Setting The Mission: Outgrowing Porn

SPEAKER_02 0:34

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.

Meet Chris And Andrew

SPEAKER_03 0:53

Hey man, thank you for listening to this delightful interview with Chris Chandler and Andrew Engstrom. They are both Christian counselors. Chris is a certified sex addiction therapist, and Andrew is a certified marriage and family therapist who do intensives together for individuals and couples who are dealing with many of the issues that we are focused on at Husband Material. Outgrowing porn, learning to connect, real intimacy, understanding our arousal patterns, and finally getting more into the life of health and freedom that we were created for. In this conversation, we talk about arousal, emotions, intimacy, and truth. Personally, I felt both challenged and encouraged that oh, this work is so difficult, and yet it's so good and worth it. I hope you get the same value as I did. Enjoy the episode. Today we get to talk with Chris Chandler from San Diego Christian Counseling and Andrew Engstrom from Seattle Christian Counseling. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Thank you very much. Thanks, Drew. Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_03 2:02

I am delighted to be talking with you guys about two of the most important topics when it comes to outgrowing porn: arousal and intimacy. You guys have been working in this space for years. Why are you passionate about this?

SPEAKER_00 2:17

For me, man, I I feel like I've my story is just one knucklehead moment after another. You know, I've chased false intimacy and synthetic versions of intimacy my whole life. And so as I've kind of stumbled, as the Lord has kind of like, you know, walked with me along my path, I honestly like I've kind of got here backwards. Like I was out getting DUIs and sleeping around in my in my 20s and just kind of eventually, you know, got into this field on accident in some ways, and then leading groups and walking with guys and realizing like I'm really like the Lord has me doing this work for me more than anything else, right? Just living completely double parked. And so as I've kind of continued it on my own journey and walked a lot of that with Andrew, it just has been more and more revealed to me that, man, this is this is the heart of every man. This is the work that we all have to do. And so by God's grace, I feel like you know, he's allowed me to step into my own work. And so I'm just I get excited that I get to do this every day with other men.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Yeah, you do. Chris and I talk just about every day. And the thing that really is awesome in the friendship is how passionate we are about therapy. So I had this pretty nice, squeaky, clean start to my therapy career. I was always interested in doing couples therapy. I was at at home alone at 10 years old, and I saw a book that had the word sex on the title, and I was like, reading that. And and it talks a bit about the honeymoon night, and that was all very interesting. But then I found myself reading more and more about these people who seemed to do like talking to people about their relationships for a living, and the idea was just such a spark. And I really never looked back. I've always wanted to do this, but my realization came when I started working with Chris. I was sitting with him in his groups, helping facilitate because I wanted to learn how to do groups. I thought it was a super powerful way of getting just therapeutic results and loved the way I saw him work. And my realization was like, oh, I'm in a headache too. I wasn't struggling with porn, I wasn't using uh substances, but I'm a distractoholic. And I typically will use, you know, YouTube or or you know, things you can scroll, but it doesn't really matter what the drug is. And so I started doing my own recovery work with him, and and now, you know, I do couples' work and he's uh we're we're doing intimacy work. Chris's his quarter four is all about relational intimacy, which makes me very happy. And of course, we're doing intensives together, and that's been a huge part of my seeing how much recovery it demands therapy. Like you have to do your core work, you have to do a whole bunch of relational work, you've got to do the behavioral work. And I see the best outcomes with recovery clients. So I I love working there. Awesome.

Arousal Beyond Sex

SPEAKER_03 4:56

As you talk about being a distractaholic and that being similar in some ways to being attached to porn or other unwanted sexual behavior, it's reminding me that arousal is not always just sexual. When we hear the word arousal, I almost immediately think sexual. Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:24

Can you help us figure out, okay, if it's not just sexual, what is arousal?

