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Limitless Spirit
Feeling stuck in the daily grind? Longing for a spiritually rich and meaningful life? Limitless Spirit with Helen Todd is for those who crave a deeper faith, a greater purpose, and opportunities to serve beyond themselves. Through powerful stories and real conversations, this podcast explores how stepping out in faith—whether through mission trips, discipleship, or simply saying ‘yes’ to God—can change your life from surviving to thriving.
Limitless Spirit
Reclaiming Sexual Wholeness
Dr. Todd Bowman discusses his unique approach to treating sexual addiction, blending faith and science.
A notable figure in the realm of Christian psychology, Dr. Bowman joins us to unpack the complex and often concealed issue of sexual addiction within faith communities. Are you aware that over 60% of Christian men and a striking number of women are affected by pornography addiction? In our conversation, Dr. Bowman, with insights drawn from his book "Reclaiming Sexual Wholeness," shares his nuanced understanding of the root causes of sexual addiction, including trauma, abuse, and unhealthy communication patterns. We dissect the distinction between addiction and occasional temptations, emphasizing the need for open dialogue both in families and faith communities.
Dr. Todd Bowman's website: https://www.allelonintensives.com/
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Welcome to Limitless Spirit, a weekly podcast with host Helen Todd, where she interviews guests about pursuing spiritual growth, discovering life's purpose through serving others and developing a deeper faith in Christ.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Limitless Spirit. Today we're diving into a topic that is real, raw and maybe a little uncomfortable, but so important. We're talking about sexual addiction. You might not think it's something that affects people in the church, but the numbers tell a different story. Did you know that over 60% of Christian men, and even 15% of Christian women, say they have struggled with pornography? This isn't just a them problem, it's a we problem, and it's impacting lives, marriages and communities in ways we often don't talk about, at least not enough. Within the church, 62% of evangelical men and 37% of pastors admit to struggling with pornography. These numbers highlight a pressing issue that demands our attention and compassion.
Speaker 2:That's why I'm excited to have Dr Todd Bowman with us today. He's the author of a book called Reclaiming Sexual Wholeness, and he's here to help us understand what's really going on, why it happens and how we can find healing, personally and as a church. Whether this is a battle you're facing, something someone you love is dealing with, or you're just wondering how to help others stick around, this conversation is packed with hope and real-life solutions. Good morning, todd. Welcome to the Limitless Spirit. How are you today?
Speaker 3:Good morning. I am excited to be here. It's just a fantastic opportunity to talk about something I think incredibly relevant, not just in the US but around the world. I know the work that I've done on an international stage just continues to reinforce how important this topic is. I'm super thankful to be here with you, to be able to unpack it and talk about it today.
Speaker 2:Wonderful. Well, let's talk about you first. So what inspired you to focus specifically on the topic of sexual addiction and write the book Reclaiming Sexual Wholeness?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that is a big story. I'll summarize it by saying really it's a story of kind of unexpected calling and the Lord's faithfulness, not really a topic that I ever set out to specialize in or do much with as a clinician or as an educator or as an author or do much with as a clinician or as an educator or as an author. And yet kind of when I was a young professional, I was in supervision. I was a young faculty member actually and under the supervision to get my clinical license to kind of continue being a faculty person. And I had a department chair actually who had a thriving practice, had an overload of clients and I needed to get licensed, so it took to clients and kind of like under his tutelage. And then I had a chance to connect with Mark Laser from Faithful and True while he was still with us and under his tutelage, and then kind of just the Lord faithfully kind of opened doors and, if anything, I strive to really just be obedient.
Speaker 3:That doesn't mean it's come like easy or seamlessly. There's been a lot of kind of I don't know Garden of Gethsemane moments, kind of just reaching my own limits and saying Lord like take the cup, like this is hard work. This is overwhelming work. It's a lot of dealing with people's traumas and their pain and their brokenness and their suffering and trying to alleviate a lot of that distress.
Speaker 3:And it's also a story not just of obedience but really the Lord's faithfulness and you know His grace is sufficient and that's response in these hard moments. Kind of that's the Lord's response. He has always been my grace is sufficient for you and my power is made perfect in weakness. It's really I'm just a guy trying to be a Christian educator at a graduate counseling level and here I'm on this incredible adventure with the Lord and just bear witness to his faithfulness, that sometimes even the things that we don't know, that we can do and can't do in our own power, I think my life, my professional work to date, is really just a story of like with God. All things are possible and it's really about just learning to be obedient, to be humble, to submit and to trust.
