What Our Desires Reveal with Jay Stringer

What if desire isn’t something to suppress or fear, but something to honor and steward?

In this two-part conversation, therapist and author Jay Stringer joins Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen to explore that very question through the lens of his new book, Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow.

From the very beginning, it was clear this topic couldn’t be contained in a single episode. Dan arrived with 16 pages of notes—so settle in for a deep, expansive conversation that unfolds across the next two weeks.

In Part 1, Jay traces the long personal and clinical journey behind Desire, opening up a deeper question beneath the surface of struggle and behavior: how do we learn to want well?

You’ll hear:

• Why desire often feels like a “civil war” within us
• How your family of origin can shape what you long for (and what you may have denied)
• The concept of the “provisional self”—and how it can both help and hinder you
• Why some of the patterns you want to escape may actually be clues to deeper healing

Through personal stories, clinical insight, and thoughtful reflection, this conversation invites you to get curious about your desires—not to judge them, but to understand where they come from and where they’re leading you.

Be sure to come back next week as Jay re-joins us to explore the disruptive role of desire, the courage it takes to engage it, and how to grow it within the context of community.

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.

You can order your copy of Jay Stringer’s newest book, Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow here:  https://jay-stringer.com/books/

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 

Dan: Rachael, I’ve never thought that we should do something comparable to the infamous Joe Rogan. But nonetheless, this happens to be one of those moments where I can just tell you from the freaking beginning, we need hours. And thankfully, we’re going to take two hours to do a work that is one of the most amazing works I’ve ever had the privilege to read. So let’s introduce our guest, Jay Stringer. You’ve been with us before the author of the infamous and glorious book, Unwanted. Jay, you have been a dear friend, part of the Allender Center. Oh my gosh, it’s almost impossible to introduce you as well, almost impossible to engage this book. So say hello before we begin to jump in quickly to this masterpiece.

Jay: Hello, Dan. Hello Rachael. So good to be with you. Good to be back. I can’t wait to see where this conversation goes over two hours. There’s some terrain that I know we will get to and then, knowing and having been interviewed by both of you, we will end up in terrain that I had no idea was coming around the corner. So.

Dan: Well, I said to Rachael, I said to you both that I’ve got 16 pages of notes and they’re pretty detailed. And we don’t have anyone on this program that we don’t read the full book. And in one sense, fully blessed. But I can just say this new book, and I’m going to say the book, Desire: What science and your story can teach you about your five core longings. So we’ll just refer to it as Desire. This book is really one of the absolute best books I’ve ever read in my life. I don’t say that often. In fact, I don’t say it hardly ever. So I just kind of want to start by saying, good Lord, man. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the labor this book has required. And I’ll also say, I’ve been waiting years since I heard the original thoughts about this book for it to come to fruition. What took you so long?

Jay: So many different directions for that. But I mean, personal and professional. Professionally, I knew Unwanted had struck a nerve. We were getting people from all over the world that were writing into my team, basically saying, can Jay interpret my sexual fantasies or my porn history? And they would offer, “Here’s 20 bucks over Venmo. I’m like, come on, 20 bucks? And so we knew that we had struck a nerve inviting people to be curious about their fantasies, their desires, what are the key drivers of that. But then it became like they’re still going back into their same life, their same marriage, and some of the difficulties that they found themselves in. And so they didn’t just need curiosity or an invitation to have a different paradigm about a area of self-sabotage. They needed more of a roadmap of how to be human. And so just trying to get a sense of what really helped my clients grow. And those that did the story work, but then really stalled at personal growth or intimacy or people that were really good at their careers. And they were Joan of Arcs in their respected fields, but then their marriages were imploding. So I started seeing there were some people that were totally overdeveloped in certain areas of desire over index, but also wildly underdeveloped in others. And so just trying to get a sense of when clients really grew, when they had intimacy, when they honored pleasure, when they had meaning and purpose in their life, they wanted to heal, they had kindness and curiosity for their story, what happened? So a lot of it was just paying attention clinically to how did people grow? How did people change? Personally, this is the nature of desire, is that anytime you have an idea to create an organization, a book, that initial instinct is so seductive and you’re like, this is going to be a great book. This is going to be great. And then all of a sudden Unwanted was released into the world on September 4th. September 5th, I got a letter from the Department of Health saying that I was under investigation for misconduct, essentially talking about that people had made the claim that I was trying to collect sexual fantasies for my own arousal purposes. It was one of the most ridiculous degrading things ever. And so that has been part of this work as well, is almost any desire that I had to write this was met with a year and probably 20, $30,000 of legal fees after all that. And so then when it came to this book, it’s been thankfully more quiet, but the process of the last three years has been so agonizing to have these … This isn’t just a book that I wrote. When I wrote Unwanted, I felt like, okay, I have some integrity here. I’m outgrowing these patterns. I felt like I could speak to them clinically with integrity. At the same time, this desire book was like, you’re never quite done with having desires before. So these categories were working on me. I think I was really trying to figure out the Allender Center story model with intimacy, with meaning, with growth. And so a lot of it was just my own wandering as well, but also the high cost of this thing is… I don’t like to write light books. These things have to be some level of significant. And so both personally and professionally, I think I needed time to process why did Unwanted work, but then also what did my clients and readers really need after that? And just doing a lot of work with people to kind of identify, okay, when people stall, when they resign, when they have self-sabotage, what are the patterns there as well?

