Jay Stringer, a licensed mental health counselor, ordained minister, and author of “Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing”, joins Greg Leith in Seattle for a conversation on a topic that few dare to touch. How does the power of a leader infused with their sexual brokenness impact their lives and the lives of those that they lead?
Whether it be in the form of affairs, buying sex, pornography, hook-ups or other unwanted sexual behavior, one thing remains true: with the power that comes alongside the C-suite, all of these behaviors become more accessible and more dangerous to your spiritual health.
The resulting question becomes, “What is the healthy path through sexual brokenness, and how exactly does understanding one’s unwanted sexual behavior lead them to healing?”
Listen in as Convene CEO, Greg Leith discusses this crucial topic with Jay Stringer as we strive to become Spiritually Healthy Leaders.
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Confronting Unwanted Sexual Behavior | The Spiritually Healthy Leader Pt. 3 With Jay Stringer
We’re very excited to be here with Jay Stringer, a licensed mental health counselor. We’re going to talk about something that to the best of my knowledge nobody’s talking about, what happens when you mix unwanted sexual behavior and temptation with the power of a leader’s C-Suite. We’re going to find out. Join me.
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Jay, it’s so good to be with you. We’re here in the Convene Studios and we’re very excited to be with you talking about something that I don’t think is being talked about a lot, so welcome.
Not nearly enough. Thank you so much for having me. An honor to be with Convene.
A Few Alarming Statistics On Pornography
Thanks. It was exciting to see Outreach Magazine pick your book Unwanted as Resource of the Year and counseling and relationships. You’re a licensed mental health counselor and an ordained minister. You’ve done some groundbreaking research where you’ve surveyed 3,800 men and women for your book Unwanted helping people use their sexual brokenness and find out that it reveals a way to healing. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the statistics.
There’s some devastating statistics that maybe CEOs are ignoring and certainly, the world is somehow ignoring. I don’t know how it happened, but the world is ignoring the fact that pornography use doubles the chance of divorce. Porn sites have more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. Speaking as a business leader, I wouldn’t mind running a $97 billion operation but not this porn industry. That’s a $97 billion industry. Sixty percent to 70% of people in the world are using pornography and 57% of pastors struggle with it.
Pastors and CEOs are resigning. The chairman of the largest law firm in the country caught sexting with a woman he did not know. Christian ministry founder caught sexting, politicians caught sexing and in jail. Hollywood casting couch being used for sexual favors to gain roles in films. Sports team owners visiting massage parlors. How did we get here? I don’t know, but you’ve done some work that basically says your faith alone, Jesus alone, memorizing scripture alone is not enough. Let’s talk about it.
When you look at just the stats like that, sexual brokenness has become dangerously ubiquitous in our world. Yet the primary Christian approach that we have attempted to address is just what I refer to as less management. This is the classic bounce of your eyes from sexual temptation. If you’re having an inappropriate sexual thought, slap a rubber band around your wrist. If you continue to struggle, part of what we advise is get into some form of accountability and get internet monitoring on your computer.
While some of these efforts do help curb unwanted sexual behavior to a small extent, as one of my friends put it. He said, “Jay, when I’ve been having the same conversation with my accountability partner for fifteen years, something just isn’t working.” As a therapist and as a minister, part of what I realized is unless we radically change the conversation, we are going to continue to consign men and women to a lifetime of utility with this issue. I thought, why don’t we just ask people who are struggling with unwanted sexual behavior to tell us their story?
Understanding Unwanted Sexual Behavior
You did some research, 3,800 people for your Master’s degree but let’s just back up one second and say let’s define unwanted sexual behavior. I’ve mentioned some pornography statistics but that’s not the only thing we’re talking about.
I define unwanted sexual behavior as basically any dimension of your sexual life that the end of the day you wish was not part of it. That could be the use of pornography, infidelity, hookups, sexting or buying sex. When most of the people first start looking at their sexual brokenness, they might initially say, “I don’t want to fall into the addiction criteria. I don’t think I’m an addict.” Usually, most people can look back over the course of their life and see a lot of the debris of their sexuality from disrupting their marriage to losing a job, a career or something that they care a lot about.
That’s basically what I’m inviting people into. At the end of the day, it’s more than likely that almost all of us have some portion of our sexual life, our sexual fantasy life that at the end of the day, we wish we could find healing from. That’s what I wanted to invite people into. Let’s get a sense of how your story is shaping the sexual behavior that you want to move away from.