Speaker 2:Amen to that and, frankly, most of our callings happen in that certain way. You know, I guess I was expecting a dramatic story or something to hear about, but, to be honest, I didn't realize how prevalent sexual addiction is until I was reading statistics and I remember now, where I saw it, the numbers that 70% of men between the age of 18 and 30 are engaged in watching pornography on a regular basis and you probably have even more statistics on that. So that's huge numbers.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it speaks to me. It's always been a problem. I mean you look at the sexual revolution and kind of some of the sexualization of the imagination in Western culture. That's not to say it's not an issue in Africa or in Asia and other places, but kind of more from a Western context. The proliferation of pornography in particular really coincides with the sexual revolution. It's kind of like there's already a bonfire going and just imagine somebody throwing I don't know like a gallon of kerosene into the middle of a bonfire. Really, how I see kind of the impact of technology 2005, 2006, 2007,. With all of a sudden it was not just a cell phone but it was a supercomputer that we started carrying around in our pockets and the accessibility that's there, the secrecy and privacy that's afforded in those spaces really again was kind of that gasoline onto a fire that was already burning. So that statistic I mean that's the reported statistic you have to maybe look at the shame dynamic of how many people have had that experience. They're struggling.
Speaker 3:Pornography is pretty predatory. It's always on the prowl. It's always looking to insert itself into our lives in the modern age. I mean from like fake accounts on social media to spam and inboxes, to even pop-ups and populating places that we tend to not think about. As I'm getting old, but as somebody who's a little bit older, like I've got three boys and even some of the pop-ups that show up on their video game systems and consoles that are just their paid advertisements by people who have nefarious intent when it comes to the content that they're trying to get my boys to click on.
Speaker 3:So pornography is very predatory in how it inserts itself and is constantly looking for open doors, open windows, any way to access our lives, and sometimes in unexpected ways.
Speaker 3:And I think that's where a lot of folks get tripped up.
Speaker 3:And you look at even that demographic that you mentioned, kind of teenagers up to 30, there's kind of a digital nativeness in that space of they've just grown up with that technology provided by the schools, provided by parents, and then there's almost just an implicit trust of things that are happening online and unfortunately, that trust gets abused by my folks who have a really ill intent with regard to the types of content they're trying to get young people, especially the average age continuing to decrease with pornography exposure, they're trying to get those hooks in at younger and younger ages eight, nine, 10 years old.
Speaker 3:When kids just have so much less awareness, they're more inclined to like shame and negative response. They're not going to tell anybody what they've seen and kind of. The longer it can grow in secrecy, the deeper the roots of the struggle are going to go. There's some pretty good research that says if we can protect kids till age 15 or 16 from that exposure, it decreases the probability of them having a struggle or an addiction with pornography until until again 15 or 16, like by 80% like it decreases their probability of having a longer term struggle by about 80%.
Speaker 2:So so let's help define the problem for our listeners, most of whom are not psychologists and maybe not even pastors. But how would you explain in layman terms? How does sexual addiction differ from occasional struggles with lust or temptation? Lust or temptation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think we have to remember that, like our sexual systems and I'll start with the brain as someone who's kind of a neuroscience geek our sexual systems driven by hormones, driven by memories, bodily sensations, like remembering that like our sexuality really is a good gift from God, right, and living in a fallen world. Like there are times when those struggles, those temptations, right, scripture says like no temptation has overcome you except what's common to man. So, honoring the reality, paul, you know in writing, would use the word soma, like the goodness of the body, the goodness of God's design for the human body, and then he would contrast that with this idea of sarx. Right, like the sinful desires of the flesh. Sometimes that like sinful desire shows up again to your point, intermittently, it's kind of situational, it's triggered by something a bit more acutely versus a longer term struggle, something where I mentioned the idea of hooks, like those hooks got in deep and they got in early. So that tends to be a story of lots of wounds, right, like when we struggle with maybe lust or temptation, there's not as much of a hook. Again, obviously the enemy of our souls desires to drag us away and entice us and pull us into maybe deeper struggles, shame, secrecy, become two drivers of that. But sex addiction, pornography addiction, really is driven by pretty deep and unresolved wounds. By pretty deep and unresolved wounds could be abuses of different sorts physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse paired with maybe just dysfunctional family dynamics really rigid, cold, unempathic parents, sometimes it's really loose environments or more permissive styles of parenting where there were no boundaries. Oftentimes it's kind of a vacillation between those two. So a family system or sometimes even a church system, a spiritual system where there's really rigid demand and expectation for conformity but not a whole lot of support, not a whole lot of like actual substance when it comes to helping, in this case, young men, young women kind of navigate the trials and temptations of the world sexually. And I think the proliferation of technology has kind of created this generational gap where again I've got three boys, two teenagers and a 10-year-old who's going on 21, trying to keep up with the older two and just looking at their understanding of technology I'm old, but I'm not that old their ability to just problem solve and figure it out, which is really good for the future as far as their careers, their professions, their ability to use technology pretty seamlessly. But at the same time it kind of gives them a leg up on being able to create spaces in their online world that I don't have access to, my wife and I don't know anything about. So it really enforces us into that space of communication and relationality. I wrote in a book years ago Angry Birds and Killer Bees.
