SPEAKER_01: 0:00

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.

SPEAKER_02: 0:19

Hey, thank you so much for listening to my interview with Jay Stringer, a licensed mental health counselor, researcher, and the author of Unwanted, one of the most popular, helpful books for men in our community, Unwanted, How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing, has opened up a world of freedom, curiosity, compassion, and redemption for so many men and women. And today, Jay is back on the show to talk about his new follow-up book, Desire, The Longings Inside Us, and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow. In this extended conversation, you'll get a preview of the new book as well as an understanding of why desire is not actually the problem at the core of our relationship with pornography and unwanted sexual behavior, but rather underdeveloped desires that need to be reshaped and welcomed with hospitality so that we can grow up, become more authentically ourselves, restore our relationships, and experience the joy of being fully alive. You're going to hear some memorable stories from Jay, some great insights, not just into sexuality, but into your story. And as we begin, there is a need for a disclaimer. There are a couple of places in the book Desire that don't fully align with husband materials' perspective on marriage between one man and one woman as the only appropriate context for complete sexual union. And at the same time, there is so much to learn from this book. Jay Stringer has taught me more than almost anyone about what it means to heal and outgrow porn, to understand your story and the things that sexually arouse you. And now in this new book, Desire, there's a lot more beauty and goodness and truth. And you'll hear Jay talk about it in his own words. So use discernment and enjoy the conversation. I'm so excited to be welcoming Jay Stringer back to the show. It's been a few years. Welcome back, Jay, and congratulations on the publication of Desire.

SPEAKER_00: 2:30

Thank you, Drew. So good to be with you and can't wait to see where we go with this conversation today. Me too. Jay, who is your new book for? Unwanted was written primarily to, I would say, like a Christian man or woman trying to outgrow a self-destructive behavior. This book is much broader. So when I wrote Desire, part of what I wanted to do with this book was to really host a much broader conversation on the topic of desire, one that wasn't just for Christians and that went much more into mainstream topics and understanding. So part of what I'm trying to do in this book is to invite Christians and non-Christians to understand what are the forces and what are the dynamics that are shaping their relationship to desire. And so, although I don't address kind of overt Christian themes throughout the book, in many ways, that's part of my hope with this project is that a Christian's relationship to desire could become one of our greatest apologetics to the world. That the more that we come alive, the more that we will be known as a people who, yeah, we've got some places that we restrict, but other places that we are far more generous, hospitable, loving, kind, and passionate than almost anyone else in the world as well.

SPEAKER_02: 4:02

Beautiful. Why are you passionate about this topic of desire?

SPEAKER_00: 4:07

One of the things that I've been thinking quite a lot about is the parable of the talents and that kind of classic parable of, you know, the master gives people these talents and that question of what are you going to do with them? And some of the harshest words are reserved for those who bury their talents. And so when I think about desire, I think about like that the God of the universe has put certain desires, certain passions inside of us that are really intended to be formed, that are intended to be developed, and yet many of us are coming from family systems or religious traditions that trained us to suppress our desires, to fear them out of this concern that they're going to inevitably become selfish or, God forbid, sexual. But as I have been in this terrain of desire for the last couple of years, I really think it's one of the most beautiful dimensions of life. And I think it's one of the most profound gifts that the God of the universe has given us. And I don't think we can ever develop too much desire for God. I think if we are truly made in the image of God, God is a God full of a desire for beauty, for diversity, for union, for glory. And so, as image bearers, I want it to be known of myself that I lived well into the desires that God put inside of me.

SPEAKER_02: 5:43

I love that. The first sentence of your new book says, you are engaged in a civil war with desire. What does that look like for someone stuck in pornography or unwanted sexual behavior?

SPEAKER_00: 5:57

Yeah. So on the surface, most people that are struggling with unwanted sexual behavior has have labeled their desires as something destructive or something that they cannot trust. And so there is this kind of inner civil war inside of them that says every single time I live into my desire, something bad happens, or I feel like I am drawn into this debris of sexual shame, or I sabotage a relationship or my relationship with God. And so essentially what someone is struggling with pornography has done is to create irrefutable evidence that their desires are broken. But if you begin to look deeper than that, we all have a civil war of our desire for anything. So I think about, you know, I'm in something of my own midlife. I wouldn't call it a crisis, but more of like a midlife chrysalis right now, where I have a desire for deeper friendships. And yet there's also been more loneliness in my life, more exile. So I have a desire for something. And yet it doesn't come to pass. And what do the proverbs say? Hope deferred makes the heart sick. And so a lot of us want a better marriage, and yet our partners don't seem to want the level of intimacy or desire or life that we have. What do we do with that? Or some of us want more meaning in our careers, but we are completely exhausted or feel a lack of purpose. And so all of these desires inside of us are in some ways competing. We desire things that are good and beautiful, and then we find ourselves disappointed. We desire things that are selfish and entitled. And those things create relational debris in our lives to have to clean up with. So all of it is going to create something of the civil war with regard to desire, which I think is why we either just kind of blindly follow it and make a mess of our lives, or we just try and suppress it for fear that it might come out of control, or just even the disillusionment that comes when you get something that you really want, and then it doesn't seem to satisfy you. So all of us, I think, are navigating our relationship to desire without much teaching or instruction.