Dan: I’ve had the privilege to walk with you through a few of those impediments, but I don’t know a better word than assaults. And you have been a good, faithful and wise man. And in that sense, the reality of why it’s taken so long, and you can hear a little bit of my immaturity and impatience as I say that, because I had a chance to see it at the initial beginning and a little bit through a few of the phases, but I can just come back to say, the research you have done in this book is staggering. I mean, if we spent nothing more than trying to encapsulate some of the research and what it points us to, because early on what you were describing to me is that unwanted was looking way down the river as to the realities of what happens to the human heart, but you wanted to go back up to some of the wellsprings as to what brings us to some of these sexual, relational, interpersonal struggles. And good Lord sir, you have done that in ways that, again, take my breath away. But as well, let’s just say you’ve looked at different theorists and you’ve begun to ask, what do they bring that we need to hear? But this is a book where you go the weaving. I don’t even want to use the word integration, but it is. It’s a weaving of so much wisdom, but also within the frame of your gospel understanding. So I think this book required a great deal of you, and thank you for delivering it. But it also is such a gift, but requires us to engage in a way that is both holy, but as you put it, you don’t have the ability to offer a light book. Rachael, I will keep talking if you don’t eventually just shun me.

Rachael: Oh, I don’t need to shun you. And I love that this book has … And knowing Jay and journeying with Jay, that there’s something of this that has also clearly evoked and provoked a lot of desire in you. And it makes me think about, Dan, you’ve had a conference over many years you’ve done called The Design of Desire, and I think it’s a risky thing to talk about desire. And so I kind of want to start there. So I’m hearing so much of what you’re saying, Jay, when you’re like, “This book is working on me,” because I do think desire is so much a core part of what makes us human. And so I know just in my engagement with your writing, I’m wrestling and taking stock and thinking, oh, there’s certain chapters I’m not ready for right now. I’m going to have to come back to you. I need some space, as my three-year-old likes to say, “I need some space, mom.” So I felt the like, ooh, there’s some deep waters here that feel pretty core. And so I don’t know if there’s a good question in that, but maybe you could talk a little bit more about some of the risks of stepping into waters of desire.

