to see if there was any hope for me, I decided to come clean with my pastor, a very compassionate man who is in no way ashamed of the gospel. I decided I would tell him everything; about my homosexual feelings, my addiction to pornography and masturbation, everything.

I admit that as I went to see my pastor, deep down, amongst many things, I wanted some sympathy from him. I wanted some acknowledgement that I had indeed travelled a terrible and lonely path full of pain and suffering. Maybe I could even get a little praise for the courageous way I had clung on to my faith in spite of the overwhelming temptation and struggle with sin. Now, my pastor is a very friendly and compassionate man, but he is also a man of the Word, and he will not compromise on the truths he finds in Scripture. When I told him my story, he did not act particularly surprised, and he certainly wasn’t dismayed at what I told him about myself. But neither did he condone any of the sins I had committed.

The surprising thing about our meeting is that my pastor spent very little time asking or talking about my heinous sins. I think he must be an expert in spiritual diagnosis, because very quickly he honed in on something that was of much more interest to him than the fact that I had homosexual feelings or used pornography. It was my attitude to my father. He discovered I had a lot of resentment and bitterness towards my father. His final advice to me was this: if I could not find a way to forgive my father, and “own” my sin (take responsibility for it) instead of blaming it on him (or on anyone or anything else), indeed, if I could not find a way to love my father, then I should not expect any kind of healing or forgiveness from God.

This was a real blow to my ego and the “poor me” within. I wanted my pastor to sympathise with me and tell me what a trooper I was and assure me of the grace and forgiveness of God. I wanted him to agree that yes, my father was a terrible man for not demonstrating love to me and was responsible for my terrible condition. Instead I got a somewhat stern rebuke that I was on a dangerous path in holding such bitterness against my father. I admit that I actually was rather offended and even a little angry at what my pastor was saying. Where was the sympathy I came for? Tears actually came to my eyes as I tried to explain how it was my father’s fault, not mine. But somehow, deep within, I knew that what my pastor was telling me was true. I went away and thought about it, and eventually accepted it.

I consider my pastor one of the godliest men I’ve known. He is not swayed by the opinions of the world, or even the church; he believes in the Word of God and in its power, and in the end, that is what he confronted me with: the Truth. I have nothing but respect for my pastor because of his refusal to pander to my cries for sympathy. If he had, I may have been stuck in a very bad place for a long time. From what he told me, I came to realise that it seems to be a spiritual principle that forgiveness and love are prerequisites to healing. I think the principle is outlined well in 1 John, where, amongst other relevant sayings, it says, “Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness… the darkness has blinded him”. The logic of the first statement might be rephrased as, “Whoever does not love his brother (or father) is in the darkness, and there is something in him to make him stumble”.

My decision to forgive my father and release him from my bitterness was perhaps one of the most important steps in the journey of healing that I am still on. Since then, by the grace of God, many of the problems I had with my self-image have disappeared. However, to this day, I do still have a lot of struggles. That’s what this blog is about.

“Struggling” with Sin

I struggle a lot with issues of “purity”. I won’t go in to all the details now, but for me, pornography use has been an addictive vice that I feel has been a very destructive force in my life, and particularly on my relationship with God. I know many people out there have a similar experience.

I say I “struggle” because it seems a natural word to use here. I once read an article by someone complaining how people say they “struggle with sin” when in fact they don’t actually “struggle”, since the word implies a very active fight against sin; in actual fact they really mean they just kind of “give in” to sin, without really putting up much resistance.

On the other hand, I recall a former pastor of mine explaining once to me that “struggling” with sin, i.e., trying to use your willpower to overcome it, is rather futile, since it will only result in you becoming even more entrenched in the sin.

While this sounds somewhat defeatist (although he did give more advice than that), I have to concur that this really is my experience over the past decade or so of “struggling”: the more I struggle with sin, the more deeply I seem to fall back into sin. How many days or weeks can I go without looking at porn? Seven days? Two weeks? A month? If I get that far, I’m usually pretty happy about it, maybe even a little proud. And you know what they say about pride and what it comes before.

