Shifting Culture
On Shifting Culture we have conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Hosted by Joshua Johnson, this podcast features long-form conversations with authors, theologians, artists, and cultural thinkers to trace how embodied love, courage, and creative faithfulness offer a culture of real healing and hope.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 412 Jay Stringer - What Your Desires Are Trying to Tell You
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Desire is shaping your life more than you think. In this conversation, I talk with Jay Stringer about why desire often feels like a civil war within us and how our longings are deeply connected to our story - our wounds, our past, and the formation we’ve received. We explore five core desires that lead to human flourishing, how shame keeps us stuck, and why paying attention to what you want can become a roadmap to healing. This conversation will help you understand your desires, uncover what’s beneath them, and begin to move toward a more whole, integrated life.
Jay Stringer is a licensed mental health counselor, researcher, and speaker who helps people uncover the unexpected meaning hidden in life’s hardest challenges. He is the award-winning author of Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing and lives in New York City with his wife, Heather, and their two children.
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If you do not act like prey, they will not treat you like prey. And most of us live as prey to these great white memories that exist within us. And we are trying to outrun shame. We're trying to swim away from it, and it will haunt you. It will chase you down and devour you. And so what we need to do is to actually turn and face our shame to disempower it.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, you know, desire shapes more of our lives than we realize. It drives our relationships, our work, our habits, and it can just as easily lead us toward beauty as it can towards destruction. In this conversation, I'm joined by Jay stringer to talk about why desire often feels like a civil war within us, and what it looks like to actually understand where our desires come from. We get into how our stories, our wounds, our longings, even our everyday choices, are forming what we want often beneath the surface of our awareness. Jay lays out five core desires that shape human flourishing, and we explore how to grow in areas where we feel underdeveloped, how shame keeps us stuck, and what it looks like to begin authoring a different story. This is a conversation about paying attention to your life, your past, your patterns, your desires and learning how they could become a path toward healing, wholeness and more integrated life. So join us. Here is my conversation with Jay Stringer, Jay, welcome to shifting culture. So excited to have you on.
Jay Stringer:Thanks for joining me. Joshua, so good to be here. Thank you for having me.
Joshua Johnson:I am so excited to dive deep into desire. Desire confounds me and a lot of people and we just like, what do we do with these these longings, these things that we have in our bodies we don't know? You open the book in your introduction, you say, desire is a civil war. We're in a civil war for desire. What does that mean that we're in a civil war for desire. Why is that fighting within us?
Jay Stringer:Yeah, I think, as a licensed mental health therapist, as a husband, as a dad, like that's what I have reconciled, is that all of us live with, you know, a civil war with our relationship to desire. So desire is responsible for all the best things in our life, the marriages that we might enjoy if we're in a marriage that we enjoy our kids, the work that we're doing in the world. And yet to desire anything also opens up the door to heartache, to unfulfilled desire, to some of the most selfish places within the human heart. So I think desire has the potential to turn us into the best, most authentic and connected version of ourselves, but it also has the ability to turn us into the worst version of ourselves. And so, you know, as a therapist, I'm watching, you know, a desire for beauty, a desire for changing generational patterns, can turn people into stunning human beings, but every day of my life I see the vandalism of desire as well of things like abuse, greed, selfishness, absorption. So I think that's part of where the civil war comes from, is we have so much evidence in our life to say desire is really good and beautiful, but we also have so much evidence in our life that would say desire opens the door to trauma, to heartache and to madness, if we're honest,
Joshua Johnson:I just Want to frame desire like, where does it come from? What is desire and how does it work on us?
Jay Stringer:So one of the ways that I've been thinking about desire is almost like through the parable the talents, right? So there's this, you know, the master gives everybody these talents, and it's that question of, what are you going to do with what you've been given? And so I think about that with regard to desire, that all of us have these innate desires that are inside of us. And part of the dilemma is that many conservative circles will often teach you to suppress your desires for fear that you might become selfish or, God forbid, sexual. And then a lot of us became adults. And then there's this new creed that emerges, and it's essentially, do you what is it that you want to do with this one wild and precious life that you've been given? Follow your heart, and I love Mary Oliver, and where. That, you know quote comes from, but there's no actual discipleship or formation of desire. And so part of what I have learned in my research and in just studying quite a bit on the topic of desire is that we have almost no idea what is shaping our desires, that desires and preferences can be built up within us that we have no conscious awareness of. And so part of what I'm trying to do with my clients, with my readers, is to invite them into a healthy level of interrogation about where their desires come from because we make probably around 35,000 decisions every day, mostly unconscious. And so part of what I'm thinking through is most of our desires, our longings, our impulses. We don't really think much about the authorship of where they come from, most of us would prefer to believe that, like, I'm making these choices, I'm following my heart. These products that I want are because I want them. But it's like, come on, there are billion dollar industries that are, you know, predators. They are designed to open up our hearts. They know what we want, and they prime our longings to be able to desire what they desire. So when you look at, you know, tech companies, when you look at Rene Girard, very famous philosopher, kind of would just talk about, you know, all desire is mimetic, like I want something, not just because I want it, but because I see someone else having something or wanting something, and I want something of that too. So I don't want high levels of suspicion around desire, but I also don't want the naivete of desire either. I think we need to form and get curious and interrogate where our desires are coming from.
