Welcome And Purpose

SPEAKER_00 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.

Guest Intro And Discernment Note

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hey man, thank you for listening to my interview with Andrew Rodriguez, who is a licensed professional counselor who specializes in SAFE T, S-A-F-E-T, Sexual Attraction, Fluidity Exploration in Therapy, working with individuals with unwanted same-sex attraction, sexual addiction, and fetishes. Andrew is the owner of Integrity Christian Counseling, where he helps people discover and live out their true identities. He is certified in reintegrative therapy and serves as the training facilitator for the Reintegrative Therapy Association. He's also on the board of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity. He's a counselor affiliate with Restored Hope Network, and he is the creator of Psycho Bible, a YouTube channel discussing psychology, theology, and sexuality through a Christian counseling lens. Andrew is also an active member of the Husband Material community where he has supported our work for years. I'm so excited for you to hear Andrew's perspective on sexual orientation, attraction, fluidity, as well as the possibility for change, what that can look like, how God is involved in this process, and all of the ways that reintegrative therapy and experiential healing can help. And before we get started, I want to remind you of something that I am going to be stating at the beginning of each interview episode going forward. The views expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of husband material ministries. Featuring a guest is not an endorsement of beliefs, methods, products, services, or any other content our guests may have created or promoted. We believe in the practice of discernment. So, as with any resource, we encourage you to listen thoughtfully, test all things against sound wisdom and your own conviction, take what's helpful, and leave the rest behind. Enjoy the episode.

Andrew’s Sexual Story And Shame

SPEAKER_00 2:08

I am so excited to introduce you all to Andrew Rodriguez. Welcome to the show. Hey, good to be on here, Drew. Andrew, what is your personal sexual story?

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Grew up in a Christian home, had the sex talk when I was like 10. My dad did a really rudimentary job. And I really didn't have much more formation aside from that. So it left me with a lot of questions. You know, when you get older, you know, you'll you'll start to notice your feelings and stuff, and you'll you'll you know, just keep it in your pants, you know, stuff like that. You know? I never felt like I could go to my dad after that point to be like, Dad, I got like real questions here. Like, what am I doing with the erections? What do I do? You know, I discovered masturbation at a very young age, even before I could ejaculate, just notice, hey, it really feels good when you press on the penis there. And I didn't know what to do with that. I just had a lot of like uncertainty about how am I supposed to manage this stuff. Most of my elementary school years dealing with a lot of loneliness. I was homeschooled. I have two other brothers on the middle one, and we lived in Amish country surrounded by farms. There's no kids in our neighborhood. It was just farmland, farmland. Church was like half hour away, so church was like my main way of socialization or homeschool groups, but my favorite one was we only met once a month. So it's like I couldn't get enough of the socialization I always wanted. Constantly struggled feeling lonely, even at church where I was actually bullied by their boys, dealing with being bullied and loneliness, and then junior high came. Uh, we went from going to like this country church to an inner city one in inner city of Lancaster, PA. You know, always grew up where we're the Puerto Rican family in the middle of Amish country, so like didn't know where I fit in there. Then we start going to inner city church, where it's mostly Puerto Ricans, and I wasn't ghetto like they were, so I didn't fit in there. And you know, my dad grew up in Brooklyn, New York. So he he grew up in the ghetto, he grew up in the projects. For me, it was like, why would you want to be ghetto? Like my dad's whole family's mission was to get out of it. So there was like a point of pride for them, and so I just never feel like I fit in anywhere. And so when puberty came and then seeing the girls give my my brothers attention, but not me, it really cemented that I'm not wanted, and so I really don't fit in. I'm not desirable. So I discovered masturbation as a way to cope with that loneliness. I didn't know who to talk to about it. Uh, it wasn't until really I started to get more of a handle on it later on in high school where I was on a youth retreat, and one of the youth leaders opened up about struggles with porn and masturbation and opened up the conversation. And I was like, man, where was this sort of talk a few years ago when I really needed it? When I was a sophomore in high school, I took a psychology class uh at one of my homeschool groups, and that's where I like fell in love with psychology. I'm like, all right, I want to be a therapist. So I was taking some college classes my last year of high school, and one of them was a group counseling class, and part of that we also had to do some reading, and one of the books we had to read was Search for Significance, which is all about your identity in Christ. And that was my breakthrough because not only was I dealing with a compulsive issue as a way to cope with loneliness, but I was dealing with perfectionism, shame, not so much fear of others, but I sort of had a chip on my shoulder from so much so many years of rejection. And so you know, just the understandings of how God loves me completely. It's not rooted in how good I am. Growing up, I was the I was the dependable son. I was the son or the kid in youth group or in Sunday school who actually loved going to church and loved praising God, loved worship, and so that actually kind of influenced me to believe that the reason why God loved me was because I was such a good Christian. I was such a good follower of God, I loved him so much, and yet there was this problem where I was struggling with with lust and I didn't know what to deal with it or how to how to deal with it. And so a breakthrough really did come in understanding that how much God loves me completely, and so I don't have to fear rejection, I don't have to fear failure, that I can really be free in Him. So that was my my breakthrough.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

