Episode 395 - Jay Stringer, "How Our Deepest Longings Shape Love, Healing, and Transformation"

Welcome back to the Restoring the Soul podcast with Michael John Cusick. In this episode, Michael sits down with licensed therapist, author, and researcher Jay Stringer for a deep and vulnerable conversation exploring the core desires that shape our lives. Together, they unpack themes from Jay Stringer’s latest book, Desire: The Longings Inside of Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow.

Over the course of their dialogue, Michael and Jay examine the five core desires: wholeness, personal growth, pleasure, intimacy, and meaning. They candidly discuss the traps of mastery and control, the importance of radical self-hospitality, and the crucial role of self-acceptance in loving others well. You will hear stories from Jay’s clinical experience, thoughtful reflections on the nature of shame and transformation, and an honest look at how pleasure and intimacy can be both revealing and redemptive.

Transcript

Exploring Desire: An Introduction to Core Longings

Michael John Cusick 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Restoring the Soul podcast. I'm Michael John Kusick. Today my guest is Jay Stringer. Hi, Jay.

Jay Stringer 0:10

Hi, Michael. Good to be back with you.

Michael John Cusick 0:13

Yeah, thank you. Last time it was a new introduction, at least face to face. We'd interacted a little bit before that. I'm going to hold up the book right away. It is, for those that are watching on YouTube, Desire subtitle. I'm sorry, I have to check out the subtitle. My false self wanted to be able to say it, you know, just smoothly, but it's it's a great subtitle, but it's long. Desire the longings inside of us and the new science of how we love, heal, and grow. This book reads.

Jay Stringer 0:43

And that subtitle has had so many iterations to it that you could almost say anything, and I would believe you.

Michael John Cusick 0:49

Yeah. Desire. We won't go there. But uh but the word desire does make me think of uh the scene from Princess Bride when the the uh man the the bishop comes out with the miter on his head and he says, Mawedge, and I just hear the word desire. I don't know why that popped in my head right now.

Jay Stringer 1:14

That would be great if we could just open up the book and have Michael say that upon reading it.

Michael John Cusick 1:19

The the new thing.

Jay Stringer 1:20

Maybe in the audible version we could do that.

Michael John Cusick 1:23

Right. This is not part two. This is actually uh a brand new conversation uh about probably eight weeks out from when we talked last time. And there were three sections of your book that we never got to. And those sections about desire had to do with intimacy, pleasure, and meaning. If you'll review the five core desires, those are three of them, but we we camped out on the first two. What are those first two?

The Journey to Wholeness and Personal Growth

Jay Stringer 1:51

So the first two are a desire for wholeness, and then the second is a desire for personal growth. So wholeness is about, you know, do you desire to know your story, to heal some of those formative wounds that have marked your life? Do you know where you come from? And then that builds upon that to a desire for personal growth. And so part of the nuance there is that I think we're in a day and age where there's a lot of desire for personal growth and optimization and getting your life into a lot of protocols and, you know, getting sunlight, getting your steps in. But if you don't know where you come from, I think a lot of personal growth these days looks like uh a level of mastery over your life. And I think that there's something about that desire for mastery that we're seeing in our world that is much more to do with a trauma response. So when we come out of a family of origin that had intimidation, aggression, uh, deprivation, you need to find something reliable to find soothing, to find someone that sees you, to find some level of competence in your life. And so, in the absence of good care and good connection, I think that there's something about protocols and mastery that can become something of that, I want to bypass my story and just kind of begin to feel solid ground underneath me. And so part of what I'm trying to develop in that section is how do we develop a radical hospitality to the difficulties that have marked our life? Like, are we kind to those places where we are absolutely underdeveloped? But then the nuance of where are you burdening other people with your need for validation and kind of just going through life pining for attention or sight? Um, those are all markers that you kind of lack differentiation. So if you don't have differentiation, you don't know who you are, you don't like who you are, that will bring you into intimacy with something of a laundry list of needs that you want your friends and significant others to meet in your life.

Michael John Cusick 4:04

Well, we could stop right there and just unpack all that, because that's some of that is fresh. The phrase we unpacked last time was that radical hospitality to yourself or the generous hospitality. And in that conversation, for those who have not listened to my first conversation with Jay, go back and listen to that. One of the things I especially appreciated, completely unexpected, not that I thought you were perfect, but you really opened up and were quite vulnerable about your own story, especially as it relates to food and compulsive eating. That's something I could um something that I could very much relate to. So my question around this word mastery, uh, you know, we both we both have been profoundly influenced and studied under Dr. Dan Allender, the legend. Um, and he used to talk about uh addictions as mastery addictions or uh absorption addictions or where you get lost in something. So there's there's an aspect of mastery that we're actually created for mastery, for competence and to have a confidence. But you're referring to mastery that's a more about control, an unhealthy control, that I'm going to hack my life and control it so that I'll either become this lovable person or so that the outcome will somehow give me a kind of security. Am I getting that?

