Speaker 1: 0:31

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. Hey man, thank you for listening to my episode with Dr Floyd Godfrey. It was quite, quite enlightening for me to hear his wisdom. We're talking about sexualized attachment, what it is, how it works and what healing and recovery look like. You're going to learn a lot about how emotional energy and sexual energy often become fused together and why it's so important for us to meet the underlying needs below our feelings and behaviors.

Speaker 1: 1:20

Some of you may be aware that there was a hoax last year in an effort to discredit Floyd Godfrey, and if you want to hear more about that, I've included a link in the description where you can go down and hear the full story from Floyd directly. This episode is a wonderful summary of his research, wisdom and experience about sexualized attachments and the emotions that are often underneath our service-level sexual attractions and behaviors. I think you're really going to enjoy it. Today I'm hanging out with Dr Floyd Godfrey, who is the author of Healing and Recovery Perspective for Young Men with Sexualized Attachments, and you're going to hear a lot more about what that means. Floyd is a certified Christian counselor, sex addiction specialist supervisor, mental health coach and he's also a clinical sexologist. So welcome to the show, floyd.

Speaker 2: 2:09

Thank you, drew, I'm happy to be here.

Speaker 1: 2:12

And in your book you say one of the most exciting discoveries in my personal recovery is that obsessive sexual attraction had developed through a process of sexualizing attachment needs and wounds.

Speaker 2: 2:29

Yes, that's actually a lot more common than people would know. A lot more common than people would know. And society has sort of bought into this myth, drew, that orientation and attractions are just something you're born with, and I think that's been more of a political move over the years. But the research doesn't really support that. The emotional factors, the emotional underpinnings of what causes someone to be attracted to this or that there's a lot of emotional undercurrents to it all. And healthy development and even the emotions underlying what we would consider healthy development that's under there.

Speaker 2: 3:10

There's a lot going on for it, and so it's very common for children and youth to start sexualizing things that are originally emotionally grounded. These are emotional issues that become sexualized over the course of development, and certainly that was an epiphany for me and learning about that and then going to school and through master's programs and then later and having a great deal of discussion with colleagues about sexualized attachments and they're more pronounced and easier to grasp when you're talking about things like sex abuse. It's easier to see it in those kinds of situations, but that it does occur.

Speaker 1: 4:11

So what exactly is sexualized attachment?

Speaker 2: 4:39

who might be in trouble for rape, maybe they're a sex offender and they have just this obsessive need to be in control.

Speaker 2: 4:42

And when you look clinically at some of those guys, there's been this emotional, ongoing need to be in control. Their life has often been out of control, control their life has often been out of control, and so this ongoing emotional need to control things around them, to be in control, to regain control, often takes a sexual, you know sort of a sexual feeling to it and it really comes back to this emotional root of longing for control. Root of longing for control. So this high intensity of emotion that then sort of gets magnetized to this sexual piece and you fuse together the rage with the sexuality and now you have eroticized rage which then plays out as rape or high levels of sexual manipulation. So it's the fusion of emotional energy and sexual energy. I don't know that it matters what kind of emotion we're talking about. It doesn't have to be rage, it could be any form of emotional energy, and the stronger the emotional energy is, then the stronger the sort of magnetism between that and sexual and the stronger the fusion becomes.

Speaker 1: 5:58

So we're talking about things like fear, shame, loneliness, envy, yes, so all of those things can become sexualized.

Speaker 2: 6:10

Absolutely, absolutely. And, on a lighter note, you don't have to talk about rage or rape. For years I've run an addiction pornography class for teenage boys, specifically for pornography. They're addicted to pornography. It's not just a habit, but they've become addicted to it, become addicted to it and frequently you see that these boys have sexualized this loneliness piece and then they go to pornography as a way of sort of compensating for that and so they feel lonely and now they're sexualizing some of that loneliness and it becomes this addiction, with the pornography as a way of trying. Their psyche is trying to resolve the loneliness.

