The Disruptive Power of Desire with Jay Stringer
Welcome back to the second half of this powerful conversation with Jay Stringer.
Building on the foundation of his book, “Desire,” Jay moves us deeper into one of the most provocative ideas of the conversation: Sometimes our desires must disrupt and even destroy something in order to make way for something more true.
This isn’t destruction for destruction’s sake. Iconoclasm is the breaking of false structures, identities, and “provisional selves” that no longer serve us. And as Jay explores, when we don’t have wise guides or meaningful rites of passage, that disruption often shows up as self-sabotage—affairs, addictions, burnout, or relational breakdown.
But instead of dismissing those moments as failure, Jay invites us to see them as honest signals—clues pointing back to our story, our unmet longings, and the deeper work our soul is trying to initiate.
Listen in to a conversation that is rich with story and grounded in research as they also explore:
- why community is essential for making sense of our desires (and why we can’t do this work alone)
- how to interrogate your desires in a healthy, curious way—not with shame, but with wisdom
- and how our desires are often shaped by forces we don’t even realize, yet can be reshaped over time
Desire has the power to both build and break. The question is not whether disruption will come—but whether we’ll have the courage, support, and curiosity to let it lead us somewhere good.
About Our Guest:
Jay Stringer guides men and women to freedom from sexual brokenness so they can pursue the lives they desire.
He is a licensed mental health counselor and researcher. For 15+ years he’s helped thousands make sense of unwanted patterns and unmet longings and turn them into a path for healing and growth. His work equips you to read your story and form desire into your greatest ally.
He is the author of Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing (100,000+ readers), grounded in a study of nearly 4,000 adults and used by clinicians and communities worldwide. His forthcoming book, Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow (Random House, 2026), offers a new framework for five core longings—wholeness, growth, intimacy, pleasure, and meaning—and shows how to form desire into a force that restores connection and purpose.
Jay lives in New York City with his wife, Heather, and their two children.
About the Allender Center Podcast:
For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.
At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
You can become a supporter of the Allender Center Podcast here.
If you and your organization would like to partner with the Allender Center Podcast, please reach out to Clay Clayton at cclayton@theallendercenter.org
Episode Transcript:
Rachael: Well, good people with good bodies. We are back to continue our conversation with Jay Stringer around his generous labor of love on his newest book, Desire. And I want to clarify that Dan had version one because he’s been so committed to this project that he read the subtitle of maybe one of the first iterations of a title. So the actual title is Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal and Grow.
Dan: I love that title. I’m stuck with the first. It will always be there, but I can make that amendment. Oh, Jay, we are, again, so grateful for your labor and for the power of this book. But I left folks with the question of the exile, the iconoclastic disruption.
Rachael: Can you define iconoclastic just really quickly?
Dan: Okay. Well, icons. The notion that certain objects bear a value, like plastic rewards for being second. I was so glad. What the heck did the person do who got the science award for first? Again, that’s another conversation.
Jay: So my project was hydrogen-based technology for a cleaner, more sustainable environment, like systems thinking high schooler.
Dan: That’s so cool.
Jay: The person who won it was the spontaneity of water who basically measured how water would drip spontaneously from a faucet and tracking that. So I was thinking systems, they were actual scientists. So I got an Audubon society membership for a year, so learned some birds.
Dan: Okay. So iconoclasm is the goodness of your son taking that ridiculous award. I think you should have won it, but nonetheless, crushing it. So iconoclasm is the breaking of idols, essentially the breaking of icons that bind us in a way into a level of the loss of self and the loss of goodness. So your son did so well, but only because at some level he knew that you were free at some level to engage the reality of his desire. And he sent you to some degree into the participation and prodigality and the destruction of icons that have really an idolatrous hold. So it’s a brilliant story, but it’s also takes us back to Luke 15. And the fact that the Father begins by provoking desire, you have never asked me for a fat calf. So in some sense, this book is the engagement with the book Prodigals who have taken desire into the violence of sabotage or to those who stand apart envying, but also hating desire for what it calls forth. This is a damn good book.
