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Destigmatizing Desire:--Our Discussion About Desire with Jay Stringer (Part Deux)
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Quick thought experiment: If someone says the word, "desire," what's the very first thought that pops into your head?
Was it any of the following:
- Romantic love?
- “Say what?”
- The U2 song off their woefully underappreciated Rattle & Hum album? (IYKYK)
- Nice to have, but more like a luxury.
- Desiring God by J.I. Packer?
- Sex?
- A psalm saying something about God giving you the desires of your heart?
- Lust?
Or did you maybe start to crave ice cream? Or a beer? Or a day off?
Was it the concept itself that you thought about, or an actual desire that you first noticed?
And even though this prompt asks about a thought, did you have any kind of feeling at the same time?
What else did you feel, if anything, when asked to think of that word?
The wide variety of possible responses that ordinary folks might have (or that one somewhat out-of-practice would-be writer/podcast producer can think up in a few minutes) suggests strongly that our relationship with desire is, well… complicated.
Author and therapist Jay Stringer is not afraid to think about desire. Or to research it. Extensively.
Nor is he at all daunted to talk about his newest book that comes out in March, Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow . Download this one and put it on repeat, cuz it's that good.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Surviving Saturday'
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to Surviving Saturday, a podcast about finding hope in the midst of life's disappointments. We resonate with the powerlessness that Jesus' first followers experienced as they waited between His crucifixion on Friday and His rising on Sunday morning.
00:00:27
Speaker
We feel led to bring light and goodness into a world that aches and wonders when relief will come. Here you'll find no easy answers, just honest conversations about actual pain through the lens of a suffering God.
Meet Wendy and Chris Osborne
00:00:42
Speaker
I'm Wendy Osborne, a licensed counselor based in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I'm her husband, Chris, a counseling intern and family law mediator. Join us as we wait together for more.
Exploring Desire Beyond Conventional Norms
00:01:01
Speaker
often we just think about desire as it relates to sex or desire as it relates to crushing our career, but it's so much more big and vast than that. And so that was part of what we did a lot of research on and just trying to understand like, what is this thing called desire and how can we develop it even more than we currently do?
00:01:23
Speaker
So in the book, you break down um the primary longings, the core longings, as you call them, into five categories. um Would you be willing to give us those and then also talk a little bit about what you mean by this idea of a civil war of our desires and the ambivalence around them?
Understanding Wholeness and Personal Growth
00:01:47
Speaker
So the five core desires are ah a desire for wholeness, which is all about understanding your story, identifying those childhood traumas and wounds, but really this desire to find wholeness and integration for your life.
00:02:04
Speaker
The second core desire... are Would you just put identity kind of in that category? Yeah. Sure. Yep. yeah ah Then the second core desire was ah for personal growth.
00:02:15
Speaker
And so this is, hopefully we'll have some time to talk about it today. I think this is so essential for it marriages. I think it's so essential for parenting. I think it's so essential for just identity.
00:02:28
Speaker
And that's the category of differentiation or individuation. So we are living in a particular moment where there's a lot of personal growth out there. a lot of major podcasts are all like, how do you live your best life? How do you optimize your health?
00:02:44
Speaker
What are the protocols you need? um All for some of those things, but it it really bypasses kind of the crucible of self-development. So that core desire is how do I desire the crucibles of my life? How do I develop hospitality for some of the difficulties that I'm in?
00:03:03
Speaker
That's the second core
Intimacy and Pleasure as Learned Skills
00:03:04
Speaker
desire. Third core desire is for intimacy, this desire to know and be known. And you know just part of what we learned is that you know intimacy is is not something that you're just hardwired with. Certainly if you grew up in a good family of origin that taught the value of knowing and being known, but most of us are a little underdeveloped there. so this is teaching people the skills of how to develop intimacy with people in their life.
00:03:32
Speaker
The fourth core desire is a desire for pleasure. And that's all kind of reframing how we think about sex and how we approach sex. And so I'm working with this notion that sex is always revealing things to us and provoking us beyond our window of tolerance, provoking us beyond the status quo that we've settled with. And then eventually has the power to heal us. But part of what I would say there is that most of us use sex to kind of avoid revelations about ourselves. We don't want to go to that place. We don't want to be provoked.