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Yeah, such a beautiful question. Yeah. In recovery, we say a drug is a drug is a drug, right? The brain doesn't really differentiate, right, in terms of like what feels stimulating. Like, for instance, I always kind of joke like a tiger chasing you is arousing to the nervous system, right? It's not sexual arousal for most, although I'm sure there's some fetish out there that you know somebody does itself. But it's you know it's right. Yeah. You know, you know it's out there, man. But yeah, arousal just means like our we're activated in our nervous system, right? We're activated, you know, in in in all of our senses. And so everything's getting heightened. And so obviously, sexual arousal is one of the most powerful forms of arousal, particularly for that little boy, Drew, that you talk so much about, right? For for all of us that got you know exposed so early on. I mean, talk about the like just it's like you know, holding on to an electric fence, right? Just rattles every part of our cage. And so, I mean, that that's what most of us really kind of hit first. I don't know, you know, Patrick Carnes, pioneer in the world on sex addiction recovery, right? Talked at one point about, you know, a lot of times when men and women come into recovery, we we we treat drug and alcohol addiction first. Regardless of when you got exposed to that, it's going to kill you the fastest and has usually the most overt negative consequences. When people get sober from drugs and alcohol, what you find underneath that immediately is sexual arousal, sexual addiction. And a lot of times when people get sober from sexual acting out, you'll find that they go to alcohol or other because they need some kind of intensity to match the intensity that they were seeking with sexual acting out, right? So I need to numb this now with alcohol. I didn't ever used to struggle with alcohol, but now all of a sudden I'm turning to alcohol. So those two are kind of like the two primary early on in recovery. And then if we get, you know, once we get those kind of, you know, more stable and healthy, then next immediately what goes is food, right? We start kind of basically working our way back into like the developmental process of like what we learn to reach for. And so food is most commonly the next powerful arousing agent. And then, like Andrew was saying, the next thing that we go to is some kind of distraction, some kind of scrolling, seeking video games that fall in this bucket, gambling, just like you know, that exhilaration, that excitement piece. And then a lot of times Carnes talks about spending. Uh our finances are a big piece of that. And then he goes into workaholism, our performance, right? We learned at a very young age before we ever became sexual.

The Addiction Ladder And Exit Drugs

SPEAKER_00 7:47

We learned that, you know, if I get a good grade, then I'm I'm valuable and have worth. And so, and then he goes all the way back to codependency. He says that codependency is the core of all addictions, right? And so, all that to say, like, you know, we find stimulation in all kinds of ways in each of those buckets. And so if we're just looking at the sexual bucket, sexual arousal, we're kind of missing the larger picture.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Yeah, totally. I have this phrase I call exit drugs that I got while I was realizing I was uh an addict, is that as someone starts getting recovered from their primary drug, there's like a lesser drug to go to. And I have some grace for that, right? At one point I got to addiction with books and I was reading until three in the morning. I was like, I think this is the healthiest drug I've ever had.

SPEAKER_03 8:29

Well, I suppose in a way, then we are all distractoholics. We're all avoiding something.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

Increasingly so, 100%. Karn said one time sex addiction, particularly, but all addiction, is the great attention deficit disorder. He says that, you know, we're constantly scanning, seeking, scrolling, like we're we're we are looking for some kind of dopamine hit, right? ADHD, you know, specifically is also referred to as a dopamine deficiency disorder. And so a lot of times there's overlap. But point being that whether we're diagnosable as ADHD or not, we're all attention deficit, right? We're all distracted and wanting to be distracted. Because again, it's too scary, uncomfortable, unfamiliar to really step into some of these parts of our heart that we're not cultivated well in terms of like knowing how to navigate, you know, our emotions and the scariness of, again, relational intimacy at its core.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

My belief is that the high of a drug is what first gets us in there. I actually think curiosity first gets the cat killed, and then there's a high that gets you coming back. But I believe that what really addicts us to a drug is when we subconsciously realize its power to take us out of our life and to remove us from the terrible struggle of feeling that feeling, facing those things, and what I call living wholeheartedly, right? Really being there. And so any any drug can take you out of that. Any drug can put you in that out of right. Chris, you you said this phrase, it just got me synthetic pleasure, and that all something in us knows this does it. I will keep this up. And actually these elaborate pathways of keeping a recurring cycle of getting back to your drug, getting into shame, back in your drug, and using pain, very reliable stimulants to keep you out of your life. I think that's what's truly addicting.