Joshua Johnson:So then take me into something. Just say, I desire the new iPhone. Like, that's something that everybody desires as soon as the new iPhone comes out. And like, I have like, an old iPhone, but it seems to be the same as the new iPhone, but everybody wants the new one. So I have this desire, and I know it's advertising and it's memetic, right, that everybody else around me wants it, and there's something new, so I want it too. How do I recognize that that's just something that's working on me, that's like, a surface level desire, and I want to know, like, how do I start to excavate what is underneath that, to figure out what is it I actually desire, because I want this new iPhone.
Jay Stringer:Yep. So, you know, personally, when I think about like, I want the new iPhone 17 Pro, I think I have an iPhone 15 right now. And so as I've thought through that, you know, I'm in an author book launch season. And so sometimes when I see Instagram, I will see videos of people that are authors or influencers, and I'm like, wow, that's a really crisp, amazing video. But what that does is, I don't just want the crisp video. It goes back to I go back to middle school really quickly, and I'm like, okay, this person had the newer Nikes. This person had, you know, my when I was in middle school, we used to go to pay less shoe stores, and so my shoes would leave black streaks across the gym floor, and would be called out quite a bit by the gym teacher to say, like Jay, like, you know, you can't wear these shoes. And I'm in a bind where I'm in a pastor's kid, not making a lot of money, but we're also in in a more of a fluent area in Northern Virginia. So part of what happens to me with new technologies, new shoes, is I am brought into my story, which is, I'm on get I'm going to be on the JV team. I'll never make Varsity. I'll never make it to the next level. And so this iPhone 17 is the seduction of, oh, if you could just get there, then more people will view your videos more. So it's it. There is a meaning that I'm attaching to it. And the technology could be better, you know, they're great at selling it. I see it. There's a different, you know, esthetic to it, but it goes back to some of these older places within my own story. And so, you know, other dynamics, like, you know, I've done a lot of research in the realm of I call it unwanted sexual behavior, so a desire for porn or infidelity, and part of what my research showed is that we could predict, not even the amount of porn that people would watch or the types of affairs that they would pursue. We could predict what they would put. It into Google, what they would search for on a porn site and get into the specifics of their fantasies based on the unaddressed portions of their story. And so part of what we have learned in the research is that the things that we want, the things that wreck our lives, the things that make our lives beautiful are not random at all. We can begin to predict human behavior based on the unaddressed and therefore unresolved portions of people's lives. And to me that's so compelling because it means that the struggles of our life, the difficulties the albatrosses that are flying around us are not this life sentence to struggle or difficulty. They can actually become a roadmap to healing and growth, if we get really curious about what our problems, what our desires, are actually trying to communicate to us so full invitation for people to be deeply curious about why do you want anything from something that you would say is benign to normal to something that is wrecking your life and you're feeling so much shame over it, what I can tell you is those desires are not random, and embedded within those desires are clues to your story. So you're
Joshua Johnson:saying that most of our desires are predicated on our story in our past, as we go. And we could dive into our past our story, see where our trauma was, see where our pain was, see what was happening early in childhood, middle school, whatever, and saying, oh, there's a pain there. I have a desire now so to alleviate that pain. So what does it look like then, to start to look at our story in such a way that helps us, like live in the present?