Jay: Yes. Part of the direction that I go in that is there’s something about some of the clinical work that I do where everybody has to destroy something. See it in everybody’s life, whether it’s a marriage, their own sexual integrity, a career, that there’s something in us that needs some level of destruction. And so part of that provisional self is if we don’t have elders around us, if we don’t have rights of passage to allow another world to be exposed, to die, part of what I’ve … I think James Hollis will say this, but the soul will initiate a crisis. And forget his name… it’ll come back to me. But one of the things he says is, “The soul is not above catastrophe to get your attention.” And I just love that line, that there’s something about the catastrophes of our life that are trying to wake us up. They’re trying to crack us open. And that often becomes like if you don’t have people that are initiating you into that death of the provisional self or where you come from, then the self-sabotage behavior often becomes the most honest dimension of your life. But then you look at your desires for destruction, you look at your desires for an affair, and then you have irrefutable evidence that your desires are not well. But part of the counterintuitive frame that almost every client recognizes is like, this wasn’t about the affair. This wasn’t about the unwanted behavior. This wasn’t about the alcohol. It’s telling the truth about something of where I come from. And so that just becomes that sense of the iconoclast of we need to destroy something. But then as we destroy, oftentimes we kind of link that in with desire and then all of a sudden we have irrefutable evidence that my desires are not going to go to a good place. They’re going to destroy eggs, they’re going to destroy trophies, they’re going to destroy integrity. And then that leads to that sense of suppression of, I really shouldn’t ask for much because if I do ask for the fatted calf, I’m so selfish, is it really mine? It just brings up all sorts of unresolved questions.
Dan: Well, as we step into this, I want to invite you to put a bit more words about the immense research. And again, this is theoretically, it’s a rich, complex, thoughtful labor, but one of the things that you did in the perception of we’ve got to be able to take the power of research into anecdotal because we’re therapists, we work with much more anecdotal realms, but there’s been a deep refinement of your research orientation in Unwanted, certainly in your first book, but feels like vastly even more.
Jay: So a lot of it is like work with different categories that I’ve learned from you Dan, Allender Center, Gottman’s Research, read Emily Nagowski, just there’s so much that’s out there. And so part of what … I don’t have a PhD in research, I have a guy that’s a PhD research scientist at New York University, and he’s the guy that kind of makes sure that everything is psychometrically valid, helps me find validated instruments that have already existed. So that was part of the play at the beginning of this process is if you know anything about ACEs, Adverse Childhood Experiences. So we find the ACE scale, but then we also find enmeshment scales that have been validated. And then we have unwanted sexual behaviors like infidelity or porn use or just what are the escape hatches of people’s lives. But then I’m also looking at confidence and meaning and purpose. So that was part of the fun of the initial formation of the research instrument is I’m working with previously psychometrically valid instruments, but then I get to bring them together to research how do all these work off each other and how does one inform the other? So an example of this would be, if you’ve ever heard of like that all of us have a sexual excitation system and a sexual inhibition system, Nagowski kind of refers to that as sexual breaks and sexual accelerators. And so most of us have a very underdeveloped sex education. That’s no mystery, that’s no surprise, but we’re coming as very underdeveloped people. So then I was like, I wonder what best predicted sex education scores in people. Guess what the number one predictor of a competent, robust understanding of sex education was in the Western world. Sexual abuse. Not education, not mentoring. And so abuse was the best predictor of having a comprehensive sex education. So that was just devastating to hear that. Porn use is often the education that people receive, receiving it from abuse. But then we also wanted to say like, okay, if there were couples that were really flourishing in their sex life, what did they do differently that other people were not doing? And one of the things we found is if you were a couple that had language to talk about sexual breaks and accelerators, like this is what turned me on, meaning you had the differentiation to reveal your sexual mind and your partner was able to reveal their mind about what they enjoyed, you were 18.9 times more likely to have a better sex life just because you were able to talk about what you enjoyed. So just different categories where, I know it’s a Jewish understanding, but that was in marriage and family back at the Seattle School with you, Dan, that sense of like most people