Jay: Yeah. I think intuitively, we know that desire has the potential to turn us into the best version of ourself or the worst version of ourself. And I think that’s really what leads to something of that Civil War is like, okay, desire led me to write Unwanted, to write this book. Desire led me to Heather. Desire led me to create kids and a church. At the same time, that desire has also led me to Heather. It’s led me to this book. It’s led me to things like unwanted sexual behavior, my own difficulties. And so I think most of us live with this intuitive sense of, I don’t want desire to get too intense because it might burn me up or might bring me into some area of self-sabotage or entitlement, but if we don’t nourish our desires and attend to them, then inevitably something in our soul will literally become depressed in that sense of like, we’ve all known people where you look at their eyes and it’s just like something in you has gone dim because you are not paying attention to your desires that are … So I think all of us live in that civil war. And so a lot of my clients would come from a religious tradition that told them, your desires are something that needs to be suppressed, the heart is deceitfully wicked. It might turn you into a narcissist, might kind of eventually lead you into something, God forbid, sexual. And so a lot of people had this suppression of desire, and then they became adults. And as much as I love Mary Oliver, that line of like, “What is it that you want to do with this one wild and precious life?” It wakes us up and it’s like, what do I want to do? And I love that line, but it’s also like, how do we actually discern where our desires come from? How do we intentionally form them into something that brings us connection, purpose, and love? And what I have found is that no one really teaches us how to want well. And so that kind of became this process of this book is these five core desires are not a la carte menu options that we get to pick or choose. You can’t just desire wholeness or knowing your story. You can’t just desire meaning and purpose and intimacy at different seasons of our life and wisdom is knowing what season of life you’re in to know which desire, but you have to be able to recognize that I need to grow all five of these desires, not just one in order to actually flourish in life. So I think all of us live in something of that civil war of desire, that desire is responsible for all the best things in our life, but also these places of shame and difficulty. Desire is at ground zero of those as well.

Dan: Well, let’s just, for folks, name them, it’s a desire for healing, a desire for growth, a desire for intimacy, a desire for pleasure, a desire for meaning. And this beginning in the early portion of the book, when we desire, when we ignore desire formation of one area, we overcompensate our reliance on another in time with this strategy as a recipe for the proliferation of desire problems that again, you can almost read little more than the introduction and already be on a journey because as you put it so well, we actually don’t think about desire. We don’t really live into desire or even acknowledge it because the cost of that is really difficult. So start with that sequence. There is a certain sequentiality, but also they are, this is why the book is so complex and beautiful because they all weave together. One opens the door to a kind of kaleidoscope of meaning in the other. This is so frustrating because I just want everyone to have the book and we’ll just go by line by line.

Jay: So I mean, I think about that category of like a desire for intimacy in an organization, with a friend, with a spouse. And I think part of what happens is that we kind of bless like, okay, you want a better marriage or you want a better organization, but we profoundly underestimate the work that’s required to actually make intimacy work. And so I always think about something like a symphony. When I go to the symphony in New York, I want my violinist Julliard trained. I want them to be some of the best in the world. Same with the percussion team. So they have had to put hours, tens of thousands of hours into practice, into understanding their craft, and to bring that to the stage of intimacy, to use that metaphor. But then you arrive at the stage and you start blaming the other person or you start blaming your instrument. It’s like, no, the marriage is not the problem. Marriage is revealing the level of differentiation, the level of individuation that you have. And so most people over index at that point of, I need to find the marital therapist, I need to find the marriage book, but maybe it’s actually revealing how underdeveloped you are, that you’re pining for validation. You have these wounds of your life and you have transferred where your mother and father did not see you well to now a demand that your spouse see you, validate you, want you, and you’ve skipped a desire for personal growth. Or you have some people in the age of kind of Huberman, Rogan, like Brian Johnson, a lot of really good stuff that’s coming out there, but you have people that are developing some level of personal growth and they’re wanting their sleep hacks and they’re wanting their protocols, but they have never wanted to develop a desire to understand their story that would actually inform why they are trying to create mastery over their life. And they don’t recognize that an attempt at mastery is revealing something of their own trauma response. So all of us have certain desires that become over indexed rather than looking at other possible clues for what might be feeding that. So every time in my own marriage, there’s a sense of, I might not like Heather, I might not like myself, but the bottom line is it’s revealing places within both of us that are individually underdeveloped and we have to desire to grow in an understanding of where those patterns come from. We can’t just desire intimacy with one another. So that’s the work that I have found is some people are phenomenal at their careers writing books, but they don’t know their own story. Or you have some people that know their own story and they are Allender Center All Stars, and yet you try and get them to engage the difficult work of growth or how that translates into how they’re underdeveloped and intimacy and they just don’t want to go there. And so all of us have these areas, these symptoms in our life that are making life miserable. It’s that no fly zone of, I don’t want to go there, don’t bring me into that. And those are the areas that we most need to desire if our life is going to develop. One of the formative stories that I can remember in middle school, and I’ve probably talked about this before, but middle school prototype of hell, as you all would say, I think I’ve heard it on this podcast first. And so that sense of like my nickname was Donut. And so I was going to say, not going to name names, but Brian put his finger into my belly.