Sexual Fantasies: The Roadmap To Healing
We talked about what happens when you mix your research findings, 3,800 people talking about the why with the power of an executive. What happens when those two things get mixed together?
Part of what the research looked at, basically, I invited people to tell me their whole story. Their relationship with their parents, formative experiences like trauma or sexual abuse and then what were people dealing with in the present. Whether they were in executive or not. Were they feeling stressed, feeling anxious, had a lack of purpose or dealing with a lot of futility in their career. I wanted to know, how does our life story and the things that we’re facing go on to shape our brokenness?
What I can tell you is, what the research showed is that the specific fantasies that we put into the porn searches, the specifics of what we fantasize about is not random at all. It was a direct reflection of the parts of our story that remain unaddressed. The implication of this is huge. Our sexual brokenness is a roadmap to healing and not a life sentence to sexual shame. If we want it to be a roadmap to healing, we have to put the problem in the foreground and say, “This is what I’m dealing with as an executive.” As a parent, as a husband or as a wife of, how do I begin to confront some of the realities of my life that at the end of the day I wish I could just hide or suppress?
Our sexual brokenness is a roadmap to healing. It is not a life sentence to sexual shame. Share on XLet’s say that again because you said something that I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say ever. Our sexual brokenness or our sexual fantasies are our roadmap to healing. That is incredible. It seems like most people would say, “Let’s put a big barrier between my history and now. I just need to stop,” and it’s not working.
It doesn’t work. This is where I’m very much informed theologically. When you look at people in Genesis who find themselves in difficult broken spaces, the presence of God pursues them and asks questions. To Adam who has just eaten of the fruit that he was commanded not to eat from, God doesn’t say, “Adam, bounce your eyes from that next tempting piece of fruit.” He says, “Adam, where are you? What have you done?”
To Jacob who’s been struggling his whole life with issues of identity, the angel of the Lord wrestles him and just says, “What is your name?” It’s the question that he has not been able to answer his whole life around identity and then we see this with Hagar too, where she has just been traumatized by the first family of the faith. She’s about to die in the wilderness and the angel of the Lord appears to her and asks two of the best questions any of us could ever be asked. Which are, where do you come from and where are you going?
The voice of God, if we’re hearing it, is calling us to deeper reflection about how our sorrow and our sin came to be. If we’re in community and if we’re hearing the voice of God, that should be the question. Where are you? What have you done? Tell me where you come from and where you want to go. That’s part of the point of healing. We need to become curious about how our brokenness came to be because right in the middle of the brokenness, there are clues into how to find healing.
The Role Of Deprivation In Our Sexual Urges
Let’s talk about maybe an example of that. Convene has hundreds of executives across the country. They are days that are full of the things that the world thinks are awesome like power, flying first class, great meals, hotels, overnight in foreign cities and telling people what to do. The truth is executives are sometimes lonely. They are sometimes anxious. There are days they are full of conflict resolution. They’re feeling huge pressure and overload fatigue.
Sometimes when that day unfolds and is drawing to a close, an executive could feel that they deserve a reward, that they deserve a break and in comes their good-looking administrative assistant and it’s game over. It’s an alone space that was created that didn’t have to be created. Talk about that whole entitlement thing.
I think of entitlement like a seesaw. If you were to think about a seesaw, a lot of us have eyes to see the addictive compulsive choice and that’s what we see. The other side of that is the role of deprivation, especially for an executive. That term might say, “I’m not deprived in a lot of areas of my life.” As you just underscored, when you’re feeling lonely or stressed or you aren’t taking care of yourself because you’re too busy. You haven’t invested in your family. You haven’t maybe been to the dentist or the doctor and you can’t even remember the last time you went. That sense of deprivation is going to set up the compulsive choice.
The language of Psalm 131, “Like a weaned child is my soul within me.” How do executives read, be mindful of what their bodies are experiencing, what dilemmas they’re facing and know how to regulate themselves when they’re in a difficult spot. If you’re not aware of what your body is feeling and the complexity and difficulty that you’re facing. There is going to be an immediate choice for unwanted sexual behavior, affair and pornography because it allows you to feel some sense of entitlement. I can get exactly what I want when I want it because I have the power to do so.
