Sexual Addiction Expert: Managing Lust Doesn’t Work! Your Unwanted Behavior Is Trying to Tell You Something | Jay Stringer

Sexual brokenness and addiction is one of the world's biggest problems today, and that applies to those in the church and those outside of it. And in today's podcast episode, I had the privilege of talking to Jay Stringer. It's actually the second time he's been on our pod. He's a therapist, researcher, and author and really just an incredibly wise man of God who has devoted himself to studying and understanding sexual brokenness, where it comes from, and then from a biblical perspective, how to find freedom. I think it goes without saying that everyone listening to this will benefit in some way, whether they struggle personally or have someone in their life who struggles. So I highly recommend checking out the entire thing. And maybe even more importantly, I recommend you check out Jay's resources and you share this episode with somebody who is struggling. Jay is a very unique man of God, and I know that God could use the work that Jay has created and continues to create to be a massive source of hope for you in your life, or for somebody in your life who struggles with sexual addiction and unwanted behavior. So check this entire episode out. As I always say, this podcast is part of Steiger, a worldwide missions movement. We raise up young missional leaders who catalyze evangelistic and discipleship in cities all over the world. It's really an incredible mission and you should check it out. If you go to Steiger. Org. You can find out more and I really recommend you check it out, because the world's problems, as you know, are massive, and it's going to take all of us to make a difference. So check that out. And as I already said, if you would share this podcast episode or just the podcast in general, our heart is to faithfully follow Jesus in a world that is obviously going in the opposite direction. And every conversation with guests or just among the regulars centers around that. And so if this has benefited you, if you have grown because of this, share it with somebody else and invite them into this community. And together we can learn how to faithfully follow Jesus today. All right. I hope you are thoroughly blessed, challenged, and encouraged by my conversation with Jay Stringer. You're listening to the Provoke and Inspire podcast. All right. We are recording. Jay. It has been a while. It's been a few years. Thank you so much for coming back on the Provoke and Inspire podcast. Ben, thank you so much for having me on. Looking forward to connecting again. Yeah. Look, I know that the last time we talked, we discussed your book, unwanted, uh, How sexual Brokenness Reveals our Way to Healing. And I know you have a book coming, and I want to talk about that closer to the time when it comes out. But as I was saying before we started recording, our audience has grown a ton. It's evolved. And among other things, it's filled with young people who are really desperate to use their lives for Jesus. And yet so many of them are struggling with unwanted sexual behaviors and desires. And and then they are immersed in a world they're trying to reach that is completely mired in unwanted or, well, they often want them, even if they don't know the destruction that they're causing in their own lives. So I wanted to talk about it again, and I thought what might be a great place to start is just a brief introduction of yourself and this, this incredible work that you put out so many years ago now. Um, and then I thought we could just I could read a few quotes from the book and then just unpack some of the key and crucial themes in it. So, yeah. Let's go. All right. So, Jay, who are you? Who am I? Uh, that is I mean, currently, I feel like I'm not quite in a midlife crisis, but I do feel like I'm in something of a mid-life chrysalis where that question of identity, of who am I? And just as you name, like, there are some seismic shifts happening inside me. Uh, unwanted was released, uh, maybe about seven years ago. And so I've been thinking, processing, praying, researching this next book for a number of years. And so there's there's a significant seismic shift just in terms of, you know what? My research has been focused on what I've been paying attention to. So I think just I am in the midst of that question of who am I? I used to be Jay Stringer, author of unwanted. Now I'm also going to be Jay Stringer, author of desire. And my kids are getting Older. And, you know, there is both like such deep gratitude of the time that I have spent with them. But also we're in that like final third, like if you divide a childhood up into three and first six years, twelve years, eighteen but my son is in the final third and so much grief. So the question of who am I? It's opened up a can of worms. There I went deep. Freudian on you, I am. I am a New York based psychotherapist, author, researcher, married to my wife Heather, for. We've been married since two thousand and nine and have two kids, twelve and ten. And, uh, yeah, a lot of my work is at the intersection of theology and psychology. So I often find that when I'm in, you know, the clinical chair for too long, I'm like, how does this actually help people and how do we work with systems? But then when I work with church systems and organizations, I'm often like, no real change actually happens in the dirt, like when you actually enter the particularities of someone's life. And so I