Speaker 2: 6:57

And you're looking at someone online, you're interacting with somebody online, even if it's just a video of pornography. It's sort of like a fake sort of kind of connection and so the brain is sort of taking it that way. It's sort of a counterfeit way of taking it that way. It's sort of a counterfeit way of sideways way of connecting, but it's not a connection and so that's why it becomes compulsive and addictive in nature and they keep going back to it. So loneliness, rejection, sadness you know it doesn't have to be a trauma, repetition, things that are obviously sexualized attachment it could be more subtle like that.

Speaker 1: 7:37

What are some of the symptoms that I might have a sexualized attachment?

Speaker 2: 7:42

So symptoms might include things like unwanted attractions, you know they might include even things like depression and you might be aware of the emotional factors and those feel like symptoms. So I'm lonely, I'm depressed, I'm anxious. I've experienced a lot of rejection in my life and I would say the typical symptom would be confusion over sexuality and guys, men, women, youth asking why would I be attracted to this or that? Or I'm so confused about why I can't stop this or that, and it feels so far outside the norm. What's going on? And I think this is also why you have so many people talking about multiple genders and multiple attractions. And multiple attractions because your sexual energy can go any kind of place, depending on the emotional energy underneath it. And so then you have eternally all kinds of never-ending genders and attractions and orientations. It's not because there are that many, it's because your sexual energy can go almost anywhere, depending on your emotional energy.

Speaker 1: 9:00

That makes sense. What would you say is the difference between a sexualized attachment and a sexual addiction?

Speaker 2: 9:09

Sexual addiction is more of using sexual activity to escape pain, distress, whatever's going on. But you use that to the point that you grow a chemical tolerance to using it. So there's chemicals produced. It's considered a process addiction, like gambling or something like that, and you use the substance or the pornography, the acting out, whatever form that is, even masturbation. You use it to a point that you're raising your baseline of chemicals. The dopamine, the serotonin, the norepinephrine, all these chemicals, they go up. Oxytocin goes up almost 500%, we think.

Speaker 2: 9:52

And so when you raise that level of chemical for so long, your body's baseline, where it's supposed to be here for normal brain function, it's now here. And so when you're addicted you have to keep doing the activity to raise that chemical level to feel normal again. When you stop that activity, that chemical drops even below what's normal baseline. And that's when guys have withdrawal symptoms. They feel depressed, they have a hard time sleeping, they have difficulty with you know, they get moody, eating problems, skin sensitivity, genital sensitivity, blue balls. You know that sort of thing because they've dropped it below the baseline and then they'll use again to pull it back up. But again it goes back up to what the body wants, that heightened baseline way up here. So when you have withdrawals, that would be addiction going on.

Speaker 2: 10:49

Some guys also act out compulsively and that's not sexual addiction. I might have emotional stuff going on and I need the sexual interaction to reduce that compulsivity. It helps, whatever the anxiety, whatever, but I'm not addicted to it, so I haven't grown a tolerance to it and I keep raising that chemical baseline. I can just stop and resolve the compulsive piece. But when someone's addicted, yeah, they have some biochemicals going on. That's making that situation much, much worse.

Speaker 1: 11:20

Yeah, it sounds like attachment is often at the core of an addiction or the compulsive behavior.

Speaker 2: 11:29

Definitely and especially for sexual addiction. So you're talking about you know Alex Katahakis has talked in her work about sex addiction as an affect disorder. You have Dr Philip Flores who's talked about it as an intimacy disorder. We're coming back to attachment affect kinds of issues related to it, not just somebody who loves sex, somebody who's using it as a way of coping for these underlying issues.

Speaker 1: 12:00

You've expressed a concern for boys and young men growing up and viewing themselves as abnormal or broken based on their sexual thoughts and feelings broken based on their sexual thoughts and feelings.