Thank you so much, and I feel like that is an excellent summary of what healing looks like, being able to experience the love of God and to overflow, especially when it comes to how we navigate sexuality. How

Why He Focuses On Orientation

SPEAKER_00 6:56

did you become passionate about this topic of sexual orientation?

SPEAKER_01 7:04

My original intent of going into psychology and counseling was really to kind of blend my two loves because I'm an artist. If I wasn't a therapist, I'd be a comic book artist. And then when I discovered psychology, I was like, ooh, you know, I can marry the two, I'll be an art therapist. And I figured I'll just work with kids with trauma issues. So that was actually my intent. I was gonna go to a Christian school for psychology because I wanted to have some theology first, and then I was gonna get my master's in counseling and then go to art school so I could be an art therapist. But that first year, but you're I mean, and subsequent after that point, God just kept bringing guys across my path who were struggling with some sort of sexual issue, whether it was just porn issues or guys with same-sex attraction or acting out homosexually, and uh, you know, I'm at a conservative Christian college and they have a code of conduct that you're supposed to adhere to, but they also didn't have any counseling services on campus. So the school at the time, thank God things have changed, at the time they didn't have any counseling services, so it was kind of like a don't ask, don't tell kind of approach, especially when it came to like the same-sex attraction issues. It was clear that there were certain guys who were struggling with same-sex attraction, but as long as they didn't break any of the codes of conduct, it just went unaddressed. I mentioned earlier I was taking some college classes when I was in high school. It was at Lancaster Bible College, and the professor I had at the two classes I took there was an adjunct professor, and he was also the director of a counseling practice in Lancaster City called Day Seven Ministries. And it was a Christian counseling practice that specialized in sexual issues. That's all they dealt with. And they also were a member ministry of Exodus International. They dealt with same-sex attraction, homosexuality, but also sexual addiction, heterosexual, sexual addiction, sexual abuse, sexual trauma, all sorts of things. And like also sexuality issues was like my main focus. Every time I did a term paper, it was on something sexual. So one of my friends would call me Dr. Sexpert. Dr. Sexpert. It would just whatever it saw. Maybe we took uh human sexuality together, and like I had my hand up for every question. I was like as I was studying this stuff, like I was researching transgenderism before it became a big issue. And I was like, guys, this is a major issue, this is gonna come down the pike soon. So this was just stuff I was fascinated by. But in particular, I was always bothered whenever I would hear people talk about how the only option for someone with same-sex attraction is just to be celibate. And especially we were going to Valley Force Christian College, it's an assembly of God's school. I did go to an AG church for a number of years in my elementary school years, but we've always gone to some sort of charismatic or Pentecostal church. And just a core belief that I have, that's part of that upbringing, is that God can still do miracles, God can heal even today, that or our past do not confine us. And that's also influenced by my my own family and my dad's story. Yeah, my dad was into drugs and alcohol, he was a dealer, he was incredibly depressed and suicidal, and then when he became a believer, just immediately set free. And I know that's not the case in most people's stories where they just have like that zap where they magic like just miraculously transform. But God is in the business of changing people, he doesn't just let people stay where they're at. So when I'm hearing people kind of just talk about homosexuality with like this sort of resignation. Well, the only option for them is to be a celibate. And I'm like, well, how do you know if they're actually called to that? You can't just assume they're called to celibacy just because they have same-sex attraction. Don't we believe in a God that can transform and heal and and grow? And even if it doesn't happen so like categorically that they go from exclusively same-sex attracted to exclusively opposite sex-attracted, don't we believe in a God that can do anything? And that there still may be degrees of change that they can experience. So that was just like a fundamental belief I had, and it bothered me when I would hear professors or fellow classmates talk about in that way. I'm like, what bot what God do you believe in? So I really got interested in studying from those who were like the founders of the ex-gay ministry movement, like Frank Worthing and then Andrew Komisky and Joe Dallas and Joseph Nicolosi, and reading their books, and like there are approaches that may be helpful for people. So even though I wasn't yet a therapist, I was researching as much as I could so I could be as equipped as possible. Long story short, after my internship at Day 7 Ministries, just more guys came to me struggling with these issues. And I was now engaged to my wife at this point. Long story short, I started a group underground with a fellow prof another professor who just had a kind of same heart as I did. And then eventually what happened after I graduated, but I was still living in the area, there was a group on campus for girls who are survivors of trauma, and they wanted to do a male version of the group. And it was called Moving On, just Moving On from Pains from the Past. And I'm like, there's no counseling services on campus. So I'm like, I just want to leave my school in a better place than how I came in. So I volunteered to lead that group. And God just brought more guys across my path who are dealing with SSA and other sexual struggles. Led that group for eight years. Eventually they did bring counselors on campus. So then after I finally got my master's, then I said, Hey, you've I've been giving you guys free counseling for years. Why don't you hire me? So then I became the campus counselor. That's just one thing after another would happen. I led that group for six years before I started my master's at a fake Catholic university. And when I was four weeks away from graduating from that program, I got kicked out of the program because of the work I was doing with guys with SSA. But that just led to me getting more connected, getting connected with Joseph Nicolosi, and then the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Restor Restored Hope Network. And so now I'm just more involved with these different organizations.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