SPEAKER_03 10:15

Yeah, so well said, and it's not just keeping us out of the painful parts of life, but sometimes we use a drug to escape uh goodness and hope. And when things are going well, yes, we self-soothe and also we self-sabotage. For real. So I hear more and more guys talking about that, how success is a trigger just as much as failure, maybe even more sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

I mean, I totally agree, Chris. I'm sure you see that a lot.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Thousand percent. Yeah. I mean, we're all the dog chasing the fire truck. We have no idea what to do when we get intimacy, when we get success, when we get those things. It's kind of like the chase is always higher than the achievement, right? So when we get closer to the achievement, the actual thing that we think we're chasing, we know, we know it's not it. And so, you know, I think the closer we get, we realize like, oh man, like this is not this is not it, right? This is not gonna work. And so, yeah, we we go back to our drugs because that's a hell of a lot easier, safer, cheaper. It's true.

SPEAKER_03 11:17

And there are different types of experiences we seek out through our drug of choice. Chris, you've talked about four different types of arousal.

Four Types Of Arousal Explained

SPEAKER_03 11:27

What are those?

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Yeah, and so I'm just I'm pulling from really like brain research on that and Patrick Karnes, you know, the four primary neural pathways in the brain. There's actually three primary, and then Carnes has really added our our kind of greater awareness or understanding of this category of deprivation. But the three that I learned in undergrad in chemical dependency class was a book. We called it uppers, downers, and all arounders. So in the brain, you have excitatory neurotransmitters. So you have, you know, you know, uppers, right? Anything like caffeine, cocaine, stimulants, right, adrenaline-seeking behaviors, anything that really amplifies and moves, if you're familiar with polyvagal theory, moves us into a sympathetic state, right? So we're uh heart rate goes up, respiration, blood pressure, body temperature, everything's, you know, going skyrocketing. Downers are anything that brings the system down, right? So we want to numb, we want to, we want to dissociate, disconnect. So, you know, alcohol, opiates, benzodiazepines. And again, what's interesting when we go into realms of process addictions like pornography, food, is that you can use different substances or or in behaviors uh in different ways. So for instance, like, you know, going to a casino, somebody can sit at the at the slot machines and and they're looking for that intermittent reward, and so it's adrenalizing for them. For others, they're like zoning out and they're just pulling the lever over and over again just so they don't have to think about their life. So it's not necessarily like, oh, you know, I use porn and that's all the same bucket. It's like some guys are using that to get them going in the morning, other guys are getting that to numb them out at night. Some guys are medicating anxiety in the morning, trying to numb out in the morning so they can go into their workday. So it's not, it's not a one size fits all, right? It's kind of like really studying my story and understanding like, you know, when am I going up, when am I going down, how am I using work workaholism, adrenalizing all week, achievement, you know, chasing after achievements, and that's kind of like adrenalizing me. And so then I need porn in the evenings or on the weekends to just like binge and numb out from all that anxiety that I've stirred up for myself all week. So you have this huge neural cocktail, right? So uppers, you know, stimulants, depressants, downers, and then all around us are there's literally cannabinoid receptors in the brain. We God has designed our brain for a hallucinogenic experience. Now, there's a lot of debate on that in the Christian world, but the idea is that imagination is a form of hallucinogen, right? Like that we have imagination and creativity, and the brain is designed to imagine what is not there, right, in reality. And so, I mean, the book of Revelation is for us for me, as I read it, it's just like this mind-blowing experience, you know. But obviously, again, like that's that can be pretty scary in in reality. So we go to these synthetic forms of that. And so practically, I think how that shows up for most of us. Obviously, marijuana, you know, all the hallucinogenic drugs, you know, psilocybin and things like that, but also, you know, dissociation, fantasy. So it's not that I'm chasing after, you know, some sexual image as much as like I want to get lost in the story of it. Like, I want to get lost in the fantasy of it. And so, you know, that's the the narrative. Some guys literally like struggle more with narrative pornography than than image-based pornography, right? A lot of love addiction is this, like the fantasizing of what this relationship could be like, you know, what it could become. And then deprivation is that last, that fourth category that Carnes really kind of hits home, which is that we, you know, we turn anorexic. We we shut down and we control as a form that is that is proving to become uh evidence in the science that that is addictive, right? There's a lot of power that comes when I can manage things, control things. So a lot of guys in recovery, I think, swing to this deprivation mode of a of a purge cycle, right? So it looks great in 12-step meetings, like, hey, I'm three years sober, and you're like, cool, man, how's your sex life? And they're like, I just said I'm three years sober, and you're like, No, no, I know, but like how how is God redeeming your sexuality? And they're like, No, I don't have sex. Like, you know, my wife and I, we don't, we don't even talk about it. Yeah. And I feel sad about that because I don't, you know, God forbid we come into sobriety and recovery hoping to just never be sexual again, right? I mean, obviously God is, you know, at work and redeeming us, but for a lot of us, that's it's like, well, if I can't act out, then you know, then I'm just gonna shut it all down. And again, we get praise in that in the church and in in meetings, but if that's where we stop, that's really sad because I think we're just finding another way to act out.

