Episode 318: You're Allowed to Want Stuff! Talking Desire with Jay Stringer

Jay Stringer, licensed therapist and author of Unwanted, is back to talk about his brand new book Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow. Together, we unpack why so many of us — especially those from church backgrounds — were taught to fear and suppress our desires rather than develop them. We dig into enmeshment, the "provisional self," why differentiation is actually the secret to intimacy and a healthy sex life, and why low libido is never just a libido problem. If you've ever felt broken, empty, or like you don't even know what you want anymore, this conversation is for you.

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LINKS MENTIONED: 

• Get Jay Stringer's book Desire
• Get Jay's book Unwanted
• Follow Jay on Instagram
• Sheila's book The Marriage You Want, and the video curriculum that goes with it

Transcript

  
Sheila 
What would your life look like if you actually awakened desire? Not just desire for sex, but allowed yourself to feel desire to feel excitement, to feel pleasure and not feel like you were somehow cheating on God if you let yourself get excited about something? That's we're going to be talking about today on the BareMarriage podcast.
I'm Sheila Wray Gregoire from BareMarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy evidence based biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage. And I am joined at the beginning by my daughter Rebecca Lindenbach

Rebecca
Hello. Hello.

Sheia
And we are sort of the face behind Bare Marriage, but we are going to be joined by one of our favorite people. Jay Stringer is here to talk about his new book on desire. And you've seen Jay recently.

Rebecca
Yes, you have

Sheila
On the Love and Respect docuseries. He was a great voice. Really added a lot to that. And he's going to share about his new book. We just loved his his first book, Unwanted. It's one of our go to recommended resources. And I know that this one will be as well.
 
Rebecca
One of the things Jay talked about on the Love and Respect series that people really resonated with was this idea that, often we talk about sex as the that is separate from the rest of our life, right? So this idea that you have lust issues will do you, but you also have eroticized rage and you've also like sexualized feelings of control. And those are actually problems more than the quote unquote lust issue, because that's the underpinning current that's causing the the problematic behaviors for the lust issue. And so I know people really liked what he was saying about that. And again, I'm gonna plug it for the next 17 years if you haven't watched it yet, all three parts are live. But I think you guys are going to really love what Jay has to say. And, we have always appreciated that Jay is one of the people who is writing in the space. He's also very dedicated to doing research and not having it just be one dude's opinion. And so how refreshing is that?
 
Sheila
So let's let's let Jay talk now, here he is.

Well, I am so glad to bring on the BareMarriage podcast. One of our favorite people, Jay Stringer. Hello Jay. 

Jay Stringer
Sheila, it is so good to be with you.  Thank you for having me again.

Sheila
And we're happy we get you on this big week for you, because your new book just launched, Desire. Yes, I have no idea what your subtitle is. No offense, I don't even know my own subtitles. But what you do, even though your subtitle?

Jay Stringer
I should. It's the longings inside us and the new science of how we love, heal and grow. But I thought I had to think for a moment, but I.

Sheila
I never remember mine either. But yeah, this is this is great. So you. Your first book was Unwanted. Well, maybe that wasn't your first, but that was your first big.

Jay Stringer
It was my first. Yeah.

Sheila
Okay. Yeah, it did really well. And I recommend it all the time for, especially for men. But it's not only for men. It's for anyone who has unwanted sexual desires, sexual behaviors, etc. to get to the root of it. And I thought your handling of that was so good because so often we, you know, 
we think of porn, use, etc. as something you just need to white knuckle through. And that's not healing. Like you got to get to the root.

Jay Stringer
Exactly. Yeah. And that was part of what we wanted to do with Unwanted was to get some level of curiosity about why we do what we do, because at least in, you know, the world that I grew up in, it was all internet monitoring. Slap a rubber band around your wrist, and as you and your team have so beautifully pointed out, the madness of, you know, to women especially, like present your bodies as merciful vials of methadone like that, that's going to kill libido in a marriage. And it also keeps men wildly underdeveloped to think like that. So Unwanted was just like this invitation to kind of saying, like, you have a lot to learn from the difficulties of your life. And so that was part of the importance of research, is we could begin to predict not just do people watch porn, but what types of porn did people go and pursue based on the unaddressed parts of their story? So it was a really fun project to work on, but also many years ago.

Sheila
Yeah, well, I really appreciate it. And of course, you're you're a licensed counselor. Here's a here's where we intersect. You're a licensed counselor, but you also do research. And you're really you're really committed to data. And so appreciate that. And that is what led you to this next project where you're kind of jumping off of where you you left it with Unwanted and okay, so, you know, we figured out what the map is for your unwanted sexual desires.
We're going to try to repair that. But now you're like, but where do we go? There's the there's bigger questions here. And and that's what Desire is. So do you want to sum that up for us what your new book is?

Jay Stringer 
Yeah. So there were a couple different reasons why I wrote Desire. One was we had a lot of people that would write in to us and say, like, that was really helpful. I don't struggle with an unwanted sexual behavior, but I'm struggling with an eating disorder. So I'm using your framework to help me do that. Or we would have a lot of betrayed partners write in to say, okay, like this is somewhat helpful, but what do I do about like, I need a defibrillator for my sex life after all this debris, how do I even find desire? And so part of what I started realizing is this isn't just about understanding destructive habits and where they come from. This is about getting underneath the engine of the desire itself. And, you know, it's such a difficult conversation for all of us, but particularly those who have been in the church where there is this notion of like suppress your desires, desires will turn you into the worst version of yourself. They might turn you into something selfish. Watch out for the desires of men. Watch out for other people's desires. And so you end up in this life of suppression and fearing your own desires. But then culturally, we get all these influencers that are saying like, follow your heart. What is it that you want to do with this one wild and precious life that you've been given? Which I love that line from Mary Oliver, but there's no practical guidance on how do you actually develop your desires. And so that became kind of just paying attention to what did marriages need? What did men need? What did women need? To be able to actually understand that desire is not just a liability, not something to fear, not something to blindly follow, but really to be part of forming people because it's this is about waking you up to the life that you really want. And a lot of times we just don't have permission to want things in our life.

Sheila
Yeah. Oh, I mean, when I read when I was a kid that, you know, you know how you're always scared that God is going to call you to do the one thing you hate the most, right? Like God is going to make me go be a missionary in some country where there's all kinds of spiders or something. You know, like, but I think we grow up with this idea of whatever I hate the most. That's what's God's going to get me to do in order to refine me. Because I'm too selfish, right? 