feel like I have a great life. I enjoy, you know, being in the midst of, you know, the individual conversations and seeing the patterns, but then also getting to work with organizations to help shape, you know, the content and the curriculum and just the, the messaging that we have around this particular area. Yeah, yeah, I know this is not necessarily connected. But I had this similar epiphany related to my son, who's going to turn ten here in a few months and just I it's really intense. The emotions that come up when you think about I got about eight years left. And also like that thought of there's going to come a point where he no longer wants me to tickle him, and that point is way quicker than eight years. That point is like right around the corner. And, you know, I still have seven and five to kind of console myself. But it's wild how fast things move wild. Yeah. And I don't know if I haven't looked into the claim of this and like what the research is, but I've even heard like as adolescents age, just even the way that their ears develop is they're much more inclined to other people's voices, so less inclined to hearing my voice and being shaped by it. And there's both grief in that. And I'm like, thank goodness there's some good men that are also in his life and coaches and just. But the the interests and the desires inside of him are expanding beyond our home. And so that's such a beautiful thing. But it's it's a source of grief nonetheless. Yeah, yeah. And I think it relates because a lot of your work in the whole area of unwanted desires and sexual brokenness stems from a lot of childhood memories and experiences negatively, obviously. So that adds a certain gravitas to the responsibility of a parent. Right? I'm sure so much of your work has been looking into the negative impacts of trauma in childhood. That's got to be an extra weight as it relates to trying to raise your own kids, devoid of any of that trauma, and yet you're imperfect. So much so. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I take great just satisfaction in that notion that, like, it's not the ruptures that always destroy the relationships. It's the lack of repair. So rupture in relationships, whether it's parenting or, you know, marriage or friendship, rupture is going to happen. The closer you are to someone, the more of a sense of, I want to be known and I want to know you deeply, there's going to be conflict, of course. And so conflict is neither good nor bad necessarily. But it's, you know, relationships are those messy containers of transformation. So that's what my wife and I will think about quite a bit is like, yes, uh, not only do we have a five twenty nine college fund for each of our kids, we're also, you know, saving money for their own therapy and intensive processes that they're going to need to go through. But, you know, it's not just the ruptures that mess with us. It's whenever parents or friends or family members are not willing to repair those ruptures. That's where the real damage happens. So we are trying to, you know, repair well in the midst of some of the, the breakdown. So. Yeah. Well, and I mean, you have to take hope in that, right? I mean, by definition, you are going to reveal more of yourself to the degree that you're close to someone. And in theory, you're going to be no closer to anyone than your spouse and your kids, and they're going to see the full weight of the ugliness that's in there. And it better be based on repair or we're in trouble. I mean, how else can we possibly we'd just be overcome by guilt and shame, I think, if we didn't accept that. Absolutely. Yeah. So there I mean, one of the things that I've been working with, both in my next book, but then also just in my parenting and in the client work that I do, is this notion that parents are not doing the best that they can. And so I first heard about this from a therapist that talked about, you know, in Germany, there's this phrase that's like stress and angle house tufele, which is basically a street angel house devil, and it refers to parents who intentionally present themselves much better outside of the home than inside the home. And what the author says is that's how people really determine that their parents are not doing the best that they can. And I often find that like, that's what a lot of my clients and myself want to hide behind is, hey, look, I'm doing the best that I can, but like, you know, I'm a pastor's kid, and I saw my dad give the best he could on Sundays. Monday through Friday was not the best that he could. Uh, so if he showed up the way that he showed up in our family on a Sunday morning, he would have been fired. And so that's part of what we have to work through, is how do we honor our mothers and fathers? How do we honor that? People are at some level trying the best that they can and may have done better than their, you know, the generation before them. But if we're really honest, all of us have a sense of like a clear picture of when we saw our mom, or we saw our dad give the best that they could. And that's that's not always this internalized experience that we have of our parents. Because, you know, often parents give the worst to their kids because it's kind of family. And so that's been part of my own parenting process. My own journey as a therapist is just to really step into there's a tension here of like, we don't want to say that like people are always deliberately doing harm, and that's not always intentional, but