SPEAKER_02: 8:26

Until now. That's changing.

SPEAKER_00: 8:29

Yeah. Well, that was part of like what I was kind of coming after Unwanted was trying to really grapple with. Like we would get emails from people all over the world saying, like, can Jay interpret my sexual fantasies? Like, here's 15 bucks, Venmo. Can Jay interpret this particular genre of porn for me? And it was hysterical, but I also knew that we had struck a nerve because people were getting curious about their lives. But as we started getting more emails and I continued to do work with my clients, there were so many people just coming back saying, like, I'm still going back to the same marriage, or I'm still going back to the same family of origin, or my life still lacks purpose. Or we would get a lot of emails from, you know, partners of people who are struggling with porn and dealing with betrayal trauma, and just a sense of like, it's not that I have out-of-control sexual desire, it's that I have no desire for sex at all. I need a defibrillator for my sex life or for some area of life and passion. And so part of what I started grappling with is, you know, we we have to look beneath just, you know, what's driving our choices? What is this kind of, if the machinery driving so much of our choices onto porn or to self-destructive patterns and relationship, if all of those desires are driving us towards madness and futility, we should really have some provocation inside of us to begin to repair our relationship to desire. So this book is for human beings, regardless of kind of what you feel like your core struggle is in life, it's really a roadmap and something of a framework of how do you intentionally form your relationship to desire.

SPEAKER_02: 10:24

That is the question that all of us need to answer. If desire is not the problem, what is?

SPEAKER_00: 10:33

So many problems exist in our life. I've broken up desire into five different core longings. So there's a desire for healing, which is about knowing your past, a desire for personal growth, which is about how do you develop hospitality for the struggles of your adult life and intentionally grow not through domination or self-optimization, but really healthy. And then how do you develop intimacy is number three. Number four is how do you develop a desire for pleasure? And then the fifth is a desire for meaning and purpose. So one of the things that will often happen is people will experience problems and intimacy. And they will think if I read John and Julie Gottman, if I get Dan Alender's new book on marriage, then I'm going to be able to solve my intimacy problem. And, you know, you read a good book and then you try and address it, and then very quickly you realize, okay, I have a desire to heal my marriage, but there's all this stuff from my childhood that's playing out. So I also have to desire to heal my story. But then for a lot of people, it's a sense of, okay, I know my story and I want better relationships, but they have never ever developed a fully developed sense of self. So I think about like a good friendship, a good marriage is a little bit like a symphony. So if you were to go to a symphony in Denver or New York City, you want your violinist to be the best in the city. You want your percussion team to like have graduated from high school band and have continued to develop themselves. So when they reach the stage of a symphony, what's being revealed is really what is the work that they have done. But the magic of a symphony is not like, you know, wow, that clarinetist was phenomenal. You might say that, but far more it's the integration of these differentiated individuals that are coming together to be able to make music. And so one of the problems in modern intimacy is that we want union, we want togetherness, we want a dear friend, we want a really passionate marriage. And yet we are arriving at the stage of intimacy wildly underdeveloped. We don't know who we are, we don't know where we come from. And so when we enter into those friendships and those marriages, we end up giving our attachment wounds and a laundry list of needs rather than some level of an invitation to an adventure. But so many of us have not really developed a sense of self. And then we arrive at the stage of marriage or our careers, and the stage shows us very quickly that we are not individuated. We don't have a sense of who we are. And that's true of everybody struggling with pornography grapples with an underdeveloped sense of self. You don't know how to calm your body down, you don't know who you are, you don't know how to navigate the disappointments in your life with create without creating some level of self-sabotage. So one of the core problems is that we have not known how to develop ourselves in a healthy and beautiful way.

SPEAKER_02: 14:01

This was one of the parts of the book that really stood out to me, the need for differentiation. And you have some questions you ask to help people understand how that might be showing up. You said, Do you hide how you really feel about things? Do you feel anxious when someone expresses a different opinion or perspective? Do you suppress your feelings until they explode? If you're in a committed relationship, do you tend to see your partner as the primary problem? Do you soothe yourself through substances or other self-destructive behaviors? Do you pursue relationships primarily when you're feeling empty or need validation? Do you care for the needs of others but disregard your own? Do you commit to doing things you have no desire for? Do you feel anxious or purposeless when you are alone? And do you gossip about your problems with others instead of talking directly to the person involved? I can imagine that will resonate for a lot of guys.