Jay Stringer
Yes.

Sheila
Yeah. 
Jay Stringer
Yeah. Absolutely. Like, there is this sense that if I actually like God's desires and my desires are so desperate, they're so disconnected that mine are obviously so wicked, deceitful, and I just it but it's we don't really contend with the reality that, like God has put desires inside of us that I think we really need to develop.

Rebecca– AD
Do you know how the messages that you heard in high school affect you today well, like always, we did a study on it. Our book, She Deserves Better. It's based on a study of  women to find out how experiences in church as teens affect them today. 
Sheila– AD
And if you were still dealing with purity, culture, baggage and garbage. This book is kind of like re-parenting you and hearing the stuff that you should have heard then. But especially if you are raising daughters, get a hold of She Deserves Better. 
Rebecca– AD
Because really. We all deserve better.
Sheila– AD
Check it out. The link is in the podcast notes.

Jay Stringer
And so I think about the the parable of the talents quite a bit, where the master gives these talents, and it's that question of what are you going to do with the desires, the talents inside of you? And some people bury them and suppress them, some actually develop them. And although, you know, as a licensed therapist, I see what destructive, selfish desire can do to marriages, to churches, to individual’s lives. But, you know, BareMarriage would not exist if it were not for desire. You know, the Great Sex Rescue would not exist if it weren't for some level of like, I want to honor the desires, I want to honor sex, and I want this thing to become beautiful, not just a source of misery and dread. And so sometimes desire gets a bad rep, but I think it's one of the most stunning, most beautiful dimensions of the life that we get to live out. But so few of us are ever given any instruction, any guidance on how to develop those desires that are inside of us.
 
Sheila  
Yeah, and I think that's what I, what I really loved. And I read the book a couple of months ago for the first time, I, I wrote an endorsement for you. So full disclosure there. But 

Jay Stringer
Thank you. 

Sheila
I think what I, what I really took away was, you know, God has made us all individual. And so he has put, you know, these key drives in some of us and, and yet we often get those things snuffed out as children or rebuffed from our spouse or from those around us. And so we quench who we are. And that, like at its heart, like at its most basic, that is who we are, right? Like the things that the things that light us up, the things that give us energy, the things we long for, the things that excite us, like these are these are good things. And yet we don't always explore them because there's there's often something that's broken inside of us that are holding us back.

Jay Stringer 
You had, dear Dan Siegel, neuroscientist, researcher. One of the things he says is that the strongest systems in the world are those that are differentiated and meaningfully linked. So he says that we're all after this desire for authenticity and belonging. And the dilemma for a lot of us is that the more authentic we become, the more of a sense of like, this is my voice, this is my talent, this.  

Sheila 
I know where this is going. 

Jay Stringer
I want to bring the less I can belong to someone and the more that I belong in some ways that compromises my sense of authenticity. So I think part of what's happened in the church and in a lot of Christian marriages is that it is a set up for investment, it's a set up for enmeshment, for codependency and so the theory is if we can just have unity, if we can just get people on the same page and have this core sense of belonging, then everything's going to go well. And so what it does is it keeps people very underdeveloped as individuals. And so instead of like, you know, part of the erotic desire, part of the life desire of marriage is not just that, like we have unity, but it's a sense of like, my wife has a passion, she has interests, she has she separate from me. And that separation actually allows for oxygen to come into our marriage. But I think in the church there's this sense of like, we just need to belong and then we need to question some level of differentiation or individuation, because that's going to take you away from the church, or it's going to take you away from the heart of God, or it's going to take you away from the church, rather than saying like, no, like whatever you develop as an individual and you stoke those fires inside of you, that's the boon, that's the gift and mythical language that you actually bring back to your community.But, I think we we have overindex on belonging and become very underdeveloped in authenticity.

Sheila
Yeah, I love it. I think that's so true, because when you think about it so much marriage advice, it's, you know, how to communicate better, how to get on the same page, how to resolve conflict. But it's not about how to be you, how to show up.

Jay Stringer 
Because the the fear of that is that you already know that your partner is underdeveloped, that they present a little bit like a toddler, that if you're not around, if you don't validate me, if you don't see me all the time, then you're going to get a temper tantrum or you're going to get contempt, or you're going to get some level of distance from me. And so some much evangelical dating advice and marriage advice really caters to a lack of authenticity. It's not inviting people to grow. It's not inviting people to develop their window of tolerance, to understand their story, to become someone that's desirable. What we are training people often in marriage is, here's a laundry list of my unmet needs. Here's a list of all the ways that I've been wounded and haven't been seen. And are you up for it? And if you're not up for it, then we can't have a good marriage. But it's like, you know, there is something deeply healing about marriage and attachment and relationship. But it also needs to be this crucible that develops us into a much better, stronger version of ourselves.

Sheila
Yeah, I love that. And what you're I think what you're trying to do and it's it's a pretty big ask that you're doing this book. I think this is a transformational book because you're saying the problem with a lot of therapy is that it's focused on one problem. And while that has its, has its place and it's important, and lots of people have benefited from that in many ways. But if you really want to get to the heart of it, we need to see the whole person and we need to see everything that's going on. And so how can we integrate and what you're saying is like looking at desire is a way to integrate so much of that, which I really like. 

Jay Stringer 
Look at that sense of like, you know, some people read The Body Keeps the Score. Bessel van der Kolk landmark book on trauma. And they're like, I have a trauma issue. That's the issue. And then they start addressing their trauma and they're like, wait, I, I don't know, I don't understand sex. I never got the sex education I want. And then you read Emily Nagoski says, Come As You Are. And you're like, yes, this is it. I'm missing the sex information I never had. And then you don't understand your story, or you don't have a sense of the meaning and purpose that you're going to in life. And so that's where this book is really inviting people to a holistic desire framework that, you know, these five core desires are not a la carte menu options that you get to pick or choose. That's it's one thing that we need to develop that it's not just about sex or purpose or intimacy or personal growth or healing. It desire is about all of them. And most of us. Yeah. Look at like, well, I did the trauma work or I did the sex work or I read that book and it's not working, so it's ineffective or there's something wrong in me rather than saying no, like, we've got to expand our understanding of what our life is asking of us.

