Episode 372 - Drew Boa, "Outgrow Porn: Lasting Freedom from Sexual Compulsion"

Welcome to another episode of Restoring the Soul. Today, Michael John Cusick is joined by author, speaker, and men's group leader Drew Boa to discuss Drew’s groundbreaking new book, Outgrow Porn: Find Lasting Freedom Without Fighting an Exhausting Battle.

This conversation dives deep into breaking free from pornography—not through more willpower or "white-knuckling," but by truly healing and growing emotionally, relationally, and spiritually. Drew shares how his approach helps men connect with their inner child, understand their sexual fantasies, and use practical tools (14 of them, to be exact) to experience genuine freedom. They also discuss the impact of betrayal and sexual addiction on wives and partners, highlighting the importance of support and compassion for everyone affected.

Together, Michael and Drew challenge the traditional “battle” rhetoric around pornography recovery and invite listeners into a paradigm-shifting journey—one where lasting change is possible and shame doesn't get the final word.

Transcript

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Hello, friends. Welcome to the Restoring the Soul podcast. I'm delighted to be here for another episode. I'm Michael Cusick, and today I am with a man that's become a friend, Drew boa. Welcome to the program. Thanks, Michael. Drew, you are the author of a new book, Outgrow Finding Lasting Freedom Without Fighting an Exhausting Battle. And there's the book. And I'm showing the book because the pacifier on the COVID is quite provocative. A pacifier is basically an artificial nipple which has both developmental attachment and sexual overtones. And it's also something that a human being is meant to grow out of. Right. It's not something that we continue to use. Otherwise it'll cause dental problems and other kinds of developmental delays. Let me start by saying this, Drew. We met about a year ago, a little less than that, when you came to my delight to be a guest group leader and observer at our Restoring the Soul men's intensive weekend. It was great to get to know you there. One of my favorite things is to have people come to the men's weekend and to just see it and to witness it, especially people that are doing work in the kind of work that you're doing. You gave me the honor of writing one of several endorsements for your book and I was humbled because you took all of the, you know, kind of the hall of fame of authors writing about sexual brokenness and overcoming porn. Jay Stringer, Sam JOELMAN, Andrew Bauman, Dr. Eddie Carpucci. And then you had Jenna Ramirzma, who is an IFS expert with her book Altogether your and Dr. Barbara Steffens. And I was so glad that you included her to represent that voice for women about betrayal trauma. But I want to start at what will sound self indulgent. Reading my endorsement because I really want to set this up. I really want to set this up as your book, in my opinion, is the present go to book for men that want lasting freedom, that really want to get delivered and set free. Surfing for God, which I wrote 13 years ago. My goal was to tell my story and to provide kind of a high level overview of how to think differently. Differently about this. And I've been longing for a book. Jay Stringer did this with unwanted. But I think you hit the bullseye where there is just a practical, concise, accessible way for men to say this is possible and not through white knuckling. So here's my endorsement. Outgrow Porn is a paradigm shifting resource that leads men from battling against the beast of porn to the pursuit of Growing up into wholeness of heart. I don't know of any other book on the subject which so practically covers all the bases of getting free and living an integrated life. Outgrow porn will absolutely change the life of any man who reads and applies even half of what's written. So, Drew, I've already welcomed you to the program, but what's it been like since you released the book to see the response from men? Because I'm hearing a lot on the street about men saying, oh, my, this is different. I'm so honored by the guys who are taking the time to take the redemptive risk to read another book about this, especially if they've been at this for years. I love the stories of breakthrough, especially for men. Being able to connect with their inner child, being able to understand their sexual fantasies, and ultimately be able to use some of the tools. There are 14 tools in the book. So if you're feeling like, man, I understand my brokenness. Now what? There's a menu of options to choose from about how to actually heal. Yeah. And I think it's Appendix four that you call your toolbox. And let me just tell any man to go right to Appendix 4 before you even start the book, because you're going to go, oh, my. If these are the things that I can do that have nothing to do with flexing my moral muscle to try to overcome this, but a way of actually becoming somebody by following these steps, becoming the