November 25, 2024 • 58 mins
What exactly is attachment? How does it relate to addiction? Michael John Cusick explains why we need to feel seen, soothed, safe, and secure, and what it looks like to experience attachment with God. At the end, Michael guides us in a beautiful meditation on my favorite chapter of the Bible, Psalm 131.
Michael John Cusick is a Licensed Professional Counselor, spiritual director, speaker, and author. Having experienced the restoring touch of God in a deeply broken life and marriage, Michael’s passion is to connect life’s broken realities with the reality of the gospel. In addition to leading Restoring the Soul and equipping Christian organizations around the world, Michael formerly served as an adjunct professor at Denver Seminary and full-time professor at Colorado Christian University.
Michael is also the host of the popular Restoring the Soul podcast, totaling over 1.8 million downloads in just 6 years of podcasting. If you haven’t already, take a listen to his most popular podcasts here.
Pre-order Michael's new book, Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion And Trusting In Divine Love
And don't forget about Michael's first book, Surfing For God: Discovering The Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle
These are paid links.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Husband Material podcast, where
we help Christian men outgrowporn.
Why?
So you can change your brain,heal your heart and save your
relationship.
My name is Drew Boa and I'mhere to show you how let's go.
Hey man, thank you forlistening to this interview with
(00:21):
Michael John Cusick.
Wow, I learned a ton from thisepisode.
You are going to hear all aboutthe science and the spirituality
and the theology of attachmentand why that is at the core of
how we're designed, what westruggle with and what healing
(00:44):
looks like.
Michael's new book, sacredAttachment, goes into depth
about that and you are going toget a wonderful download from
the riches of that book.
I got a chance to read it.
It was excellent, and this isreally building on his first
book, surfing for GodDiscovering the Divine Desire
Beneath Sexual Struggle.
(01:05):
Both books are excellent and inthis interview, you're going to
get some new perspectives onwhy is there such a gap between
what we believe about God andwhat we experience.
You're going to get some newideas about sin and brokenness
and a much more beautiful,expansive view of who God is
(01:27):
much more beautiful, expansiveview of who God is and what
Michael means when he says thesethree powerful words.
Love has you.
We end the interview with ameditation on my very favorite
chapter of the Bible, psalm 131.
That was so powerful.
I hope you get a chance tolisten to the whole thing.
Enjoy.
Today we get to hear fromMichael John Cusick, who is the
founder of Restoring the Souland the author of a new book
(01:47):
Sacred Attachment EscapingSpiritual Exhaustion and
Trusting in Divine Love.
Welcome, michael.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
It is so good to be with you, Drew.
Glad to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Yeah, I've been hopeful about having you on the
show for a long time.
Your book Surfing for God isone of the best out there for
Christian men who want freedomfrom porn.
So what is new about this bookfor men who are struggling?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Well, for the past 13 years since Surfing for God
came out and yes, it's hard tobelieve it's been out that long
I've ministered and worked andtaught a lot in the area of
human sexuality in the academiclevel at Denver Seminary and
around the country, and the workthat I've done in intensive
counseling has been largelyaround sexual brokenness I've
(02:36):
felt with the way that I'velearned about trauma and my own
journey and freedom, and I'vehad to deal with a food
addiction since I wrote Surfingfor God.
That's been very real and I'veexperienced freedom from that as
well.
And I was diagnosed withAsperger's on the autism
spectrum disorder about sevenyears ago and it's required me
(02:57):
to take a deep dive inunderstanding the brain and the
central nervous system and thegift of neuroscience to therapy
and especially Christiancounseling, how it highlights
the idea that we really arefearfully and wonderfully made.
It's been an unintentionalpullback from the work of sexual
brokenness and more looking athow actually the underlying
(03:17):
issues of sexual addiction andcompulsion which is trauma and
attachment that's, you know, nowa regular part of the approach
to the healing process how thoseissues of trauma and attachment
actually impact ourrelationship with God and,
culturally, what's happenedduring and after the pandemic,
where there is a whole newembrace of mental health and
(03:40):
counseling, it almost feels tome as if there's almost a
prophetic element and I'm notsaying that in the most biblical
sense of the word prophetic,but how people are bringing
truth and speaking truth intothe hearts and lives of broken
people around neuroscience andmental health and psychology and
counseling.
(04:00):
And of course we always need toweigh that up against how God
made us and who God is and whatthe scriptures reveal about that
.
But I have really been readingdeeply around just this area of
attachment and speaking for thelast four or five years on these
four S's that are in the bookthe need to be seen, soothed,
safe and secure and how thedegree to which those elements
(04:22):
are met will affect whether wehave a healthy attachment or not
.
And generally speaking, if wedon't have a healthy attachment
which I'm sure we can unpack inthis conversation we will attach
to something we will eitherunattach in human relationships
or we will overattach in humanrelationships, and both of those
will lead us to want to attachto a person, to a behavior, to a
(04:44):
substance, and of course pornbrings all three of those
together.
Right?
There's generally an image of aperson, the substance is our
own body chemistry and thebehavior is whatever kind of
sexual acting out is there.
So it's this trifecta of whathappens.
And you know the book that cameout 10 years ago by Alexandra
Katahakis I think I may bebutchering her name sex
(05:06):
addiction and affect regulation.
So it was all about howaddiction, and sexual addiction
in particular, because of thattrifecta it elevates our mood
and it brings us a sense ofsoothing and so, as we
understand attachment, it canhelp us to almost reverse
engineer, looking at ourcompulsions and our addictions,
and say what's the attachmentneed that's being met here and
(05:29):
in Surfing for God?
I think I talked about four A'sand three S's attention,
affection, affirmation, security, significance and satisfaction.
And I've distilled those evenmore with the four S's, which is
not an original idea to me.
It came from Dr Dan Siegel, thepatriarch of interpersonal
neurobiology, and then kind ofhanded down to Dr Kurt Thompson,
(05:50):
my good friend and psychiatrist, and it's just become a robust
way of thinking about our humanbrokenness, but without
necessarily having to go backand look at every detail and
aspect of our story.
It's just a really great way ofgoing.
Well, of course I wasn't soothedor whoa.
Yeah, I wasn't seen andtherefore I didn't feel safe and
(06:12):
therefore I don't have a secureattachment.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Let's dive deep into those four S's.
What are they and why do weneed them?
Speaker 2 (06:20):
First of all, they are the four components that
build a healthy attachment.
And for those of your listenersthat listen to different
podcasts on recovery or mentalhealth or on healing from trauma
, you start to hear the wordattachment everywhere, or
attachment theory and attachmentstyle.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Yeah, it's like everyone talks about it, but
what is it?
Speaker 2 (06:45):
style.
Yeah, it's like everyone talksabout it.
But what is it?
Yeah, exactly A little bit likethe word brokenness, where you
hear it a lot, and I love to saywell, what do you mean by that?
Technically speaking, attachmentis a God-ordained, god-given
process that's wired into thecentral nervous system of an
infant and it's the process bywhich that infant draws upon the
strength and the health of thatmature brain of that adult
(07:07):
caregiver and through that theinfant is able to learn to
regulate themselves and toorganize the world.
So through that other brain ofthe caregiver.
It's a reciprocal back andforth process.
It's literally how the infantdoesn't just come to bond or
experience emotional connectionlater in life, but literally how
(07:29):
they're able to be present intheir own body, how to regulate
and how to be soothed.
And so a paraphrase for thisidea of regulating is how we
sense, how we sense the world,how we feel it in our body, and
then that organizing thathappens in this attention
process is how we make sense ofthe world around us.
So it's a little bit of a rightbrain, left brain way of
(07:52):
thinking about it and that'smore of a metaphor than what's
literally happening in the brain.
But all healing happens as welearn to sense the world
accurately and, in that sensing,be able to respond to that
stimuli or to what it is thatwe're experiencing and sensing
in a way that's healthy, asopposed to a way that's
unhealthy.
And I know I'm jumping around alittle bit here, but this is
(08:14):
why I talk about addiction as acompulsion in which we're really
just essentially mishandlingour pain.
We're mishandling thedysregulation, the distress, the
discomfort inside of us, and wecan't just read a book about
how to do that.
We have to experience it in anembodied fashion.
So that process of how theinfant learns to regulate and
(08:37):
organize through the brain ofthe adult, the way that that
comes to the infant, is throughthese four S's that that infant
needs to be seen, and that beingseen is, of course, when the
baby comes out.
There's no parent and my wifehad a C-section and then went to
the recovery room with ourbiological son we have an
(08:57):
adopted daughter but as she wentaway to the recovery room they
handed me this bundle ofblankets and I was like what do
you want me to do with these?
It's not my job to put them inthe hamper.
And I looked down and there wasa baby in it, it was my son.
And I was momentarily terrified, like I don't know what to do.
My wife's not here.
And then something happenedwhere I looked at his face His
(09:18):
eyes weren't open yet and I justfell in love and something in
me melted and all I wanted to dowas to gaze upon him.
And then I have this video thatit can still make me cry where,
while she was in recovery, thenurse said go back to the room
and just sit with him.
And again I had this moment ofterror of what am I going to say
and do and think about.
(09:39):
I think I was 32 years old andyet I sat down in the room and I
turned on this little softmusic in the background and I
just started to sing to him andto gaze upon his face.
And I was seeing him in themost literal sense.
But I wasn't just looking athim with visual acuity, I was
seeing into him and somehow,even though I had just met him,
(10:00):
it felt as if I actually knewhim and it felt as if he was a
complete stranger on the onehand, and on the other hand
there was a sense of he's mineand I'm his, and therefore I had
a sense of I get him.
I needed to learn what his crysounded like and why he was
crying at certain moments, butthere was this deep sense of
knowing him.
(10:20):
Now it's not just looking at ababy, but Kurt Thompson's also
the person that taught me thatthat infant is born with about
50 to 60% of active neurons inthe brain, and the average adult
human being has 50 to 80billion neurons, billion with a,
b.
And that baby is born with less, but it's still in the tens of
(10:43):
billions, but only half of themare online.
So imagine buying a laptopcomputer and you power it up and
something flashes across thescreen and it says only half of
the hard drive is working.
You'd want to take it back tothe store, but what happens is
that those other neurons in thatinfant come online, generally
(11:03):
between zero and four years old,but all the way up until 26 or
27, when the human brain stopsformally developing.
How those neurons come onlinein the earliest days and years
is through eye contact,literally, as the adult
caregiver, the mom, the dadgazes into the eyes, even though
that baby has no construct orno mental vocabulary, for mom or
(11:27):
dad is gazing into my eyes.
They're here's the word againsensing that they are being seen
and bing, bing, bing, bing,bing, bing, bing times a billion
those neurons are coming onlineand they're beginning to
organize their world.
So, within a couple of days,that baby's going to be able to
acknowledge and recognize oh,this is mom, this is dad.
(11:48):
That's different than the furrycreature that crawls on the
ground.
Now that infant turns into atwo-year-old or maybe
18-month-old and they starttoddling and walking, there's
never been a parent that I knowof that sees that child take the
first step and go.
Oh, I wonder what we're havingfor dinner tonight.
You know, it's the celebration.
It's calling grandma andgrandpa, it's texting all your
(12:10):
friends, it's posting pictureson social media and it's this
big deal why we see this childand it's awesome.
Junior brings home scribbles inkindergarten, you know from from
crayons on the paper, andsuddenly that artwork is more
valuable than a Picasso and itgoes on the refrigerator and
that's something that mom anddad are proud of.
(12:31):
Why it's a bunch of scribbles,but it's yours and it matters,
and I see you and I could go onand on and on and on.
And this becomes a little bitproblematic because as somebody
goes into their teen years,where identity formation really
happens.
If I'm a baseball star or ifI'm a cheerleader, or if I'm
really, really smart and have a4.5 GPA, then I can start to say
(12:55):
I'm seen when I do X, y, zfunctions, when I perform, when
I achieve, and that becomes asense of identity which actually
sets me up to develop a reallygood-looking false self, which
also sets us up for addiction.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
What happens when we grow up?
Seen only for that false selfor unseen?
Speaker 2 (13:21):
That's a great question.
One of two things will happenif we develop a really good
false self.
And that false self can take acouple of different directions.
One is I have to be bigger andbetter than I actually am.