Speaker 3:Talking to your kids about sex, kind of this veil of shame and secrecy and silence really shame, secrecy, silence, kind of being a driver and sometimes we're afraid in the church to talk to our kids about sex shroud because we have this fear, this mythology. Kind of see it around the topic of suicide as well. Like if we teach our kids about this, they're going to be inclined to go and explore it and then they'll be exposed to the bad things that I don't want to expose them to. So if I just stay silent about it and don't inform them, don't shape their imaginations around sexual things, like, then they won't have any struggles. And the reality is like in the modern world, like porn is looking for our kids. Like I told you, it's predatory. So, thinking about what we're not serving our kids well when we're not really forming healthy understandings of sexuality, when we're avoiding those sex talks I always encourage parents to kind of establish themselves as the expert or authority, because if we don't, google would be happy to Pornhub would be happy to establish themselves as the expert that our kids go to.
Speaker 3:So I think it's a combination of things as far as what drives this, but it's a lot of wounds. It's kind of driven by rigid and kind of disengaged or chaotic environments, a lot of omission, like things that we're not instructing or teaching our kids, and if we do, we'll kind of say, like you know, don't have sex before you're married, which is really rigid and disengaged. Right, there's not a lot of relational formation or imagination around. What's the nature of sexuality? What are the body parts Like, how do they work? Are they good or are they like shameful? So when there's a story of those kind of really I would say really essential dynamics, psychologically and relationally, that are absent and like it just leaves a barren patch where I think you know addictive behavior of any sort, but especially in our hypersexual culture, that sexual struggle takes root and grows really deep roots and then over time it's much harder to root out.
Speaker 2:Speaking about the church's role. So why do you think the church often struggles to talk openly about sexual addiction, and how does the silence affect people in the pews who are struggling with that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think I would love to see a scenario wherein every church around the world had some type of ministry to addiction. All addiction right Could be. There's a number you know pure desire.
Speaker 3:There's other 12-step processes that exist, numerous of them that exist, that churches have onboarded and are using to great effect. Sometimes it's this idea of, sometimes the church doesn't want to intrude too much into people's lives. Scripture's there. Scripture clearly puts some boundaries, parameters around sexuality, what's healthy, what's not healthy. But we don't want to scandalize.
Speaker 3:I've had people walk out of sermons when I'm preaching on the issue of pornography. So I think pastors see that and there's just a fear of this is a hot topic that we don't want to touch. If we can just kind of get by with, like, indirectly addressing it, then indirectly address it and hope that that's good enough. But again, pure desire, celebrate recovery and other 12-step process. I would love to see a place where, even if it's not directly from the pulpit, like there's an adjacent ministry that's purposefully there, that in the context of somebody identifying a struggle, in the context of spiritual direction or pastoral counsel or discipleship, that we understand the reality of human struggles actually in the modern world. And like here at the church, we have a place where you can go and walk with people who are experiencing a similar struggle. Right, scripture says iron sharpens iron. And like that idea of like how do we go and allow ourselves to be sharpened?