kind of person that no longer needs to look at pornography and be ruled by lust. Then after you look at those toolbox, the toolbox in Appendix 4, then go back to the beginning and start, hey, I'm wondering if we can do something a little unorthodox in Appendix 2 or 3, I forget which one. You wrote a beautiful letter to wives and partners of sex addicts, porn addicts, and as you say throughout the book, men that have an attachment to porn. And I loved that, because the healthy side of attachment is. I'm finding security in this healthy attachment. And porn is an unhealthy attachment. And if we go back to probably the 6th century, the desert fathers and mothers, they spoke of our attachments. And as the people, the behaviors, and the ways that our heart would move toward things other than God and his life giving gifts. And then we'd become bound by them. So I really appreciated that word attachment. But here's my ask. Would you comment to the women that are listening? And by the way, your book is explicitly written for men. Women will definitely benefit from it, possibly even if they have a sexual compulsion themselves. But speak to the women right at the outset, because I don't want to just put that on the end as, like, a parenthesis at the end. Speak to the women that are listening because their husband, partner, ex husband has an addiction and they've been wounded by that. Yeah. It'S not your fault, period. There is nothing you did or did not do to provoke your husband to betray you. And unfortunately, in the past, there have been voices saying, well, if only you gave him more sex or if only you were more emotionally supportive. If only, if only. And all of that is shaming. All of that is just re. Traumatizing. And so it's not your fault. And also, you deserve just as much support for what you're going through. Oftentimes the person who is wanting to outgrow porn gets the community the resources, the professional help while his partner is left in the dust. And maybe she doesn't even realize that healing is for her too. Yes. And the impact of that, because you said in the book, and my wife Julianne has said this so many times, that women describe this betrayal as being hit by a bus and that they're in ICU in a body cast or something that dramatic. And there's often not the kind of validation that that's actually the case. So your words, spoken from the heart and very simply, I know, will mean a lot and bring healing to women. And I just want to say that if you don't have a therapist that can help you with the issues of betrayal, trauma, and navigating that, where that you become central, where that you're not somehow manipulated to give your husband more sex or to look more like a porn star, because I'm unfortunately still hearing that a lot. There's a lot of pastoral counselor, counsel, and pastors and others that are giving that advice. And I just want to reiterate, as you said, there's no if only. This is a betrayal, and this is a wound. And I think it's important to start there before we jump in to talk about the men. So thank you. You're welcome. If you've been hit by a bus of betrayal trauma, it's not your job to take care of the bus driver. Yeah. Wow. And yet isn't that what happens so often? Drew, why the title outgrow porn? You know, as opposed to win the battle against porn? It all starts with a recognition that primarily men and women don't get hooked on porn. Boys and girls get hooked on porn. This starts so early. We were just kids and yet when I ask my clients and community members, how much of your struggle with porn do you feel like is your fault? They will almost always say, it's all my fault. I chose it. I wanted it. But the truth is, before you chose porn, before you searched for porn, porn searched for you. A $100 billion industry has exploited kids, teenagers, in really critical, sensitive stages of sexual development. And so to outgrow it is a way of recognizing that many of us have been sexually exploited by porn at a young age. Yes. Yes. Thank you for saying that. I'm currently working on a book project for men that have been sexually abused. And one of the categories that I'm going to speak about, which is controversial, is that pornography is a form of sexual abuse for children. Right, yes. That so many men will say, well, I was never molested. I was never sexually assaulted or abused. And then I say, well, what was it when you were nine years old and you discovered violent pornography or images of people having sex and you had no idea what to do with that, and what did that do to your nervous system? And what did you do with the shame? And what did you learn about having to carry that in isolation? And if in any living room in America, parents were to walk into the living room and there were three people having sex together in the middle of that living room, they would call the police and those people would be imprisoned for sexual assault. But the very same thing is happening in living rooms where nine year olds are on their iPad or their smartphone