That's

SAFE-T And The Conversion Therapy Label

SPEAKER_00 13:21

amazing.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

I get accused of being called or being a conversion therapist, you know, the boogeyman that's out there. And once you start talking about the idea of therapy to explore any degree of change in sexuality, whether you're talking about the attractions, the identity or self-concept or the behavior, the world labels that conversion therapy. And like you're indoctrinating graduate school to run away from that. That's terrible, it's innately bad, all this stuff. Like I said, we're indoctrinating to believe that people are just born with whatever their sexual arousal templates are, like they're built in. So to explore any change in it is considered harmful and ineffective at best. And that really just doesn't fit the reality. The reality is people can experience change in degrees. And ironically, one of the big people that have helped kind of enlighten people to that is lesbian researcher Lisa Diamond, who talks about sexual fluidity or sexual attraction fluidity. So I don't believe people's actual sexuality is fluid. Because I said male, female, that's not fluid. That's stable. But your attractions can be fluid. And now, of course, that doesn't mean that it's fluid like water, like it's just constantly changing. So I prefer more thinking of like plastic. There's maybe conditions to help facilitate that sort sort of change. But it's quite ironic. She's Lisa Diamond brought up this idea of sexual attraction fluidity, but she only thought that it is something that is naturally occurring. To try to do some sort of intervention to help facilitate that fluidity, she like condemns that. But without really any justification. The problem is any sort of therapy approach to explore or any sort of intervention, self-help or ministry or pastoral counseling or professional therapy, to help explore change in sexuality gets labeled conversion therapy. And it just kind of muddies the water and poisons everything. So all the research out there showing that conversion therapy is harmful and ineffective, they don't distinguish necessarily between actual professional therapy and like someone seeing their pastor or their relative who's just telling them to white knuckle it or just shaming them or trying to punish them. And so we get blamed for all these bad things that have had that happen. And so in 2016, the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity, they adopted the name Safety, Sexual Attraction Fluidity Exploration in Therapy, so that we can be more precise in our language that what we're advocating for, what we're looking to develop and train clients, uh clinicians in is professional therapy, you know, actual psychotherapy that uh facilitates the exploration of sexual attraction fluidity. So it means one, we're not adhering to an orientation paradigm, so we're not looking at people in these fixed categories, so we think that the only successful outcome is categorical change. So we understand that if change does occur, it's going to be on a continuum, and that's okay. That that helps clients live more in alignment with their values. Great. But also means it's more inclusive of any sort of professional therapy approach. So you can have a safety therapist who does psychodrama, who does narrative therapy, kind of behavioral therapy, reintegrative therapy. So that way we're not talking about just one approach. That's one of the problems with reparative therapy. It was used so broadly, people assumed any approach was reparative therapy. That was a very particular one.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

That makes a lot of sense. And it helps me understand the difference between exploration and coercion or trying to force something. I feel like there's a huge difference between internal exploration and internal violence. You know, being curious about myself versus trying to force something within myself or trying to remove or replace a part of myself.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah, if anything, all the therapists I know, I don't know a single one who doesn't do this. Our main concern is actually reducing the shame that clients have about their sexual feelings. If I see someone who is preaching more of a shame, especially if they're telling them that they're sitting just by feeling their feelings, it's usually not an actual psychotherapist that I know in this field. It's usually someone who's more of a pastoral counselor or someone who's just doing some sort of like lay counseling approach. They don't really adequately trained. Professionals in my field are the most ethical therapists I've ever met. They're most professionally trained, they're using the most sophisticated techniques. They think about this stuff at a higher level. The idea that we're quacks and using pseudoscientific techniques is just bunk. We're using the latest interventions in trauma reprocessing and attachment theory, and it's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