SPEAKER_00: 14:56

Yeah, even as you read them, I feel confronted and cornered. Like I don't want to have to deal with these questions. But part of the background of those questions is there's this notion of a provisional self that I first heard about from a guy by the name of James Hollis. But one of the things that a provisional self is, is it's not your real self. It's a self that you needed to develop in order to navigate your world. So when I think about my own family of origin, my father was a minister, and my mom was like the oldest daughter of Plymouth Brethren missionaries. And so very religious home that I come from. My older sister was the classic rebel in our family. She was kind of doing things, saying things that would reflect quite poorly on my parents. My older brother took more of the like the philosophical rebellion camp. He was reading Nietzsche and other philosophers at like 16, critiquing my parents' parenting and my dad's sermons. And so part of what I grew up in as the third of four kids is I'm watching the difficulties of my parents' marriage. I'm watching my sister wreak havoc, watching my brother bring a lot of heartache and truth, kind of like those moments of like, did he really just say that? You can't say that. And he's completely right. So part of the provisional self that I developed was I'm going to be good. The more that I read Dead Theologians, the better my relationship with my dad is. The more that I am attuned to the sorrow and the anger of my mom, the more our relationship goes better and the kinder she is around the house. So part of my provisional self is that I've been something of a therapist and an integrator between theology and psychology since I was a kid. So that provisional self, it launched me into a career as being a therapist, being insightful and trying to integrate what's this person saying and what's that person saying is part of, you know, unwanted of kind of the integration of here's what I heard from laser and here's what I heard from Carnes, and here's what I heard from Dan. Like I've been doing that since I was a young kid, right? So that sense of the provisional self works really well until it doesn't, until there's a sense of I can't express what I really want. I can't disappoint people because everybody wants my voice to sound a particular way or to think a particular way. So if I begin to actually bring my original ideas or bring myself, then, oh shoot, what's going to happen to this marriage? The other dynamic would be in my marriage, that's part of how I would say I drew my wife in was some sense of I can see your pain. I know where men in your world have not known you well and engaged you well, and that I'm gonna bring you into that. But my provisional self also had no other place to bring anger, to bring entitlement, to bring resentment, because I couldn't bring those places to my mom and my dad. So Heather and ex-girlfriends were the places that most of my darkness and entitlement went to. And so that's part of what gets exposed through relationship, through some level of failure, is the self that I built to be able to navigate and survive my world is now impeding any sense of purpose, any sense of intimacy, any sense of just dignity and worth. And that's part of what we have to learn how to desire is we can't just learn to desire our own healing for our story. We also have to desire how to intentionally grow a sense of self that never really got developed in our childhood.

SPEAKER_02: 19:10

Yeah. It sounds like porn could be a part of that provisional self. Unbelievably so.

SPEAKER_00: 19:18

Yeah. Where it's, I don't know how to regulate my own emotions. I don't know how to get the sight and intimacy that I want, but in porn, I can find some mimic. I can find eyes that want me. I can take my anger to a genre of pornography where I can be bad. I can bring the fullness of my dark shadow desires because I can't bring them anywhere else. Or maybe I grew up in a family that I never felt any level of soothing. And so that first orgasm that you have, that first pornography scene that you see is like oxytocin and dopamine that you were made to experience relationally, but your first most reliable experience of it came through the world of porn. So I remember just early on in my career, right when I finished grad school in the state of Washington, you have to get 3,000 hours of supervised therapy. And so one of the fast tracks to get licensed was to work for a community mental health organization. And I worked with the, they were referred to as the highest utilizers of King County, Washington. So these were essentially the men and women that cost the city of Seattle more money than anyone else in the city. So I remember being at Harborview Medical Center making a visit after someone had just essentially OD'd and just asking about the power of heroin. And he said, Man, the first time I did heroin, it felt like a warm hug. And again, just that sense of when we lack soothing, when we have lacked hug, when we live as something of a skin orphan, sometimes that first orgasm, that first hookup, that first sexual experience that we have as kids can bring us something that our hearts and our bodies long for. And we don't feel normal or alive later on in life unless we're remixing or reenacting some of those core patterns. So absolute can be part of provisional.

SPEAKER_02: 21:33

You talk about remixing or reenacting those patterns sexually. Can you give an example?

SPEAKER_00: 21:42

Yeah, I mean, it can happen through the world of pornography, but it can also happen in subtler ways as well. One story that I tell in the book is working with a client who essentially, when he would get together to have sex, was just like full of anxiety. Anxiety, was, you know, always felt like he was underperforming. And so for him, part of what he wanted was to orgasm at the same time as his wife or after. And so essentially, if he would have an orgasm before the one of those two things would happen, he felt like an immense failure. And so, as we started doing some work during couples intensive, you know, just asking him to identify like what is the pressure that you begin to feel? Like, what's the voice that you're beginning to experience? And part of what he began to name is he said it felt like high school athletics. And I said, Tell me a little bit about high school athletics. And he was a baseball player, basketball player, and he just had so many memories of his dad being on the sidelines, just like telling him, like, protect the plate, protect the plate, you got two strikes. Or, you know, in basketball, he would just like be yelling at him all the time of like how he was supposed to box out. So his inner voice was full of his father's critique. And when he would do well, meaning he would get a double-double, he wouldn't strike out, his dad would kind of remain after the games and just kind of tap his chest with some level of affection. But when he would fail or strike out a couple times or, you know, just score three, four points, not get enough boards, his dad would just leave and would not talk to him the rest of the night. And so part of what we began to kind of realize is part of the reenactment for him is that he was creating something of an athletic stage to evaluate his sexual performance. And so he was doing all the, you know, trying to learn all the sex books, trying to optimize his body, hold on to himself, like learn all these techniques. But he had never addressed something of that inner voice and to recognize that, you know, you can let someone down and fail without being a complete failure. So all of us are doing that with regard to could be sexual intimacy, could be with our careers, but we often use sex and our careers and our bodies as a mirror of, you know, tell me my worth. I need to have, you know, my life validated to me through do people want me? Do they like me? Am I keeping the achievement, the metrics that I want in life?

