Husband Material
So you want to outgrow porn. But how? How do you change your brain, heal your heart, and save your relationship? Welcome to Husband Material with Drew Boa, where we answer all these questions and more! Each episode makes it easier for you to achieve lasting freedom from porn—without fighting an exhausting battle. Porn is a pacifier. This podcast will help you outgrow it and become a sexually mature man of God.
Husband Material
The Science Of Attachment (with Michael John Cusick)
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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- Step 1: Listen to this podcast or watch on YouTube
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Thanks for listening!
Welcome to the Husband Material podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, heal your heart and save your relationship. My name is Drew Boa and I'm here to show you how let's go. Hey man, thank you for listening to this interview with Michael John Cusick. Wow, I learned a ton from this episode.
Speaker 1:You are going to hear all about the science and the spirituality and the theology of attachment and why that is at the core of how we're designed, what we struggle with and what healing looks like. Michael's new book, sacred Attachment, goes into depth about that and you are going to get a wonderful download from the riches of that book. I got a chance to read it. It was excellent, and this is really building on his first book, surfing for God Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle. Both books are excellent and in this interview, you're going to get some new perspectives on why is there such a gap between what we believe about God and what we experience. You're going to get some new ideas about sin and brokenness and a much more beautiful, expansive view of who God is much more beautiful, expansive view of who God is and what Michael means when he says these three powerful words. Love has you.
Speaker 1:We end the interview with a meditation on my very favorite chapter of the Bible, psalm 131. That was so powerful. I hope you get a chance to listen to the whole thing. Enjoy. Today we get to hear from Michael John Cusick, who is the founder of Restoring the Soul and the author of a new book Sacred Attachment Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love. Welcome, michael.
Speaker 2:It is so good to be with you, Drew. Glad to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been hopeful about having you on the show for a long time. Your book Surfing for God is one of the best out there for Christian men who want freedom from porn. So what is new about this book for men who are struggling?
Speaker 2:Well, for the past 13 years since Surfing for God came out and yes, it's hard to believe it's been out that long I've ministered and worked and taught a lot in the area of human sexuality in the academic level at Denver Seminary and around the country, and the work that I've done in intensive counseling has been largely around sexual brokenness I've felt with the way that I've learned about trauma and my own journey and freedom, and I've had to deal with a food addiction since I wrote Surfing for God. That's been very real and I've experienced freedom from that as well. And I was diagnosed with Asperger's on the autism spectrum disorder about seven years ago and it's required me to take a deep dive in understanding the brain and the central nervous system and the gift of neuroscience to therapy and especially Christian counseling, how it highlights the idea that we really are fearfully and wonderfully made. It's been an unintentional pullback from the work of sexual brokenness and more looking at how actually the underlying issues of sexual addiction and compulsion which is trauma and attachment that's, you know, now a regular part of the approach to the healing process how those issues of trauma and attachment actually impact our relationship with God and, culturally, what's happened during and after the pandemic, where there is a whole new embrace of mental health and counseling, it almost feels to me as if there's almost a prophetic element and I'm not saying that in the most biblical sense of the word prophetic, but how people are bringing truth and speaking truth into the hearts and lives of broken people around neuroscience and mental health and psychology and counseling. And of course we always need to weigh that up against how God made us and who God is and what the scriptures reveal about that.
Speaker 2:But I have really been reading deeply around just this area of attachment and speaking for the last four or five years on these four S's that are in the book the need to be seen, soothed, safe and secure and how the degree to which those elements are met will affect whether we have a healthy attachment or not. And generally speaking, if we don't have a healthy attachment which I'm sure we can unpack in this conversation we will attach to something we will either unattach in human relationships or we will overattach in human relationships, and both of those will lead us to want to attach to a person, to a behavior, to a substance, and of course porn brings all three of those together. Right? There's generally an image of a person, the substance is our own body chemistry and the behavior is whatever kind of sexual acting out is there. So it's this trifecta of what happens.
Speaker 2:And you know the book that came out 10 years ago by Alexandra Katahakis I think I may be butchering her name sex addiction and affect regulation. So it was all about how addiction, and sexual addiction in particular, because of that trifecta it elevates our mood and it brings us a sense of soothing and so, as we understand attachment, it can help us to almost reverse engineer, looking at our compulsions and our addictions, and say what's the attachment need that's being met here and in Surfing for God? I think I talked about four A's and three S's attention, affection, affirmation, security, significance and satisfaction. And I've distilled those even more with the four S's, which is not an original idea to me. It came from Dr Dan Siegel, the patriarch of interpersonal neurobiology, and then kind of handed down to Dr Kurt Thompson, my good friend and psychiatrist, and it's just become a robust way of thinking about our human brokenness, but without necessarily having to go back and look at every detail and aspect of our story. It's just a really great way of going.
Speaker 2:Well, of course I wasn't soothed or whoa. Yeah, I wasn't seen and therefore I didn't feel safe and therefore I don't have a secure attachment.
Speaker 1:Let's dive deep into those four S's. What are they and why do we need them?
Speaker 2:First of all, they are the four components that build a healthy attachment. And for those of your listeners that listen to different podcasts on recovery or mental health or on healing from trauma, you start to hear the word attachment everywhere, or attachment theory and attachment style.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like everyone talks about it, but what is it?
