So you want to outgrow porn. But how? How do you change your brain, heal your heart, and save your relationship? Welcome to Husband Material with Drew Boa, where we answer all these questions and more! Each episode makes it easier for you to achieve lasting freedom from porn—without fighting an exhausting battle. Porn is a pacifier. This podcast will help you outgrow it and become a sexually mature man of God.
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In this powerful teaching from the Same-Sex Connection Conference, Drew Boa breaks down the difference between SSA, SSSA, and sexualized attachment. You'll learn the 4 P's of attraction (preference, pleasure, pull, and power), the 5 types of intimacy, and why unmet attachment needs often get sexualized. This episode provides practical vocabulary and clarifies the truth that same-sex attraction is meant to lead you into healthy same-sex connection.
A personalized plan shaped around your sexual story, your values, and your goals.
Daily lessons and guided reflections exploring SSA and SSSA through the lens of Internal Family Systems (IFS), sexual development, faith, and healthy brotherhood.
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Welcome to the Husband Material podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, heal your heart, and save your relationship. My name is Drew Boa, and I'm here to show you how. Let's go. Do you experience same-sex attraction, SSA? Or more accurately, sexual same-sex attraction, SSSA. Then this episode is for you. It's an excerpt of my most powerful teaching from the recent same-sex connection conference, where you will learn about the difference between SSA, SSSA, and sexualized attachment and how these things can help us understand our experiences without shame and mature into sexually healthy, mature men of God.
This episode is also a great example of what you will find in the brand new SSA coaching app, which you can find at SSAcoaching.com. This app provides guidance for Christian men who experience same-sex attraction so that you can process your story with curiosity and compassion, build strong friendships and own your masculinity and live in alignment with your Christian values. No shame, just growth. So if you resonate with this teaching, go to SSAcoaching.com, take your free personalized quiz to get started. And there's a whole lot more where this came from. Enjoy the episode.
Hello, husband material men. Welcome to the same sex connection conference. My name is Drew Boa. I'm the author of Outgrow Porn and Redeemed Sexuality. I'm the founder and CEO of Husband Material Ministries. I'm passionate about changing brains, healing hearts, and saving relationships affected by porn. In 2015, I got my master's from Wheaton College. And since then, I've completed training as a pastoral sex addiction professional, certified brain spotting practitioner, unwanted guide, and inner child recovery specialist. And I'm really passionate, not just about helping guys outgrow porn, but also to process through same-sex attraction. As we start, I would like to pray. God, thank you so much for brotherhood and for our connection with you. Thank you for each man here and his unique masculinity. Help us to grow, heal, and become the men you created us to be. Men who are defined by same-sex connection. Amen.
Well, this conference is hosted by Husband Material Ministries. And in case you were wondering, we have some core beliefs and core values that define how we address same-sex attraction, sexual attraction between men, and sexuality in general. We believe marriage is a covenant between one man and one woman, and that marriage is the only appropriate context for sex according to God's design. I want to define same-sex attraction, really identify what it is, what it isn't, how we can process it.