I've got to get better grades,I've got to be better looking, I
have to date a prettier girl, Ihave to be in all the clubs, I
have to be on varsity as I growup, I have to have a bigger
(13:44):
house, I have to have a betterjob, et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera, and that's a lot ofpressure.
So in that performance andachieving of being bigger or
better, it's pressure and it canlead to pride.
And by pride I don't meanhaughtiness I'm better than
everyone else, I meanself-sufficiency, where I don't
need anyone.
And that's a really dangeroussetup for addiction.
(14:05):
Let's just talk because youwork with men.
A man who doesn't need anyoneis a man who will be addicted
and compulsive 100% of the time.
The other side of the equationis that if I have a false self,
I'm going to dial myself downand I'm going to become smaller
than who I am.
I will diminish myself.
And very few people actuallyjust choose this.
(14:26):
They're doing it in response totrauma, and they're doing it in
response to shame, wherethey've been told you know, how
dare you?
Who do you think you are?
You're not better than otherpeople, our family doesn't dream
about going to college, thosekinds of things.
And in that sense of shame,there's this belief that I'm not
worthy to get my needs met andso that's going to set me up for
addiction and compulsion aswell.
(14:48):
And these addictions andcompulsions might be work.
It could be a pastor trying toget more people in his church or
, you know, preaching bettersermons and taking a longer
amount of time for that, or itcould be pornography.
So this question of what if ourfalse self dominates us in
either direction of I'm smallerthan I really am or I'm bigger
than I really am?
The issue with that, drew, isthat we will never be loved for
(15:11):
who we really are If what we dois present to the world a
version of ourselves that is afalse self.
And I'm not just talking aboutinauthenticity, like not being
vulnerable, or talking to youraccountability partner, but
coming into the world sayingthis is who I must be in order
to be loved.
Not, this is who I am and I canbe loved.
(15:31):
We set ourselves up that nobodycan ever love us for our true
self.
They love us for who we thinkthey want us to be, and that
sets us up for addiction andcompulsion.
Why?
Because the deepest longing ofour heart is to be loved and
known and to be acceptedunconditionally, and the false
self actually sets us up so thatactually becomes impossible.
(15:55):
And then the second S of thefour S's is soothing.
We have to find a way to sootheourselves Now.
If we're not seen as infants,if we're crying, if we have a
wet diaper and a rash, or ifwe're hungry and the baby's
blood sugar is low, or ifthey're cold, or if there's loud
, scary noises around the house,or if mom and dad have
(16:16):
emotional disconnect, or ifthey're fighting, or if the
consistent presence of peace andcalm is not there, it's very
likely that that's going toimpact whether or not the child
is seen and can be attended to.
And if that child is not seen,then it's likely that they're
not going to be soothed so thatsoothing is.
There is distress in the infantand care comes predictably to
(16:41):
meet them and to attune to thatdistress so that there can
actually be soothing and infantsthat don't get that will learn
up.
They will grow up and notactually learn how to soothe
themselves through being presentto themselves, through asking
for care, for hugs, for thingslike that.
(17:02):
Instead, they will either shutdown their capacity to feel and
kind of become emotionally dead,or to dissociate out of their
own body, to not be present, orthey will turn to things, and
this happened to me at a veryyoung age.
Parallel to my exposure topornography.
At age four, I turned to food.
One of my earliest memories ishiding under a bed.
(17:23):
This was an old-fashioned bedwhere they had box springs and
under the box spring I somehowfound a way to cut open the
piece of cloth and I would takecandy and I had a bag of
Nestle's chips that were used tobake cookies and I had that
entire bag stuffed up underneaththis bed.
When I was just very, veryyoung pre-kindergarten and when
(17:43):
I was hurting, when I wasanxious and I didn't even know
what to call it, then I would gounder the bed and I would eat
food and that struggle was withme long after the freedom from
sexual compulsion, and that wasa form of self-soothing.
If a child and an infant is notsoothed, they're not going to
feel a sense of safety withintheir own body.
(18:04):
And safety is so important.
And I'm not talking about, youknow, put double locks on your
doors because you live in a badneighborhood.
I'm talking about the kind ofsafety that, under normal
conditions, that I can feel safeand calm and quiet on the
inside and that, even with allthe normal ups and downs of life
(18:25):
, that I know that, if I getanxious, that there is safety
around me, that there areboundaries and that there are
people that are going to comeand attend to me, and as that
happens, from infancy throughchildhood, through adolescence,
that becomes internalized andthen I become a person that can
live in my own body andtherefore navigate the world in
(18:46):
my own body, because when Isense the world, I'm actually
able to regulate and get to aplace of relative calm and I'm
able to actually organize andact upon the world so that I can
have a sense of self anddevelop a sense of competency
and efficacy and things likethat.
And again in my story, I didn'thave this language, but I had
(19:06):
very little safety growing up.
There was a lot ofunpredictability, there was a
lot of abuse, there was a lot oftrauma and I found myself for
three decades with all kinds ofsexual struggles, shame, what
eventually became a full-blownsexual addiction that I wrote
about in Surfing for God, and Ihad no idea why I was doing what
I was doing, and in theChristian world, the best that
(19:28):
people gave me was you're asinner, you just need to repent,
and there was grace andforgiveness for that,
fortunately, but there was nohope about how to actually
change.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
The reality is for many of us is, for many of us,
the most secure attachment weever had in life where we felt
seen, soothed and secure wasporn.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Right, one of my greatest moments of shame was
acting out in a old fashionedadult video booth.
This was 31 years ago.
About two weeks after thatexperience, 31 years ago, about
two weeks after that experience,I had a kind of vision, and at
the time I wasn't a charismatic.
I didn't know that these kindsof things would happen.
But I had this picture in myhead.
But it was like out in front ofme and yet it was inside of me.
(20:17):
But I call it seeing in theeyes of the heart, like Paul
talks about in Ephesians 1.18.
And Jesus was there with me inthis adult video.
Kate and I'm down on my kneeslike worshiping, and his arm was
around me and he whispered inmy ear of course, of course.
And it wasn't a kind of asnarky well, of course, like
(20:39):
you're accusing, you're screw up.
Of course this is what you'regoing to do.
It was, of course, because Iunderstand your story, I know
the wounds deep inside of you, Iknow the deep thirst of your
heart, I know all the ways thatyou've mishandled your pain.
And right now, today, michael,it could not be any other way.
(21:02):
And when I say that I'm notgiving myself slack or laying
myself off a hook, nor am Igiving men permission to go.
Oh well, well, god forgives me.
And he says, of course, becausethat was the moment when I
sensed that this was someone 39talks about that before a word
is on my tongue, he knows itcompletely.
(21:22):
And before I stand up, he knowsit.
And before I stand up, he knowsit.
And before I go out, he's there.
He knows me so thoroughly andintimately.
Well, he knew exactly why I wasdoing what I was doing.
He had the most precise.
You know better than MayoClinic, better than Patrick
Karnes sex addiction program,you know, dare I say, better
than husband material or surfing.
For God.
(21:42):
Jesus knew precisely why I wasdoing what I was doing and he
wasn't mad at me, he wasn'tdisappointed in me, he wasn't
frustrated, he wasn't pacingback and forth, wringing his
hands.
His, of course, was I've gotthis, I've got this.
And it was in me, actuallyhearing those words, that that
(22:03):
began to prepare my heart forjust three or four months later
when, gratefully, my world cametumbling down and everything
broke apart, where my doublelife was discovered.
This past July 10th, my wifeJulianne and I were over in
Scotland on a hundred-milepilgrimage and we celebrated
while we were walking barefootacross the North Sea.
(22:24):
We celebrated while we werewalking barefoot across the
North Sea.
At the end of this pilgrimage,we celebrated 30 years of the
freedom and the D-Day of ourmarriage, and it was pretty
remarkable to think about wherewe were then and where we are
now.
So, for men that are listening,I just want to say, whether
you're far along in yourrecovery, whether you have no
recovery, whether you're juststarting your recovery that it's
(22:47):
not just possible to be sober.
That's the starting point.
That's the doorway that we walkthrough.
What's possible is freedom.
What's possible is restoration.
What's possible is that you wereactually created to live a life
that you probably have verylittle idea could happen.
But deep in your heart there's aseed, and in that seed there's
(23:08):
a vision of the you that Godcreated.
He says in Jeremiah 1, before Iformed you, I knew you and I
set you apart, which means thatGod had a dream about your life
and what it would be like foryou to be alive and awake and
free and to, as David says inPsalm 119, to run in the path of
his commands.
That's something that'scompelling.
(23:31):
I mean, if we could get aglimpse of that, that would be
more compelling than porn on thestrongest day.
But to get from A to B is todeal with and you brought this
up before we started the podcast.
It's to deal with this gap, orthis delta, which is the
distance between what we'recreative for and what we're
(23:51):
actually living, what we believeand what we actually experience
, what we hope for and whatwe're promised and what our
everyday reality is, and thatgap is pretty huge and bigger
than what most people talk about.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yeah, so many of us have been on this road for years
and part of us thinks God why.
I'm doing my work, I'm tryingto heal, I'm pursuing recovery
and there's still this huge gapbetween what I believe and what
(24:28):
I experience.
Between what I believe and whatI experience.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
You know we want a microwave transformation and to
your point about I'm doing mywork.
Thanks be to God that more andmore men have programs like
yours to be able to be in acommunity of other men, to have
a path forward, to understandthe depth of the struggle and
not just the superficial let'skind of rearrange the furniture
(24:51):
in the room approach.
So thanks be to God for that.
But real let me use an oldfashion word sanctification, or
the process of becoming holy andwhole, and those are synonymous
.
They're two sides of the samecoin.
That takes a very, very, verylong time.
I just turned 60 in August.
Surprise.
It just feels like I was just20, just 30, et cetera.
(25:14):
And it was pretty profound whenI turned 60.
And I was delighted because I'dbeen stepping more and more
into the role of being a fatherI'm not a grandparent but a
father to young men and steppinginto the authority of who I am.
And then I said, like a coupleof days around my birthday, I
was like God, why does it takeso long?
(25:34):
I thought when I was 60 thatall this crap was going to be
behind me and I just kind of sawhim smile like, yeah, I knew
you thought that I didn't wantto burst the bubble too soon.
But if all that stuff wasbehind me.
But if all that stuff wasbehind me, then my hunger and
(26:05):
thirst for wholeness and fordeeper experiences of God's love
and of his faithfulness, ofbrokenness.
But one of the points in thebook Sacred Attachment is that
our brokenness is never thebarrier to the life that we want
.
It's the bridge to the lifethat we want.
But what we have to do is wehave to be in our brokenness
rather than try to avoid it orto push it down or, as
(26:28):
Christians will often do, we'retaught or encouraged to somehow
manage our brokenness, asopposed to allow our brokenness,
which are both moments in ourlives where we have no game, but
also parts of our story wherewe had no game that lead us to a
pattern and a way of being inthe world of trying to make life
(26:48):
work.
And as long as we're trying tomake life work, including to try
to manage our sin, that's goingto be really hard to trust God
and to learn that love has usand that's actually the antidote
to all addiction is to attachsecurely to the source of love
and gratefully.
We get to do that on thehorizontal level with spouses,
(27:11):
partners, girlfriends, fiancés.
We get to do that with closefriends, with family, and that's
practice for how we can do thatwith God.
But here's the difficult part wecan't just attach to God by
saying I'm going to readMichael's book or listen to a
podcast on attachment or justchoose to do this.
It's that same process inadulthood as it is for infants.
(27:33):
It's a process whereby mynervous system has to draw upon
a more mature, more regulated,stronger, healthier nervous
system where I can learn to andI'm going to take a deep breath
and exhale and make this exhalesound where I can learn to.
And you asked before thepodcast you know what is this
(27:55):
idea that love has me.
And that idea love has me isnot an intellectual idea, it's
the exhale, it's the infantwho's anxious, who before
nursing at the breast or havingthe bottle, they were hungry,
their blood sugar was low,they're a little jumpy, they're
crying, and then they getsnuggled and they have the milk
(28:15):
and there's nourishment in theirbloodstream and their tummy
starts to get full and theystart to relax as they're held
and then they let out this sigh,psalm 131.
But I have calmed myself, Ihave quieted my ambitions.
I am like a child at itsmother's breast, like a child
with its mother.