Mastery vs. Control: Understanding Our Addictions

Jay Stringer 5:23

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yep. I forgot about those distinctions, but those are great. Um, you know, the absorptive addictions versus those of mastery. And so part of, you know, one of the th stories that I always think about in this particular realm is I had a client come into a session one day, and she was just kind of on her lunch break, came in gloriously sweaty. Uh, and but essentially what she told me is, you know, uh just went for a run. And I said, How'd the run go? And she said, I crushed it. And I said, Um, you know, what does crushing mean? Like, I'm a therapist, I'm paid to be hyper-vigilant about word choices. And so I just said, like, you know, I have a sense of what crushed means, but tell me what crushed means to you. And she essentially said, if I run eight miles in under an hour, that's how I know that I've kind of crushed a workout. And asking her, like, okay, so let's say you run six miles, let's say you run five miles, what what do you feel? And she said something along the lines of, like, I don't really feel strong. I don't really, you know, I might feel more shame. And, you know, whenever people are initially talking about shame, they want to fly over that story at 20,000, 30,000 feet. So it wasn't just shame about her body if she wasn't, you know, running a lot. I I asked her kind of what are some of the particulars of where you will feel shame. She thought for a couple seconds and then essentially said that she feels uh shame in her thighs if she does not run eight miles. So again, that opens up the door to a lot of stories of what has been the war with regard to your thighs. And she brought me back into a childhood memory where her mom said to her, Women in this side of the family have very thick thighs. You're gonna have to work out throughout a lot of your life. So for her, this running, this commitment to develop mastery over a particular number of miles within a particular number of minutes was a trauma response. That there was an unreasonable hospitality. There wasn't grief or anger about what her mom was setting up for her. It was a sense of mastery so that I do not have to feel shame. I don't have to feel my own vulnerability. And I think that's what I see happening quite a bit in our world today is that we don't like who we are. Uh, we don't, we might feel vulnerable, we might feel weak. But then if we can optimize our life, if we can do all the things, get all the right meds, get all the right regiments in, then we can try and feel at home in our bodies and in our souls. And yet there's something in us that knows that we are over-indexing in good things, but really not really paying attention to our soul, to our story in the process.

The Importance of Self-Love in Relationships

Michael John Cusick 8:26

So let me ask you this question about loving ourselves, because you've referred several times to not liking ourselves. Um I think I know how you would respond to this. You know, I I have this sense that many therapists do, that if we don't love ourselves, that we can't really love others. And recently I was going through the social media uh platform of a hyper, hyper conservative female commentator who her whole episode was that if you wait to love yourself before you love others, that you'll never get there. So we just need to decide to love others. It's a choice. There was a book years ago called Love is a Decision. And she gave such compelling Bible verses that I found myself, despite my stance on that, going, like, geez, I need to r reevaluate that and I need to understand the Greek and the Hebrew. But a comment on this idea of liking ourselves, self-acceptance, compassion toward ourselves, gentleness, patience toward ourselves, why that's essential to be able to love in a way that actually is kind of flow instead of just flexing our muscles.

Navigating Shame and Vulnerability

Jay Stringer 9:40

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I it's a great question. And I wonder if part of us as therapists are more predisposed to those that to the answer that we need to first kind of love ourselves in order to love others really well. There could be something in the therapist makeup of kind of how our unique wounding works there. But yeah, I find that all the time, that there's a sense of, you know, raising kids for me has been a cornering process of, you know, when I was growing up, I used to have this like Atlanta Braves t-shirt regiment. And I wore a t-shirt, you know, Atlanta Braves t-shirts almost every day of the week. And then eventually this kid said, you know, Jay, you you should probably have your mom take you shopping and get some Tommy Hill figure, some rusty shirts, some Steussy. Like you could really use a wardrobe upgrade. And hadn't thought much about that story, but when you look at me throughout all of high school, I'm wearing colored shirts. That Atlanta Braves baseball is just gone. So that sense of being a pastor's kid, image management is really core to me. So now I'm with, you know, I'm fathering a teenager, and my son loves kind of New York Knicks wear and, you know, has his favorite sweatshirt that he wants to wear virtually every day of the winter. And so I have all of this kind of unaddressed baggage of like, you're gonna be made fun of, you need to manage your image. What are, you know, your leaders thinking? What are your teachers thinking? What are your classmates thinking? And I'm trying to manage him. And I think part of that sense is I'm not loving my son well. So I'm needing to go back to my 10-year-old self, 12-year-old self, to kind of say, like, what was that level of mockery? What was I going through? And so I think when I understood something of my story and understood where I came from and what I was navigating, that really helped me to love my son well, which was basically to not meddle in his fashion choices. So I think that happens. But we also know from the neuroscience that, you know, the more attentive you are to your own grief, your own trauma, um, the gray matter in your brain is going to shift, which then allows you to have more empathy towards the needs of others because you first recognize it in yourself. And so when I was going through grad school, you know, we used to have a professor that was always talking about like it doesn't matter if you're dealing with schizophrenia, if you're dealing with illegal behavior, you have to learn how to identify that part of yourself before you can do really good work. Because there is a certain rationale to why people function the way that they do. So I think that's part of how I'm trained is that I need to recognize it in myself first, recognize my own wounds. But I do think to nuance that, I think there is a time and a space to figure out, like, okay, maybe I don't know where this is in my own story, but I'm still called to love. I'm still called to give something, you know, and someone better than I have deserved. And what I find in doing that is that when I try and commit to loving my wife well, even when I don't feel like there's a level of, you know, deserve there, or I feel like, okay, like there's a certain friendship that I'm reaching out to them so much more than they are reaching out to me. When I move towards that, part of what opens up in me is that sense of grief and loss, of like, I'm loving better than I have been loved. And that creates some level of tears, some level of grief, which I think opens and changes me to connect to some of these places in my life that I have longed for so much more connection. And yet that connection has not come. So um I yeah, I think the the most reliable path is to identify your own story and vulnerabilities and grief and glory. But I think there's still a call to love. And when you move towards an honor to love others, I think that opens up your heart to more grief, uh, but also more love. So I think it's all of it.

The Role of Pleasure in Our Lives

Michael John Cusick 14:09

Yeah, I love that. And and um certainly not loving yourself, because I've I've struggled with self-hatred for decades, uh that directly comes out of my own story, and I've experienced some significant healing there, but that's never an excuse for not loving or for a lack of kindness. And and maybe a way of thinking about it is not do we have to love ourselves first and is it possible to love others? But shame, which is in effect all the forms of not liking yourself and self-rejection, self-loathing, that that's a barrier and it always creates distance. So if you're loving out of shame, you s you you know, you may be able to fill the person's cup or whatever the moment is, but uh you can't sustain that because there's a distance to it.

Jay Stringer 14:55

Yeah, that's what you see a lot with the Enneagram twos, where it's like you develop this provisional identity around.

Michael John Cusick 15:03

I'm an Enneagram 2. We're not gonna go there. All right. So I'm sorry. Let's move on.