Speaker 2:And it seems like in theory that's beautiful. But one of the marks of sexual addiction is shame, tremendous shame that that person is experiencing. So even if there is a group dedicated to people who overcome that, for a person just to be able to admit on a public level that they're struggling with that is very hard because of the issue of shame. So how does your book help Christians to move past shame into healing? Because that's, I think, is the first step on the path to recovery.
Speaker 3:Yeah, kind of. You know, breaking through denial means kind of having to tell the truth to ourselves about ourselves and the first thing, you're right, that we're going to encounter in that space is having to deal with the shame. You know that the idea to you know, genesis chapter three talks about they covered themselves and they hid. And I think that's exactly the psychological, relational and spiritual function of shame as we cover ourselves and we hide, not realizing that like the Lord comes and he is with us, he's omniscient, he's omnipresent, like he knows we're in shame, we think we're covering ourselves in hiding and like somehow keeping something from him. Maybe it's more like a psychological and sociological endeavor and shame, but I think it's so true that that's the kind of first place to have to lean in with shame.
Speaker 3:Specifically, I asked about the book a buddy of mine, kurt Thompson. He's a psychiatrist that is in the greater Washington DC area, incredible thinker. He's got numerous books. He's just such a gift to the Christian psychology world with everything from Anatomy of the Soul to the Deepest Place, a book about suffering and others. I could go on and on about. He's just incredible.
Speaker 3:He wrote a chapter. He's a contributing author in this text. So I was privileged to be the contributing author, wrote a number of chapters with good friends and colleagues, but also had kind of an unexpected network of people who have become dear friends over the years professionally personally, kurt Thompson being one of those. So his chapter is just unbelievable from a neuroscience perspective. Kind of distilled down into practical application, it's really about overcoming shame with vulnerability and kind of this thesis that taking the risk to vulnerate ourselves really is the antidote to shame. To lean in to think about the idea of entrust, like how do I take the risk to entrust myself? We see this a lot kind of more natively in human development, where you look at children right Like I remember my boys would, like you know sometimes unexpectedly like run and take a flying leap, like just expecting that I was going to catch them as they jumped off the couch or jumped off the rocks or the swing set or someplace.
Speaker 3:So this idea that kind of what we're created to entrust ourselves. Right, relationally I could bore you with the neuroscience what that looks like, but I think obviously, theologically, we're created to entrust ourselves to the Lord and I think that's what shame does. Is it really like creates a narrative in our minds, our beliefs about ourself, that we're somehow so deficient and so defective that we're beyond the reach of grace, we're beyond the risk of getting back to the good that we're created with, of of entrusting ourselves, like to say, like I'm going to vulnerable myself and I'm going to like jump into this space, like believing that, that there's going to be people here that are going to catch me.
Speaker 3:And I think that's the power of these groups is that it's not just one person. And as a therapist, as a psychologist like, I think therapy is great, it's impactful, it's the deep dive into a lot of the wounds, a lot of the traumas. It's so important. But I can't can't overstate the impact of recovery groups, 12-step work and celebrate recovery, pure desire, others around the country where really it's that place to be caught.
Speaker 3:If we're struggling, it's hard. I mean shame, everything about us. If we even looked at shame, it comes online early, it's obviously intense. But I think one of the things that we forget about shame is that the longer we persist in it, the more reflexive it becomes. And I think it takes an immensity of courage to say I'm going to override this reflex that's been conditioned by years of secrecy, years of struggle, years of reinforcing the belief that I'm somehow bad or unlovable or deficient or defective in some way.
Speaker 3:But let's really throw ourselves and entrust ourselves to mercy, not just the Lord's mercy, but the fact that men and women in these groups who are walking out stories of healing like really are grace in the flesh, like they're agents of mercy who are there to help do the hard work of exploring story and providing accountability and being present and holding us in our Christian spirit and brokenhearted, and it's powerful spirit and brokenhearted and it's powerful. I mean, if anybody's spent time in these spaces, it's just incredibly powerful to see the healing and redemption that happens. But it starts with, to your point, like recognizing our shame and taking that risk and vulnerability to entrust ourselves to others who we don't know. But we have to choose to believe that the Lord can and is using them for our good and that in that vulnerability they'll meet us with mercy, with tenderness, with grace and help lead us, help disciple us, to that place of healing and restoration.