and they're seeing those same kind of images and we're like, oh, that happens. That's the world we live in. And I'll get a filter and try to prevent that from happening. But it is an assault on the soul. It's an assault upon, as you indicated already, the emotional, relational, physiological development of that boy or of that little girl in so many cases, increasingly. So it really is a form of abuse. And you used an even stronger word, exploitation. Right. For profit. Because even if you're not paying for the porn, the advertisers and the industry is still making money. Yeah. So, you know, some of us have asked, okay, how much money have I paid for sexual content? Well, how much money have they made on me? I mean, it's a business. So we have to recognize that porn is a pacifier in the hand of a predator. I love that. A pacifier in the hand of a predator. Not unlike how tobacco companies, now that we know all the dangers about tobacco, have shifted into vaping and how it's perfect Perfectly legal. Although states are pushing back on having vapes for teenagers with cherry grape and, you know, coca cola flavored things so that it's actually seductive and desirable by teens. Now, I might sound for a moment like the moral police, and I'm generally. I try to avoid that road. Right. This is not about how bad something is. This is about the impact and the wounding and as you said, the exploitation. Before we jump into the content, I really want to take a moment and dig a little bit deeper and let's kind of go back and forth with our mutual thinking about this. There's something so paradigm shifting about the title of your book, Outgrow Porn. I want people to realize at the beginning because I hope that every person who downloads this buys a copy of your book. And I hope that your book becomes a New York Times bestseller, because this is the cure for the cancer. This is the cure for cancer. And listeners, I'm not being hyperbolic. I'm not trying to flatter this man that lives down I25 in Colorado Springs. From me, I believe this book is the cure for the cancer of pornography addiction. It really, really is. So this paradigm shift is that this is not something that you work your way out of. This is not something where you flex your muscles and try to get more strength and pray for Jesus to strengthen you. And there's a place for saying, help me to resist temptation. We pray that in the Lord's Prayer. But it's not about that. One more heave ho try. This is about something completely different. Yes. Yes. This is about sexual and emotional development that we didn't get or that got hijacked. And when you think about how much healthy, safe, supportive sexual education and guidance many of us received, it is little to none. And then in terms of emotional maturity, learning how to develop emotional intelligence, we didn't get that either when we were growing up. And so for many of us, how did we learn to deal with emotions? What was our sex ed porn? So I view this as stunted development. And I see that so strongly in my life with the sexual fetish that I developed. And that was always the focus of my porn searches. If I can be a little bit vulnerable, it was always about girls and women with braces. And that relates directly to what I experienced in middle school. So it was developmental for me. I always thought, what is this? It's so weird. Like, God, would you just take this away? I'm fascinated by it. I'm also disgusted by it. It's arousing, but it's not really what I want. And it was this interrupted stage of development that I've been able to thankfully like get more maturity in the places where I needed it. You were able to outgrow it because of the emotional, relational, spiritual health that made up for the wound where you miss something along the lines. Yeah, and not that I've completely outgrown those attractions, but as you have a great story at the end of Surfing for God from a guy named Joe saying, I simply don't need it anymore. Yes, that's lasting freedom. Yeah. There's a verse in Proverbs

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7, and it says that the one who is full loathes honey. But to the one who is hungry, what is bitter tastes sweet. And there's that sense where as we become emotionally healthy, relationally healthy, spiritually grounded, where we are held and be held by God, we no longer need to go to what is bitter that tastes sweet because there's actually a fullness inside. And the biblical word for that is shalom or wholeness. Right? Yeah. Or sacred attachment, you might say. Oh, now you're just flattering me. Well, actually, one of the most important concepts in my book is divine desires taken straight from surfing for God. That underneath our sexual struggles and underneath the things that we find magical or forbidden, that if we can get below the surface, we find good, beautiful, God given desires for acceptance, for connection, to be chosen, pursued. I like the four needs of being seen, safe, soothed and secure. I have a list of 40 because