Speaker 2:style. Yeah, it's like everyone talks about it. But what is it? Yeah, exactly A little bit like the word brokenness, where you hear it a lot, and I love to say well, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 2:Technically speaking, attachment is a God-ordained, god-given process that's wired into the central nervous system of an infant and it's the process by which that infant draws upon the strength and the health of that mature brain of that adult caregiver and through that the infant is able to learn to regulate themselves and to organize the world. So through that other brain of the caregiver. It's a reciprocal back and forth process. It's literally how the infant doesn't just come to bond or experience emotional connection later in life, but literally how they're able to be present in their own body, how to regulate and how to be soothed. And so a paraphrase for this idea of regulating is how we sense, how we sense the world, how we feel it in our body, and then that organizing that happens in this attention process is how we make sense of the world around us. So it's a little bit of a right brain, left brain way of thinking about it and that's more of a metaphor than what's literally happening in the brain. But all healing happens as we learn to sense the world accurately and, in that sensing, be able to respond to that stimuli or to what it is that we're experiencing and sensing in a way that's healthy, as opposed to a way that's unhealthy. And I know I'm jumping around a little bit here, but this is why I talk about addiction as a compulsion in which we're really just essentially mishandling our pain. We're mishandling the dysregulation, the distress, the discomfort inside of us, and we can't just read a book about how to do that. We have to experience it in an embodied fashion. So that process of how the infant learns to regulate and organize through the brain of the adult, the way that that comes to the infant, is through these four S's that that infant needs to be seen, and that being seen is, of course, when the baby comes out.
Speaker 2:There's no parent and my wife had a C-section and then went to the recovery room with our biological son we have an adopted daughter but as she went away to the recovery room they handed me this bundle of blankets and I was like what do you want me to do with these? It's not my job to put them in the hamper. And I looked down and there was a 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.
Speaker 2:And then something happened where I looked at his face His eyes weren't open yet and I just fell in love and something in me melted and all I wanted to do was to gaze upon him. And then I have this video that it can still make me cry where, while she was in recovery, the nurse said go back to the room and just sit with him. And again I had this moment of terror of what am I going to say and do and think about. I think I was 32 years old and yet I sat down in the room and I turned on this little soft music in the background and I just started to sing to him and to gaze upon his face. And I was seeing him in the most literal sense. But I wasn't just looking at him with visual acuity, I was seeing into him and somehow, even though I had just met him, it felt as if I actually knew him and it felt as if he was a complete stranger on the one hand, and on the other hand there was a sense of he's mine and I'm his, and therefore I had a sense of I get him. I needed to learn what his cry sounded like and why he was crying at certain moments, but there was this deep sense of knowing him.
Speaker 2:Now it's not just looking at a baby, but Kurt Thompson's also the person that taught me that that infant is born with about 50 to 60% of active neurons in the brain, and the average adult human being has 50 to 80 billion neurons, billion with a, b. And that baby is born with less, but it's still in the tens of billions, but only half of them are online. So imagine buying a laptop computer and you power it up and something flashes across the screen and it says only half of the hard drive is working. You'd want to take it back to the store, but what happens is that those other neurons in that infant come online, generally between zero and four years old, but all the way up until 26 or 27, when the human brain stops formally developing. How those neurons come online in the earliest days and years is through eye contact, literally, as the adult caregiver, the mom, the dad gazes into the eyes, even though that baby has no construct or no mental vocabulary, for mom or dad is gazing into my eyes. They're here's the word again sensing that they are being seen and bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing times a billion those neurons are coming online and 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. That's different than the furry creature that crawls on the ground.
Speaker 2:Now that infant turns into a two-year-old or maybe 18-month-old and they start toddling and walking, there's never been a parent that I know of that sees that child take the first step and go. Oh, I wonder what we're having for dinner tonight. You know, it's the celebration. It's calling grandma and grandpa, it's texting all your friends, it's posting pictures on social media and it's this big deal why we see this child and it's awesome.
Speaker 2:Junior brings home scribbles in kindergarten, you know from from crayons on the paper, and suddenly that artwork is more valuable than a Picasso and it goes on the refrigerator and that's something that mom and dad are proud of. Why it's a bunch of scribbles, but it's yours and it matters, and I see you and I could go on and on and on and on. And this becomes a little bit problematic because as somebody goes into their teen years, where identity formation really happens. If I'm a baseball star or if I'm a cheerleader, or if I'm really, really smart and have a 4.5 GPA, then I can start to say I'm seen when I do X, y, z functions, when I perform, when I achieve, and that becomes a sense of identity which actually sets me up to develop a really good-looking false self, which also sets us up for addiction.
Speaker 1:What happens when we grow up? Seen only for that false self or unseen?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. One of two things will happen if we develop a really good false self. And that false self can take a couple of different directions. One is I have to be bigger and better 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, I have to be in all the clubs, I have to be on varsity as I grow up, I have to have a bigger house, I have to have a better job, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and that's a lot of pressure. So in that performance and achieving of being bigger or better, it's pressure and it can lead to pride.