And I've experienced a taste of it with the research that Joseph Nicolosi Jr. did that included many of husband material community members. It was an eight-minute intervention and it really took down the arousal of some memories that were still plaguing me. So it was very powerful, and I can attest that you know this is real research. It is not made up, and it can actually help. Yeah. As

The Questions Men Ask Most

SPEAKER_00 18:59

you have researched and worked with so many clients, what do you see as the biggest questions people have about sexual orientation?

SPEAKER_01 19:11

The big one is can I change? Is that even possible? And then you really know you're when you're dealing with someone also, not just a sexuality issue, but also like major anxiety or some OCD tendencies, when they ask, like right off the bat, how long will this take? You know, how long should I expect for me to then go from only same-sex attractive to exclusive to just attracted to the opposite sex? I'm like, okay, we gotta work on just to get to that point where you can even do the work because the anxiety is gonna get in your way too much. Can it change? Am I this just the way I am? Will I be cursed with like a life of loneliness? There are guys who they hear that message that, well, if you have same-sex attraction, you're just meant to be celibate, and they actually get repulsed by that idea, and it really turns them off to the church when they're like that's the only solution that the church is giving me. And sort of they get the sense that the church is giving up on them, and so there's no hope for them to to grow, to heal, to better integrate, and so they think that that just means the church is just throwing up their hands and like, well, we don't know what to do, so we'll just just tell them just to be celibate. And so a lot of times they're wondering, is there any hope for me? Can I get to the point where I can enjoy a relationship with a woman that is fulfilling and also arousing, and that I'll be sexually interested in my partner if I get married. A lot of guys I work with already are in a relationship with a woman, so they're already married. They may have had sexual attractions to their wife at one point, but it waned, or they just had so many same-sex issues come up that it sort of clouded the attractions to their wife, and or they just like I just wish I could reduce this so I can just enjoy sex with my wife and attraction toward her. And others, it's like I don't I don't understand how they got married because it seems like they never had attractions to their wife, you know. So some of them entered in with like like just no arousal, and they need to get back online, get alive again, and get in touch with their arousal. So a lot of the question they have is can I experience change, at least to a degree? Most clients come to me knowing that it's unrealistic to expect like a complete categorical change. They just want to know if they can change enough to have a fulfilling life and a fulfilling marriage.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

With someone of the opposite sex.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Yes. Yes. When I think speak of marriage, to me, there's that's the only legitimate marriage is a natural marriage. I don't tend to think of same sex marriage as a marriage.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Yeah, makes sense. Even

The History Behind “Orientation”

SPEAKER_00 21:50

this concept of sexual orientation has certain assumptions behind it, it has history behind it, it has an agenda behind it. So how do you unpack that?