they're so nuanced. And particular types of porn often symbolize specific desires. Yes, you mentioned that. And thank you, by the way, for sharing about your own fetish as you described it. Even though you might do it regularly. It's never easy to disclose like that because I know you said, oh, this might sound weird, but the truth of it is that that was your story. And what you were referring to was this idea of what Patrick Carnes coined a couple decades ago about an arousal template that we all become attracted to. Either the encounter that we have somewhere around our sexual awakening, or the attraction allows the deficit to somehow have that need met. It's almost like two sides of the coin. And that's an important concept, especially as wives are saying and we're trying to communicate to them, it's not my fault, period. There was no if only that this arousal template has nothing to do with you and it has everything to do with, with that developmental deficit or that encounter in the midst of the developmental deficit. So you bonded with and you attached to the Object of what later became your compulsion. Exactly. So it aroused me, even though it's not what I truly desired. Yes, that's a big distinction. Yes. Because of this automatic reaction. Whereas desire is something much deeper. Yeah, talk about a little bit more about that distinction, specifically on the side of desire. Yeah. So this comes from my friend Doug Carpenter and his book for male survivors of sexual abuse. It's all about this emotional connection, intimacy. It's what my soul craves. Desire is so, so core to who we are. And ultimately, like, it's a choice for me to desire my wife, whereas arousal is just something that I don't necessarily choose. It's my body reacting to stimuli. So it's helpful to make this distinction because I can say, well, even if my wife doesn't arouse me every single day, I still desire her. Yes. And so that languaging can be anti shaming. And ultimately, I think desire gives us a path out of the battle. Because instead of just continually trying to avoid what's bad, my focus is now on receiving what's good. Yes, yes. Finding what I desire with God, others, and even within myself. Right. So, for example, even if for whatever reason, because my addiction has wired my brain to something or someone that's not my wife, at any given moment, the, the erotic impulse that trigger for the object of our behavior, we may not be able to feel the deeper desire which might be for. Among your 40 words for connection, that that's there and we have to be able to drop down into that. But it then becomes about, I'm going to move toward connection and as you said, begin to receive what I need to be able to create connection or to receive connection. Because most addicts are really bad at receiving. Right. The only thing they can receive and to be in a vulnerable state is actually the object of their addiction. And it's a counterfeit kind of vulnerability. Actually, it's vulnerable in the sense that it doesn't require the risk of being known and the risk of real intimacy. Yeah, it's true. So talk for a minute. And there's a lot of conversation around this. When Surfing for God came out, there was far less understanding and conversation about the brain and the brain on porn. But recently I talked to a man who went to his pastor, and his pastor just said, get accountability and just make up your mind that you're not going to do this anymore. I mean, the pastor literally said something like, it's do or die time. You're going to lose your marriage. Right. How does that strike you? And why is that shaming or unhelpful. Yeah. It's motivating. Through fear, shame, and loss, which I describe as the three great sexualizers, they actually increase our compulsivity and stress, the need to soothe. And sadly, this is all too common in porn recovery groups. The group either becomes really stressful because it's so focused on behavior, or it becomes stagnant because we have a casual approach to our behavior. What we really need and what that pastor neglected was what you've described as the cardiologist instead of the cop. Yes, yes. Someone who can come close, look into my eyes, listen to my heart, and find out what's underneath this instead of just trying harder to deal with the symptoms. Yeah. What's underneath this? What's going on in the heart? And your answer, and what I believe is that there is a kind of brokenness from developmental moments that needed to happen and didn't, where the porn industry exploited the little boy or the little girl, and that became the solution to that momentary aloneness, pain, need for soothing. By the way, I want to back up because what you said. I've never heard it before when you said it this way, and that is that these approaches that cause pressure actually result in fear, shame, and I think the third word was stress, and that that actually perpetuates the problem and it makes it worse. Yeah. If I had to go a little deeper. Patrick Carnes research showed that the family environment