SPEAKER_02: 24:42

So man, that makes so much sense. While you were talking, I had a light bulb moment of realizing we not only do that through porn or through unwanted sexual behavior, we can also do that through sexual recovery. All the pressure, the shame-based performance, our provisional self can show up in recovery. And this was a key insight from the book. You talk about the difference between self-mastery and actual healing and growth. I mean, many of us have come into porn recovery with the intention of trying to master myself, fix myself, achieve a state of moral or spiritual okayness. Why is that not the way?

SPEAKER_00: 25:32

Yeah, so part of like what happens to people is that there's either this sense of kind of domination or suppression that pervades a lot of recovery circles. So the example that I've used in previous years has always been like working with a client who came to see me who had worked with a CSAT. And again, I know great CSATs, I know CSATs that are underdeveloped, so certified sex addiction therapist. But this guy had been in recovery for, I don't know, a year. And so he had wanted to do some work with me. And part of what he started telling me is essentially how much he had optimized everything. Like, I've got this internet monitoring on my computer. I've been in recovery for this amount of time. Here's the level of sobriety that I've reached. Like essentially, I'm optimizing my life and recovery. And he was like a recovery all-star. And yet, as he talked, I was like, this man is dead inside. And so the, you know, what I told him is I said, like, I feel like you're taking me out into your backyard and you're saying, Jay, I have no weeds back here. I have eliminated every hint of sexual lust, and I am full of integrity. And yet, when I look at the backyard, it's it's a dust bowl. And so you've essentially taken your recovery gospel version of Roundup Weed Spray, and you're just spraying it. And there's nothing growing out here. So the purpose of recovery is not just the elimination, it's not just freedom from, but it's a sense of what is your freedom for? Which is, I think, why we need to get back to the issue of desire, is to allow our hearts to awaken again to desire. And so I always think of like Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize winning author, has this great line where she says, I never knew I was a bell until the moment I was lifted up and struck. And so I would love for recovery to be more like that sense of where are the bells ringing inside you now? Where have they rung at different points in your childhood, in your adult life? Because that is where the God of the universe is putting desires into your body, into your heart, into your soul. And that's what we need to be accountable to is that there are places of beauty, longing, aches, passion that exist inside of us that many of us have never developed. So the point of recovery is not just freedom from sin. Like we need freedom from. We need to stop sabotaging our lives, our marriages, our integrity, our sense of dignity. But the purpose of recovery is not just cessation. It's to grow something that is stunning and alive and beautiful. All that to say, desire is trying to wake people up from this slumber that we have called our life. And we tend to try and control it, suppress it, instead of really honor where it's trying to take us.

SPEAKER_02: 28:42

Yes. You say desire is the way back to the authentic life force within us. So how can we reshape our desires?

SPEAKER_00: 28:54

Lovely word of just reshape. That all of us are having our desires shaped by someone or something. So, you know, when you think about things like pornography, that is shaping our sexual templates. We see there is a significant rise of choking during sex. Where is all that coming from? Well, we know that pornography is shaping how we understand desire. So we have multi-billion dollar tech companies that are grooming our desires. They are shaping them. And so it's not the question of, you know, are our desires being shaped, but who is shaping them? So we need some healthy interrogation with like, why do I even want what I want? So that could be, you know, a financial number. I know a lot of clients through the years that have been like, you know, I just need to reach$5 million,$10 million, and then I'll live off the interest, and that's what I want. And again, where is that being shaped from? Where are desires for greed taking over authenticity or presence in your family? Where are your desires for intimacy coming from? So we need a healthy interrogation for any of our desires that we currently have to be able to say who is authoring them? Have they been primed into us? Are they being influenced by a childhood wound? Are they being influenced by something really unhealthy in culture? So the first step to reshaping is curiosity with regard to why do I desire anything that I desire?

SPEAKER_02: 30:36

What are some of the sources that you want to shape your desires more?