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Word. I talk about this a lot, especially on my YouTube channel, about the sexual orientation paradigm. And this is what we've all been inundated with and inculcated and indoctrined with is this idea that people have an innate or and fixed, immutable orientation that determines how they will function sexually and how they'll be fulfilled sexually. Even those who are not in agreement with, say, homosexuality or homosexual relationships and marriage will oftentimes even still agree that, well, people just have a certain orientation. And I say this is a sign of just how much the church has dropped the ball in really thinking more critically about this topic. And allowing basically a very secularized and anti-Christian world and society to dictate the terms of this whole discussion. Historically, the whole idea of an orientation really is a more modern concept. Historically, we just were more concerned with behavior. So, how did people actually act was how you determined someone's sexuality in a way. What you actually choose to do, not just how you feel. However, the downfall, the pitfall with just reducing your concern to someone's behavior means that the feelings that people had went neglected. We weren't adequately addressing the feelings that people had. And we see this pop up even in my own lifetime before really this whole idea really blew up. I could think of a time when I was at a Christian camp, but of course there's kids that are at this camp who weren't even Christians. And so we're having a discussion about homosexuality. And one girl who's a non-believer who's just really arguing with us as Christians, and this other guy who's trying to hold firm to the biblical approach, but he says, Hey, hey, as Christians, we we think it's okay to be gay, just don't act on it. And like, I just I heard that, and I'm like, I cringe so much as a high schooler because I'm like, that's not satisfying the world. Because, oh, just don't act on the behavior. But for someone who is struggling with the same sex attraction or the inclinations, the feelings and temptations, that's not comforting to them either. Just to tell them, hey, this is just what you are, just don't act on it. And it's okay to be that. Like, they're like, well, how does that help me with the feelings? Because I work with a lot of guys who they just have same-sex attractions, but they never acted on it. And if we just tell them, well, just don't act on it, like, okay, they already know that. That doesn't really give them any hope, or like also it doesn't address what may be beneath that. And so historically, when we just focus on behavior, that's a recipe for breeding resentment and for making a good kind of uh impetus for an activist movement, and that's what happened. So if you go to the 1800s, you had in Germany uh Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who he didn't actually coin the term sexual orientation, but he laid the foundations for it by arguing that we have certain sexualities that are innate, like the same language that we're using today. It's innate, it's biologically based, it's natural, so it's immutable. And so people are born, he would use terms like earning, u-r-n-in-g, for someone who is same-sex attracted, and dioning for someone who is opposite sex-attracted, or at least a male. He was using that as his base to fight for gay marriage in Germany in the 1800s. And so later, John Money is the one who kind of came with the term sexual orientation as a replacement for sexual preference. That's what we used to use as a term. But he wanted to make sure, well, people aren't choosing this, so it's not just an arbitrary preference. So he wanted to use orientation, and that's now sank into our culture where we just believe people just have an orientation. And the problem with that is it cuts off curiosity. If you subscribe to this idea that you're just born with a particular orientation that you discover any age, who knows? Because you get some of the other archetypes of the sexual revolution, like Kinsey, who believed that children are sexual at birth. Once you get this idea, people have an innate orientation, they're born with it, then sure, they have their sexual from the earliest age. So why can't we just talk about orientation at the youngest ages? And so that's why you see in Comprehensive Sex Ed all this talk about what your gender identity is, what your sexual orientation is. But what happens is once you conclude that you just are born that way, that this is just what you are, you take in your experience of same-sex attraction or whatever your particular sexual interest is, whatever your sexual arousal template is, and you refer to that not as an experience that you're having, but as a marker of what you are. It's not something that you have, but it's something that you are. So this is why I don't even like to refer to other guys who experience the same sex attraction as, oh, he's an SSA guy. He is SSA. Like, no, no, you have SSA. You are not SSA. You're a man. Scripture is clear, we have, and just reality is clear. We have two sexual identities, male and female. You can have a whole range of sexual attractions and desires and arousal templates, but only two actual identities. And the ideal would be that your attractions align with the reality that you're made for, and that is that God made us male and female, and he called the two to become one flesh in marriage. And so the idea would be that your sexual attractions are toward your wife. And gosh, it'd be even easier if it was exclusively toward your wife, you know. So, but yes, that I think you you run into difficulty when people preclude the possibility of learning from the meaning from their attractions what it may mean and where there's areas where God wants to bring greater healing and growth because they've just concluded is just what I am. We actually have research. There's a diverse team of researchers. One of my colleagues at the Alliance, Dr. Christopher Rossick, he teamed up with several other psychologists, a bunch of them were gay identified, so they wanted to get a large sample. And they did this four-option survey: people who identified as gay and were in a relationship, gay but not in a relationship, people who had same-sex attraction but didn't identify as gay, and people who and they weren't in a relationship, and those who had same-sex attraction, at least in their history, but were in a natural marriage. They had wanted to get some demographics and learn more about their life and what may have helped them. And so they had a sub-survey of 33 methods. What are if you've ever tried to change your orientation or your attractions, what sort of interventions did you try? And they found that for those who held to an LGB identity, any approach that could be considered more of an exploratory approach, one to help explore change the attractions, they viewed it as more harmful than helpful. So it just shows that you preclude your possibility of maybe growing outside of that way of being attracted and acting and or just feeling and dealing with your sexual feelings when you like latch onto an LGB identity. But I would say this also applies to other forms of things you may be attracted to or behaviors. Because if you look at the way they define orientation these days, it's so broad that even things like kink is considered an orientation. That's why you're seeing like an upsurge these days of people saying don't kink shame. Because once you base your sexuality on your feelings, then whatever your idiosyncrasies are, the little minutia of what you're attracted to or what brings up arousal for you becomes justification for a particular identity. And so, yeah, you see, even BDSM is like a sexual orientation. Whatever your fetish may be is an orientation. You can be attracted to people of different ages, and that's an orientation. If you don't have curiosity about what that means, you just conclude that's what you are. You're just born that way.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

So without curiosity, we can't really learn to understand ourselves. And we also, it seems to me, get confined. Yeah. Like for me, it would be incredibly offensive and just oppressive to consider my sexual fetish or the details that have turned me on to be part of what I am or who I am, rather than something I feel, something that activates my body, something that happened to me, something that I have developed rather than some kind of trait.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Much rather