most likely to create the conditions for sex addiction is rigid and disengaged. Which is of conservative Christianity. Exactly, exactly. So most of conservative Christianity and your typical porn recovery group and the pastor who's telling the guy to just do whatever you have to do to stop, that's actually recreating the original environment of the addiction. Yes, It's a reenactment of that environment. Wow. That's a big statement. Yeah. And it's what I've experienced, and it's what I used to do myself when I led purity culture groups. I didn't realize that by having everybody say, well, did you relapse this week or not? That I was becoming the strict father in the group. Yes. Yes. Who's dealing out punishment. Hmm. You used stagnation. Yes. That's how people experience you. You said, sorry, I spoke over you. You used the word stagnation. And I want to come back to that, because so many groups, and I won't name particular groups, and I don't want to be blaming, but there are certain groups and programs, and many of them have sprung up with Good intent, where there's not really a sense that you can be free, where you can have lasting freedom. There's a sense where we're going to meet in this group and try to hold each other accountable and maybe give one another insight and possibly some really good, safe relationship, but that people can be in those groups for years and never really experience lasting freedom. So I just want to say with your book and with the material that's in your book and husband material, your ministry, I want to say it again. If there's a man listening and you have struggled for years or decades, which is so often the case as I work with men, lasting freedom, real freedom, where you don't need this anymore in your life is possible. And I want to say to women that are listening, whether you are an ex, wife and partner, whether you are presently married and not sure if there's hope that real change is possible. Real change, lasting freedom is possible. And Drew Boa's book Outgrow Porn is a very, very trustworthy, powerful, immensely practical resource toward that end. Get a copy today. All right, that's not the end of the podcast. I feel like I'm wrapping up, but there's more that I want to ask about. So do you have more time? Yes. Okay. Shame. We need to talk about shame. We've alluded to it, condemnation. And I believe that until shame is dismantled, or until a man, through compassion and kindness of other men and God, that until shame is dismantled, that there's not going to be lasting freedom. And shame seems to be far more pernicious and more of a stronghold than porn itself. So talk about shame and how men begin to get free of the shame. In so many cases, it starts with silence. It starts with growing up in a home, a church, a school, where no one's talking about sex, no one's talking about porn, no one's being vulnerable and real and honest about this. And in that silence, secrecy, shame naturally begins to get infected. I mean, I'm curious to hear if you might have a different opinion on this. But I don't think shame is necessarily a problem as a normal human emotion. If it becomes pro social shame that I share with somebody else, that I actually process, it really becomes an issue when it's hidden in the dark and there it will fester and it will grow like a cancer. Yes. And eventually become self contempt, self condemnation, total isolation, decades of secrecy. I mean, the shame is what often takes us to porn, and it's also what we feel right afterward. Exactly. So it's the core of that cycle. And one of the most powerful ways to interrupt that cycle is to be absolutely, radically honest about the things that I've never told anyone before that I don't like about myself. It opens up the space for us to be known and loved. That's what I saw at the restoring soul retreat over and over. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah, you have to deal with shame. It takes a lot of safety for that to happen. Right. Because men are so terrified, not just as an emotion, but in their body, where their hearts are racing and they're heavily guarded and defended. And I know in my sex addiction story, I made an inner vow. I will never tell anyone that last 7%. I'm not sure what percentage I actually said, but, you know, that. That last little percent. And let me just come back to the, you know, you post to get my opinion. I would agree with you that in and of itself, shame is not a harmful emotion unless we ignore it, suppress it, and hide from it. Quoting my friend Kurt Thompson, he said that shame always creates distance, even momentarily. It's this, ah, I have to flee. I have to close my eyes. I have to go inward from the exposure that is there in other people. But when we press into the shame and say, I will not just be radically honest, and I agree a thousand percent with that, but actually let myself be known, because I remember there were things where I finally became radically honest, but there was still this resistance to. I won't let you