SPEAKER_00: 30:43

Yeah, the framework that I'm developing in desire is this kind of five-fold process of that's it, it's a little bit of like they're not a la carte menu options that you get to pick or choose. You need to develop your relationship to all five desires. The dilemma is that many of us will over-index in one of these realms of desire. And that's when, you know, back to your question, Drew, about problems start showing up. Problems show up when we get over-indexed. So one quick example would just be, you know, you have some people that become Joan of Arcs in their respective fields. They care all about mission. They could be a ministry leader, a faith-based leader. They're all about mission. They're all about, you know, some concept, some aspect of justice in the world. And yet when you look at their marriage, it's imploding. Or when you see someone that's all about, you know, self-optimization and they're running their marathons and they have a great VO2 max score, and they can farmers carry and they can do all those things, then you start realizing wait, this guy has over-indexed in physical health because there's something very small and vulnerable inside of his story that he doesn't want to deal with. And so in optimizing his health and his body, he gets to abandon that boy and then just appear strong in the world. So all of us are over-indexing in one realm, and that's where the problems begin to show up. So we need a holistic relationship to desire for the health of our desires to really flourish.

SPEAKER_02: 32:27

It seems like so much of that work starts in processing our childhood experiences.

SPEAKER_00: 32:34

Yeah. One of the stories that I've been processing just as a dad is I have a son that is about to be 13. And one of the stories that I write about with him is when he had turned seven years old, he was just like basically arguing with me all the time, upfront about every disagreement that he had, challenging every just small decision from what I was making for dinner to like how I would engage his sister, just like full-on critique. And so we were butting heads quite a bit. And essentially my wife saw what was happening, saw some of my feeble repair attempts and apologies, and just basically said, like, Jay, like you need to leave the house, and I don't want you coming back until you have some answers with regard to why you're showing up. So I was essentially exiled from my home and told not to come back. And she was inviting me to grapple with like what was stirring inside of me with regard to my son. One of the things that he had done that week was there was a billboard behind our house that was essentially like each egg is like 50 gallons of water. I don't know how they figured that out, but he had essentially thrown three eggs against our backyard fence and then told me, Dad, I just wasted 150 gallons of water when I got home. So, like just this beautiful Ronald Rollheiser refers to this as like raw desire. So that sense of like childhood raw desire is not going to be formed. Unrefined. Exactly. Perfect word for it. And that sense of he's coming out with unrefined, raw desires. And again, what is he cornering me with? He's cornering me with the reality that he got to bring his disagreement to a dad who will actually engage him. He's getting to rebel, not in secrecy, not in privacy, as I had to do, but he's getting to do it in the light of relationship. So he is exposing my provisional self, my childhood self, every dang day of his entire life. And so, you know, we were about to move from Seattle to New York City at that time. And my parents had dropped off this like enormous blue bin full of all of my childhood accomplishments and high school accolades. And, you know, part of the nuance and the asterisk that I'm going to put here, and this isn't false humility, but I went to a Southern Baptist high school where the motto essentially was the best ability was availability. And so basically, you did not get cut from sports teams. So I won a lot of awards, like male Christian Athlete of the Year, Male Athlete of the Year, the Barnabas Award. But I was also into science. And so my science fair project, I think my junior year, senior year was hydrogen-based technology for a more cleaner, more sustainable environment. And that finished like second in the state of Virginia. So I had this great big trophy from the state of Virginia that was all in this blue bin. And so wasn't thinking anything about this blue bin when I came back into the house after my wife had kicked me out. And basically what I told my son was, hey, I have made your desires and the things that you want bad. And I'm letting you know that I'm no longer going to do that. You like destroying things, and I've made that really bad. So your desire to destroy things is good. So how about once a week we identify one thing to destroy together? I have to agree to it, but you get to kind of speak to the desire that you have for destruction. And he paused for about a second and then looked back up at me with this huge smile and said, I want to destroy your trophies. And so he grabbed my state of Virginia trophy. He put it on a rock in the backyard and then grabbed my high school baseball bat and just swung as hard as he could. And it just shattered this trophy into like a hundred of little pieces. And I'll never forget his laugh and his next sentence was Dad, your trophies are made of cheap plastic. And in that moment, I'm like, that is the role of children. They are trophy destroyers. They know what is dear and precious to us, and they expose and they destroy it. Now, I didn't really care about my high school trophies, but those all represented a provisional self in terms of how I needed to develop in the world. And my son has continued to play that gift in my life of exposing the image management, exposing my control, exposing my rigidity in ways that I don't like what he reveals most of the time. But every once in a while I'm willing to allow him to expose what needs to be repented of so that I can find far more joy in life than I'm currently living with.

SPEAKER_02: 38:07

Wow. This story is such a great example of how I might see that behavior of throwing eggs against a fence and call it sin to pathologize that and see it as a problem. Whereas you're inviting us to get curious about the good desires at the core of what might seem unacceptable for a kid. And that's how porn started for so many of us. When we were kids, it was this unrefined expression of desire that we didn't understand, but it was coursing through our bodies. And so now as adults, what I hear you saying is that we get to discover how we learn to survive and then get more in touch with parts of ourselves that we may have buried or suppressed so that we can be fully alive.