Curiosity And Compassion Over Control

SPEAKER_01 31:22

people be a little more curious and compassionate. If you don't have both at the same time, I know we talk about this a lot in husband material. I have a variation I've used: curiosity, compassion, and coaching. Uh, because then I think within coaching you have a bunch. And most clients I work with, especially if they come from a more strict background, they'll jump into wanting to coach themselves first. I should just not feel that way. I just need to stop doing that. I need to stop the behavior. So it's this thing, I just gotta correct it first. And like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Starve the curiosity and the compassion at the same time. Because if you don't have the compassion for yourself, then your anxiety and shame is going to be activated too intensely. You won't be able to be curious. And I just explained that curiosity is just being in learning mode. You have to go back to being like a child when you're just experiencing the world with wonder, and you're taking it all in and you're just figuring out what does this mean?

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Yeah, you're not judging it, you're not analyzing it, you're not trying to fix it or solve it. You're just learning, you're just noticing and observing. And that language of orientation seems much more categorical, as you said, or kind of like an element of certainty rather than curiosity. So if you reject that language, what language do you use instead?

SPEAKER_01 32:49

I

Desire Attraction Arousal Templates

SPEAKER_01 32:50

just view people as male or female. And so that's the only sexual identities I really consider valid. People can use whatever the identity they want when they're talking to me. I'm not going to like correct them. No, no, no, I don't accept that. But like in my mind, like, he's just a guy. He has same-sex attraction. And so I'll refer to that more, not as an orientation, but I break things down by desire, attraction, and arousal. Oftentimes what you find is what you desire is linked more to what your needs were that weren't met. So one of the things I oftentimes tell people is the greater the deficit, the greater the desire. Where the greatest desire is, particularly by the time you get to puberty, that's where the sexual urge is going to direct itself toward. It's going to energize that desire. Why do we eroticize anything? I think God gave us the capacity to eroticize in order to amplify our sense of urgency to meet a need. Wow. And so when you notice there's a strong urge for something, that's good like our body's way of signaling, do you have a great need here? And we need to be curious to recognize, well, what is that? And a lot of guys I work with, they'll just be aware of the surface level. I feel arousal. Okay, let's go beneath that. It takes a little more like patience and sitting with it a bit more. A lot of guys will just be like, all they notice is the arousal they feel when they're looking at their fantasy or their behavior. But to go beneath it a bit more, they realize there's a desire here. There's something a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

Right. And we have lots of tools, especially in HMA, to help you get beneath those surface-level feelings. Like, what's happening in your body? What are the thoughts going through your head? When have you felt this way before? When have you felt the opposite? And also, like, what is the desire underneath the arousal? I think that's what you're talking about. The desires, the needs, especially when it comes to attachment and our relational needs. So it really resonate with the way you unpack that.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Yeah. So like I'll borrow from Patrick Carnes as much as he probably doesn't like if he knew that I did this, but I'll use the term arousal template. It makes sense that we develop whether you want to call it a template or a pattern or a schema. I use schema terminology a lot because schema I understand is like it has two components. There's a core belief or expectation, and then a behavior or like a way of coping with it. And so that fits pretty well. But either way, what we're at a biological level, it's a neural network. And so when it comes to arousal, it's helpful just for clients to understand this is just an involuntary reaction to your body recognizing a sensed good, a good that it senses. It's a and there's a sensory impression from that, and it's reacting to it like it's a good. Right. Or it's a bad. You can have you can have reactions to good things, and that might be more sexual arousal. You can have like I explained to clients sexual arousal similar to how I would explain fear and anxiety arousal, both like threat arousal. They're both arousal, and but they're they're with basically it's it's awakening to something, something that is deemed important. How you judge it can be is it good or a bad. A lot of times I work with clients where they are having simultaneously a good and a bad judgment about it. And so they're feeling both anxiety and arousal at the same time. So to help them learn how to regulate that anxiety through that more compassionate approach, then they can gain more insight into what it means.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

So you're not only providing reintegrative therapy to people, you're also training people in it.

Reintegrative Therapy And Memory Healing

SPEAKER_00 36:34

Yes. How can that approach help?