have not fully left their mother and father. They have not fully … You can’t say yes to your spouse. You can’t prioritize them if you’re still deeply loyal to your parents. So I’m taking that category of enmeshment and then saying, what happens if there’s high enmeshment and then high conflict? And that’s, again, 2.6 times more likely to have significant marital conflict if you remain enmeshed to your family of origin. So that was part of what we were able to do in the research is people that were really flourishing in life, sexually with meaning, with purpose, with confidence, with differentiation, what were they doing differently that the rest of us could learn from? And then just those people that were deeply struggling, what was going on in their life? So one of the key findings was sometimes we think if you actually honor the desires of a child, they’re going to end up being very selfish, self-absorbed. But what we found is that if you had a parent or a caregiver that actually made your desires matter and they moved towards those desires and cultivated them, you were four times more likely to have healthy, robust desires as an adult. So contrary to popular opinion, investing in the desires of your kids actually turns people into the best version of themselves when they’re developed. So we were just able to do a lot of different, like, okay, if this is happening and this is happening, or let’s say someone has high anxiety, well, how did their family of origin work inform that? But then there’s some people that had really difficult family of origins, but their confidence was high and their meaning in life was really high and they didn’t feel nearly as traumatized as we might expect. And one of the things we found there was if you had one person in your life that was an empathetic witness that actually asked about your pain, your likelihood of developing PTSD drops significantly. I can’t remember the exact language. So again, when you hear Gabor Mate talk about trauma is not just what happened to you, but it’s what happens inside of you in an absence of an empathetic witness, we have data now that actually supports that. And so that was just part of the fun of being able to say, okay, what does Emily say? What does Dan say? What does Gabor say? And just being able to say, okay, there’s truth to what these theorists are saying, but now let’s bring them together to see how they work off each other. And that’s the fun, that’s the play of research. And as much as it’s also just sat at my computer for way too many freaking hours … I have memories of my dad working on sermons on Saturday, like just all day and there would be these Saturdays and Sundays where it’s like my son and daughter have walked by me about nine, 10 times and just seeing someone at his laptop at his computer. So a lot of play, but also a lot of isolation.
Dan: Again, to go back, there’s so much and this is why I’m reluctant to use the word integration in this book, but you have many divergent thinkers sitting with you at your table. And from my standpoint, you have literally stepped into some of the brilliance of very different viewpoints, sometimes contradictory viewpoints, and brought that question into a research focus to ask, given theory, given anecdotal, how do we actually begin to talk about what’s the wellspring? And to step that back to the realm of desire, which most of us would say, at least with some degree of honesty, it’s not brought us goodness, it’s brought us much more complexity, conflict, disruption. In other words, there are not legitimate, but feel understandable reasons why we’ve capped this sucker and not allowed to grow much. So one of the comments Rachael made in our inner play was, where do you want to take us? Because there are five unique, rich desires that you see in this kaleidoscope of creating the unique beauty and color of the human condition. What most intrigued you today?
Jay: Yeah, I think part of where I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic of desire, I’ve been thinking a lot about the parable of the talents, where the master has given these people talents and the question is, what are you going to do with them? And the harshest words that the master has are to those who have buried their talents. So I think of desire as similar to those talents, that there are these raw, beautiful talents living inside of us. The terrain inside of us is vast, and yet most of us, I think, are much more in a war to suppress those desires, to not cultivate those desires. And I think the master will have its harshest words on, I gave you these stunning desires for beauty, truth, goodness, and you did not develop them. You buried them. And so I think part of what I want to do through this work is to wake people up to how stunning their desires are, but you can’t just move towards them and expect that they’re going to turn into the best version of yourself. Desires are highly susceptible to being influenced by forces that we have no idea of. So when I first started doing research, I came across this really great simple study where the researchers basically gave these people word pairings. And so one group was given the word pairing ocean and moon, and then a couple distracting