Speaker 2:And by pride I don't mean haughtiness I'm better than everyone else, I mean self-sufficiency, where I don't need anyone. And that's a really dangerous setup for addiction. Let's just talk because you work with men. A man who doesn't need anyone is a man who will be addicted and compulsive 100% of the time. The other side of the equation is that if I have a false self, I'm going to dial myself down and I'm going to become smaller than who I am. I will diminish myself. And very few people actually just choose this. They're doing it in response to trauma, and they're doing it in response to shame, where they've been told you know, how dare you? Who do you think you are? You're not better than other people, our family doesn't dream about going to college, those kinds of things. And in that sense of shame, there's this belief that I'm not worthy to get my needs met and so that's going to set me up for addiction and compulsion as well. And these addictions and compulsions might be work. It could be a pastor trying to get more people in his church or, you know, preaching better sermons and taking a longer amount of time for that, or it could be pornography. So this question of what if our false self dominates us in either direction of I'm smaller than I really am or I'm bigger than I really am? The issue with that, drew, is that we will never be loved for who we really are If what we do is present to the world a version of ourselves that is a false self. And I'm not just talking about inauthenticity, like not being vulnerable, or talking to your accountability partner, but coming into the world saying this is who I must be in order to be loved. Not, this is who I am and I can be loved. We set ourselves up that nobody can ever love us for our true self. They love us for who we think they want us to be, and that sets us up for addiction and compulsion. Why? Because the deepest longing of our heart is to be loved and known and to be accepted unconditionally, and the false self actually sets us up so that actually becomes impossible.
Speaker 2:And then the second S of the four S's is soothing. We have to find a way to soothe ourselves Now. If we're not seen as infants, if we're crying, if we have a wet diaper and a rash, or if we're hungry and the baby's blood sugar is low, or if they're cold, or if there's loud, scary noises around the house, or if mom and dad have emotional disconnect, or if they're fighting, or if the consistent presence of peace and calm is not there, it's very likely that that's going to impact 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 that soothing is. There is distress in the infant and care comes predictably to meet them and to attune to that distress so that there can actually be soothing and infants that don't get that will learn up. They will grow up and not actually learn how to soothe themselves through being present to themselves, through asking for care, for hugs, for things like that. Instead, they will either shut down their capacity to feel and kind of become emotionally dead, or to dissociate out of their own body, to not be present, or they will turn to things, and this happened to me at a very young age.
Speaker 2:Parallel to my exposure to pornography. At age four, I turned to food. One of my earliest memories is hiding under a bed. This was an old-fashioned bed where they had box springs and under the box spring I somehow found a way to cut open the piece of cloth and I would take candy and I had a bag of Nestle's chips that were used to bake cookies and I had that entire bag stuffed up underneath this bed. When I was just very, very young pre-kindergarten and when I was hurting, when I was anxious and I didn't even know what to call it, then I would go under the bed and I would eat food and that struggle was with me long after the freedom from sexual compulsion, and that was a form of self-soothing.
Speaker 2:If a child and an infant is not soothed, they're not going to feel a sense of safety within their own body. And safety is so important. And I'm not talking about, you know, put double locks on your doors because you live in a bad neighborhood. I'm talking about the kind of safety that, under normal conditions, that I can feel safe and calm and quiet on the inside and that, even with all the normal ups and downs of life, that I know that, if I get anxious, that there is safety around me, that there are boundaries and that there are people that are going to come and attend to me, and as that happens, from infancy through childhood, through adolescence, that becomes internalized and then I become a person that can live in my own body and therefore navigate the world in my own body, because when I sense the world, I'm actually able to regulate and get to a place of relative calm and I'm able to actually organize and act upon the world so that I can have a sense of self and develop a sense of competency and efficacy and things like that.
Speaker 2:And again in my story, I didn't have this language, but I had very little safety growing up. There was a lot of unpredictability, there was a lot of abuse, there was a lot of trauma and I found myself for three decades with all kinds of sexual struggles, shame, what eventually became a full-blown sexual addiction that I wrote about in Surfing for God, and I had no idea why I was doing what I was doing, and in the Christian world, the best that people gave me was you're a sinner, you just need to repent, and there was grace and forgiveness for that, fortunately, but there was no hope about how to actually change.
Speaker 1:The reality is for many of us is, for many of us, the most secure attachment we ever had in life where we felt seen, soothed and secure was porn.
Speaker 2:Right, one of my greatest moments of shame was acting out in a old fashioned adult video booth. This was 31 years ago. About two weeks after that experience, 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 kinds of things would happen. But I had this picture in my head. But it was like out in front of me and yet it was inside of me. But I call it seeing in the eyes of the heart, like Paul talks about in Ephesians 1.18. And Jesus was there with me in this adult video. Kate and I'm down on my knees like worshiping, and his arm was around me and he whispered in my ear of course, of course. And it wasn't a kind of a snarky well, of course, like you're accusing, you're screw up. Of course this is what you're going to do. It was, of course, because I understand your story, I know the wounds deep inside of you, I know the deep thirst of your heart, I know all the ways that you've mishandled your pain. And right now, today, michael, it could not be any other way. And when I say that I'm not giving myself slack or laying myself off a hook, nor am I giving men permission to go. Oh well, well, god forgives me. And he says, of course, because that was the moment when I sensed that this was someone 39 talks about that before a word is on my tongue, he knows it completely. And before I stand up, he knows it. And before I stand up, he knows it. And before I go out, he's there. He knows me so thoroughly and intimately. Well, he knew exactly why I was doing what I was doing. He had the most precise. You know better than Mayo Clinic, better than Patrick Karnes sex addiction program, you know, dare I say, better than husband material or surfing. For God. Jesus knew precisely why I was doing what I was doing and he wasn't mad at me, he wasn't disappointed in me, he wasn't frustrated, he wasn't pacing back and forth, wringing his hands. His, of course, was I've got this, I've got this. And it was in me, actually hearing those words, that that began to prepare my heart for just three or four months later when, gratefully, my world came tumbling down and everything broke apart, where my double life was discovered. This past July 10th, my wife Julianne and I were over in Scotland on a hundred-mile pilgrimage and we celebrated while we were walking barefoot across the North Sea. We celebrated while we were walking barefoot across the North Sea. At the end of this pilgrimage, we celebrated 30 years of the freedom and the D-Day of our marriage, and it was pretty remarkable to think about where we were then and where we are now.