Jay Stringer:So one example I often think about in this realm would be from, you know Harry Potter. And in Harry Potter, there's this scene where Harry Potter, who's the orphan, looks into the mirror of Iris said. Now Iris said, is desire spelled backwards. And so when Harry looks into this mirror, what he sees is his parrots. He see, you know, as the orphan, what is reflected back to him is his most ardent longing or wish. But when his friend Ron Weasley looks into the mirror of Ira said, what he sees is not parents, it's he's like the Quidditch champion. It's a much more narcissistic image. And what's his backstory? Well, he lives in the shadow of his older brother's achievements. He's not really desired or pursued, and so he developed some particular fantasy just around being wanted and being successful. So that sense of just ask yourself, if you were to look into the mirror of Iris said, what would be reflected back to you. And sometimes what happens in our life is that we get on this hedonic treadmill, and we're trying to be successful enough, we're trying to be competent enough. And yet, if we go back into some of the formative places in our stories, what we'll find there is a lot of pain, and so part of what I have found in my own life and in working with clients is that the more that you grieve some of the heartaches and traumas of your life, the less susceptible you are to unhealthy desire. So you know, classic case would be someone who wants to sculpt their body into, like an Adonis, like beauty they want to, you know, be the most attractive, well dressed person in the room. And it's like, where does that come from? Or I had a client when I was in Seattle. She came in during a lunch break and was just like, gloriously sweaty, and I was like, you know, worked out. And she's like, Yes, I just crushed that workout. And as a therapist, I'm paid to be hyper vigilant about people's word choices, so I knew what crushing of a workout meant. And yet I asked her, I'm like, what does it mean for you to crush a workout, and why do you need to crush a workout? And essentially, what she said is, you know, if I run eight miles in an hour, I've crushed it. So that's when my body feels rest. And I said, you know, what happens if you run a little slower? What happens if you only run, like, three miles around Green Lake? Like, what happens at that point? And she just said, like, I feel much more shame around my body and again. So good for her to name that. But what has she done? She's named her shame at 30,000 feet. So I knew that she wasn't feeling shame in her elbow. She probably wasn't feeling it in her ear, so I kind of inquired more of just. Saying, and where in your body are you more likely to feel shame? And she came down further and said, my legs, but again, legs coming down to 15, 10,000 feet. And essentially, what she began to name after a little bit of my being a badger of a therapist, was that she felt acute shame in her thighs if she didn't run long distances, and that was tied to a story of essentially, her mom saying, women in this line of the family have very thick thighs, and so you're going to need to exercise a lot throughout your life in order to kind of allow your thighs to not merge and be connected to each other. And so for her, when she was 13, going bathing suit shopping with her mom, that was the symbol of shame. Is her thighs touching and her mom critiquing that and so so much of her desire, which would be good to exercise, to have healthy rhythms, was actually rooted in a type of self hatred. And so that's what it means to kind of say, okay, like we can even have healthy desires on the surface that are informed by contempt, that are informed by trauma, heartache, and so I think that's the curiosity category of let's, let's wonder together why we want the things that we want.
Joshua Johnson:I think that's helpful, that know that things are happening because of our story, and that we actually have the probably, then the ability to rewrite some of the story and move into a new story, which is fantastic. And I want to, I want to get there, and I want to get to that, but first I want to just, just go broad level, high view. You talk about five fundamental human longings, and I just want to just lay those out for people to know that these are some of these desires that we're all longing for. What are they?
Jay Stringer:So they are a desire for wholeness, a desire for growth, a desire for intimacy, a desire for pleasure and a desire for meaning. So in the research and in my clinical practice, this is these are the five desires that really predicted human flourishing. They predicted confidence and authenticity in a individual's life, but they also determined the amount of connection and intimacy that they would have throughout their life. So a desire for wholeness, just to summarize each of the five real quickly, and then we can go wherever. Wholeness is about knowing your story. It's about understanding the adverse childhood experiences that you've gone through. Really important concept for people in this section is to understand your provisional self. So your provisional self is not your full self. It's not your authentic self, but you had to develop a persona, a way of life, to navigate your family of origin and some of the difficulties that you found yourself in. And I would say, like, you know, middle school is like a prototype of hell. And so all of us are developing a type of Persona, self to navigate the complexities of our world. So I want to invite people to desire wholeness and healing for those stories. The second desire is a desire for personal growth, and we are living in an age that loves personal growth. We want to optimize our habits. We want atomic habits. We want protocols. But part of what I keep coming back to is that we haven't actually desired radical hospitality for the difficulties that we find ourselves in. So we have developed a way of life that's always trying to have mastery over our difficulties, rather than hospitality and then healthy growth. So I want to teach people how to desire healthy, formative growth. Third is intimacy, and you know, that's the desire to know another person and to be known. We're not in a world that wants to know other people. We like rage. We like polarization, and many of us came from families that had no idea what intimacy with another human being meant. It either meant enmeshment or you, do you, but no sense of giving and receiving love. So intimacy is not just something that you're born with. It's a skill that you have to intentionally develop, a desire for pleasure is this sense of you know, we need pleasure. We need embodiment. We need our bodies to be fully alive. And this might cover sexual desire. This might cover a desire for just basic pleasures, like, where do you feel pleasure? As you go through your life, that could be with a really good craft cup of coffee, that could be on a mountain, but just where it is your body receive goodness and beauty. And most people have either a deep suspicion of allowing their bodies to feel immense amounts of pleasure, or once they begin to feel sexual pleasure and immerse themselves deeply in it, they begin to feel ashamed of that, or feel like it will become out of control. So teaching people, how do you desire healthy, integrated, fully embodied pleasure, and then final one would be, you know, a desire for meaning and purpose. This isn't just like general categories of what's the meaning of, you know, Joshua's life or Jay stringer. It's it's like there are particularities that the meaning of your life is going to look very different than what is meaningful for my life based on our story. So how do we develop a life of purpose and meaning, knowing our story and kind of getting a sense of what is it that we want to do with this life that we've been given, and most of us don't get there. We follow scripts of what is meaningful to other people, and we don't really understand how to, you know, find a life of purpose. So all that to say, these are not a la carte menu options that you get to pick or choose these. You have to desire all five of these in different seasons of your life to really find authenticity and connection in your life. But what happens to a lot of people is they over index on one realm of desire, you see this in like, person who wants to be the Joan of Arc in their field, a great missionary on the field, great pastor, great CEO, and yet their marriage is imploding. Or you have other people that they love marriage and they love to be cozy with their spouse and friends, but like they don't know who they are, they don't know where they come from, and they do almost nothing in the world because they've over indexed on cozy relationships and have not really pursued intense risk and growth. So all that to say, these five core desires in the research and in my clients, lives really predicted flourishing.