SPEAKER_01 36:36

Yeah, with re-integrative therapy, uh developed by Joseph Nicolosi Jr., to be honest, it's essentially it's the evolution of reparative therapy, in that his father, Justin Nicolosi Sr., is the father of actual authentic reparative therapy. It's broadened in that it's not just for guys with same sex attraction like the work his father is doing. And so with reintegrative therapy, we really have brought it to be it's a therapy approach for trauma and addictions in general, but obviously we're going to get a lot of people are interested in using this type of therapy to explore sexual attraction fluidity and to see, well, do I have potential to experience changes in my sexual attractions? And so we use it a lot for clients with sexual addiction or other compulsive issues. And we're utilizing our own God-given mechanism of memory reconsolidation that God gave us to help better understand that it's helpful to kind of take most of your therapy approaches and you can boil them down to like two, maybe three approaches. One is just sort of be a supportive counselor. I don't really consider that therapy, but just to listen to people, you know, and just sort of reflect back. That's good supportive counseling. But therapy is more about trying to do interventions to help someone experience change in some way. A lot of therapists are more trained at what we call like counter-conditioning approaches, where their focus is more on conscious thoughts and behavior. The feelings that just sort of accept feelings as we can't really change feelings. So let's just work on change in behavior and change what your conscious thoughts are. And that has a benefit that can help produce incremental change over time. But it's going to require a lot of willpower, a lot of energy, tons of accountability, you know, doing a lot of work and patience. So you see that in approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy, but also in a lot of your Christian counseling approaches that are mostly like coaching or like discipleship sort of approaches. Maybe biblical counseling. Biblical counseling. It's ironic how much they call the counseling I do as like behavioral management, when really their approach tends to be the more behavior approach. And so it's like repent, you just gotta repent. And when someone's really dealing with more of an emotional issue, that can just be discouraging. Now, when I'm dealing with someone from really like they're really in the throes of addiction, that may be helpful for a time to get it a little more under control, a little more manageable, maybe help reduce some of the shame from the constant relapses or constant falls. So I can see the benefit to some degree. But the other form of therapies that are out there are more experiential therapies, where they actually reverse the order. They're focused more on the emotions, less on the behaviors and the thoughts, at least the conscious thoughts. And so that the therapy itself is designed to help people gain insight into the emotional roots of whatever their behavior is or their way of thinking and feeling, and deal with that primarily through one mindfulness, not just mindfulness for self-regulation, like you might see in like dialectical behavioral therapy, but mindfulness for self-exploration. And so that's built into what we do in reintegrative therapy, training clients to look into their attractions, into their whatever their fantasies may be, even the behavior that they acted out on. I get a client who comes to me, I just acted out this week, and they're full of shame. And me just approaching them with just a calm attitude, helping them relax a bit, so then we can look into the behavior with curiosity and compassion. That's what we call a mindful, curious approach. Like, let's look into this, let's see what we can learn. What is it you were after? What is it that you liked about this? And as we do that, then we can go into either memories. So it might bring us back to an unmet need or a wound, oftentimes more in the childhood. And we can use the same interventions that you might use in trauma reprocessing techniques, whether it's EMDR or image transformation therapy or flash or mindful self-compassion, and we heal that trauma.

SPEAKER_00 41:02

Yeah. So at Husband Material, some of the other tools we draw upon include inner child work, internal family systems, brain spotting is another one.

SPEAKER_01 41:13

There's a lot of overlap with what we do in reintegrative therapy.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

Psychodrama?

