Making a daily phone call during early recovery is a vital tool for staying focused and accountable. This daily check-in helps you take responsibility for any acting-in or withholding behaviors, and it reinforces the truth that you're not alone—there’s a support system in place to walk with you through recovery.
Much like alcoholism was in its earlier days; sexual addiction has been viewed as a moral problem. The thought has been, “If the addict would just control himself, he wouldn’t act this way.” Too often sexual addiction has been cast as a character or spiritual problem. Many people have labeled it a psychological problem. The real root of sexual addiction isn’t any one factor. And discovering the root to your personal addiction requires a study of the possible causes.
Sexual recovery is a significant indicator of healing for someone recovering from intimacy anorexia. The list of excuses for avoiding sexual growth could go on for pages—but at its core, this resistance reflects a refusal to be giving, loving, and emotionally mature within the marriage.
Unfortunately, neglect is all too common in Christian marriages seeking help. One clear form of this neglect is prayerlessness—when a couple fails to pray together consistently. Over the years, I’ve heard countless women express deep frustration over the lack of emotional and spiritual connection with their husbands.
Take some time this week to sit down with your spouse and create a project list together. Agree on the priorities, and then work through them intentionally and consistently. I get it—I’m a busy guy too—but that’s not an excuse. Look for meaningful ways to serve your spouse.
It’s important to be clear about what you're aiming to accomplish during sex as a recovering intimacy anorexic. You're not just trying to go through the motions—like keeping your eyes open or making conversation. More importantly, you're learning to keep your heart open and to give from a place of genuine love and vulnerability.
Understanding the different types of sex can support your recovery as you work toward experiencing relational sex. This awareness can also help you remain empathetic to the patterns you and your spouse may have developed over time. In recovery, your sexual relationship can grow into one that is not only personal but also nurturing and deeply fulfilling.
Withholding spiritually is a common trait among those struggling with intimacy anorexia. Even individuals who are active in their spiritual communities—those who are religious, volunteer regularly, or serve as spiritual leaders—can behave quite differently at home. Ask yourself: “When was the last time I initiated prayer, worship, or spiritual reading with my spouse without being prompted?” If it’s been a while since you’ve connected spiritually with your spouse in a private setting (not just in public), you may be withholding from them in this area. Take a few minutes today to make a plan to intentionally connect with your spouse on a spiritual level.
The car is a very common place where lust will try to talk to you. You may wonder why. It’s because you are often alone in it. When you are alone, it’s much easier for lust to talk to you. It’s easy for your mind to drift from subject to subject, especially in Western culture where we have so little time to just think.
Most intimacy anorexics, like many people, have an unconscious contact with God. They rely most of the time on their own thinking and resources, and connect with God only after they have thoroughly botched their lives. Step Eleven reminds you to keep God in your conscious mind. You are then able to experience the power and love of God in a whole new way. As a result, you will experience life in a whole new way. You will have a higher sense of purpose and joy. The result of this new awareness of God on a moment to moment basis is a better relationship with God. As with any relationship, efforts at improving the relationship require time, energy, and some sort of communication. With time, you will find the method of communication that works best for you. There is no right or wrong way to do it. Just do it.
The losses for an addict, who disclosed or was caught in adultery due to his addiction, are real. Even though they are the guilty party, they still experience losses.
Steo One: "We admitted that we were powerless over our intimacy anorexia and that our lives had become unmanageable."
Step Eleven: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
In the Old Testament, God gave the Promised Land to the tribes of Israel as an inheritance. But in order to get their inheritance, they had to go to war and kill to receive what God had already given them. In the New Testament, God has given us the lust-free nature of Christ. We just need to go to war with lust in order to receive that nature.
Over the last thirty years, I have observed the following characteristics consistently in those who value their marriage as a miracle:
Initiating intimacy is part of healing. Remember, the definition of intimacy anorexia is active withholding, so sobriety is actively initiating connection and intimacy, of which the 3 dailies are a part of. These exercises are to be done daily, regardless of how much you like your spouse, or how much he/she likes you. This recovery exercise is like the cast on the broken bone: it needs to stay on so you can heal from your addiction to withholding. These are to be done with your heart, not just checking off the box. Intentional sabotaging would be to withhold your heart and claim you are staying sober, but not really investing yourself in these exercises. Since the 3 dailies are important toward demonstrating your intimacy anorexia sobriety, you will need a consequence for relapsing or not initiating. This way, if you withhold, you’re the one who gets the pain, not your spouse. If you withhold the 3 dailies, and you get pain through…
When you are tempted, sometimes your mind isn’t working right. So allow me to make this real simple. The next time you’re tempted to look at porn, masturbate, or act out in other sexual behaviors that do not include your wife, consider this, “Your pastor is a spiritual authority over you as a shepherd over a flock.” The next time you’re tempted to do anything sexually inappropriate ask his permission. Since your sex organ does NOT belong to you, you don’t get to make the decisions. If you choose to submit to authority when you are tempted, you can avoid a relapse.
Technology is a dream come true for many intimacy anorexics, since it can feel as if they are actually doing something or relating to the images on some type of screen. The computer, and especially the internet, is the greatest avoidant strategy of our day. The anorexic may be involved in social networking, shopping, checking weather, chat rooms, pornography, games, gambling, research, etc. This may eat up many hours, while their spouse is in the other room waiting to relate. Take a few minutes today with your wife and set boundaries around technology.
Intimacy Anorexics have many strategies to avoid intimacy and sexuality. For some anorexics, they use the sexual encounter itself to accomplish avoidance and intentionally give pain to their spouse. If you are punishing or pushing away your spouse through sex, then you can clearly see this as an anorexic strategy to give pain, so you can be avoidant.
Sometimes, as a Christian, I feel we are being kicked out of our American culture. Our God has been taken out of our schools and His commandments taken out of our court houses. Even His nativity scene is taken out of some places. I don’t know about you, but it feels like we are being kicked out of our own land.
I want to share a tip with you for patience and that is prayer, but don’t just pray for patience. I am sure you all heard the preacher’s story about the guy who prayed for patience, and he lost his job, his house burned down, and he had a flat tire all in the same day. Of course, that’s a myth, but many of us have a concern about praying for this fruit.
Intimacy is the ability for me to let you behold me, flaws and all. I have heard some say intimacy is in-to-me-see. That’s clever and I think you get the point. The intimacy anorexic prefers to be regarded as altogether good. Prior to recovery, the intimacy anorexic has great difficulty letting their spouse see their flawed self. Interestingly, as intimacy anorexia progresses over time in a soul they become less able to see the positives in their spouse. It’s as if they are (the intimacy anorexic) the good of humanity, and their spouse becomes the bad of humanity over time.
When we lust we are moving in the opposite direction of God. We take a woman and reduce her to an image or an object. We depersonalize her for our consumption. A loving behavior is to expand her by seeing her as God’s child, a wife, mother, and friend. Love expands who she is. Lust reduces her.