the impact of that harm certainly is there. But what if we could actually grow in our honesty of Heather, my kids, I did not give you the best that I could this week. I was a lousy dad and I knew it. Um, so that's been I've felt cornered by that notion, and it's been deeply freeing and I think pretty provocative for a lot of my clients to grapple with. I wonder if it's a matter of just being more honest outside of the home, because maybe the inside of the home version of you is the real you. And if you didn't have that bifurcated reality, you wouldn't console yourself with this religious front that appears on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. Maybe you just be more real honest and everyone would see it and maybe call you out for it. Yeah, and you'd have to go through that crucible of change so much faster. So I think you're you're right on how backwards and sad is that though, right? Like, you put on a front for people that hardly care, really, relatively speaking. And then for the people you impact the greatest. You almost even overcompensate. Or you or you let out like you like it's like the releasing of steam because you've been holding it together for the public. Yeah. And that's what we likely saw our parents do. And that's the the notion of mimesis or mimetic desire or mimetic behavior as we, we watch other people behave. We watch other people want things and have things, and then we're like, oh, we're going to mirror some of that. We're going to mimic that behavior as well. So I think that is what we have seen. And if we're honest, it's it's not genuine. It's not an honest way of living. Yeah. So yeah I know we took a bunch of detours, but this is the best the best conversations are detours. I think, uh, look, in the end of the day, it's it's a challenge, right? Because we're not just talking about parents, we're talking about followers of Jesus. And when you add that religious layer on top of all this, it becomes even more damaging, right? Because then you see this sort of false religiosity. And in the, um, the Jekyll and Hyde of that becomes even more stark when you see that false religiosity a couple of days a week, but then you see the complete opposite at home. I mean, that doesn't just damage your image of your parents, that damages your image of God. Oh my goodness Ben. Yes, absolutely. And that's I mean, that's where I find on this particular front. I find scripture so encouraging, but also so cornering, uh, just because, you know, when you look at what Jesus is saying about the human heart, I learn this from a guy named Dan Allender, uh, just the way that he really invited us to grapple with it. But basically, Jesus says that all sin is this notion of lust and anger. So when you lust, you commit adultery. And when you are angry with someone, you murder. So what Jesus is saying fundamentally, is true about the human heart is that all of us are murderers and adulterers, and at some level, we're okay saying that about ourselves. But if that's true, that's also true about our parents. And so where have you seen your mother lust after a clean home? Where did your father lust after the image of his family needing to look a particular way. And when you were perfect and you modeled that golden child mirror back to him and you won a tournament, or you knew your Bible or you won a degree or you whatever it is, you know, when he lusted after you, there was a sense of delight. But if you disappointed the image of your father, or if you disappointed the lust that your mom had for your time and your energy when you got married, and now you have a new loyalty to a wife or a husband, now she murders you. It, you know, metaphorically for these new loyalties that have shifted. So I think that there's something so provocative about those texts to be able to say, where have my parents lusted after me? And where, when they did not get what they wanted, did they kill me? And so we see that, you know, in the Old Testament as well, with Abraham. Like we know that. Like we honor that Abraham. You know, Genesis twelve left the land to go into this new land with inheritance and. You know, was a man of deep faith. And yet we also know that Abraham attempted to. Traffic his wife twice had sex with a teenage concubine after doubting the promises of God. So part of what Scripture is inviting us to grapple with, I think, is revolutionary. And it's this. It's that you cannot fully honor someone if you're not willing to be honest. And so we know that we're supposed to honor our mother and father. We honor Abraham, but we can also be honest about who he is. And so many of us that have grown up in the church have believed the lie that if I was honest about my family of origin, if I was honest about some of the childhood pain that I went through, I couldn't possibly be honoring the church, or I couldn't possibly be honoring my mother and father. And I think that's a lie. I think our capacity to heal, our capacity to grow, our capacity to desire comes to the degree to which we can be honest about the heartache of our life. And so I think that's what Jesus is inviting is, you know, blessed are those who mourn the absence of good fathers and mothers because he wants to bring comfort to us. And how many of us don't know how to receive the comfort of God? Because we've never allowed ourselves to feel the heartbreak of how we haven't been cared for? Well, you mentioned like, okay, I say we worship God, but really we worship the God