00:04:07
Speaker
And for those reasons, we don't really experience the healing that
The Quest for Life's Purpose
00:04:12
Speaker
we could. And then finally is this desire for ah purpose and meaning in our life.
00:04:19
Speaker
And ah really trying to show people how to find that, how to identify that, because a lot of, I'm sure you all see this as well, some people over-index in their careers. ah They crush their careers. They go after this yeah particular retirement number.
00:04:36
Speaker
And they're so over-indexed, they become Joan of Arc's in their career and their field, and yet their marriages are imploding, or they have no idea why they've entered into this hedonic treadmill of achievement and success, because they've never taken the time to understand their story. And so yeah part of what what what I was trying to develop was a holistic relationship to desire and What I would say is those things are not a la carte menu options that you get to pick or choose from. this is This is one thing and you have to learn how to desire all five core longings to really develop.
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah, i loved your metaphor of it. View this as a five course meal. Like you really want all parts of it. and you but and and you don't necessarily pursue them sequentially, although sometimes you might.
00:05:27
Speaker
But um it really lines up with a lot of them in the world of where I've done a lot speaking stuff for Lawyer Wellbeing and kind of that movement. and It's been radical to reconceptualize what is Lawyer Wellbeing. It's not just not having a breakdown, not being an alcoholic, not you know doing something stupid and take your career.
00:05:43
Speaker
We are trying to promote the idea of um wellness, integration of all these dimensions of ourselves many of which could you know kind of overlap with this. And so I think that's really appealing to say, um and it's not a hey, you've got these three tips and you master them and boom, you're off to the races. It's a, these are things to continue sort of, you know, dialing in and figuring out where you are on and adjusting.
00:06:07
Speaker
Yes.
Challenges of Self Development in Relationships
00:06:08
Speaker
Yep. Yeah. So let me give like a super practical example of like, you know, why wrote it, but also like the importance of it is, you know, this transition that i make between kind of like a desire for wholeness and knowing your story to that of differentiation.
00:06:23
Speaker
This is like a really big one for people that do story work. It's a really big one for people that have come out of therapy or are wondering why intimacy in their marriage or their careers are kind of falling short.
00:06:35
Speaker
And you know differentiation is taken from cell biology. So essentially, like think about a plant. And for a plant to grow, those cells have to differentiate or divide in order to promote the growth of the organism. yeah And so I always think about this in terms of you know like a symphony. that if you were to go to Atlanta, Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, and you were to walk into the symphony, you want to make sure that these musicians are highly differentiated. you You don't necessarily want broken strings in there, even though we all have them from time to time. You don't want them to be like, you know, that's really hard work to practice. So I just like... kind of phoned it in and now I'm going to get onto to the stage and it's all going to be good.
00:07:24
Speaker
But that's what a lot of us do is we arrive on the stage of marriage or the stage of our career or the stage of growth. And then it begins to break down. There's conflict. And part of what's being exposed is our lack of individuation, our lack of differentiation.
00:07:40
Speaker
And so, you know, you get into a marriage and you're like, I don't even like myself, but you're supposed to not just like me and pursue me and validate me. you're You're also going to want to have to have sex with me too. And it becomes this conundrum of, wait a minute, these people don't like themselves. They don't know how to do intimacy, but... They think because they understand an orgasm or because they want sexual connection, somehow they're good at intimacy or sex and all that kind of stuff. And that's the problem that I was running into out of Unwanted is you can give people insight into their story about why they are drawn to these escape patches. You can give them some intimacy of or some understanding of why intimacy in their marriage is struggling.
00:08:26
Speaker
But until there is a development of a self, ah that you enjoy, that you like, that you're working through, you are bringing an underdeveloped self into your marriage, asking for it to be validated. You're going to use your career as a reflected sense of self. And so you know narcissism, at least when i was in high school, was always like this guy that had...
00:08:51
Speaker
In my high school, he had a Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt or collared shirt. He always had like some Ford Mustang, Saline, Cobra edition of his car. like We're like, he's so full of himself. But what I learned in counseling is you know narcissism is not a fullness of self. It's an absence of self. And so you basically develop a reflected sense of self of this, how many books I've sold, how many downloads I've had, how much my net worth is, how many people want me, how many people text me a day, all become reference points of this is who I am.