SPEAKER_00: 38:59

Yes. Part of our autonomic nervous system is we have a sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic nervous system. And that sympathetic nervous system is what is creating some of that unrefined desire. It's full on. Think of the sympathetic nervous system as the gas pedal. That's like, I want to touch that thing, taste that thing, experience that thing, watch that thing, click on that thing. All of that is sympathetic nervous system that's happening. Kids don't have a fully developed parasympathetic nervous system, which is where you get the breaking system. It's where we rest, it's where we digest, it's that sense of no. And so desires must be disciplined if they are to develop. So discipline is, you know, from that the root word disciple, which means to teach. And that's the dilemma that I have with most parents is that they think that they're disciplining their kids, but they're actually not disciplining their kids. They're not teaching them to understand what they want and how they want. So the role of parenting is you want those raw, unrefined desires to come out with your kids. You want your kids to be able to bring their passion, their anger, their sexual failures to you and see that you can survive them because then they learn, okay, it doesn't mean that everything I want is going to come to pass. It doesn't mean that everything I want is good for me, but I can at least be known in the context of a relationship and then have these things develop. So that's kind of Rollheiser's point that he makes with this raw desire is the point of Christian community, the point of parents is to connect those raw desires to the wider blessing and benefit of society. So think about something like food. Like all of us can desire some level of food for self-soothing. We've all been in those moments where we've used food or a substance in private to self-soothe. That's been so much of my own civil war with my own body as a man, is my relationship to food. Well, part of what Rollheiser would say is that the point of integration is not to just eat in private or just pathologize that desire for food, but to actually allow your desire for food to bring you into community life and to create a table for people. Same thing with sex and desire. Those initial desires for novelty and creativity and union are so powerful and beautiful because they speak to our desire for union with Jesus. They speak to our desire for union with our brothers, they speak to our desire for union with a romantic spouse. So all of that is that sense of how do I take these raw and core unrefined desires and then learn how to connect them to the people in places where they most deserve to settle. But part of what happens for a lot of us is there is an interruption where that raw, unrefined desire is pathologized. It's said that it's bad, it's selfish, and it can't be trusted. And then it gets severed, it gets cut off, and then we have nowhere to direct it. And then we spend the rest of our lives in suppression, in some two-step dance between like, I don't want to be completely dead, but I need some outlet for all this pressure. And it's just a maddening cycle that so much of recovery and Christian parenting sets up.

SPEAKER_02: 42:46

Yeah. We amputate our desires and call it biblical. Baptize it. Yeah. Yeah. There is a verse that sometimes gets used to support that attitude. The heart is deceitful above all things. And yet it seems like you're inviting us actually into our hearts.

SPEAKER_00: 43:10

Yeah, there is tension in the scripture. Like lean not on your own understanding, and all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths. There's also the notion that God wants to give us the desires of our heart. So for me, it's this is where formation plays out, where as Christians, we are to seek first the kingdom of God. But the way that you, Drew, seeks out the kingdom of God is going to look different than the way I seek out the kingdom of God, different than the way Andrew Bauman seeks out the kingdom of God, different than Alander seeks out the kingdom of God. So I think about just the desires inside of you, the story that you come from is so different. And so if you are to seek first the kingdom of God. Where are you going to seek first that kingdom? Like God has put desires inside of you that need to be developed. So some people have these engineering minds. Like I remember one of my best friends in college, a guy named Eric, was basically designing helipads that could be dropped in any disaster zone in the world. Like, think about Hurricane Katrina or a famine. But basically, he was building helipads. And I'll never forget a conversation with him where he was like, I don't know if my work matters for the kingdom. And it was this sense of like, what on earth has happened in theology and in churches that we don't see that there is not one square inch of this world, not one square inch of any vocation that is not what it means to seek first the kingdom of God. So as he brings structure, safety, rescue to a place of disaster, he is seeking first the kingdom of God. And so you have to know your story, you have to know your mind. How does it work? How does it function? What are the themes that bring me life? But also, just as importantly, where do you weep? Where do you get pissed off? Not just in traffic, but some sense of like when this happens in the world, there is an anger and a holy rage that develops inside of me that literally says, hell no, will this ever happen on my watch ever again? So when you pay attention to what gets you very angry, but also what inspires redemptive action, all of that is going to inform how you seek first the kingdom of God. But what I'm claiming is that all of that is fueled by this powerful force called desire.

SPEAKER_02: 45:59

So in order to obey that command and follow Jesus, we actually can't do that without our desires. Like it sounds like we cannot live this life you're describing unless we're in touch with our desires.

SPEAKER_00: 46:16

I don't think you can, because then what do you care about? Like the work that you're doing is gonna be underdeveloped. It's gonna lack humanity, it's gonna lack passion, it's gonna lack your intellect. So it all of this requires a fullness of self. And that's where, again, just think about this, even in terms of Trinitarian language. Part of the reason why the Trinity is what it is is it's not just union, it's also differentiation. Like these are three distinct persons that if you've ever seen Henry Matisse's La Dance, it's a great piece of art to look at that he's trying to understand the Trinity. And it's it's the dance. Theologians from I don't know when the phrase was first formed, but this notion of paracuresis, the divine dance of the Trinity, is the celebration of unity and differentiation. And so, again, back to those primary categories, Dan Siegel says that the strongest systems in the world are those that are differentiated and meaningfully linked together. So that sense of differentiation is a sense of do you desire to develop a sense of self? Are you a distinct person that's capable of bringing your unique personhood into a divine dance? Well, that's where I think we have really been led astray, that we've been invited to want intimacy with Jesus, intimacy with our partners, intimacy with friends, but also this sense of like less of me. I don't want to know myself, forget myself, and then show up in relationships. And it's like, I just don't think that that is really what it means to be made in the image of God.