And let's start with some terminology. What is same-sex attraction? The term same-sex attraction is a misnomer, but it doesn't actually mean the thing that most people mean when they say it. If same-sex attraction means simply being attracted to members of the same sex, everyone experiences same-sex attraction. Every man in the world feels drawn to other men. If we didn't, then we wouldn't form friendships with some men instead of others. We wouldn't feel drawn to certain people if we weren't attracted to them. But there are lots of different types of attraction. And here's a framework that I've been working on that has never been shared before. I call it the four P's of attraction: preference, pleasure, pull, and power. When you talk about being attracted to someone or something, which type of attraction is it? Which level of attraction is it? It could be a simple preference. I'd rather work with this guy on the project rather than that guy. Simple preference. It could be pleasure. I really enjoy working with this guy rather than that guy. It could be a pull, a kind of draw. Like, wow, something about him really catches my interest, or I really like some of his qualities and I admire them. Maybe I feel a magnetic kind of draw. Maybe there's a sexual energy of like, I wish I could do certain things with him, including sexually. And then there's the power. The power is where it becomes more of an obsession, more of a fixation, maybe even a fantasy. And while it's normal to have preferences, it's normal to take pleasure. It's normal to have a pull towards certain people, male or female. What we can really start to feel a huge shift in sexually is in the power that certain attractions have over us. Everyone experiences non-sexual, same-sex attraction, because every man in the world is drawn to other men. But not everyone experiences the pull or the power. So you see, everybody has attraction to men, to women, to children, but it doesn't have to be sexual. It can just be a preference, a certain amount of pleasure, or it could be a pull, or it could be power. So this is some new languaging we can use. There's nothing wrong with experiencing these things. But the intensity of it can be different for some of us. And this is so big because sometimes you might feel like I'm in a different category of man because I have these preferences or I have this pleasure with certain people. It's like, no, that's that's just a human experience. Even having the pull or the power towards certain people doesn't mean something's wrong with you. It doesn't mean you're weak. It doesn't mean you're different, it doesn't mean you're abnormal. It just means something's happening in your brain, in your body, in your emotions. And even beyond the four P's of attraction, I think it's important to notice that attraction could be mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, and or sexual. So mental attraction might be: I like the way this person thinks. I want to listen to him talk. I want to have a conversation because he really sees things clearly or he has an interesting perspective. There could be an emotional attraction. I'm drawn to this person's personality. It's just nice to be with him. There's a connection between us. I feel close to him. There could be a spiritual attraction where, wow, this person's relationship with God really resonates with me. Or when we pray together, or when we read the Bible together, it's really meaningful. There could be a physical attraction. Man, I really like his haircut. Wow, he's looking good today. And you can experience all of those things without the sexual attraction. There can also be the sexual attraction of like someone who like takes your breath away, or you or you just keep wanting to look at them again and again. There could be the sexual attraction of having urges, of having fantasies, of having arousal involved. All of those different types of attraction are unique and nuanced. And if you're wondering, well, why do I feel attracted to other men? First of all, you're probably talking about the sexual attraction. But in general, why do we feel attracted? Because we're human.
And here's what I really want you to take away from today's session same-sex attraction is designed to lead you into same-sex connection. Whether it's mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, sexual, the whole thing has a purpose, which is to draw you into something good and beautiful. The brotherhood that is your birthright as a beloved son. Everyone experiences same-sex attraction, mentally, emotionally, perhaps spiritually, physically, the preference, the pleasure, maybe the pull, maybe not the power. And yet not everyone experiences same-sex connection. If you were deprived of connection with other boys, maybe with your dad, with men in general, if your connection with men got sexualized, there are lots of different reasons why not everyone experiences same-sex connection and why it became sexualized for many of us. And you'll hear more about that at the next session. But first, I just want to lay this level common ground out. We are all created for same-sex connection.
What is same-sex connection? Well, very simply, it's intimacy, it's closeness, it's attachment. Same-sex connection is good for you. Not only that, it's essential developmentally. We need it. And so, similar to the five types of attraction, there are also five types of intimacy. The mental intimacy of feeling like, wow, we really see things from a similar perspective. The emotional intimacy that could be we text every day, or we talk about vulnerable things that I've never talked about with anyone else, or we were able to go deep with each other. There's the spiritual intimacy of perhaps praying for each other or having a meaningful worship experience together. There's a physical intimacy of shared activities, physical touch, and then there's the sexual intimacy. So you can have four out of five types of intimacy with other men within God's design. We're not designed for sexual intimacy with the same sex, but we are designed for this mental, emotional, spiritual, physical intimacy. And so it may feel sometimes as if you are like being completely deprived of the intimacy that you desire because of your beliefs about God and sex. And if you if you have a traditional historic Christian view of marriage. But really, most of the feast is available, my friends. And it's good. Same-sex connection is simply intimacy with members of the same sex. You were created for this. God made you this way. Men need men. The Bible celebrates same-sex connection. In Psalm 133, it says how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity. So we don't have to be ashamed or afraid of what God created us
