Robert Hayworth Life Coach

I am a Christian man who has struggled with lust and its effects since early childhood.  My mother intended to make up for her lack of accurate information about sex by providing detailed answers to my child’s simple questions but the effect was to hyper-stimulate me to sexuality at a very young age.  My mother’s approval was very conditional. Combined with the wounds from an absent, angry father you can well understand how this set me on the path of seeking intimacy through sex, romance and lust as a way to numb the ache and fill the emptiness inside.

 

In my youth I made a commitment to Christ having been taken to church all my life.  This set up in me a terrible tension between my faith with its moral principles and the coping behaviors I had adopted.

 

My relationships prior to marriage were marked by the pursuit of sexual intimacy and the high of the initial infatuation stage of a romance followed by the guilt and shame of knowing that I had behaved immorally.  In between I filled the emptiness with pornography and constant flirting always looking for the next connection to fill my void and soothe my pain.

 

After a brief respite following my marriage, I found the dull ache returning and with it the pornography which was followed by the flirtatious trolling to see who might be available.  I lived on a pendulum swinging back and forth between the high of a new connection and the shame of violating my marriage.

 

This continued until, by my mid-30’s, I had notched up numerous infidelities.  I was constantly steeped in lust.  Then I suffered a very public accountability for an affair that proved to be my turning point.  I hit bottom.

 

What followed was two years in a very intense accountability group followed by seven years in Celebrate Recovery (CR).  I began my participation in CR with the thought, “I can help those people” meaning, of course, those poor addicted, dysfunctional people.  I wasn’t there long before I had to face the fact I was one of them.  My coping behaviors had become an addiction to lust and sex.  But at last, I had found a new path, a healthy path.

 

In CR I confronted my demons.  I addressed the coping behaviors I had adopted that had made my life unmanageable.  I surrendered to Jesus at last.  I owe much of this to the example of my sponsor and dear friend Pat K., a fellow recovering sex addict.

 

Thankfully, and only by God’s grace, my marriage survived all of this mayhem and abuse.  I found that I had married a wonderful woman who chose to give me the grace of forgiveness within the context of my changed life.

 

In the years following my CR experiences I found myself again on staff at a church as lead musician.  I made the acquaintance of three counselors who came alongside me as I began to have more and more folks show up in my office “to talk”.  My life experiences and the training I received in CR were helpful but I came to see I needed more formal training.  Under their tutelage I began to pursue training as a Biblical Lay Counselor through Light University online and became affiliated with the American Association of Christian Counselors.

 

As I worked through my courses I became aware of Life Coaching as another possible avenue of helping hurting people.  I added training to become a Certified Life Coach and affiliation with the International Christian Coaching Association.  With the encouragement and supervision of Burt and Judy, my coach and my supervising Marriage and Family Therapist, I began seeing clients through The Growing Place counseling center.  I soon gravitated exclusively to Life Coaching.  I love the very present, linear, “moving on with my life” aspect of Coaching.  I continue to add other course work and training to better fill my tool kit but I remain solidly committed to helping people through Life Coaching.