Schedule, Book and Assessments
Schedule
Meeting with Scott on Wednesday at 5:00 PM (Zoom)/ August 27, 2025
Meeting with Band of Brother's Men's Soul Care Small Group at 5:30 - 7:00 PM CST on Thursday (Pending on whether it will be at 4:30 - 6:00 PM EST)
Book
Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing
Link: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Unwanted/vnVPDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=unwanted+how+sexual+brokenness&printsec=frontcover
Foreword
Mark Laaser's foreword of the book moved me to tears. It is true that one finds the teacher when one is ready. I hope I am ready. God knows he is in my heart. Thus, it must be his design to put on my path this other piece of the puzzle, life has been for me, via the materials made available to me in this course. It has taken me all these years to try to explain to myself the events that led me to be the person I have become. The reference to Paul's words in Romans 12:12 instructing me on how I can change my mind and heart by transforming the way I think about myself in sin has been an epiphany. Rather than shutting down my mind, I need to embrace our longing for love, companionship, community, validation and presence and acknowledge the various ways this longing manifests itself through our sexual desires. Thus, channeling those desires towards a deeper understanding of God's love transforms my journey into a valuable archive of experiences needed to truly embody God's love first and self-love second.
Introduction
In the Introduction, the concept of unwanted behavior is provided. It is any kind of sexual behavior that continues to persist despite our efforts to change it. Most of these behaviors manifest through lust and consumption of sex. The more one does it, the more unwanted one feels. No amount of prayer can make one invulnerable to it, unless one understands where it comes from. Instead of denying it, one needs to bring God into it to change the frame. For God one's sexual behavior is the road-map to one's redemption. God knows who I am. My behaviors do not shame me, it connects me with God, who will replace it with love. For most of us who have been unwanted, the origin of our sexual behaviors stem from the type of experiences we had during our formative years. So, to free ourselves from unwanted sexual behaviors I need to dig out of my past the specific reasons that led me to them. For those of us in the helping professions, understanding our own life stories is key in moving from perceived failures regarding our sexual behaviors to focus on what truly happened in our lives. Just by reading the introduction, I was able to understand why a certain kind of trouble women feel attracted to me; they love the way I listen to their problems when they confide them in me, the same way I did when my mother made me her confidant from childhood until now. In my case, I can tell with conviction that God has answer my prayers. This work I am initiating has been provided to me by God; there is no other explanation for what may seem to others a series of accidental coincidences, but to me have happened as a result of God's design.
Chapter 1 A Theology of Unwanted Sexual Behavior
One of the most stimulating ideas Stringer writes about is that of God being the author of erotic pleasure. Since I'm created in the image of God, I do not have to feel ashamed of being a sexual being. Thus, our sexuality should not get in the way of us getting closer to God.
Assessments
Please take the following assessments and send me the results (a pdf of screen shots of the results page or the pdf of the report) before our first meeting:
1. Sexual Addiction Screening Test (SAST) Send me your number. https://new.recoveryzone.com/PublicSurvey/Create?SurveyTypeIDS [I was not able to go beyond the check-mark "I am human"]
2. Sexual Behavior Self-Assessment (SBSA) - https://sexualbehaviorassessment.com/ (this is the only one that costs anything and I think it’s $30. Please send me the pdf of the entire assessment along with the passcode) [Saved and sent to Scott]
3. Adverse Childhood Experiences Score - Take this assessment and tell me your overall numerical score: https://stopabusecampaign.org/what-are-adverse-childhood-experiences/take-your-ace-test/
[ This Liven test results bellow is not part of the assigned assessments, but for some reason I did it thinking it was ACE] However, the ACE Score was 10, the highest possible.This was the summary: As your ACE score increases, the risk of disease and socio-emotional problems increase Think about your ACE score measuring the amount of toxic stress your endured as a child alerting yourself to some statistical indicators of health risks.
The results of the Liven test were:
Negative Effects Levels: Medium
Trauma Type: Acute
Impact intensity: Moderate
Trigger Sensitivity: High
Defense Mechanism: Mixed
This means that I may often feel disconnected from my sense of self, struggling with feelings of being unsafe and not good enough, which can affect my mental and physical well-being.