00:09:28
Speaker
And when those things get exposed, which marriage does, career does, children does, then it's like, what do I do in this moment?
Growth Through Marriage and Parenting
00:09:38
Speaker
And so that's where I think individuation and personal growth is just so essential to have a good marriage, to have a good career, to have good sexual intimacy is that you really have to get a sense of who you are and know who you are. And, you know, to go back to the symphony metaphor, ah it's not just about playing an instrument. it's not just about being a good violinist. It's, you know, part of the kingdom of God, part of churches, part of good marriages are we all come together as growing differentiated people
00:10:15
Speaker
that don't necessarily need validation from one another, but we get to play music together. We get to create a piece. We get to create melody and harmony in a way that has not existed before. And I think that's really what flourishing is, is you know two people, especially in the context of marriage, that really enjoy who they are. They know where they come from. yes And they could be alone. They could also be together.
00:10:45
Speaker
But when they do come together, there's a sense of they they make music. there's There's something about the co-creation of what they come together to do that could not have been done without going through the the miserable places of development.
00:11:04
Speaker
Well, and it requires that the differentiation, I think is so great with Semphimetaphor, everybody knows how to blow let's say The way you blow a trumpet, you know, whatever. I don't even know what it is.
00:11:16
Speaker
But if you apply that, look what I can do to every other instrument, it's a disaster. It's not even going to get you anywhere with drums or violin. But even moving to a wind or even a different size of of ah of a horn, you've got to adapt. There's something different going on. And I think what I relate to, like from our marriage, I think we both came into marriage without much of a sense of self. right We knew how to care for others. to do.
00:11:49
Speaker
And so we come in, great, I'll care for you, I'll care for you. But we ran out and we didn't know who we were. and And really, we didn't know what we needed. We had people telling us, we have these five love links, all that stuff. Okay, great. But we didn't really know what ourself was to either know how to lay it down when you're supposed to or how to love somebody as I love myself.
00:12:09
Speaker
If that's completely underdeveloped in the first part, how am I going to do anything going outward to anybody that's really neat good? Well, yeah, because I'm thinking mirrored self or an undifferentiated self can't receive. It can only reflect. And so I try to believe the way you're treating me. i don't really believe it. So you can never convince me.
00:12:31
Speaker
um And it's a, you know, we're talking before we started recording about being in a place in life where we feel like we're in a chrysalis.
Crises as Catalysts for Personal Growth
00:12:40
Speaker
Okay. And we are becoming, but it's a bloody mess in there.
00:12:44
Speaker
Like it's not just this sweet um evolution. It is a messy stage of development and it's hard on both sides for the one differentiating and the one allowing the other to do that.
00:13:02
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. And that I think, know, part of what I want to be clear on is, you know, nothing will prepare you for marriage except for your marriage. So there's not like this sense of I'm going to get really differentiated and then all of a sudden my marriage is going to be good. That's part of what happens is like, I would say that your marriage is working quite well.
00:13:26
Speaker
when it leads to a level of distress, when it leads to a level of conflict, because marriage is doing what it's supposed to be doing, which is to expose how both partners are underdeveloped and the things that they need to identify in terms of where they are calloused,
00:13:45
Speaker
where they abdicate power, where they are coercive with power. And so obviously we want a baseline level of safety ah in the midst of that. This isn't in reference to a domestic violence situation, but we need to recognize that that's what marriage is, is it's a stage and the insecurities are going to be very quickly noted.
00:14:08
Speaker
ah the pattern ways of behavior. And so I think we need a new concept of like when we encounter you know a marital breakdown or difficulty with our spouse, your marriage is working great at that point. yeah ah But this is true. There's this guy by the name of Bill Plotkin.
00:14:28
Speaker
And he says that essentially, usually between the ages of someone's mid-20s and late 50s, the soul will initiate a crisis of some kind. And why he says that that happens and because we live in a society without elders. We don't have people that are initiating us into what it means to be a human, to be a man, to be a woman, to be married. And so when we are not initiated into growth, into identity, into formation, he would say that the soul initiates a crisis to be able to crack people open. And that could be marital tension. That could be an unwanted behavior. That could be depression.
