brother you look awesome though i say that all the time i mean you're yeah you're gonna be unstoppable after 70 here soon and and you look you look great and uh you know you and stephanie your wife you guys are you know obviously you're doing the rv thing now and traveling around the country but you're also really you've got you both of you have really doubled down on health and being unstoppable right

yeah and and she actually listens to your podcast honestly more than i do but she there was one and actually she got one a book from somebody um function i think it was called function if i'm not mistaken yeah so what you're doing is great um so i want to get started because i'm really excited to talk i am excited to talk about this i'm not doing it just because you're a friend the only other thing i'll correct is we were sitting on our boat and we were talking about podcasts and you asked me probably for the umpteenth time if i should do one And I didn't encourage you.

I challenged you to step up.

But it's been great.

And you're serving a really – an important need, which I think is pretty cool.

So, Mike, one of the things I like about this book, besides the subject, like a good video – it gets right to the point, like there's no fluff.

Literally from the first few pages, I'm like, okay, here's Mike's backstory.

That way, the women that are commenting on my YouTube and my book, I can point them to that.

Can you kind of talk through some of the points Si's making here?

Yeah, I think there's a couple ways to think about this.

Certainly sexual repression that happens in high control religion pushes sexuality into secrecy.

because there's not a healthy outlet for a person to be sexual.

And so they go into a place of secrecy where they're able to kind of indulge their normal sexual interest and sexual desire.

That's one thing that happens because when you repress something, it's not like it leaves.

it's gonna come out somewhere.

Yeah, and yet when you use stuff that might be considered slang, it sort of feels like you're getting someone to tell you, let's not use language like that.

So I just have to

cool my heels, right? But it's interesting.

Today was a really good day for me.

And one of the clients I'm working with, been with him, we've been working together for a very long time.

What I was able to share with him, because he wants to start a coaching program.

He's kind of getting his feet, you're dipping his toe in the water.

But he's been talking for a couple of years and I kind of had that, are you going to do this or is it just going to be a dream? By the way, if it's a dream, fine.

But do you see it or have you seen it affect other people when they actually did make a big transfer from doing one thing and they didn't really have the next thing to go to? Was there a vacuum there or have you seen that?

What happened?

So I had a, um, [clears throat] a woman in our congregation who requested that we'd have coffee together, which was strange, but I could tell that in her voice there was some desperation, so I agreed to meet with her.

And in our meeting, she, she was wearing, like, a long-sleeve shirt and a long dress, and she pulled up the sleeves of her arm and showed me the bruises that were up and down her arm, and then she pulled up her dress a little bit up her leg and showed me the bruises on her leg.

Now, she was married to our worship director, um, at the church, and this was a little bit of the beginning of the end for me because I started recognizing that despite my bulletproof theology that I spent years of my life in theological school developing, and people depended on me to be the person to explain the Bible, what it meant to know God, how to cultivate a deep religious faith, that despite all of that teaching, I started recognizing over time that there were problems that persisted in the congregants of our church that never seemed to go away.

Anxiety-

Talk to me, though, about, um, uh, obviously, there's so much negative that you would have to say about that experience i- in, I, I sense in love, but, like, um, at the time, what would you have kind of listed as, like, the good things that this church was doing?

Yeah.

There, there are many, and there are a lot of, um, extraordinary human beings that were part of building Willow Creek Church, and many of them are still my friends.

Mm.

That's one thing that happens, because when you repress something, it's not like it leaves.

It, it's gonna come out somewhere.

It's gonna take an expression somewhere.

Now, the other thing that I would say is sometimes I feel like, you know, w- in conversations about sexuality, pornography, masturbation, this kind of thing, like, maybe we need to step backAnd couples need to be able to have conversations about the kind of relationship that they want to have based on what matters to them, based on their deepest values.

You know, trying to work out these individual issues, I think is just symptomatic of something that doesn't happen with couples, where they sit down and they talk about the kind of relationship that they want to have, and then of course, they wanna, they, they build that together.

The problem is is that religion doesn't let people have that conversation often around sexuality, because it can be very threatening.

Yeah, and, and yet when you use stuff that might be considered slang, um, y- you know, it, it, it, it, it sort of feels like you're, you're getting, uh, you know, the [laughs] someone to tell you, "Let's not use language like that." Jim Palmer, what's going on here?