My Best Friend: Overcoming Sexual Addiction by "Bella" 
 
Masturbation…it was years before I could actually say that word out loud.  I hated it.  It represented everything dirty, vile, and wrong with me.  It shouted to the world my secret shame, my secret vice, my secret best friend.  A best friend that I had known from my earliest memory.  A best friend I had tried to get rid of, tried to deny, tried to hide, for years, only to return to, time and time again.  In a household filled with chaos, dysfunction, drugs, alcohol, and pornography, this best friend become my solace, my comfort, my relief, my escape, my hiding place, and my refuge.  This best friend, masturbation was her name, felt like she was giving me life, but she was really slowly choking the life out of me.

I grew up in a sexually charged household.  It felt like sex was the undercurrent of our home and our family.  I was overly sexualized as a child – it feels like I’ve always known what sex was…and it was something dirty, done in the dark, and something to be kept secret.   I learned the price of affection, love, and ‘being special’ was sex, or at a minimum, inappropriate touch and attention.  I had to pay the price to my father, to neighbors, a boss, even my mother as I become her surrogate spouse, providing her comfort and security. 

For a little girl, even the most covert sexual abuse, distorts her sense of value, her sense of femininity, and her sexuality.  They all become seeped with shame.  She begins to look at life in black and white, good and bad, safe and not safe.  How can a daughter feel safe when her father is entertained by drugs, alcohol, lust, and pornography?  Where does she go to answer the questions in her heart:  do you love me, do you delight in me, am I safe, am I beautiful, am I enough?  I had learned those questions, those basic needs and desires of a little girl, will get you hurt, will get you violated.  So, I learned to silence those questions by turning to masturbation.   Masturbation became a place I could go to not feel.  It was an escape into isolation…just me and my best friend, where I wouldn’t be hurt, wouldn’t have to feel.

I kept this best friend with me for years, even after becoming a Christian in college.  There was no way I could or would tell anyone about my best friend.  Women just didn’t have friends like this.   Only men did, right?  In all the women’s retreats I had been to, not one woman ever talked about sexually struggling.  I can remember desperately trying to find help, this addiction I was battling – compulsive masturbation – wouldn’t go away, no matter how much I prayed it away, or denied it.  I went to the Christian bookstore – there was not one book for women who struggled sexually.  I had to go to the men’s section to find something, anything.  This further confirmed there was something dirty and vile about me, no woman did something like this – especially a Christian woman!

God gently, and not so gently, showed me I needed to come out of hiding in order to get help.  I could not manage this on my own (the hallmark of addiction).  As I began to share my story with others – during those days, just saying the word masturbation nearly made me vomit, it just became M – I realized I was not alone.  More and more women confessed they struggled with the same thing, or some variation, and how lonely and shameful it was.  I sought out counseling and accountability.  Not the accountability that heaped more shame on me, the accountability of men and women who I could call when I was triggered, that would look past the acting out and ask what was going on in my heart.  The accountability that bestowed acceptance, love, and grace.  For me, having Godly men walk this journey with me has been invaluable.  They have been able to affirm my femininity, speak truth into my life, and allow me to experience relationships with men where I was not objectified or violated.  Through counseling I have learned to identify the ‘soul hunger’ – all those questions, needs, and desires – I had tried to squelch by turning to masturbation.  It has been a hard, painful, yet beautiful journey to allow God to satisfy that soul hunger.  I have learned that intimacy with men and women does not have to sexualized.  I can be vulnerable, transparent, and broken, and others will not take advantage of that to meet their own needs.  Nor, do I need to sexualize intimacy in order to get my needs met.  There is freedom and grace in that.

I have had to say good-bye to my best friend.  Honesty, there are times I miss her – times when the intimacy she offered me seems so real, so constant, and so easy.  Those are the days I have to fight to stay alive in who I am as a woman, fight to believe the truth that the intimacy she has to offer me is really death.  The journey, the fight, and saying good-bye to a best friend…that’s the dance of grace.