Speaker 2:So, for men that are listening, I just want to say, whether you're far along in your recovery, whether you have no recovery, whether you're just starting your recovery that it's not just possible to be sober. That's the starting point. That's the doorway that we walk through. What's possible is freedom. What's possible is restoration.
Speaker 2:What's possible is that you were actually created to live a life that you probably have very little idea could happen.
Speaker 2:But deep in your heart there's a seed, and in that seed there's a vision of the you that God created. He says in Jeremiah 1, before I formed you, I knew you and I set you apart, which means that God had a dream about your life and what it would be like for you to be alive and awake and free and to, as David says in Psalm 119, to run in the path of his commands. That's something that's compelling. I mean, if we could get a glimpse of that, that would be more compelling than porn on the strongest day. But to get from A to B is to deal with and you brought this up before we started the podcast. It's to deal with this gap, or this delta, which is the distance between what we're creative for and what we're actually living, what we believe and what we actually experience, what we hope for and what we're promised and what our everyday reality is, and that gap is pretty huge and bigger than what most people talk about.
Speaker 1: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 trying to heal, I'm pursuing recovery and there's still this huge gap between what I believe and what I experience. Between what I believe and what I experience.
Speaker 2:You know we want a microwave transformation and to your point about I'm doing my work. Thanks be to God that more and more men have programs like yours to be able to be in a community of other men, to have a path forward, to understand the depth of the struggle and not just the superficial let's kind of rearrange the furniture in the room approach. So thanks be to God for that. But real let me use an old fashion word sanctification, or the process of becoming holy and whole, and those are synonymous. They're two sides of the same coin. That takes a very, very, very long time. I just turned 60 in August. Surprise. It just feels like I was just 20, just 30, et cetera. And it was pretty profound when I turned 60. And I was delighted because I'd been stepping more and more into the role of being a father I'm not a grandparent but a father to young men and stepping into the authority of who I am. And then I said, like a couple of days around my birthday, I was like God, why does it take so long? I thought when I was 60 that all this crap was going to be behind me and I just kind of saw him smile like, yeah, I knew you thought that I didn't want to burst the bubble too soon. But if all that stuff was behind me. But if all that stuff was behind me, then my hunger and thirst for wholeness and for deeper experiences of God's love and of his faithfulness, of brokenness.
Speaker 2:But one of the points in the book Sacred Attachment is that our brokenness is never the barrier to the life that we want. It's the bridge to the life that we want. But what we have to do is we have to be in our brokenness rather than try to avoid it or to push it down or, as Christians will often do, we're taught or encouraged to somehow manage our brokenness, as opposed to allow our brokenness, which are both moments in our lives where we have no game, but also parts of our story where we had no game that lead us to a pattern and a way of being in the world of trying to make life work. And as long as we're trying to make life work, including to try to manage our sin, that's going to be really hard to trust God and to learn that love has us and that's actually the antidote to all addiction is to attach securely to the source of love and gratefully. We get to do that on the horizontal level with spouses, partners, girlfriends, fiancés. We get to do that with close friends, with family, and that's practice for how we can do that with God.
Speaker 2:But here's the difficult part we can't just attach to God by saying I'm going to read Michael's book or listen to a podcast on attachment or just choose to do this. It's that same process in adulthood as it is for infants. It's a process whereby my nervous system has to draw upon a more mature, more regulated, stronger, healthier nervous system where I can learn to and I'm going to take a deep breath and exhale and make this exhale sound where I can learn to. And you asked before the podcast you know what is this idea that love has me. And that idea love has me is not an intellectual idea, it's the exhale, it's the infant who's anxious, who before nursing at the breast or having the bottle, they were hungry, their blood sugar was low, they're a little jumpy, they're crying, and then they get snuggled and they have the milk and there's nourishment in their bloodstream and their tummy starts to get full and they start to relax as they're held and then they let out this sigh, psalm 131. But I have calmed myself, I have quieted my ambitions. I am like a child at its mother's breast, like a child with its mother. I am content and you know I have two graduate degrees in psychology, one in pastoral counseling and one in counseling psychology, and I'm all about that. But the beautiful thing and I know that your ministry draws upon scriptural resources is when you start to understand things like neuroscience and attachment. It starts to open your eyes to see scripture in a whole new way.