Jay Stringer 15:08

We'll cut it off. No, go ahead. Go ahead.

Michael John Cusick 15:09

Go ahead.

Jay Stringer 15:11

Um the you know, the that sense of the Enneagram too, there's a provisional self when you're not in health with that. So there's this sense of like my worth, my understanding, my self-soothing, going back to that level of mastery and grounding. The more that I love other people, the more that I can kind of feel like I have an identity, I have a place in life. And so that's part of you know, the work is when you stop and outgrow something of that identity, you're gonna have all these swirling feelings of, well, people want me, what's my purpose? What's my need? How do I get through life? And I think that's what a lot of us tend to avoid is that crucible of growth. So we we all have provisional self. You might have your Enneagram two, I have my Enneagram three, which is, you know, a lot of image management. And when I begin to let that go, then there's so much confusion. There's so much uh just a sense of I don't know where to go if I don't go back to this default identity. And so I think that's all the personal growth stuff is will you actually desire for your provisional identity to eventually fade into the sunset so that something new, something authentic might be able to emerge. And, you know, just even in the last couple of years of being in a midlife crisis, as a pastor's kid, a lot of my desire was about being good. It was about being a golden child. It was about knowing the theological commentaries, knowing the language, being a good therapist. But as that begins to recede a bit, part of what I feel come to me is if I don't have to be good, then I can actually be creative. And so, you know, even in the last couple months, the less that I've been trying to be good for people, the less I've been trying to be a therapist to all people at all times, the more longing there is to express things, to discover things, to document things. Like I want sketchbooks, I want journals, I want so much stuff around me because I'm not living into that provisional identity of needing to be good for other people to be able to offer a surrogate sense of soothing in my life.

Michael John Cusick 17:36

I love that. So where do threes go in health? I know as a two, I go to four. Where do you go? I don't know.

Revelation and Provocation in Sexuality

Jay Stringer 17:44

This is where my Enneagram knowledge I knew at one point, but I could not tell you. Okay.

Michael John Cusick 17:51

If this were a live program, I feel like I can see if someone knows the answer to the same thing.

Jay Stringer 17:56

I know you have some friends that could help us.

Michael John Cusick 17:58

Yeah, I could call Ian up right now and and he could he could answer. But uh if someone knows the answer to that question right now, call 1-800-253-5961. That's 1-800-253-5961. That's the restoring the soul line. That's actually not when I was a kid, that was the number to WMMS, the uh the radio station that brought rock and roll to Cleveland and led the Rock and Roll Museum there. So you can't call if you're listening. It's not a real number. But whatever the case is.

Jay Stringer 18:28

I could look it up right now, but I feel like I can see the the arrow at some point in my life. But we know that it gets better.

Michael John Cusick 18:36

When we're in health, it gets better. When I when I go to the Enneagram 4, I like to say that I pick up my guitar and I start writing poetry. And I have a guitar that hangs on the wall and I can kind of gauge my mood and where I'm in, health or stress, based on it feels like effort and I don't want to go there versus that I do pick it up and oh, okay. That that's a good sign.

Jay Stringer 19:02

And do you do you sing? Do you are they other songs? Do you do you write?

Michael John Cusick 19:07

I I I write I write songs. I've recorded just a little bit. It's been a number of years, but um write poetry and and I just like to sometimes just do scales. There's just something about hearing the sound and the focus. It's very self-soothing.

Jay Stringer 20:03

I'm curious obviously could be a very sacred dimension of your life, but like do you find yourself right like I'm curious like how you find your poetry, your songwriting, what do you write versus when you write for an audience? Like are they similar or are they?

Desire as a Reflection of Our Stories

Michael John Cusick 20:21

No, it's very di it's very different. And it it comes back to that word creativity, where something flows. Uh the way that I write is I have hundreds of post-it notes and scraps of paper from morning journaling, and then I dictate a lot and I transcribe talks, and then I have an editor kind of take it to the next stage. Uh, my longtime friend Dudley Delft, who went through the counseling program with me at CCU, he was never called to be a therapist, so he got a PhD in creative writing. So we've collaborated for a while. He's also part of our men's weekend. Um should you ever come to that, I'd love for you to meet him. Um so it feels freer, it feels lighter, it feels like there's something inside of me that needs to be birthed, as opposed to there's something in me that I have to accomplish. I mean, it's very hard if you're writing nonfiction right to write nonfiction in a way that feels like it's flowing because you're you're you're crafting something. Um but then there's also that aspect of the stuff we write, we're pretty much thinking about it all the time, unless we're intentionally shutting off shutting it off. But it's a great question. Hey, I want to move on to the other three desires. You mentioned the first one and the second one wholeness and growth. The three that we didn't touch on once again uh were pleasure, intimacy, and meaning. And let's start with pleasure, even though in the book intimacy was preceded pleasure, yeah, I believe, because maybe we'll need to talk about self-regulation after we talk about pleasure. Because not all of it, but a big chunk of pleasure was sexuality. Let's start with the obvious. That is, we live in a culture, in a world, in a time that is obsessed with pleasure and yet so little satisfaction. So talk about why you included pleasure as one of our core desires.