Joshua Johnson:You say there's particular times in your life that these, maybe more will will come in a little bit more than than others. So if somebody like has a desire for intimacy, but they're not very good at it, like they're somebody that is like pursuing their meaning, their purpose out there, but there's no intimacy, but they they have a desire for it. They just don't know what it looks like or how to achieve it. How do we get better at one when we're actually doing pretty well at another?
Jay Stringer:Yeah, so good. So a couple things. The first thing is, like, we have, like, a really fun quiz that we created because of that question came in often, like, how do I just know? And so I once took like a online peloton class from this woman by the name of Jess Sims. And one of the things she said in her workout was, you know, you are a masterpiece and a work in progress at the exact same time. And I was like, you know, dismissive of her words, but then I'm like, you know, she's got a point. Like, the human body is phenomenal. Like, this is amazing that we're able to do this, and yet, like, Man, I am a work in progress at the same time. So that's part of we have a free desire quiz that will give you 21 of 20 different archetypes of where your high desire is and then where you're under developed in desire. So that will form a particular archetype. And so if people want to take that, I can give you all the link later, but it's, you know, free desire profile quiz, and that will show you where you're over indexed and then kind of underdeveloped. But all of us are gonna be strong in one area and underdeveloped in another. So I think about like when I first got married, I had just a big desire for intimacy at that time. So I grew up in a family that my dad was a pastor, my mom was ministry wife. My dad was gone, often, attending to various duties, and so part of my job was to check in to see how my mom was doing. In some ways, I've been something of a therapist within my family since I was a young kid, but because I had all of this provisional self of being good to other people, of being insightful, the more that I read the dead theologians, the more that my relationship with my dad took off. So. That was kind of how I learned intimacy is like, what does my mom need? What does my dad need? And so then, when I got married, I thought I had a really healthy desire for intimacy, but it was so entitled. It was a sense of like, for now, I want someone else to want me, to validate, me, to pursue me. The dilemma was, especially when I got married, I hated myself. I didn't like where my career was, I didn't like my body. I felt stuck in life, and I wanted my wife to desire me far more than I desired myself and my own growth. And so I would say there was something of like an emotional hostage situation. Of you know, I need you to want me, even though I don't want myself. And so part of what that exposed is I had really good desires for intimacy. I'm not throwing that all out, but I had a desire for intimacy that was much greater than my desire to heal and much greater than my desire for growth. And so part of what marriage cornered me with is you can't just desire intimacy and sex, which was what I thought I was wanting. I also had to desire personal growth of how do I have hospitality and kindness to some of the difficulties I find myself in, and I need to be the father that I never had. I need to be the parent that sees the difficulties of my life, rather than outsourcing it to porn, a substance or a wife to take away. So I think if you're paying attention to your life, you're all going to pay attention to particular areas of dissonance or gaps that you experience. So now I would say, I've I've pursued a lot of growth. I've also pursued a lot of meaning and purpose with my life and books and writing. But where am I underdeveloped now in the area of relationships and friendships, like I will often sacrifice friendships because of a desire for work or family or growth, and so I think that's part of the cornering now in my life, is to say, okay, like you develop some of these rhythms and patterns that are good, but at what cost? And so all of us have places where our desires are working quite well and some that are underdeveloped.