I am content and you know Ihave two graduate degrees in
(28:38):
psychology, one in pastoralcounseling and one in counseling
psychology, and I'm all aboutthat.
But the beautiful thing and Iknow that your ministry draws
upon scriptural resources iswhen you start to understand
things like neuroscience andattachment.
It starts to open your eyes tosee scripture in a whole new way
.
And my friend Andi Kolber, whowrote the book Try Softer and
(29:01):
Strong Like Water, she made acomment to me walking out of our
office about a year ago and shesaid Michael, I'm starting to
believe that all theology isattachment.
And I just thought it was a newway that she said that to me.
But as I pondered that, I waslike well, gosh, jesus' last
sermon was I am the vine, youare the branches.
What more powerful picturecould we have of attachment than
(29:22):
that?
And what would it be like ifthis hole in the heart of men
that is part of our brokenness,that's part of our fallenness,
part of our autonomy and ourindependence from God and part
of what we did not learn how todo with our caregivers, which is
to be vulnerable and how toreceive.
What would it be like if inthat hole in our heart we could
(29:43):
picture like almost an umbilicalcord, but it's more like a
giant tree root that comes outand attaches to this giant vine.
And that's what Jesus is saying.
That whole idea of I'm the vineand you are the branches remain
there.
Dwell there, just be there.
Just let it be connected likeyour umbilical cord to your
(30:03):
mother's umbilical cord in utero.
Just be in that space and asyou focus on that, you'll have
everything you need.
Like the psalmist has said, Ican quiet myself, I can calm
myself and I'm content.
But we don't talk about thatand our churches generally only
give us a left brain cognitiveunderstanding of that.
And that's why there's achapter in the book on
(30:24):
embodiment and how we need tointernalize this into our bodies
, because without embodiedspirituality we have no
spirituality at all.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
I hope everyone listening can take a deep breath
and receive that truth in ourbodies.
That love has you.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
It's really freeing.
It's really freeing, it'sreally freeing.
And I've sat with, you know,hundreds and hundreds of men in
circles and in my counselingoffice and that idea is
presented and they woulddesperately like to believe it
and they desperately want toseek to experience it.
But because their own nervoussystem is let me use the
(31:11):
non-clinical term their nervoussystem is so jacked up from
trauma or from addiction itself,or from social media or from
just stress in life, that we tryto take that breath.
We can't even take 100% breath.
I'll often say to men take adeep breath and they'll exhale.
And I'll say what percentage ofa full breath do you think you
(31:31):
just took?
Oh, 60, maybe 70 at most.
And starting to become awareand to develop this bodily
awareness that there's so muchtightness in my chest that I
can't even take a full breath.
Now I'm not shaming orpathologizing everyone, but we
are meant to be so relaxed thatI can take a full breath.
(31:52):
Just so happens that right nowI could and I can actually feel
that expansion and at the top ofthat full breath I can feel
this surge of oxygen go throughmy chest and system and down
into my arms.
But if I can't feel that whatis it that will make a release
of oxytocin and vasopressin andendorphins and dopamine and all
(32:13):
that good stuff.
It's an orgasm, or it's eventhe fantasy, without even
touching genitals, of therituals and the images and all
that goes into our acting outritual that that will also
release those chemicals in oursystem and then we become
dependent upon that to get thatsense of soothing and that
(32:36):
exhale on the inside.
So you know, it goes withoutsaying, but the beauty of your
work and the beauty of a lot ofthe work that people are doing
today in trying to deal withfreedom, wholeness and recovery
from any number of addictions,is that there's a greater and
greater emphasis on embodimentand attachment in a non-shaming,
(32:57):
non-judgmental, beautiful,generous, merciful, magnanimous
understanding of God.
That God is simply there for usand he's always giving, he's
always embracing, and that hispassion is infinitely more than
just wanting to save us so thatwe can go to heaven, but his
passion is to actually make uswhole, so that we would bring
(33:22):
the kingdom of God into ourrelationships and into our
workplaces and into our familiesand our neighborhoods on earth
as it is in heaven.
That's God's passion, is hiskingdom.
God dealt with sin on the cross,and so sin is just something
that God hurts over.
Sin because it causes his lovedones pain, and if we are
(33:43):
married and betraying our spouse, that causes pain and that
hurts God's heart.
But God is not hurting aboutsin because he's somehow holy
and can't look upon sin.
That's actually a misnomer.
But for the past hundred-ishyears we preach that God is holy
and cannot look upon sin.
And I used to preach thatsermon myself and it comes from
Habakkuk, chapter 2, and it saysyou, o Lord, are holy and
(34:05):
cannot look upon sin.
Dot, dot, dot.
So why do you look upon sin?
And you take the idea of Jesusbeing born into a sinful world
and he was with sinful kids onthe playground and he was with
sinful disciples and on and onand on and on.
God, who is holy, includingJesus, loves to be in the midst
(34:26):
of sin because he's bringing hislight into the darkness.
So this was another reason whyI wrote the book Drew is I
wanted to help heal people'simage of God, because there is
no healing from addiction andcompulsion if there's no healing
of our understanding of God,because if we see God as
(34:46):
vengeful, angry, disappointed,frustrated, judging, exacting,
requiring us to live accordingto a certain moral standard.
If we see him as that way,there's no way that we can be
securely attached.
That's going to create eitheran anxious attachment where I'm
always working really hard totry to make sure that I'm okay
with God.
(35:06):
And that was my story.
I was the master of spiritualdisciplines for the first five
years of my life, memorizingscripture.
I literally had a clipboardthat had like 10 different
categories of Christianactivities that I would do.
I was really all in.
It was a little crazy and sincethis is a guy podcast, I'll say
this it's a little embarrassing, but at one point I was a
(35:27):
senior in high school I told GodI'm going to put my Bible in
the clipboard with all mymarkers and pens for my morning
quiet time on my toilet and I'mnot going to take a pee until
I'm in the Word.
And of course that's almostlike self-abusive, but it was
how desperately I wanted to befree and the only way I knew how
(35:48):
to do it was to anxiously tryto please God, because my
thought was, if God's pleasedwith me, then he'll give me the
key that will turn in the doorthat I can walk into this room
of the abundant life that I sodesperately wanted.
And if we're not an anxiousattachment, it's an avoidant
attachment, where intimacy andunconditional love that's not in
(36:08):
my control, that's overwhelmingto me, it dysregulates me, so
I'm going to pull away and I'mgoing to stay distant.
And those are the two forms ofunhealthy attachment.
There's also one calledambivalent attachment, which is
a mixture of avoidant andanxious.
According to research says 60%of people in America have a
secure attachment and mosttherapists think that's about
half, actually, that the peoplesomehow in the research missed
(36:31):
what was actually happening inreal people's lives.
I would certainly say that thegenerations that have grown up
as digital natives that areattached to screens and find the
majority of their soothingthrough screens, that it's
significantly less than 60%.
So at best 40% of us in Americahave either an anxious, an
(36:51):
avoidant or an ambivalentattachment style where we're
going to turn to people,substances or other
non-relational behaviors tobasically satisfy the deepest
needs of our heart.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
This understanding of attachment has been so freeing
and healing for me, but Ihaven't had the words for it, I
haven't had the theology to beable to reconcile it with a lot
of my understanding of the Bibleand spirituality, and you've
really helped me with that beingable to bring together the
(37:27):
science and the scripture to seeeverything more clearly.
And one of the categories thatyou've already talked about a
little bit is sin.
I can hear some people saying,man, all this stuff about
attachment and trauma andembodiment, yeah, that sounds
good, but this is a sin issue,right, this is sexual sin.
(37:50):
So what is your view of sin.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
I like to say, using the big, fancy seminary word, I
have a very strong and very deephamartiology, and hamartia
H-A-M-A-R-T-I-A is the Greekword for basically for sin.
The reason why I believe it'svery strong and deep is that it
is a depth view of sin.
It was Sigmund Freud that firstused the iceberg as an
(38:15):
illustration of the humanpersonality and one of the
people that popularized that.
One of the patriarchs ofChristian counseling, who I had
the good fortune and blessing tobe my mentor for 15 years, is
Dr Larry Crabb, who was here inDenver, wrote 25 books and
influenced people like DanAllender.
That wouldn't be who he istoday if not for Larry and John
(38:36):
Eldridge, who studied underLarry, and many, many others.
Places in my story where myneeds weren't met, where there's
neglect, where there are, infact, attachment wounds, places
in my story where there istrauma, where things that never
should have happened happenedand that can be profound.
Things like my story wherethere's sexual, physical,
(38:56):
emotional, spiritual abuse, orit can be something you know,
almost the cliche issue of beingasked to read in class and
stuttering in second grade andeverybody laughs at that child.
That can be a deep wound and atrauma where an arrow comes into
the heart.
Anyway, our iceberg behaviorsabove the waterline are driven
(39:20):
by what's beneath the waterline,that's, all the places where we
either have or have not beenseen soothed, safe, secure.
Those are the attachment wounds.
They're the trauma wounds.
And as we deal with what'sbelow the waterline, our hearts
become whole.
We can experience more and moredeeply how loved we are.
We can actually begin to bepresent to ourselves instead of
(39:44):
have to repress or push awayparts of who we are.
Many of your listeners may befamiliar with a book written
many, many centuries ago calledPracticing the Presence of God,
which is a great thing to do foraddictions, just learning how
to be present.
And I bought that book, I don'tknow 20 years ago, and I would
read it and I'd reread it and Ieven made like a three-page
(40:04):
outline of it and I couldn't doit.
Whatever.
Practicing the Pres presence ofGod.
You know I failed that class.
So I said to God you got tohelp me with this.
And it wasn't until many yearslater that I read Psalm 27, 4,
where David, the man after God'sown heart, says one thing I ask
God, this is what I seek todwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life, to gazeupon his beauty and to seek him
(40:26):
in his temple.
Here's my paraphrase of that.
When I read it it just reallyhit me.
God, here's the thing that iscentral in me right now.
I want to dwell in your temple.
I want to dwell in your houseall the days of my life and, in
that space, be so connected toyou that it's like I'm just
gazing upon you.
(40:46):
Parentheses God, I am thetemple, I am the house of the
Lord.
Second Corinthians, chapter two.
Do you not know that you areGod's temple and that his spirit
dwells in you?
So if we can't be present toourselves, which is the temple
of God, we're not going to beable to be present to God or to
other people and we're going tobe starving and dying of thirst
(41:10):
on the inside because we're notgoing to be able to get our
needs met.
So one of the first orders ofbusiness in recovery is not just
truth-telling and gettingconnected into a supportive,
loving, truth-filled,grace-filled community, but it's
also really about just learninghow to attune to our own bodies
, learning how to be still.
Sometimes you know that'sdownloading a meditation app.
(41:32):
I have a chapter in Surfing forGod, on centering prayer, how to
be still and it's interesting,I either never hear from people
about that chapter or I hearfrom people, generally older men
, who tell me that chapterchanged my life because it gave
me a way of being and it gave mesomething to do that was much
more than just trying to resistsexual temptation or flex my
(41:53):
moral muscles.
It actually gave me theexperience of being able to do
nothing in the presence of Godand to learn to be present to
myself and to learn how to havethat real rest that Jesus talks
about in Matthew 28 when he saysAll you who are weary, come to
me and I will give you rest.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
So sin is when we turn away.
It's not when we fall away, asmany of us have pictured
ourselves, like falling off acliff.
It's turning away from love,turning away from the beauty
that's being offered by Jesus.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Exactly.
I've always had a struggle withthe word fall, but it's more
relational to say the term.
And here's the beautiful thingwhat happens when we turn away
from God?
What happens when I am in myparking lot, at this truck stop
that had a big pornography storewith free donuts in, and I
(42:49):
would first tell myself andself-deceive myself that I was
going there for the free donutsand that I was just gonna walk
out.
But I would start spending alot of time in that one porn
store.
And what happens when I turnaway from God?
Does he stay in the parking lot?
No, he walks inside with me.
And what happens when I walkfrom where all the shelves are
with all the these were VHStapes back then, if people know
(43:12):
what that is.
What happens when I walk fromthat room into the little
inter-room behind the curtainand walk into one of the booths?
Does Jesus stay out?
No, he comes in.
And what happens when and Icould just keep going and going
and going in our worst moment,on our darkest day, on our
longest night?
