Make Sense of Your Story With Adam Young

Listen in as Scott and Chris chat with Adam Young, host of The Place We Find Ourselves Podcast and author of Make Sense of Your Story: Why Engaging Your Past with Kindness Changes Everything.

There is so much good to take away from this conversation. We hear Adam Young share his own story of how he was 35 years old before he was first confronted with the abuse he endured. We hear about why engaging our sexual brokenness and addiction without engaging our family or origin story is a "cul-de-sac" of shame and self-contempt. But most of all, we learn what it takes to truly heal beyond just stopping unwanted sexual behavior.

The transcript is below, but here are a couple nuggets:

"What turns you on is a function of your story in your family or origin. It’s not random. There are dots that can be connected and understood.”

“Looking at your story gives you a robust understanding, in time, of your calling. Of who you are supposed to be in this world and what you are called to do in this world. Your calling is a function of your story, not primarily a function of your gifting.”

“The goal is not to get over it, the goal is for your heart to be enlarged so that you have an increased capacity for sorrow, and and increased capacity for joy. Because trauma robs you of the ability to feel and to be present in your body with your feelings and with your stories.”

00:12

[Music] Well, hey guys, it's a Wednesday again. We're back with a very special episode of the We Got Balls podcast. And without further ado, we want to bring on our guest. We're excited to have Adam Young of Adam Young Counseling. You can connect with him at Adamyouungcounseling.com.

00:40

Adam is the host of The Place We Find Ourselves podcast and the author of a new book, Make Sense of Your Story. So, Adam, thank you. Thank you so much for being with us. Glad you took some time out of your day. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me. So, one of the things that we talk

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about on this podcast all the time is story work. And one of the things that you are you wrote a book on it and it's an excellent book because I finished in fact I think I'm on my second listen which are you an audio book guy or a reading or a book reader? I'm a reader.

01:18

Okay. So, I I need my audio book. But what prompted Yeah, y'all are smarter than me. What What prompted you to start engaging your story? I know you're were 35 years old,

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which I think in your book you talk about being frustrated that you were kind of late to the the game on that, but what was it that got you moving in understanding a little bit about your own life and what's going on internally? I had a lot of symptoms as a 35 year-old.

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Um, by symptoms I mean anxiety, depression, sensations in my body that were deeply unpleasant, that were painful. I had relationship problems with others, with God. I had a lot of shame and self-contempt. And so the short version is I had symptoms like my

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life was not peaceful. It was not well. I did not have shalom inside. And at around age 35, somebody gave me a copy of a book called The Wounded Heart by Dan Allander. And that book described the landscape of my heart, my insides better than anything I had read. And it

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introduced me to the idea that my family of origin story was playing itself out in my present life. And that was a huge shift for me. Wow. Wow. So where did you go from kind of that realization that oh um all these symptoms are related to what's happened in my past now what what do I do next?

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Well where I went was I flew from Atlanta to Seattle to be with Dan Allander for a week-long program called Recovery Week which is a a week with Dan and others for the purposes of recovery from sexual abuse. Now listen here's what's really important to understand. I

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had no concept when I went to Seattle that I had a history of sexual abuse. I just wanted to be with the man who wrote this book that was so helpful to me. So, I had no category in my mind as I'm flying across the country. I have not I do not have a

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history of sexual abuse. But when we got there, we were given 25 minutes to tell our story. And I spent about 23 and a half minutes talking about the violence that I experienced from my father. He was a Vietnam vet and um he he had just

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a horrible temper and I experienced a lot of contempt, a lot of violence from him and I talked about that and then I spent like a minute and a half saying some version of my mom and I were kind of emotionally close and in some ways I was like a surrogate spouse to

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her I guess and then I was done. So ain't that interesting? Yeah. Yeah. And there was a a man in my group who asked me, "Do you think your father was jealous of your relationship with your mother?" And that was the first time I had ever pondered that question. And I

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dismissed him. I blew him off. I said, "Sure, I guess. I don't know. I don't care." And Dan Allander leaned forward in his chair and he just simply said to me, "Do you really want that to be your answer?" And that was the moment that my life changed. That's when I began to let in

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that the relationship that I had as a boy with my mother was deeply violating. It was sexualized and it was harmful. And it's properly called covert sexual abuse, subtle sexual abuse. She looked, my mom groomed me, trained me, looked to

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me as a husband because her husband, my father, was emotionally checked out of their marriage. And that intensified your father's hostility towards you because he's not too fond of the fact that you're a better husband to your his wife than