Jay Stringer 22:20

Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I think that we are we are made for pleasure. We are made in the image of God who finds so much pleasure in uh connection and intimacy in the flight of an eagle and creation. And so, you know, part of where I'm going with regard. To pleasure is that pleasure is not just something that's completely confined to the realm of sexuality. Pleasure is something that we are made for. And in many ways, it is our birthright. And so oftentimes what ends up happening is that people will pursue different pleasures. They pursue orgasm, they pursue Michelin-starred restaurants, they pursue luxury travel. And at the end of the road, they often feel like that sense of this doesn't satisfy me or everything that I have wanted and I have pursued keeps falling through my fingers, and I don't understand why. Well, I think part of where I'm trying to build is that sometimes if you don't have a fully developed sense of self, if you don't have, you know, a deep connections of kind of deep vulnerability with other people, there's something about pleasure that will never fully satisfy. And so, in that realm of a desire for pleasure, part of what I'm talking about with regard to sex is that, you know, sex is the great revealer of where we come from. It provokes us and it has the power to potentially heal us. But I think most people don't like the revelations that come up for them with regard to their sexual life. We don't like to be provoked beyond our window of tolerance. And for those reasons, we don't really get towards a sexual pleasure that has the power to heal us. And so I think part of what we need to desire is how do I desire the revelation of sex? How do I desire the provocation of, you know, sex and intimacy are always going to push me to grow beyond my current window of tolerance? But most of us try to use sex and intimacy to escape those difficulties rather than move through them. So an example would be, you know, let's say that there is this man and write about, you know, this case example in the book, but one of the things he was dealing with was just a sense of premature ejaculation, that every time he got together with his partner, he felt like a failure. And so what he said is that every time he had intimacy with his wife, he would feel some level of a voice inside of him berating him to not finish too soon, to pleasure his wife, to not fail. And so part of what we started working through is that that's actually revealing some unaddressed aspect of his life. And the story that he began to tell was having a father at some of his sporting events who was always just yelling at him, like protect the plate in baseball. When he was playing basketball, his dad was always yelling at him to box out. And so, you know, basically what he learned is that when he did well, his father was waiting for him after the games. But anytime he failed, had an error, struck out a couple times, missed like more than two or three free throws, his dad would just desert him and leave him. And so what he started realizing is that part of what sex was revealing to him is that he has this father's voice inside of him that's constantly berating him. And he has these metrics of success or failure that are really ruining so much of his life. So sex was the great revealer of a truth that he had not been able to see before. And I think that's what happens a lot, whether it's an unwanted sexual behavior of, you know, something like pornography, infidelity, or just a place of sexual anxiety or a level of like, you know, hypoarousal, meaning I don't have any desire for sexuality. That is revealing some really core fundamental truths about the relationship or about your own individual life. And so a lot there, but how do we desire the revelations of where we feel like sexually inadequate or that we have failed?

Michael John Cusick 26:56

That's so powerful. Um, I know that you're familiar with the work of David Snarch, who was right here in Evergreen, Colorado, um, and wrote the book Passionate Marriage, and he talks about the word you used earlier about crucible. And so this idea of revelation is that not just in sexual intimacy, but really in the pursuit of any pleasure, where that is whether that is Michelin star race restaurants or pornography, that that too becomes a revelation. And you've be you've been known as the the desire whisperer or the fetish whisperer, uh, where you know you've written about in your book Unwanted that what we desire actually reflects back something of our heart's longings and something of our story. So say a little bit about that before we move on from revelation to provocation.

The Battle for the Human Heart

Jay Stringer 27:46

Yeah. So this is taken from uh I I first heard about this concept from uh the French psychoanalyst by the name of Lacan. And so for Lacan, Lacan would say that every person has a symptom. And in French, if you know it, Michael, let me know. I think it's symptom, but he said that every symptom, symptom is a saint home. And saint home in the French is holy man. So for Lacan, every symptom of your life, those unwanted fantasies, depression, anxiety, conflict in your marriage, those are the holy prophets that are trying to get your attention. But most of us do not do not like holy prophets. We shoot them, we annihilate them. Uh, most of the time we want medication for our symptoms, we want a gin and tonic for our symptoms. We don't really try to listen. And so part of what I was doing with Unwanted and within desire is how do we learn how to develop a desire to listen to the holy prophets in our life? And so all of us are going to face some level of sexual shame or struggle. It could be a sense of our own pornography use, it could be a sense of just feeling no sexual desire. It could be just being in a marriage where it feels like, okay, I'm the only one who holds desire. I'm never desired by my partner. And there's a certain heartache, there's a certain woundedness that comes in us. So, how do we understand that these symptoms, these difficulties are trying to get our attention? So, in the realm of pornography, part of what our research showed is that uh we could begin to predict not just how much porn men and women watched, but far more the particularities of their porn use. Uh, so, you know, we could begin to predict what they put into Pornhub, what they put into Google. And that was how we knew we had kind of struck a nerve is that people developed a lot of curious curiosity for like, why am I drawn to this fetish? Why am I drawn to this particular sexual fantasy? So uh I think this was from Patrick Carnes, but it could have been from anyone. Um, but there is uh the line in uh Harry Potter series where Harry looks into the mirror of Erased, if you've read the book or seen the movie, and what Harry Potter, the orphan, sees reflected back to him is his parents. And so he is an orphan. And so the way that J.K. Rowling wrote Erased is that that's actually desire spelled backwards. So whenever the person looks into the mirror of Erased, what's reflected back to them is their most ardent longing or wish. And so I think that's a really good exercise that if you were to look into the mirror of Erased, desire spelled backward, what would that image be that would be reflected back to you? And instead of hating what's revealed in that, instead of hating your desire or endlessly chasing it, can you develop a healthy and kind interrogation for I wonder why this is the image? I wonder why this is the archetype, I wonder why this is the symbol that is reflected back to me. And, you know, throughout different seasons of our life, that ERISET is gonna reflect back many different things. I know I'm in my 40s now, and my mirror of Eraset is very different than it was in my 20s or my 30s. So we have to kind of recognize that that our desires are gonna shift and change. And not every desire needs to be chased, but not every desire needs to be suppressed and pathologized either. We need to learn how to listen to what our desires are trying to tell us.

Michael John Cusick 31:48

Yeah, your line that I quote all the time in Unwanted is listen to your lust. We could we could say outside of the sexual realm, listen to your longings and and just simply listen to your desire. So if I'm getting this right, tell me your story, tell me your longings, and as we walk together, I'm gonna be able to predict what it is that you're drawn to and possibly what you're addicted to. That's that's essentially what you're saying.