Joshua Johnson:Well, that's good. It's good to know that I'm not the only one that needs some more friendship, and I have that, that desire. And you've talked about, you've written before in your book unwanted about about porn and other unwanted desires, and how to get over that. It feels like most of these have a pornification aspect to them, and it's not just the the porn as in sexual desire, but they're in pleasure, but there is a pornification that's happening in culture where it actually limits my growth, because it is all about, you know, taking what I want, and it's really a false image of what growth really is, right? And you can see that and everything. So how does, how does that unwanted aspect and the that porn aspect actually work, and not just the the pleasure piece and sex, but in, in all of these,
Jay Stringer:yeah, I mean, it's part of what I have grappled with, is this notion of, you know, a lack of differentiation in our lives. So differentiation is taken from cell biology, and it's essentially for a cell to grow, for a plant to grow, those cells have to differentiate and divide into different cells in order to support the growth. So I always think of like a symphony that if you were to go into Seattle, Kansas City, New York City, and you were to go into a symphony, you want your violinist to be the best in the city. You want them to be Juilliard trained. But oftentimes what ends up happening when you get to you know, the stage of intimacy or difficulty or complexity in life is that the stage very quickly shows you where you're underdeveloped. And so rather than developing a sense of self, you begin to seek out places to find relief, places to outsource the solution to something else. And so, you know, porn is a bit like a squatter in an unlived home, that if you don't know where your life is going and you don't like who you are, one of the the appeals to porn and to objectification is not just the issue of lust and arousal, it's the issue of power. So. For seven eight minutes, I can get exactly what I want, when I want it. My whole life. Can feel like a mess. I feel like I can have no power anywhere in my life, no purpose, and yet, for 10 minutes a day, for hours a day, I can have a realm, a setting where I feel in command, I feel in control, and that appeals to people who don't know how to author their lives, who always feel some level of self hatred or feel some level of stuckness in their life. We're also seeing that with regard to some of the latest statistics around artificial intelligence and romance. You know, something like one in five people now are pursuing artificial intelligence for romance. And so that sense of that's
Joshua Johnson:higher than it was now, wow,
Jay Stringer:yeah, so it depending on the age, it's even higher. You know, Microsoft has, I think, some character that, I think it's like over 600 million downloads, or, you know, ways that people are connecting to these character AIS and Microsoft versions of that. So we are consistently outsourcing our desires for connection, for sexual pleasure, to a business product. And to me, that's really striking is like what's happening that we don't know how to move through conflict. We don't know how to connect in our relationships and our romantic and in the midst of that vacuum, AI porn is more than happy to take over the residence of that and so I think all of this kind of comes down to that category of differentiation of like, who are you? Who are you developing into? Do you like who you are? Do you know how to work through the difficulties of your life without needing to find an external solution for it. And so, yeah, there's so much pornography in the world today, I think because, I mean, I could get into the, you know, a theology of evil that I think is really at work as well, to destroy something of the, you know, the image of God, but also, just from a sociological standpoint, we don't know how to do intimacy. We don't know how to grow and so there's a vacuum that technology is
Joshua Johnson:taking over. Earlier in your explanation there, you talked about how people they want power and control because they don't know how to author their own story, and so we talked about earlier in this conversation, about going back and excavating our story so that we can start to heal from the pain and trauma that actually then gives us the desires that we have now. So as we move forward, what does it look like to author our story so that we could have a healthy desire.
Jay Stringer:Annie Dillard, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, she has this great line in her Pulitzer book where she says, I never knew I was a Belle until the moment I was lifted up and struck. And so just to be thinking about that like, what are the bell like, moments of your life where something inside of you was struck that could be in your adult professional life, it could be a time of solitude when you were on the mountains or a trail, or you saw some act of beauty, you know, some act of moral courage, moral beauty, where you saw someone do something for someone else that really just struck something inside of you. It could be when you were a young kid, like, what rituals did you have that you just loved? It could have been riding a bike around your neighborhood, running through the cornfields, going into your grandmother's house and kind of just smelling good food. But when you think about all these experiences of goodness and beauty, I would say those are bells that are ringing inside of you that are trying to invite you to build a future around some of those themes. And so I think that's part of the excavation is, where do you come alive? Where does your body feel deeply connected to itself, to God, to the world around you? And those stories mean something for what it means that you want to pursue. But also, I would say, what has broken your heart, what places of trauma, difficulty, heartache, have found you, and how is that trying to wake you up to the reality of what themes in your life and in your community that you should really begin to engage and so when I think about kind of just my own life. In journey, you know, I came from a pastor's family that I went through puberty in a Southern Baptist High School, and it was, you know, you don't want to go through puberty while going through a Southern Baptist High School. And so I think about all these places of sexual shame that there was almost no conversation. And one of the things that I have often felt when I go into the church is like hearing about sex in the church is a little bit like going to a culinary school that will only teach you about food poisoning, but then has the audacity to ask for like, a masterpiece out of you. And so that's part of the story, the lack of education, the lack of language that I was given, and because of so much of my sexual shame, so much of my body shame that has informed what is meaningful, what is purposeful. How do I begin to outgrow porn and shame, but really offer to the world a different insight, a different perspective, so that people are not shame bound. And so, you know, really addressed issues of unwanted sexual behavior in my own life and clients lives. Now that I've addressed that, part of what I'm grappling with far more is what does it mean to be a man that a lot of us have never had initiations and to like, this is your identity. This is who you are. Well, I have a son that just turned 13, and I'm like, No one did this for me. I don't know what to do. So I have had eating disorders, Body Dysmorphia throughout a lot of my life. Not a lot of initiation into this is like what it means to be a man, and so that is cornering me now of how do I outgrow some of these behaviors and frameworks and actually offer something of goodness to my son, to the world around me? So your story, your body, your bells, your albatrosses, your places of heartache, are trying to wake you up to say, this is these are some compass headings of what a meaningful life would be like if you were to engage them. So you know, last quick story was, you know, working with a client, and I'll change, you know, the story here and there. But they were restoring a 1960s sports car. And this client always viewed himself as like a broken down Toyota, but he has been restoring this old sports car with, like, a lot of horsepower underneath the hood. And I'm like, Do you not see the metaphor is like, there is something old in you, wise in you, but also something that wants to come fully alive in this restoration project that you've been doing in your garage. Please don't miss the metaphor here. And so the things that you're drawn to look at them through the lens of metaphor. And I know I'm a therapist saying that, so I will see shapes where there are only shadows from time to time. But like, think about the metaphors that are all around you.
