Counseling Sexual Addicts
Hal B. Schell and Gary Sweeten with Betty Reid
Counseling rule number one: if possible, get counselees out of the environment that is causing their problem. Remove alcoholics from bars, keep drug addicts out of opium dens, and tell overeaters to lock the refrigerator.
Unfortunately, pastors don't have that luxury. Sexual temptation is impossible to avoid altogether. It pervades our culture. Consider these factors:
— Pornography became the focus of national attention with the Attorney General's Commission and its landmark 1987 report, which among other things, documented the rapid spread of porn in recent years. "Sales have never been better in the pornography trade," reported U.S. News & World Report of the $8 billion annual business.
— The VCR, barely known five years ago, has made sexually oriented material much more easily available and brought it into many homes for the first time. Sales of hard-core porn videos, for example, more than doubled from 1983 to 1986.
— This trend has not spared church members. According to our survey of Christianity Today magazine lay people, 45 percent indicate they have done something they consider sexually inappropriate. Twenty-three percent admit they have had extramarital intercourse.
Church leaders must help these people. But help in a way that doesn't put themselves in compromising positions.
There are several ways to do this.
One is to learn specific counseling techniques to use for different sexual problems. Several of the chapters in this section deal with these specific problems:
Gary Sweeten and Hal Schell, who minister at College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, write in Chapter 8 about "Counseling Sexual Addicts," how to deal with people who have all the earmarks of being addicted to sex. Sexual addiction is a category ...
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