So perhaps that’s precisely the problem. Somehow I think it’s really my flesh that wants to “struggle” with sin, because I want to overcome it in my own strength (and perhaps take the credit for it). But that really is futile; what man can struggle with sin and overcome? The Bible doesn’t seem to encourage us to “struggle” against sin (although the term is used somewhere in Hebrews), so much as to point us continually back to God, who is the only One ever to successfully conquer sin. Sin and my struggle with it shouldn’t be my focus; God and His word should be.

Perhaps it’s not wrong to say we “struggle” with sin in one sense, but my problem is definitely that I usually try to do it with my own resources rather than looking to God. Like many things, I think it may get back to how we define words. If by “struggling with sin” I just mean “trying really really hard not to look at pornography”, I’m probably on the wrong track. But if by “struggling” I mean equipping myself diligently with the word of God, making sure I’m walking with Him daily, living a life of repentance, of faith and hope and love, then perhaps I’m on the right track. I guess it’s a question of focus.

My daily Psalm reading yesterday is pertinent, in fact it’s what got me thinking about this:

How can a young man cleanse his way?
By taking heed according to Your word.
With my whole heart I have sought You;
Oh, let me not wander from Your commandments!
Your word I have hidden in my heart,
That I might not sin against You.
Blessed are you, O LORD!
Teach me Your statutes.
With my lips I have declared
All the judgments of Your mouth.
I have rejoiced in the way of Your testimonies,
As much as in all riches.
I will meditate on Your precepts
And contemplate Your ways.
I will delights myself in Your statutes;
I will not forget Your word.

(Note how Psalms never say things like, “How can a young man cleanse his way? By struggling with all his might against sin. Struggle, struggle ye, until sin bother ye no more.”)

So as I undertake the “struggle” once more, I take this Psalm as a prayer and as a model, that in heeding God’s word and hiding it in my heart, I might not sin against Him.

Apology.

It is with some hesitation that I start this blog. After all, what springs to my mind when I think of blogs is usually the incoherent babblings, ranting opinions and mundane life details of mainly self-absorbed net junkies. What justification is there, really, to write a blog, particularly when you don’t even know who you’re addressing? If you’re mainly addressing yourself, surely a personal journal should suffice, unless you really are naïve enough to think people out there are actually interested in what you ate for dinner last night?

Recently, though, as I’ve started reading more blogs I’ve realised not only are there some good ones out there, but there also seem to be many reasons people write. Some seem to be authorities on the topics they write about, and justifiably have something of worth to offer their readers. Others (perhaps the majority?) seem just to need an outlet or use writing as a means for them to work through the things on their mind, regardless of whether anyone actually reads what they write.

I guess I’m the latter. I’m a Christian who struggles with many issues, but most notably sexuality. I’ve been very much encouraged lately reading through the blogs of some of the same-sex attracted Christians out there. I think one in particular stands out, it was the first one I read, and that is Disputed Mutability. Her story and experience are completely different from my own, but I like her blog because it is extraordinarily well-written, generally not boring (and when it is it’s probably just due to my own impatience) and it is honest and personal, without smacking of self-importance.

My own reason for starting a blog is that I want to use it as a means to focus myself as I try once again to start dealing with the issues in my life that lately I’ve just been avoiding. I’d also really just like to interact with some of you guys out there. The path I’ve trodden over the past decade or so has been rather lonely with regards to support, so it’d be great to hear what some of you think about the topics I bring up.

I am unapologetic in that this will be pretty much a single-issue blog. Well, maybe twin-issue since faith and sexuality are intertwined, but the point is, I feel I really just need to work through the sexuality stuff. The “apology” is mainly for myself, for doing something I said I’d never do, and that is write a blog. Since I struggle a lot with motivation, I’m not sure how far I’ll get. In fact, I originally thought of entitling this blog “Listless Procrastinator: the opinionated musings of a half-interested blogger” but I thought that might be perceived as being trite. Nonetheless, this first entry represents at least the hope that I can get motivated for once.