Welcome back to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast. One of the things that I really strive to do as your podcast host is to look at what episodes are you guys most interested in, and giving more of those episodes to you. Hello, and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace. We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right in today’s episode.
I’ve always noticed that personal stories do really well. It helps reduce shame, stigma, and so we try to throw a lot of personal story examples of people who have struggled with OCD and have worked through treatment and come out to a better place in their recovery. That gives you guys hope and encouragement, and so as I was going through and looking at our download numbers and episodes that you guys were most interested in, what I found was we had a pattern: whenever we do an episode regarding OCD, sexuality, that gets a pretty high download number. Back on episode 1 32, I talked with my husband, Steve, about “is this a sexual obsession or lust,” and I really just wanted him there for the male struggle regarding lust. And what is that experience is like? Because obviously I know it’s very different for males than females, and this tends to be an obsession that I’ve seen a lot more men struggle with than women. So that episode was pretty popular. We had an episode back on 1 63, “Overcoming Shameful Sexual Themes.” And so those two episodes, in particular, have seemed to be way more popular than some of our other episodes.
So I know that a lot of you as Christians out there are dealing with sexual themes, sexual obsessions, and you’re really struggling. It’s something that you can be very ashamed about. You don’t wanna talk to anybody about it. How in the world could I tell someone that I’m dealing with all of these sexual intrusive thoughts? So I thought let’s go ahead and just do a whole series, and I’m calling it the Healthy Perspectives on Sex Series. So this is gonna run for the next several weeks. If you don’t deal with any sexual themes, I guess you can kind of skip over if you want to, but I think that there will be some really good information in here for you regardless.
To be completely transparent, I have been procrastinating on getting today’s episode done. My assistant will tell you that things are usually prepared much farther in advance than this particular recording of this episode. And as I sat down to record it and looked through the struggle, I realized what it was. I realized, just through prayer and connection with the Holy Spirit, and what I felt like he was speaking to me, was that I needed to get kind of personal on this episode. And that’s really hard because, quite frankly, I have family members that listen to this. But in the end of the Holy Spirit and I wrestling with this and me saying, “Hey, we really have to put all that in there, God. I think people could still benefit from this episode. I don’t really need to know all Carrie’s stuff regardless.” But the Bible tells us in Revelation that we overcome by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony. I am here to tell you today that I’ve been through some stuff surrounding sexual things that I’m gonna get into—and nothing super graphic; we’re not going there today—but I will tell you that I have a testimony, and I want to be able to share that with you. The reason for that is if the pain that I have experienced, and sharing some of that with you, if that helps one other person who hears this out there, then it is completely worth it.
I want to talk about my story today. I’ve had some time and some distance removed from some of these things that helps me be able to talk about it, and I have had a lot of therapy and healing and prayer and different things that have really helped me be able to move forward by the grace of God. That’s the only reason that I am here speaking to you about this today.
Today’s topic is recovery from purity culture. Now, you may or may not be able to relate to this. I grew up in a very conservative background. My dad was a pastor. I am in my early forties right now. Around the time I was a teenager, it was very much promoted: the IAH State and goodbye. The True Love Waits campaign was absolutely huge. People were getting purity rings. There was a lot of conversation surrounding saving yourself for marriage. Now, the reason for this was because we were dealing with things on rapidly on TV and on the internet. It was getting more and more perverse. I think our parents’ generation saw this, that we were being exposed to things that they were not ever exposed to. I think the movie Titanic came out somewhere around—I could be totally wrong on this—but I was maybe in middle school, maybe 11, 12-ish, and everybody was going out to see Titanic, like it was a really big deal. It was a huge movie. My parents went to see it, and they were like, “Nope, you’re not watching that.” And I was like, “Why? I don’t understand. Like, all my friends are seeing this.” And I think over time they finally relented. Like after all of my other friends had seen it, then my best friend was like, “I’ll go with you, and so I’ll see it again.” So her and I went and saw it. I think it had something to do with the sex scene in the car and probably something else, and you didn’t even see anything, but my parents were just like, no, that’s too much. Respect their decisions, ’cause they were just trying to raise me right. I’m not judging that—just to give you a glimpse that that was the culture.
The culture was very much the only conversations surrounding sex were “No, no, no. You don’t do that until you’re married.” And this has been very damaging for a generation of individuals, for a generation of men and women. I believe a lot of times we focus on it being damaging to women, but I think it was equally damaging to males as well. I am a part of a group of therapists that are in the Nashville, Tennessee area, and I will see people running groups all the time about recovering from purity culture. So I know that this is a thing that people experienced, and let’s talk about the reasons that it was damaging—were because we did not have a balanced perspective of “God has created us as sexual beings,” and one of the things I want to point out here is when we look at the Bible, we’re seeing people who are getting married much younger than we are getting married today in a more modern society, except for if you are in other countries. Some places, they’re getting married younger, but in the broad generalization, Western cultures, we are getting married much older. And so we have to kind of take that into consideration: that we have urges and things that were fulfilled at a younger age back in the day, and I’ll probably bring that up again in future episodes.