How Lack Of Purpose Leads To Sexual Failure
You talk in your book about one other thing that you just alluded to a little bit, the idea that futility and lack of purpose can lead to sexual failure. How does that happen if I’m a company with the mission statement on the wall? I let everybody through a mission statement exercise. Do I have a personal lack of purpose, a personal lack of futility?
Men in the search were seven times more likely to increase their involvement with pornography for each unit of a lack of purpose that they felt, personal purpose. They look back at their life and saw a lot of failures. They looked at some of their relationships and couldn’t feel like they had the life that they wanted with their partner or with their careers. When that was your story, your involvement with unwanted sexual behavior increased by a factor of seven.
Part of the uniqueness you had asked earlier is just about the confluence of unwanted sexual behavior and power. Part of my recommendation to executives would be to read Unwanted and a book called Rising to Power side by side. The authors of this are Ron Carucci and Eric Hansen. They did a ten-year longitudinal study on over 2,700 executives. Very similar to Unwanted they found that the problems that executives are facing are not random.
One of their findings was that over 60% of executives did not feel prepared for the strategic challenges that they had to face when they moved and were appointed to their executive positions. Some of the other research that we know on executives, I believe it’s somewhere in the range of 50% to 60% of executives will fail in their first eighteen months. If you are an executive, it means that you are feeling some level of difficulty, incompetence and you’re not making the right decisions.
That load will have a very great effect on you. If you look at your business life, your personal life and you say, “I’m not measuring up. I’m not meeting the standards that I intuitively want to meet.” One of the reasons why pornography becomes so appealing is that it gives you exactly what you want when you want it and nothing else on the planet offers you that.
Inviting Your Body To Kindness And Comfort
Which is what? Let’s talk about a hypothetical executive that’s traveling in a city away from home that just had a tough day of whatever they were doing. They were hiring or firing or doing a strategy meeting or thinking all day long or had fifteen white boards filled up with story brand stuff. Whatever they did was a lot and it’s now 10:00 at night. They’re tired and in the room. They flip on the television and it says, “Click here for the adult channel.” They do.
They watch a pornographic film and at the end of the time, they’re full of shame and wish they hadn’t done it. What if we reroute, rewind the tape to turn on the television or leave the day stressed. What would you say they could do differently or think differently? You have some questions in your book. How do I get out of here? How could they play the tape in a different way?
Part of what I would say is when you arrive in that hotel room, you need to check in with your body. How am I? How was my day? I had a terrible day. One of the things that we think about with regard to sexual brokenness is a lot of people use the language of, “I’m just doing it to self-medicate or to escape.” The reality is, as one songwriter says, “Every gambler knows that to lose is what you’re there for.” Most people know that if they watch porn, if they have three or four drinks and have some illicit behavior. They’re going to feel terrible about who they are.
How to engage that is to say, “What if I didn’t feel judgment at the end of the night?” I’ve been through a lot of stress. I’ve been through war. What my body needs more than anything is comfort. That’s where when I work with executives that travel quite a bit, part of what I tell them is, “I want your senses alive.” We always have some choice and we can choose something that dead ends ourselves and gives us the reinforcement of that judgment or we can begin to pursue something that brings rest and comfort to our bodies. That’s the invitation. You don’t need to feel worse. You don’t need to contain your desire but I would say invite your body to goodness. Invite your body to kindness and to good soothing.
We always have the choice to pursue something that brings rest and comfort to our bodies. Share on XIt starts off when you walk in the hotel room to say, “I had a terrible day.” It’s like that Australian book for kids.
“I had an awful, terrible, no-good day. I think I’m going to move to Australia.” You say, “I had a bad day. I don’t want to feel worse, so I’m going to do some things to treat myself to feel better.” That might even be to call your spouse or your kids or a friend. I know my Pastor Rick Warren does not travel alone. Do some things that would be a treat to yourself because that’s the point. Most of us when we are stressed, when we are not doing well, we pursue behaviors that reinforce that feeling. That’s the main pivot that I want people to make. What if you pursued comfort?
Why do people pursue something that would make them feel worse? What’s the cycle graphic of that?
That’s this issue of shame. When you are an executive, you have a lot of power and yet you also feel some level of if people knew what I was doing, if people knew how incompetent that I felt or that I’m posing or I’m an imposter. They would see through it and then everything would crumble. If that’s part of your identity, you’re going to pursue behaviors that reconfirm that is your story.