of how we are perceived by those around us. Or we worship the God of the meritocracy. So to the degree that my kids are successful, that reflects on me something. And then when our kids reinforce that by accomplishing the very thing, worshiping worshipping to the idol, so to speak. That just creates an entire idolatrous family structure so that they come to think that's what God is really like. He's as performative or demands the performance that my parents demanded of me. And so you can see how vital that is. And then, as you said, you juxtapose that against honesty, which is really just the gospel, right? Which is to say, I can't do it, I am broken, I need help. And so that's not just some sort of victimized like woke thing. That's just that's just an admission of the actual state of the human condition. Indeed. Yes. Oh, man. Man, I don't know this whole parenting thing. You know, it's probably too late now. I should maybe reconsider. I didn't know if I counted the cost here. Oh, man, that's heavy days. Okay. Um, you mentioned in your book, you know, so much of those who who grapple with your work and who are encouraged by it or who are entering into it, of course, dealing with sexual sin. And that's such a huge problem in our culture. And I think one of the the core messages out there in culture is you got to fight it. You got to, you know, you got to kill it, you know, or at the very least, you got to manage it. And so when it comes to lost, which, you know, you would think is at the core of most unwanted sexual behavior, how are we to reframe it in a more biblical way or in a way that will actually lead to freedom in your mind? Yeah. No, I think you're spot on. The the way that I think we have dealt with it in Christian culture is lust management. And that's the get internet monitoring, get, uh, you know, get into accountability, try a recovery group, uh, try and slap a rubber band around your wrist if you're having a sexual thought. And so most of it is this sense of, I don't want to look into it. I don't want to address it. I don't want to lean into understanding how all this stuff came to be. I just want to eliminate it. And so, you know, part of that it might work for a little while, but it always inevitably comes back. So I think of like Romans twelve two that says, you know, don't be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. You know, Christians love the first half of that. Like, don't be conformed to the patterns of this pornified world. Uh, we already know that in our bones, the things that we're supposed to do and not supposed to do. But then the second part of that verse is, you know, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Well, how many churches, how many homes, how many organizations or seminars have you ever been to that have taught you how to disciple your sexual mind, that have taught you how to renew your mind? And so that was part of, you know, when I wrote unwanted and did some original research connected to it, I wanted to get a sense of not just do people look at porn, but what types of porn do they actually look for? And so this was kind of like a to me, a little bit of a invasive question to begin to ask is not just like how often do you watch porn? At what age were you exposed all that matters. But I wanted to know, like, what are people actually googling? Or when they actually get onto one of the top porn sites, what are they seeking out? And so part of what the research showed is that your sexual fantasies, your unwanted sexual behaviors, and your porn searches are not random. They are a direct reflection of the parts of your story that you haven't addressed. And so the implication of this that I kind of make clear and unwanted is that unwanted sexual behavior doesn't have to be this life sentence to sexual shame or addiction. It can actually become a roadmap to healing and growth. So what does all that mean? It's that we have been taught, uh, to see lust as something to eradicate. But the reframe here is that we want to see it as a signal to interpret. So we want to understand it. We're not giving it carte blanche. We're not saying it's, you know, normal and good, and you do whatever you want to do. We're trying to say that embedded in the very behavior that brings you shame and arousal are very, very important clues for you to begin to pay attention to. So, uh, they are clues. They are signals. They are messengers, whatever language you like there. But it's there is so much that we have to learn from our sin, but we've never been trained to get curious about why we sin in a particular way. And part of what I would say is your sin is not random. Your sin is actually very predictable and embedded within your skin are clues to the healing and growth that I think Jesus actually wants for you. Could you give me a just a practical example? Like walk me through what that discovery process would look like, and then how that would lead or help someone along the journey towards freedom? Sure. I'll give you a research finding and then something from a client that I was just working with this week. So research finding would be, you know, a really common fantasy would just be, you know, someone that wanted to see a race that suggested to them some level of subservience, maybe a petite body type, a college student, kind of barely legal, that type of search. And so we wondered, like if that was your search. And the researchers tagged that as kind of like a power over others. We wanted