Joshua Johnson:It reminds me there of the Frederick Buechner quote about the purpose of life, it's the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. And what you articulated there is that it's not just the world's deep hunger, it's your own deep hunger where you had pain and trauma. And that place there is not just you that is yearning for something new and healing. There's so many others that are struggling with that specific thing that need healing, and that could be purpose and meaning for you, you're gonna find that desire. So I think that's gonna be helpful for so many people, because that that piece the world's deep hunger, like there's so many places of hunger in the world, right? That you get lost in it. You're like, Okay, I know what makes me come alive, but where do I then point that to try to heal? So that's, yeah,
Jay Stringer:it needs to have a zip code. I mean, I think that's part of what I'm grappling with. Is everything happening in our world today, from Iran to Minneapolis to I just read a really heartbreaking article on Haiti and how much you know of their population is dealing with hunger and kidnapping of children. And, I mean, that was off my radar. But then it's like, I start going to this, you know, orphanage that I go to, this other world relief category, this church, and I'm like, How do I support them? And then all of a sudden, I'm just feeling powerless and overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. But there's also like, okay, where in my own neighborhood, where in my own zip code is. Of this needing to play out, and I can support organizations that are doing great work in the world, but it's also the sense of where in my story, like, what themes Am I drawn to? Is that themes of abuse, is that themes of, you know, trauma, and how do I connect to those themes based on portions of my story, but also where the world is deeply hurting. So you know, pick, pick a country, pick a zip code, and you're like in your locale, and then let some of the compounding interest of love do its work over time. So yeah, you can't meet the entire world's need. You'll get exhausted, you'll feel powerless, and then you'll eventually tap out because it's too much. But if you find a theme, find a people, find a local zip code, and then maybe something else in the world, and then give it time something beautiful will grow.
Joshua Johnson:One of the things that I really love what you're doing here with desire and making a map to a healthy life to flourishing, is that you're couching it in story, and you're catching a metaphor. And for me, I can embody and I can live out story and metaphor more than I can say I have the facts. This is where I was. Was shamed. This is what shame does. This is who like if I just have the facts of everything I was like, I don't know how to implement that, but I do know how to implement and then form my desires through story. How does story help us then form desires? How does it then help disciple our desires?
Jay Stringer:Yeah, I'd be curious if I could turn the question back to you, of like, how have you found that to be true in your own life? Because I think part of the framing that I would say is we don't just have a story. We are a story. And so, like, my story, your story, is still very much unfolding, and so I'm always trying to understand, like, what is my life revealing? And I'll get to that. But I do want to hear from you, like, how do you think about that?
Joshua Johnson:Some of the things that have been helpful with with story is that I could see myself growing up, and I had a particular story my 20s. I was very like scattered all over the place. My story felt very nebulous. I didn't know who I was or where I was going, what I was doing. And then as I turned the corner and I started to move into a different story of desiring, actually the ways of Jesus in the world and what his desire is. In my life, it actually helped formulate who I am and where I'm going, because my identity wasn't in what I wanted to get out of the world. It was actually, how do I partner with God in the world? And my identity was found in him, and that was helpful in my story, really helpful. But then as I look back into those nebulous parts of my story, the disparate parts, I was like, Oh, they all actually then coalesced into who I am, what I'm doing, and where I'm going, and they were all training grounds. So looking back, I was like, Oh, this is, this is how this part of the story, my story intersects this part, which felt very disparate and separated, but they actually then all coalesced into one thing and made me who I am, because I was able to see it coming from different parts into a complete story which was really kind of Cool. I was like, Oh, this is who I am, and now I know I could take these parts and then offer something to the world
Jay Stringer:that's good. Yeah. I mean that, that sense of, you know, when you're out on a trail and you're walking, you don't necessarily know where you are, but you don't want to be looking at the map all the time. But every once in a while, at the end of the day, beginning of a day, you want to say, okay, like, Where have I traveled? Where have I gone? And I would say, like, very similar in my own life, where I'm a middle child, I'm the third of four kids. And so I grew up in some ways, and meshed with my parents and with my siblings, where they would always tell me the difficulties that they had in one another. So mom would say, this is where I'm struggling with dad. Dad would say, this is where I'm struggling with mom. Siblings would have their critiques of my parents. My parents would tell me about their critiques of their kids. So I grew up triangulated. I grew up enmeshed. And so when I think about the work that I'm doing in the world, there's a there's a similar aspect to that where it's like, Okay, here's what the leading Christian voice says on unwanted sexual behavior. Here's what the leading progressive voice says on it. And like, I think they're both wrong, but I can't necessarily, but like, let's figure out how to. We integrate that. You know, there's wisdom in both of these, but like, let's come together. So being a middle child has been really helpful for me to understand. Like, where do I want to blend in? Where do I want to reconcile different places in the world? But also, where is it more comfortable for me to try and be good to people and listen to people, rather than actually reveal more of my own mind and to take greater risks. But there's also a sense of some of my calling has been to not be the oldest, to not be front and center. But also I'm not the youngest that kind of gets to do whatever he wants to that there's I'm a little bit on the outside. I'm I'm an ordained minister, but I'm also a licensed therapist. I am involved with churches, but I'm not on staff at churches. I'm a clinician, but I also believe in spiritual formation and the importance of so I am an insider in some place. I'm never an insider, I should say, always a little bit of an outsider, with regard to most of the places that I go, and that feels very painful to me, until I begin to also integrate that. That's been part of my story. It's been part of my calling, is in but not of bit of an outsider as I sojourn through life.