Speaker 2:So your title talks about sexual wholeness. So what is sexual wholeness, and is it different from just overcoming the addiction?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a great question. I think one of the more overlooked dimensions of sex addiction recovery is not just the like, how do we create programs and interventions to help facilitate the cessation of the struggle? I would say, you know, that's sobriety, right, like how do I stop doing the thing I don't want to do? And it's kind of like the roman chapter 7 deal here right, the good I want to do, I can't do, the evil I don't want to do, I can't stop doing. Like who will rescue me from this body of death? Right, like, it's so profound, because that's the struggle of any person I've worked with in my 17 year career with any type of addiction. But but the idea is it doesn't just stop at like, oh good, like now I can stop doing the thing I don't want to do. Like now I'm healed. Hallelujah, praise God.
Speaker 3:I would say like that's just sobriety, and sobriety is a necessity in this process of recovery. You know, recovery insinuates like we're putting things back to the good. We're putting things back to the way they were created or ordained. Things back to the good. We're putting things back to the way they were created or ordained. So I think the Hebrew word here would be shalem peace, how we would translate that when Paul is using this construct, he's not just talking about peace like the absence of conflict or internal turmoil. He's really talking about this notion of shalem, the root for shalom, meaning the peace that comes from things being restored back to the whole.
Speaker 3:So when I think about reclaiming sexual wholeness, it's not just the cessation of the problematic behavior, it's really this work of grace, this work of healing, this work of redemption, hard work of tilling the soil of our hearts and going back to the traumas, going back to the wounds, telling the truth about relational dynamics or family dynamics that can be sometimes hard to deal with and to navigate. You know, honor thy mother and father, except for, like a lot of folks believe, kind of answering your previous question. You know, sometimes the reason we can't talk about this in the church is because we have to take a hard look at like. Are there ways as parents? I'm a dad of three boys.
Speaker 3:Boys are the ways in which I've contributed to any of my son's struggles right, like a little bit early to tell right, but like the answer is probably, like probably, and doing the hard work of taking out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we all do right, like I'm not trying to beat myself up or be hard on any other parent, but like it's just part of living in this fallen world and looking at like, oh, like, did the things that happened when I was young create a space where I didn't want to talk about this? Maybe my story is different, right, because I'm like the. We talked about this all the time. From the time they were two, we were talking about body parts, and then, by the time they were seven or eight, we had like the full on, like here's, here's how, the whole thing of human sexuality, or like. I don't know if that's going to be helpful or hindering for them until I'm like.
Speaker 2:That reminded me of the experience we had. We have two sons too, and they're nine years apart. And so, because you know, the generation has changed in nine years and I was super nervous about, you know, having this conversation with our youngest son soon enough before he's exposed to it in a negative way, you know, from his peers and the school environment. So I had my husband, you know, do this because he's the dad, and my son later told him dad, that was just too soon you started this company and he was like six or seven, you know, but I think that's part of it right, like part of this is getting in front of culture and back to the idea of sexual wholeness, like that's part of it.
Speaker 3:Like part of sexual wholeness is about like restoring things that have been negatively impacted by sin, by the broken world we live in, restoring those back to the good.
Speaker 3:But I think a part of it too is like how do we protect that wholeness, like how do we keep things whole without having to go to the full measure of brokenness? And that's part of this too. So reclaiming sexual wholeness dynamic really is about how do we look at not just the cessation of problematic behavior, but how do we do the underlying work of helping heal the pain of trauma, the different pain of wounds that have happened, maybe wounds of omission I used that word earlier wounds of rejection, wounds of abandonment in different situations. But then some of that work my experience in 17 years is maybe the most glaring absence in a lot of recovery work is what does it look like then to help a couple who's been through this story of betrayal, trauma and sex addiction kind of then come to cultivate an experience in their own marriage? There's not just a kind of a repetition or a borrowing from the distorted things of a world that populates that space. What does it look like to help them maybe prioritize kind of spiritual intimacy and emotional intimacy and then the physical marital act is like emanates from that?
Speaker 3:So sex is not just like this disembodied thing, like we're going to be spiritual intimate, go to church together, but like then our physical intimacy right, it's kind of like just a physical dimension. I think that wholeness piece is about the reintegration, the restoration of all those dimensions of how we're created into a coherent whole and into your previous question and comment about shame. Shame is very disintegrated. It literally like keeps things in secret, it creates compartments in us, whereas I think the work of reintegration, sexual wholeness, is really about how do we take all those dimensions of how we're created in God's image and reintegrate, reconnect those and live in the fullness of that, rather than living in the compartmentalization, the disintegration that sin always facilitates in our lives.