Jesus doesn't stay back, hecomes with us.
So that when we turn away fromGod I think one of the most
(43:33):
profound pictures of whathappens when we turn away from
God is I've never done this andI don't know if I will but
jumping out of a plane.
I have a friend who jumped outof a plane on like their 40th
birthday and they sent me thevideo.
And you know, the goggles arethis big and there there's a
GoPro camera and the wind is intheir face.
And then you see that there'sthis instructor that is
(43:54):
literally like Velcro, doubleharnessed attached to them, so
if one of them dies, they'reboth going to die.
And that's what it's like whenwe turn away from God.
And I'm going to spin in mychair right now for the people
on the video.
So I turn away from God andhe's actually attached to me,
like that skydive instructorwhere there's no way we can
(44:14):
separate.
But I turn and I keep lookingfor him.
Where did he go?
Well, he's actually behind meand he's.
You know, all he has to do iswrap his arms around me, but
he's still attached.
That's what it's like.
And even in the turn in theGarden of Eden, there was not
that separation from God in theway that we think about it today
.
There is a felt sense ofdistance, there is a disconnect
(44:39):
relationally, in the same waythat when the parent is there in
the room and can breastfeed ortake a bottle and pick that baby
up, they're there, they seethem, they hear them, but until
that moment of that embrace, thebaby doesn't actually feel it.
And so this profound realitythat we can discover in our
brokenness and in our failureand in our sin and our struggle
(45:01):
and our shame, is the idea thatnone of that intimidates God.
None of that is problematic forhim, and his very nature is to
give himself in the way thatJesus gave himself on the cross.
Yes, he suffered greatly, butit didn't.
It wasn't like him going.
I can't believe I've got to dothis for humanity.
(45:23):
It's just who God is, it's whathe does, and far greater than
the physical suffering was thehumiliation and the
vulnerability that the creatorof the entire universe chose
humiliation.
Let's not forget that on thecross, he was stripped naked,
for his genitals to be flailingout in front of everybody.
For that's what they did inRoman crucifixions, was they
(45:44):
humiliated people?
And so if we want to knowwhether we can really trust God
and whether love has us, it'snot just that he took nails for
us, but he took the humiliationand choosing the powerlessness
to say this is what God is like,which means, in our suffering
and in our shame, god's not justwith us.
He's experiencing the shame aswell.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
He never detaches.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
That's right and that's why the sacred attachment
is an eternal union in christ,just like a an infant in its
mother's womb.
And let me just throw this infor kicks when I was a young
christian, I was taught, youknow, grace is the word.
Charis means gift, unmeritedfavor.
It's a gift that god gives withsalvation.
That that's true.
Mercy is something that Godtakes away, a punishment that we
do deserve, and that's about10% of the meaning of mercy.
(46:38):
In other words, that I deservesomething bad but God withholds
it like a judge who's going tosend me to jail, but instead he
has me do community service.
Mercy's root word in Hebrew israhamin and it means womb.
Mercy is this womb of God thatholds me, that sustains me, that
(46:59):
provides everything that I need.
Talk about food, clothing andshelter.
That's what the womb is, and nowonder Jesus says you must be
born again.
You have to be born in a waywhere you can now enter into
that heavenly womb in whichyou've always been in just read
Psalm 139, and to begin torealize that there is an
(47:23):
attachment and a security whereyou're seen soothed and safe.
That is even more profound thanwhat happened in your mother's
womb mother's womb and it's themost reliable, ever present
reality, so that in the midst ofour recovery journey, in the
midst of our shame, in the midstof our great need, whatever our
suffering might be, thatthere's a person that we have
(47:45):
access to, in the same way thatthe baby has access to the
mother, and there's a placewhere our hearts are secure,
even though we may not know thator feel that, in the same way
that the infant doesn't know.
Oh, there's this thing called amom on the outside there, but
the love is there, the care isthere, the provision is there.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Wow to, even though we can't directly see him, hear
him.
It's actually because we're soclose, we're like in the womb.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
I believe that's absolutely true.
There's an old Celtic proverb.
When we were in Scotland Iquoted this to somebody and they
picked up on it and they gaveus all little thimbles as a gift
.
The Celtic proverb says youcan't put the ocean in a thimble
, but you can drop the thimbleinto the ocean.
And our hearts, our spirits,our bodies are like thimbles
(48:49):
dropped into the ocean of God'slove.
And it would be silly for a fishliving in the middle of the
ocean to say I'm thirsty.
And that's often what happensin my life.
Before I knew about, the waythat I most deeply experienced
God is by being still, byexhaling, by stepping back, by
resting.
I would say, God, I'm thirstyand I was in the middle of an
(49:11):
ocean.
I didn't know that I coulddrink without having to earn it
or somehow get his good favorfirst, and that I didn't know
that I could drink withouthaving to earn it or somehow get
his good favor first, and thatI really didn't know how to
drink, because I thought it wasthrough more effort, more Bible
study, more prayer, more doinggood things, and then God would
bless me and I would somehow nolonger struggle.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
So now, what does a secure attachment with God look
like for you?
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Oh, wow, what a wonderful question.
I think it looks like Psalm 131, verse 2 and 3.
There's only three verses inthe whole Psalm.
It says but I have calmedmyself and quieted my ambitions,
like a weaned child with itsmother.
Like a weaned child, I amcontent.
(49:59):
And so I just see a Michael.
I'm 60 years old, but I'm beingheld like a baby in the arms of
God and I'm being pulled closeand he's gazing upon my face,
almost like those historicCatholic pictures of Mary, you
know, holding Jesus in the armsand gazing into Jesus' face.
(50:23):
This is the Father, son, holySpirit, the whole Trinity.
Now they're, you know, they'rewrapped around me and I'm in the
middle and just being held.
And there I can breathe, I canexhale.
As I exhale, something beginsto settle in me and, like the
psalmist says, but I have calmedmyself.
(50:43):
And calm is not just an emotionof I'm feeling peaceful or the
absence of stress.
Calm is an embodied experience.
And then I've quieted myambitions.
Calm is an embodied experience,and then I've quieted my
ambitions.
When I'm calm, I can begin toquiet down this part of me that
(51:03):
says you know, I've got to writea book that sells more copies
so that I can be more famous, sothat I'm somebody.
See back to the beginning ofour interview.
That's my false self, that's myego that goes I'll only be
loved if I'm greater than I amnow, if I weird word to use for
a 60-year-old man but likesexier to the world and more
important.
And so if I, I'm going to dothat next time.
So I start to think about acourse I'm going to do, or, you
(51:25):
know, talk that I want to give.
And those are ambitions thatare trying to make life work.
And the psalmist says when I'mcalm, I can quiet my ambitions.
And the psalmist says when I'mcalm, I can quiet my ambitions.
And for some addicts, ourambitions are the places that
our mind goes, sometimesreflexively, to an image, to an
(51:50):
action, to an app, to a hookup,to an affair partner, to a
certain place where we can getsexual relief.
And that's an ambition where,basically, here's my strategy to
get calm.
But when I'm calm I can quietall of that.
And in that quietness thepicture of me with God and me
with my own heart, in my ownbody is I can be like a child at
(52:11):
its mother's breast, and inmany of the translations of
Psalm 131, it says like a childweaned from its mother's breast.
And in many of the translationsof Psalm 131, it says like a
child weaned from its mother'sbreast, which means that it's
actually satisfied and it'slearned how to begin to nourish
itself.
And then the last part of thatis like a weaned child, I am
content.
So what secure attachment looksfor me, and I would say that
(52:34):
I'm growing in secure attachment.
Most of my life I've lived withan anxious attachment, but as I
move into secure attachment,it's a calm Michael, inwardly,
quieted ambitions, all thesestrategies that I have to make
life work and to get the lovethat I want.
And then content.
(52:54):
And oh my goodness, if sexaddicts and porn addicts could
experience a little bit ofcontentment.
Our addictions would justvanish.
If we could trust love.
It's easy to say I trust God orI don't trust God, but trust
love.
God is love to trust thisperson and this't trust God, but
trust love God is love To trustthis person and this reality of
(53:18):
this embrace of love.
If we could trust love, ouraddictions would vanish and you
and I would be out of work,which would be a nice thing.
Speaker 1 (53:26):
Yeah, I'm just sitting in that experience.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
Scriptures are good stuff, aren't they?
I mean, they invite us to thisdeeper journey, and let this be
of an encouragement to listenersand men in recovery.
I've read that Psalm I don'tknow 50 times, and only in the
last six months have I read itin this way where it's like food
that I'm taking in and as I didthat little exercise, I can
(53:57):
kind of feel it in my body.
I can feel myself getting calm,I can feel the release of oh,
I've got to make life work, andI can feel myself drop down into
that contentment.
But like signing up for amarathon, saying, you know, I
want to lose weight or be ableto bench a certain amount of
weight, we can't just walk inand get to the optimal level or
(54:19):
the highest level on day one.
We have to train, and sorecovery is like training.
Spiritual formation is liketraining, and that's why I love
talking about.
In the book there's a chaptercalled practice instead of
disciplines.
Spiritual disciplines are goodthings and necessary, but some
of that language has becomeharsh or shaming or judgmental
(54:42):
or really burdensome on addictsthat have tried discipline,
because we know that willpower,as David Benner says, is a
wonderful servant but a horriblemaster and addicts have tried
to make their willpower theirmaster.
If I can just master this withmy willpower, then I won't feel
shame and I won't feel bad and Iwon't hurt people.
But an addiction, by definition, is something we can't do with
(55:05):
willpower.
But our willpower kicks in whenwe position ourselves through
training over time, where webecome the kind of person who
can see temptation and go, yeah,that looks attractive, but I
don't actually need that today,versus, you know, flexing our
muscles and not doing something,we actually say no to sin
(55:28):
because we've experienced asecure attachment on the inside.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
It's so beautiful and you didn't know this, but
that's actually my favoritechapter of the Bible.
Speaker 2 (55:39):
Psalm 131?
Yeah, oh, that's so cool AtHusband Material.
Speaker 1 (55:43):
we talk a lot about being with a little boy who
first became attached to porn,allowing that little boy within
us to be with our adult self, tobe with Jesus.
Speaker 2 (55:58):
Yeah, absolutely.
It's so much more than Jesusgives us a little bit of
strength to overcome our sin.
It's that we're somehow infusedwith a whole new way of being
in the world, where that littleboy is loved.
And isn't it a tragedy that wehave to address the little boy
as the person that's firstexposed to porn?
It's tragic, it's heartbreakingand it's abusive that little
(56:21):
children are exposed to, youknow, really hardcore things
that short circuits theirnervous system, gives them
categories that they have noability to comprehend or to
integrate categories that theyhave no ability to comprehend or
to integrate and then causes akind of awakening to their
sexual system that can't beintegrated into who they are,
and then so much of it is shameput upon that.
(56:43):
So how absolutely beautiful thatthat's a starting point for you
with the ministry.
Isn't this why Jesus saidthings like you know, unless you
become like a little child, youcan't enter the kingdom of
heaven.
Unless you engage with thelittle child within you, you'll
never experience heavenhappening here, because your
listeners probably know.
But when Jesus spoke of thekingdom of heaven or the kingdom
(57:06):
of God, he wasn't talking aboutwhere you go when you die.
He's talking about heavenhappening here he's talking
about the kingdom that he saidis among us, that is within us,
that is here and that we're toseek now.
And we can't access that unlesswe go to these vulnerable,
younger parts of who we are.
Speaker 1 (57:24):
Amen, Michael.
What is your favorite thingabout healing and freedom from
porn?
Speaker 2 (57:31):
Joy.
That's an easy one, Joy.
I've underestimated theimportance of joy in my life and
the power of joy in my life.
Joy is deeply, deeplysatisfying and it's something
that I can practice.
Things like watching the leavesturn or watching little
(57:56):
children in Halloween costumes,or playing backgammon with my
wife or talking to you.
I mean, I just I'm talking toyou and I'm seeing your eyes
light up and I'm seeing you withyour passion about working with
men and especially talkingabout how you're doing it.
It just brings me great joy todo this and to have this
conversation.
Speaker 1 (58:14):
Thank you, Michael.
Thank you so much for sharing.
I learned so much today.
Speaker 2 (58:18):
You're welcome.