questions. And then 10, 15 minutes later, the researchers came back to those people and said, “Random, but will you tell us your favorite detergent?” And the amount of people that answered Tide detergent that were given the word pairing ocean and moon. And so what the researchers say in their own kind of hidden research language is desires are highly susceptible to outside forces. So if our desire for wanting Tide detergent can be primed into us by ocean and moon, are we really taking seriously the interrogation of our desire? Not in a deep suspicion, but when you think about this is a lot of the world that I dwell in with regard to porn or sexual, this would be a trigger warning, but even things like sexual choking and the desire for that that men are doing plays into the presence of pornography. So all of us have certain desires that we are mimicking to kind of use kind of Girardian language of, it’s mimesis, it’s mimetic behavior. So even the desire that some people have for green grass in some of the research that I did, that dates back to like 17th and 18th century aristocrats who had too much money, too much land, and basically gave money to people to develop their fields. So when you’re thinking about like, oh, I just want this new house and I want to have a nice green lawn. And it’s like, well, maybe you want a soccer field for your kids to play in, but what if you want a Japanese rock garden in your backyard? What if you don’t want a backyard and you don’t want to deal with grass? So all of our desires from something like detergent to sex to intimacy to the meaning of my career of being a therapist and being an author and what I write about has all been primed into me. And that’s so discouraging. That haunts me every night of like, what do I embrace? What do I move towards? What are the desires that I should be listening and paying attention to from childhood that God has planted inside of my heart that I have not paid attention to? And so that’s part of what is keeping me up at night is I want something of the provisional self to die, but that’s part of, I’m sitting as a middle child with all these theorists who I know hate each other. And that’s part of the fun in the writing is I’m like getting Schnarch and Sue Johnson to hang out for a little bit. And I just think that that will be hysterical to have both of them. And I think at this point, I think I might lean slightly more towards Schnarch than other categories, but that’s part of the fun is I get to try on different theorists, as you said, and be the middle child and say, okay, I get to integrate, but I also get to say this person is wrong. And so that’s where it becomes play is to be able to work through different theorists and different ideas, think about clients, think about my own life. But I think back to the language of the parable of the talents, all of us have talents. All of us have desires inside of us that I don’t think we’re taking seriously enough. I think so many of our desires are being hijacked to things that are unto selfishness, unto drama, unto destruction. And I think that there are so many beautiful, stunning desires in us that never get to be developed because people haven’t taken the time to study the themes of their life, the stories of their life and say, where is all this taking me? And that’s what I’m intrigued by is I don’t know where my desires are taking me in the next decade. I have some compass settings, but that’s part of the fun is I’m in a goop right now and I don’t know what’s forming. I know something’s dying and I don’t quite know what’s going to rise, but I’m at least a little bit intrigued.
Dan: Rachael, a direction because if not, I’m going to go back to a conflict I had with Becky using Jay’s work with regard to green grass, but I’ll let you go wherever you wish.
Rachael: Well, I wanted to kind of, I’m just thinking for the listener because I do think people, exactly what you’re saying, like our desires are really susceptible. Our desires are deeply formed in trauma and in goodness. They’re revelatory. They move us, they terrify us. So when you say interrogating your desires, obviously you need to read the book because Jay’s giving you a very beautiful actual process for like what does that mean and specifically what are we interrogating and how are we understanding what are the kinds of desires that we need to cultivate more deeply? But just for you when you say interrogate, what does that mean? Because I can hear people going back, defaulting back to because the heart is deceitful above all else and because our desires can’t be trusted. So interrogating them means like where are these bound in sin? So I’m just wanting you to play more with that language for people.
Dan: So I read that section to Becky about the idea that green grass went back to the notion of elitism and aristocracy. And I said, “Do you understand, sweetheart, that this bondage you have to your lawn?” Well, it didn’t go well. Nonetheless, it was hilarious because neither of us understood the power of that mimetic desire. So as you would help me engage Becky in helping her be free from-
Rachael: No, he said, “Interrogate your desires” not interrogate other people’s desires.
Dan: Oh, well, yeah.