Sheila
Yeah. So those five core longings, I've got it. I mean, you just you just said wholeness, the desire for wholeness. So that's that's to heal the wounds of our childhood. Right? A desire for growth. So to live with authenticity and strength, a desire for intimacy, to know and be known, a desire for pleasure. So for touch vitality and sex and then a desire for meaning. So long for clarity and purpose. I love that. And and I just want to say we are going to talk a lot about libido. So everyone listening, I know you're all wondering about the libido because Jay talks a lot about low libido, and we're going to get to that, I promise. We're going to spend a lot of it on that.
 
I just I just want to work through a couple of other interesting things in your book before we get there. I, I, I really liked how, how you did say that, you know, you can't just work on one thing because even if you've got, like, the childhood wound thing, you might still have all of these other issues, right? And so if we take a step back, we can look. So I want to talk about, you told a story of a guy named Charles. Do you remember that in the book? I often change people's names. And so then I can never remember what I put them in as in the book and.

Jay Stringer
Tell me about Charles. Tell us about Charles.

Sheila
So, you know, he, he had his parents really wreck a lot of his desires, you know, like, he was excited about things and he got them really squashed down. And then his wife sort of did that, too. And so he just felt like he didn't know who he was.

Jay Stringer
Yeah.

Sheila
You know. And do you remember that story? Can you tell us? I'm not telling it right now.
 
Jay Stringer
Yeah. No, it's. Yeah. So part of like where I would go from this from like a ,ft view, whether it's Charles, my life, would be to think about like that. All of us have, what I would refer to as, like, a provisional self. It's not a real self, but it's the self that you needed to develop in order to survive your world. So an example from my life would be my. I grew up in a pastor's family. My dad was a pastor. My older sister was kind of the classic rebellious pastor's daughter. Like doing the things that would reflect poorly on my family. My older brother took more of the kind of philosophical rebellion he was reading Nietzsche, at 16, critiquing my dad's sermons.
And so they would say things about my family that I'm like, you can't say that. What is going on here? But they were right. There was a level of truth and what they said. So part of what I started realizing was, if I'm a good kid, if I talk theology with my dad, if I tend to some of the heartache in my mom, life goes better as a family. I have an identity. I have a sense of how to maneuver through my world. So I became something of a, you know, golden child, good kid. And that provisional self helped me maneuver through my world to become a good therapist. But it also traps me. And so, Charles, that story is, you know, his parents are undermining his desires that almost everything he wants is seen as a competition, that, you know, they want his desires to exist only for their family, not to have life outside of that family. And they begin to frame him as selfish. And so what happens to Charles is that he begins to go through a type of life where he reinforces and creates evidence to support his parents’ case, that his desires are selfish. And so his provisional self is I'm always going to get this wrong. I'm always doing this thing wrong. And so all of his life kind of reflects back to him of, I'm not going to be able to date, I'm not going to be able to get healthy. Because something in me is underdeveloped and my mom is right, my dad is right at the end of the day. So we all have provisional selves and the part of crisis, the part the, point of crisis, the point of emptiness, the point of dread as adults is to wake us up, to say this way of life, this way of seeing our life, our marriage, it needs to end so that something healthier can begin to emerge. And so sometimes people think it's their marriage. Sometimes people think it's their unwanted sexual behavior. But in many ways that's their provisional self. And so for a lot of us, our provisional self as being good, like, I don't know who I am, I don't know what I want, but I'm going to be an Enneagram 2 and serve the needs of other people and love on other people. And that works until that person betrays you or you become an empty nester. And then it's a sense of what am I doing with my life? And I feel empty, I feel vacant, there's no life force inside of me. And what's being revealed in that is not that you are broken, but your provisional self is being revealed. And we have to kind of take those revelations and get curious about. Yeah, this is actually a gift. It it's painful. It hurts like hell. But it's it's showing us something about how we have once oriented our life and now trying to wake us up to a new way of being in the world.

Sheila
Yeah. I think, you know, there's so much there's so many metaphors in the Gospels about death, right? Like, like how we need to die. How unless unless the seed drops to the ground and dies, nothing can grow. And I mean, a lot of what you're talking about is allowing that that picture that you had of yourself to, to go, to die, right, so that you can find who you were really meant to be and maybe who got snuffed out. And it's a hard thing, though, when you're in the middle of it.

Jay Stringer
Yeah. And to think back to like as a young girl, as a young boy, like what did I want. And was there innocence. Was there play. And the death of something is so that new life can emerge. Like the food that we eat. Something had to die to give us life. And so one of the concepts I'm working with, with regard to just marriage is this distinction between like a capital D divorce and a lowercase d divorce, like certainly a lot of cases and, you know, abuse and infidelity where the marriage does need a capital D legal divorce.
But for a lot of the clients that I work with, they often think about how to get a legal divorce before they've thought about how do I lowercase d, divorce myself from the patterns that are probably going to lead to a divorce? And that's what I think we haven't done a good job with, is to say, like, what are the patterns in our marriage? What are the patterns in our churches? What are the patterns in our teachings that need to die? Like we need to divorce ourselves from this framework, this way of being, this way of thinking about how other people are supposed to serve us in a particular way if we don't divorce ourselves from that, if we don't let those patterns die, I think we're actually setting up the capital D divorce. And, that's the dilemma, is that there are things within ourselves and within our marriages that need to come to an end. They've reached their expiration date. And that becomes part of the invitation of life and adventure is where do we go next? We were enmeshed. We had no sense of ourselves. We used each other for validation. We were deeply hidden and separate and how do we actually create something new here? And that's a lot of work.
Sheila
Yeah, yeah it is. I was gosh, I'm thinking about all the things I want to Keith about now, but anyway. But I want to talk about what you said about enmeshed because I think we hear this word a lot. There's a lot of psychological therapy words that people hear, but I don't know if they know entirely what they mean. But you said that emotional enmeshment affects both boys and girls. But women are 42% more likely than men to report high levels of it. Just. And because it aligns with traditional gender roles. And we found that with a lot of our stuff too, like, yeah, it can it can apply to both men and women. It's just tends to be a female problem overall, but it can apply to both. But what is the enmeshment? This thing that women have more than men.