Love to come back on theprogram anytime.
I love talking.
Speaker 1 (58:22):
Awesome.
Well, we love listening.
And if you guys want to connectwith Michael or get a copy of
his new book Sacred Attachment,go down to the link in the
description and you can learnmore there.
Go down to the link in thedescription and you can learn
more there.
Gentlemen, I want to pause andtake a deep breath and sigh
(58:47):
Before I remind you somethingthat I want you to receive in
this moment.
You are God's beloved son.
In you, he is well pleased.
Welcome to the Husband Material podcast, where
we help Christian men outgrowporn.
Why?
So you can change your brain,heal your heart and save your
relationship.
My name is Drew Boa and I'mhere to show you how let's go.
Hey man, thank you forlistening to this interview with
(00:21):
Michael John Cusick.
Wow, I learned a ton from thisepisode.
You are going to hear all aboutthe science and the spirituality
and the theology of attachmentand why that is at the core of
how we're designed, what westruggle with and what healing
(00:44):
looks like.
Michael's new book, sacredAttachment, goes into depth
about that and you are going toget a wonderful download from
the riches of that book.
I got a chance to read it.
It was excellent, and this isreally building on his first
book, surfing for GodDiscovering the Divine Desire
Beneath Sexual Struggle.
(01:05):
Both books are excellent and inthis interview, you're going to
get some new perspectives onwhy is there such a gap between
what we believe about God andwhat we experience.
You're going to get some newideas about sin and brokenness
and a much more beautiful,expansive view of who God is
(01:27):
much more beautiful, expansiveview of who God is and what
Michael means when he says thesethree powerful words.
Love has you.
We end the interview with ameditation on my very favorite
chapter of the Bible, psalm 131.
That was so powerful.
I hope you get a chance tolisten to the whole thing.
Enjoy.
Today we get to hear fromMichael John Cusick, who is the
founder of Restoring the Souland the author of a new book
(01:47):
Sacred Attachment EscapingSpiritual Exhaustion and
Trusting in Divine Love.
Welcome, michael.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
It is so good to be with you, Drew.
Glad to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Yeah, I've been hopeful about having you on the
show for a long time.
Your book Surfing for God isone of the best out there for
Christian men who want freedomfrom porn.
So what is new about this bookfor men who are struggling?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Well, for the past 13 years since Surfing for God
came out and yes, it's hard tobelieve it's been out that long
I've ministered and worked andtaught a lot in the area of
human sexuality in the academiclevel at Denver Seminary and
around the country, and the workthat I've done in intensive
counseling has been largelyaround sexual brokenness I've
(02:36):
felt with the way that I'velearned about trauma and my own
journey and freedom, and I'vehad to deal with a food
addiction since I wrote Surfingfor God.
That's been very real and I'veexperienced freedom from that as
well.
And I was diagnosed withAsperger's on the autism
spectrum disorder about sevenyears ago and it's required me
(02:57):
to take a deep dive inunderstanding the brain and the
central nervous system and thegift of neuroscience to therapy
and especially Christiancounseling, how it highlights
the idea that we really arefearfully and wonderfully made.
It's been an unintentionalpullback from the work of sexual
brokenness and more looking athow actually the underlying
(03:17):
issues of sexual addiction andcompulsion which is trauma and
attachment that's, you know, nowa regular part of the approach
to the healing process how thoseissues of trauma and attachment
actually impact ourrelationship with God and,
culturally, what's happenedduring and after the pandemic,
where there is a whole newembrace of mental health and
(03:40):
counseling, it almost feels tome as if there's almost a
prophetic element and I'm notsaying that in the most biblical
sense of the word prophetic,but how people are bringing
truth and speaking truth intothe hearts and lives of broken
people around neuroscience andmental health and psychology and
counseling.
(04:00):
And of course we always need toweigh that up against how God
made us and who God is and whatthe scriptures reveal about that
.
But I have really been readingdeeply around just this area of
attachment and speaking for thelast four or five years on these
four S's that are in the bookthe need to be seen, soothed,
safe and secure and how thedegree to which those elements
(04:22):
are met will affect whether wehave a healthy attachment or not
.
And generally speaking, if wedon't have a healthy attachment
which I'm sure we can unpack inthis conversation we will attach
to something we will eitherunattach in human relationships
or we will overattach in humanrelationships, and both of those
will lead us to want to attachto a person, to a behavior, to a
(04:44):
substance, and of course pornbrings all three of those
together.
Right?
There's generally an image of aperson, the substance is our
own body chemistry and thebehavior is whatever kind of
sexual acting out is there.
So it's this trifecta of whathappens.
And you know the book that cameout 10 years ago by Alexandra
Katahakis I think I may bebutchering her name sex
(05:06):
addiction and affect regulation.
So it was all about howaddiction, and sexual addiction
in particular, because of thattrifecta it elevates our mood
and it brings us a sense ofsoothing and so, as we
understand attachment, it canhelp us to almost reverse
engineer, looking at ourcompulsions and our addictions,
and say what's the attachmentneed that's being met here and
(05:29):
in Surfing for God?
I think I talked about four A'sand three S's attention,
affection, affirmation, security, significance and satisfaction.
And I've distilled those evenmore with the four S's, which is
not an original idea to me.
It came from Dr Dan Siegel, thepatriarch of interpersonal
neurobiology, and then kind ofhanded down to Dr Kurt Thompson,
(05:50):
my good friend and psychiatrist, and it's just become a robust
way of thinking about our humanbrokenness, but without
necessarily having to go backand look at every detail and
aspect of our story.
It's just a really great way ofgoing.
Well, of course I wasn't soothedor whoa.
Yeah, I wasn't seen andtherefore I didn't feel safe and
(06:12):
therefore I don't have a secureattachment.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Let's dive deep into those four S's.
What are they and why do weneed them?
Speaker 2 (06:20):
First of all, they are the four components that
build a healthy attachment.
And for those of your listenersthat listen to different
podcasts on recovery or mentalhealth or on healing from trauma
, you start to hear the wordattachment everywhere, or
attachment theory and attachmentstyle.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Yeah, it's like everyone talks about it, but
what is it?
Speaker 2 (06:45):
style.
Yeah, it's like everyone talksabout it.
But what is it?
Yeah, exactly A little bit likethe word brokenness, where you
hear it a lot, and I love to saywell, what do you mean by that?
Technically speaking, attachmentis a God-ordained, god-given
process that's wired into thecentral nervous system of an
infant and it's the process bywhich that infant draws upon the
strength and the health of thatmature brain of that adult
(07:07):
caregiver and through that theinfant is able to learn to
regulate themselves and toorganize the world.
So through that other brain ofthe caregiver.
It's a reciprocal back andforth process.
It's literally how the infantdoesn't just come to bond or
experience emotional connectionlater in life, but literally how
(07:29):
they're able to be present intheir own body, how to regulate
and how to be soothed.
And so a paraphrase for thisidea of regulating is how we
sense, how we sense the world,how we feel it in our body, and
then that organizing thathappens in this attention
process is how we make sense ofthe world around us.
So it's a little bit of a rightbrain, left brain way of
(07:52):
thinking about it and that'smore of a metaphor than what's
literally happening in the brain.
But all healing happens as welearn to sense the world
accurately and, in that sensing,be able to respond to that
stimuli or to what it is thatwe're experiencing and sensing
in a way that's healthy, asopposed to a way that's
unhealthy.
And I know I'm jumping around alittle bit here, but this is
(08:14):
why I talk about addiction as acompulsion in which we're really
just essentially mishandlingour pain.
We're mishandling thedysregulation, the distress, the
discomfort inside of us, and wecan't just read a book about
how to do that.
We have to experience it in anembodied fashion.
So that process of how theinfant learns to regulate and
(08:37):
organize through the brain ofthe adult, the way that that
comes to the infant, is throughthese four S's that that infant
needs to be seen, and that beingseen is, of course, when the
baby comes out.
There's no parent and my wifehad a C-section and then went to
the recovery room with ourbiological son we have an
(08:57):
adopted daughter but as she wentaway to the recovery room they
handed me this bundle ofblankets and I was like what do
you want me to do with these?
It's not my job to put them inthe hamper.
And I looked down and there wasa baby in it, it was my son.
And I was momentarily terrified, like I don't know what to do.
My wife's not here.
And then something happenedwhere I looked at his face His
(09:18):
eyes weren't open yet and I justfell in love and something in
me melted and all I wanted to dowas to gaze upon him.
And then I have this video thatit can still make me cry where,
while she was in recovery, thenurse said go back to the room
and just sit with him.
And again I had this moment ofterror of what am I going to say
and do and think about.
(09:39):
I think I was 32 years old andyet I sat down in the room and I
turned on this little softmusic in the background and I
just started to sing to him andto gaze upon his face.
And I was seeing him in themost literal sense.
But I wasn't just looking athim with visual acuity, I was
seeing into him and somehow,even though I had just met him,
(10:00):
it felt as if I actually knewhim and it felt as if he was a
complete stranger on the onehand, and on the other hand
there was a sense of he's mineand I'm his, and therefore I had
a sense of I get him.
I needed to learn what his crysounded like and why he was
crying at certain moments, butthere was this deep sense of
knowing him.
(10:20):
Now it's not just looking at ababy, but Kurt Thompson's also
the person that taught me thatthat infant is born with about
50 to 60% of active neurons inthe brain, and the average adult
human being has 50 to 80billion neurons, billion with a,
b.
And that baby is born with less, but it's still in the tens of
(10:43):
billions, but only half of themare online.
So imagine buying a laptopcomputer and you power it up and
something flashes across thescreen and it says only half of
the hard drive is working.
You'd want to take it back tothe store, but what happens is
that those other neurons in thatinfant come online, generally
(11:03):
between zero and four years old,but all the way up until 26 or
27, when the human brain stopsformally developing.
How those neurons come onlinein the earliest days and years
is through eye contact,literally, as the adult
caregiver, the mom, the dadgazes into the eyes, even though
that baby has no construct orno mental vocabulary, for mom or
(11:27):
dad is gazing into my eyes.
They're here's the word againsensing that they are being seen
and bing, bing, bing, bing,bing, bing, bing times a billion
those neurons are coming onlineand they're beginning to
organize their world.
So, within a couple of days,that baby's going to be able to
acknowledge and recognize oh,this is mom, this is dad.
(11:48):
That's different than the furrycreature that crawls on the
ground.
Now that infant turns into atwo-year-old or maybe
18-month-old and they starttoddling and walking, there's
never been a parent that I knowof that sees that child take the
first step and go.
Oh, I wonder what we're havingfor dinner tonight.
You know, it's the celebration.
It's calling grandma andgrandpa, it's texting all your
(12:10):
friends, it's posting pictureson social media and it's this
big deal why we see this childand it's awesome.
Junior brings home scribbles inkindergarten, you know from from
crayons on the paper, andsuddenly that artwork is more
valuable than a Picasso and itgoes on the refrigerator and
that's something that mom anddad are proud of.
(12:31):
Why it's a bunch of scribbles,but it's yours and it matters,
and I see you and I could go onand on and on and on.
And this becomes a little bitproblematic because as somebody
goes into their teen years,where identity formation really
happens.
If I'm a baseball star or ifI'm a cheerleader, or if I'm
really, really smart and have a4.5 GPA, then I can start to say
(12:55):
I'm seen when I do X, y, zfunctions, when I perform, when
I achieve, and that becomes asense of identity which actually
sets me up to develop a reallygood-looking false self, which
also sets us up for addiction.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
What happens when we grow up?
Seen only for that false selfor unseen?
Speaker 2 (13:21):
That's a great question.
One of two things will happenif we develop a really good
false self.
And that false self can take acouple of different directions.
One is I have to be bigger andbetter than I actually am.
I've got to get better grades,I've got to be better looking, I
have to date a prettier girl, Ihave to be in all the clubs, I
have to be on varsity as I growup, I have to have a bigger
(13:44):
house, I have to have a betterjob, et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera, and that's a lot ofpressure.
So in that performance andachieving of being bigger or
better, it's pressure and it canlead to pride.
And by pride I don't meanhaughtiness I'm better than
everyone else, I meanself-sufficiency, where I don't
need anyone.
And that's a really dangeroussetup for addiction.
(14:05):
Let's just talk because youwork with men.