Jay Stringer 32:17

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And what is glorious about you. I think that's the that's the beauty of this work is I'll be able to kind of begin to predict uh the heartaches, the traumas, the addictions in your life, but I'll also be able to begin to imagine what redemption, what glory would begin to look like. And I I I w I need to memorize this line from C.S. Lewis, but that sense of, you know, if we could behold the marvel of some of who someone would one day be, we would be tempted to fall on our knees and worship them. Or if we could see the horror of what we would become, you know, essentially we would run away as if it was a horror. And I think all of us have that potential. Uh, you know, our desires can move us into the most horrific version of ourself. Our desires can also move us into the most beautiful, stunning version of ourself. And that's often where the work of evil and the work of the gospel vie for the human heart.

Michael John Cusick 33:21

Say that again. The work of evil and the work of the gospel, therefore the Trinity, is to vie for the human heart. I think that'll be a new thought for some people. That God's work is not just to get us into heaven, uh, but to really capture our heart. And that evil is right there trying to do the same thing.

Intimacy as a Transformational Force

Jay Stringer 33:44

Yes. Yeah, if evil is out to destroy the glory of God, which it can't, it will go after that which most reflects God's glory, which is men and women. It's our gender, it's our longings, it's what the God of the universe has put inside of us. And so I think there is gonna be that sense of God is seducing us to beauty, to goodness, to truth, to what it means to be formed in the image and likeness of God, to be, you know, uh desiring community, to be part of the church, to be part of the people of God. But at the same time, evil wants to k kill, it wants to steal, it wants to destroy those desires. So I think there's always this sense of vying to seduce us to things that degrade beauty, to things that begin to make us feel that our worth is not in our belovedness, but it's in our ability to accomplish something or to love someone else well. Um, and so I think part of what the gospel is always inviting us into is this sense of like it, you are beloved, you are beautiful. Uh, will you wake up to that? That there is a father who waits for us. There's a father who, you know, in the words of Alander, you know, repentance is turning to the party that God is throwing in your honor. Uh that's what it means to wait, uh, to recognize that God wants to party with us, that wants our beauty, wants good food, good drink for us. At the same time, I think evil is really trying to move us towards the, you know, towards the degradation of desire, towards the selfishness of desire, so that when we look at the desires that have marked our life or the desires of others, we see that they have brought in a lot of heartache or a lot of cruelty.

Michael John Cusick 35:45

A good segue to intimacy, because we're already talking about this, and I and I love how your your chapters and the sections of the five core desires weave into each other. But you talked about the transformational possibilities of intimacy, and intimacy being one of the core desires. So just for those that were intrigued or nudged by what we're talking about with pleasure and the revelation, provocation, and healing that can come from that, just talk about the bigger idea of the possibility of transformation. And so I'm I'm remembering this quote, and I cannot remember the author's name either. I should memorize the author's name. But he said that marriage is the last best opportunity to grow up.

Life Through Death: The Journey of Marriage

Jay Stringer 36:31

Yeah. So this was, I think this was part of what I started grappling with after Unwanted was, you know, I could outgrow a paradigm like unwanted sexual behavior. I could help clients understand, see their shame from a very different standpoint, uh help them to grow, but they were still returning back to the same marriages. They were still, you know, very underdeveloped in that capacity of giving and receiving love. And then what they would do is they would often blame the marriage rather than recognize that they are profoundly underdeveloped in love. So so much of our work as therapists, and if you are a client, it's the invitation to see, like, you know, Dan Siegel's great four S's of seeing safe, soothed, and secure. Very likely you lacked a sufficient amount of those four S's. And so another way of saying that is that your home was underdeveloped in intimacy. And then you become an adult and you arrive at that stage of marriage, and then you realize I'm very selfish, my spouse is very selfish, we are very underdeveloped in intimacy. But just because you've understood your story and you grieve some of that does not mean that you are developing the skill of learning how to give and receive love. And so, you know, this is what I think marriage and friendship are always doing is uh exposing where we are underdeveloped. So a lot of times people get to the stage, get to the terrain of intimacy, and they're like, this marriage sucks. Um, I don't want to be in this marriage anymore. I need to leave it. And part of what I would say to a client in that situation is, yeah, maybe if there's divorce, if there's infidelity, if there's some things that we need to look at, but is it possible that your marriage is actually doing exactly what marriage is designed to do, which is to show you and your partner and your relationship where it needs to grow in order to have a greater capacity to give and receive love. And so, you know, some of the most difficult years of my marriage, I blamed my wife quite a bit rather than recognizing that my marriage was working very well to show where my provisional self was, where a lot of my anger and unaddressed anger was, a lot of the dimensions in her life that she needed to confront. And so many of us move very quickly into my friendships are broken, my marriage is broken. And part of what I want to say is, nope, uh, your relationships are probably working very, very well to reveal the exact places and the particularities that await your level of integrity. So that's part of intimacy, is I think all of us are underdeveloped. And in that Schnarchian language of crucible, we all have to go through the crucible of marriage or the crucible of relationships in order to see where we need to grow.

Michael John Cusick 39:45

And now I'm not keeping my own order, but fast-forwarding to you know the very end of the book. And and you talk about three pillars. Uh and I I want you to unpack this more later. But one of them was remember that life comes through death. And that's really what we're talking about. Uh to say it in a I won't say fundamentalist way, because it's it's actually probably true for mystics as well, but that marriage is really an opportunity to die so that you can actually become and live the life that God created you to live.