However, from what I remember of the education in the nineties and going through the True Love Waits—I read that book; I read some other books that were maybe a little bit more balanced—and it was very much a big focus about saving yourself for marriage. There were a couple things that, for me, happened within me that may have not happened within other people. One, it caused me to fear sex, and I didn’t get that balanced perspective of “God has created you as a sexual being; that is a good thing.” That goes all the way back to creation—when you look at God creating Adam and Eve in his image—that they were naked and that they were unashamed, that there was this sense of heightened intimacy, and it was beautiful, like God said it was good. So there wasn’t a perspective of “Hey, sex is good if you use it within certain boundaries.” It was just like, no, we don’t do that. We don’t talk about sexual things. And so then, as a child, I’m like, okay, so if I don’t talk about it, that must mean it’s bad, ’cause I think there’s probably other things that are bad that—oh no, don’t say anything about that. And I think some of that was just that generation—they didn’t talk about those types of things. Hopefully we’re finding some more balance in our generation.
You may have not grown up in the purity culture generation, but you may have grown up with parents who were influenced by it. And I have to realize some people my age have children that are getting to be almost grown, right? Understand that there’s a wide variety of ages that may have been influenced by some of this teaching in the church culture. And the problem is when you believe maybe sex is bad, or it’s dirty, or it’s not a good thing because I’m just being told “no, you just don’t do that until you’re married,” and it can have all these horrible consequences. I remember, like, in youth group, we watched these interviews with Dr. Dobson and Ted Bundy. I don’t know if anybody saw those. I think they’re on YouTube. Wild stuff—just very extreme. Ted Bundy was a serial killer, but it all started with pornography, and so you gotta stay away from pornography. I mean, that was just—for my nervous system as a middle school, high schooler growing up in a conservative culture—that was too much. It really was. And if it scared some people outta using pornography, great. I don’t think it probably had the intended effect that they were hoping that it would have. But I remember watching those videos and being quite horrified by those.
Then you also add this other layer that I was in public school, and we go to public school and they’re like, “Hey, don’t have sex because you’re gonna get all these horrible sexually transmitted diseases. And now let me show you an entire slideshow of genital warts and other infections and different graphic pictures of all of these different things,” and quite frankly, that was traumatizing. I mean, I don’t know any other way to say that for a highly sensitive person who’s growing up in a conservative culture, and I can’t go home and say, “Oh, hey mom, they’re showing me pictures of penises at school.” My parents would’ve been horrified. They had no idea that all of that was going on and that that was part of the sex education from the school system.
There was fear on both sides. There was fear from the non-Christian, secular side about sex: “You’re gonna get all these diseases.” And then there was this fear from the Christian side of “You are going to really harm your relationship with God, yourself, your body.” All of that—and the intentions were to protect me, and, like, as a full-grown adult, I can understand that now, and I can respect those people and what they were trying to do on both sides. However, I am going to say it again: it was really damaging for me.
I got into a relationship in college and ended up marrying somebody that I had met, that we were serving together in the church, you know, continued to be in a conservative culture. And then you get married, and all of a sudden you’re just supposed to be, like, able to have sex now? I mean, like, there’s just supposed to be some kind of switch that gets flipped in your brain—at least this was how I thought it. And then you’re supposed to, like, I don’t know, know how to do these things and be good at it. That’s so unrealistic. That is an unrealistic picture that comes from our culture of TV and movies where people just meet somebody, and they magically fall in love, and then they have this great, amazing sexual encounter. That is such a lie out there, if you don’t already know that. It’s a huge lie that many of us believe, and then it causes us to shame ourselves of like, “Wait a minute. I don’t know how to be a good sexual partner. I’ve had no experience with this.” And then some other people, that led them to believe, “Well, maybe I should have some experience with this before I get married.” And I don’t believe that is what God wants us to do.
According to what Scripture says about sex, I still hold to a conservative standard of sexual ethic, but I want you to know kind of, like, what my process has been on recovering from purity culture. One of the things I’ve had to realize is that: A) God created sex; B) sex is a beautiful thing if it’s in the right boundaries; and C) God wants us to enjoy this intimate connection with our spouse that we are married to and that we are in a fully committed relationship.
