... teach me even what do you see, what's the data say, and how do you predict destructive habits so that maybe with our awareness we can then move in the opposite spirit in our own lives?

Yeah.

Um, so a couple different directions there.

So we, you know, we looked at things like- like, uh, marital satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, what predicted that? So we saw that there were some really clear patterns, uh, that aren't necessarily surprising, but, like, something like confidence really predicted marital satisfaction, and that's gonna sound obvious, but let me unpack that for a minute.

A lot of times we end up in marriage with a reflected sense of self.

And so, y- you know, we're in an age where we talk a lot about narcissism.

And so narcissism, at least when I was in high school, it was, like, this guy that really needed his Tommy Hilfiger shirt.

And you know what is so difficult about that is for the folks that are wired toward perfectionism, performance, that, knocking on that door is like, I, I can't even touch that with a 30-foot pole.

what is it about fostering a secure attachment style that helps someone to um get their their desires in order so to speak

Yeah, so Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, he once said that the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived or unprocessed life of its mother or father.

And so that sense of the greatest burden that we are passing down to our children, to our is precisely the places in our own development that we have not been seen safe, soothed, and secure.

And so oftentimes that's what happens in the realm of desire, is that if we grew up in a family system that conflated desire with something selfish, we're likely going to pass that on to our kids as well.

Or let's say that we have an unwanted sexual behavior or a disordered relationship to alcohol.

That is going to affect the way that we show up with our kids.

We might just resign to the reality that everyone's going to struggle with this, therefore I'm not really going to try and protect my kids.

How do you respond to that?

But, you know, you say in your book, "Our life is speaking to us through our desires, but I wonder how well we are listening." If you can, uh, expound upon that a little bit more because you also mentioned the two great parati- paradigms of our time, um, that counteract us listening to our desires being pathologizing desire and dismissing desire as inconsequential.I know you already talked a little bit about the one, the latter, but can you put those into almost fifth grader language for those that are listening that are just trying to wrestle with what this looks like for them?

When you think about desire, let me kind of back up a little bit.

Um, and part of what I would say is in the first book that I wrote, it was a book titled Unwanted.

And w- what we looked at was we did a lot of research to kind of say, you know, not so much how do we stop people from looking at porn or, you know, pursuing infidelity, but we really looked at what were the key drivers that were influencing people to pursue it.

So one of the counterintuitive things that we did in that original research study was we didn't just ask people how many affairs they had had, how much porn that they were watching.

We actually asked for some of the specifics of their fantasies.

Like, we asked them, you know, "What do you actually put into Google? When you go to a porn site, what do you actually look at? Or when you are pursuing, uh, an affair partner, is that someone that is close to you? Is that someone that's anonymous?" And part of what we found in that research is that the sexual fantasies that people have are not random at all.

So can you speak to the four S's and kind of explain what those are?

Hmm

... working with this notion called a provisional self, which is not the, you know, the fullness of your identity, but it is the self that you needed to develop to survive your world.

So my provisional identity was being something of the golden boy in my family.

My, uh, I was, uh, the third of four children growing up as a pastor's kid, and so I watched my older sister, uh, you know, be the classic, uh, pastor's daughter rebel.

Um- Mm ... she was into things that kind of reflected poorly on my parents.

Her music choices were not up to par.

Then my older brother, uh, he, he was much more into philosophy.

Yeah.

Because that part of the book is really important to me.

Oh, it's central to everything I do.

A- and all of us are living out a script of a particular story, and that could be a script from my dad always said this to, you know, this is what it looks like to be a good Christian.

We have all been groomed [chuckles] with regard to what a good life, a good church, a good community begins to look like.

So that's part of, I think, the adult invitation is, we need to interrogate our desires.

We need to interrogate the things that we have defined as meaningful.

Like, is that something connected to our story? Is that connected to something that is wildly unhealthy and traumatic? Because you can develop a bond to a very traumatic system.

Yeah.