Author and therapist Jay Stringer writes, “Unwanted sexual behaviors are due to the unexamined and therefore unresolved issues in our lives.” My struggle with the pain of unexamined and unresolved issues allowed shame to become one of the most effective weapons to shut me down and cause me to hide. 

Shame is a profound feeling that I am inherently weak, that I am damaged and unworthy of love. One of the first symptoms of underlying shame is isolation. Shame steals, kills, and destroys our integrity and joy as a man or woman. In my reluctance to relive and reveal parts of my story, I resisted looking at those things in my heart I didn’t want to remember.

There are parts I would rather dismiss, gloss over, or even rewrite in my story. But quickly driving past these scenes, as if they didn’t exist or had no impact, was not honest and built a wall against the transformational work of God in my life. I believe now more than ever that the past is not the past when it invades the present.

In my confusion about virtues and to protect myself from being hurt, I locked my heart in a coffin, much the way C. S. Lewis described in The Four Loves: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up in the casket or coffin or your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.” Love involves risk, but the risk of not loving means your heart changes; it becomes unbreakable, but brokenness is the pathway to healing.