Let’s pursue that. If everybody knew I was a poser, incompetent or felt like a failure even though I just did something great in front of a thousand people at the company meeting. If everybody knew the truth, therefore, I would go to a strip club or a massage parlor. How did we miss a step along that journey? The step being self-talk that helps me push eject to get me to a better place.
That goes back to the important point that you raised at the beginning. Most of us when we’re in a difficult spot, we pursue entitlement. I think of unwanted sexual behavior a little bit like a river. One of the primary tributaries that flows into that river of unwanted sexual behavior is certainly lust. What we haven’t had language, especially in Christian circles to name is there is power and anger that plays out as well. If you’re only trying to curb your porn use so your massage parlor pursuits with just, “I’m going to stop lust,” but you don’t have language to see there’s a lot of anger and desire for power that’s funneling you towards that.
You’re going to set yourself up to continually fail because those parts of your life are left to fester and hide. This is the language of James 4 is, “What causes fights and quarrels among you that you desire but you don’t get what you want?” What do you do? You kill. That’s what we need to have language to name, especially for people in leadership positions.
When you don’t get what you want, you don’t pursue healthy behaviors but far more, you aren’t loving and kind to people around you. If we can hold the complexity of, it’s not only I who needs kindness but how do we not exploit it? How do we not use people in the midst of all the difficulties that we’re facing? That will put us in a much better position to find something healing instead of something that feels compulsive.
Our sexual fantasies are a roadmap. We need to listen to our lust. I love what you said in your book, “Efforts to eliminate lust sets us up to manage our sex life with a tourniquet.” That was a great quote.
The Right Way To Get Free From Lust
With regard to listening to your lust, I know people often like, “What are you talking about? We’re supposed to free lust. We’re supposed to run from it.” That was some of the research findings. One of the most common searches for terms on the internet had to do with teens or college students erasing that suggested to someone’s observance, a petite body type. We looked at what are the key drivers of someone’s pursuit of that behavior. What we found was that those men had three primary categories.
They were dealing with a lot of lack of purpose in life. They had high levels of shame and had a strict father. That becomes that thing. You can just imagine what it’s like to be that person sitting in front of their phone or computer. They come from a family system where there was a lot of authority that was used to power over them. A lot of their own choices were taken away. They had to be subservient to an authoritarian father and then they’re dealing with a lot of difficulties in life.
This is the language of Genesis 3 where, “The curse for a man is thorns and thistles.” Everything that we do has some level of futility in it like by the sweat of your brow, that blood is going to be your experience. In the midst of all that, we want to find relief. We want to find some arena of power to re-establish this difficulty that we’re feeling. That’s the invitation of this book. It’s to say, your sexual brokenness and some of the specifics of what you’re seeking out are reading your story and they’re inviting you to heal some of these stories.
Maybe you have some wounds and some pain from childhood that needs to be addressed. As this book outlines, if you’re feeling unprepared, part of what that crucible is you need to get a team around you to help you sort through some of the complexities and problems that you’re facing. If you go into isolation, you’re just going to set up your cycle of addiction. All these things that we’re facing are invitations to us to find deeper healing and deeper competency than we would have originally chosen.
If you go into isolation, you are setting up your cycle of addiction. Share on XI’m glad you brought up Genesis 3 because I do think that a lot of people think that if I had a bad day that could have been a good day or should have been a good day and tomorrow should be a good day and could be a good day. As a matter of fact, if every day was a good day, my life would be better. That’s not what it says in Genesis 3. Many people get this mixed up. They say, “Work is cursed but work was never cursed. The ground was cursed.”
If the ground was cursed, your iPhone might break. Your car might have a flashing light on the dashboard that says, “Engine malfunction.” Your spouse might not be happy when you come home. Your kids might have got a D in Physics. That was me, by the way, but things aren’t always going to work.
How Female Executives Must Deal With Unwanted Sexual Behaviors
When things aren’t working as an executive, it’s time for us to say that is because I’m living in a post-Genesis 3 world. Let’s talk to some of the executives that are women who are reading. Some of their issues are the same as men. No doubt about it, but some of them, God has ordained that the issues they may be struggling with in unwanted temptation type behavior are different than men speak to them.