00:15:13
Speaker
ah You know, Wendy, we were talking before the show. Sometimes that's your own kids and it's a parenting crisis that you go through, but something has to crack us open. And we usually hate the symptom. We want to we loathe it We want to get rid of it. We want to treat it. ah But that's part of the the goodness of this goop part of the goodness of the misery is that it's trying to expose a provisional self. It's trying to show this is the way that you have made your life work, and it's no longer sufficient for where you want to go. And that's so that's been a big reframe for for me in my marriage, but also in kind of elements of parenting, career.
00:15:58
Speaker
yeah It's all these places where my shortcomings are exposed. I'm like, okay, the stage parenting is working well. The stage of marriage is working well.
Unveiling the True Self
00:16:09
Speaker
stage of the podcast world is working yes well i was going say that's of things that jumped off the page in reading the new book the reconsider and i know you got it from know uh young or somebody but reframing the whole idea of what's at war with my true self or what's when i'm not being my true self i'm calling it the provisional self that was eye-opening for me i'm like oh i like that language because it's like this is the self that I've developed to get by in the world.
00:16:38
Speaker
Some by choice and some by necessity survival. um I like that better than this whole image of the false self that's held up in contrast to true self. That sort of felt indicting. It felt like, oh, you're lying. You're being false.
00:16:53
Speaker
And that's not exactly right. It's I, when I'm being that provisional self, I'm being true to how I was formed to be. I don't have agency over it. And I'm not the self that God had in mind that he wants, I think, to liberate from a lot of that junk.
00:17:08
Speaker
But that provisional self is a much um less pejorative and more welcoming. Oh, it's my provisional self. Duh, not my false self. I'm lying. No, I'm not lying. I'm reverting to things that are maladaptive. their Things are not helpful.
00:17:24
Speaker
But now I can sort of get back in the driver's seat you know to get a little IFS on it. But yeah i'm going to get the true self back in and we're trying to aim for what what is that person? Who are they? And what do they need? And how can they operate with agency in this moment instead of defaulting? The default self is the next best thing I can think of.
00:17:43
Speaker
Definitely. Yeah, the provisional self, i I first read about it from a union analyst by the name of James Hollis and found it so helpful in the in the same category where there was...
00:17:54
Speaker
You know, that was part of, you know, persona comes from the Greek phrase stage mask. And so I know that can be false self too, but it's like, no, I i both had this stage mask handed to me, but I also decorated that thing and I protected it and I got the fitting just right. So that's that's part of what we have to do is to honor, like, I built a really good mask. I built a really good persona, a provisional self that like,
00:18:23
Speaker
I can honor it, but I also have to get a sense of like, it needs to break down. And so yeah that's such a gift to be able to go through something of that crucible to say, like, just if I show up in the world with image management all the time, that's going to create difficulty with, know,
00:18:43
Speaker
My own family growing up. So like, you know, I grew up couple brief stories would be we had a we were pretty we were among the poor people in our particular upper class neighborhood in northern Virginia.
00:18:56
Speaker
ah But we had like a Dodge caravan with wood paneling, like probably 18 years old or something, like way long after everybody. So picture it you know anytime we were driving Matt or my dad had a geo prism that eventually became mine. And I just remember like, you know,
00:19:16
Speaker
putting the you know recline on the seats back so that kids in my neighborhood wouldn't have to
Impact of Family Dynamics on Behavior
00:19:23
Speaker
see me. i was bullied pretty incessantly in middle school.
00:19:28
Speaker
ah I used to love my Atlanta Braves t-shirts. I had a grandmother that lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and we'd always go down to Atlanta to like see a couple games every summer.