Rachael: Brian.

Jay: Brian.

Rachael: You don’t want to be exposed? Don’t do mean things.

Jay: But he put his finger in my belly and did the Pillsbury Doughboy. So everything going on in my life at that time, my parents were, my dad was highly attuned to his church, his ministry. And so just even that sense of like, we didn’t have a dad or a mom that was attuned, that’s partially true. It’s what they were attuned to because everybody’s… attuning is like breath. It’s just what are you … So my mom was more attuned to how clean our house was. My dad was more attuned to things of ministry. So when I started imploding inside in middle school, I can remember going out to Chesapeake Bagel Bakery with my dad and he had asked me, he knew that something was up and started asking me really kind questions about like, “Are you doing all right? I can tell something has shifted in your eyes.” And now a lot of us have never had dads that have seen us with that level of discernment and attunement, but I didn’t have much to say. I didn’t know much about Broca’s Area that when you’re in trauma, speech goes offline. I didn’t have words at that time. So then when he drops me off at the kiss and ride drop off location at school, one of the things he said was essentially, “If you were an elder in my church, I don’t know if I would continue to meet with you.” And so just the compounding nature of trauma of I’m being bullied, but then my dad, being called donut is a lot easier to metabolize than that comment and what that has done to the trajectory of my life. So my dad, my relationship with my dad, my relationship to myself, everything begins to implode at that point. But then by my senior year of high school and certainly through college, I start desiring dead theologians. So I’m like, if Calvin’s going to write his institutes by 21, at least first draft, my discipleship group is going to have them read. And the more that I read Edwards, Calvin Luther, Lewis, the more that my dad and I had a great relationship, our strongest years of connection were in my early 20s. Same thing with my mom. The more that I attuned to her and developed a desire to meet her needs, the more that life flourished. Well, now when I look at my life now, I’m a good therapist. I can have theological conversations. So my provisional self out of trauma, out of difficulty, made me my livelihood, it is what allowed intimacy with Heather to first take place of being able to attune to things that like my mom, I could read my mom’s faces better than her husband. I could read things of what she needed. So now there’s this provisional self that gets me awards. It wins me competitions. But then inevitably there’s this sense of like midlife crisis or midlife chrysalis that I feel like I’ve been in in the last couple years where it’s like, I don’t want to sit at that post forever. That doesn’t feel authentic anymore. I don’t want to just keep meeting my mother’s needs and being a therapist in that way. I don’t want to just have theological conversations. There are other desires that I have annexed that I have killed off in the service of a traumatized response to how I learned how to navigate my world. And so that creates a lot of difficulties with regard to identity and kind of Bill Plotkin’s notion of the loyal soldier that I have all these wars, all these ways that I keep going through life and the war is over and yet I keep living into these wars with my identity, with my body. And so I think that’s that sense of the difficulties of our life, as much as we loathe them, are really trying to wake us up to what more freedom, what more joy could look like and to free ourselves from the provisional self and provisional identities and escape hatches that have formed our life. So I’m doing that work right now of in a midlife chrysalis, lot of pain, a lot of confusion, kind of above the treeline. My desire has led me there and I’m grateful for that, but I’m also like, I don’t know where to go next.

Dan: Sweet gift to give us something again of, you’re not merely an author, but you are actually a reader of your own writing, which is another way of saying you’re willing to learn in the process of offering us what it is that will help us grow as human beings, but you’re also willing to let that process mature you, which I think is the height of what it means to be wise. So you’re naming enmeshment and there’s a lot of research that you’ve done through this process on a enmeshment. Take us into that category, enmeshment with desire, enmeshment with others’ desire as the framing of our own desire, and yet at times occluding and obliterating something of the nature of desire.

