Until recently, I wasn’t familiar with the term moral incongruence, but I’ve had clients through the years describe the effects of growing up in ultra-conservative families usually within strict religious communities that labeled pornography as sinful. As a liberal Jewish therapist, these stories always surprise me, but I continue to learn about the suffering associated with such complicated childhoods.
James was raised in a Southern Baptist town in Georgia, a middle child in a family of nine kids. His town had no traffic lights, one gas station. He was the son of a pastor and his mother was devoted to raising her children with impeccable morals. Don’t have pre-marital sex. Don’t masturbate. Don’t go on dates without a chaperone. There was an excess of “don’ts” but no guidelines for healthy sexual exploration. Anything beyond hand-holding and light kissing was considered taboo.
In high school James was only allowed to use the internet in the living room of his home. He heard about internet porn from friends but this was strictly off-limits. He received a full scholarship to a well-known Christian-based college and it was in the dorms where he ironically found porn for the first time. James was intrigued with his fellow students who broke the rules, and he eventually became so distracted with porn that he neglected his studies in his first semester. He was put on academic probation and was mandated to speak with one of the college counselors.
As part of his counseling, he learned about the brain and how it can get hijacked by the abundance of erotic images. He also heard the term “moral incongruence” for the first time which describes the inner conflict between one’s religious values and morals that don’t match up with one’s choices and actions.. For the first time, he understood the repressive effects of religion on his sexual development as well as having compassion for the part of him that tried so hard to abide by his family rules.
James also discovered that he wasn’t really a porn addict in the classic sense. In other words, he had been experimenting with pornography resulting in a problematic sexual pattern. Like a kid in a candy store, he compulsively consumed porn but he also felt a deep sense of shame—a common example of moral incongruence. Because he found a counselor who understood these distinctions, James had a much better chance to develop healthier ways of expressing his sexual self over time. If he can work through the dogma and rigidity of his conservative upbringing, he may be able to transcend the set of sexual rules given to him in his youth.
As a result of his religious trauma, James was referred to longer-term counseling outside the college—a therapist who understood problematic porn use within a strict Southern Baptist background. The latest research reveals that moral incongruence requires a different clinical track than the more secular version of out-of-control pornography use. In Part Two of this blog post we will explore specific action steps for the client and the therapist to address this unique issue.