00:19:39
Speaker
ah but people started critiquing the clothes that I was wearing of like, why are you always wearing these Atlanta brave shirts? And, you know, my mom would often, her attunement was often on things like how clean our house looks. So she might miss my face coming back from a horrendous day of school, but the, you know, our blue collar kitchen was clean and that's where her attunement often was. And so,
00:20:06
Speaker
This sense of, you know, what I'm both feeling very critical of myself, but also my family was a lot of image management. And so now later on in life, you know, if my wife is trying to have a party or a get together, she will often wait until I'm traveling to have people over because I'm like, is the house clean? What are we going to do? What are we doing? And so I want like perfection in terms of how we're hosting and everything needs to be just right to be able to manage that image. I also have a son that he, he currently has this, there's a brand in New York called New York or nowhere. um way too expensive sweatshirts but in shirts but he has this new york knicks new york or nowhere sweatshirt that looks fabulous like it it's such a great sweatshirt but he wants to wear it all the time and i have this sense of like no you can't wear that every day of the week because people might think that's the only sweatshirt you have um and so my provisional self that came out of trauma heartache my own you know family and
00:21:14
Speaker
is at war with rest and play in my own family. And that's part of what family does in this particular season is there's going to be a breaking point with this image management in me or this sense of everything has to. So That's part of the kindness of the difficulties that we face is you're being cornered all the time. And you can either go to rage, to contempt, you can go to an addiction and fade, but at some level... you're going to have to engage this identity, this way of life that you have built, because the people in your world, whether it's your employer, your spouse, your dear friends, they all smell it.
00:21:59
Speaker
they they They know what's up with you. so in In my practice, i see people three years old and up. And so oftentimes I'll see multiple family members And one of the sweetest experiences is when parents will come in because they have a child that is rebelling, either lowercase r or capital.
00:22:26
Speaker
But there's a lot of animosity because the child maybe is lying and not getting school assignments done. And as we begin to talk, the parents have so much integrity that they will say, actually, i think part of this issue is me.
00:22:42
Speaker
And so it's not so much I got a bum child or suddenly my child has been corrupted by his middle school, but there's something I'm bringing to the equation. And so ah recently had a scenario where one of these families came in and the parents came for their first meeting. And then we realized, you know okay, you came into parenting with this beautiful desire for cohesion in a family, for um morality in your family, for unity.
00:23:14
Speaker
And then the more we talk, we realize, you know first, that's a beautiful desire. i have the same one. And then you have these teenage years and that's kind of out the window because everybody is differentiating, including the parents. We're trying to move into a new stage and not as a parent of young children. So then, you know, with this family, I discovered that the dad's mother left the family when he was four because of an addiction to alcohol.
00:23:43
Speaker
She would periodically call and going to come and pick you up and have this grand adventure. So he'd go sit at the end of the driveway and he would wait. And more times than not, she would not come.
00:23:55
Speaker
And dad would then you know invite him as he's wiping tears back, come in and let's play a game. Okay, and so what we discovered is his desire for this time with this mother to have connection. like He would get up, he'd get himself dressed, he would brush his hair the way he thought she liked it you know from what he remembered. And the desire was humiliated, right?
00:24:21
Speaker
And so he had come into marriage and then into parenting with a vow that he would not experience distrust and disconnection again.
00:24:33
Speaker
And so what he was doing is putting so much pressure on this child that he was actually experiencing the thing that he was most afraid of.
00:24:43
Speaker
And so I feel like this topic of desire and this topic of individuation, differentiation is so practically important for myself and all the people I sit with. And it sounds like you're seeing the same thing.
00:25:00
Speaker
Yes, yeah yeah so much about that particular story that we could workshop and uncover. but i mean yes like Parenting, of ah marriage are are all of these places of exposure of these scenes. One of the stories that I was thinking about with my son was we were when we were moving from Seattle to New York, my son was just challenging almost every decision that I was making about everything. Yes. I was hoping you'd
Children as Catalysts for Parental Growth
00:25:31
Speaker
tell this story. So I was going to steer you next, please. Okay. Yeah. and you know just challenging...
00:25:37
Speaker
everything So it was you know kind of pandemic parenting where you're trying to do be the math teacher, the language arts teacher, Zoom technician, and also mom, dad. And it it was just impossible. And so he was pushing back and it was right around the age of like seven. and part of what I you know began to experience was just like everything inside of me wanted to kind of come against him for rebelling. ah this raw desire in him. I wanted, there was a billboard behind our house in Seattle that was like every gallon or every egg ah basically takes 53 gallons of water to create.