Jay: Yeah, so many different directions to go, but that sense of Ronald Roheiser says that all children are born with these raw desires. And so the task of the community is to kind of link the raw desire to the life of the family or life of the community. But so many of us, when we see the raw desires of children, we are very quick to pathologize them. I remember when my son was at Greenwood Park or Green Lake Park, there would be kids that would just be like, “Give me my truck. I want my truck.” And you’re just seeing these petulant desires lived out. And I remember thinking like, what is wrong with these parents? This kid, I know what this kid looks like 20 years from now in therapy, but I didn’t ever have the language at that time to just be like, why is he so free to be able to just be petulant? And I was never able to be petulant. So me being pissed off at him has less to do with his petulance and more to do with that I wasn’t able to be.

Rachael: That’s right.

Jay: And that’s what I kept running up to as a dad with my son, is my son wanted to disrupt, he wanted to challenge, and I would have all sorts of conflict with these raw desires. And so then it becomes this kind of enmeshment category of, I’m going to pathologize your desire, I’m going to make it selfish. And so you need to desire the things of the kingdom. You need to desire to put your family first, to make our image management was really big in the Stringer household. So all of my desires are enmeshed with the idols of my mom and dad, which are all about image management and suppression. And so that’s going to wreak havoc. And so one of the things that we found even in the research on intimacy is that for couples that were in the highest degree of conflict and enmity with one another, they were 2.6 times more likely to be enmeshed with their family of origin. So there’s the enmeshment with your family of origin because you actually like your parents and you want to meet their needs and they’re good people. But if you go back to kind of Dan Siegel’s categories of kids need to be seen, safe, soothed, secure, just that sense of if you were not soothed by your mom and your dad, you had to find solid ground underneath you. I think Rilke says, “If you can’t stand on fish, you’re going to have to find something to stand on.” And so a lot of times your family of origin, loyalty is not showing up so much into, I really like my mom and my dad and I want to prioritize them at the cost of my spouse, which happens all the time, but you also probably learned a way of life where video games or disconnection or alcohol or porn became the way that you would find some level of connection and soothing. Then you get married and the difficulties of your marriage start coming out and then you’re loyal to the way that your family of origin operated, which is to escape or to fight or to box with someone. So a lot of the difficulties of your adult life, whether it’s escape tendencies, contempt categories, are clues to your family of origin of where you remain enmeshed. But most of us are just trying to say, okay, I have some unhealthy behaviors, but we don’t really look at the category of enmeshment within that. So enmeshment, that leads to your provisional self, like the job that you’re in, the way that you relate to people, needing to be good, needing to be bad. Those are all aspects of provisional self that have their root systems into enmeshment. But what you call being a golden child or a scapegoat, it can still be highly enmeshed.

Dan: No, just such opposites and yet that notion of you are literally bound into the structure. And again, your research indicated that you’re twice as likely to have PTSD as a result of that level of high enmeshment. I mean, this is one of those elements, again, of wanting to geek out. And I mean, there’s so much research based, literally have traveled the terrain back to some of the core realities, began to look at that form of intersection. So when the enmeshment structure, whether you have been scapegoated or you’re a golden child, it really is the same. What have you discovered for yourself in that and what are you discovering needs to be engaged with regard to the people that you’re privileged to work with.

 

Jay: Yeah. Scapegoats are way easier to work with than golden children that just want to be good, that want to manage their own image. So I am much more of that golden child at various points in my life, and I’ve definitely been the scapegoat as well. But the tendency, the default, the most impressionable times were always just the need to be good. And so then that becomes like the enmeshment to my family, the more dead theologians I read, the more good I am to my mom, the more the darkness in me, the more the questions, the more the difficulties of my life have to go underground. And so for golden children, they essentially have competing desires. There’s the desire to be good, but it forms something of a two-step dance where it’s, I’m desiring to be good, but then also I desire to be going off into my own addictive behavior. I need an escape from having to be good all the time. I need some level of relief, but also some level of judgment that then sets the seesaw back up to be good. So that tends to be the seesaw structure of a lot of golden children. The scapegoat, I mean, if you listen to what they’re trying to say, it’s holy, it’s stunning. And yet the tragedy for so many scapegoats is that they end up destroying their own life to tell the truth. And so instead of just staying in grief, staying in honesty, they end up doing things to destroy their own lives in the process. And so that usually begins to be some of the debris that it’s more out in the open that they have destroyed their lives, their marriages, things around them through that scapegoat structure.

