Bless my arousal

I just finished talking with Scott, who's been on a week of therapy for sexual abuse in Washington state. He said the leader said to him, "You were made to want to make love to anything beautiful. You want to merge with beauty." This begs the question, "Are you going to make love to everything that arouses you?" Clearly he's not, but needed to have an attitude other than shame for when he was aroused by different people and things in different scenarios.

I often have close friends give me compliments because they know I've filtered them out of my internal narrative. My shields are down now and I can receive compliments, it's not to get a big head, but receiving them now improves my mental health, my internal perception, and my self worth. Yes I need to be not reliant on other people, and just value myself and God's perception of me, but my default position is to criticise myself, put myself down, self-condemn, self-hate, and self-loathe, so receiving compliments is helpful, but extremely rare in Australian culture. 

When friends give me compliments, I often get a little erect and usually this is not obvious when I'm wearing clothes. However today, Doug gave me a compliment when we were sitting naked beside each other in the sauna. It was a genuine compliment and he gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze and left his hand there for reassurance. I got a little erect, not fully erect. I expect this is because I have a high testosterone count and as a result of my sexual abuse. But I just felt the tender connection of the compliment without any sexual thoughts or lust. But clearly a tiny part of me wanted to "make love" to whatever aroused me, but most of me says "No, that wouldn't be glorifying God, nor living in integrity with my values."  Previously I would have shamed myself for having a same sex sexual response, despite the same arousal response likely to happen if it were my wife, or any other woman, or any other man.

So I need to choose to bless my erection, not shame it, and bless that I respond to tenderness and love of the compliment with tenderness and love. It's sad that the usual response or attitude I get is: "Any penis arousal is sexual, and if you're getting an erection from a man, then it's unhelpful, lustful, and you need to flee from the temptation André!" Effectively the message there is: “there’s something wrong with you if you get aroused by anything other than your wife”.

I admit if someone came into the sauna at that instant, they would see two naked men, one with his hand on the other guy’s shoulder, one with an erection, and they would assume they were a gay couple. But seconds later, my erection was gone, and it was just a tender platonic moment between friends who are not ashamed to show affection in public and who are not into shaming each other. 

I hope I can have tender moments like that with my wife someday soon.