A man who doesn't need anyoneis a man who will be addicted
and compulsive 100% of the time.
The other side of the equationis that if I have a false self,
I'm going to dial myself downand I'm going to become smaller
than who I am.
I will diminish myself.
And very few people actuallyjust choose this.
(14:26):
They're doing it in response totrauma, and they're doing it in
response to shame, wherethey've been told you know, how
dare you?
Who do you think you are?
You're not better than otherpeople, our family doesn't dream
about going to college, thosekinds of things.
And in that sense of shame,there's this belief that I'm not
worthy to get my needs met andso that's going to set me up for
addiction and compulsion aswell.
(14:48):
And these addictions andcompulsions might be work.
It could be a pastor trying toget more people in his church or
, you know, preaching bettersermons and taking a longer
amount of time for that, or itcould be pornography.
So this question of what if ourfalse self dominates us in
either direction of I'm smallerthan I really am or I'm bigger
than I really am?
The issue with that, drew, isthat we will never be loved for
(15:11):
who we really are If what we dois present to the world a
version of ourselves that is afalse self.
And I'm not just talking aboutinauthenticity, like not being
vulnerable, or talking to youraccountability partner, but
coming into the world sayingthis is who I must be in order
to be loved.
Not, this is who I am and I canbe loved.
(15:31):
We set ourselves up that nobodycan ever love us for our true
self.
They love us for who we thinkthey want us to be, and that
sets us up for addiction andcompulsion.
Why?
Because the deepest longing ofour heart is to be loved and
known and to be acceptedunconditionally, and the false
self actually sets us up so thatactually becomes impossible.
(15:55):
And then the second S of thefour S's is soothing.
We have to find a way to sootheourselves Now.
If we're not seen as infants,if we're crying, if we have a
wet diaper and a rash, or ifwe're hungry and the baby's
blood sugar is low, or ifthey're cold, or if there's loud
, scary noises around the house,or if mom and dad have
(16:16):
emotional disconnect, or ifthey're fighting, or if the
consistent presence of peace andcalm is not there, it's very
likely that that's going toimpact whether or not the child
is seen and can be attended to.
And if that child is not seen,then it's likely that they're
not going to be soothed so thatsoothing is.
There is distress in the infantand care comes predictably to
(16:41):
meet them and to attune to thatdistress so that there can
actually be soothing and infantsthat don't get that will learn
up.
They will grow up and notactually learn how to soothe
themselves through being presentto themselves, through asking
for care, for hugs, for thingslike that.
(17:02):
Instead, they will either shutdown their capacity to feel and
kind of become emotionally dead,or to dissociate out of their
own body, to not be present, orthey will turn to things, and
this happened to me at a veryyoung age.
Parallel to my exposure topornography.
At age four, I turned to food.
One of my earliest memories ishiding under a bed.
(17:23):
This was an old-fashioned bedwhere they had box springs and
under the box spring I somehowfound a way to cut open the
piece of cloth and I would takecandy and I had a bag of
Nestle's chips that were used tobake cookies and I had that
entire bag stuffed up underneaththis bed.
When I was just very, veryyoung pre-kindergarten and when
(17:43):
I was hurting, when I wasanxious and I didn't even know
what to call it, then I would gounder the bed and I would eat
food and that struggle was withme long after the freedom from
sexual compulsion, and that wasa form of self-soothing.
If a child and an infant is notsoothed, they're not going to
feel a sense of safety withintheir own body.
(18:04):
And safety is so important.
And I'm not talking about, youknow, put double locks on your
doors because you live in a badneighborhood.
I'm talking about the kind ofsafety that, under normal
conditions, that I can feel safeand calm and quiet on the
inside and that, even with allthe normal ups and downs of life
(18:25):
, that I know that, if I getanxious, that there is safety
around me, that there areboundaries and that there are
people that are going to comeand attend to me, and as that
happens, from infancy throughchildhood, through adolescence,
that becomes internalized andthen I become a person that can
live in my own body andtherefore navigate the world in
(18:46):
my own body, because when Isense the world, I'm actually
able to regulate and get to aplace of relative calm and I'm
able to actually organize andact upon the world so that I can
have a sense of self anddevelop a sense of competency
and efficacy and things likethat.
And again in my story, I didn'thave this language, but I had
(19:06):
very little safety growing up.
There was a lot ofunpredictability, there was a
lot of abuse, there was a lot oftrauma and I found myself for
three decades with all kinds ofsexual struggles, shame, what
eventually became a full-blownsexual addiction that I wrote
about in Surfing for God, and Ihad no idea why I was doing what
I was doing, and in theChristian world, the best that
(19:28):
people gave me was you're asinner, you just need to repent,
and there was grace andforgiveness for that,
fortunately, but there was nohope about how to actually
change.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
The reality is for many of us is, for many of us,
the most secure attachment weever had in life where we felt
seen, soothed and secure wasporn.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Right, one of my greatest moments of shame was
acting out in a old fashionedadult video booth.
This was 31 years ago.
About two weeks after thatexperience, 31 years ago, about
two weeks after that experience,I had a kind of vision, and at
the time I wasn't a charismatic.
I didn't know that these kindsof things would happen.
But I had this picture in myhead.
But it was like out in front ofme and yet it was inside of me.
(20:17):
But I call it seeing in theeyes of the heart, like Paul
talks about in Ephesians 1.18.
And Jesus was there with me inthis adult video.
Kate and I'm down on my kneeslike worshiping, and his arm was
around me and he whispered inmy ear of course, of course.
And it wasn't a kind of asnarky well, of course, like
(20:39):
you're accusing, you're screw up.
Of course this is what you'regoing to do.
It was, of course, because Iunderstand your story, I know
the wounds deep inside of you, Iknow the deep thirst of your
heart, I know all the ways thatyou've mishandled your pain.
And right now, today, michael,it could not be any other way.
(21:02):
And when I say that I'm notgiving myself slack or laying
myself off a hook, nor am Igiving men permission to go.
Oh well, well, god forgives me.
And he says, of course, becausethat was the moment when I
sensed that this was someone 39talks about that before a word
is on my tongue, he knows itcompletely.
(21:22):
And before I stand up, he knowsit.
And before I stand up, he knowsit.
And before I go out, he's there.
He knows me so thoroughly andintimately.
Well, he knew exactly why I wasdoing what I was doing.
He had the most precise.
You know better than MayoClinic, better than Patrick
Karnes sex addiction program,you know, dare I say, better
than husband material or surfing.
For God.
(21:42):
Jesus knew precisely why I wasdoing what I was doing and he
wasn't mad at me, he wasn'tdisappointed in me, he wasn't
frustrated, he wasn't pacingback and forth, wringing his
hands.
His, of course, was I've gotthis, I've got this.
And it was in me, actuallyhearing those words, that that
(22:03):
began to prepare my heart forjust three or four months later
when, gratefully, my world cametumbling down and everything
broke apart, where my doublelife was discovered.
This past July 10th, my wifeJulianne and I were over in
Scotland on a hundred-milepilgrimage and we celebrated
while we were walking barefootacross the North Sea.
(22:24):
We celebrated while we werewalking barefoot across the
North Sea.
At the end of this pilgrimage,we celebrated 30 years of the
freedom and the D-Day of ourmarriage, and it was pretty
remarkable to think about wherewe were then and where we are
now.
So, for men that are listening,I just want to say, whether
you're far along in yourrecovery, whether you have no
recovery, whether you're juststarting your recovery that it's
(22:47):
not just possible to be sober.
That's the starting point.
That's the doorway that we walkthrough.
What's possible is freedom.
What's possible is restoration.
What's possible is that you wereactually created to live a life
that you probably have verylittle idea could happen.
But deep in your heart there's aseed, and in that seed there's
(23:08):
a vision of the you that Godcreated.
He says in Jeremiah 1, before Iformed you, I knew you and I
set you apart, which means thatGod had a dream about your life
and what it would be like foryou to be alive and awake and
free and to, as David says inPsalm 119, to run in the path of
his commands.
That's something that'scompelling.
(23:31):
I mean, if we could get aglimpse of that, that would be
more compelling than porn on thestrongest day.
But to get from A to B is todeal with and you brought this
up before we started the podcast.
It's to deal with this gap, orthis delta, which is the
distance between what we'recreative for and what we're
(23:51):
actually living, what we believeand what we actually experience
, what we hope for and whatwe're promised and what our
everyday reality is, and thatgap is pretty huge and bigger
than what most people talk about.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yeah, so many of us have been on this road for years
and part of us thinks God why.
I'm doing my work, I'm tryingto heal, I'm pursuing recovery
and there's still this huge gapbetween what I believe and what
(24:28):
I experience.
Between what I believe and whatI experience.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
You know we want a microwave transformation and to
your point about I'm doing mywork.
Thanks be to God that more andmore men have programs like
yours to be able to be in acommunity of other men, to have
a path forward, to understandthe depth of the struggle and
not just the superficial let'skind of rearrange the furniture
(24:51):
in the room approach.
So thanks be to God for that.
But real let me use an oldfashion word sanctification, or
the process of becoming holy andwhole, and those are synonymous
.
They're two sides of the samecoin.
That takes a very, very, verylong time.
I just turned 60 in August.
Surprise.
It just feels like I was just20, just 30, et cetera.
(25:14):
And it was pretty profound whenI turned 60.
And I was delighted because I'dbeen stepping more and more
into the role of being a fatherI'm not a grandparent but a
father to young men and steppinginto the authority of who I am.
And then I said, like a coupleof days around my birthday, I
was like God, why does it takeso long?
(25:34):
I thought when I was 60 thatall this crap was going to be
behind me and I just kind of sawhim smile like, yeah, I knew
you thought that I didn't wantto burst the bubble too soon.
But if all that stuff wasbehind me.
But if all that stuff wasbehind me, then my hunger and
(26:05):
thirst for wholeness and fordeeper experiences of God's love
and of his faithfulness, ofbrokenness.
But one of the points in thebook Sacred Attachment is that
our brokenness is never thebarrier to the life that we want
.
It's the bridge to the lifethat we want.
But what we have to do is wehave to be in our brokenness
rather than try to avoid it orto push it down or, as
(26:28):
Christians will often do, we'retaught or encouraged to somehow
manage our brokenness, asopposed to allow our brokenness,
which are both moments in ourlives where we have no game, but
also parts of our story wherewe had no game that lead us to a
pattern and a way of being inthe world of trying to make life
(26:48):
work.
And as long as we're trying tomake life work, including to try
to manage our sin, that's goingto be really hard to trust God
and to learn that love has usand that's actually the antidote
to all addiction is to attachsecurely to the source of love
and gratefully.
We get to do that on thehorizontal level with spouses,
(27:11):
partners, girlfriends, fiancés.
We get to do that with closefriends, with family, and that's
practice for how we can do thatwith God.
But here's the difficult part wecan't just attach to God by
saying I'm going to readMichael's book or listen to a
podcast on attachment or justchoose to do this.
It's that same process inadulthood as it is for infants.
(27:33):
It's a process whereby mynervous system has to draw upon
a more mature, more regulated,stronger, healthier nervous
system where I can learn to andI'm going to take a deep breath
and exhale and make this exhalesound where I can learn to.
And you asked before thepodcast you know what is this
(27:55):
idea that love has me.
And that idea love has me isnot an intellectual idea, it's
the exhale, it's the infantwho's anxious, who before
nursing at the breast or havingthe bottle, they were hungry,
their blood sugar was low,they're a little jumpy, they're
crying, and then they getsnuggled and they have the milk
(28:15):
and there's nourishment in theirbloodstream and their tummy
starts to get full and theystart to relax as they're held
and then they let out this sigh,psalm 131.
But I have calmed myself, Ihave quieted my ambitions.
I am like a child at itsmother's breast, like a child
with its mother.
I am content and you know Ihave two graduate degrees in
(28:38):
psychology, one in pastoralcounseling and one in counseling
psychology, and I'm all aboutthat.
But the beautiful thing and Iknow that your ministry draws
upon scriptural resources iswhen you start to understand
things like neuroscience andattachment.
It starts to open your eyes tosee scripture in a whole new way
.
And my friend Andi Kolber, whowrote the book Try Softer and
(29:01):
Strong Like Water, she made acomment to me walking out of our
office about a year ago and shesaid Michael, I'm starting to
believe that all theology isattachment.