Speaker 2:And my friend Andi Kolber, who wrote the book Try Softer and Strong Like Water, she made a comment to me walking out of our office about a year ago and she said Michael, I'm starting to believe that all theology is attachment. And I just thought it was a new way that she said that to me. But as I pondered that, I was like well, gosh, jesus' last sermon was I am the vine, you are the branches. What more powerful picture could we have of attachment than that? And what would it be like if this hole in the heart of men that is part of our brokenness, that's part of our fallenness, part of our autonomy and our independence from God and part of what we did not learn how to do with our caregivers, which is to be vulnerable and how to receive. What would it be like if in that hole in our heart we could picture like almost an umbilical cord, but it's more like a giant tree root that comes out and attaches to this giant vine. And that's what Jesus is saying.
Speaker 2:That whole idea of I'm the vine and you are the branches remain there. Dwell there, just be there. Just let it be connected like your umbilical cord to your mother's umbilical cord in utero. Just be in that space and as you focus on that, you'll have everything you need. Like the psalmist has said, I can quiet myself, I can calm myself and I'm content. But we don't talk about that and our churches generally only give us a left brain cognitive understanding of that. And that's why there's a chapter in the book on embodiment and how we need to internalize this into our bodies, because without embodied spirituality we have no spirituality at all.
Speaker 1:I hope everyone listening can take a deep breath and receive that truth in our bodies. That love has you.
Speaker 2:It's really freeing. It's really freeing, it's really freeing. And I've sat with, you know, hundreds and hundreds of men in circles and in my counseling office and that idea is presented and they would desperately like to believe it and they desperately want to seek to experience it. But because their own nervous system is let me use the non-clinical term their nervous system is so jacked up from trauma or from addiction itself, or from social media or from just stress in life, that we try to take that breath. We can't even take 100% breath. I'll often say to men take a deep breath and they'll exhale. And I'll say what percentage of a full breath do you think you just took? Oh, 60, maybe 70 at most. And starting to become aware and to develop this bodily awareness that there's so much tightness in my chest that I can't even take a full breath. Now I'm not shaming or pathologizing everyone, but we are meant to be so relaxed that I can take a full breath. Just so happens that right now I could and I can actually feel that expansion and at the top of that full breath I can feel this surge of oxygen go through my chest and system and down into my arms. But if I can't feel that what is it that will make a release of oxytocin and vasopressin and endorphins and dopamine and all that good stuff. It's an orgasm, or it's even the fantasy, without even touching genitals, of the rituals and the images and all that goes into our acting out ritual that that will also release those chemicals in our system and then we become dependent upon that to get that sense of soothing and that exhale on the inside. So you know, it goes without saying, but the beauty of your work and the beauty of a lot of the work that people are doing today in trying to deal with freedom, wholeness and recovery from any number of addictions, is that there's a greater and greater emphasis on embodiment and attachment in a non-shaming, non-judgmental, beautiful, generous, merciful, magnanimous understanding of God. That God is simply there for us and he's always giving, he's always embracing, and that his passion is infinitely more than just wanting to save us so that we can go to heaven, but his passion is to actually make us whole, so that we would bring the kingdom of God into our relationships and into our workplaces and into our families and our neighborhoods on earth as it is in heaven. That's God's passion, is his kingdom.
Speaker 2:God dealt with sin on the cross, and so sin is just something that God hurts over. Sin because it causes his loved ones pain, and if we are married and betraying our spouse, that causes pain and that hurts God's heart. But God is not hurting about sin because he's somehow holy and can't look upon sin. That's actually a misnomer. But for the past hundred-ish years we preach that God is holy and cannot look upon sin. And I used to preach that sermon myself and it comes from Habakkuk, chapter 2, and it says you, o Lord, are holy and cannot look upon sin. Dot, dot, dot. So why do you look upon sin? And you take the idea of Jesus being born into a sinful world and he was with sinful kids on the playground and he was with sinful disciples and on and on and on and on. God, who is holy, including Jesus, loves to be in the midst of sin because he's bringing his light into the darkness. So this was another reason why I wrote the book Drew is I wanted to help heal people's image of God, because there is no healing from addiction and compulsion if there's no healing of our understanding of God, because if we see God as vengeful, angry, disappointed, frustrated, judging, exacting, requiring us to live according to 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 either an anxious attachment where I'm always working really hard to try to make sure that I'm okay with God. And that was my story.
Speaker 2:I was the master of spiritual disciplines for the first five years of my life, memorizing scripture. I literally had a clipboard that had like 10 different categories of Christian activities that I would do. I was really all in. It was a little crazy and since this is a guy podcast, I'll say this it's a little embarrassing, but at one point I was a senior in high school I told God I'm going to put my Bible in the clipboard with all my markers and pens for my morning quiet time on my toilet and I'm not going to take a pee until I'm in the Word. And of course that's almost like self-abusive, but it was how desperately I wanted to be free and the only way I knew how to do it was to anxiously try to please God, because my thought was, if God's pleased with me, then he'll give me the key that will turn in the door that I can walk into this room of the abundant life that I so desperately wanted.
Speaker 2:And if we're not an anxious attachment, it's an avoidant attachment, where intimacy and unconditional love that's not in my control, that's overwhelming to me, it dysregulates me, so I'm going to pull away and I'm going to stay distant. And those are the two forms of unhealthy attachment. There's also one called ambivalent attachment, which is a mixture of avoidant and anxious. According to research says 60% of people in America have a secure attachment and most therapists think that's about half, actually, that the people somehow in the research missed what was actually happening in real people's lives. I would certainly say that the generations that have grown up as digital natives that are attached to screens and find the majority of their soothing through screens, that it's significantly less than 60%. So at best 40% of us in America have either an anxious, an avoidant or an ambivalent attachment style where we're going to turn to people, substances or other non-relational behaviors to basically satisfy the deepest needs of our heart.