Jay: So here’s an example. My son just turned 13, same week as Desire was released in the world. So I’m thinking about rites of passages. I’m thinking about all these things. So wanted to take myself and him to Sweden, which is where all my ancestors are from. So my great-grandfather came over late 1800s, early 1900s, about a million Swedes left out of the country of five million people. So we’re just trying to get a sense of where do we come from? I want to let him snowboard, let him kind of understand … There’s certain things that he really wants to enjoy leaving the familiar, designing a rite of passage for him. And so we go to Sweden, ski, snowboard for a couple days, but then the family farm is about to turn 200 years old this summer and had never met them. My uncle had done some research on family history. Who were they? And so that was one of the most meaningful parts of the trip is took a train ride down to Southern Sweden and essentially dairy farmers for seven generations. And I was so struck by them, like their love for the land. I mean, they call themselves rock poor, but it’s like rocks or rock rich or stone rich, that’s what they said. Stones everywhere. They’ve had to work the land. They know how to stay. They know how to work the land. They have neighbors, they have friends. But then when it comes to the notion that their 19-year-old might travel more than three hours away from home, and they live three hours from Stockholm and had been there, one of their kids had been there once. And so they know how to stay. When I went there, part of the question I had is like, “How have you all understood my family?” The ones that essentially left and they said, “We have a word for you all.” And I can’t remember what the word is, but it’s essentially Outwalkers. They said, “You are the Outwalkers. You are the immigrants. You are the ones that left.” And they’re like, “It’s not entirely derogatory.” But I was like, “Oh my goodness, this is phenomenal.” I feel that word in my body that I am an outwalker. I leave places. I also, for Christmas this year, kind of leading up to this with my son, basically said to my parents, I don’t want Amazon gift cards or checks. I want you to sit down at your computers and give me five hours of writing of just stories that you remember from your grandparents. Just give me stories that I can read with Amos when I’m going. And so some of the stories that my dad had written for us, I had never heard before, but my grandfather, essentially during World War II, knew that his commander was not trustworthy. So allowed himself to be disciplined and thrown out of that particular community in order to not go to war under him. So I’m learning all these stories in the last couple months of like, I am someone who leaves. I’ve left denominations, I’ve left cities, I’ve left vocations, I’ve been pastor, I’ve been there. And so there’s something about my desire to leave that is so good. That is what led me to Seattle was to leave the iconoclast reformed, I was going to go to outside of Philly where you live, Rachael.That was the seminary, but I left that. I left certain worlds. And so that’s part of what seeing my Swedish family did to me is like, how do I honor that there is a time to leave and so much of my best work is around leaving, but there’s also a time to learn how to develop a desire to stay, to learn a skill, to work the land. I can’t build anything. My second cousins, everything that they were talking about was like they want to do practical things. So one of the guys that I met wanted to work the farm with his hands. Another woman was like doing Michelin level baked goods with her hands. And it’s like, I don’t even think about my hands. Why do I not have a desire to work with my hands in that particular way? So that’s all, like just understanding more of my story, understanding more of my lineage is leaving comes so naturally in a conflict like, screw you, I’m done. I’m not going to be here. But then there’s also this sense of there is a staying power that I saw in the lineage to be able to kind of stay. And I know that there’s a loyalty in me that stays. So some people stay way too long in places of deadness and difficulty. And that’s just because they don’t want to go to Stockholm. They can’t deal with the anxiety of leaving three hours. So that needs to be interrogated is if you’re terrified to leave, you’re terrified to develop a desire to disappoint your mother, your father, a friend. Where does that come from that you can’t disappoint? Or you’re always moving on. You’re always moving on to the next relationship and you have a debris of relationships behind you that you’re just good at leaving and acting like, who cares? Those dynamics need to be interrogated, but most of us just kind of look the other way because interrogating desires might lead you to another way of life. It might lead you to another country. So that’s part of what I’m saying in the interrogation process. It’s really one of discovery. We need curiosity not there to try and indict people, but far more a sense of like, “So you want to stay. Why do you want to stay? You want to leave? Why do you want to go? ” And as you all have both said, wisdom is often about timing. And so that sense of you have to know your story in order to know what time it is, in order to know should you stay or should you go?
Dan: Well, at one point, again, there was much in the manuscript that I have marked, but I remember marking this like when I circle something 30 times, community is the place where shame goes to die. And that sense of how do we interrogate without a community and that the isolation of interrogation, given the, in some sense, the blindness that comes even in the hermeneutical process of reading our own life, you needed your dad to give you stories. You needed to travel to find communion, but communion in story. So I’d love for you to name a little bit more how interrogation happens in community.
Jay: Yeah. I mean, so many of us … I mean, I think just some of the difficulties of my life, whether that has been issues with unwanted sexual behavior, my own eating disorders as a man, my own body dysmorphia as a man, when I see these things, there’s some level of, what’s wrong with me that I’m doing this? I remember being in grad school, talking to my therapist and just being like, I should be excluded from ministry at this point. I should be excluded. And so just even her asking that question of what role did you play in your family helped me kind of break open the matrix of my sexual fantasy life, that these fantasies are not random, they’re actually informed by my relationship with my mom. So how could my sexuality be formed outside of the context of my mom? That happened in community because my own sense of judgment was blinding my capacity to see. And it always does. Shame will always carry this kind of open and shut case of like, this is the evidence, this is what it means. And so what we do in community is to kind of say, okay, this is part of what’s going on. And even all week with clients, that was part of the evidence. When they looked at the evidence, they saw indictment. When I looked at the evidence, it was just a sense of you’re seeing yourself as this Honda Accord that has broken down after 50,000 miles. And you’re wondering, what’s wrong with me that I’m breaking down? And it’s like part of what I told the client is, your mom is much more of the Honda Accord. I mean, she broke down. She could go two, 300,000 miles for your community, but not for you. Why? And so just that’s part of typically when we read our own story, we are biased against some level of judgment and then the brain is a human anticipation machine. And so the more that we see ourselves in a particular way, the more that we will create irrefutable evidence that that version of the story is true. And so we’re bound much more towards judgment than we are to any sense of just escape from difficulties. But all that to say, we need other people to help us understand the decisions that we’re making. So even that sense of leaving was so helpful to get a sense of you are an Outwalker. And if I ever start a band, that will be, I think-
Rachael: The Outwalkers.