SPEAKER_03 15:27

Wow. Is that what's sometimes called acting in?

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Correct. Yeah, that's well said. Yeah, that's what Carnes has termed that side of it, right? That binge bird design. Hadn't heard that before. Yeah, that's nice.

SPEAKER_03 15:38

Yeah, acting out versus acting in.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

I had a chance to speak about sexuality at church one time, and we talked about the verse that said basically, don't stop making love unless for a time to pray and then come back together again. And there is this funny biblical command there, right? Pursue your sexuality. You know, there's the verse, your body's not your own. So if we're not so much about your desires, we've got to make this work as a couple. And I remember I had two older couples come up to me and they had been really convicted by that because they had figured out how to make it easier by just ditching that urge and not having sex. And they had gotten hit by the Holy Spirit. They're like, Yeah, we know that this is wrong. What do we do? I'm like, let's get together, let's figure this out. And what a wonderful thing to restore people to. But in terms of like, you know, as a couples therapist, in terms of recovery, when you get when you get to that step, restoring sexuality, then you're really getting out of like rescue and and out of the the gunk and into the glory, the goodness, the the intimacy, the good stuff.

SPEAKER_03 16:47

Yeah. Each of these four types of arousal is a way of trying to regulate without relationships, without real intimacy, especially that last one, deprivation. And Andrew, you're talking about people coming back together.

Acting Out Versus Acting In

SPEAKER_03 17:11

What does it look like for somebody who has never really learned relational intimacy to start meeting those needs, not just in isolation or in fantasy?

SPEAKER_00 17:26

I think that's the most beautiful question, Drew. And that's, I mean, I know that's Andrew's heart. I haven't even laid out my my my three-legged stool of recovery, but I mean, really truly, we're talking the final frontier of recovery. This is long-term recovery. God is a God of reconciling all things to himself, reconciling us to God, to ourselves and to others. And so this idea of like, what is it like to live in deep relational intimacy? I mean, that is that is the heartbeat of recovery, right? I kind of joke with guys all the time, this is not a don't touch your penis program, meaning, you know, this is not just about stopping porn. And even it's not even just about healing the wounds, you know, it's about like for what purpose, right? To what calling? Like, what does God want to do in your story and what does it mean to show up in love well?

SPEAKER_01 18:10

I remember sitting in group with you, Chris, and and hearing first steps and people reading their story and the remarkable lack of intimacy training, like just not knowing, like you said, Drew, they're practically starting at zero. And terrible wounds, right? You see just awful stories of how people were harmed and abused and you know, shown how to sexualize, but also just deprived of talking about your feelings, being given affection or coddled or or held. And you know, Chris would know so much more about the research you've been involved with the research of how stark. I think, especially with addiction, I think especially where you see the brain go that way, that you see a depravity, like a depriving of relationship and connection.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Yeah, the image that I always have is like in the matrix, right? Maybe I'm dating myself, the old movie. He gets freed from the matrix, right? It's like, great, I got into recovery, I got sober, but then he gets dropped into this tank and he's like completely atrophied, right? And he gets like pulled out. It's like, we got a lot of rehab to do now, right? Like, yes, you're out of the matrix, you're not looking at porn, you're sober. Praise God. And he says, you know, my eyes hurt, and he's like, Yeah, because you've never used them, right? It's like, man, my heart hurts. Like, I don't know how to relate to my wife in intimacy, real intimacy, right? Because I've been in a stupor, self-medicated stupor for decades.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Chris, we got to use that clip at an intensive. That was so good. You've never used them. That's how it feels like sitting with some of these, especially guys, but I've definitely sat