for. Now, within intimacy, within this concept of same-sex connection, we do have needs. The need is not for orgasm. The need is not for stimulation. They are attachment needs. Five attachment needs. And these are true for every single human in the world. And if you think about, well, what helps me feel close to someone? What is that intimacy comprised of? These five things are a pretty good summary. The five attachment needs are feeling safe and protected in a relationship, feeling seen, heard, known, and understood, feeling comforted, soothed, and reassured, feeling cherished, treasured, and delighted in, and feeling supported and becoming one's best self. That is what secure attachment is made of. That is what so many of us grew up not experiencing, yet not even realizing it, and just thinking it was normal. Why are we talking about this? Because when attachment is absent or inadequate or inconsistent or maybe even abusive, our brains brilliantly try to meet our attachment needs in other ways. And often the most convenient, controlled, powerful way that our brains do that is through something sexual, is through masturbation, fantasy, porn, hookups, affairs, dating, one night stands, relationships that go against your values. Sexualized attachment is what drives what we usually think of as SSA, which I think we should say probably is more accurately, same-sex sexual attraction. That's the version of SSA that I I would like to make more well known or more popularized. Like if we end up saying SSSA instead of SSA, I'll be happy about it. I think we can also just use the letters SSA and it's still fine. But technically speaking, same-sex sexual attraction is really what we're talking about. Not the mental, emotional, spiritual, physical. And the other SSA, or sorry, SSSA is same-sex sexualized attachment. So I realize this is a little bit confusing. It's unclear. We're still working on the languaging. Labels are limited. They have value, yet they can also be restrictive and constraining. Use whatever acronyms work for you. When I say SSSA, it could be same-sex sexual attraction or same-sex sexualized attachment. I'm just going to use them interchangeably. And if you want to learn more about sexualized attachment, there is a really great book, specifically for men who are sexually attracted to other men called Healing and Recovery by Floyd Godfrey. This is a great workbook that John Kilmer leads groups through. But basically, what we usually think of as the curse that I feel in my body of being irresistibly magnetically pulled toward other guys is not just attraction, it's sexualized attachment. And this is not unique to men who are sexually attracted to other men. Sexualized attachment can be experienced by any person, male or female, and it could be toward the opposite sex as well. So using this language of sexualized attachment is helpful because it's not othering. It's like this is not just limited to this population. It's it could be anyone's experience.
And for me personally, I want to tell a little bit of my story of sexualized attachment and how it relates to same-sex attraction that I've never really shared before. So by the definition of like the draw towards same-sex connection, I have experienced same-sex attraction emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, intensely for most of my life. My dad worked 12-hour days while I was growing up, and he was not around very much. I really missed out on connection with him. And in his absence, I was really, really close with my mom and eventually felt very icky and the need to separate from her, even though I still stayed in her orbit. And women in my family did not honor my physical boundaries. And so I was actually sexually abused by my grandmother. And so some of these dynamics, like distance from my dad, enmeshment with my abuse by a woman, as well as growing up moving around so much, being lonely, being bullied, separated from my peers, left this huge gaping hole of connection with other men, with other boys that I could not live without. So part of why I developed sexualized attachment was hugely because I did not experience the same sex connection that I needed. I also did not experience the opposite sex connection that I needed. And so it's really interesting to me that part of why I think I have this unique ability to resonate with guys who experience SSSA is because I've had so many of the same points in my story. The one difference is that my attraction did not get sexualized for whatever reason. Despite all these developmental things, it didn't turn into sexual attraction toward other men, but it was an intense emotional attraction, spiritual attraction, need for physical touch, desire for all these types of intimacy. And so I want to suggest that there is so so much in common between what we might think of as OSA and SSA. And as we start to to dig deeper into our stories, no one here is in some kind of special category. And the longings and aches that we feel are good. Those attachment needs are from God. And they got sexualized in different directions for each of us, as our brain's brilliant way of trying to help us survive. And it could have been toward men, could have been toward boys, could have been toward girls, could have been toward women, could have been toward lots of different varieties. And what we're doing now is growing up and sexually developing in the places where we have been stuck. So if somebody is asking, like, why do I experience SSA? It's because you're human. It's because you were designed for same-sex connection. And that's good news.
Thank you so much for listening to this preview of the Same-Sex Connection Conference. The recordings will be made available. And in the meantime, go to SSAcoaching.com if you're ready to get started on your journey of understanding SSA, SSSA, and sexualized attachment without shame in a way that allows you to gain momentum every day. With personalized, customized, curious, and compassionate feedback, SSAcoaching.com is the place to go. Take the free quiz at SSAcoaching.com and always remember you are God's beloved son, and you, he is well pleased.