Part of what Genesis 3 outlines is that the curse for a man is much more about the ground. It’s about work, the thorns and thistles. The curse for a woman is a relational curse. One of the statistics that jumped out at me from this book Rising to Power is that 38% of executives. It felt like they were not prepared for the isolation and some of the loneliness of their career. If we hold the reality, if you are a woman leading an organization, extremely lonely and extremely isolated for you.
What my research looked at was that we found that about 30% of porn users are now women. We also found that women who felt like their needs were not met like they were not pursued by significant people in their life. They were nearly five times more likely to pursue an affair. That’s what we have to hold together. It’s when you are an executive, a female executive at the top and you have this experience of just relational curse anyways of, do people love me or are they going to pursue? Are my needs even important because I’m checking out for everybody’s needs, my family’s and my organizations? What about me?
That’s a very difficult crucible to undergo. What happens with unwanted sexual behaviors is that you outsource that to an affair or to an unwanted sexual behavior. The immediate feeling is, “I’m a little bit less alone because now I have someone that pursues me.” At the end of the day, you feel more ashamed and isolated. The problem just keeps compounding. That’s the invitation especially to women as, do your needs? I would say this to men as well, but how isolated you are? Do you feel lonely?
That’s why I highly recommend that people just have a team of people around them. Whether that’s an executive coach or a licensed therapist and the quality of your friendships to be able to say, do you have other people that are bearing some of these burdens with you and how are you confronting some of your own loneliness in your career?
Again, I don’t think that this isn’t just an attempt to try and say there’s something bad about what you’ve done. It’s, if you find yourself a Lord and seduced to unwanted sexual behavior. That should be like an indicator light on a dashboard that just says, “There’s something that’s a little bit off. What if you pursued wholeness and connection instead of unwanted sexual behavior?”
Anything else you would say to women executives to look at the issues that might be unique to them? You talked about maybe loneliness being something that they would feel in a more magnified way than men. Being alone for dinner with a male executive that reports to them where they talk about their life and their loneliness could be a gateway to failure.
Part of what we know from the search is that about 1 out of every 3 women have had some history of sexual abuse or sexual assault in their life. Part of what we have to name is that a lot of times the earliest sexual experiences for a woman are not chosen. They’re not wanted. What ends up getting established early in childhood and through sexual harm is basically violation. It’s shame.
What happens to a lot of women later in life is that they don’t feel sexually alive unless there’s some reenactment of that original harm. That’s that interplay of if you find yourself seduced into experiences that at the end of the day are going to lead to more shame and isolation. As a therapist, part of what I need to ask you is, where did your sexual story go offline that’s what you find most intimate and arousing? Not only is that not a wise decision. Far more, it’s this invitation to say, “You’re leading a company extremely well against so much adversity.” What if you took time for yourself to begin to heal some of the pain that might be driving you to make compromise decisions with your sexual life?
Figuring Out What To Do About Shame
Can we talk a little bit about shame? A friend of mine who’s a psychologist in Southern California works with executives all the time and says, “The holy grail of psychology is figuring out what to do about shame.” Bruce McNicol would say almost the same thing with different words. He’s the author of the book TrueFaced and The Cure. When we figure out shame, we’ve unlocked something that hasn’t been well unlocked. This same friend of mine said he’s read 100 books for his doctorate in psychology and none of them figures out shame like the book The Cure. Talk about that a little bit.
Brene Brown says it’s this painful experience that something about you is unworthy of love. Most of us, when we even think about sharing a story from long ago or even a story of how you felt about yourself getting dressed this morning, have some experience of shame. What happens in the midst of shame is we end up living as prey to shame. You try to run away from its accusations. You try and hide the shame and the closet and yet what the reality is, that sets you up to live as prey. What I outline in Unwanted is that if we want to address shame what we need to do is to turn towards it and face it.
There’s this fascinating interview by this guy named Andy Casagrande who’s the videographer for the show Shark Week. He films in cold Pacific Oceans with great white sharks swimming at him. They said, “Andy, what in the world do you do when you’re swimming with great whites?” He says, “It’s counterintuitive but you swim right at the shark with the camera.” What he says is that if you’re a great white shark, everything in the whole entire ocean swims away from you. If you have something swimming towards you, it’s like, “What in the world is happening?”