From Sobriety To Relational Intimacy

SPEAKER_01 19:46

with sat with females also, where it's like, you don't know how to identify identify a feeling. We both have a three-step feeling process, and mine is like super simple, and Chris's is really therapeutic. So Chris's is better, but mine is just, and I often teach this to guys is one, notice that you had a feeling. And a lot of times, we'll stop there, right? This week, your assignment is to just notice you had a feeling and to be aware that it was there, right? Two is identify what the feeling is, three, figure out where the feeling came from. And then you go and talk to that person. Then you go and start that work. But a lot of times I want to start at step four, which is like, all right, let's go have the hard conversation. And and it's like training wheels, we don't like, we need to figure out what a bike is.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Yeah, I'm always having to slow Andrew down a little bit. He's like, he's getting a lot of that mastered, so he just assumes everyone else can ride bikes, but we're like, dude, we, you know, I don't even know where my pants are, let alone my helmet. Slow down, you know. And I I'm so appreciative too of like that there's that voice, those voices are starting to emerge in the recovery circle. I think of like like Eddie Caparucci's book, right? Why men struggle with love. And it's like, like, we just gotta get like some basics in place of, yeah, to your point, Andrew, like just identifying and not just left brain identifying feelings, but really like, you know, like slowing down, getting into that right brain experience of just experiencing the feeling without language or concepts, just like you know, being able to like really sit in in our emotional, you know, experience for any amount of time.

SPEAKER_03 21:11

Yeah. Eddie told me that no one has ever argued with him when he says, I think you're emotionally immature and underdeveloped. Like it's true. Any of us who are dealing with unwanted sexual behaviors and attachments have sexualized our feelings because we don't know what to do with them. We don't even know we have them. I have noticed in myself that oftentimes I don't even realize I'm feeling an emotion until a sexual feeling comes along and gives me a clue that something happened. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Yeah, what I say to people is nobody knows what they're feeling. Some people get faster at figuring it out. And I think that helps uh people starting the baseline because it can be really disturbing to look at and like, okay, what are you feeling? And you don't know. A lot of people are like, no, I just don't have feelings, trust me. It's like, no, you have feelings, trust me. That's what therapy is. It'll be okay.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

This next quarter, as we go into relational intimacy for all the groups that I'm running, you know, one of the I have kind of level one guys, level two guys. So some of the guys that are more advanced in recovery, level two, we're we're gonna be studying Kurt Thompson's book, who I know you've had on your show as well, Soul of Desire. And he talks a lot about, you know, like we don't even realize how anxious we are underneath all of it. Again, kind of to this point that we've been kind of medicating. And so back to your point, it might even look like sabotage because things are going really well, but it also might just be like we don't know, we don't, yeah, we don't know how to like live in this state of, you know, again, what Kurt Thompson would call anxiety, which is like my nervous system is scared really fundamentally, right? The boy just doesn't know how to live in the real world, you know, in real relationships, real intimacy. And so, yeah, man, it starts like we start paying attention. My one of my mentors used to always say, the good news in recovery is that you're more aware, the bad news is you're more aware. You know, it's like like you get to like notice more of what you're feeling, but that's not always a pleasant experience.

SPEAKER_01 23:12

Rarely. Yeah, people don't walk out of the room and be like, I can feel.

SPEAKER_03 23:19

And then we come into our relationships, and now it's intimacy. This is my new word that I invented today.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

Drew is beautiful. We were we were talking off camera here, and and we're talking about like how we're gonna figure this out. And Drew's like, maybe intimacy is intimessy, and I just fell in love. It's fantastic.