A little bit back to my story: flipping that switch was very, very challenging for me. I did kind of, like, get to a place where I could be sexual and all of that type of stuff, but I think I still had, in the back of my mind, maybe some ideas about sex that probably weren’t true or weren’t accurate, or I just had a lot of confusion. I think probably, like, how do I reconcile all the things that I grew up with—who I am now? Like, I know I’m married, and I know, like, sex is okay inside of marriage and all of those types of things, but I think that there was just a lot of confusion there.
So, God creating you as a sexual being goes back to Genesis, but also read the book of Song of Solomon, which made it into the Bible. Okay, so some spicy stuff made it into the Bible for a reason—because sex is beautiful, and I believe that the enemy wants nothing more than to distort this because of how good and how beautiful it is. Genesis also talks about two becoming one, and that is not just a physical connection. That’s the thing that you need to have an understanding about sex that I was not taught growing up. Sex is more than a physical connection. The reason that there are boundaries surrounding it is because God loves us and because sex is an emotional connection. It’s a spiritual connection. And so you do not want to be spiritually and emotionally or physically connected to somebody that you are not married to, that you are not in that committed relationship with, because it leads to all kinds of problems. And you know somebody that could come to your mind right now that should not be in a relationship and probably would not be in that relationship had they not jumped into bed with that individual—because now their soul is tied to that person, and their emotions are very much tied to that person, and they’re having a hard time pulling back from that.
The second point that I wanna make here is it’s really important for you, if you’re gonna recover from purity culture, to look at: what were the things that I was directly told about sex, and what were the things that—maybe it was an undercurrent—maybe it was something I picked up, or I came to reason to believe, and it was reasonable that I should come to that reasoning process? To really just identify what some of those things are. Some women are led to believe that all men care about is sex, and this causes major problems for them when they get into marriage because they think, “Oh, well, you only want me for my body,” and that could be not their husband’s intention at all. Men are trying to get a sexual need met, and then women are like, “Whoa, there’s sexual needs and there’s emotional needs,” and a lot of time it’s really important for women to feel that emotional connection before they have sex. And it’s really important for guys to feel, like, physically attracted and to feel good about themselves, like, engaging in that encounter. So it’s a complex thing that happens.
How did you come to believe certain things about sex—whether it was “sex is bad,” “sex is dirty,” “men are just out to have sex, that’s all they want” (kind of like that dirty old man syndrome), “sex should be painful,” and that is not true. If you are a woman, please do not believe that—run so, so far from that belief. Maybe your beliefs about sex are, “Well, sex is a natural thing, and so therefore I should just be good at it, and I don’t feel like I’m very good at it, and so I just don’t wanna engage there.” Maybe your beliefs are that sex isn’t safe because you’ve had abuse in your past, or you’ve had trauma, and so it’s really hard—even though you know you’re with a safe person right now—it may be that it’s really hard for you to be vulnerable with that person and open up to them. And that is totally normal. We’re gonna get into some of those things in later episodes.
But if you’re able to sit down and identify, “Okay, what are these lies, basically, that I have believed about sex, and do those lies align with Scripture?” And I wanted to focus on some sense that it’s normal to feel pain during sex that some women may believe—it is not. I have experienced sexual pain at a variety of different points in my life, and the things that have helped me with that have been seeking gynecological help, going to a pelvic floor physical therapist—I didn’t even know what that was, I mean, for a long, long time. So if you don’t know what pelvic floor physical therapy is—sounds really out there—it’s more common, probably, or understood by women who have had babies because everything just gets screwed up, okay? When you have a baby, like, it’s crazy. But they don’t just help with women who have had children. If you are having sexual pain issues, I really encourage you to be evaluated, and if the first person doesn’t listen to you or they don’t help you, go find the next person who can help you. The first time, I had to go through many different providers before I was really heard and understood, and they were competent enough to be able to help me, because the initial people that I found were not confident enough to be able to help me and, fortunately, finally referred me to someone who could help me. Pain is not okay. It’s not normal, and it’s something that you really have to work with and communicate with whoever you are with in dealing with that.
I felt a lot of shame for a long time because I felt like somehow the pain had to do with my purity culture upbringing and my rigidity about sex and la, la, la, la, la. It was not true. I had a physical condition that I was dealing with, and once I got treatment for said physical condition, the pain went away and life was good. I share that to say it is possible for you as well if you are dealing with any type of sexual pain, to just reduce the shame surrounding that and say, “It’s not okay. I’m not going to deal with this, but I have to have the courage, and I have to be able to face that and get the help.” And that is super, super hard, especially if you’re dealing with a lot of shame or a lot of embarrassment: “I just don’t really want anybody touching me or dealing with that.” But that is something that you have to work through, and certainly find a therapist that can help you work through the emotional side of going through that, because that is challenging.