Jay Stringer
Yes. And I would say men have a lot of it as well. So enmeshment, it can it can look a variety of different ways. So the classic in measurement would be like, I'm okay if you're okay. Right. So if you see that your partner is anxious, it's like, oh, I need to come through for them and maybe I'll get them their favorite snack or, you know, they're stressed out so I need to be good and available to calm them down. So it's the sense that you are reading the, the distress. They might be in the red zone of anxiety. They might be a bit blue. And you're saying I need to go in in some ways rescue them from that. That's kind of the classic case is if you're depressed, I need to kind of make you happy. If you're anxious, I need to soothe you. And if you're angry that I need to give something to you to help you come back down, that's all in enmeshment because the person that's, you know, over indexing and caring for the other person can't manage their own anxiety. Or maybe they've been socialized or conditioned to take care of other people because that's their identity. But codependency can also look like something that you wouldn't expect, which is let's say that you have a partner that is, really angry, selfish, moody, and you have to cover up for them and it's a sense of like, you know, inside of your marriage, you're dying, but in your public life you're protecting them like, oh, so and so, Jo, Susie, they're just they're going through a lot right now in their personal life or work is really stressful for them. So sometimes you can't let your partner's consequences be what they need to be. You just keep covering it up. And again, that's the dilemma of how we are often socialized. Is one of the things that I love about the scriptures is that it holds honor and honesty together. Like Abraham, we know that he was the father of our faith like he. He was a remarkable man of faith. We also know that he attempted to traffic his wife a couple times and you know, had sex with a teenage servant concubine because he was doubting the promises of God. So the Bible actually teaches like, yes, we need to honor people, but honor can never be divorced from honesty. And so some people think, if I was honest about my marriage, if I was honest about my church, I could not truly honor them. Whereas I think we've got that mixed up that we need to be able to be increasingly honest and have honor. I think that's much more biblical. And so codependency is that sense of being able to be honest or the, you know, the change to codependency is is first to be able to say, like, I'm anxious when my partner is anxious, I feel like I need to soothe them.
And where does this provisional self come from? That actually sets me up to be enmeshed. So I've got some work to do to learn what are the patterns? What are the relationships where I learn this model of behavior? And maybe it stems back to you had a dad that would, you know, get home from work and be really sad, and your job was to cheer him up. And then you get into a marriage and that's your job as well. Or maybe you are, you know, someone that you know that your dad is going to be irritable. And so if you are good, if you clean up around the house, if you make good grades, then you know that there's not going to be an eruption around the house. And so that those are some of the early seeds that get developed with regard to codependency and enmeshment.

Sheila 
Right? Yeah. It is fascinating. You know, you think about that little kid who, yeah, they did feel responsible for their mom's emotions because their mom was upset about dad. And so, you know, they became their mom's emotional outlet. And their mom was always telling them, right. And we all know people that have gone through that both I know both men and women who have become that for their mothers and the and that doesn't just go away when you get older, but so often.  

Jay Stringer
Changes clothes and gets transferred.

Sheila
Yeah, but we think it's not going to be like that in our marriage. Right. Like we think, oh, this is so great because now I'll have someone who just loves me, you know? And yet those patterns don't just disappear. Yeah.

Jay Stringer
They don't. And we we often marry people at the same levels of differentiation than us. And that's really uncomfortable to acknowledge that a lot of times we think it's the best in us that attracts us to one another. And I think part of what I've been grappling with is it's actually what's underdeveloped in us that attracts us. So I think of like my marriage to Heather, like my provisional self, as I mentioned earlier, was to have a sixth sense for the needs and difficulties of what women were going through. Like that's how my relationship with my mom played out. That's where I was like a good therapist from an early age. And part of, you know, early dating with Heather was a sense of like, having a sixth sense for some of the difficulty that she was in and then presenting myself as the rescuer or someone that would see her really well. And then for her, it became that sense of outsourcing the need for a, you know, a man, a guy in her life to kind of give her some direction. Heather is also an artist, like, full of life. And so part of what I began to kind of see in her was this artist of like, you know, that's what attracted me to her was she was this artist that she was she knew who she was. But then in the context of dating, marriage, all of our provisional identities got exposed where she started having life outside of me. And I just felt so angry. I felt so upset that all of this life force that I had earned through being a good, attentive boyfriend was supposed to be for me. And, you know, that was part of what bound us to, a to to each other in those early days was, you know, we were both playing out a story that we weren't entirely familiar with and so that's part of the gift of marriage is that it exposes some of these core patterns, style of relating to one another that we need to grow through and develop.
Rebecca
So, yeah, I think what you're saying is really a hard truth. And I know Rebecca, Rebecca's talked about it more on the podcast. I've been scared. I've shied away from it because often Becca like, no, we have to talk about this. But that idea that if your marriage is really bad, we often think it's entirely the spouse, but often you can't grow until you realize that there was a broken part of me that attracted him and and that was attracted to the broken part of them, you know, like, yeah. Like we do often marry people on the same level of emotional health or maturity or whatever you want to call it. Which doesn't mean that we have the same issues. You know, somebody is controlling and your people pleasing. Those obviously aren't on the same moral plane.

Jay Stringer
But yeah, yeah. So let me give an example of like, let's say a guy is struggling with infidelity or porn and that sense of like when I do a lot of couples intensive work, you know, I'm working with betrayal trauma and triage of that situation. But, you know, after that we have to get into some level of what's the meaning that they have made out of the affair. And part of what they will tell me is that they had some sense of intuition that something was off. And they whether they had been gaslit or they suppressed what they knew, they went essentially mind blind to what was happening. And so their partner had this secretive aspect of themselves that they had some intuition of. But then they suppressed what they knew. And so again, it plays out very differently. The destruction is very different. The consequences of that is very different in terms of what that man is introducing. But that becomes part of the work is what type of family, what type of church system did you come in that the intuition that something about this is off was suppressed and ignored, and that becomes the movement of growth is I'm not, you know, blaming the other person. I have work to do too. But I also have to look at how my marriage was not a blank slate. It was actually a continuation of a narrative and a way of life where I was trained, groomed to be able to ignore what my body was telling me, what I felt, was true of a relationship. And so it doesn't, you know… Marriage, part of what I say in the book is that, you know, your marriage is doing exactly what it's designed to do when it gets hard, that a lot of times people think like there's something broken in the marriage, but I'm like, no, marriage is this crucible from time to time. This stage that shows like, this is where what needs to grow. This is what healthy looks like. And a lot of us know that, like, we're in a marriage that's tepid, or we're in a marriage that's full of contempt and we know that's not what I should be experiencing. And that's the wake up call that, you know, marriage is trying to do is like, it's trying to alert you to, what you've settled for, what your partner is settled for, or the orbit that you currently have around your partner is is not sustainable for another year, another decade. And so let the problems let the difficulties wake you up. And I think that's the process of integrity is something's not working. And then is your partner willing to kind of be curious and address the patterns in their life that they're not at this point willing to, to learn from?