SPEAKER_03 23:39

So I've heard people say intimacy is like into me see. Yeah, you know, like truly being seen. Maybe we also need to add it's into messy.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Like

Learning Feelings: From Numb To Aware

SPEAKER_00 23:54

so good. It is a boot cotton, bro. Legit. And then you know what's funny, Drew? If I can just be super candid for a moment, I you know, Andrew and I, we've done a fair amount of you know, podcasts, we have lots of conversations, we talk to people all day. But as we, you know, got on this morning and just started talking, and you kind of started talking about a different set of topics than I was anticipating. You know, Andrew and I had kind of like talked about doing relational intimacy, and and so I found myself getting all of a sudden like, oh no, like this is gonna be messy, like this could be scary because I had an idea, a direction, a thought, and it's like, oh, we might go a different direction. And so even like as we've been talking, I've been like noticing my own anxiety and like trying to calm myself down because it's like you know, it doesn't have there's not a clear path, right? And I love Brene Brown. She said, you know, I'm a great map maker. I can tell you what the road map to recovery looks like, but I'm a terrible, I'm I'm in the same boat of you as walking the map. Because if if I know you know, she quotes Carl Jung saying, if you know if you think you know your map, you're on the wrong map. Like we don't know our map, we're just taking one step at a time. So I feel like even in this conversation and like back to your point in marriage, it's like you can read all the marriage books, but actually like walking that out in the moment and just showing up authentically without knowing like the next question, the next topic, the next answer, the next solution, that is inter what do you call it? Intimessy. That is we're into the messiness, and it's it's beautiful. So I'm so glad that this morning unfolded this way because it's like this is this is real recovery, this is real relationship, this is real intimacy.

SPEAKER_01 25:23

Amen. As you spoke that vulnerably, I felt it in my body, which you and I are used to, right? Because all the time we're we're getting real, and that's how we're getting recovered. I believe that silence engenders shame because everybody's making mistakes. Everybody's missing the mark, everybody's sinning. And I believe that when you go, for example, to church and no one's talking about porn or even about sex, then you do have a problem, an active problem. It's caused by passivity, but if you're messing up, if you're messy and no one else is messy, then you get tacitly the message, you're alone, you're the problem. Just now, Chris, you were like, this is what happened. And and you were a grown-up, right? But the reason we fear wholeheartedness, the we're the reason we so run from from being real is those mistakes. We just can't wrap our heads around the fact that we will be valuable and worthy even though we're messing up. And where people can model that, then you can be revealing with your heart. You can get intimate, you can let people see in. But we're so, I think, knowledgeable of the fact that there's a God and that what is right and wrong are there, and messing up ultimately a scene, I believe the heart knows there's something we gotta avoid. And how you know is that story? It's all about reconciliation. It's a ministry of reconciliation where it's like, you bring it to me. Don't fix yourself, don't try to be your own savior. It doesn't work. Don't try and fix your addiction on your own. It's that it's that silence, it's that doing it on your own that's the problem.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

So if I can piggyback on that back to your question, Drew, it's like, well, I think what we're both saying there, Andrew, is like we just step in, right? Imperfections and all, right? It's like, I'm just gonna step into this conversation this morning and I'm gonna bring my whole heart and do the best I can, acknowledge my imperfections, my my brokenness, my fears, my anxieties. I'm gonna pay attention to what my body's doing in this moment, and I'm gonna do it imperfectly. I I'll bet you anything when I go back and listen to this, you're gonna I'm gonna hear my anxiety as I'm even as I'm sharing, right? Because it's like it's scary to like step into the unknown. And so, and I think that's beautiful. I'm praise God for that. I hope that listeners can feel human and normal that you know, though I've been in the field 20 years and I've trained with carnes and I've done a lot of great work, I'm still a human, right? I still get nervous, I get scared, and so I still do my work of checking in with what I'm feeling and naming honestly where I'm at. And that's again part of our all of our ongoing process.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 27:56

Amen. I'm hearing two themes. One, do emotions, and two, step into the mess. That sounds like a great place to start for learning intimacy skills that we never got when we were younger.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

And teaching people, probably especially gentlemen, to listen to a feeling, get into a feeling, feel a feeling, ask their wife more about the feeling, even though the feeling hurts and makes you feel like she's saying you're a failure. It's very it doesn't make sense to people, it's counterintuitive. But what happens is you feel heard.