Jay Stringer 40:19

Yes. Yeah. That notion of life comes through death. I mean, I think to me, that's so central to what it means to live as a Christian is, you know, that there is we live, you know, with the recognition that there is Good Friday, there is trauma, there is loss, there is sexual abuse, there is heartache. And then Saturday is that sense of holy Saturday, which the church has not had ever a robust theology of, but it's it's absence. And then obviously Sunday, day of resurrection, day of uh, you know, death does not have the last word, and we celebrate and we rejoice in that. But all of us live in that tension between death and resurrection. And I used to think that, you know, being a good Christian was about having a dogmatic story of redemption for every bad thing that had happened. Like I could talk about trauma a little bit if I could tell a Sunday story of like, this is, you know, how evil meant it, but this is what God meant, something for good. I could tell that story, but lingering in Good Friday, lingering in death was like, nope, I am not gonna have a good window of tolerance for Friday or Saturday. I just, I need to move towards Sunday. And so that's part of what I think marriage is doing such an exceptional job about is you can't just move your marriage into a place of health. You can't just move it into like, yeah, I'm gonna do a conference, I'm gonna do a retreat, and then all of a sudden I'm gonna start desiring my spouse. There's so much stuff that needs to be undone. So one of the core realities for me was, you know, I grew up meeting a lot of the needs of my own mom. Uh, I had a sixth sense for the needs of what women were going through. And then it became this place of, I'm gonna suppress my needs. But in the context of romantic relationships, I felt this intense desire gone mad to be seen, to be enjoyed, to have those four S's that were never given to me in my childhood. And that sense of the desire becoming a demand to be filled is part of, you know, that's the nature of lust, is I didn't have something and now I need it. And so part of what marriage began to expose was a lot of my unaddressed anger, a lot of my unaddressed entitlement. And part of what I was doing in my marriage was bringing a laundry list of unmet needs and a lot of entitlement. But then I really wanted my wife to desire me sexually and emotionally. And it's like, come on, Jay. That's what I was being cornered with is how can you show up entitled and extremely needy and still expect your wife to desire you and to want you? And that was an ego death for me of recognizing I don't like myself. I I have so much self-hatred inside of me. I am a tyrant to live with. And then at the same time, I'm wanting my kids and my wife to desire me. It was such a mind-bender. And I think that's the power of relationships, is something in me really does need to die, not violently, but with a level of grief of what have I been asking my family to have a front row seat to? And then again, that brings me into my relationship with my dad of like, how is it possible that all three of his sons at some level have received an inheritance of self-hatred that doesn't come from nowhere? So, what is it in the stringer lineage that really sets us up to hate ourselves and then also be intimidating to others? Interesting. So that's a question that my marriage cornered me with to ask. And then in my grief, in my sorrow, in my repentance of bringing those to my wife, to my kids, and my tears, there's more love, there's more intimacy that's able to emerge through that process of integrity and death. And so that's the process is none of this is easy. Uh it's really difficult to desire your own death. And yet sometimes failure will do it. Other times you need to pursue some kind of critical period of transformation for something that you know in your soul is killing you. So uh there's a for you. I'll come back to what his name is. Um Liturgies of the Wild. He just wrote this book. I can't remember the author's name.

Michael John Cusick 45:10

I read that, I read that this morning and uh yeah.

The Power of Relationships and Personal Growth

Jay Stringer 45:14

Martin Shaw. Um one of the things Martin Shaw says in that in that book, or maybe another book, is he says the soul is not above catastrophe to get your attention. And man, that hit me hard at some point in my marriage where it was like, okay, so the catastrophe of an unwanted sexual behavior, the catastrophe of a divorce, the catastrophe of, you know, a midlife crisis where you allow your life to be self-sabotaged. The soul is not above that to be able to get your attention. But you don't have to have a crisis or a profound failure to change. You just need to be able to listen to your life, to be able to study the conflicts, to be able to pay attention to where does my soul feel dead? Where does my marriage feel tepid? Where do my relationships feel lonely? And to have integrity with trying to understand how it got to be that way and what is really needed to change. So it could be catastrophe, it could be crisis, but you can also begin to choose a critical period of growth. And that's the madness and the beauty of relationships is that they are cornering us all the time to make changes.

Michael John Cusick 46:33

Thank you for sharing all of that. Once again, the vulnerability of sharing your own story in that. And I I'm struck by the fact for a couple of reasons. It feels important to say as a kind of parentheses from um simply our conversation, and I do want to get to the meaning desire. Um it's never too late to do the kind of work that you're talking about. Uh I turned 62 in a few months, and um I went with my wife and some dear friends to see Gabor Mate on Saturday night. And here's this physician, New York Times bestselling author, uh, grandparents died in the Holocaust. Uh, his mother had to abandon him when he was eight weeks old. And he told the story, this 82-year-old man who's just full of vibrancy. Um, and he told the story, he said, uh 10 years ago when I was 72, like like it was just this this it was funny. He was talking like when I was much, much younger, but he was 72. He he was flying back from Philadelphia into his hometown of Vancouver, and uh his wife texted and said, Do you still want me to pick you up at the airport? And he said that triggered a response in him where he was immediately filled with rage and and incredulity that she wouldn't pick him up at the airport and that she wasn't waiting. And he drove home uh in a taxi, uh was filled with rage the whole time, and then for 48 hours gave her the silent treatment. And I thought it was just gonna be a cute story. And he said, What I realized after she said to me something like, Are you done yet? was that there was unresolved trauma in my life at 72 that he went to therapy, I think for the first time in his adult life, had to begin to deal with his compulsions and addictions, had to begin to deal with this deep, deep attachment wound of being abandoned at eight, eight uh weeks. And then he said, pull up the slide, please, to the to the tech person. And up on the slide comes this painting. His wife Ray is a remarkable painter. Yes, and she painted a photograph of his mother standing in the spot holding this eight-week baby, literally handing him off to a stranger because she couldn't feed him and care for him. And he said, It was when I turned 74, I believe, two years after this process of starting therapy, he went back to Budapest, where he was born, and stood on the exact square where his mother handed him off. They could tell through the photograph and the painting. And it was so moving. So stunning. And it was it was just the next day where that provoked something deep inside of me that literally felt like rage. And I wasn't exactly sure what it was, but um, I felt so liberated by this 82-year-old man to say, do your work, even at this stage of life. So that's a process happening within me, but I but I I know a lot of men that I work with and have worked with who are, you know, post-success, they've retired, uh, they're in the last third of their life, and they're doing significant things, but there's work for them to do. And the invitation really is if you enter into this death, that there's more life, more abundance, more joy, more connection, more intimacy, more pleasure, and even more meaning to touch on, you know, all of your five desires. So thank you. All of that provoked that inside of me.