to know what predicts that porn search. And what we found is that there were three things that were largely at play. The first was that these people had a strict or authoritarian parent. Second is they had very high lack of purpose in their life. And then the third is that they had deep levels of shame. So if you were to play armchair psychologist for just a little bit, if you had a parent that was kind of my way or the highway, some sense of like, it's, you know, whatever I say, you just need to listen and, you know, some level of anger. But when you're growing up in authoritarian home, it's not just the experience of powerlessness. There's also a look that you will get or a hit that you will get that makes you feel humiliated and small. Right? And so part of the question is, is if you grew up in that type of family system that consistently powered over you and you felt profound levels of powerlessness, where is all that going to go in life? And as you hinted at earlier, we've been taught to see porn use as this issue of lust. And sure, that's a partial truth. That's partially true. But the other side of porn is that it will give you a place to have unlimited power. You know, in your day to day life you might feel like Clark Kent, but in the world of porn, you can be Superman. Uh, you might feel powerless and futile and a lack of purpose in your life, but in the world of porn, you can do anything you want to do. You can see anything that you want to see. And that's a very, very powerful experience for people who come from a powerless context. So that's all part of it. The lack of purpose, the the powerlessness, but also that deep level of shame. And most of the way that we understand shame is that we feel shame in response to doing something bad. But the reality is, is that the more I feel shame and I have this core identity of shame, the more I'm going to seek out behaviors that confirm that core belief about who I am. So I look at myself and I'm like, I hate myself. I don't like who I am. I'm not as successful. I'm not as beautiful. I'm not as, you know, holy. I'm not as pure as my neighbor. And I just, like, deeply struggle with my own contempt. You have to think about where are you going to create further evidence to confirm those core beliefs. And so that's often what happens, is people who have unaddressed, shame unaddressed lack of purpose in their life and unaddressed rigid family system come to porn. And it is just a petri dish of confirming the core belief that I'm broken and I'll never be able to change anything. I'm powerless over this, but simultaneously nine minutes. Two hours. Right? To be unlimitedly powerful. If you don't mind me asking. Like why do we want to reinforce our own sense of worthlessness? Yeah, the brain is a human prediction machine. So, you know, we the reality that we see. So left brain, right brain, there's been a lot of research kind of debunking how we think we understand the left brain and what the right brain does and versus what the left brain does. But one of the points that, you know, an author by the name of Iain Mcgilchrist makes is that it's essentially the way that we attend to information, the way that you see when you see the particular world. So if I see myself as fundamentally broken, fundamentally full of shame, no one would want to be around me if they actually knew me. I'm going to create evidence to support that thesis to be able to support like this is the evidence that I expect to find, because we all know that healing and change and, you know, updating the software is so much more difficult than any of us would want. And so we have neuropathways not just unto addiction and compulsive behavior. The deeper reality is that we have neuropathways and processes of addiction and grief and or not grief, but, you know, just levels of shame and shame based thinking that are deeply woven into our brain structures. So that becomes part of the renewing of the mind, is we need to get curious about why does my mind need that? Why does my mind go in these particular patterns? And most of us in the church have never allowed our sexuality and our sexual desires to be a core place of discipleship. We just think that we need to eradicate it for our discipleship. And I'm like, that has. No, that's not going to help you. Yeah. Is there even an element of power in reinforcing a self-loathing? You know, because in the end of the day, maybe this sounds really callous, but self-loathing is just another form of selfishness in the end, right? You're constantly thinking and fixating on yourself. And there's even a bit of a letting go of self to heal from that. Assumably so is there some degree of that where you're looking for things to reinforce this self-loathing so that you can maintain control of that woe is me feeling? Absolutely, yeah. Like I'm experiencing that even like with this new book project. And I would say, like, you know, fill in new book project to anything that you have hope for these days. You know, hope deferred makes the heart sick. And so I have no idea how this book is going to do. Um, that's, you know, no idea how my parenting is going to do in the next six years. So when we lack the ability to predict where it's all going to go, when there's so much beautiful hope that we have, self-sabotage becomes the way that I will put, I'll ruin it before someone else can. So if I just don't like my life, or if I don't like it and I sabotage the process, then I didn't really give my best