Intimacy As Intimessy

SPEAKER_01 28:39

And when you get into like you can listen to somebody about something and it feels nice, right? What was your plan? What were we doing? But when somebody shows you their heart, here's something important to me, and you just listen about it, they feel heard, and I call that the secret sauce of marriage therapy. Feeling heard just makes things work. Uh you didn't agree to something, you didn't write a contract, there's nothing necessarily a change that's going to happen, but everything shifted because of softening. And man, I've seen wives just cry. And and especially the last few months, I've been focusing on this. How to basically show your wife that you're listening to her emotions instead of trying to correct her or or say, no, I didn't. And they just desperately need it. Right. But anybody needs it.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

But on to that point, I just there's this difference between hearing and listening, right? And I because I think when you say listen, Andrew, you have such depth to that. But what we're talking about is even less than hearing the sound waves of words coming in and more about opening our heart and feeling what the other person is saying, right? I love when Schnar says, you know, communication is nothing if you can't stand the message, right? Like you're communicating just fine, right? It's not, you don't have a communication issue, right? Jesus says out of the heart, the mouth speaks. So it's not the words that you're using or the words that I'm hearing. It's about where is your heart and where is my heart and how are we attuning to that? I think some of the best listening is with no words at all, right? I'm just, it's just presence, the ministry of presence. Can I just sit with you in your pain and feel that with you? That is listening. And of course, we need to wrap some left brain language around that as well. And so I just when you say listening, I think the audience probably thinks like just the communication skills and just, you know, we're, you know, what I hear you say is this, and what I you know felt was this. And that and that's true. That's part of it, because we have to slow it down and add some structure to it, but but it goes far deeper than that.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

Yeah, totally. What I'm finding in couples therapy is a a tool I call tension holding that is changing everything for me. So tension holding is no. Knowing and saying what your truth is, the hard truth. Without reactivity, that's the big key. Uh, and without changing the topic. Because you'll bring up, you know, your truth about your partner, and it's it's hard. And your partner instinctively will say, put that away, stop that. That's terrifying to me, without saying it that way. You press into that without changing the topic, without getting reactive. And what I find is we we go, ah, and then we're finally willing to stop trying to control that other person's truth. We're finally willing to be like, okay. And it's usually not an act of hope. Like, you love me, even though you think I do this thing wrong. Usually there's this sort of like, okay, strike true, stab me, you hate me. All is lost. Sort of despondency that happens there. And that's where you can finally have a connection to say one of my favorite phrases, I don't hate you. You're the person I want to have these problems with. But a person can't hear that when they're trying to control your truth. Can you say that line again? I don't hate you. You're the person I want to have these problems with.

unknown 31:40

Right?

SPEAKER_01 31:41

You can have problems with anybody, right? The whole escape idea, right? It's so related to drugs, is the avoiding we do in our relationships is actually quite nuanced. It takes a lot of uh work. You have to do a lot to stay in your addiction. And facing going without it just feels crazy. And then you get into really scary stuff, start feeling your feelings, and you have to do it without your drug. And what I find is that God's help me, tap into truth as that huge driver, that kind of final frontier perhaps of how to get people really growing. And I'm having people spontaneously step into health, and I'm not having to train them normal tools of like this is how you listen to each other, this is how you do kind things and want to, you know, get each other's gifts and go on dates. Those are all terribly important, and you have to train people. But what I find is if I can get them into saying the hard truth, there's like there is so much more there that didn't need training necessarily. What really needed to happen is we is we face truth together.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

If I could summarize real quick, too. I mean, I think the the word that really captures that in the field would be differentiation, right? And Andrew, Andrew speaks to this a lot, but it's it's that can I hold the tension of both sides, right? Show up with 100% of my actual capital T truth. This is who I am, what I'm feeling, where I'm at, and simultaneously hold 100% of your truth, your feelings, your values, your perspective. And that doesn't mean relative truth, just to be clear. It's not that, you know, you're your truth and my truth, it's that there is an objective truth, and I don't own capital T truth. I have my lowercase T truth, and you have your lowercase t truth. And God has what you know built the system in a way that we almost we need each other to collaborate around really coming to understand what is the actual truth, right? And so can we sit in the tension? And as you heat that up, that's called differentiation, right? And we it is

Listening, Presence, And Attunement

SPEAKER_00 33:28

it is painful, it's uncomfortable. Dr. David Schnarch calls it the crucible, uh, and he says we got to turn the intensity and the heat up, right? That's where it exposes the impurities of the heart. And so he says marriage is a people growing machine. And to your point, Andrew, it's really a less about you know tools as much as it is about helping people grow up, right? And uh and stand in their own truth, stand on their own on their own two feet, right? That's scary, hard things that most of us did not have modeled growing up, right?