SPEAKER_02: 48:06

And when we do that, a part of us might protest through seeking out some kind of secret sexual experience.

SPEAKER_00: 48:14

Yeah, because that becomes the surrogate level of differentiation, is this is this is who I am. So I can show up with passion, energy, the darkness inside of me. I can bring all of that here because I can't actually bring it into public. I can't bring it into these other spaces. And again, back to the provisional self is that you have learned how to two-step dance. Instead of critiquing your community, instead of bringing a prophetic engagement or inviting some redemptive change, you just hide what you really think and then take your rebellion underground rather than actually risk disruption among your friendships or community.

SPEAKER_02: 49:02

That need to bring our suppressed desires out into the light of self-awareness and into relationship with other people reminds me of one of my favorite quotes in the book: community is where shame-based belief systems go to die.

SPEAKER_00: 49:19

Yeah, like you know, shame is a merciless narrator in our lives. So it is ready to document every fundamental failure and inadequacy in our life. And it brings them to the surface, especially when we seek to try and change. And so, you know, when you need community the most, you're gonna desire it the least. And so that sense of, you know, what is your inner voice? What is that sense of judgment, of accusation that has been with you, could be in your adult life, but also goes back to childhood. And so that's the dilemma that all of us have to grapple with is that we have a shame-based identity. And we are not very good at being able to see our own story or our own face. And that's the dilemma of social media and selfies is we see our face probably too much, and yet we can't read it very well. And so I need other people in my community to help me to understand what I'm in because almost always I begin to narrate my story wrong. So one classic example of this is just I think of like clients that I work with that are like remarkably gifted. I think of them as, you know, they see themselves as like a broken down Toyota. And yet you start working with them, and it's like, oh dear God, there is a Ferrari Porsche, like we got 500 horsepower in this person, but they present as if they're like the most broken, weak individual on the planet. And so again, just that sense of how did that come to be that they present in that particular way? Well, they need community to see themselves differently. Or you have some people I think of like the story of Joseph. Joseph had a coat of many colors. And what happened to him? He was envied and thrown into a ditch. Well, many of us have been thrown into ditches, and we think it's because we were weak rather than saying we had a coat of many colors. Maybe we weren't as strong as the other boys, but there was something about our life, there was something about our language, there was something about the brightness or vibrancy in our eyes that was the basis of why we got picked on. So some of the men that I work with are walking around thinking that they are very weak and underdeveloped when the opposite is actually far more true. And so, you know, shame always narrates our life negatively and kind of begins to ask those questions like, what's wrong with you? Like, why do you do this? And again, those are great questions if they are allowed to be questions, but most of our questions about ourselves are far more accusations than full curiosity. So we need other people to develop, but we also don't always desire it. It's that civil war with desire. Yeah, I want to be seen and known, but I don't want to be known. And that's I remember Dan Alender doing this quite a bit to our graduate classes, but he basically just said, everybody's doing this all the time. Got one hand stop sign, the other hand kind of waving you in. So, like waving you in, come on, I want to, I want to be known, Drew. Like, tell me, like, know me, know me. And then like you start asking a question, you start seeing something that you notice, and then it's like, let me stiff arm you and put a hand in your face because I don't want you to go any further. And so that's what we're all doing relationally. We do that with God, we do that with our dear friends, we do that with knowing ourselves. Like, I want to be known, but also like that's kind of scary close. So back off a little bit. Or wait, that was uncomfortable. You've misunderstood me, back off.

SPEAKER_02: 53:33

We have such ambivalence about our desires. One of the words that you highlight in the book as a way of responding to our desires redemptively is the word hospitality. What can we do with our desires? We can be like a host, welcoming them in. Can you say more about that?

