Action Steps for Clients:
- Find a licensed therapist or counselor who has training in “moral incongruence.” Although therapists can always learn from their clients, it’s best to work with someone who truly understands these intricate underpinnings.
- Explore your current religious and/or spiritual beliefs to ground yourself in what feels right to you today. Consider talking with a pastor, a therapist or a sponsor who understands your current religious belief system.
- With curiosity and non-judgment, list whatever ideas you received about sex as a child. For example, “If you have sex before marriage, you will go to Hell.”
- Which sexual messages still fit for you today? Which messages do you want to discard?
- Healing moral incongruence requires a grieving process. Grief is a natural part of letting go of what doesn’t fit for you and integrating what you would like to retain. Generally, grief is handled most effectively with a therapist because of the complexity of feelings that will arise.
- It’s possible that you would like to integrate pornography usage into your life. With the help of a therapist or a sponsor, learn about and integrate sexual health values that are congruent with your beliefs. Consider the possibility of experiencing fun, playful, erotically-satisfying experiences. Maybe it’s something to consider or maybe it’s not. Try not to impose rigid rules on yourself. You’ve had enough rules imposed on you in the past.
Action Steps for Therapists:
- We can’t all be experts at everything. Is “moral incongruence” within your scope of practice or is it best to refer out to a specialist?
- If you work with clients like James, seek consultation. As a result, you will feel more equipped to work with problematic sexual choices without diagnosing and possibly stigmatizing your clients with a label of “porn addiction” every time there are compulsive sexual behaviors.
- Because griefwork is part of the therapy, be sure to integrate the client’s grieving process into the sexual health framework.
- Religious trauma is often based on threatening messages and images if you go against the teachings of the church, synagogue or mosque. It’s even more complicated when the pastor is your father. Learn about the many implications of religious trauma and refer out if you don’t feel equipped to address this type of trauma.
- Trauma healing modalities like Somatic Experiencing, Brainspotting and EMDR, just to name a few, are the best clinical approaches for trauma healing. There are other possibilities, but I find nervous system-based approaches to work most effectively.
Each and every client with moral incongruence has their own story and their own healing path ahead of them. Don’t make any assumptions and let your client teach you about their particular religious ruptures.
