Emotions and Sexual Escape: Reframing the Rescue

Christians who are trying to stop using sex to escape have heard it all—learn this new insight (cognitive focus), find the right accountability (relational focus), use this strategy (behavioral focus). The answer, indeed, is as multifaceted as the problem. But these answers often neglect the emotional distress of temptation. And yet it is the intense, negative emotion in temptation that sexual escape ostensibly solves. This session re-frames temptation as an experience of emotional suffering, and explores the ways this framing changes our entire approach to the issue—what insights we look for, what strategies we employ, what help we ask from friends, what help we seek from God. Strugglers and helpers alike will be challenged to expand their emotional vocabulary to give voice to pain, with God and others, and to faithfully endure, rather than escape.