Speaker 1:This understanding of attachment has been so freeing and healing for me, but I haven't had the words for it, I haven't had the theology to be able to reconcile it with a lot of my understanding of the Bible and spirituality, and you've really helped me with that being able to bring together the science and the scripture to see everything more clearly. And one of the categories that you've already talked about a little bit is sin. I can hear some people saying, man, all this stuff about attachment and trauma and embodiment, yeah, that sounds good, but this is a sin issue, right, this is sexual sin. So what is your view of sin.
Speaker 2:I like to say, using the big, fancy seminary word, I have a very strong and very deep hamartiology, and hamartia H-A-M-A-R-T-I-A is the Greek word for basically for sin. The reason why I believe it's very strong and deep is that it is a depth view of sin. It was Sigmund Freud that first used the iceberg as an illustration of the human personality and one of the people that popularized that. One of the patriarchs of Christian counseling, who I had the good fortune and blessing to be my mentor for 15 years, is Dr Larry Crabb, who was here in Denver, wrote 25 books and influenced people like Dan Allender. That wouldn't be who he is today if not for Larry and John Eldridge, who studied under Larry, and many, many others.
Speaker 2:Places in my story where my needs weren't met, where there's neglect, where there are, in fact, attachment wounds, places in my story where there is trauma, where things that never should have happened happened and that can be profound. Things like my story where there's sexual, physical, emotional, spiritual abuse, or it can be something you know, almost the cliche issue of being asked to read in class and stuttering in second grade and everybody laughs at that child. That can be a deep wound and a trauma where an arrow comes into the heart. Anyway, our iceberg behaviors above the waterline are driven by what's beneath the waterline, that's, all the places where we either have or have not been seen soothed, safe, secure. Those are the attachment wounds. They're the trauma wounds. And as we deal with what's below the waterline, our hearts become whole. We can experience more and more deeply how loved we are. We can actually begin to be present to ourselves instead of have to repress or push away parts of who we are.
Speaker 2:Many of your listeners may be familiar with a book written many, many centuries ago called Practicing the Presence of God, which is a great thing to do for addictions, just learning how to be present. And I bought that book, I don't know 20 years ago, and I would read it and I'd reread it and I even made like a three-page outline of it and I couldn't do it. Whatever. Practicing the Pres presence of God. You know I failed that class. So I said to God you got to help me with this.
Speaker 2:And it wasn't until many years later that I read Psalm 27, 4, where David, the man after God's own heart, says one thing I ask God, this is what I seek to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon his beauty and to seek him in his temple. Here's my paraphrase of that. When I read it it just really hit me. God, here's the thing that is central in me right now. I want to dwell in your temple. I want to dwell in your house all the days of my life and, in that space, be so connected to you that it's like I'm just gazing upon you. Parentheses God, I am the temple, I am the house of the Lord.
Speaker 2:Second Corinthians, chapter two. Do you not know that you are God's temple and that his spirit dwells in you? So if we can't be present to ourselves, which is the temple of God, we're not going to be able to be present to God or to other people and we're going to be starving and dying of thirst on the inside because we're not going to be able to get our needs met. So one of the first orders of business in recovery is not just truth-telling and getting connected into a supportive, loving, truth-filled, grace-filled community, but it's also really about just learning how to attune to our own bodies, learning how to be still. Sometimes you know that's downloading a meditation app.
Speaker 2:I have a chapter in Surfing for God, on centering prayer, how to be still and it's interesting, I either never hear from people about that chapter or I hear from people, generally older men, who tell me that chapter changed my life because it gave me a way of being and it gave me something to do that was much more than just trying to resist sexual temptation or flex my moral muscles. It actually gave me the experience of being able to do nothing in the presence of God and to learn to be present to myself and to learn how to have that real rest that Jesus talks about in Matthew 28 when he says All you who are weary, come to me and I will give you rest.
Speaker 1:So sin is when we turn away. It's not when we fall away, as many of us have pictured ourselves, like falling off a cliff. It's turning away from love, turning away from the beauty that's being offered by Jesus.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 2:I've always had a struggle with the word fall, but it's more relational to say the term. And here's the beautiful thing what happens when we turn away from God? What happens when I am in my parking lot, at this truck stop that had a big pornography store with free donuts in, and I would first tell myself and self-deceive myself that I was going there for the free donuts and that I was just gonna walk out. But I would start spending a lot of time in that one porn store. And what happens when I turn away from God? Does he stay in the parking lot? No, he walks inside with me. And what happens when I walk from where all the shelves are with all the these were VHS tapes back then, if people know what that is. What happens when I walk from that room into the little inter-room behind the curtain and walk into one of the booths? Does Jesus stay out? No, he comes in. And what happens when and I could just keep going and going and going in our worst moment, on our darkest day, on our longest night? Jesus doesn't stay back, he comes with us.