SPEAKER_01 33:53

No.

SPEAKER_03 33:55

That's incredible.

SPEAKER_01 33:57

Did you have that modeled well?

SPEAKER_03 33:59

Some of us grew up in a house where it seemed like our parents never fought because they never got into the crucible, and others heard their parents fight and it was really dangerous and unsafe. It seems like you need a safe container to be able to go there.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

It takes a sober man or woman, right, that's not self-medicating and has done, has read Drew Boa's book on outgrowing porn and is healthy and whole at your core, right? You you're integrated in your parts, and then you're capable of stepping into the crucible of relational intimacy. You know, it's not, I'm not saying you can never get there at all in any capacity if you haven't done those things, but that's really what it takes to really step in and stay in the heat of that that fire, that passion. And what else are we here on earth for, man? Good grief. Like that is where it's all going. Like that is where passion and worship and and you know, like kingdom on earth happens, right?

SPEAKER_03 34:57

Like it's previously such a contrast between the crucible and the tension of telling the truth and stepping into mess versus seeking arousal in all these yeah, synthetic ways and the way we learned how to soothe us kids.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Yeah, truly. I believe that delayed gratification really is central to the gospel. He who takes care of his wife takes care of himself, loves his wife, loves himself, right? It's all in there. There's a map for sewing into the hard stuff as a way of blessing yourself. And when we sit to the bottle, when I get on YouTube, when we open a porn site, there's a thing that goes, ah. But that relief is what I would call fusion. That's actually in measurement. That's that's running from differentiation. That's a thing where you feel relief from the strain of existing and being. But it is beautiful to create, to experience, to express, to work together. And man, that's true in my marriage. We've done some suffering and some fearful, terrifying things together. And it's working. And I I woke up and said, I love how much peace we have.

SPEAKER_03 36:17

So maybe it's following that pattern of crucifixion and resurrection.

SPEAKER_01 36:23

That's good.

Tension Holding And Truth

SPEAKER_01 36:24

Lay your life down for your wife as Christ did for the church. And doing that listening stuff feels like laying your life down. But when you get into that moment where finally the tension holding turns into complexity building, getting more of the other story, like you said, Chris, putting your heads together to form a truth that's more full than your truth. That feels like taking it up again. It all of a sudden you start coming into peace. We don't have a fight because we didn't have to fight, we got the thing out from between us. And now what's between us? Well, drugs medicate us from the terror of nothing's between us, right? But it turns out it's a good thing. In fact, it's the best thing.

SPEAKER_03 37:03

That's awesome. Guys, thank you so much for going on this adventure today. What is your favorite thing about relational intimacy?

SPEAKER_01 37:15

I'm a big fan of sex. I really think that's a slice of heaven. There's incredible, playful memories. Yeah, it's been wonderful. I think I'll just put that out there today, and maybe I skipped other things.

SPEAKER_00 37:31

That's what we all want to say, but nobody says. It's like, yeah, what what a picture, right? What an incredible God that we worship that like says, like, you know, puts this in our experience, right? As human beings, to just say, like, taste and see that the Lord is good, and and this worshipful experience. So yeah, I'd I can't add much more to that, other than just like, you know, that experience lived in in my friendships, my community, that kind of scariness, that kind of exhilaration. I mean, it is it is the you know, life to the full that Jesus describes, and what a gift, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:06

Amen. Thanks, Chris and Andrew. If you guys want to learn more about their counseling practices, and if you're interested in finding out the details of their upcoming intensive that they do every once in a while, this next one's on relational intimacy. You can go down to the links in the show notes. And gentlemen, always remember you are God's beloved son, and you, he is well pleased.