Joshua Johnson:One last thing before we get into a couple questions that I'd like to ask at the end, we get stuck after we identify our desires, usually through fear and shame, really gets people stuck. Can you just give me a I mean, that's such a broad, hard, hard thing, and it's specific to for people. But what are a couple of ways that we could start to move past or heal our shame so that we can move towards healthy desires and we don't get stuck in that space.
Jay Stringer:Yep. So you know, shame is this, as Brene Brown would say, this painful experience that something inside of us is unworthy of love or belonging. The way the neuroscientists talk about shame is to think about it in terms of like a manual transmission car, so you have the gas pedal, the brake and the clutch. So the gas pedal is the sympathetic nervous system that is the part of our body that is going into the world with gas pedal on. We want to touch things, explore things, engage things, go after things. We also need to have a braking system, which is called the parasympathetic nervous system, and that's how we rest. It's how we digest. You know, desires must be disciplined if they are going to develop. So that's the category of No. It's the category of, how do I hit the brake? That not every desire needs to be chased. But what happens neurologically when we experience shame is that our sympathetic nervous system, our gas pedal, is going towards something, and then something happens, and we are shamed for that desire. Maybe it's seen as something selfish. Maybe we've pursued something that got us into trouble, and then what happens is that break is slam that No, I shouldn't have done that, or you shouldn't have done that. And then what happens is your whole system, like a manual transmission car, doesn't just gently come to a halt, the whole thing jolts forward. And that's what the neuroscientists say, is the experience of shame in our body is we wanted something and then we're shamed for it. So when that shutdown happens, we believe a lot of lies about ourselves. We have these core beliefs that like I was I wanted too much, I was too small, I was too big, and that's why I was shut down. So what we've learned about trauma is trauma is not just a bad event in and of itself, but it's what happens inside of us when we don't have an empathetic witness. And so trauma is not just this dire, horrible story, it's what happens inside our mental schema and our thoughts when we don't have a relationship of love and tenderness that are seeing us, and so all of us need to be able to say this is why I feel shame, not at 30,000 feet, not at 20,000 feet, but to get into the dirt of your story, to be able to Say this portion of my face feels most deeply unloved, this portion of my stomach, this reality about my mental aptitude or competency, and then attend to what are the stories that really allowed those belief systems to cement like at what point in your life? Did you believe that you were incompetent, that you were ugly, you didn't have what it took? What were the lies that were playing out there? Because part of what we experience with shame is not just in response to doing something, like we ate too much, or we watch porn, or we did something that we knew we weren't supposed to do, we also pursue shameful behaviors as evidence to confirm the core belief about ourselves? So if I don't like who I am, I'm going to go and pursue evidence in the court of law against myself and so long way of answering it. But shame is telling you lies. But shame isn't random, it's it's in particular moments. So that you know that category with porn that I was talking about, some of my clients, I've asked them like, what are the specifics of what you seek out? And at what point did that arousal become important to you? Or you know you might feel ashamed of your body or your mind, but at what moment in history, what moment in high school, middle school, childhood, did that lie get cemented? And that's the category I think of grief like Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted instead of outsourcing the comfort instead of dissociating, you're welcoming those memories of shame to come back and to say, I'm going to be the adult, the empathetic witness that you have never received. And so most of us are always trying to run away from messages of shame. The most important thing that we can do is to actually turn and face our shame and ask it what it's trying to do to us, where it came from. And last story I'll end with in that question would be, you know, a couple years ago, I watched Discovery Channel Shark Week with Andy Casagrande, and he's the videographer for that show. And they they basically asked him, What do you do when you're in the waters with a great white shark? And he said, It's counterintuitive, but you swim at the shark with the camera. And so what ends up happening is the camera goes up against the shark. The shark's nose bonks up against the camera lens. The shark realizes that it's not food. And if you're a great white shark, everything in the entire ocean, except for maybe an orca swims away from you. So that combination of, I don't know what this thing is, and it's actually pursuing me. The shark has an amygdala fear response and swims away. And what Casa Grande goes on to say is this phenomenal phrase. He says, If you do not act like prey, they will not treat you like prey. And most of us live as prey to these great white memories that exist within us, and we are trying to outrun shame. We're trying to swim away from it, and it will haunt you. It will chase you down and devour you. And so what we need to do is to actually turn and face our shame to disempower it.