SPEAKER_00: 53:59

Yeah, so a couple stories come to mind here. So the the first is that this first came to me from reading John O'Donahue, who is a great Irish poet, I think one of the best. And one of the things that he wrote to a friend dying of a terminal illness is he said, like, may you find in yourself a courageous hospitality for all that is difficult, painful inside of you. And I just love that notion of what does it mean for people to develop courageous hospitality for the difficulties of their life? And I think especially as men in our 30s, 40s, 50s, like optimization has become, you know, what you do with your midlife crisis. So we don't want a Corvette or a sports car anymore. We want to like get our VO2 max up. I've got my whoop on. Like we want to optimize things rather than actually having hospitality towards our bodies or hospitality towards the difficulties. So one of my friends, a guy by the name of Will, he wrote a great book called Unreasonable Hospitality. He had the number one restaurant in the world a couple of years ago. And, you know, they're making however many 40-day, 30-day dry age, Muscovy duck courses. Like this is like three Michelin star, number one restaurant in the world. Like this is once-in-a-lifetime dining experience that he's running. So he's at a table kind of during service, and he overhears this table of four foodies talk about all of the expensive world-class restaurants that they got to go to, like La Burnadin, Levin Madison Park, per se. And this one guest says, Yeah, but the only thing we didn't get to try was a New York City hot dog. And so the whole table laughs and Will clears the table, but then he has this light bulb go off inside of his mind for what he would later call unreasonable hospitality. And he ran outside to the nearest hot dog cart in New York City and grabbed this hot dog, brought it back to Chef and asked him to plate it. And the chef, again, was like just incredulous. Like, what on earth? Like, we're not bringing this hot dog to a table. And, you know, Will said, This is really important to me. Chef, you know, allowed for that to happen, got a canal of sauerkraut and relish, and then kind of plated it. And what Will said when he arrived at that table is he said, to make sure you all don't go home without any culinary regrets, I present to you a New York City hot dog. And the whole table was just like completely ecstatic. And they would later tell Will that it was like not just like the highlight of their night, but really their entire trip to New York. And so it's a great story, but I've had to sit with like, why does that story work so well? And you don't expect it, right? You're going into this Michelin-starred restaurant and yet you want a hot dog. And you don't expect someone to actually listen to that and to move towards your desires. And that's what I've been grappling with is, you know, Will had to be attuned to his table. He had to rebel against some of the three-star Michelin world because it was about hospitality for his guests that night. That was the greatest thing, not the idol of James Beard award-winning restaurants and number one in the world. It was a sense of I want to create a place of hospitality. And again, how many of us live like that? How many of us have dear friends and parents that actually saw the desires that we ached for and met them? What's all this about? Well, it's about eventually becoming someone like Will as well. It's a sense of many of us are going to go through life without hospitality, without people seeing us and offering us what our hearts are longing for. And yet, can we desire to be hospitable, not just to ourselves, but also to others? And that's the flourishing of the kingdom of God is I I may have not received enough bread in my life. But when I give bread, I also create bread. And that's part of the mystery that I want people to understand about desire is that it's not just about selfishness. It's not just about doing this for a good marriage or for your own children. This is about becoming a good ancestor as well, about being hospitable to what is broken and hurting inside of you. But also the more you do that, the more that you begin to see people very differently.

SPEAKER_02: 59:08

I have this beautiful image in my mind as you talk about that of a table, the table within me with my desires that might not expect hospitality, but desperately need it, the table of my wife's desires and how I might come alongside her, the table of my kids' desires, the table of my community. And that is just so beautiful to think that that we can show up to that table with unreasonable hospitality, the wonder, the beauty that can come from that.

SPEAKER_00: 59:44

Yeah, and just even as you say that, it's like what would you and your wife bring to that table? What are your kids like these days? What would they bring? What laughter? What books? What art would they bring to that table? And again, like that's what we're aching for is to, you know, not say I hate myself. That's how I arrive at this table, but like I got to discover something today. I got to create something today. I saw something that like made me so angry and I engaged it. And here's a great story of what happened. Like that table that you mentioned, the fullness, the flourishing of that table comes when we are fully alive.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:29

Amen. That is stunning. Jay, what is your favorite thing about desire?

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:36

Honestly, what comes to me initially is that like my desires are currently haunting me. As I have begun to kind of address some of the provisional self in me, I don't think I'll ever cease being a therapist, but there are desires inside of me that I know I have not honored. I know that there are places inside of me that being a therapist would actually be a form of rebellion, I think, to God, because it would be this is the role that you need to be stuck in. This is the conversation that you need to stay in. And there's so much more to me than just like wanting to talk about sex and unwanted sexual behaviors and desires. There's more that I want to be able to bring to my family, to my world. And so I that's part of the haunting nature of what I'm in. Like on the surface, I can tell you with 100% legitimacy, my favorite thing about desire is how it wakes me up. It's also haunting me because there's a certain deadness that I can feel in not heeding the call and just trying to coast or just, you know, developing one way of life. But I think part of what I'm haunted by is there are more desires inside of me that need to be watered and cultivated and come alive.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:04

Wow. It's like those dead places in our lives are being nudged by desire toward resurrection.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:13

Consistently and well said. I mean, like, there's so much more in me for creativity and expression and artistry than I've ever really allowed myself to peer into. And so that's part of what I love about going back to childhood desires, is there are these seed forms of like, huh? And I think that's the glory of the spirit working in our lives, is there's a knock, and it could come through misery, it could come through desire, could come through the bell ringing inside. But I think the spirit is very committed to waking us up.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:50

Jay, thank you so much for your vulnerability, for your hospitality in sharing these parts of your story and your research. Everyone, if you want to go deeper into what we've been talking about today, please pick up a copy of Desire, The Longings Inside Us, and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow, which is available now, as well as the Desire Workbook. We've got links to those as well as to Jay's website in the show notes if you would like to connect with him or work with him. Thanks again, Jay. Thank you for your time as well. Appreciate your support in getting this out. And gentlemen, always remember you are God's beloved son. In you, he is well pleased.