because I actually ruined it. And so self-sabotage is so foundational to a lot of this, which I'm glad you're bringing it up. So you need to be thinking about if you're struggling with porn, how is that self-sabotage inhibiting you from actually having hope that something good could come? It's kind of your way of saying, yep, here's the irrefutable evidence that my life is fundamentally screwed. Or maybe you get something good, but you don't know how to experience and taste Joy, like you don't know how to enjoy a feast. And so you get done with a feast, and then you go back to a shame based behavior that makes you feel not honored and, like, worthy of celebration. But now, yep, I deserve to be thrown out of the party. I deserve to kind of be out in exile all over again. So self-sabotage is always our way of creating judgment, of creating control. Because, you know, goodness just doesn't last very long, if we're honest. But misery? I know misery quite well. Wow, that's so brutal. We become our own jailers, right? Which is so pernicious and such a horrible scheme of the enemy that he has on people that kind of sets up the system that they then reinforce, which is just horrible. Um, you know, you talk so much about trauma and childhood, but even that word I feel like has become politicized or it's seen as, as a victim thing. And no, you just got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and take responsibility. And it's your choices help navigate between those tensions, because for some people, it can connote this idea of like a woke thing, like a liberal thing, you know, all of that just distorted nonsense that helps us lose the baby with the bathwater. So help us bring both into the bath, if you will. Sure. So, you know, trauma is sometimes psychologists will, you know, designate it as big T traumas or small t traumas like a big T trauma is, you know, nine over eleven, a big hurricane, some type of life threatening event. A small t trauma would be, you know, bullying, racism, just kind of that sense of a death by a thousand cuts. And so one of the things that we have learned from trauma is that trauma is not just this event that happened to us long ago. It's the ongoing imprint of that event on us today. So in that sense, your trauma is not something past. Your trauma is actually being lived out in your body right now. So for most of us, we won't know our trauma through memories. We will know it through our particular reactions. So if you feel, you know, triggered and you don't know how to navigate your own loneliness, or you get into a conflict with someone in your life, or you feel really all alone in life, you're not just twenty eight years old or forty two years old or sixty years old, however old you are listening to this, there is an age in you that's probably nine or ten years old that felt very similar feelings and didn't know how to regulate their own emotions without outsourcing it to a substance or a screen or a behavior. So trauma is that sense of, you know, what is unfinished business from your past that's living out in the way that you organize your life right now. So another trauma therapist says that trauma is not just what happened to us. It's what happens inside of us in the absence of an empathetic witness. And that's really important phrase that when you think back to some of the worst moments of your childhood, or even some of the worst moments that you've been through in your adult life. Did you have an empathetic witness that actually saw you, that cared for you, that offered some level of support? And if you didn't, your whole organizing schema is going to be affected by that. And so, you know, trauma is, you know, not an invitation to kind of just blame it on, you know, I can't help myself because I'm traumatized. It's far more saying, you know, what is the pattern of behavior that's playing out in this moment? So let me nuance this by just saying, like Dan Siegel says, that kids need four things in order to survive. So I want you to be thinking about your childhood through these four S's. So the first s is to be seen. The second is to be safe. The third is to be soothed. And then the fourth is to be secure. So seeing refers to a parent who sees a child's joy, but they also see the heartache and the lament of their life. So I often think about middle school as a prototype of hell of, you know, my nickname was doughnut growing up, uh, was, you know, Pillsbury Doughboy commercials where people would put their finger inside my belly and just go, ooh! And so I know when I would come home from school and when I would go to the bus stop where I knew I was going to be bullied, my face was not well. I remember looking at my face in the mirror just being like, you are depressed, you are sad. And I didn't have a mother or father that saw me in attune to that and asked about it. But I'm going to jump to that third S, which is soothing. Well, where does a middle schooler go who doesn't have relational soothing, and that his parents and his bullies at school are actually the source of the dysregulation are not soothing. Well, before porn for me was food. So do you see the irony? The very thing that brought me comfort in life in the absence of a good mother and a good father in that particular way, became the basis of my soothing. Well, if I had had a good witness to offer their tears, to help me work through this, to be able to address the bullies at school, I would not have been looking to Who brownies and