What if we told you that exploring your past could be the key to unlocking your sexual wholeness and integrity?
This episode is a powerful exploration of understanding sexual brokenness and the path toward healing. Join our riveting conversation with Aaron Tagert, a seasoned coach at Regeneration, as we dissect the insights from Jay Stringer's thought-provoking book, Unwanted. We'll confront our family dynamics, the effects of abandonment and enmeshment, and the pivotal role curiosity plays in this journey.
Story work, as you'll discover, can offer profound insights into our lives, habits, and patterns of brokenness.
Ever wondered why we remain stuck in patterns of sexual brokenness and how we can liberate ourselves? Our guest, Aaron Tagert, brings his expertise to the table, illustrating God's care for our past and His invitation to participate in our healing process. Together, we'll probe into addressing sexual temptation and the significance of curiosity in decoding the reasons behind our actions. This isn't just another episode; it's an invitation to embark on a journey towards sexual wholeness.
So, tune in, and let's discover the path to freedom together.
Want us to talk about a specific topic? Change up the format, or just tell us the podcast rocks! We want your feedback on Becoming Whole. You can leave your feedback here
If you are in the Baltimore Area, Regeneration is happy to invite you to our 2024 Dessert Fundraiser, Spark: One Small Thing Leads to So Much More. This annual gathering is a highlight for so many as we gather for tasty desserts, heartfelt worship, vulnerable and powerful stories, and an opportunity to partner with what Jesus is doing through Regeneration. Click Here for more info or to register.
What if we told you that exploring your past could be the key to unlocking your sexual wholeness and integrity?
This episode is a powerful exploration of understanding sexual brokenness and the path toward healing. Join our riveting conversation with Aaron Tagert, a seasoned coach at Regeneration, as we dissect the insights from Jay Stringer's thought-provoking book, Unwanted. We'll confront our family dynamics, the effects of abandonment and enmeshment, and the pivotal role curiosity plays in this journey.
Story work, as you'll discover, can offer profound insights into our lives, habits, and patterns of brokenness.
Ever wondered why we remain stuck in patterns of sexual brokenness and how we can liberate ourselves? Our guest, Aaron Tagert, brings his expertise to the table, illustrating God's care for our past and His invitation to participate in our healing process. Together, we'll probe into addressing sexual temptation and the significance of curiosity in decoding the reasons behind our actions. This isn't just another episode; it's an invitation to embark on a journey towards sexual wholeness.
So, tune in, and let's discover the path to freedom together.
Want us to talk about a specific topic? Change up the format, or just tell us the podcast rocks! We want your feedback on Becoming Whole. You can leave your feedback here
If you are in the Baltimore Area, Regeneration is happy to invite you to our 2024 Dessert Fundraiser, Spark: One Small Thing Leads to So Much More. This annual gathering is a highlight for so many as we gather for tasty desserts, heartfelt worship, vulnerable and powerful stories, and an opportunity to partner with what Jesus is doing through Regeneration. Click Here for more info or to register.
Speaker 1:
All right, everybody. I am here today with one of Regenerations Coaches, aaron Taggart. Aaron, glad to have you in the studio, which is really just my office.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's a great studio that you have here. Yeah, yeah, so you know so we're.
Speaker 1:
So buckle in everybody we're. Usually, I try to record for maybe 10 minutes, and today we're going to go a little bit longer than that, because we want to dive into some topics that Aaron and I are both passionate about and then really introduce you with an opportunity or two for you to go deeper into some of the stuff that we'll be talking about. So, aaron, why don't you just start by just real quick, give us a just listeners a little bit of a picture of who you are and what your work is here at Regen.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so well. First of all, I'm really excited to be a part of this conversation today, so thank you for that. Yeah, I'm some of our male coaching here at Regeneration and I just love that opportunity to work with men and their story and to just help intersect where the Lord wants to take them in their healing journey. I find it just such a blessing and an opportunity to be a part of that work in their life.
Speaker 1:
And outside of here is this all you do. You have any other thing, Anything else about you besides?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so yeah, I'm a husband of 16 years, a father of four, 10 to five. Two boys, two girls, help with our men's ministry at our church and I just have a real heart for men and for family and for husbands and fathers, and you've heard what Jim Gaffigan says about parents of four kids, right? Oh yeah, it's like drowning. Yeah, just hand them a baby.
Speaker 1:
Yeah right, like imagine yourself drowning in someone who hands you a baby.