Dan: And Rachael, where would you name yourself on this?

Rachael: I was genuinely like … I mean, for sure, I’m a golden child with the caveat that my body often put me in a scapegoat category because of the anxiety I would manifest, which would then sometimes turn into a lot of belligerence or like I was embodying the terror and then I could just be like the crazy one. But when she’s not crazy, oh, she’s a really good caretaker. She’s really loving. She’s called to ministry. She’s a good student. She’s a stellar athlete. So in some ways, I think I feel more the category of the golden child, but I think because there really was almost like this duality, the scapegoat liberated me because eventually I really was like, you know what? I am crazy. So I’m going to just not lean into it and indulge it, but I’m going to walk through this door of like, I’m crazy and investigate a little bit like, why am I crazy? And that took a lot of hermeneutical work. So I do feel both. I was mostly sitting here thinking about enmeshment, desire for care. Mine is probably, I’m a two on the Enneagram, so there’s a lot of like I need to be helpful and I can find a sense of like the word, what’s the word you were using? Your pry what self?

Jay: Provisional self.

Rachael: Provisional self. My provisional self is like very helpful, very kind. Like you said, Jay, very attuned, not going to have a lot of needs. And so I think my desires have always felt very threatening. I’m like you, I’m watching my three and a half year old. I mean, she literally says, “I want much. I want much.” And we’ll be like, “Yeah, we know you want much. You want much, much.” We pour some orange juice. “I want much. I want more. I want. I want this stuff and I’m with you.” There’s a part of me that’s like, your unapologetic desire for all the things is so stunning and also so terrifying and also so disruptive because now I got to contend with this and I got to contend with the parts of me that learned very early, your raw desire is very dangerous. It is going to be met, not just with a lack of attunement or a turning away, but also like a punishment and being constricted and being made to be compliant. And so I don’t want to do that to her, but I also don’t want to be like, it’s safe to navigate the world with this unadulterated desire. And those things collide. In many ways, she’s inviting me to pay more attention to my desires. And that’s a good thing in this season where I have lost myself a little bit, tending to everyone else and the needs of the home and the needs of our, the varying needs of our family with teenagers and a toddler, my husband finishing a PhD and all these things. It’s really easy for me just in the way our world works in a more systemic way to be like, who has time for desires right now? We’re in survival mode and that sense of losing, I love how you brought the language of the origins of the word desire. And there’s some north stars of desire that I have been actively like, I’m not looking at you right now because you’re going to call something of me that’s going to require something that I don’t feel like I have the energy for or the courage. I think the courage piece is a big part of it too because those trauma wounds in me are, if you have desires, they’re going to either blow everything up, they’re going to bring you violence or you’re going to be alone because other people’s desires are not going to align with yours. And I think that that’s part of what you bring some language to in the stories that you tell because I think that’s also the part of desire that’s so risky. It’s like, what do we do if our desires are pulling us into something that the differentiation feels like is the center going to hold? And yeah.

Jay: Yeah. I think of the Carl Jung notion that the greatest threat a child must bear is the unlive life of its mother or father. And so that sense of like much orange juice, much of anything, if you have a mother and father who did not have much and were taught to live with little, to taught to be camels wandering through the desert without much of a desire for drink, that’s going to create conflict in your family where it’s live like us, live as camels, live without many needs. And so think of when Winnecott was talking about good parenting, there’s this place where he compares it to what we see Jesus doing on the cross, which is just an unfair standard to set. But what he says is that humanity needed to give their worst to Jesus, like all of their scapegoating, all their rage, all their anxiety, all their petulance, and see that Jesus is vulnerable enough to be impacted by it, but he’s also stronger than the worst thing that we can throw at it. And that’s part of what allows us to have more of a maybe not entirely secure relationship with God, but far more like God can hold the worst in me. And that’s what we need as children, as we go through life, is I need to bring all of my much desire for orange juice. I need to be able to bring sexual desires. I need to bring petulance. I need to bring my tears. I need to bring my heartache. And I need to have a mother, a father, a community that is strong enough to be impacted by me, but also like I can survive your big emotions. And I think part of what I had to wake up to at some point is most of our parents are very underdeveloped with desires themselves.