Speaker 2:So that when we turn away from God I think one of the most profound pictures of what happens when we turn away from God is I've never done this and I don't know if I will but jumping out of a plane. I have a friend who jumped out of a plane on like their 40th birthday and they sent me the video. And you know, the goggles are this big and there there's a GoPro camera and the wind is in their face. And then you see that there's this instructor that is literally like Velcro, double harnessed attached to them, so if one of them dies, they're both going to die. And that's what it's like when we turn away from God. And I'm going to spin in my chair right now for the people on the video. So I turn away from God and he's actually attached to me, like that skydive instructor where there's no way we can separate. But I turn and I keep looking for him. Where did he go? Well, he's actually behind me and he's. You know, all he has to do is wrap his arms around me, but he's still attached. That's what it's like.
Speaker 2:And even in the turn in the Garden of Eden, there was not that separation from God in the way that we think about it today. There is a felt sense of distance, there is a disconnect relationally, in the same way that when the parent is there in the room and can breastfeed or take a bottle and pick that baby up, they're there, they see them, they hear them, but until that moment of that embrace, the baby doesn't actually feel it. And so this profound reality that we can discover in our brokenness and in our failure and in our sin and our struggle and our shame, is the idea that none of that intimidates God. None of that is problematic for him, and his very nature is to give himself in the way that Jesus gave himself on the cross. Yes, he suffered greatly, but it didn't. It wasn't like him going.
Speaker 2:I can't believe I've got to do this for humanity. It's just who God is, it's what he does, and far greater than the physical suffering was the humiliation and the vulnerability that the creator of the entire universe chose humiliation. Let's not forget that on the cross, he was stripped naked, for his genitals to be flailing out in front of everybody. For that's what they did in Roman crucifixions, was they humiliated people? And so if we want to know whether we can really trust God and whether love has us, it's not just that he took nails for us, but he took the humiliation and choosing the powerlessness to say this is what God is like, which means, in our suffering and in our shame, god's not just with us. He's experiencing the shame as well.
Speaker 1:He never detaches.
Speaker 2: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 in for kicks when I was a young christian, I was taught, you know, grace is the word. Charis means gift, unmerited favor. It's a gift that god gives with salvation. That that's true. Mercy is something that God takes away, a punishment that we do deserve, and that's about 10% of the meaning of mercy. In other words, that I deserve something bad but God withholds it like a judge who's going to send me to jail, but instead he has me do community service.
Speaker 2:Mercy's root word in Hebrew is rahamin and it means womb.
Speaker 2:Mercy is this womb of God that holds me, that sustains me, that provides everything that I need.
Speaker 2:Talk about food, clothing and shelter. That's what the womb is, and no wonder Jesus says you must be born again. You have to be born in a way where you can now enter into that heavenly womb in which you've always been in just read Psalm 139, and to begin to realize that there is an attachment and a security where you're seen soothed and safe. That is even more profound than what happened in your mother's womb mother's womb and it's the most reliable, ever present reality, so that in the midst of our recovery journey, in the midst of our shame, in the midst of our great need, whatever our suffering might be, that there's a person that we have access to, in the same way that the baby has access to the mother, and there's a place where our hearts are secure, even though we may not know that or feel that, in the same way that the infant doesn't know. Oh, there's this thing called a mom on the outside there, but the love is there, the care is there, the provision is there.
Speaker 1:Wow to, even though we can't directly see him, hear him. It's actually because we're so close, we're like in the womb.
Speaker 2:I believe that's absolutely true. There's an old Celtic proverb. When we were in Scotland I quoted this to somebody and they picked up on it and they gave us all little thimbles as a gift. The Celtic proverb says you can't put the ocean in a thimble, but you can drop the thimble into the ocean. And our hearts, our spirits, our bodies are like thimbles dropped into the ocean of God's love.
Speaker 2:And it would be silly for a fish living in the middle of the ocean to say I'm thirsty. And that's often what happens in my life. Before I knew about, the way that I most deeply experienced God is by being still, by exhaling, by stepping back, by resting. I would say, God, I'm thirsty and I was in the middle of an ocean. I didn't know that I could drink without having to earn it or somehow get his good favor first, and that I didn't know that I could drink without having to earn it or somehow get his good favor first, and that I really didn't know how to drink, because I thought it was through more effort, more Bible study, more prayer, more doing good things, and then God would bless me and I would somehow no longer struggle.
Speaker 1:So now, what does a secure attachment with God look like for you?
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, what a wonderful question. I think it looks like Psalm 131, verse 2 and 3. There's only three verses in the whole Psalm. It says but I have calmed myself and quieted my ambitions, like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. And so I just see a Michael. I'm 60 years old, but I'm being held like a baby in the arms of God and I'm being pulled close and he's gazing upon my face, almost like those historic Catholic pictures of Mary, you know, holding Jesus in the arms and gazing into Jesus' face. This is the Father, son, holy Spirit, the whole Trinity. Now they're, you know, they're wrapped around me and I'm in the middle and just being held. And there I can breathe, I can exhale. As I exhale, something begins to settle in me and, like the psalmist says, but I have calmed myself. And calm is not just an emotion of I'm feeling peaceful or the absence of stress. Calm is an embodied experience. And then I've quieted my ambitions. Calm is an embodied experience, and then I've quieted my ambitions. When I'm calm, I can begin to quiet down this part of me that says you know, I've got to write a book that sells more copies so that I can be more famous, so that I'm somebody. See back to the beginning of our interview. That's my false self, that's my ego that goes I'll only be loved if I'm greater than I am now, if I weird word to use for a 60-year-old man but like sexier to the world and more important. And so if I, I'm going to do that next time. So I start to think about a course I'm going to do, or, you know, talk that I want to give. And those are ambitions that are trying to make life work.