What happens is the shark bumps the camera, realizes that it’s not food and then has a defense mechanism of, “I don’t know what this thing is,” and then it swims away. To me, that has a lot to do to teach us about how to interact with shame. Most of us try and run from it but once we turn towards it and tell other people where we harbor it. The power of shame is reduced in our lives. That’s the invitation. You’re going to feel shame often, but shame can also be a crucible for growth. It can be a place where you invite good friends, a therapist and a mentor into some of those places where you harbor shame.
What Executives Should Do When Things Don’t Go Well
Speak to the executive who had a shareholder meeting, a board meeting or a tough meeting and it didn’t go well. They walk out of the room and get in their car and they say to themselves, “I did not do that well.” What would a good next thought be in heading down a pathway that would be a shameful place that might lead them to pornography or a massage parlor? What could something be that they say to themselves when they say, “I did a horrible job?”
I would invite them to do two things. The first is to recognize what didn’t go well in their meeting. To have some good rational thinking as to, “Was I not prepared? Was there someone else in that meeting that saw me lead? Maybe I did terribly. Maybe I did well but I need some other voice to help me understand what happened there.”
You might call a friend and say, “how did I do?”
Maybe you can say, I felt like I wasn’t prepared for this. How do I have some accountability the next time to be well prepared so that I’m not sabotaging the next big meeting? The other important thing is that you have to engage your limbic brain, which is basically the emotional center. When we are around a threat, the brain does fight, flight, or freeze. I want to kill someone because that didn’t go well. I want to run away from this. I never want to go into another meeting or I just freeze and I feel some sense of paralysis.
Part of what the research would show is that if you’re able to breathe eight times in one minute, so a big inhale, pause for a couple seconds at the top and exhale. You will send a message to your brain that says, “All clear. Everything is safe. You’re going to be okay.” Most of us after we come out of a big meeting are very dysregulated. That’s the invitation to do a body scan saying, “Where am I intense? Where am I crunched over? What if I expanded my chest? What if I breathed?”
Dan Siegel has this wonderful phrase that says, “Name it to tame it.” That’s the invitation to say, “There’s something about me that’s not well.” How do I begin to find a type of beverage that would begin to soothe me? I know a lot of times that’s when people just go to gin and tonic, some more dissociative behavior or ice cream, which again as we’ve talked about. That will just reinforce the experience of shame.
That’s the counterintuitive move that we need to make with shame. Not to run from it and not to pursue more behaviors that confirm that core belief but to say, “I need comfort.” This is Genesis’s words, “Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.” A lot of us try and get through life without mourning, without grieving and without feeling the experience of loss. That sets us up to find counterfeits all over the world.
A lot of us try to get through life without mourning and grieving. It only sets us up to find counterfeits all over the world. Share on XI would add that if you’re an executive that’s trying to do good things for the Kingdom of God, you’re trying to love your employees. You’re trying to serve them well and be a friend to them on the journey. You’re trying to pay them, create a place where they can find hope, meaning and purpose Monday to Friday and then you have a bad board meeting and you feel terrible. No doubt about it that Satan is going to go after your mind and say, “You’re not doing well.”
We need to take that biblical technology, that biblical verse that says, “Cast down vain imaginations,” and go attack that as you just said and say, “I’m okay.” Call your spouse and head for a great dinner or go to the beach and go for a walk but don’t say, “It was a terrible meeting and I need to reward myself by massage parlor or buying a magazine I shouldn’t or sexting or taking my negative pathway to destruction.
As you mentioned evil, in John 10:10, “The thief comes to steal, to kill and destroy.” The word to destroy is the sense of mar. One of my colleagues will talk about basically the work of evil is to go into an art museum, find a Picasso or a van Gogh, and then just run a knife through it. It’s that sense of wanting to mar something beautiful and that’s what so many of us face when we’re in difficulty. The thief wants to kill us, wants to destroy or wants to mar something beautiful about our leadership or wants to mars something beautiful about our sexuality.
That becomes part of this to go on the offense of saying, “I don’t want some of the most beautiful and vulnerable parts of me,” which are my ability to lead others and my sexuality to be marred just because I had a bad day. That is part of what the gospel is all about. It’s, “Come unto me all you who are weary heavy laden. I want to give you rest.” That’s the invitation, where can you find rest in the midst of the difficulties that you’re facing?