Speaker 2:In your approach you talk about the connection between trauma and addiction. So can you share how past wounds can drive that addictive behavior and how healing those wounds can lead to freedom?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so a lot of great neuroscience, a lot of great kind of psychological science on the impact of trauma. What it does to us neurologically kind of activates our stress response system, our sympathetic nervous system, kind of leaves it on full bore looking for threat, looking for danger, and then kind of the neuroaffective model that you'll find in reclaiming sexual illness in those early chapters that I've been on since I think about 2009. So I must be getting old if I've been working on the same model for the past 15 years. But it looks at that idea of emotional regulation and how so much of the neurochemistry of addiction and the neurochemistry of sexuality kind of fit together like hand in glove. They kind of amplify one another so that the power of kind of sexual neurobiology, both from an anticipatory perspective but also from kind of a realized I would call it consummatory. So I just even thinking about sex living in sexual fantasy like starts a dopamine drip, it starts an opioid drip. Same thing with the idea of kind of consummatory experience, right Like orgasm or sexual experience, also coincides with very powerful neurochemical processes.
Speaker 3:And I think what we see with trauma is especially for sexual trauma but even other trauma we see this idea of the power of our sexual neurobiology very quickly being leveraged to help soothe the distress of post-traumatic stress, of post-traumatic stress, and in the hand and glove right, it's kind of the the most intense dimension Our neurobiology has again like intended for different reasons, right, I would say the intensity of that is really there to be a door opener for bonding If we want to look at the neurochemistry of sexuality and God's design. But I think it's a. It's an abuse of that, a distortion of that, maybe better said than abuse, a distorted utilization of our sexual neurobiology. But it's effective and that's the hard part is because it's so effective and because there's so much intensity of distress. We see, with people who have endured trauma, like the intensity of that sexual neurobiology kind of like very quickly becomes the priority, the go-to mechanism for down-regulating and escaping some of the distress psychologically, but even physiologically as well.
Speaker 2:So for those of our listeners who struggle, maybe, with sexual addiction, or our family members of people who struggle with sexual addiction, what advice do you have, what hope can you offer and maybe some of the practical steps that they can take towards recovery?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think you know, sometimes it's hard to help. If you're a lay person, if you're a family member, it's hard to even know how to broach the topic. But I think what's true is most of us, most of us in the world, by way of technology, by way of where we're at in the modern age, have a porn story, right. Have a exposure to pornography when I was six years old. Have a right like found a VHS tape when I was 11, have a you know, clicked on the wrong link or I typed in pokemoncom, which used to be pornographic website before it was purchased back. Right, like some incidental, accidental exposure. So I think leading with that space of empathy so important. But like it starts with just being willing to have a conversation hey, I'm concerned about you If it's for our kids, right. Like remembering that we're the parents and being able to lead from that place of like rather than punishment. We're leading from a place of care, like we might have to draw some different boundaries, we might have to remove some technology, but really, like my job as a parent is like the wellbeing of my child's soul and nurturing them in the faith, like embodying godliness to them, anchoring myself in the word and anchoring them in the word, helping them anchor themselves in the word Right. So like thinking about yeah, this is hard but like, my care and love for this person is greater than like yeah, like they might dismiss me, they might be angry with me, but it's about planting seeds and I think being able to like pray obviously prayer, I think is a huge one like trusting that the Lord is going to provide language, provide insight. Sometimes it's provide the right timing around these things, but I think just leading with, with concern, but also being able to demonstrate that we're connected to our own story and have our own place where we realize like yeah, but for the grace of God, there go I or I've got my own history of struggle and I'm willing to share that with somebody. Whatever our stories are. Being willing to talk out of our own stories I think is a great way to help get that ball rolling, but not expecting immediate returns. I mean, you talked about shame earlier, which again I think is so powerful, and realizing that people might stay stuck in their shame for a little bit, wanting to get out of it. But again, we're talking about oftentimes people who are really embroiled deeply in the throes of addiction. It's not just been an eight-week or eight-month year kind of thing, like it's not just been an eight week or eight month year kind of thing. It's probably like an eight year or an 18 year, and not trying to force or coerce, but really just to be persistent in terms of prayer, in terms of invitation, in terms of kind of accountability resource for you.