apple fritters and bagels and could eat, you know, pints of ice cream in an evening to help bring that soothing. So why am I bringing all that with trauma? Those are all small t traumas that I went through later in life. I'm not thinking about those stories. I'm just thinking, why do I hate my body? Like I'm going to try and run marathons, but then I'm also going to, like, eat lots and lots of apple fritters and donuts. And so I live with something of a civil war of against my body. Or maybe I struggle with porn. And again, I'm not thinking back to those childhood days, but the story that I'm recreating, the memories and the feelings inside are not just the feelings that I was having in my mid to late twenties. They were reenactments of that thirteen and fourteen year old story, and so I had unaddressed trauma that I was so dismissive of, of I don't want to have to go back to childhood. Like, I'm not a victim. I can address this. I'm more than a conqueror here. I'm in seminary. I'm in grad school. I should have the ability, through the power of the spirit to stop this. And if I really understood the gospel more than I do right now. And if the gospel was more beautiful than this addiction or this compulsive behavior, then I would be a good Christian. And it was like that just didn't help at all. So it kept reinforcing kind of the binge and purge cycle, which is I binge on porn, I binge on food, and then I also try and purge it all out through being holy and listening to music and trying to, you know, just eliminate that part of my life. And it wasn't until I went back to my trauma to be able to say, what is the story that I'm recreating here? And what was the site? What was the soothing that that boy needed in the midst of that. And so the more that I was able to regulate my nervous system and find tears for grief, the more that my body and my arousal changed, because I wasn't looking for self-soothing from, you know, outsourcing it to another behavior, I actually became an empathetic witness to myself that offered soothing and kindness for my distress. And once I internalized in some ways my own love for myself, but also the love of God for me in the midst of that season, that was such a game changer for me in this particular space. So I get why people are dismissive of trauma. But, you know, we don't like to feel weak. We don't like to feel powerless. So I have never met a real victim. Most people that say, I don't want to be victimized or I'm like, you haven't spent 10s of your freaking life feeling like a victim because I've been around victims. After a season of time and the grief in their eyes about the innocence being stolen, the anger, the fury in their face about how the dignity of their life and the image of God has been violated. So when I see real victims, I am haunted by how beautiful they are. So I just don't I. Most people that are afraid of being victims have not spent any real time experiencing the horror and the beauty of what it means to live as a victim. Yeah. Kind of continuing on with this idea that, okay, you're speaking to me, I'm maybe I came into this conversation reluctant, uh, skeptical, uh, kind of scanning my past superficially thinking, I don't know. I mean, I couldn't hardly write a book about my past. Not that interesting. So let's say you've walked me to the point of saying, okay, I got to do some of that work. Assumably that can't be done alone, right? And so much of this is made worse in isolation. So talk to me about the idea of needing other people, needing the body of Christ, needing help to do this. It's not enough for me, you know, you've converted me now to the concept conceptually, but then what? I got to actually go out and get some real help, right? Yeah. So I would say it's both there. There are things that you can do in your own life, like so, you know, for me, when I was going back to some of these moments, if you have the ability to return back to your childhood, middle school or bus stop, that was something that I would do is I went back to my bus stop, and I stood there and I remembered the trauma. I remembered what my body felt. I remember the hiding. I went to the giant grocery store and I walked past the donuts that I loved to eat at that time. And I got one. And I began to taste. And I began to, in some ways, incarnate myself back into the body of that kid with, you know, an empathetic witness. I did this when I was in my thirties, but there was a sense of like, I welcome this kid. I've always been so ashamed of you. I've always wanted you to change. I've always been embarrassed of you. But as a man in his mid thirties, I'm going to welcome and love you well. So that was something I did by myself. But that was also something that I would bring into relationship and into, you know, conversations with my friends, with my wife. Um, so, you know, community is so important in the midst of this. So we can't see our own face without a selfie, without a mirror, and so I'm not able to read my story well without the presence of others. So the way that I naturally see my own life is often through the lens of shame. So I need other people to be able to reflect back to me part of what they see when I'm looking at a story or a reality about my life that I'm not fond of. And so, you know, as we go through this, you know, I think of Romans five, where it is for freedom that you have been set free. To me, the purpose of accountability is to not check in to see what you're doing wrong, but