SPEAKER_01 41:17

Yeah, any of those interventions, when you go to a root, and then we go back to the fantasy, to the peak moment. And this is what makes reintegrative therapy a little more unique and different from a lot of the other approaches where the mentality was if there's an unmet need, like say, say, for example, guys with same-sex attraction, where maybe a parent that the core wound there is a father wound or a lack of affiliation with other guys. And so a more that counter-conditioning approach, it's going to be, well, you just need to build better relationships with other men. And that is important. There's actually some research on those sort of approaches where you just focus on meeting the need. But when that experience of meeting that need maybe ends, they kind of revert back. So the benefit only lasts as long as they're still meeting that need. Psychologist Bruce Ecker has identified that for a therapeutic breakthrough to happen, there needs to be a few elements. First is that the old schema that you're trying to change, that target schema, needs to be activated first. So the client needs to be aware of it. They need to feel the feelings that are associated. So, for example, we actually invite clients to go into the memory or the fantasy and feel the arousal. Get that schema activated, get it online, articulate it. Then we bring in some experience that's what we call a disconfirming experience. Something that counters the prediction that's part of that schema. Like I expect if I fantasize about me having anal sex with this guy, I will feel like I'm wanted. But then when you bring in this disconfirming experience, where it's like, well, maybe say we do Flash, for example, where okay, let's put that to the side. So it's still in the back of your mind. We're not thinking about it currently, but we're gonna put it off to the side. But then that schema has been activated, so it's still in working memory. Let's just focus on something that you really enjoy. And a lot of times clients will just auto-select a time where they felt wanted, but it wasn't sexual. And so that's this confirming that prediction that the only way they can get that sexual arousal is through that sexual component. That's that fantasy. And they realize, oh, there's other ways I've gotten this. It's just been that template has been dissociated from other parts of who they are. So as we're doing interventions, their brain, that neural network is unlocking and it's being Edited so that then it can reconnect to the other parts of who they are that have been that it's been dissociated from their value system, awareness of other ways to meet their needs in healthy ways, their sense of time. Yeah, like and like you know, a lot of times how many guys are they don't start looking at porn until it's like 1 a.m. They go into like a whole different mode of being, they lose all sense of time, you know, instead of awareness, like, what am I doing? I should just be asleep right now, you know. And so these these other parts of you they get disconnected when we go into that state of the the arousal. And so when you unlock it, it can reconnect you like, oh, there's other ways I can get this feeling of being wanted. It doesn't have to be through this, huh? You know? So that it's what it needs to be activated, then you bring in this other experience that disconfirms the schema. And when you repeat that, it doesn't need to be as long as it would be if you're doing that counter-conditioning approach. Like it doesn't need to take years, but it doesn't need to be repeated. So that now this new way of feeling and thinking is associated with that old template. So that's more transformational work using experiential approaches, and so reintegrative therapy falls within that tradition. Sometimes we don't even go to a trauma memory, sometimes we just focus right there on the arousal template itself. And what we've learned is that you can use the same interventions you might use for reprocessing trauma memories to reprocess the arousal associated with something right there in the moment.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

It's amazing what our brains are capable of.

SPEAKER_01 45:35

Yeah. One of the things I pray so often at the end of my sessions is thank you, God, for the way you made our brains. That like the client comes in, they're so frustrated with how they're feeling. But at the end, I'm praying, thank you, God, that you made us so that we can change. We're capable of updating these old ways of thinking and feeling. So yeah, I teach this. This is one of the things I love to do. So

Training Opportunities And Resources

SPEAKER_01 45:55

as of last year, I became the training facilitator for the Reintegrative Therapy Association. So I'm updating everything, I'm revamping our training program. So I just finished the basic training, it's reserved for therapists. I know I got a lot of coaches to reach out. Unfortunately, we do reserve the training for therapists. So whether you're licensed or if you're like an associate and you're working on your license, you could do the training or psychologists, of course. And so I would love to train you. We have a basic level in the fall. I'll be doing an advanced level. I also run a consultation group to provide ongoing consultation for therapists because the training with me will be like a fire hose. There's a lot. So I want to make sure that it nothing snowballs. And so we do require you to do consultation before you move on to advanced training. So you're adhering to the protocols.

SPEAKER_00 46:47

Awesome. You guys can learn more about the Reintegrative Therapy Association, the training, Andrew, his counseling practice, the Alliance, and his YouTube channel, Psychobible. Well, did you want to talk about the Alliance?

SPEAKER_01 47:02

I'm also on the board of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity. And we're going to be doing our conferences online. And so that way you can join from anywhere. So it'll be August 28th and 29th, a Friday night and Saturday during the daytime. And so it's geared more toward clinicians, but really we're broadening it out. And so if you want training and just more education on topics of sexual identity and sexual attractions and gender identity, that's the place to be.

SPEAKER_00 47:33

Awesome. And you should definitely check out Andrew's YouTube channel, Psychobible. It's all in the show notes.

Relief From Guilt And Final Blessing

SPEAKER_00 47:41

Andrew, what is your favorite thing about healing and freedom from porn? Relief from guilt.

SPEAKER_01 47:47

One of the potential pitfalls of even our compassionate curious approach and is that we can tend to neglect that God still has a standard for us. And so I do want to acknowledge that, yeah, there is still sin. All right. We're not saying that, oh, there's nothing wrong with your behavior, nothing wrong with this lust in your mind. When you actually do gain some ground, there is a relief that comes from knowing, okay, I don't I don't have to feel so guilt so guilty right now. Like I'd have I can actually feel guilty not because I'm just tricking myself to not feel guilty, but oh, there's relief that I'm not continuing to do the thing that I don't want to do. I'm now more aligned, more integrated with what God's design for me is. The path of getting there is where you have to accept where you're currently at while still striving for more.

SPEAKER_00 48:40

Thank you so much for sharing. Thank you, Drew. Check out the show notes to learn more about Andrew and always remember you are God's beloved son. In you, he is well pleased.