Rachael: That’s right.

Jay: And so that was being a dad as a masterclass in all these places that I’m underdeveloped and where the Stringer lineage is underdeveloped. So I tell one story in the book about my son who around the age of seven right in the middle of the pandemic just challenged every single rule that I had. Every single like, you need to do 10 minutes of reading. And it’s like, no, I don’t actually need to do that. And I was just getting upset and just we talk about rupture and repair a lot as therapists. And it’s like, but when your repairs mean nothing because the rupture just keeps happening and you’re trying to … So Heather essentially kicked me out of the house at some point in April or May and said,”I don’t know what in the world is going on with you, but you cannot come back until you have some answers. So she kicked me out. I got into my forerunner and that was part of what I had to grapple with is like, this son of mine is able to challenge in ways that I have never been able to challenge. He is able to speak the truth about these things in ways that I have never been able to. So I look at my sister. My sister was like the classic pastor’s rebel that she got to live out loud. She got to wear her Beastie Boys shirt and her boyfriends and that drove … I remember having … She had a boyfriend that had a Chevy Blazer and she gave me a Bud Light. And so that sense of like she’s living out a level of rebellion and working with my innocence in a particular way. My brother, Justin, he took the much more philosophical route of, he was reading Nietzsche by 15, 16, and was critiquing my parents for the structures of our home. And I remember growing up being like, “I can’t believe my sister said that. I can’t believe my brother said that.” And that’s where the provisional self of like, “Oh, the agony, the heartache of what this brings into my parents’ life, I need to be good.” And so Rachel and Justin and my son got to be angry and not have to live… Why did I not? Well, my parents were underdeveloped. They had their own idols. They had their own gods that I developed a desire to serve. And that was the complexity for me is with my son, he wanted to destroy things. So my parents had dropped off a bin because we were about to move from Seattle to New York and I had all of my provisional self trophies, like male Athlete of the Year, male Christian Athlete of the Year, second place science fair winner. And part of what my son did was, or before that I said, “Son, I’ve made your desires bad and they’re not. You want to destroy things and that’s a good thing.” Because he had seen this billboard behind our house that was basically every egg is 50 gallons of water. So he threw three eggs from Costco against the backyard fence and was like, “I just wasted 150 gallons of water.” And that was one of the fights that led to my exile. But I just said, “You want to destroy stuff. So how about we figure out something once a week that you can destroy and we’ll do it together.” And the first thing he said is, “Dad, I want your trophies.” And so he grabbed my science fair trophy and my high school baseball bat and put it on a piece like a rock and then just swang and obliterated the trophy into hundreds of little pieces. And I’ll never forget his laugh where he was just like, “Your trophies are made of cheap plastic.” And that was that sense of like, okay, I have pathologized him. He’s wanting to destroy something and there’s something glorious about being able to destroy, about being able to take a trophy of your parents and smash it. And why was he able to do that at seven? But I was not free at that point at 35 or however old I was to actually smash my parents’ trophies. So my son was teaching me how to repent, how to actually let go of this provisional self of needing to be good all the time. And that’s what we need. We need parents that are strong enough to survive our attempts to annihilate their trophies. And most of our parents are not strong enough, mature enough to be able to grapple with that. And yet provisional self will get you into trouble. You will feel dead. You will be tired meeting other people’s needs. You will be tired meeting the needs of your organization and deprioritizing authenticity. So the problems of your life are trying to wake you up. I just don’t think most of us are paying attention.

Dan: Well, your son, whether you’re aware of it or not, was living out the reading of reformed thinkers who were iconoclasts. So your son invited you as, and this is where I want to come back when we have the privilege of talking with you next. And that is, you were a brilliant and gifted older brother. And your son is basically saying, dad, you need to go into exile. You need to become something of the complexity of the prodigal. Now, of course, the reality is, shall we sin so that grace abounds, Paul’s statement is “megenoito” in Greek may it never be yet, the more sin abounds grace abounds. So we have to step into further complexity of you have become a prodigal on the basis of your son’s iconoclasm, and at the same time, inviting you back to becoming the father in the midst of being the prodigal. Oh, I love this. This is a really good book. See you next week.