Speaker 2: 12:16

Yes, to me it's a concern that what is often normal boyhood or adolescent experiences even as a young adult in college what might be normal experiences get misinterpreted or mislabeled as something different, something wrong, something broken. Social media makes it worse. So, as an example, maybe 10 years ago I had a client who's going into ninth grade, so he's probably about 14. And he was just in tears, just sobbing because he was gay. He thought he was gay and he didn't want to be gay, and it took us a while just to calm the tears a little bit, his panic, even talking out loud about it. And as we got to the story you know, school had just started a couple weeks ago he's now in a new high school and he's seeing his friends from junior high and so they're interacting through the halls, passing each other, and hey, buddy, and they're hugging each other. Hey, how are you? Oh, my gosh, this is so exciting.

Speaker 2: 13:27

We're in high school and as he's walking to class, some group of older boys starts harassing him about hugging these boys, these other boys. Why are you hugging those guys? Do you like that? Because if you like that, that means you're gay. You must be gay. Did you know you were gay and really coming down on him, really coming down on him. And so here he is sitting in my office describing himself as gay, because he had seen all his old buddies in the hallway and they're all hugging each other and excited to be in high school. And he's telling me Floyd, I do like to hug my friends, I do. Does that mean I'm gay? The misinterpretation of what's normal and legitimate. So now they create these labels and misperceptions. And I don't think it's an accident that the rate of transgender diagnosis has gone up 300%. I mean that's statistically unreal. That's not because it's 300%. More Kids are identifying that. Kids are confused about where they're at, are identifying that things. The kids are confused about where they're at.

Speaker 2: 14:51

So so that's what I mean, I think, when we talk about confusion, about about where the kids are at.

Speaker 1: 14:53

Yeah, that story of the 14 year old boy is so heartbreaking and it shows how he had this normal need and desire to bond. He had this normal need and desire to bond that was then labeled as sexual, when at the core, no, it was emotional.

Speaker 2: 15:14

Yeah, I run a pornography addiction class for boys, teenage boys, and we have one for young adult men. The amount of times I'm hearing them come in and tell me that they never even thought about this or that until they saw it on porn. I was at summer camp with Bible camp, church camp, a few years ago and I had a 14-year-old in my group and we were processing as a group. You know the struggles they were having in life and this is just a Christian group, it wasn't therapy, just a group, and the kid was just busting down in shame. He could hardly control his breathing. He's crying so hard and ultimately it was because he was looking at tranny porn.

Speaker 2: 16:02

And this is an athletic popular kid, horn. And this is an athletic popular kid. And he's saying to me why, why, why am I having this attraction and the confusion even that pornography is introducing and the kinds of pornography? And nowadays I don't know that some parents realize pornography viewed online is not like a playboy. These are live graphic, dopamine-inducing oxytocin 500% increasing interactions that are novel, that create a spontaneous rush. Even if it's a little gross to the kid, there's a rush about it. It leaves an imprint and then later they're going back and they'll report in my group that I went back again to see what I liked about that or to see why I would be curious about that. And what are they doing? They're reinforcing the imprinting, and then the more they do it, the more it imprints, and then it just gets worse and worse and worse.

Speaker 1: 17:04

So that sexualized attachment is not who they are. It's what happened to them.

Speaker 2: 17:10

Yes, something happening to them. It's something they're experiencing, something they're feeling, and when they keep looking at the porn or they keep experimenting with the guys, or whatever they're doing, they are reinforcing the pattern, and so now the attraction keeps coming up, or now the confusion stays unsettled and it keeps coming back, and so, again, that's where recovery comes into play. So I can help the kid at camp with the tranny porn and we can resolve the healing. And well, this is what's going on, and you were lacking this in your life and whatever. But he still has to stop looking at it, you know.

Speaker 2: 17:48

You still have to stop viewing it, and so you're going to need to have some buddies in place that you can be accountable to. You can be honest and tell them hey, dude, I'm so horny today. I really need help, I need to get through the day. You have to push through and show some grit, or you're going to keep memorizing the same pattern and it's going to get stronger and stronger and stronger. My heart breaks for some of the teenagers, drew, because they're reinforcing these patterns, memorizing them subconsciously, and they get stronger and stronger and stronger, and then they're graduating high school wondering why the thoughts won't stop, and that's, you know. Two plus two is four and sadly they're just going to have more work.