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than he was. Perfectly said. He had a rivalry with me. It was like from his perspective, my mom's having a live-in affair and it happens to be with his son. And so I understand my dad's contempt for me. I understand his humiliation. I understand the rivalry,

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but I had no language for that as a boy, and I didn't have any language for that until well into my late 30s. So, Adam, let me let me ask you a kind of storybased question. When Dan says, "Is that the answer you want to give?" What

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did you feel in your body at that moment? A shudder. I felt a shudder from like my cervical vertebrae down. Um, and what do I mean by shutter? I don't know. It was like something was happening existentially for me that was that was ch that that

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just felt so deep and so big and so confusing all at once, but I knew it mattered. That's what I mean by a shudder. And and the the thing I want to highlight there is it occurred in your body, not cognitively. You're not you're not thinking through, oh, this is

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happening because of this or this is this. You're just feeling something really foundational that's at the core of you, right? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Okay. That's important. Pay attention to that. Very big. So,

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Adam, I think, you know, it's interesting having reading your book and read your book and having seen how it's laid out. One of the things that we get when we talk to guys is we get a guy a lot of guys want to talk about their sexual story, their sexual behavior,

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their compulsive issues, maybe even some of their sexual abuse if they're aware of it, which many of them like yourself are not. But where should somebody begin to engage their story? Is it with those sexual things or or someplace else? I think the best place to begin is with

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your role in your family of origin. And by role, I mean, what was it like for you as a boy growing up in your family? Think about your dinner table. Think about holiday gatherings. Think about your siblings if you had them. Think about your mother, father, stepmother,

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stepfather, whatever your family constellation looked like. what was required of you in your family that just felt so normal because it was it was your normal. It was the water that you swam in. So for me, the beginning parts of making sense of my story was I knew

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my father was physically and emotionally abusive and deeply distant from me. And I knew that I was super close emotionally with my mother. So those two things were the were I knew like I I I

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knew that from my memories and I was able to put language to that and that was the starting point for me of naming the triangulation that's the technical term that was happening in my family and all I mean by triangulation is I was

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closer to my mother than my father was to my mother emotionally speaking and so I think everyone needs to draw a triangle at some point in their life. And it's really good to start with your triangle and just have your your primary caretakers at the top, the two points at

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the top, the bottom point of the triangle is at the bottom. That's you. And the closeness of the lines represents the closeness of the relationships. So you need to know, were you emotionally closer to your father or your mother? And were your parents, your

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primary caretakers, emotionally closer to each other than either one of them were to you? That's what I'm asking you and inviting you to ponder as you draw your triangle. So, so when you're talking about the role, you're not you're not really aware what you just described in terms of

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triangulation at that point, but you had to feel that had to feel very confusing because in one side you're used by your mother to kind of comfort and soothe her and the other side of that equation makes you the target of your dad's

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wrath. Is that Yes. Is that right? Yes. Perfect. So, as a as a boy, what does that do in you in your body? What's that doing to you? Here's how I made sense of my life as a 35year-old and up until that point. Mom was the gift that God gave me to

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compensate for a violent father. That's how I made sense of my life. And that is that was a whacked compass. It couldn't have been further from the truth. The truth of my life, which I didn't know at the time, was that my mother orchestrated rivalry with my

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father by having an emotional affair with me in front of him. And she was the orchestrator of the dynamic. And and in my mind, my mom was just this weak, helpless. My dad said she was like a lamb, you know, she was dumb. Oh, no. She was very

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sophisticated in her grooming of me, her choosing of me, and her orchestration of the rivalry with my father. But I had no idea that that was the case as a boy. Yeah. So then I I can almost hear the question coming from some of the guys

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watching like well then but how does that end up showing up in my sexual choices or my sexual story or you know what what I find to be arousing sexually? How does that impact me? I don't see the connection. Well, when I was a sophomore in high school, it was not uncommon for like seniors to date

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sophomores. Like that happens. Like that's a pretty normal thing. I thought to myself, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Who in the world would be attracted to a younger girl? Like, that just made no sense to me. Why? Because my body

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had been trained to be aroused by mothers, by older women. And so, I was always aroused by older women. And so when when when I would look at pornography, I had no interest in younger girls. Like that was just repulsive to me. It was older women that I was aroused by. Why? Because of my

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story. And that's the case for everyone. What turns you on is a function of your story in your family of origin. It's not random. There are dots that can be connected and understood. So good. So the importance just to

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highlight this then of engaging your family of origin before you go to the sexual story is you're not going to be able to make sense out of a lot of things in your sexual story until you kind of locate them in the context of what the family dynamics were, what role