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ACE Score = 10
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Thank you for taking the sensitivity test for adults. Your score was 7.0
The test placed you at the upper end of the sensitivity spectrum, suggesting you fit best into the high sensitivity group, known as the “Orchids”.
According to research studies, about 30% of the adult population tend to fall into this category.
What does it mean to belong to the high sensitivity group?
People in the high sensitivity group are strongly influenced by both negative and positive experiences. For example, they suffer more stress when facing adverse situations, but they also respond more strongly to positive experiences.
Given that people in this group are generally more affected by the quality of their environment, they have been compared to the “Orchid”, a beautiful plant that requires specific conditions and care in order to thrive.
This means that you tend to get more easily thrown off by stressful situations and struggle to persist in difficult situations. On the other hand, you easily notice fine details in your environment and get much out of arts or thinking about philosophical questions.
Please note that the outcome of this test may differ depending on other factors such as age, gender and nationality, especially if your score is close to another sensitivity group.
In preparation for our kick-off call, I’d like to invite you to listen to the following The Place We Find Ourselves podcast episodes, in order (this will take several weeks to get through so it will not be possible to complete this before our kick-off call if you start in the next week):
The Place We Find Ourselves / Podcast by Adam Young
- Episode 1: Why Engaging Your Story is the Best Thing Your Can Do for Your Brain
Why the story of my life may matter more than I think. The only way I can experience it in my heart is by engaging with it. Think of my life as an epic story (Hero's Journey). Stories have plots, settings, characters. Who are they, the characters of my story? Who are the important characters? Who are those who play a role, but only for a short time? Who are my teachers? The plot line of the relationship with my father? What moments marked the dynamics, the shifts in the relationship with my father? What about my mom? If you were to get a scene for every moment with your mom, what would they be? My sibling, my only brother? What trajectories launched me into the world?
How have I related to God over the years? In a time line of my relationship with God, what would my time line look like? How would I graph it? All plot lines that become meaningful to us are related. They all happen in some kind of disorientation. The stasis of drama disrupted by an event that shakes my believes about how God operates. We find in these events how we function in a situation of crisis.
If I take the story of my life seriously in a way that God becomes the co-author of it, what will happen? The neuro-biological way of thinking about it is through the connections of genes and life experiences. So, a story is a particular way in which the neurons are connected with each other in relation to my experiences and the genes I was born with that made me react in a certain way.
The most significant plot line of my story is my relationship with my parents. Two scientific principles proves that: relationships influence the brain more than anything else; and my earliest life experiences have much more influence than any other time in my life. My earliest relationships with my primary caretakers have affected and shaped my brain in ways nothing else has. I may think the first years of my life may not seem important because I do not remember, however, my implicit memory does.
Looking backwards, I can seek the understanding of the dynamics with my parents and sibling inferring how it may have been for me when I was 6 months old. Given the nature of my relationship with my other brother, how could that relationship could have been during those first 6 months, or when my brain moved high speed during the first 2 years of my life.
Neuroscience has found that people who are committed to self-reflection are more emphatic than others. One cannot love others until one faces via self-reflection the way one has been in the world. Reflecting on my story is like reflection on my brain, my heart. Naming what has been true with my relationship with my parents, is not blaming them. Thus, if I want to love my parents well, I have to reflect on what has been true about my relationship with them. Objection 3 is saying, "my parents did the best they could. For Christians, in particular, this poses a conundrum, because in the bible, no one does the best they can, we are all sinners. So, why should we give our parents a pass? I need to think about the primary ways in which my mother harmed me, the same with my father. Have I thought about it? Have I written down the ways they harmed me. I have been deeply affected by them.
In Genesis, (the last 13 chapters) Joseph finally names the way his brothers have sinned against him. This narrative in the scripture requires for me to think about the ways in which I have been hurt. I have not named the way my parents have hurt me. This will change my brain and it will change my truth in regards to how I have been harmed. The question is when and where have I excused them. There are areas I have been very reluctant to name; how devastating their harming behaviors have affected my life.
I have done a masterful job at excusing my parents. I excuse them for being poor, uneducated, neglected, etc. These affects they way they raised me. The fact that the excuses serve as a way to avoid judging them is key in understanding the story. We prefer explanations to excuse them. Rather than claiming to God "my family is broken inflicting on me terrible wounds," I explain.