And I just thought it was a newway that she said that to me.
But as I pondered that, I waslike well, gosh, jesus' last
sermon was I am the vine, youare the branches.
What more powerful picturecould we have of attachment than
(29:22):
that?
And what would it be like ifthis hole in the heart of men
that is part of our brokenness,that's part of our fallenness,
part of our autonomy and ourindependence from God and part
of what we did not learn how todo with our caregivers, which is
to be vulnerable and how toreceive.
What would it be like if inthat hole in our heart we could
(29:43):
picture like almost an umbilicalcord, but it's more like a
giant tree root that comes outand attaches to this giant vine.
And that's what Jesus is saying.
That whole idea of I'm the vineand you are the branches remain
there.
Dwell there, just be there.
Just let it be connected likeyour umbilical cord to your
(30:03):
mother's umbilical cord in utero.
Just be in that space and asyou focus on that, you'll have
everything you need.
Like the psalmist has said, Ican quiet myself, I can calm
myself and I'm content.
But we don't talk about thatand our churches generally only
give us a left brain cognitiveunderstanding of that.
And that's why there's achapter in the book on
(30:24):
embodiment and how we need tointernalize this into our bodies
, because without embodiedspirituality we have no
spirituality at all.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
I hope everyone listening can take a deep breath
and receive that truth in ourbodies.
That love has you.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
It's really freeing.
It's really freeing, it'sreally freeing.
And I've sat with, you know,hundreds and hundreds of men in
circles and in my counselingoffice and that idea is
presented and they woulddesperately like to believe it
and they desperately want toseek to experience it.
But because their own nervoussystem is let me use the
(31:11):
non-clinical term their nervoussystem is so jacked up from
trauma or from addiction itself,or from social media or from
just stress in life, that we tryto take that breath.
We can't even take 100% breath.
I'll often say to men take adeep breath and they'll exhale.
And I'll say what percentage ofa full breath do you think you
(31:31):
just took?
Oh, 60, maybe 70 at most.
And starting to become awareand to develop this bodily
awareness that there's so muchtightness in my chest that I
can't even take a full breath.
Now I'm not shaming orpathologizing everyone, but we
are meant to be so relaxed thatI can take a full breath.
(31:52):
Just so happens that right nowI could and I can actually feel
that expansion and at the top ofthat full breath I can feel
this surge of oxygen go throughmy chest and system and down
into my arms.
But if I can't feel that whatis it that will make a release
of oxytocin and vasopressin andendorphins and dopamine and all
(32:13):
that good stuff.
It's an orgasm, or it's eventhe fantasy, without even
touching genitals, of therituals and the images and all
that goes into our acting outritual that that will also
release those chemicals in oursystem and then we become
dependent upon that to get thatsense of soothing and that
(32:36):
exhale on the inside.
So you know, it goes withoutsaying, but the beauty of your
work and the beauty of a lot ofthe work that people are doing
today in trying to deal withfreedom, wholeness and recovery
from any number of addictions,is that there's a greater and
greater emphasis on embodimentand attachment in a non-shaming,
(32:57):
non-judgmental, beautiful,generous, merciful, magnanimous
understanding of God.
That God is simply there for usand he's always giving, he's
always embracing, and that hispassion is infinitely more than
just wanting to save us so thatwe can go to heaven, but his
passion is to actually make uswhole, so that we would bring
(33:22):
the kingdom of God into ourrelationships and into our
workplaces and into our familiesand our neighborhoods on earth
as it is in heaven.
That's God's passion, is hiskingdom.
God dealt with sin on the cross,and so sin is just something
that God hurts over.
Sin because it causes his lovedones pain, and if we are
(33:43):
married and betraying our spouse, that causes pain and that
hurts God's heart.
But God is not hurting aboutsin because he's somehow holy
and can't look upon sin.
That's actually a misnomer.
But for the past hundred-ishyears we preach that God is holy
and cannot look upon sin.
And I used to preach thatsermon myself and it comes from
Habakkuk, chapter 2, and it saysyou, o Lord, are holy and
(34:05):
cannot look upon sin.
Dot, dot, dot.
So why do you look upon sin?
And you take the idea of Jesusbeing born into a sinful world
and he was with sinful kids onthe playground and he was with
sinful disciples and on and onand on and on.
God, who is holy, includingJesus, loves to be in the midst
(34:26):
of sin because he's bringing hislight into the darkness.
So this was another reason whyI wrote the book Drew is I
wanted to help heal people'simage of God, because there is
no healing from addiction andcompulsion if there's no healing
of our understanding of God,because if we see God as
(34:46):
vengeful, angry, disappointed,frustrated, judging, exacting,
requiring us to live accordingto a certain moral standard.
If we see him as that way,there's no way that we can be
securely attached.
That's going to create eitheran anxious attachment where I'm
always working really hard totry to make sure that I'm okay
with God.
(35:06):
And that was my story.
I was the master of spiritualdisciplines for the first five
years of my life, memorizingscripture.
I literally had a clipboardthat had like 10 different
categories of Christianactivities that I would do.
I was really all in.
It was a little crazy and sincethis is a guy podcast, I'll say
this it's a little embarrassing, but at one point I was a
(35:27):
senior in high school I told GodI'm going to put my Bible in
the clipboard with all mymarkers and pens for my morning
quiet time on my toilet and I'mnot going to take a pee until
I'm in the Word.
And of course that's almostlike self-abusive, but it was
how desperately I wanted to befree and the only way I knew how
(35:48):
to do it was to anxiously tryto please God, because my
thought was, if God's pleasedwith me, then he'll give me the
key that will turn in the doorthat I can walk into this room
of the abundant life that I sodesperately wanted.
And if we're not an anxiousattachment, it's an avoidant
attachment, where intimacy andunconditional love that's not in
(36:08):
my control, that's overwhelmingto me, it dysregulates me, so
I'm going to pull away and I'mgoing to stay distant.
And those are the two forms ofunhealthy attachment.
There's also one calledambivalent attachment, which is
a mixture of avoidant andanxious.
According to research says 60%of people in America have a
secure attachment and mosttherapists think that's about
half, actually, that the peoplesomehow in the research missed
(36:31):
what was actually happening inreal people's lives.
I would certainly say that thegenerations that have grown up
as digital natives that areattached to screens and find the
majority of their soothingthrough screens, that it's
significantly less than 60%.
So at best 40% of us in Americahave either an anxious, an
(36:51):
avoidant or an ambivalentattachment style where we're
going to turn to people,substances or other
non-relational behaviors tobasically satisfy the deepest
needs of our heart.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
This understanding of attachment has been so freeing
and healing for me, but Ihaven't had the words for it, I
haven't had the theology to beable to reconcile it with a lot
of my understanding of the Bibleand spirituality, and you've
really helped me with that beingable to bring together the
(37:27):
science and the scripture to seeeverything more clearly.
And one of the categories thatyou've already talked about a
little bit is sin.
I can hear some people saying,man, all this stuff about
attachment and trauma andembodiment, yeah, that sounds
good, but this is a sin issue,right, this is sexual sin.
(37:50):
So what is your view of sin.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
I like to say, using the big, fancy seminary word, I
have a very strong and very deephamartiology, and hamartia
H-A-M-A-R-T-I-A is the Greekword for basically for sin.
The reason why I believe it'svery strong and deep is that it
is a depth view of sin.
It was Sigmund Freud that firstused the iceberg as an
(38:15):
illustration of the humanpersonality and one of the
people that popularized that.
One of the patriarchs ofChristian counseling, who I had
the good fortune and blessing tobe my mentor for 15 years, is
Dr Larry Crabb, who was here inDenver, wrote 25 books and
influenced people like DanAllender.
That wouldn't be who he istoday if not for Larry and John
(38:36):
Eldridge, who studied underLarry, and many, many others.
Places in my story where myneeds weren't met, where there's
neglect, where there are, infact, attachment wounds, places
in my story where there istrauma, where things that never
should have happened happenedand that can be profound.
Things like my story wherethere's sexual, physical,
(38:56):
emotional, spiritual abuse, orit can be something you know,
almost the cliche issue of beingasked to read in class and
stuttering in second grade andeverybody laughs at that child.
That can be a deep wound and atrauma where an arrow comes into
the heart.
Anyway, our iceberg behaviorsabove the waterline are driven
(39:20):
by what's beneath the waterline,that's, all the places where we
either have or have not beenseen soothed, safe, secure.
Those are the attachment wounds.
They're the trauma wounds.
And as we deal with what'sbelow the waterline, our hearts
become whole.
We can experience more and moredeeply how loved we are.
We can actually begin to bepresent to ourselves instead of
(39:44):
have to repress or push awayparts of who we are.
Many of your listeners may befamiliar with a book written
many, many centuries ago calledPracticing the Presence of God,
which is a great thing to do foraddictions, just learning how
to be present.
And I bought that book, I don'tknow 20 years ago, and I would
read it and I'd reread it and Ieven made like a three-page
(40:04):
outline of it and I couldn't doit.
Whatever.
Practicing the Pres presence ofGod.
You know I failed that class.
So I said to God you got tohelp me with this.
And it wasn't until many yearslater that I read Psalm 27, 4,
where David, the man after God'sown heart, says one thing I ask
God, this is what I seek todwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life, to gazeupon his beauty and to seek him
(40:26):
in his temple.
Here's my paraphrase of that.
When I read it it just reallyhit me.
God, here's the thing that iscentral in me right now.
I want to dwell in your temple.
I want to dwell in your houseall the days of my life and, in
that space, be so connected toyou that it's like I'm just
gazing upon you.
(40:46):
Parentheses God, I am thetemple, I am the house of the
Lord.
Second Corinthians, chapter two.
Do you not know that you areGod's temple and that his spirit
dwells in you?
So if we can't be present toourselves, which is the temple
of God, we're not going to beable to be present to God or to
other people and we're going tobe starving and dying of thirst
(41:10):
on the inside because we're notgoing to be able to get our
needs met.
So one of the first orders ofbusiness in recovery is not just
truth-telling and gettingconnected into a supportive,
loving, truth-filled,grace-filled community, but it's
also really about just learninghow to attune to our own bodies
, learning how to be still.
Sometimes you know that'sdownloading a meditation app.
(41:32):
I have a chapter in Surfing forGod, on centering prayer, how to
be still and it's interesting,I either never hear from people
about that chapter or I hearfrom people, generally older men
, who tell me that chapterchanged my life because it gave
me a way of being and it gave mesomething to do that was much
more than just trying to resistsexual temptation or flex my
(41:53):
moral muscles.
It actually gave me theexperience of being able to do
nothing in the presence of Godand to learn to be present to
myself and to learn how to havethat real rest that Jesus talks
about in Matthew 28 when he saysAll you who are weary, come to
me and I will give you rest.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
So sin is when we turn away.
It's not when we fall away, asmany of us have pictured
ourselves, like falling off acliff.
It's turning away from love,turning away from the beauty
that's being offered by Jesus.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Exactly.
I've always had a struggle withthe word fall, but it's more
relational to say the term.
And here's the beautiful thingwhat happens when we turn away
from God?
What happens when I am in myparking lot, at this truck stop
that had a big pornography storewith free donuts in, and I
(42:49):
would first tell myself andself-deceive myself that I was
going there for the free donutsand that I was just gonna walk
out.
But I would start spending alot of time in that one porn
store.
And what happens when I turnaway from God?
Does he stay in the parking lot?
No, he walks inside with me.
And what happens when I walkfrom where all the shelves are
with all the these were VHStapes back then, if people know
(43:12):
what that is.
What happens when I walk fromthat room into the little
inter-room behind the curtainand walk into one of the booths?
Does Jesus stay out?
No, he comes in.
And what happens when and Icould just keep going and going
and going in our worst moment,on our darkest day, on our
longest night?
Jesus doesn't stay back, hecomes with us.
So that when we turn away fromGod I think one of the most
(43:33):
profound pictures of whathappens when we turn away from
God is I've never done this andI don't know if I will but
jumping out of a plane.
I have a friend who jumped outof a plane on like their 40th
birthday and they sent me thevideo.
And you know, the goggles arethis big and there there's a
GoPro camera and the wind is intheir face.