We’re inviting executives to not choose this counterfeit path, which is interestingly way more available than it was 100 years ago. If you think about it, I love what Randy Alcorn says. If I invited you and said, “Jay, I know there’s a neighbor of mine that’s having sex tonight. We can watch them do that through the window.” You would say, “We’re not doing that,” and you’d say I was crazy. What often happens is we go to an R-rated movie and watch that very thing because it can happen through the technology of movies. Alcorn would say, “That wasn’t true 100 years ago.”
The availability of the internet, web, sexting, live webcams and all this stuff has made what wasn’t available before very available now as a destructive choice. You’re calling executives through your book on Unwanted to say, “Stop. Figure out why this is happening. Figure out that your lust can be a roadmap and stop rewarding yourself with things that are just going to cause more shame.”
Risks Of Abdicating Your Responsibility And Integrity
Exactly. The last thing that I’ll say about just this book Rising to Power again is that they wanted to understand basically what power failure was and they found that it went into two categories. Either the classic leader that is intimidating, toxic and authoritarian. What they found was that it wasn’t the greatest power failure among most executives. The greater power failure was the abdication of power. They were indecisive. They were overly accommodating of poor performance. Unwanted sexual behavior becomes that as well.
If you abdicate your responsibility and your integrity, you’re going to set yourself up for sexual failure and also business failure. This is the way that our lives speak to us. If you’re dealing with brokenness and abdicating integrity in your sexual life, it’s very likely that you’re also abdicating responsibility in your business life. That’s the confluence of healing. We need to use our power and our positions much more efficiently and with more integrity than we currently do.
Maybe speak to the executive who says, “I’ve been struggling. I’ve been memorizing Bible verses. I’m in an accountability group. I put the management system on my computer. I’ve been at it for ten years.” What could they do? If going to one of your websites is a great idea, just bring it on.
The first thing that I would say is when we are in the rut of our unwanted sexual behavior, the story that’s always at the forefront of our minds is our shame and our failure. When that is the story that is in the forefront of our mind, we often think that all God wants from us is just compliance and obedience. We project onto God basically this understanding that maybe you’re just the board of directors that’s disappointed me waiting for me to turn this whole thing around. The reality is, God’s face is turned towards us with kindness and that invitation is an unbelievable transformation.
God’s face is turned towards us with kindness. It is an invitation to unbelievable transformation. Share on XGod doesn’t invite us to suppress our desire. He gives us the keys to his entire Kingdom saying, “Where do you want to go with this one beautiful stunning life that you have?” That would be the first thing. If you’ve tried a lot of tourniquet stuff or suppression of desire, the reason it doesn’t work is because the way that our hearts are made are for beauty and for desire. We have to begin there. Our desire and our sex life are beautiful and good things.
Beyond that, part of what I would say is just as our unwanted sexual behavior is not random. The journey to freedom is not random either. That was part of writing this book, but also I created an eighteen-episode eCourse with the Heart of Man film to basically invite people to understand how their story is shaping their sexual choices. This is a five-month journey that people can go through. I also created an unwanted sexual behavior self-assessment that’s on my website. You complete the survey. It’s about 160 questions that covers a lot of things from the stories that you don’t want to talk about and then it says, how do all these things shape your involvement with unwanted sexual behavior?
It’s going to give you a 40-page report that reads your life and says, “Here are the connections.” That’s part of the course as well and that’s what we’re finding. Through five months or six months, find another executive or find someone else in your convene groups to go through this with. You’ll be surprised at what you find because most of us try to change just through behavioral stuff rather than understanding our story and why we make the decisions that we make. That course is called Journey Into the Heart of Man. People can find that at www.HeartOfManJourney.com or my website is Jay-Stringer.com.
Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words
Thanks for that and it’s been just joy to be with you in Seattle. I just wish you all the best as you continue to make things happen in an area that I’m sure you probably have a couple people who thought maybe your approach was not quite what they heard before. I want to encourage you and say keep doing what you’re doing. Executives from coast to coast and around the world need it. I’m sure you’re hearing from them, but keep doing what you’re doing. We’re raving fans of what you’re doing at Convene.
Thank you so much. It’s such an honor and just a delight to be with you.
Important Links
- Jay Stringer
- Jay Stringer on LinkedIn
- Jay Stringer on Instagram
- Jay Stringer on X
- Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing
- Rising to Power
- TrueFaced: Trust God and Others With Who You Really Are
- The Cure: What if God isn’t who you think He is and neither are you?
- Journey Into the Heart of Man