What is the point of dwelling in the past? "The past isn't dead is not even past," words of a writer... Thinking about the past informs the present. Any event occurring in the present is filtered through the lens of experiences lived in the past. The drunkenness of my father, will stain my vision of future drunkards I encounter throughout my life. The reason why the past is not past, is due to priming, this is the role of the neurons created by God. The past allows us to live in the present.
The practice of engaging in the story of my life heals me; it heals my brain. This process connects neurons that were previously separated. Two ways in which this happens is connecting left and right, the neurons of the left (the experience) and those on the right (feelings). This is called integration, which the bible calls sholom. Another way of healing is through the connection of the top of my brain with the bottom of my brain. Telling the stories the limbic brain reacts (fight or flight), as the brain of the person listening regulates. The presence of an attuned listener regulates the cortical brain. The story matters because it gives me the freedom to heal and connect at the micro and macro levels of existence.
- Episode 2: Why Your Family of Origin Impacts Your Life More Than Anything Else
No parent is perfect and no child needs a parent who is perfect, 50% good is enough. The most significant part of my story is about my parents. God created humans as relational creatures; thus, it is at our core the We and not the I of living life.
Looking at the relational needs the child has when coming to this world is key; for instance these are the relational needs:
1) attunement (the degree to which my mother was able to know what was happening, what needs I had, a parent who is distracted by their own stuff cannot be attuned with her child; same with the dad, he was not attuned; the core of attunement is recognizing when the child is feeling unheard and unseen when the care takers do not cater to the child's needs. (My parents did not notice I was OK nor asked me if I was doing well.)
2) responsiveness (Every child needs a parent who is responsive. My parents were not responsive. They way they responded was dismissive. So they did not bring comfort or safety to my life experience.)
3) engagement (Did they really want to get to know you? Did they pursuit your hart to find out who you were? Abandonment is about lack of attunement, about being undiscovered by my parents, (which affected the development of my brain.),
4) affect (my parents needed to regulate my affect. As a child, I had little ability to regulate my affect. As an infant, I had no way to regulate. So parents, when attuned, soothe their child. Regulating my affect by myself was not possible. Mom needed to do it for me; she needed to regulate my own anxiety.
5) My parents needed to be strong enough for me to express negative emotions (I needed to know that my emotions were accepted and allowed. Were they unwelcome. If my family was not strong, there was no way I could express my negative emotions. I needed to be free to express, fear, anger, etc (without negative consequences.)
6. willingness to repair when there was disconnection or when they hurt me (all parents fail, yet what matters is the willingness to repair the ruptures they caused). They need to respond in a way that is comforting and safe. They need to be willing to rectify their mistake. Re-atunnement and re-engagement processes allow parents to fix the relationship through re-connection.
Summary
As I reflect back to my story in regards to these 6 categories I want to tell my story as a confession. The word confession, a Greek word that means homolagaio (speaking sameness with God about what actually happened). Can I be truthful about my story using the six core. The relational experiences I had as a boy, become a story in which, (there are two relational styles), I was often dismissed, or a story in which I was often parentified. Thus, I was not taken seriously nor were my emotions. So my parents' response was unauthentic. Thus, it is easier to regulate my own responses, and so become a person who solves everything on his own. My core narrative is "I am alone and do everything by myself." I have a hard time receiving care from my spouse because I have the habit of doing everything by myself. The think that crushes the child's soul is the parents' reluctance to help. There are times when my mother was there for me, however, a healthy family triangle (isoseles) where mom and dad are at the top and the line that connects to me in the bottom should be longer that the distance between them on the top.