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you played, how your mother and your father are kind of modeling for you what it's like to be a man, what it's like to be a woman in a relationship with a man, so on so forth. Yes. What's the other tendency though? If I start with my sexual story, what what is some of the pitfalls that you

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could might run into if you did that instead? Because I think a lot there's a lot of pressure when guys are coming to us, they're acting out, they're continuing to look at porn or they're acting outside of their marriage. They have a lot of kind of shame or they're

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in crisis mode and they want to just I gotta fix this problem, right? So they're they're looking for a quick kind of seesat just stop it, try harder, you know, approach. What would you say are

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some of the the the barriers that are going to prevent that from actually working really well in the long term? The number one barrier is shame and self-contempt. I mean, the amount of accusation from Adam to Adam with regard to my sexuality was off the

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charts in my 20s and 30s. And why? Because I didn't understand why I was doing what I was doing. I had no compassion, no kindness, no curiosity about my sexuality and my quote unquote sexual choices. And the reason I had no

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curiosity and no compassion was because I didn't know my story. I didn't which is let me make this really practical. I didn't understand how the neurons in my brain which drive all of your decision- making had been configured in such a way that set me up for my sexual arousal and

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template the way things that aroused me the the quote unquote choices I made and so I had no compassion no kindness and no curiosity and so I think the danger if you start addressing your sexuality your sexual story before understanding your family of origin story. The danger

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is that you're going to get stuck in a culde-sac of self accusation which is really self violence. I mean the the the the voices internally were so condemning because I had so much shame. And so in that sense then this is I

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think hard for people to understand what is the relationship between the shame I feel about my sexual arousal or what I'm attracted to or what turns me on and then why do I turn to self-contempt because what's that doing for me? It is punishing you for what you believe is so

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unacceptable that if anyone knew it, they would not want to be in relationship with me. So, it's an escape from shame. It's an escape from the shame. And it's a it's a level of congruence. It feels congruent. It's like cutting. It's like cutting. It

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makes and and it's actually a really good analogy because the self violence of the self accusation, the self-contempt is like taking a knife to your inner thigh and drawing blood. Yeah. And what what that does is it makes my life feel more congruent

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because I know that what I'm doing is awful. And now it feels like with the blood it feels like congruent. It feels um integrated in that sense. It feels honest, but it's so painful and it's so isolating and it's so lonely and it just intensifies

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kind of if you're in an addictive cycle, it just intensifies. I I choose to go to this, you know, porn, masturbation because I feel shame about, you know, at the core I feel there's something wrong with me. So, I go to this to temporar temporarily feel better, but it makes me feel worse about

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myself. So, now I've got to go back and I'm in this I can't break out of this by myself. Right. And that's the key two words by myself. And so many of us are trying to address the wounds and the captivities in our heart by ourselves. And we can't do that. We need others.

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So, the thing that I'm resonating with, Adam, is that culde-sac of of shame and self-contempt. Um, and you're saying I can't do it by myself, but it's ultimately my responsibility. I've got

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to fix this. It's up to me. And most of the guys that I talk to when we first meet is this. You know, I've tried everything. Nothing is working. So, now what do I do? and and you know the the the idea is well if I just tell my story one time then you know I'll get to

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understand why this happened and so then everything will be fixed and you know I can think my way out of all these struggles now and I won't be tempted anymore. That's the that's the um magic rocket ship that they think exists in

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that cult to launch them into a life that they don't exist that that that they think hasn't existed yet. But what you say is something vastly different. It's it's something about going back and doing multiple passes at your story and

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really soaking in this story process. Talk about that because I I I think guys need to understand this is a a way of living more so than it is an activity that I do to fix myself and and what's

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the difference between that and naval gazing and really getting stuck in this. Yeah. Right. Sure. Sure. Great questions. Um, your story is not meant to be endlessly fascinating to you. It is meant to be in service to others. But you can't know

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the gifts that you have, the unique ways that you bear and reflect the glory of God apart from understanding yourself as a boy or a girl in your family of origin. So the re far from naval gazing what the neuroscience shows is that if you want to grow in empathy and care and

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love for others you have to know your own developmental story well. The neuroscience is crystal clear about that. There is a direct relationship between empathy, love, care for others and an individual's awareness of their own developmental story.

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However, or I shouldn't say however, in addition, yeah, looking at your story gives you a robust understanding in time and it takes time, a robust understanding of your calling, of who you are supposed to be in this world and what you are called to do in this world.

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So, people that think of calling in terms of gifting, I think are missing the point. Your calling is a function of your story, not primarily a function of your gifting. That'll mess some people up if they

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really understand what you just said because instead of trying to get to the place where they're like, "Oh, you know, God gave me this and this is what I meant to to be." And so that that brings me back to a question about your mom.