Finding Meaning in Connection and Play

Jay Stringer 50:17

Oh, it's so good. And I mean, not to move it too quickly into meaning, but you think about that story of like the meaning of this great um psychiatrist who, you know, at that moment when he's going back to Budapest and he's at that square, I I think if you cornered him with a threat to his life or death to say, like, uh, do you want more meaning here, or do you want a number one New York Times best-selling book next? Um, I don't think that there's any doubt in his mind kind of what he's going to choose, that it wasn't about more success. It's about integration. It's about knowing kind of where he comes from. And it's our adult duty to tend to those wounds. Not necessarily something like we can hope that a wife can draw that painting, we can hope that a good friend. But so much of what it means to be human is this recognition that um it a lot of this pain, a lot of this sorrow is something that I need to develop my own sight, my own soothing for. And so for him to make that journey and to connect with that eight-week year old inside of him, that's so much of just the beautiful, stunning work is not necessarily to outsource it to someone else, but that he gets to stand there as an 82-year-old receiving an eight-week year old. And there, there's something just so beautiful about that process, but also so meaningful.

Michael John Cusick 51:48

Yeah, it was, it was really, really lovely. And and all of that happened in front of 5,000 people. It was it was like being at a rock concert hearing this 82-year-old man just talk for two and a half hours. Um, Mick Jagger at age 80, I saw him play at uh the Mile High Stadium. And um he just he just keeps going and going. But I was so struck by the vitality inside of him. And I think that that vitality was directly correlated to the being able to integrate the eight-week old and to do that work. So you talk about meaning and in this world of mastery, going back to the earlier part of the conversation, I think for many people, meaning often takes the form of I have to do something significant. Uh I have to somehow touch the world in a way where I'll be remembered. But you're talking about something that's far more relational and really about intimacy and connections.

Jay Stringer 52:53

Yeah, I think there's so much pressure these days to have to like have a great legacy, to leave something profound behind, to be able to, you know, in many ways, we're not made to know all the world's problems and all the injustices that exist, whether it's, you know, dealing with people or agriculture or oil. Like, I mean, just I I finished reading Everything Is Tuberculosis. And great book on just like, you know, a million people essentially dying of tuberculosis when we have a cure. It it infuriates me. But, you know, you can read so many books along those lines. You read trauma books and you're like, why does sexual abuse have to happen? Why does tuberculosis have to happen? Why does racial injustice have to happen? Why does you know all this have to happen to our food system and what's happening to animals? So we very quickly get overwhelmed by the injustices and needs of the world, and then paralysis begins to set in. So part of the question that we have to begin to ask is, you know, where does our story come from? And we shouldn't feel the pressure to have to solve everything, to be the messiah in all places. But if you begin to study your story, there will be themes that begin to emerge that are meaningful. So part of what I want to hold in tension for a little bit is how do we develop a desire for meaning, but also how do we develop a desire for pleasure and vitality and play? And so, you know, when you ask Victor Frankel, like, you know, man's search for meaning, he might say that that's what we need is meaning. But then you ask someone like Joseph Campbell, and Joseph Campbell would say, I don't think so much that, you know, humanity is after meaning. I think we're after experiences of feeling fully alive. And I think that's the tension is how do I feel alive as I go through life, but also how do I have a sense of what is meaningful and good? And so one of the categories that I work through is just how, you know, what is play for people? So when, you know, Eugene Peterson was talking about the notion of a Sabbath, one of the things he says is that the people of Israel needed a Sabbath because they essentially went 400 years without a vacation. And so that sense of we need places in our life that we don't have to be good. We don't have to be there for other people, we don't have to kind of contribute uh in ways that feel disingenuous, we just get to be a human being. And so just that category of like, where do you play in your life? Um, you know, when we talk about some of the greats, the great pianists, we don't say that, you know, Mozart, Beethoven, John Batiste, like they're working and laboring at the piano. We say like they play the piano. And so all of us need to kind of go back to like where in our life do we play? Is that when we cook? Is that when we're doing landscaping? Is that when we are hosting people? Is that when we are playing a guitar? And so part of this invitation is yeah, like it there's a lot of difficulties in our life. There's a lot of crucibles that we have to go through, but also are we developing a desire for more playful existence than the one that we have? So uh can talk about play for a little bit before we move to meaning, but I think play and feeling alive is just so central to having a good life.

Michael John Cusick 56:33

You know, it's interesting that you talked about landscaping. Uh, I have this is a dead serious thing. You know, in our field, there's not a lot of closure. There's always loose ends. And so people talk about, oh, I love gardening. And that's my wife's thing. I love pulling weeds. Like I never knew that I loved pulling weeds, but I I've got my Home Depot, five-gallon bucket, little weeder, and to go out in the yard and just pull, but not just pull them, but to like get the little weeder underneath so it just pops up and you get the entire thing. And then the lawn looks great. And I've spent probably the last two weeks doing that, and it just I I literally feel joy doing it. Right. But it but it's hard work. And uh so sometimes play is this idea of no, I have to go do something that is uh fun and out it it can't be cooking because that's hard work, or it can't be pulling weeds because that's hard work. But but it it's something that um it's it's more about that it's life-giving, yes?