Jay: My band is The Outwalker or The Outwalkers, but that’s part of just I need other people. I needed my uncle to have done so much of the labor to be able to go into that. I need my parents to be able to write stories to understand where I come from because otherwise I’m just like, why am I always leaving? What’s wrong with me? So shame dies in the context of community.
Dan: Oh, does it ever? And yet community, I would also go to one of the sentences that’s a little lengthier, but you write, Professor Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes we now live in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation. So community creates a context for the potentiality of desire coming to a point of engagement, interrogation, and really in some ways honoring, honoring desire, not indulging, but honoring and growing in too. But given that there are communities that are committed to distraction and so often, I think it’s heartbreaking to say that I think often churches become the context for distraction from what you’re inviting us actually to live into the middle of. But certainly media, technology, et cetera, becomes part of that predatory structure. You write further, living with technology is like being stalked by a pack of private equity funded wolves, but their goal is not just to eat you. Again, I’m like-
Jay: I don’t know if that made the next version, but they may have taken it out.
Dan: Really?
Jay: Yeah. I’ll have to check.
Dan: Well, I have my version and I’m damn well keeping it.
Jay: Yes, I love it. No, I love it. I need to go back to the archives. It’s like six drafts of this guy.
Dan: Well, wherever it shows up…
Jay: Could be.
Dan: Again, how do we disrupt community when community is the context for us to be able to engage the meaning of desire?
Jay: I mean, the question in and of itself is part of what we have to grapple with. Yeah. I mean, I think of different communities where the prophets are not going to be accepted. We kill prophets, we shoot them, we stone them. They’re not invited to the parties. And so most of the time, most church communities are, I would say, an extension of that provisional self. It’s about image management, that there’s this sense of we need to defend God and God’s absence. We need to make God good all the time. We need to be able to move this horrible Friday experience, Saturday hell that I’m in, and I need to move it to a dogmatic story of redemption to save face for God. And so many of our particular desires for the theologies that we love, that we align with, the songs that we sing, have much more to do with that moving towards dogmatism of this is the way that things are. So when you actually have a miscarriage and you actually stay in that grief, or you have a marriage where you’re like, this is dead. I don’t want to leave, but I also cannot stay in this particular way. You’re going to make people very, very uncomfortable around you. So most people, this is where I think just window of tolerance language that Dan Siegel formed of, we have a green zone, a red zone, a blue zone, don’t want to bore people with that. But most of the time what happens is the green zone is where the self is flexible and adaptive. The red zone is fight, flight, adrenaline, neuroadrenaline. And so what ends up happening in a lot of theological communities and church communities is that they have a very narrow window of tolerance for distress. They have a very narrow window of tolerance for honesty. Like Dan, I remember the first time that I heard you speak, you brought Psalm 88, that darkness is a closer friend than you owe God. And I was shook by that. I’m like, “What?” And just that notion of most people don’t have a window of tolerance to be able to survive that. So if you’re in a church community that has a very narrow window of tolerance for honesty because you’re over indexed in a desire to honor, but you don’t have a desire to be honest, that’s going to lead to very predictable problems. And so sometimes people have to leave the church in order to be honest about what the church experience has been. And so we see that all over the place. And instead of increasing our window of tolerance for distress and for honesty, we basically scapegoat people who tell the truth because we can’t deal with the anxiety, we can’t deal with some of the blue zone depression that might come if we actually embraced the honesty, the depression, the heartache of that particular season. So all of this, even though it’s a tool of developing a window of tolerance, I would say I would love for churches to just take discipleship of the window of tolerance seriously because if you don’t have a window of tolerance, that’s where porn comes from. You don’t know who you are. You can’t tolerate anxiety, anger without sexualizing it. You need to increase your window of tolerance. So when my spouse says something or does something, so much of my contempt is really a mirror to me of how narrow a window of tolerance is. So most people desire the outside world to change rather than actually desire maturity and an increased window of tolerance. So maybe not the direction that you wanted to go, but it’s just community and churches, there’s so many different categories. But in Calvin’s “Prophet, Priest, King,” we like our kings, our queens to be the pastors of our church. We like good priests. I want my daughter to be a priestess, my son to be a priest, but both of my children are much more prophets. My daughter especially, she will say, “Dad, is this really the face that you want me to have for my father for the rest of my life?” And just that sense of like, “No.”