Sheila
Yeah. And of course, some people just don't. Right. Some people just do not address things. And it's not like if one of you wakes up, the other person automatically is going to. So we're not trying to say that. And you don't say that in the book, but but you give such a good example. You give multiple examples in the book of, people who are in these really difficult marriages, and they do do the work of looking at their wounds and growing and wholeness and learning to pay attention to their bodies and all of those. And and it still might lead to a big D divorce. But they're such different people now. They're walking forward in wholeness and integrity and all of those things. And that's a really good thing to do. Whereas if you just did the small D divorce without doing that work. Yeah, that can that that doesn't necessarily lead to a to a more fulfilling life. Obviously it may not lead to more fullfilling life but sometimes you still need to get out. Yeah. I'm not saying you shouldn't get out but it's just I don't just what you say. If we want you whole, we want you flourishing. We want you to be who you were meant to be. You know?

Jay Stringer
Yeah. It's so sad that that's the way that we've had to frame it for a long time as, like, to be safe. But it's like, yeah, the this is about flourishing. This is about enjoying who you are, enjoying the relationships that are part of your life.

Sheila
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I do want to get to the libido part. Yeah. But I found there's this one quote in your section on wholeness that I reread several times, and I just I want to talk about it. You said this for those who need to hear it, a desire for mastery can be a trauma response. Rather than cultivating systems to sidestep painful beliefs, we should focus on developing systems that allow us to grieve and befriend our inner pain. When we seek wholeness, we realize that the opposite of shame isn't mastery or shamelessness, but vulnerability.

Jay Stringer
Yeah, yeah. I mean the where I go with that initially is, you know, I think of like the, the modern midlife crisis is like health optimization. So I think of like, you know, I have a around my wrists now to kind of keep tracking sleep and kind of how my stress levels are doing.

Sheila
Yes. Did that, yeah.

Jay Stringer
Yes. Yeah. There are protocols that we're supposed to follow for sunlight. And, you know, exposure and like, just like all these things that are like really optimization has become like the new Corvette of the midlife crisis. Like, let's not, you know, waste a lot of money, but let's get our health in order, and I'm all for it. There's so much wisdom within that. But part of what I had to grapple with is that there's a lot of people that go to optimization or develop mastery over their body, over their career, and it's it's a trauma response. So a couple examples would be like, I was working with a woman who she came into a session just kind of gloriously sweaty.
And, I was like, you know, how is your workout? And she's like, great. I crushed it. As a therapist, I'm paid to be hyper vigilant about people's responses. So I knew what crush meant. But she essentially said that she had run about eight miles in an hour. And I. And she said, you know, and I essentially said, like, what happens if you only get to five miles? And she's like, oh, I would just feel it more in my body. There would be more lethargy. There would be more, just, kind of a slog inside of her. And so part of what we began to kind of work through is that it was actually far more the issue of shame that if she didn't work out during a week where she felt a lot of shame was, around her thighs and her parents, you know, long story short, there had been some version that was passed down that, like, women in her family had really thick thighs.
 And so she really needed to workout quite a bit. And so for her, this crushing of a workout was actually a trauma response. Instead of dealing with all the debris of, you know, the ideal bodies and dysmorphia, she got to sidestep that through just developing mastery over her body. And so for a lot of us, the the desires that we have for money, the desires that we have for a better body, the desires that we have for virtually anything in life can often be an attempt to sidestep some of the vulnerability that we really need to be able to go through. So, you know, what are the stories of our own poverty? Not so much financial poverty, but of poverty, of love. What are the places where our body has been shamed that we haven't had kindness find us? And so if we're not vulnerable, if we're not addressing the shame, the difficulty, the messages that shame is telling us about us, very likely we're trying to develop some level of be there mastery of life or disassociation from life. And that's what I find a lot in clinical practice, is you get some people that get into screens and Netflix and porn and substances and eating, and then you have another group of people that are just developing mastery over every realm of their life. And both dissociation and mastery are trauma responses.

Sheila
Yeah, I think that's fascinating, because often the people that we look at that we so admire because they're so disciplined and yeah, we're like, oh, I wish I could be like that. Yeah. They're often running from things to and that that's actually 

Jay Stringer
It's their heroine. Yeah. Like this is what gives them comfort.

Sheila
And that's actually part of what you were saying and unwanted as well about why, a lot of the modern porn like porn recovery programs don't work is because they're just promoting mastery. Like, you just need more discipline. You just need more disciplines, like, no, we need more vulnerability. We need to get to the to the root of why you're drawn to this particular thing of what what role is this playing in your life? And yeah, yeah.

Jay Stringer
Precisely.

Sheila– AD
What does it mean to actually know your spouse?


Keith– AD
All right, babe, you got to take one of these. How is that fair? This is going to be the first of an eight part series. So the studies that we've done have been looking at what people believe and what people put into practice and what the outcome is for those marriages.
Sheila– AD
So we decided to go big or go home. And we've done four massive surveys. 78.9% of couples make decisions totally together and do not give the husband the time break vote
Keith– AD
Every valley shall be raised up. Every mountain and hill may blow.
Sheila– AD
Need to be putting your all in. Because a lot of us are afraid to speak up.
Keith– AD
Just let your spouse hear that and know that you can let each other into your emotional worlds.
Sheila– AD
The point is prioritizing the ingredients of great sex.
Keith– AD
Noticing what you're supposed likes, what your spouse needs. And that's what keeps that romance, that spark alive in your relationship. We hope you enjoy doing them together as a study group, and we just wish you all the best as you create The Marriage You Want.

Sheila
Okay. Let's go where everyone wants us to go now, I think 

Jay Stringer
I have no idea where you're going with this, so.

Sheila
Oh, no, this is great.

Jay Stringer
I might have to reverse the tables and say she'll help me with this one.

