I was so honored to be interviewed by my friend Tiffany from the Brookville House of Worship. I shared my story of struggling with pornography and wrestling with my sexuality along with how I later discovered intimacy with Jesus to satisfy the deep longings of my heart.
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Founder of Walking in Freedom Ministries, Certified Life Coach, Author, Speaker
Amy Riordan is the founder of Walking in Freedom Ministries. She is a certified life coach, author, and speaker. She is passionate about helping women walk in freedom as they pursue intimacy with Jesus and embrace who they were created to be. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two teenagers and can often be found taking pictures outdoors, spending time with friends and family, and camping in the summer.
I think it’s really great to see people talking openly and honestly about these things without judgement to examine what’s really going on. I tend to think a lot of same sex attraction is a healthy impulse for comforting touch that only gets labeled as sexual by our culture for some reason and then gets out of control as people have no other way to conceive it as something else. Many of us come from families where affection between parent and child was very scarce.
Your story about feeling butterflies when your friend caught you makes me think of this too. How you were just innocently craving affectionate touch from other women, but didn’t know that was normal and healthy and didn’t have to take a sexual path.
My sister is studying to be a massage therapist and I’ve seen how positive it’s been for her to learn and practice massage arts. I think it’s misguided to assume comforting and therapeutic touch is sexual. These instincts seem to exist for good reason and we only make them harmful by making them only associated with sexuality. So many of us are starving for touch it’s no wonder we can find porn so appealing as a desperate way to imagine touch we aren’t getting.
Men also need to understand this. They are also craving non sexual touch and in marriage they can bond much deeper focusing on that rather than just sex and will often find the desire to watch pornography disappears.
Thanks again for sharing. Your love and care for your family, Jesus and others is very inspiring.
Hi Brianna, I completely agree with what you said regarding physical touch. I have wondered about this concerning my own situation. The feelings I felt for her were so intense, but they were not lust-filled or anything like that. I wasn’t sure what to do with what I felt, and I assumed the only outlet of expression I had was a sexual one. Thank you for your insight.
Thank you Amy. I wanted to ask how you would deal with the thoughts and feelings that tell you that you should be with a woman. I know I wasn’t created to be with a woman but my mind at times is my own worst enemy and twists thoughts and feelings. I would really appreciate your advice and prayers x
Hi Joanne. Something that helped me was to ask God to show me if I was believing anything that wasn’t true regarding other women, other me, my sexual identity, etc. He started to show me (over time) that I believed women were safer (emotionally) than men. I believed I could never get as close to a man as I could a woman. Every time my husband and I would get into an argument, or when I felt lonely in my marriage, it just validated those fears/thoughts. I have a blog post where I described some of this in more detail: Healing Takes Time: My Journey of Freedom From Porn and Same-Sex Attraction