00:26:20
Speaker
And so i remember this assa he had chucked three eggs against the fence in our backyard and said like, I just wasted 159 gallons of water. and He's proud it. He just had this tackle that he was proud of. And yeah we were just in friction and difficulty all the time. And like my wife saw you know rupture and repair is really good on one hand, but if parents are not really going beneath the surface to understand like why do I keep rupturing, it just doesn't do much. So my wife essentially kicked me out of our house and said, you got to work on this.
00:26:56
Speaker
And don't come back until you have some answers and some level of commitment. And part of what that drive offered, I went to a park and part of the the first sense that came to me when I was in Carkeek, I can remember it like it was yesterday, was This kid is able to rebel in ways that you were never allowed to rebel.
00:27:17
Speaker
This is what Rachel was able to do. This is what, ju but you have never been able to rebel and you are pathologizing your son's defiance rather than kind of. yeah And so that was the message that I needed to hear. didn't It didn't clear it all out. It wasn't, you know all the debris wasn't gone, but I'm like, I'm vowing in this moment to come back without pathologizing uh,
00:27:43
Speaker
Disruption. And so part of what I said is like, you know, what do you want to destroy? Once a week, I want to destroy something with you. And my parents just dropped off my childhood bin because we were about to move and they wanted it out of their house and clean out their storage. Perfect.
00:27:59
Speaker
And so I had this bin full of like trophies. I went to a small Southern Baptist high school and won ah almost every award there is to win, like male Christian athlete of the year, male athlete of the year, student athlete of the year, the Barnabas Award. Like i I finished second in the state science fair in terms of. Yeah. I built a, it was called hydrogen-based technology for a cleaner, more sustainable environment.
00:28:26
Speaker
So I had this this trophy from the state of Virginia for winning second place. And he said, dad, i want your trophy. So he grabbed my second place science fair trophy and then my high school bat.
00:28:41
Speaker
ah from when I played baseball and ah essentially put it on top of a rock and then swang the bat with as much gusto as he possibly could. And the trophy shattered into...
00:28:56
Speaker
like a thousand pieces. And he just started laughing so loud. And he's like, dad, your trophy is cheap plastic. And again, the metaphor not lost on me of like that, you know,
00:29:12
Speaker
kids are trophy destroyers. They know what is dear to you. They know the things that you, you know, I don't have trophies that I keep up in my apartment, but it's like, they know that there are certain things that I idealize certain ways of life that, you know, I don't want disruption. I want control. i want order. And that's what my kids and my wife are teaching me is like, we will destroy virtually every trophy that you hold dear and you're most of the time i resist it but maybe one out of a hundred i'm like okay they have a point yeah you're coming here with that record uh let's tell you how little it means um yeah so just as a ah basic question jay what do you gain when you let them destroy your trophy like there's just so much in that
00:30:01
Speaker
What's the gift to you?
Embracing New Family Dynamics
00:30:02
Speaker
It's some level of freedom of being able to say, I don't want to hold this kid hostage in the way that I help. So even though I feel like I've broken loyalty to my mom and my dad, I also continue to be deeply loyal to them and creating systems of order at the cost of connection.
00:30:21
Speaker
And so really what I gain is connection. It's light. It's being able to break loyalty so that new life can emerge. So I think it creates much more freedom and just a different tone in our family. So it supports desire. Intimacy, like the safety of intimacy. Yeah. I'm just thinking the safety of of that kid. Like I can tell dad,
00:30:45
Speaker
I'm not impressed. I'm not going to do this. It's a visual reminder, but I'm still for you. Like he's got this. He's not smashing you. He didn't say your head. You know, let me smash that at the baseball bat. He's like, let me smash this icon.
00:30:58
Speaker
The thing I love about that, Jay, too, is it it reinforced something for me that was helpful. um I found that the whole thing amazingly, and and but so illustrative. of the problem of parenting um because I view you as a disruptor, okay? Unwanted, disrupted, how all those books that you mentioned are are written and and Sheila Rae Griguaire is doing the same sort of thing with bear marriage there is disruption that is overduing needs to happen You are iconic for me for disrupting. And how ironic is it that your child is is showing that and your response is, no! you know i mean but But I i resonate with it because that's how I am too.