Speaker 1: 18:34

They have to do to get over it? Yeah, you've talked about the importance of attachment with parents and also with peers, and how when there is not a safe connection, we often will sexualize it and seek out a sexual version of the relationships that we really need. How did you personally experience that growing up?

Speaker 2: 19:03

So when I was leaving about fifth grade, we started moving. My family would move and we moved so often. Up through high school I had attended by that time, seven different schools. So fifth grade was a school, sixth grade was a different school, seventh grade was a different school, eighth grade was a different school, ninth grade and then finally high school tenth grade different school.

Speaker 2: 19:27

And so I had a very difficult time staying connected to friendships and some of that ongoing longing to always have a friend who was there, a longing to belong, to fit in. That created a lot of confusion for me and I think the longing in retrospect, the longing was legitimate, but always moving and always never having any consistent way of connecting with buddies, consistently, getting to know girls. It created a lot of confusion and I started to question myself and who am I? And I think that's also a normal part of adolescence and young adulthood. Trying to figure out who you are and so never feeling like I had a permanent place to settle in and learn who I am was confusing. Pornography certainly introduced confusion. It was a little harder back in those days to get pornography. You had to randomly find it or steal it at Circle K, but some of that added some confusion to the mix. My father was always very distant. He may have been a little on the spectrum, I'm not sure Very hard to connect with too, not having a lot of guidance from an adult mentor or male.

Speaker 2: 20:50

In my life I didn't have a place to have questions answered. You know, is this normal? What's normal, what's not? What's it supposed to be? Like, you know? And puberty. So I had a lot of questions that were difficult for me to resolve and gratefully, later in college I found some mentors and I found some people. I started getting some good counseling from a man who was able to answer some questions for me and help me work through some of my own issues and then also to see what's legitimate versus what's confusion, because some of my own confusion was coming from all these unmet needs and lack of information and not knowing so to have a counselor sitting in front of me saying you know, floyd, it's really normal for men and young men and teenage boys to want to have their pack, to have a group to fit in with, to feel like a boy and wanting to know what that's like. That is very, very normal.

Speaker 2: 21:54

And having him help me and mentor me into scenarios where I could find what I was missing was life-changing to me. I didn't need to seek it out in unhealthy ways. Here's what underlying needs are going on. Here's what your brain really wants, and in my case, faith was always really important to me. I was always faith-based. Even with all the confusion, I always believed in God. I felt like that was important. I believed he was there. I just didn't know why. I was so confused, and so learning how to ask God to teach me where can I find some of those friends, god, where can I go to get some of those needs met? And having God help me to see what was really going on was invaluable to me.

Speaker 1: 22:39

Thank you for sharing, and there's a whole lot more in the workbook. But what would you say you sexualized, and how did you find those needs met in real life?

Speaker 2: 22:52

I just mentioned the need to belong. I mean, that was a big one, because moving so much. So when I was in college and started to get some counseling from a counselor and let me tell you too, he was the free counselor you go to at campus, and so that's. I couldn't afford anything else, but he was open-minded enough not to take a certain political perspective on anything. You know, I would say to him I just don't think this is who I am, this is certainly not who I want to be. Help me to, can you help me figure this out? And he would read the books together with me about attachment. And so I'd come back to sessions and he had read several chapters and I would read a chapter and we would talk through it, which was really, really good and helpful. And so, talking to him about that, one of the main things I realized was I never had a place to fit in. I didn't know where my buddies were. I didn't know where I could fit in. So in college, that was my counselor's first recommendation to me. Okay, we've discovered this about you, floyd. Now, where can you find that? I want you to start praying over that. So, instead of asking God to magically fix you. To take this away, god, he said start asking God to magically fix you, you know, to take this away. God, he said start asking God. Now that God showed you that you're longing to fit in somewhere, ask him where to go. Where to go to find that? Where are the guys you can connect with? Because you can't connect with everybody. And he was very honest with me, you know. He says I don't connect with everybody. There's people at my church I don't like, I don't necessarily jive with, and you have to find that for you. Where can you find it? And so I started to pray over that, god, where can I go? And sure enough, I found some men in my major, in the department I was in. I was also involved in a college choir, started to really connect with some of those guys.