Joshua Johnson:Wow, beautiful. This has been so amazing, so good. Couple really quick questions here at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, Jay, what advice would you give
Jay Stringer:I have, like, so many we would need, like, a
Joshua Johnson:year of pills. This isn't just a therapy session.
Jay Stringer:Yeah, 21 Yeah. I think I just had a lot of angst with regard to, like, would my life turn into anything what I and I think I would just, like, want a lot more kindness. Like, I think I would want a lot more play. I grew up in a family that you just didn't do anything unless it had a utilitarian purpose to it. And so I think part of what I have loved is, you know, mountains, trails, just a sense of, like being out into beauty. And I think that 21 year old self only knew suburbs and the misery and boredom of that. So I think I would just say, like there is a world of wonder and a world of beauty and a world of good food and good drink in good landscapes that you know nothing about. And so I'm going to help you find those places.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, that's good. That's why I have my my cascades, little, little thing that I'm hanging out on here. I have it so I could put my drink on it, but I could look at the Cascades and I'm like beauty trails in the mountains. That's where I want to be. That's where my desire is. But I'm in the middle of the country. I have no mountains. I have no big trees. What's going on? I have
Jay Stringer:an emotional response to that coaster, just even the word cascades. I have so many in Dell.
Joshua Johnson:Moments in those mountains. I know it hurts. Yeah, anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend part of I
Jay Stringer:would say to listeners I've been in, I wouldn't call it a midlife crisis. That feels too strong. I've been something in, like a midlife chrysalis. I feel like I'm in a goop. I don't understand where my life is headed, like, and I don't know what's gonna emerge. And so one of the story, you know, read, you know, the Odyssey, last year. Now I'm reading Beowulf. And Beowulf is like, you know, this great story of, like, this guy goes into, basically, people of Denmark goes into the Danes and like, there's this monster by the name of Grendel that's killing people. And so he goes in, and, you know, it's a great story. Hopefully I'm not ruining it. It's a, you know, you at least know something of the plot. But then he kills Grendel, and it's like, there's relief and celebration, then it's like, dear freaking god, Grendel's mother is there. And so that sense of like, to me, that's been something of that life that's been really helpful is like, I feel like I've addressed some of the grendels in my life, and then it's like, I think I'm done, and then I have to deal with Grendel's mother as well. So that's been, like, a helpful book for me to be part of. So yeah, Beowulf, some of the greats. So and I also David White's poetry and writing he wrote, you know, crossing the unknown sea. So if anybody is in that sense of, like, trying to figure out the meaning of my life and where to go, he, you know, he uses that kind of metaphor of crossing the unknown sea as, like a metaphor for this vocational journey. So that's that was a really important book for me this last season, as well as as I've attended to my own crossing of this unknown sea. What are the metaphors? What are the ways of kind of thinking about these things? So David White's great on so many fronts.
Joshua Johnson:Well, your your book desire is now out anywhere books are sold. It's a fantastic book. It's about the longings inside us and how the new science of how we love heal and grow. It's almost like five books in one, because you go into each of our longings in depth that really helps move us and like we could actually live into the story of that and start to heal and grow. It's fantastic. It's like it is deep, it's meaningful, it's very helpful. It's actually a road map and a path through our desires. It's a fantastic book that I think people should sit with, go through it, like, in a year and like, just sit, sit with it. I mean, because there's so much work to be done in it. And so I really love it. It's really good. And so you could go and get that book. Now, is there anywhere else that you'd like to point people to? How could they connect with you or your work, what you're doing?
Jay Stringer:Yeah, thank you for those kind words. It is a big book. And you know, J, a y stringer.com is my website. There's another J stringer out there who's a British crime fiction novelist. That's not me. He beat me to all the websites and social media handles, but I'm the therapist and yeah, that that website has all things like books, I do, individual, couples, intensives, you know, those quizzes that I talked about, the assessments, courses, that's kind of the hub of all things, probably most active on Instagram with sometimes me, sometimes my team. But that's the that's the primary place to find me. Sounds good. Well, Jay,
Joshua Johnson:thank you for this conversation. Really enjoyed talking to you and going deep with you, so
Jay Stringer:it was fantastic. I did too. Thank you so much, Joshua, such a honor to be on your show and get to know you a bit as well. You