far more to be able to say that if the God of the universe has given you desire, which I believe he has, what is the terrain of your heart all about? Like where does your heart come alive in terms of beauty? Where does your heart come alive in terms of what you want to do for missions or what you want to do as a singer songwriter. Like, where does this heart inside of you come alive? And that's what we need other people for, is to be able to say, where is your heart coming alive? And here's where my heart is coming alive, alive. And let's have some accountability. Not to just say we're screwed up. And, you know, we're trying to get this together, but it's like, no, we need to address the self-sabotage behaviors, but it's always in the service of growing something glorious and beautiful. And so that's where I want my friends to be around, is I want to be honest about my sin and how that's messing with my marriage, or how that's messing with my parenting. But the purpose of that is not just to trap me and get me to feel tears and sorrow over my sin. The point is that sin is inhibiting joy from taking place. And so that's what I think about friendships now is yeah, it's not that I'm trying to hide anything from them, but we talk not just about like the bad things that we're doing, but like the deep terror of coming alive in life. And I think coming alive is so much more difficult than living with a level of deadness. I can do deadness, depression all day long. Um, but coming alive and taking risks so much more difficult for the human heart. Yeah. There's an illustration that I've heard you use, and so I'm going to steal it here, which is that, you know, dealing with sin porn struggles in this sort of militant with not having a growth mindset, not having a life mindset. It's kind of like just spraying your entire yard with weed killer, right? It's not trying to cultivate a beautiful garden and in so doing, Needing to deal with the weeds, of course. Right. But good, healthy accountability should, yes, look at the weeds. But the aim is a thriving garden. Isn't that part of this, right that we God has given this this beautiful vision for a thriving and abundant life, and yet we have reduced it into this narrow, shame based moralism where we're just constantly fixated on death. When God invites us, as you say, to something so much more profound and beautiful, so much so. Yeah, I mean, I think of like the C.S. Lewis phrase around, you know, he has that or not phrase, but he has the analogy of like, you know, when God comes into our home, we expect that there are portions, there are wings of our home that God is going to need to renovate. And so God starts, you know, renovating and tearing down some wings. And we're like, okay, I get it. And then all of a sudden it's like the whole house is coming undone. Like, wait a minute, I thought that you were just trying to, like, make this a nice cottage. And where Lewis goes with that is like he's he, he's taking it all down because he intends to build a palace that he wants to live in with you. And I think that's the vision is that we are trying to, like, get these little cottages all fixed up and nice, and we end up living a very small life, rather than being able to say, like, there is a palace inside of me. Um, there are dreams, there are desires, there are things that the God of the universe has planted inside of me that have never been given space to develop. And so that's really what allows us to outgrow these unwanted behaviors is, you know, we're attending to the grief, we're attending to the sorrow, to the trauma. But that's never the end. The end is this sense of, you know, it's a it's a it's a life that is fully alive. And so that's where good recovery should always be. Focused is not just trying to prevent you from doing bad things or harmful things, but having integrity with your heart. That's beautiful. J. This has been awesome as I knew it would be. I really appreciate you, and I want to end here to give you a little bit of time, but appreciate you. Where can people find more of your work? And if you're willing, I'd love to have you on again once your new book comes out. But just in the meantime, how can people get resources from you? Yeah. So my website is J. The dash is because there's also a British crime fiction novelist that I think, darn him. Com. Uh, also on Instagram, I think it's like j underscore underscore again because that other crime fiction novelist got there first. Um, so you can find me there and then website just has a lot of resources, whether it's online courses or self-assessments, that will give you compass headings about what's driving it. And so we just want to create a lot of resources for organizations and individuals and couples that are struggling with this. Um, you don't have to go through this stuff alone. There's there's some really good people, organizations, books that are out there. So just know that if you're exhausted by this, you know, less management approach to life. Um, there's a much better approach out there. So awesome. That's where they can find me. Okay, well, we'll put it in the intro, in the show notes and all the different places, and hopefully we can talk again soon. But J appreciate you, man. This has been awesome. And yeah, I'm just going to hit the record button to make sure the file gets uploaded. But otherwise thank you. Thank you for taking the time for sure. Thank you Ben.

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