Sheila
No, I just I really appreciated your sections on low sexual desire, because basically what you were saying is, yeah, your body's really smart, like your body's. We're treating we're treating low desire is the problem. And I have this one great quote from you, something that you said to one of your clients. You said you've pathologized your supposed low desire, but how could you have a high desire for what you just described? I don't know, anybody would want that kind of sex. 
Yeah. 

Jay Stringer
Yes. Yeah, yeah. I, a wise sage once said that, you know, low desire it is not a problem. It's a symptom. Right. And so that's something that I have learned a lot from you through the years, like whether it comes to divorce, whether it comes to low desire, like your framing of when we critique the divorce without addressing the causes that lead to a divorce, when we critique low desire without critiquing the causes of low desire, that's where the real problems start adding up. And so, you know, there's great. This is where philosophy is really helpful, even though it's boring. But the way that we frame a problem can be part of the problem. And, that's what I think is happening a lot in the world is what we have framed as a problem is actually not the real problem. We need to go deeper into this problem. So yeah, the the example that you just read in that book was a woman who, when she described sex and her marriage, it was like it was hard to listen to. It was a sense of like, there's no mutuality. Your pleasure is not centered at all. This is like very much like you are living in an orbit around his arousal.And there is just like, I can't imagine having any level of desire. So part of our work was to go back to previous relationships and other experiences in her life where her body actually felt alive. And so that led to, you know, just an early dating relationship where she had a level of sexual desire. But also what preceded that sexual desire with this past boyfriend was a hike where they were out, you know, on trails. She was experiencing the dignity and goodness of her body. And I think that's part of what we have to come back to is sex is not just about what we're doing with our genitals. Sex is about, the fullness of our body. Like where we feel pleasure, where we feel power, where we feel sensitivity and sensuality. And to really go back to understanding that all of that is an expression of our sexuality. So sometimes we try and get, you know, some level of intercourse or genitals going without kind of saying, like, do I like my body? Do I feel integrated in my body? Am I getting the sleep that I need? Am I getting the rest that I need? Do I enjoy who I am? Because that's all the self that we bring into our sexual experiences. So, yeah, the, the, the difficulties of our life, especially low desire, is speaking to us. So one last thing and then I'll, I'll, I'll stop. But this is taken from this guy by the name of Lacan. And Lacan was a French psychoanalyst. And one of the things that he would say is that every symptom is a holy man.
So in French, the word symptom is like a word play with the French saint Tome. And I might be butchering that a little bit, but for for Lacan, every symptom is a saint Tome. Meaning every symptom of someone's life is the holy man that's trying to get the patient's attention. The problem is, we don't like symptoms. We try and get gin and tonics, ibuprofen. We try and suppress them, tune them out. But the holy man, the symptoms are speaking to us. But I don't think that we are trained to listen very well to their revelations. So when it comes to your low libido, part of what you need to kind of begin to think about are what is the symptom trying to say? Is this trying to say that there's something about sex in my marriage that's all about a laundry list of his needs and his desires, and therefore I've been deprioritized? Is this something that is highlighting that I've never known how to orgasm? I've never known how to prioritize my own pleasure and understand how my body works. And so I never received sex education.
And I've always been trained to not want. And now this is leading to a sexual pain disorder. And that symptom is trying to highlight the reality that I've been conditioned, primed to not have desire. And then the whiplash of now I'm supposed to have a lot of desire. So the symptoms of our life are speaking. They're trying to let us know about where we come from, and they're also trying to tell us what is wrong in ourselves or in our relationship. That could be part of the Gospels deep work to transform our past, to be able to transform our marriages. And so the dilemma is we don't like symptoms very much. But we we need to listen to our symptoms.
Sheila 
You know, one of the most interesting stats, that that we found, we actually saw first in the survey that we did of men for a book, The Good Guys Guide to Great Sex. But we asked and both our survey to women and our survey to men, we said, like so we asked women, does your husband prioritize your sexual pleasure?And we asked women, does he do enough foreplay? And then we asked men the same thing. Do you prioritize your wife's sexual pleasure? Do you do enough foreplay? And what we found was that when women frequently reach orgasm, over 90% of both men and women say, yes, he does. But when when she doesn't reach orgasm, 71% of men still say they do enough foreplay and still say they prioritize their wife's pleasure.
But so do 52% of women. And that's what I that's what I find so fascinating. And I've written about this before. But you know we think we think about the patterns that you start in your marriage and, and the story that we end up telling ourselves about sex. Like in our most recent survey for The Marriage You Want, we asked we asked people about their honeymoon experience if they waited for sex, for marriage, which obviously not everybody does. But in the evangelical community, there's still a large minority that do. And if you waited for marriage, for sex, the chance that, that the couple brought him to orgasm before the first time you tried intercourse was like twice as much as that they brought her to orgasm. And then the, the the chance of of them having an orgasm on the first sexual encounter that involved intercourse was like 84% for him, or 87% or something, and only 15% for her. So you're starting marriage where we're prioritizing his orgasm, even though hers is tends to be more elusive. Right? And you just think of a couple going through that for a couple of years and being really confused and not even knowing like that, this, that this isn't the way it's supposed to work. And you assume that, well, he's the sexual one and she's just broken because what we're doing isn't working for her.
And, you know, it's just a really sad story because so many women do think, no, I'm just broken. I'm just broken.  

Jay Stringer 
Yeah. And then the story that you begin to make up about that, like if you're a man, it's a sense of like, am I not desired? Which then reinforces you better desire me desire me, but I'm powerless to do anything. And then that sense of for women, I'm broken and then I'm not even supposed to really want this. And it's supposed to be his need, his pleasure. And I need to kind of protect him from himself. It's just like, I mean, it's such a set up for misery and low libido and entitlement and under functioning, it's I mean, it's like as you talk, I just it's hard to be in my body as you talk about the statistics of both the sense of men thinking they're doing a lot when we're not as like, just painful as a man because I'm like, I've been there, done that. Yeah, I think I'm contributing. So much around the house and to pleasure and to goodness. But it's like, yeah, just because I'm showing up in one area, yeah, there's a lot of room to grow. So I mean, it's a painful revelation that you're bringing, but it's also important for, for me to integrate.