Rachael: I love her.
Jay: But I’m so glad that you have language to be able to name the truth of what my face is revealing in this particular moment. But most communities don’t allow that level of honesty. So last story would just be like, I’ll work with some men and women in the Midwest and just it’s been fascinating as I’ve moved across the country and done work, just like the gods of different parts of the country and the gods of Seattle versus the gods of New York City are so wildly different. But then I’ll come into a place like North Dakota, South Dakota, and it’s just family or Minnesota. They live their entire life to kind of escape to the lake house in the summer with their families or the lake, and their whole life becomes over-indexed and pleasing their family. So they might want to go to Cabo, they might want to go skiing, but they can’t disappoint their mother and father because they invested their whole career in building this lake house that all the children and grandchildren must go to during the summers in order to fill it. And so again, communities function like that as well. There are these gods that you feel like you have to desire and that’s part of the invitation is will you actually desire to disappoint people? And most of us don’t disappoint people very well without kind of setting fire to ourselves or someone else. And I think there is a way of kind of exposing gods and exposing what needs to change without blowing stuff entirely up.
Dan: Well, have you named that you are a lovely iconoclast.
Jay: Definitely. Yes. Yeah. I enjoy blowing things up. I think that’s part of what I’m trying to grapple with through what is the nature of desire. I’ve talked about this maybe before on this show, but my uncles were special forces on my mom’s side. Delta teams, clandestine operatives. And when they would tell stories that were declassified, that was like food for me growing up of like, wow, to be in the world with these kind of elite forces doing work in the world, stories that will never be told, and yet you’re highly skilled doing work that’s remarkable. I’m like, when I think about our recovery week with the Allender Center, there’s something of that, these like special forces teams of like no one else understands what we do and what ends up happening there. And it’s stunning, but that’s one desire, but I have like a hundred that need to be cultivated. So then it becomes that sense of, yeah, there’s a time to be an iconoclast. There’s a time to be special forces. There’s also time for like music and for poetry and for cultivating other aspects of my identity that I haven’t quite honored yet. So I think that’s part of the curiosity of like, what all has God put inside of me? And every time I fly across the United States, I think about that of like swamp lands, water, Florida, the Appalachian Mountains, Rocky Mountains, desert to the Southwest. It’s like there’s so much terrain just in our country and the human heart, the human mind is just the same. And so that sense of some of us only know the Cascade Mountains in the Pacific Northwest, and it’s like head down south, there’s way more there. So that’s part of the questions that I’m asking is I don’t know what it means to live well into desire. I don’t want to just be a provisional self and a good therapist for the sake of my mother and a good theological discourser for the sake of my father. There’s more to it than that. And that’s part of the questions that I bring to my life.
Dan: But part of what I gained as I read through your book is I can bless the heartache of disappointment in part because I have known something of the wonder, not just of desire, but desire fulfilled is a taste of the tree of life. And if you have tasted desire at some of the richest, deepest levels, and some of that as I just look on my screen, which people don’t get a chance to see, but the pleasure of working with you, Jay, and Recovery Weeks, the pleasure of working with you, Rachael, and the context, I am a stunningly rich man. And I do believe that when desire begins to be richly celebrated, but also where disappointment is no longer a form of detachment, but actually in anticipation of what it is that hopefully I’m much sooner than the two of you will know in its utter fullness. So that reality of desire and what you have offered us is going to take the good reader of your book to the face of God. And in that, Jay, we cannot thank you enough, not just for these hours, but for your labor.
Jay: Thank you.