Speaker 1:
The first time I heard that I thought that is what it's like to parent four kids. All right, so today we want to dig into we're actually going to be drawing a lot from the work of Jay Stringer. If you don't know that name, listeners, check out his book. He's got a book called Unwanted how Our Sexual Brokenness Reveals the Way to Healing, or something like that. I might be getting the subtitle wrong, but Unwanted by Jay Stringer, because Aaron and I both dug deep into that work and continued to and found it really helpful in our own ongoing journeys towards sexual integrity and sexual wholeness, and also really helpful in the work that we do with coaches. And so today we're going to talk about the first part of Jay's book which he entitles. What does he call it? The section is how did I get here? How did I get here? Yeah, so what stands out to you from that section that we had to dig into a little bit?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So the how Did I Get here section is a real introduction If you haven't done much story work for your own story. It really is an introduction to some of the things that may have happened to us or that we've experienced in our lives, going all the way back to childhood. So it's looking at family dynamics, dysfunctional family systems. He talks about maybe ways that we've experienced abandonment, even this concept of triangulation or enmeshment with parents, which is like an over attachment to one and trying to maybe be seen as someone in that relationship. That is providing something that's not meant for you as the child to bear, whether it's information or maybe some of the heavy things that spouses carry sometimes and taking that to the child instead of being able to talk to each other about that, to his husband and wife.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so early on you said something, you used a different expression and you didn't explain it. So story work, which is something that is a. If you've been around regeneration for any length of time, you've necessarily looked at your story a bit your family of origin, what it was like for you growing up, relationship with mom, relationship with dad, relationship with peers into your present day story like what are your relationships like today? But story works a little bit different in that it takes that in it and it kind of goes a specific direction with it. So share just a little bit about what that means, Aaron.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, well, I think in story work you're identifying the good, the bad and the ugly, and that can be hard.
Speaker 1:
I'm signaling to Aaron make sure you say I'm like doing this sign of the air and he's like looking at me like what are you talking about? So let me jump in and say so. I think to me one of the really unique parts of story work was actually like writing the way that we write about it, which was different, like I'd written about my story before, but there was a unique way of writing about it or a different way of writing about it.
Speaker 2:
So, yeah, Now I'm picking up what you're putting down now. Yeah, so there's this. When we look at our stories, it's really easy to do the 30,000 foot kind of look at our story, like, oh yeah, these things happen. I experienced this. But story work is more than just identifying those things. It's stepping back into those things up close, which can be scary. There's emotions and feelings and, to be honest, it's a lot of the things that we run from and in a lot of ways where this behavior, we turn to these types of things.
Speaker 1:
But these are symptoms of these deeper things in our story, yeah, and that's the key of it really is in writing your story or pieces of your story, as a story actually does ignite or kind of turn the lights back on to some of the specific emotions and earlier you had mentioned, aaron, just the reality that these emotions are often things that we wanna run away from, and so part of story work invites us to be curious in areas that before we've maybe been skittish about being curious about. So talk a little about the role of curiosity in this journey.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So curiosity, I think, is something that when we create that space for, can kind of draw us in a little bit more. It certainly feels a little more personal, I think, like being curious and creating space to be able to be curious and know that that's okay yeah so the specific let me jump in here real quick.
Speaker 1:
But specifically then, like a lot of us, when we experience sexual temptation and those old tapes or videos of the fantasies we've gone to a million times or somebody we just saw start rolling in our head, we have this kind of reflex like either to indulge in it or just run the heck away from it. And curiosity is, I mean, where's like? So throw curiosity right into that.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely, and so I think what comes up for me there is this analogy that Jay uses in talking about engaging this on the porch, like if we are a house of our bodies, a house our mind, those things that you don't let this in the house because it's knocking on the door and it continues to knock and ring that doorbell, and we could put fences around walls up, but this continues to find ways over the wall, ways through the fence, ways up to the porch where the knocking and the ringing of the doorbell takes place right.
Speaker 2:
And so the curiosity is what the heck is this about Trying to, why is it coming around and stepping out on the porch to engage that, to ask these questions what do you want? Why do you keep showing up? How, what, like you know, without letting it inside. You know to our hearts and to our minds, and I think that's where you know, as scripture talks about, you know, fleeing from temptations, you know, I think it's. It kind of sounds like that to me, in a sense of like you're not letting this in and you're doing things so that you don't let it in, but taking it a step further and trying to be curious about why the heck, is this showing up in the first place? Yeah, and to me, when you engage it in that place, that's a shift, that's something different. I think it's something a lot of people haven't done.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So let me take that analogy a little bit further. So Jay's analogy of temptation comes, it's on the doorstep, it's knocking on the door, it's ringing the doorbell and we are somewhere inside the house and we might look out through the window and see you know, I mean the pizza delivery guy's here Like what's he doing here? You know, like I didn't order a pizza, get out of here. Temptation comes knocking. You're like hey, I didn't, I don't want you here, get out of here.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and yeah, Paul says flee from sexual immorality. Ever the sin you commit is outside your body. But this is, this is in your body. So don't, don't, don't let it in.