Sheila 
I, you know, I was talking to a group of therapists and, oh, gosh, I want to forget the city. I think it was Chattanooga. Maybe it was somewhere in that area of the United States. And they were saying, like, the most common thing that they get is women coming in with low desire. Or with sexual pain disorders, but just some sort of sexual disorder. And then as they unpack it, it invariably is not about low libido. It invariably opens up. But all of these other things that we're talking about. And so if you can get curious about the and treat it like a symptom, as you said, you know, that really is is where the healing comes.

Jay Stringer
And that's the framework that I'm inviting people into is like, how how is sex revealing something about where you come from? How is it revealing something about your relationship and then it provokes you to change? And I think sex and marriage can actually become healing. But healing also hurts, like learning requires unlearning. And the dilemma for most of us is we don't like things being revealed about ourselves. We don't like being provoked to address certain things. And for that, I think we miss out on a lot of the healing of what sex could offer to us. But we've got to take those revelations seriously.

Sheila
I know, and I won't. I won't mention what book because I don't want to. I don't want to put you on the spot of like, critiquing another author necessarily. But there is a book that that we've looked at, and, in it, the author was talking about how great it is when women give, um, handjobs postpartum, you know, or when they're having their period because they can't have intercourse. And he was explaining why a husband likes these things, and he was saying, you know, he just he loves to hear you moan. He loves, the wetness between your thighs. He loves, like he was just describing all these signs of women's arousal. And I just found that so strange because she's postpartum, like there is the only wetness between her thighs is blood. Like she's still wearing a diaper. Like a, you know, a pad the size of a diaper at this point, right? 

Jay Stringer
Yes

Sheila
But it's what it read like to me was that he had to convince himself, like he he at heart knew that what he wanted was selfish, right? Like, he like, like to want your wife to give you a hand job when she's having a heavy period or when she's right postpartum is is inherently a selfish thing. Now, if she if she wants to do it, that's great. And a large minority of women do enjoy doing that and do find it, but they're not the kind of women who need to be talked into it in a book like this. You know what I mean? Like, this is like a woman who wants to do it does not have to be convinced to do it by a book. So this this passage in this book is directed at women who don't want to do it, but he's describing how much it turns women on to do this. And I'm just picturing this man who had in his heart must realize that he's selfish, but can't deal with the fact that he's selfish. And so he convinces himself that she actually wants to. And and one of the things that I've heard a lot from women is like, I have to pretend that I'm having a good time, whether it's faking orgasm or moaning when you're doing other things or whatever. Or else he gets really upset. But that is so far from honesty or honoring anyone, isn't it? 

Jay Stringer 
It is.

Sheila
Like, that's such a bad pattern.

Jay Stringer
Yeah. And I know from like, I mean, this is a pretty familiar story for me in the counseling office where, you know, that. I'll frame it as a vulnerable time for men that when they talk about this, they might talk about, like, I, I realized that, like, I built this marriage, I built this level of intimacy. And now I'm watching my wife devote time, energy to go towards this baby. And then there's this sense of like, it's creating something of an attachment severing this thing that they used to expect to rely on. And again, they don't know how to be with themselves as the attachment shifts that as needs begin to expand and as, they begin to feel some level of like betrayal, even though cognitively they're like, I don't want to frame this as a betrayal, but something in their body feels betrayed or doesn't feel seen or doesn't feel prioritized because the baby's now getting the the gaze, the the baby is now getting the energy and the life. And they don't know how to deal with their own envy. They don't know how to deal with their own sense of like, now I actually have to be alone or I'm not going to be prioritized. So I would say that this is a crucible to develop a sense of self, to be able to develop a sense of how do I find calm in my body? How do I recognize that this is actually trying to grow me into not just someone who is a romantic lover, but also a father? And what does it mean to kind of allow, and to move towards what my wife needs and what my baby needs and to grow a deeper sense of self than someone that just needs to be tended to. And their needs, their anxieties, their pleasures need to be prioritized. This is all part of the growth curve. And so sometimes what I experience from men and couples that I've worked with is that I'll have some men, we'll we'll just say, well, I was struggling with porn after the birth. So therefore the handjob became the place that I didn't struggle with porn where again, back to the same issues before, as you know, just the sense of it's not truly about a desire that this woman has it's a sense of like, I need to protect him from himself. And that guy bringing some sense of, I've been deprioritized, I have been overlooked. Therefore this becomes the litmus test of if you still love me, if you still care about me. And again, it's just madness for everybody.

Sheila
Yeah. And I and again, it just brings us full circle to, you know, what does it mean to honor someone? And we have to have some honesty, right? Like we have to commit to. Yeah. Being vulnerable and being honest and covering up all of those things and making it seem like everything's okay when it really isn't, is not going to grow your marriage or end up with anyone flourishing. And I, I guess that's what makes me so heartbroken. I think in this whole industry that that we're both in is when you look at so much of the marriage advice, that's really what it's doing, is it's telling people to lie, like to not be honest with themselves or to gaslight themselves into being like pretending things are okay when they're not, you know.

Jay Stringer
All the time. Yeah. And I think that's like where it part of the, the big emphasis that I'm seeing is super important is like this category of differentiation. And so, you know, this sometimes when I think about a good marriage, I think about it like a symphony. And you know, if you go into any symphony in any major city, you want your violinist to be the best violinist in the city. You want your percussion team to be so good at what they do. But the magic of a symphony is not just that you have a good pianist or violinist that somehow they're able to come together to make amazing music. And part of what I think evangelical marriage advice is, is we want to create really beautiful music. We want to be unified. We want to be of one song, but we're not teaching people how to practice, how to develop their instrument, how to enjoy the music that they will bring into their marriage, into their communities. And so a lot of times we arrive completely underdeveloped. And so I think the invitation to a lot of us is, how can I begin to differentiate?
How can I develop a sense of self that I can actually bring to my marriage? So when you think about those early days of attraction to someone, separation was part of the oxygen of arousal. It was like, I don't know when I'm going to see this person. I might see them tomorrow, they might have a work commitment, they might have a family commitment. So I'm not going to be able to see them. But I'm wondering what they're doing and are they going to call me? So there was some level of separation individuation that actually allowed for desire to build. And sometimes a lot of marriage advice is all about coming together, all about unity and not enough about like, who are you? That's actually separate from your spouse. So I remember working with one couple where, you know, they had kind of asked me like what I was going to do for Labor Day weekend when I was in Seattle, and I said I was going to go into the mountains with some of my friends in this place called The Enchantments. And they both looked at me like, wow, that would be so nice to be able to prioritize something that you want to do. And they got into a marriage fight, essentially, because they both wanted to do separate things with their life. But there was the sense that if they separated from one another, they weren't choosing intimacy rather than saying like, no, instead of maybe a family vacation this year, maybe we each need 3 or 4  days to go on our own private retreat to like come back into our bodies to stoke something that has gone dormant and to wake back up so you might miss your partner for 3 or 4 days, but when they come back, there's actually going to be a more fullness of self because they've been living a story, developing a story, and so sometimes the problem with some marriages and the tepid ness that you feel is there's not enough separation. And so just the invitation to say, who are you that's separate from your marriage is just a really important question for intimacy.