Jay Stringer 57:41

Yes. Yeah, I love that image. I I don't I live in New York City right now, so I don't have a lawnmower. But one of the things that I loved living in Seattle was just getting out my old lawnmower, starting that thing up, and then just doing the lines and getting to see the impact of my life immediately. Because that's part of like you and I being therapists, where it's like, yeah, we can be in someone's story for six months, years. And not to say that we don't see change, but we're often waiting. We're playing the long game with people's lives, of like, you know, this devastation of a forest fire to what new life begins to emerge months, years after that. It takes time. So I think for us as therapists to be able to like do an activity where I can see the immediate impact of my life, there's something so satisfying to that. So I did some of that upstate a bit too. I was just trying to clear some property, clear some weeds, and I could just be gone. Like I could tell my wife, like, I'll be back. And I don't it like did not need water, did not need food. I could work for like eight, 10 hours, just kind of like digging things, making my own trail out of. We had uh kind of an invasive species. It's called burning bush at a property upstate. And so essentially just cut that burning bush down, mulched it, and then the, you know, the the poison, the invasive became the path. And I was like, oh, that's my work, is you know, these invasive aspects of our life actually become the trail that we walk. So you're you're right. I didn't just want always to be outside. It's hard work, but there's something about dedicating life to some of that hard work that can eventually become somewhat playful and meaningful. So there's a there's a region in our brain called the AMCC. It's the anterior mid-singulate cortex. And that's one of the biggest discoveries in neuroscience in the last couple of years. And what they found is that your AMCC is essentially like your will to live, is the way some neuroscientists are talking about it. But essentially, it grows the more that you do something that you don't want to do. So a lot of people, you know, like sauna, and it's really difficult. But if you like it, your AMCC does not grow. You actually have to do something that you don't like. So the AMCC is a lot stronger, it's a lot bigger in athletes, uh, in people who, you know, have to move through a lot of resistance. And then it's a lot smaller in people that are obese or have more of a lazy lifestyle. Uh, it's a much smaller dimension of their life. So there are, I think, times and places where you have to intentionally choose something that is difficult. And I think therapy is a context for that. I think relational growth is a context for that. But also, that was part of my question to you earlier about music and songwriting is I think writing nonfiction therapy books is hard. When I've tried to write music and poetry, uh, uh it's so much more difficult than anything I've ever tried to write. And so that sense of my AMC really needs to grow in a creative way. I can be good, I can be useful to other people, I can kind of do that in my sleep. But the creative way of life, um, that's what's calling for me now in a life of meaning.

Michael John Cusick 1:01:21

So well, you're in the right place to live in New York City for that. That feels to me like uh like just a so much annoying levels of talent here. I know. So many distractions, but so much talent. And when I uh you know, having grown up Catholic and spent a fair amount of time in a monastery with my my aunt who is a nun, when I go on a retreat, I like to go to New York City or to a to a city where I feel more contemplative when I'm in an urban setting.

Jay Stringer 1:01:53

Huh. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I want acreage. No people.

Michael John Cusick 1:02:01

Yeah, there you go. Hey, will you finish with in meaning, you talk about three things to remember uh village, life through death, which we touched on, and then remembering your beauty. Can you just give a summary of those?

Jay Stringer 1:02:15

Yeah, so life through death we covered. Um the role of community is, you know, this is taken some from uh Francis Weller, but many others have spoken to this in our day and age too, where, you know, part of the problem that we're running into with intimacy or friendship is that we used to rely on a whole community, a whole village, a whole tribe to be able to give us some level of identity formation, a rite of passage, intimacy, connection, and meaning in our life. But now we often over-index into a particular romantic relationship or our career. And so that's what I find a lot in my clients is that they begin to bring all of their needs for validation, all their needs for meaning into their career. And they over-index in that career, and then inevitably their marriage implodes or their friendships begin to erode. Or you might have other people that they just love cozy relationships and they're all about connection, they're all about kind of bringing their needs, their desires to their good friends and to their significant other. And yet at the end of the day, it's like there, there's something about this relationship that begins to feel enmesh because there's no outside influence that's summoning them to create, to kind of move beyond. And so in the past, we used to have, you know, a village that would help us to understand who we are. This is the family history that we come from. Here's the rite of passage that will form you into being a man or a woman. And then also here is your community that you can bring your difficulties to, that you can bring your sense of love and commitment to. And then you find fulfillment through kind of mutual connection and love for one another. We live in the absence of a lot of that. So we over-index in careers, in relationships, in our own self-sabotage, be able to be able to avoid something of that kind of mutual reliance on other people. So we need a village. And then that third category that I'm working is what does it mean for us to remember our own beauty? And the complexity is that most of us have an inner voice that already tells us that we're not beautiful, that we look at how much we ate last night, we look at something of, you know, our own difficulties in life, meaning I didn't make enough money this year, uh, don't have enough friends. Most of us have irrefutable evidence that surrounds us that convinces us that we are not beloved, that we are not beautiful. And yet I think part of, you know, the parable of the talents that God has given us, these desires, these talents, uh, God has given us his son, uh, we are born in the image of God. Like there is so much beauty inside of us that uh I don't think many people are waking up to. Um, but the more that we understand our beauty, I think the more that we protect it, the more that we're able to see it in other people as well. So I think this is part of if I could just shake people uh in a very kind way, that's what I would want to do is I would want to wake people up, shake people to the recognition of how beautiful, how stunning they are.

Michael John Cusick 1:05:50

The book is Desire, and it's available everywhere fine books are sold. And uh Jay Stringer, thank you so much uh for another great conversation uh helping us to unpack this absolutely crucial aspect of our lives.

Jay Stringer 1:06:08

Oh, Michael, thank you for having me. I I really enjoyed our first conversation, also really enjoyed seeing you with your Home Depot bucket and your guitar. And again, like whether it's the Restoring the Soul podcast or the weekend that you have or the guitar, like desire is central to all the beauty and goodness that you bring to your family, to your life, to uh the men and women that you serve. So I think, yeah, just very struck by that. Again, that desire is not something that will inevitably bring you into something of self-sabotage or selfishness. Like it your desires are creating a feast for a lot of people. So thank you for bringing us into some of your desires as well.

Michael John Cusick 1:06:58

Oh, thank you. You're you're welcome. I receive that. So everybody listening, just remember this that on your darkest day or your longest night, love has you. Take care, everybody. So we've wrapped up another episode of Restoring the Soul. We want you to know that Restoring the Soul is so much more than a podcast. In fact, the heart of what we have done for nearly 20 years is intensive counseling. When you can't wait months or years to get out of the rut you're in, our intensive counseling programs in Colorado allow you to experience deep change in half day blocks over two weeks. To learn more, visit restoring the soul.com. That's restoring the soul.com.