Speaker 1:
But I think what ends up happening for us when we shut down curiosity about why the temptation is there, why this specific fantasy is, we end up not just fleeing from sexual immorality but fleeing from some part of us that is crying out for our attention.
Speaker 1:
And so pizza guy shows up and we keep saying I didn't order any pizza, without going out and saying who ordered the pizza.
Speaker 1:
You know, and I think in some ways that's what we're trying to do.
Speaker 1:
We're trying to go out to the temptation and say what, why do you keep coming around here right now who in the house ordered you?
Speaker 1:
You know like because because oftentimes we'll find is like, yeah, there's a little little kid version of you from six years old, eight years old, and he keeps calling this temptation because that's the only place he knows to get attention, attunement, care, and so the final goal is not to, like you said, it's not to invite this temptation into the house and say, yep, do whatever you want, but it is to say like, I got it from here, you don't need to keep showing up, because I'm going to go to the room in the house where this eight year old, 10 year old, 12 year old or whatever has been crying out and I'm going to start caring for him or her now.
Speaker 1:
So that's the rule of curiosity, like, and I think that does open some doors, does flip some lights on departs of the house that really really matter, that we've maybe avoided. Instead of, like you know, holding up in our prayer room, plugging our ears and saying Lord, please, please, just let the doorbell stop ringing, we have to recognize like it's like the fantasy is there, but there's actually some other part of us inside that is that is actually making the noise that we need to pay attention to what comes up for you, as you, as you hear that.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think of, I think of, as you were kind of talking about, you know, in our, in our houses, and I think maybe some of the different traumas or things that we've experienced, right, and we shut the doors to those rooms. We don't, we don't want to go in those rooms, we don't want the memories of those rooms, we don't want the feelings of those rooms, and so the room is there vacant and we close the door. We might even lock that door, you know, and that's kind of a we have, you know, friends over or something we don't. We don't talk about this room, you know, we talk about the other rooms, we don't talk about this room, and I think curiosity gets us to the place, to to help us understand some of those you know core, maybe feelings or emotions or experiences that are behind those rooms. But it's not something we have to avoid.
Speaker 2:
You know we're we're actually invited into, to that kind of curiosity, to explore that, and really that that invitation is from Jesus, I like to think. In a way he's kind of our, he's our wayfinder, he's our GPS. He's not taking the wheel, he's not doing the steering, but there is this element where you know he's guiding, he's directing, he's suggesting and he's with us through the journey, not just at the end of the journey or the beginning of the journey, but the entire journey, and I think that's important to know. I think a lot of times we don't think about, you know, maybe because of our own shame, we don't feel worthy, that he would be a part of that journey. But he's at that destination, but really he's with us in that journey and that's an invitation that he gives us.
Speaker 1:
You know what comes to mind as you say. That is the word in Greek for healing in the New Testament. It's the same word for salvation in the New Testament and it's related to that phrase or the word SAV. You put SAV on a wound to heal it.
Speaker 1:
And a lot of us know, yeah, I know that Jesus saved me. I know he forgives me, but part of what comes to mind as you're sharing is that he is available to us then, as he is available to us now, and we've left parts of ourselves wounded Now just because we didn't know how to heal. We didn't know, or maybe we didn't know it needed healing, or maybe we thought it was healed. And there is a mercy in all of this, a grace in all of this that invites us to to allow Jesus access again to some of the wounds that we carried from long ago the neglect, the trauma, the, the abandonment, the lies we believe, whatever it may be so that he will bring all of us into the kingdom, all of us in salvation, not just our adult self, but our younger self too, parts of us that we don't have access to outside of ourselves. And that takes this whole curiosity thing and into this really holy place.
Speaker 1:
It's mysterious it's and the one hit might sound to some people like sounds like really, you know psychobabble or whatever, but like really it's just a holy, holy journey about becoming whole, about becoming fully integrated past, present, future. Yeah, all right, this is too rich. We're not, we can't wrap all this up in one pocket, so we're, we'll continue, we'll, let's go in, because we want to get into next time. This time we've talked about Jay's first part of like you know, how did we get here? His next section is about why do we stay?
Speaker 1:
And I know, I know that people listen. You're going like why do I keep doing this stuff? So let's, let's continue next time, and so we will. So, lord, thank you that you care about our past and thank you that you don't want to leave any part of us. And I pray for our listeners right now, lord, even as we've maybe just scratched the surface and in some curiosity, that you would grant them grace and end it, and to feel and sense and hear your sweet invitation to go deeper with you, praying Jesus in that.