Sheila
And I think that really hits when you're in your 40s and 50s too, you know, when we're all trying to figure out who we are because the kids have grown and you've got to rewrite your life, I know. Yeah, that is that is a big question, but it's an important one if we want to keep feeling alive. Right?

Jay Stringer
And yeah, because I mean, that's something I hear from you and Keith, like, Keith is this doctor and pediatrician and your researcher and like you all have different interests. And yet there's a way of coming together, but then going back into your own careers and professions and that's that's a microcosm of what goodness and energy looks like, is like we're not just always on the same page. We we see things differently, we engage things differently, and there's respect for one another, but there's also an ability to push back and say, this is what I see from my perspective, but it's it's the differentiation that allows for the union to come. And that's what we see in the Trinity is father, son, spirit, you know, three different beings that all dance together.
They don't invalidate each other. They don't say like, you know, I'm better than you. Like there's usually some level of humility there, but there's a level of appreciation and delight. The the divine dance between us because they're three separate beings.

Sheila
You know, I love that. Well, the book again is Desire by Jay Stringer. You can tell the subtitle one more time 

Jay Stringer 
The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We love, heal, and Grow.

Sheila
Love it. It's very based on data. So it's it's it's totally up our up our alley. And I just think it's really helpful to get people to get a glimpse of what. Yeah. What growth and wholeness is and what it means to just validate those parts of you that that have have felt like you really want to go in a certain direction, but it's always been pushed out of you. It's like, well, why is that there? Why is that desire there? Let's explore it. And I love that's something that you keep saying in all of your books is, yeah, let's explore that. Let's figure out what that map is trying to tell us. And I think that's so helpful. So thank you.

Jay Stringer
Yeah. And thank you for your work as well, Sheila. Like, I mean, I do my own research, but there is some post that you made. I don't know, in the last couple of years that I think you had reference like how many peer reviewed studies were in your book, or maybe some of the leading books that were out there and there were so few in these leading books that are out there with regard to peer reviewed research. So I took that seriously. Like, I think there's 200-300 peer reviewed references in addition to the research that I did and that, I mean, it felt important to kind of honor like both: what am I seeing from a clinical perspective? What have I seen from my own data? But then does this how am I vetting what I'm seeing and building against all of that? And so, yeah, thank you for your encouragement and your work in that area as well.

Sheila
Yeah, I love that. Well, thank you, Jay. So I'm going to put a link to the book and you are you're on Instagram, I will put a link to that. You have a weird moniker on Instagram and then you're on Instagram because someone else already had Jay Stringer. So you're like underscore Jay Stringer or something.
Jay Stringer
Yeah. So website is G Dash Stringer A.com. And that's the hub for intensives and trainings and books. But then J underscore Stringer underscore is Instagram because there's another Jay Stringer who is a British crime fiction novelist that beat me to every social handle. And website.

Sheila
So so we will put links to all of that. Well thank you so much.

Jay Stringer
Appreciate. You are such a delight to be with you. Thank you for the work you are doing in the world as well.

Sheila
Yes. That definitely. All right. Take care. 

Jay Stringer 
Bye bye bye bye.

Sheila
Okay. I was really thrilled when he said that after we talked about peer reviewed resources and how so many vaccines. None. Yeah, he made sure there were so many resources.

Rebecca
I know I will say one of the things, I mean, like we all have, there's everyone has like things that are good about whatever, all that stuff, obviously. But Jay is so good at, like just changing course. He's like, when we talk about being evidence based, a lot of it is also just doing what, you know, works. And I love that he heard us saying that. He's like, I'm gonna get the most peer reviewed research. I'm gonna get so much peer reviewed research that is so perfect. And I just respect that so much because, I mean, I try to act the same way, but it's just lovely, lovely seeing people so willing to change. And yeah, no, no, they need to change. That's not the right word. It's not that he needed to change.

Sheila 
But to grow and and always raise the bar.

Rebecca
Yes. Right. Thank you. Raise the bar.

Sheila
Raising the bar. Yes. Do to So do check out Jay's book. Desire. Please. The podcast notes, of course. And also, if you enjoyed Jay on our docu series and if you want to see more, that docu series, you can join our Patreon group. We've been doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes and extra, episodes.

That or just extra information that we didn't put out.

Rebecca
There, including, the entire interview that we did with Jay Stringer is going to be going up. I think, at the point that this is going live, a couple weeks ago. He had the best interview and I wanted to use. He did so much great stuff about how to actually get emotionally healthy. And I tried so hard to find a place to fit it, and it just didn't fit. And I was so gutted. And we're going to put a lot of like the actual full interviews up for our patrons. And I told them that when we did the interviews that we will be doing that. So if you if you want to sign up for a patron, if you haven't already, it's likely already uploaded at the point that this is, going live because I have no ability to remember what date where we're filming for at any point. But there are there are the full interviews, including some really great content from Jay about what it actually means to become emotionally healthy, how to differentiate in relationships in a healthy way. He's got great stuff.

Sheila
Yeah, yeah. So check that out. And of course, if you want to help us, remember to like and subscribe wherever you listen. Especially if you're watching on YouTube, make sure that you like and subscribe to this video and or to this channel. And also leave a comment because that helps the algorithm think, oh, this is something cool, I want to show it to other people. So, that helps us a ton. And next week we'll be talking about what happens when women don't have desire.

Rebecca
Yes.

Sheila
So, Rebecca, they're going to go through a whole bunch of different studies and hopefully try to find the thread that connects them all.

Rebecca
Only you will you'll be able to see next week if we successfully do it.

Sheila
Yeah. So join us again next week on the favorite podcast. Thanks for always being here. Bye bye 

Rebecca
Bye