The third thing that I want to say is that you want to replace those lies that you are believing—figure out where they came from, and then seek truth. What is true? Go back and read Genesis. Go back and read “they were naked and unashamed.” Go back and read that “the two became one flesh.” Like, God didn’t mean for us to be alone—he wanted us to be able to connect in this way, and that level of intimacy, in a lot of ways, is a mirror of our intimacy with God. We want to be close to God and unashamed. We want to be super connected with God and have an intimacy in our relationship with Christ. It’s not the same—it doesn’t exactly all fit together—but hopefully you understand what I’m saying is that there was a sense where people could be fully open in the Garden of Eden with God without the sense of needing to hide their bodies. Go read Song of Solomon, even if it makes you blush. Go ahead and read that. Read what Paul talks about in terms of the marital union, and he talks about how we are the bride of Christ and our husband is representing Christ in the relationship. And yes, this is a marriage, but it’s also this picture of the connection between Christ and his church. That is a beautiful thing. Hey, sex is part of that union. It is part of that connection. It is part of that intimacy. Your physical body, including your sexual organs, were created by God—they are not bad. So that is another belief that some people hold: that not only “sex is bad,” but “oh gosh, my private parts are.” No, they are not.
Teach your children the correct name for private parts. I’m a really big proponent of that. My husband thinks I’m a little nuts, so I’m like, it’s important. I don’t want her to have any kind of shame surrounding that area of her body. I know that these things are super hard to talk about, but if you have dealt with any kind of sexual trauma, any kind of abuse, any kind of someone exposing themselves to you—even if it wasn’t something where you’re like, “Oh, well, that wasn’t a big deal. It was just kids playing around”—if it bothers you, go to trauma therapy. Get in some counseling, please. It will change your life if you find the right provider that you feel like you can trust, that you feel like you can connect with. Getting that trauma therapy—I had to go through therapy over those sexual images that I saw in health class, okay? And most people would be like, “That’s ridiculous. Like, no one was killing you at the time.” I agree. But it was traumatizing to me. So nobody else gets to say that wasn’t traumatizing to you and your nervous system, because they’re not in your body. And I think part of the reason it was so horrifying was because I thought, “Oh, I know my parents wouldn’t want me to be looking at this,” growing up in that very conservative environment. And my dad’s, like, even calling the health teacher trying to find out, like, what exactly they’re gonna be teaching and what’s going on, and I’m sure she minimized everything.
I know a lot of people make light of trauma, and they say, “Oh, it’s not as bad as somebody else’s,” but just to say that if it bothers you, and it still bothers you, or still comes back, or you still think about it, or you feel like it’s shaping your thought process, then go ahead and get some EMDR for it. Brainspotting. I have—I don’t care what you do, but get some healing for that. It’s just so important, and it’s gonna affect your relationships, whether you’re single and wanna be married, or whether you are married, whether you’re divorced—whatever you’ve been through—please get the help that you need. And if you need help for your physical body, if you are really struggling sexually for any reason, definitely look into pelvic floor physical therapy. Look into going to a gynecologist, talking to somebody about this. As embarrassing and uncomfortable as it is, it’s time that we free ourselves from the shame of getting what we need.
I definitely believe that for—if you are super struggling with OCD, sexual intrusive thoughts, and you think, “There is no way that I can go talk to another person about this,” that may be exactly what you need to do. And you don’t necessarily have to go into massive amounts of detail about all the things that are coming up in your head in order to get the help. Your counselor is gonna be able to teach you skills and help you know, like, what to do when those intrusions come up. It’s super important, in terms of OCD, that there’s maybe a lot of mental compulsions—whether it’s confessing those thoughts that are coming up or repeating a certain Scripture verse or other things that you’re doing in your mind, like trying to replace it with a positive image. All of those things are actually strengthening the OCD because it’s the obsessive-compulsive loop—that you’re just stuck in, and you’re going around and around. So, as hard as it is, it’s important to be able to learn those skills not to react, and then maybe the same way that you are reacting.
I have a self-help course which integrates Christianity with inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy. I would love for you to check it out on my website—it’s just kerry bach.com/training. If you’re not at a place where you feel like you can go to therapy and talk with somebody, or maybe you say, “I just can’t seem to find the right provider. I keep running into walls. I can’t afford it,” this self-help option is available for you, and I hope that it’s really your entrance in being able to get the help that you need. God wants you to thrive as a healthy being—physically, emotionally, mentally, and yes, sexually. God is for you. He loves you. I hope you hang around and check out the next few episodes that we’re gonna have on the Healthy Perspectives on Sex Series. See you then.
Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.