Speaker 2: 24:46

I was so blessed with three roommates and I started to be more open, more transparent. That was part of my recovery too. I remember telling God I'm so alone, I feel so alone, and God sort of slapping me on the face and I could just hear deep down in here God saying to me Floyd, you never talk to anybody. And I remember arguing with God, saying well, but nobody wants to talk to me. And God, sort of chuckling and saying well, how can you know that you don't talk? You don't tell anybody. And so I realized I got to be transparent and I started to learn, and recovery requires transparency. And so I started to open up.

Speaker 2: 25:26

I opened up to one of my roommates because he noticed I was depressed one day and he says hey, he said what's wrong, what's going on. And so I revealed a little. Everybody's going to the football game. I don't even know how to play football, I never played football. And he says oh, I played football. He says let's go together, let's go together, I'll take you and I'll tell you.

Speaker 2: 25:47

And he sat next to me that game the whole time and explained everything. This is what a down is. They have to hit 10 yards. They have, you know. And he explained it all. And I'd ask well, why are they starting over? Well, they didn't hit. You know, they didn't hit the mark. Now it's the next team's turn.

Speaker 2: 26:04

He explained everything and then the next night took me out to the football field to throw the ball, to show me how to throw the ball, and then after a few weeks, we're all going to the games together, all the roommates and a group of us, and I kind of understand what's going on.

Speaker 2: 26:20

And so anyway, just as a recap, god told me to be more open, be more transparent, and in the process of that I started to relay to roommates you know, here's what I need, and then they were able to meet some of those needs. Now I find a bunch of football friends and get out to the games. So learning how to meet some of those needs emotionally which was the whole issue all along started to decrease the sexualization of those needs. I was sort of feeding the hunger, feeding the need, and then the sexual peace sort of went dissipated and went down. It wasn't so obsessive anymore. Of course I'm a boy, so I still had sexual urges and wanted to date and things, but the obsessiveness over some of the attractions and the weird places they would go was calming down. It was dissipating as I met the needs.

Speaker 1: 27:26

Those sexualized attachments started to lose their power. Yes, someone in our community recently shared that underneath every behavior is a feeling and underneath every feeling is a need. When we meet those unmet needs, it's so much easier to navigate the feelings and behaviors.

Speaker 2: 27:45

Yes, absolutely 100% agree. I think that guy's right, whoever it is. Yes.

Speaker 1: 27:51

Yeah, totally. You talk about healing and recovery. What is the difference between those two things?

Speaker 2: 27:59

Yeah, I titled the book Healing and Recovery because I think there's a big difference between the two and the healing involves, in my mind, the kinds of stuff we're just talking about Some self-awareness, some personal insight about what's underneath it all, whether it's the need to belong, to fit in, to bond with other men, to feel safe around women, whatever the emotional needs are about to address that in healing ways. That's all emotionally-based kind of stuff and in some cases trauma-based. If I was sexually abused, if I was emotionally manipulated or abused, all those things need some healing. You have to work through that, sometimes with a counselor, sometimes with with my roommates. That freshman year of college my roommate was so mature and patient with me for years and would talk to me, and even when I was kind of a jerk or snarky. But then the recovery piece I think is a little bit more of what we would think of in terms of addiction recovery work.

Speaker 2: 29:17

I think there's also some hard work that has to go into play here.