00:31:36
Speaker
When I see my kids, or as they were growing up, rebelling, pushing against the goads and kind of resisting, particularly things of faith, I'm like... Hey, hey, I'm je Gen X. We already did that.
00:31:48
Speaker
I was already listening to cool, edgy, stick it to the man Christian music back in the 90s and, you know, 2000s. So you don't have to do that. And and no they're not impressed. That's right. but But we already did the rebelling we need to do, right? every generation thinks this right stuck into the man we We rebelled against the boomers. The millennials come along like, y'all nothing.
00:32:08
Speaker
um But then I realized, wait a minute, they're going to have to, if they're going to different differentiate, ah these kids have to do it push against what we gave them, which is painful because we're like, no, no, no, we've learned all this stuff. We're the ones. We're reading Dan Allender books about parenting and we're we're trying to get it right and we're rejecting all this other stuff.
00:32:24
Speaker
But they're like, yeah, but we're about to reject everything you signed up for, too, because they read it's a thing you signed up for. It's a your way of producing what you want. It's not necessarily authentic, true, good in of itself. And they're to have to figure out that on their own.
00:32:41
Speaker
which is, yeah and what's it terrifying? Think about like ah a seed, like for ah a seed to be able to grow into a plant, the, you know, the the casing, you the the root has to go down in order for the shoot to eventually emerge. So at some level, parents don't like this, but yeah, some breaking, some rebellion from the casing is required for growth. And so that's, you know, what what really challenges us in parenting is kids have to break it They have to break open. They have to go down and descend into who they are in order for a differentiated self to emerge. And most families don't have the maturity to tolerate that there's going to be different desires and different opinions and different ways of seeing
00:33:29
Speaker
an issue and a dynamic. So that's, again, back to differentiation isn't just like, I know it all. It's it's it's being solid and who you are, but it's also increased flexibility. And flexibility is what's needed in relationships and stretching in organizations. Like you you want to have a solid sense of who you are. You want to be solid, grounded, have muscle mass, but you also want to be flexible. So flexibility is is such a hallmark of maturity.
00:34:01
Speaker
Well, and I think our kids trained me in that, right? Because I had to become solid enough that I could allow for flexibility for them to become themselves and not who not a mirror reflection of me, but who they are meant to be in the world. yeah And that's a hard lesson. Right.
00:34:24
Speaker
We sort of, yeah, we sort of redefine like being able to, I didn't even use the word success in parenting. I think that's just what that term means. Nothing of survival is a better one, but, but feeling okay about where our kids are. We're like, well, how long did it take us to find our real selves and what kind of crises had to happen? Oh crap. We were in our thirties, forties.
00:34:47
Speaker
If they're getting some of that stuff a little earlier and they're like more therapy friendly earlier they're asking honest questions earlier even though that's painful for us I've had to let go of my own certainty on a lot of things oh they're doing a little earlier than we are actually cool maybe they won't have to go they will have to go through crisis and suffering but maybe not as much or not the same way we can't control that but it's they're gonna have to grow an individual and even as ours are in their 20s they're not done we weren't done in our 20s we look back we i make we were not done by a long shot
00:35:18
Speaker
No, but I think they're more mature than we. at that stage, if you compare like that, yes. This morning about, you know, it it is my glory to watch them become more mature than me, to see them do better in the world than I've done. And I can have an envy because of baggage that kept me, but if I can launch beings that flourish more than I did at their age...
00:35:47
Speaker
I am pleased and so grateful. Beautiful. And it drives us the last little point too, and we got wrap, but that's a faith stretcher too, because it's less hey i got this great christian book or resource that's going to produce the right kid or Even the book you know that Dan wrote of like, don't follow any of that, but we're still like, okay, but I read that one and I'm doing that one. I'm i'm letting my kids raise me. Look at this.
00:36:12
Speaker
No, no, no. It's still capable of being turned into this. Come on. It's a vending machine, input, output. It literally is a faith stretcher of both ourselves and watching our kids just to say, okay, I'm going to trust God's bigger, more mysterious, and really knows more about my desires and cares more about them than I do.