Speaker 2:And the psalmist says when I'm calm, I can quiet my ambitions. And the psalmist says when I'm calm, I can quiet my ambitions. And for some addicts, our ambitions are the places that our mind goes, sometimes reflexively, to an image, to an action, to an app, to a hookup, to an affair partner, to a certain place where we can get sexual relief. And that's an ambition where, basically, here's my strategy to get calm. But when I'm calm I can quiet all of that. And in that quietness the picture of me with God and me with my own heart, in my own body is I can be like a child at its mother's breast, and in many of the translations of Psalm 131, it says like a child weaned from its mother's breast. And in many of the translations of Psalm 131, it says like a child weaned from its mother's breast, which means that it's actually satisfied and it's learned how to begin to nourish itself. And then the last part of that is like a weaned child, I am content. So what secure attachment looks for me, and I would say that I'm growing in secure attachment.
Speaker 2:Most of my life I've lived with an anxious attachment, but as I move into secure attachment, it's a calm Michael, inwardly, quieted ambitions, all these strategies that I have to make life work and to get the love that I want. And then content. And oh my goodness, if sex addicts and porn addicts could experience a little bit of contentment. Our addictions would just vanish. If we could trust love. It's easy to say I trust God or I don't trust God, but trust love. God is love to trust this person and this't trust God, but trust love God is love To trust this person and this reality of this embrace of love. If we could trust love, our addictions would vanish and you and I would be out of work, which would be a nice thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm just sitting in that experience.
Speaker 2:Scriptures are good stuff, aren't they? I mean, they invite us to this deeper journey, and let this be of an encouragement to listeners and men in recovery. I've read that Psalm I don't know 50 times, and only in the last six months have I read it in this way where it's like food that I'm taking in and as I did that little exercise, I can 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, and I can feel myself drop down into that contentment. But like signing up for a marathon, saying, you know, I want to lose weight or be able to bench a certain amount of weight, we can't just walk in and get to the optimal level or the highest level on day one. We have to train, and so recovery is like training. Spiritual formation is like training, and that's why I love talking about.
Speaker 2:In the book there's a chapter called practice instead of disciplines. Spiritual disciplines are good things and necessary, but some of that language has become harsh or shaming or judgmental or really burdensome on addicts that have tried discipline, because we know that willpower, as David Benner says, is a wonderful servant but a horrible master and addicts have tried to make their willpower their master. If I can just master this with my willpower, then I won't feel shame and I won't feel bad and I won't hurt people. But an addiction, by definition, is something we can't do with willpower. But our willpower kicks in when we position ourselves through training over time, where we become 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 because we've experienced a secure attachment on the inside.
Speaker 1:It's so beautiful and you didn't know this, but that's actually my favorite chapter of the Bible.
Speaker 2:Psalm 131? Yeah, oh, that's so cool At Husband Material.
Speaker 1: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, to be with Jesus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. It's so much more than Jesus gives us a little bit of strength to overcome our sin. It's that we're somehow infused with a whole new way of being in the world, where that little boy is loved. And isn't it a tragedy that we have to address the little boy as the person that's first exposed to porn? It's tragic, it's heartbreaking and it's abusive that little children are exposed to, you know, really hardcore things that short circuits their nervous system, gives them categories that they have no ability to comprehend or to integrate categories that they have no ability to comprehend or to integrate and then causes a kind of awakening to their sexual system that can't be integrated into who they are, and then so much of it is shame put upon that.
Speaker 2:So how absolutely beautiful that that's a starting point for you with the ministry. Isn't this why Jesus said things like you know, unless you become like a little child, you can't enter the kingdom of heaven. Unless you engage with the little child within you, you'll never experience heaven happening here, because your listeners probably know. But when Jesus spoke of the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, he wasn't talking about where you go when you die. He's talking about heaven happening here he's talking about the kingdom that he said is among us, that is within us, that is here and that we're to seek now. And we can't access that unless we go to these vulnerable, younger parts of who we are.
Speaker 1:Amen, Michael. What is your favorite thing about healing and freedom from porn?
Speaker 2:Joy. That's an easy one, Joy. I've underestimated the importance of joy in my life and the power of joy in my life. Joy is deeply, deeply satisfying and it's something that I can practice. Things like watching the leaves turn or watching little children in Halloween costumes, or playing backgammon with my wife or talking to you. I mean, I just I'm talking to you and I'm seeing your eyes light up and I'm seeing you with your passion about working with men and especially talking about how you're doing it. It just brings me great joy to do this and to have this conversation.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Michael. Thank you so much for sharing. I learned so much today.
Speaker 2:You're welcome. Love to come back on the program anytime. I love talking.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, we love listening. And if you guys want to connect with Michael or get a copy of his new book Sacred Attachment, go down to the link in the description and you can learn more there. Go down to the link in the description and you can learn more there. Gentlemen, I want to pause and take a deep breath and sigh Before I remind you something that I want you to receive in this moment. You are God's beloved son. In you, he is well pleased.