And then you see that there'sthis instructor that is
(43:54):
literally like Velcro, doubleharnessed attached to them, so
if one of them dies, they'reboth going to die.
And that's what it's like whenwe turn away from God.
And I'm going to spin in mychair right now for the people
on the video.
So I turn away from God andhe's actually attached to me,
like that skydive instructorwhere there's no way we can
(44:14):
separate.
But I turn and I keep lookingfor him.
Where did he go?
Well, he's actually behind meand he's.
You know, all he has to do iswrap his arms around me, but
he's still attached.
That's what it's like.
And even in the turn in theGarden of Eden, there was not
that separation from God in theway that we think about it today
.
There is a felt sense ofdistance, there is a disconnect
(44:39):
relationally, in the same waythat when the parent is there in
the room and can breastfeed ortake a bottle and pick that baby
up, they're there, they seethem, they hear them, but until
that moment of that embrace, thebaby doesn't actually feel it.
And so this profound realitythat we can discover in our
brokenness and in our failureand in our sin and our struggle
(45:01):
and our shame, is the idea thatnone of that intimidates God.
None of that is problematic forhim, and his very nature is to
give himself in the way thatJesus gave himself on the cross.
Yes, he suffered greatly, butit didn't.
It wasn't like him going.
I can't believe I've got to dothis for humanity.
(45:23):
It's just who God is, it's whathe does, and far greater than
the physical suffering was thehumiliation and the
vulnerability that the creatorof the entire universe chose
humiliation.
Let's not forget that on thecross, he was stripped naked,
for his genitals to be flailingout in front of everybody.
For that's what they did inRoman crucifixions, was they
(45:44):
humiliated people?
And so if we want to knowwhether we can really trust God
and whether love has us, it'snot just that he took nails for
us, but he took the humiliationand choosing the powerlessness
to say this is what God is like,which means, in our suffering
and in our shame, god's not justwith us.
He's experiencing the shame aswell.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
He never detaches.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
That's right and that's why the sacred attachment
is an eternal union in christ,just like a an infant in its
mother's womb.
And let me just throw this infor kicks when I was a young
christian, I was taught, youknow, grace is the word.
Charis means gift, unmeritedfavor.
It's a gift that god gives withsalvation.
That that's true.
Mercy is something that Godtakes away, a punishment that we
do deserve, and that's about10% of the meaning of mercy.
(46:38):
In other words, that I deservesomething bad but God withholds
it like a judge who's going tosend me to jail, but instead he
has me do community service.
Mercy's root word in Hebrew israhamin and it means womb.
Mercy is this womb of God thatholds me, that sustains me, that
(46:59):
provides everything that I need.
Talk about food, clothing andshelter.
That's what the womb is, and nowonder Jesus says you must be
born again.
You have to be born in a waywhere you can now enter into
that heavenly womb in whichyou've always been in just read
Psalm 139, and to begin torealize that there is an
(47:23):
attachment and a security whereyou're seen soothed and safe.
That is even more profound thanwhat happened in your mother's
womb mother's womb and it's themost reliable, ever present
reality, so that in the midst ofour recovery journey, in the
midst of our shame, in the midstof our great need, whatever our
suffering might be, thatthere's a person that we have
(47:45):
access to, in the same way thatthe baby has access to the
mother, and there's a placewhere our hearts are secure,
even though we may not know thator feel that, in the same way
that the infant doesn't know.
Oh, there's this thing called amom on the outside there, but
the love is there, the care isthere, the provision is there.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Wow to, even though we can't directly see him, hear
him.
It's actually because we're soclose, we're like in the womb.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
I believe that's absolutely true.
There's an old Celtic proverb.
When we were in Scotland Iquoted this to somebody and they
picked up on it and they gaveus all little thimbles as a gift
.
The Celtic proverb says youcan't put the ocean in a thimble
, but you can drop the thimbleinto the ocean.
And our hearts, our spirits,our bodies are like thimbles
(48:49):
dropped into the ocean of God'slove.
And it would be silly for a fishliving in the middle of the
ocean to say I'm thirsty.
And that's often what happensin my life.
Before I knew about, the waythat I most deeply experienced
God is by being still, byexhaling, by stepping back, by
resting.
I would say, God, I'm thirstyand I was in the middle of an
(49:11):
ocean.
I didn't know that I coulddrink without having to earn it
or somehow get his good favorfirst, and that I didn't know
that I could drink withouthaving to earn it or somehow get
his good favor first, and thatI really didn't know how to
drink, because I thought it wasthrough more effort, more Bible
study, more prayer, more doinggood things, and then God would
bless me and I would somehow nolonger struggle.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
So now, what does a secure attachment with God look
like for you?
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Oh, wow, what a wonderful question.
I think it looks like Psalm 131, verse 2 and 3.
There's only three verses inthe whole Psalm.
It says but I have calmedmyself and quieted my ambitions,
like a weaned child with itsmother.
Like a weaned child, I amcontent.
(49:59):
And so I just see a Michael.
I'm 60 years old, but I'm beingheld like a baby in the arms of
God and I'm being pulled closeand he's gazing upon my face,
almost like those historicCatholic pictures of Mary, you
know, holding Jesus in the armsand gazing into Jesus' face.
(50:23):
This is the Father, son, holySpirit, the whole Trinity.
Now they're, you know, they'rewrapped around me and I'm in the
middle and just being held.
And there I can breathe, I canexhale.
As I exhale, something beginsto settle in me and, like the
psalmist says, but I have calmedmyself.
(50:43):
And calm is not just an emotionof I'm feeling peaceful or the
absence of stress.
Calm is an embodied experience.
And then I've quieted myambitions.
Calm is an embodied experience,and then I've quieted my
ambitions.
When I'm calm, I can begin toquiet down this part of me that
(51:03):
says you know, I've got to writea book that sells more copies
so that I can be more famous, sothat I'm somebody.
See back to the beginning ofour interview.
That's my false self, that's myego that goes I'll only be
loved if I'm greater than I amnow, if I weird word to use for
a 60-year-old man but likesexier to the world and more
important.
And so if I, I'm going to dothat next time.
So I start to think about acourse I'm going to do, or, you
(51:25):
know, talk that I want to give.
And those are ambitions thatare trying to make life work.
And the psalmist says when I'mcalm, I can quiet my ambitions.
And the psalmist says when I'mcalm, I can quiet my ambitions.
And for some addicts, ourambitions are the places that
our mind goes, sometimesreflexively, to an image, to an
(51:50):
action, to an app, to a hookup,to an affair partner, to a
certain place where we can getsexual relief.
And that's an ambition where,basically, here's my strategy to
get calm.
But when I'm calm I can quietall of that.
And in that quietness thepicture of me with God and me
with my own heart, in my ownbody is I can be like a child at
(52:11):
its mother's breast, and inmany of the translations of
Psalm 131, it says like a childweaned from its mother's breast.
And in many of the translationsof Psalm 131, it says like a
child weaned from its mother'sbreast, which means that it's
actually satisfied and it'slearned how to begin to nourish
itself.
And then the last part of thatis like a weaned child, I am
content.
So what secure attachment looksfor me, and I would say that
(52:34):
I'm growing in secure attachment.
Most of my life I've lived withan anxious attachment, but as I
move into secure attachment,it's a calm Michael, inwardly,
quieted ambitions, all thesestrategies that I have to make
life work and to get the lovethat I want.
And then content.
(52:54):
And oh my goodness, if sexaddicts and porn addicts could
experience a little bit ofcontentment.
Our addictions would justvanish.
If we could trust love.
It's easy to say I trust God orI don't trust God, but trust
love.
God is love to trust thisperson and this't trust God, but
trust love God is love To trustthis person and this reality of
(53:18):
this embrace of love.
If we could trust love, ouraddictions would vanish and you
and I would be out of work,which would be a nice thing.
Speaker 1 (53:26):
Yeah, I'm just sitting in that experience.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
Scriptures are good stuff, aren't they?
I mean, they invite us to thisdeeper journey, and let this be
of an encouragement to listenersand men in recovery.
I've read that Psalm I don'tknow 50 times, and only in the
last six months have I read itin this way where it's like food
that I'm taking in and as I didthat little exercise, I can
(53:57):
kind of feel it in my body.
I can feel myself getting calm,I can feel the release of oh,
I've got to make life work, andI can feel myself drop down into
that contentment.
But like signing up for amarathon, saying, you know, I
want to lose weight or be ableto bench a certain amount of
weight, we can't just walk inand get to the optimal level or
(54:19):
the highest level on day one.
We have to train, and sorecovery is like training.
Spiritual formation is liketraining, and that's why I love
talking about.
In the book there's a chaptercalled practice instead of
disciplines.
Spiritual disciplines are goodthings and necessary, but some
of that language has becomeharsh or shaming or judgmental
(54:42):
or really burdensome on addictsthat have tried discipline,
because we know that willpower,as David Benner says, is a
wonderful servant but a horriblemaster and addicts have tried
to make their willpower theirmaster.
If I can just master this withmy willpower, then I won't feel
shame and I won't feel bad and Iwon't hurt people.
But an addiction, by definition, is something we can't do with
(55:05):
willpower.
But our willpower kicks in whenwe position ourselves through
training over time, where webecome the kind of person who
can see temptation and go, yeah,that looks attractive, but I
don't actually need that today,versus, you know, flexing our
muscles and not doing something,we actually say no to sin
(55:28):
because we've experienced asecure attachment on the inside.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
It's so beautiful and you didn't know this, but
that's actually my favoritechapter of the Bible.
Speaker 2 (55:39):
Psalm 131?
Yeah, oh, that's so cool AtHusband Material.
Speaker 1 (55:43):
we talk a lot about being with a little boy who
first became attached to porn,allowing that little boy within
us to be with our adult self, tobe with Jesus.
Speaker 2 (55:58):
Yeah, absolutely.
It's so much more than Jesusgives us a little bit of
strength to overcome our sin.
It's that we're somehow infusedwith a whole new way of being
in the world, where that littleboy is loved.
And isn't it a tragedy that wehave to address the little boy
as the person that's firstexposed to porn?
It's tragic, it's heartbreakingand it's abusive that little
(56:21):
children are exposed to, youknow, really hardcore things
that short circuits theirnervous system, gives them
categories that they have noability to comprehend or to
integrate categories that theyhave no ability to comprehend or
to integrate and then causes akind of awakening to their
sexual system that can't beintegrated into who they are,
and then so much of it is shameput upon that.
(56:43):
So how absolutely beautiful thatthat's a starting point for you
with the ministry.
Isn't this why Jesus saidthings like you know, unless you
become like a little child, youcan't enter the kingdom of
heaven.
Unless you engage with thelittle child within you, you'll
never experience heavenhappening here, because your
listeners probably know.
But when Jesus spoke of thekingdom of heaven or the kingdom
(57:06):
of God, he wasn't talking aboutwhere you go when you die.
He's talking about heavenhappening here he's talking
about the kingdom that he saidis among us, that is within us,
that is here and that we're toseek now.
And we can't access that unlesswe go to these vulnerable,
younger parts of who we are.
Speaker 1 (57:24):
Amen, Michael.
What is your favorite thingabout healing and freedom from
porn?
Speaker 2 (57:31):
Joy.
That's an easy one, Joy.
I've underestimated theimportance of joy in my life and
the power of joy in my life.
Joy is deeply, deeplysatisfying and it's something
that I can practice.
Things like watching the leavesturn or watching little
(57:56):
children in Halloween costumes,or playing backgammon with my
wife or talking to you.
I mean, I just I'm talking toyou and I'm seeing your eyes
light up and I'm seeing you withyour passion about working with
men and especially talkingabout how you're doing it.
It just brings me great joy todo this and to have this
conversation.
Speaker 1 (58:14):
Thank you, Michael.
Thank you so much for sharing.
I learned so much today.
Speaker 2 (58:18):
You're welcome.
Love to come back on theprogram anytime.
I love talking.
Speaker 1 (58:22):
Awesome.
Well, we love listening.
And if you guys want to connectwith Michael or get a copy of
his new book Sacred Attachment,go down to the link in the
description and you can learnmore there.
Go down to the link in thedescription and you can learn
more there.
Gentlemen, I want to pause andtake a deep breath and sigh
(58:47):
Before I remind you somethingthat I want you to receive in
this moment.
You are God's beloved son.
In you, he is well pleased.
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