Jay Stringer on Transforming Conversations Around Desire
00:36:32
Speaker
So Jay, thank you for being with us. Thank you for your work. Thank you for your research. Thank you for the hard labor of putting this into a form that we can access, that those that we love, our clients, our friends, our family can access. um Can you let us know what you are doing other than writing and how people could find you?
00:36:59
Speaker
Sure. Thank you so much, Wendy. um i am You can find me on jay-stringer.com. There is also a Jay Stringer that's a crime fiction novelist that he got to the web websites first. He got to Instagram first. Little punk. Yes!
00:37:19
Speaker
so but
00:37:34
Speaker
understand their own sexual stories so that they're more effective in leading others but that website or instagram will be the hub for all things in the j stringer universe. So i had I was recording the audio version of desire.
00:37:51
Speaker
And part of what I was talking to the audio director about was like, it'd be really great if we could collaborate on a book together where it's like, you know, you you're reading like random house audio presents desire read to you by the author, but to be able to have read to you by Jay Stringer and Jay Stringer.
00:38:12
Speaker
think, and thing Crime fiction meets sex and desire. i think There's a lot of overlap, actually. We could go a lot of directions with that, um certainly. no good to be with you all today.
00:38:27
Speaker
You two, one last question. Are you still offering intensives for people? Because that has come up in my practice before and I've sent people your way. I do offer intensives. Yep. So we do three day intensives for people that are just wanting to take a deep dive into their story. I don't ever view it as a replacement for therapy yeah or, you know, some silver bullet of this is what's going to help me outgrow an unwanted behavior. This is what's going to solve intimacy. But, you know, we work pretty quickly to kind of get into what are the major themes that are at work. And so,
00:39:03
Speaker
day one is about the past the provisional self who you were the roles that you played day two is about the patterns that you've developed in your adult world that are leading to conflict and difficulty and then day three is kind of a some sense of future of if the provisional self no longer is active the patterns of sabotage are no longer there like who do you want to become and that's what desire is all about to me It's not about a book. It's about like when we don't tap into our desire, which is our talents, which is what God has given us, we're not just self-sabotaging. We're not just being sidelined by shame. We are preventing podcasts like Surviving Saturday from entering the world. We're preventing books like Unwanted from... like All of this happens because of desire. And so that's what I really want people to kind of get a sense of with regard to desire is, yeah, we've got shame, we've got destructive patterns, we've got conflict, but if you can really honor the desires within you,
00:40:08
Speaker
Our world needs your creativity. it needs your passion. it needs you to stop freaking burying your talents and begin to invest them and develop them. So Jay, I'll give you props on that. I mean, I've experienced it from you and the conversation that we had during that interview. intensive and that whole reframing of desire and where my desires were not even big enough.
00:40:33
Speaker
um It's the reason I'm i'm getting a therapy degree or counseling degree and becoming a therapist. It's an ingredient in it. It was one of several that kickstarted that and said, what what is it that you want, especially now that my identity of being a parent all time, you know every minute of the day is gone.
00:40:50
Speaker
um Who do I want to be? and so we are grateful to you i hope that this desire book is changing the conversation yeah like on one it did, but broader and, and, and really people find freedom um in it um and find that God's, God's got a lot of good stuff um that he will give us the desires for heart, but he'll shape them and determine something way more than even we could dream of if we just let.
00:41:16
Speaker
Well said. Yes. So good to be with you both. You too. Thanks, Jay. The Surviving Saturday podcast is brought to you by Nurture Counseling PLLC, a counseling teaching and training center based out of Charlotte, North Carolina.
00:41:32
Speaker
We help families flourish one story at a time. Nurture Counseling provides counseling, counseling intensive for couples, conflict resolution coaching, story work groups, seminars, workshops, and retreats to provide a safe and welcoming context for exploring the agonizing experiences of pain, brokenness, and evil that disrupt our lives.
00:41:51
Speaker
and that God often uses to nurture deeper trust and intimacy with Him and with each other. You can find us online at www.nurturecounseling.net.