Speaker 2: 29:20

I can do a lot of healing work, but it doesn't magically change the fact that I have an addiction and I have to learn to stop. So I can do all kinds of healing work, but if I don't learn to stop viewing pornography or hooking up randomly with people or whatever, stop drinking. If I don't stop those things, I'm going to keep the other going. I'm going to perpetuate it. You're memorizing it. So if I have some random sexual attraction in this case towards something off the wall, and I keep going back to it because it feels good or it's fun or it's an escape from reality just like I was drinking alcohol or something my mind keeps memorizing that same behavior over and over. So you have to stop and recovery is hard and there's times where I needed not just a roommate buddy to put his arm around me and give me some love and affection. Sometimes I needed an accountability partner who says Floyd, I want you to throw this away. I want you to come to me every time you're tempted.

Speaker 1: 30:25

I want you to attend this 12-step group so you have some accountability partners to check in with every week and it takes grit, so there might be some really tough decisions like getting a different phone or moving to an environment that's more supportive and less triggering all the time.

Speaker 2: 30:44

Yes, a new job. You know that's on a different side of town so I don't have to drive by certain streets. You know it could be a different roommate because the one I had and in my case I had a fantastic roommate, I'm not talking about him, but I had buddies in recovery and their roommates had porn all over the room and they were hooking up with girls and there was all kinds of problems there. And why would I want a roommate that's not helping me. I can be nonjudgmental and still move out and go somewhere else. So, yes, changing behaviors and letting someone feed into you where you're messing up, Dude, you have to stop. You have to get rid of things, you have to push yourself through discomfort and stop. And there's no quick, easy fix to that. In my case there were some situations that were easier. When I met the underlying emotional needs, when I resolved some of the trauma, the temptation went down, but it wasn't gone completely and I've had guys who will say it is for them. For me I had to learn how to throw some stuff away, get an accountability partner, not go over here anymore, not do that anymore, because it's too difficult, it's too teasing, it's too difficult, it's too slippery, and in AA they call it a slippery slope, and I just learned to avoid the slippery slopes, and from a faith perspective, for me that's important.

Speaker 2: 32:16

I really appreciate the scripture that says flee from sexual immorality, because you're sinning against yourself. In other words, you're making your own life worse. That's how I see that scripture. I'm making my own life worse when I just put myself in teasing, difficult, edging situations. So that's recovery, so two pieces, and I think they have to go together. You have to work on both that you're going to be successful. The guys who aren't successful and long-term successful recovery, they've missed one piece or the other. You know they're either trying to stop cold turkey, do all recovery work, just be sober, but then they never address the emotional stuff and then it bubbles up like a pressure cooker. Or all they do is the emotional work, you know, but they don't stop their habits and their addiction, and so then they keep falling back into these old habits, which brings all the feelings back again. And you gotta do both, you gotta hit both ends of it yeah, that is so wise.

Speaker 1: 33:15

I love the way you just put that, because I see both all the time. Yeah, men who feel like they've tried everything but the emotional healing hasn't been touched yet, or they've done so much emotional healing and yet the habits have not shifted at all, or they're still living in a toxic environment. You wrote a sentence that really stood out to me strong emotion and attachment.

Speaker 2: 33:39

Drivers are like magnets attracting themselves to sexual energy yes, so it's a psychological phenomena that we haven't done enough research about. There are some organizations like I tap and a set that will talk about it. Jay Stringer talks about it in some of his work kind of stuff. Attachment has a psychological direction for connection. You're talking about survival by being a part of the pack, being a part of the tribe. So psychologically I'm going to bond with my mom, my dad, others around me, my peers, and so that attachment energy that's the drive is for survival, to connect.