actually know me. I would never, for example, choose to let you look in my eyes. I'll tell you these facts as my head is hanging down. And that's a huge start. That's 25 miles of the marathon. But that last mile is to actually receive the gaze, the love that beholding another man at your conferences who looks you in the face and in the eye and says, thank you, and I'm not going anywhere. Yes. And this might be a helpful place to talk about the difference between transparency and vulnerability. Yeah. Please, please. So if I go to the zoo and I'm looking in at the lion exhibit, through a thick pane of glass, I can see the lion, the lion can see me. There's transparency, but there's not vulnerability. Vulnerability is when we take away the glass. Because the word vulnous has the meaning of wound in Latin. Vulnous is wound. So to be vulnerable is to be woundable so that we can be healable. Yes. The kind of wound that a surgeon brings when you're having an operation, you know, whether that's having a spot removed from my face, from minor skin cancer to having my gallbladder taken out or something like that. Even with anesthesia, there's going to be pain before, during, and after. Right. And so I'm so glad you brought that up, because I actually talked at Kurt's conference last weekend in D.C. in the middle of my talk, I was talking about safety and this idea popped into my head. So I did this like five minute aside, and I want to get your input on this. Just like you got my input. I said, how many of you have heard the story in Chronicles of Narnia where Lucy is at the river and Mr. Tumnus is there and she's about to cross over to see Aslan and she says, is he quite safe? Sorry, that was a bad Lucy impression. And Tumnus says, safe, he's not safe, but he's good. And I said, I've quoted that and I've preached that, and it's so powerful, but it's wrong. Because God, the God that looks like Jesus, Jesus said, if you've seen me, you've seen the father. He is 100% safe. But safety is not the same as discomfort. Safety is not the same as I feel vulnerable. Right. So oftentimes when our culture. And I applaud some of this and I also am concerned by, you know, we need to have safe spaces everywhere and I need to have safe zones. Yes. And you're not actually unsafe. You're vulnerable and you're not comfortable. And for someone who has trauma, that will absolutely feel unsafe. And therefore we have to have as just a foundation that this God that looks like Jesus, that's a huge part of the equation of your work. It's not just a little baptized scripture on top of your book and your approach and that, that God is safe, that God is holding us like a good parent. But sometimes that good parent needs to give us a medicine that we go, gosh, that's really yucky, or hold us down, as I did with my 1 year old son, where they could not find a place to put an IV in him. And it was so heartbreaking to see the needle go in again and again and they didn't get the vein. And my son was terrified and probably didn't feel safe because he didn't have that mental construct to understand what was happening, felt the needle going into his arm, having no idea that it was there to save his life. So in that moment, to be a savior, to make him safe, you had to do something incredibly heartbreaking and difficult. And you know that's who. Who God is sometimes. He is a savior. He makes us safe. That's his job. But it's often going to be uncomfortable and painful. And as we're talking about vulnerability and shame, here's another reason why I feel that this is so important. Oftentimes the very particular places where we feel shame, for example, about a part of my body become the thing that we search for in porn. Yes. So if I'm ashamed of my teeth, I might fix it on someone's teeth in an image or a video, which is a big part of my story. I often hear men having shame about their penis and then seeking out porn that has that as the focus. So shame can also become sexualized. And then it is the very thing that porn is promising. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. I want to start to wrap up and you talk about as a topic throughout the book, but especially in the appendix, that relapse is not failure, it's feedback. Unpack that idea. Especially for all the wives and partners out there. I am not excusing relapse like the harm is real. And also for the person who is wanting to process their own relapse, using that language of failure just reinforces shame and a fixed mindset rather than a growth mindset. To view relapse as feedback is to non judgmentally observe what happened with curiosity and compassion and say, what can I learn from this? How can I choose to be loved in the middle of this? Mm. And not just in that moment, like, okay, five minutes or five hours before that relapse, what was happening? But how can that relapse actually shine a light on the developmental process that's still happening? Like, oh, so my, my growth work right now, whether in therapy or at a husband material group or a Surfing