Speaker 3:So many good resources available right now. Just the last 10 years has seen an incredible increase in the number of really good tools. Some of them are Christian-based, not all of them are Christian-based, but tools that do a great job of blocking or filtering things on computers, on cell phones, on tablets, accountability dimensions and online group places to plug in recovery services, three-day workshops, workshops and part of the team at Bethesda workshops in Nashville. We've got guys from all over the country that show up at Bethesda and do a four-day retreat.
Speaker 3:So so many good resources, I think, just being able to brush up and if there's somebody in our lives that we're concerned about being able to just do a little bit digging and say like, hey, I thought of you like being able to just do a little bit digging and say like, hey, I thought of you.
Speaker 3:Like you know, here's my story of struggle. Here's some, some resources that may be helpful, uh, and to break the veil, kind of tear the veil, if you will, of silence and secrecy and shame, uh, and venture to, to risk loving someone enough to to identify like hey, I'm concerned and like here's some resources that I think, like may be helpful, but but loving someone enough to to risk kind of violating that, that prescript that we have. It says like don't talk about it, right, but like letting being compelled and love to do the work of you know, if we're wrong, we're wrong, like okay, like we're wrong, like we love enough to like say like hey, this is important, and like I know, like here's what I've seen in the history online, here's what, whatever, like, whatever data point it is that's created concern for us to just like tell the truth about it and and again, risk maybe them being upset or angry with us, when really what we're doing is compelled by love and genuine concern for them.
Speaker 2:Well, and of course, I think your book is a very helpful resource. We are going to post the link for our listeners to Amazon and other websites where they can pick up the book. You also mentioned that you have a website with some other helpful resources. What is it, Todd? Would you mind mentioning that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's just a place where, as I've done this work for 17 years of helping folks in recovery, helping churches with recovery dynamics, just recognizing that oftentimes kind of needing to deal with underlying family system dynamics, kind of dysfunctional or addicted family systems that sometimes folks grow up in and they need to do some deeper healing in those arenas as well. As sometimes when the point of impact for a church system is kind of pastoral moral failure an affair driven by sex addiction or a pornography addiction that causes moral failure. Sometimes they're just stories of spiritual abuse in those spaces that is largely unknown until that pastoral moral failure occurs. So dedicating some time and space to building resources to help in those arenas for people as well, in addition to the work that I do kind of more directly dealing with problematic sexual behavior and recovery.
Speaker 2:And that website is.
Speaker 3:The website is alelancom, same root as the word alleluia, A-L-L-E-L-O-Ncom, alelancom.
Speaker 2:Perfect. Well, we'll post the link to this website in our show notes In the meantime. Thank you so much for this interview and I hope that it's going to be a helpful resource and a helpful start, maybe, for some listeners that are facing this issue in their lives.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I hope that as well. It's been a true pleasure and joy to be with you and just again, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here with you and joy to be with you and, just again, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here with you.
Speaker 2:Wow, what an interesting conversation with Dr Todd Bowman. If you're like me, you probably have a lot to think about after hearing all this, whether this is something you've dealt with yourself or you know someone close to you who struggles with these issues. I hope you're walking away feeling a little less alone and a lot more hopeful. I encourage you to pick up Dr Bowman's book Reclaiming Sexual Wholeness and check out his website alalanintensivescom for more resources. I'm posting a link to the website in the show notes. The truth is, none of us are perfect and we all have our own battles, but as we lean into God's grace and take steps towards wholeness, he equips us to overcome. Your testimony of victory is not just for you to enjoy. It is your tool to help someone else find wholeness in Christ. At World Missions Alliance, we give you the opportunity to do just that. If the Great Commission is on your heart and you desire to take your personal testimony to the nations, check out our website, rfwmaorg. Thank you for listening. Until next time I'm Helen Todd.
Speaker 1:Limitless Spirit Podcast is produced by World Missions Alliance. We believe that changed lives change lives. If your life was transformed by Christ, you are equipped to help others experience this transformation. Christ called His followers to make disciples across the world. World Missions Alliance gives you an opportunity to do this through short-term missions in over 32 countries across the globe. If you want to help those who are hurting and hopeless and discover your greater purpose in serving, check out our website, rfwmaorg, and find out how to get involved.