Speaker 2: 34:26

Sexual energy has a similar objective to connect, for survival of the species, to sexually connect, to physically connect, and so they both have the same directional objective, which makes it even more likely as to why these two things can fuse and become one, because they're so parallel in the direction that they're going. It just so happens they become fused over time and it becomes more and more it feels like the same thing, and so I feel lonely because I want to belong to the guys and now I'm feeling attracted to them. But really, underneath that there's this longing to belong, to connect, to be one of the guys. It's a legitimate emotional need. It's just getting sexual. It's almost like the sexual energy is hijacking, piggybacking onto this need to belong. So that's kind of what I need or how I would describe that sort of magnetism that occurs between the two.

Speaker 1: 35:30

That makes so much sense. I've never heard anyone put it quite so clearly. That blows my mind that emotional attachment and connection, as well as sexual energy, are all about survival. Yeah yeah, whether individually or for the species.

Speaker 2: 35:47

Yeah, absolutely, and I wish I could take credit for it, for the idea. But again, others have talked about it before. It just gets downplayed. It's not always politically correct to bring it up, it's not always as dynamic as a topic to talk about, but it's there and it's been talked about for years and just maybe not highlighted like we needed to.

Speaker 1: 36:10

Yeah, this is awesome. What is your favorite thing about freedom? Healing, recovery.

Speaker 2: 36:21

I haven't struggled with pornography in a long, long time, meaning I haven't had a slip in a long, long time with that, nor have I been compulsive in years and years with it. I feel free, I feel like I have choices and it's not always easy, because now I have to really talk to my wife. If I'm mad at her, you know, I can't just avoid it. So there's a liberation, there's a freedom in it. I feel more connected to God than I did before. I feel more in tune with Him than I did before. I feel like a better father. When difficulties come along, it's painful because you have to actually deal with the difficulty, you have to actually deal with the truth, and on the other hand, I can, and it goes away and eventually you fix it and resolve it. I didn't realize the lack of intimacy in my life, and it wasn't until I got into recovery that I started to discover what real intimacy is, and not just with my wife and our sexual relationship, but also with buddies and friends. I wasn't having sex with them, but I was definitely intimate with them and they were sharing back. Hey, floyd me too. Hey, I've struggled with that too. Hey, I've been lonely too, or hey, I know what you mean. And to have a buddy.

Speaker 2: 37:48

I remember one of my roommates was going to leave mid-semester. He had some things going on at home. I was helping him take stuff out to his car and it was just me and him. The other guys had classes and whatnot. And so he's loading up his car to leave and I'll never forget how he turned around as he's all set to go and just gave me this big old hug and he wouldn't let go and I'd never had another peer hug me like that before. And I remember him saying Floyd, I love you, man, you've meant so much to me in my life. And here we are, two 20-year-old kids, and it's the first time I actually experienced intimacy with a dude in a way that was so healthy and connected. I had not experienced that before. So those kinds of experiences are liberating, but they're soul filling in a way that I would never have achieved through sexual random behaviors.

Speaker 1: 38:55

So beautiful Sounds like you were receiving a hug from God in that moment I definitely felt that way, for sure, yeah, yeah, awesome there are so many other great stories from your life in this workbook, as well as insights, questions, journal prompts, healing and recovery perspective for young men with sexualized attachments. You can get a copy of it at the link in the description. You can also learn more about Floyd at floydgodfreycom.

Speaker 2: 39:28

Sexualizedattachmentscom is another place they could go, yeah.

Speaker 1: 39:31

Awesome To get more research, education and to connect with you. Floyd, thanks so much for being with us.

Speaker 2: 39:40

Thank you. Just as a final concluding thought, drew, I would just want to say to you or your listeners, there's hope. If you're struggling with sexual confusion or sexual addiction, if you've been a victim of sexual abuse, whatever your situation is, there is hope and there are answers, and the best thing you can do for yourself is to keep looking, keep looking, keep praying. Seek support Podcast. I know, drew, you have a weekend retreat that men can attend to do healing work. Keep looking, don't give up. The answers are out there. It might not be easy, it might even be painful, but there is hope and there's freedom in recovery.

Speaker 1: 40:27

Amen, awesome and gentlemen, always remember you are God's beloved Son and you he is well-pleased.