for God Restoring the Soul weekend or an intensive or whatever it might be, the work is now to continue to press into where is it that a little boy or a younger part of me. And let's touch base on this rather than close. It's fascinating to me and beautiful that you included ifs and parts work as part of this whole process. So talk about. I think most of our listeners are familiar with internal family systems, but talk about how we really need to go back to and for that little boy in other parts. Well, we started by saying that it's boys and girls who get hooked on porn. So my ability to regulate without porn in large part depends on my ability to relate to that little boy within me. Yes. Because it's not the mature adult Logical Drew who gets triggered from time to time. It's the little boy. Not that we have one inner child. It's really more like an orphanage. But we've got these younger parts that are emotional, that are vulnerable, that are carrying the weight of what we've been through. And so to be able to be with those parts rather than have those parts take over is just so empowering. I loved, I think, my favorite part of your book, just as a reader, and I have to be honest, I got the early copy, and I don't know if the appendices were in the early copy, because the copy that I now have has the appendice of the Parable of the Monster and the Mouse. And again, man, I think, like, if people read that appendix first, they would stay up all night and read the book. You know, they wouldn't put it down because it. It actually wasn't going where I thought it was going. But then when it started to go there, I went, oh. And I won't give away the parable, but it's exactly what you're talking about. It's. It's a parable of. Rather than discovering this monster of lust and taking out a dagger and killing it, it's basically saying, can we just sit down and be together? I love that. That's so freeing. I, like, I feel lightness in my body right now as I'm thinking about that story. It's just so freeing. Like, everything belongs. I can welcome, even the monster. And then, quite paradoxically, as I welcome it, not to say, hey, let's act on whatever you want. As I welcome begins to get its needs met, it realizes that it doesn't have to be this devouring, consuming part of me, but maybe the grown Drew or the grown Michael that is sitting with this part that is really quite needy and vulnerable, there can be a relationship that builds there and an acceptance and a welcome, which is the heart of ifs. Right? Yes, absolutely. Even our darkest sexual thoughts and feelings can become allies. Yeah. Drew, what's beautiful about that idea in the Monster of the Mouse and all throughout the book is that the implications about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Trinity are pretty beautiful as well. Because if that resonates with our hearts and our sanctified sensibilities, then Jesus would also sit with those parts, just like he would sit with a leper or with somebody that needed physical healing. He wouldn't push his agenda on them, but just create safety and loving presence. That's right. And he said, let the little children come to me. Yes. We are learning how to let the little children within us come to him. Yeah. So, brother, I want to thank you because this book is not just a theoretical book that some guy wrote after researching sex addiction. Like all of my work, this book has grown out of your story. Your not just your successes, but your failures. It's grown out of deep research in spiritual formation and training and training that you've pursued around healing sexual addiction. And there was a cost. I know there was a cost to write this book. And if your life is at all like mine, as we who are helpers and caregivers at the tip of the spear against the darkness, that there's a cost on a day to day basis with our marriages and our families. And grateful to God that he provides refuge for that. But thank you for paying the cost to bring this book into the world. You're welcome. Thank you for seeing me and sharing this. And it's a redemptive risk. Yes. Which is another one of the tools. Right. What is one thing that you'd want to say to men as we wrap up this conversation? You may feel like you've tried everything. Accountability, partners, groups, maybe even some kind of counseling books, different techniques and strategies and programs. And I want to reassure you that none of that is wasted. It all matters. And maybe, just maybe, there's more. Maybe there's more healing than you've known yet. Maybe there's more freedom than you thought was possible. It is incredibly brave and vulnerable to open yourself up to the possibility of a different approach, of something new in this area of pain and heartache. So thank you for listening to this episode. Drew Boa, thank you for sharing your heart and your wisdom and your expertise. Your new book is Outgrow Find Lasting Freedom Without Fighting an Exhausting Battle. This has been a gift to me and to so many. Bless you. Thanks, Michael.