If the triangle is not isoseles, they do not own their failures; one of the parents will get closer (triangulation) to one of the children. If they are not in a deep relationship with each other, attuned to each other, one of the parents will attach to one of the children. A kind of child that will husband the mother. This triangulation puts the child in a kind of emotional incesttual relationship with that parent. This puts the child in a horrible bind (that of husband and son). This is tormenting since I could not be a son nor a husband nor a child nor an adult. You as a child were better at it than you father, which makes your father hate you and destroys you. So one is consuming you and the other hating you. Then, I felt perverse given the attunenment with my mom, on the one hand, and abandoned on the other, when she was not available. I became hyper focused on her needs as opposed to she being hyper focused on mine. This dynamic means others cannot be relied upon when it comes to my needs which creates a kind of inner-franticness. So parentifying me was gave birth to two types of insecure attachment: one is a form of ambivalent attachment and dismissed which is avoidant attachment. This reverberates through the whole family, since it also affects the way my sibling looks at me. So what is true about my story; it is where the triangle is?
- Episode 5: Attachment - What It Is and Why It Matters So Much
What is attachment? I is the manner in which we connect with other people. The emotional bond developed with the people closest to me. We are biological driven to attach to others to survive, we seek protection from and develop a connection with those who are important and closest to us. Why is it so important? We are created in the image of a trium God, a We and not and I, which makes us highly relational beings. I our relationship with our care givers we develop either secure (when there is a relational rupture, there is hope and expectation that it will be fixed without sacrificing my individuality; it is embodied hope) or insecure attachment (when the parent is overwhelmed and there is no attunement)
(Young references The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy by Alan Sure)
The first year of my life had more influence than any other year on how I feel, behave and think today. The process of attunement (the process of reading what is the inner-state of the child, intuiting the baby's needs and feelings). These the mirror neurons allow the mother to feel in her body what they are feeling, which is the basis for empathy. This happens when the mother does not read what the child is in need of. What if the mother is depressed and cannot attune to her child. The result of this is an insecure attachment. This is not a function of how much time you spend with a child, but a function of hugging the child when the child needs it. A child with secure attachment get hugged when he/she wants and is put down when he/she wants. One way the baby know the mother is attuned is when he/she is fed when needed via facial interaction.
The bottom line is a parent able to read what the child needs and this in turn develops a secure attached child. the baby continuously senses the facial expression of the mother. (The still face experiment - online). If the face of the mother is not expressive, the baby attempts to get the mom to respond and tries to get a response. If the experiment would continue, eventually the baby will shut down completely. The experiment shows that the baby needs the mother's attunement non-verbally, the facial expressions. The baby needs the synchrony with the mom in action. Another experiment shows that a double video monitor of the mother's face and the baby's face will not make it. What the baby needs is the synchrony of the mom's movement and gaze, the baby needs attunement (mutual responsiveness and interaction in real time).
We cannot talk about attachment without (attunement) and affect regulation, which refers to one's internal emotional state. Whenever I am stressed my affect is disregulated (from the 5 -6 range). Regulated means a sense of peace, excitement. If disregulated
- Episode 7: How Your Attachment Style Affects The Way You Relate to Other People
Types of insecure attachment:
secure: mom is often attuned to you and responsive to your needs
avoidant: rarely attuned to you and rarely responsive to your needs
ambivalent: Sometimes attuned to you, sometimes responsive to your needs and sometimes preocupied with her own emotions
disorganized; a care giver who did not attuned to them and scared them. They developed a paradoxical paradigm. On one hand they want go to the parent for protection at the same time that they fear their parent. The child dis-regulates because the abusive parental behavior of the parent gives them no choice but to go to him/her or protection.
What if the person you run home too terrifies you?
Trauma that happens at home is the most disorganizing and traumatic trauma that affects the brain.
- Episode 57: How to Know If You have Experienced Trauma
- Episode 11: Implicit Memory - The Thing That is Running Your Life
- Episode 18: Why Your Story Makes It Hard to Hope
- Episode 20: Affect Regulation- Why It’s Critical for Every Day Life
- Episode 49 and 50: Struggling with Sexuality - How Understanding Your Story Can (Surprisingly) Help You - Part 1 and 2
- Episode 58: Healing from Trauma - Your Posture Toward Yourself
- Episode 147 and 149: Why Listening to Your Body Leads to Healing - Part 1 and 2
- Episode 148: The Healing Power of Understanding Your Story
- Episode 150: Trauma Heals by Connecting with Others
- Episode 155: Why Engaging Your Story Heals Your Brain
- Episode 158: The Critical Relationship Between Attachment and Affect Regulation
8/4/2025
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