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You said your mom was a gift of God, right? What a twisted gift for God to give you, right? H how did you wrestle with transitioning from that story that you told yourself for 35 years about my mom as a gift of God to to my mom as a covert sexual abuser? Yeah. Uh my mom

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introduced me to Jesus. My mom took me to church. My dad never hugged me. My mom hugged me all the time. So as a boy, my relationship with my mom felt good, felt sweet. And this is the case not

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just with opposite sex parent sexual abuse. This is the case with abusers. Often your relationship, if you have a history of sexual abuse, your relationship with your abuser, there was sweetness, there was goodness in it. This is what's so violating and hard about sexual abuse is the ambivalence

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that you feel in your body because what was violating and stealing and robbing of you and horrifying the sexual abuse. It was it was also interwoven with goodness, with attunement, with care, with connection with your abuser, whether that abuser was male or female.

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And so I had to come to terms with the fact that there was lots of goodness in my relationship with my mom and that it was deeply violating. Why? Because children are not supposed to be surrogate spouses to adults. When you as a child are serving the needs of an

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adult, your childhood is stolen and you're not free to be a kid. And sadly, many of people, many of the people that struggle with sexual stuff in adulthood can trace back, if they take the time to do it, their sexual struggles to what was required of them and how they were harmed as a boy or a girl.

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And to just kind of highlight this point to to a book I know that you guys recommended at the story conference in Atlanta. I've heard you talk about Dan Seagull's whole brain child. I got that

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book and I read and the opening introduction where he talks about this little boy who's in an accident and his caregiver, you know, his his daycare worker is taken away and he needs to tell the story over and over again. And

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most of our tendency as parents would be, "Yeah, it's okay. Let's have some ice cream." Right. Yeah. And there's a Jesus version of that that says, "Oh yeah, that was really bad, but God's going to cause all that to work together for the good." Yes. And the thing that

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struck me, so we use this term now in our practice is eowoo, which is the term that the little boy says, which is the sound of the siren. like he's repeating this over and over again until there's no more

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big emotion left in that story. That's what I found so compelling about that little story there in the introduction like Yes. And you're saying that too. Yes, Scott. I love that you bring that up. And here's why. Your stories

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plural because you have many of them. Your stories of harm need to be witnessed repeatedly by others. Which means you need to be able to tell, to narrate, and to feel your big feelings as you're narrating some of the most pivotal and transformative stories of your growing

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up years. And those need to be heard by one man, by two men, by a community, by a small group. They need to be witnessed not just by God but by other human beings with limbic systems. I need you two men to hear my story for me to heal.

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That's what Dan Seagull is getting at with that anecdote in the introduction. The stories need to be told repeatedly. The goal is not to quote unquote get over it. That's not the goal. The goal

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is for your heart to be enlarged so that you have an increased capacity for sorrow and you have an increased capacity for joy because trauma robs you of the ability to feel and to be present in your body with your feelings and with your stories. H.

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So then talk about this idea. You you talk about how your mom was the person that led you to Jesus and you know there's a chapter in your book that's devoted to why your story involves anger with God. Can you touch on that for a

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little bit? Because again most most guys that come from a spiritual or Christian background are like, "Oh, you can't be angry with God. God's perfect. He does everything right. So if you're angry with God, it's your problem. Right. Uh

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yeah. Uh most of those guys are not Jewish. They're evangelical types. You're right. Okay. You're right. Jewish people know. And by Jewish people, I mean Israel, if you look at the Hebrew Bible, what we call the Old Testament, if you look, if you read it,

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Lamentations, Job, the book of Psalms, Jeremiah, if you actually read the words, you will see that Jewish people know how to fight with God. They know how to wrestle with God. Think Jacob. They know how to argue with God. They know how to accuse God.

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The Psalms are filled, Job is filled with people accusing God. And here's what you have to understand. The accusations that come out of us, the anger that comes out at us, out of us at God, it's not theologically accurate. That's not the point. God could care less. He

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wants your heart. And that means that if you're angry, he wants your anger. If you're grieved, he wants your tears. If you're rejoicing, he wants your celebration. But he wants an engagement with you that is honest and candid. And I would add this word, it's pre-reflective.

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In other words, what would it look like for you to pour out your feelings to God before you've reflected on whether they are theologically appropriate for expression to a holy God? Just pour out

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what's in you. I mean, for those of you that are listening that have children, you know that your children, if they feel safe with you, they will pour out what's inside of them, whether it's appropriate and respectful or not. And

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that's deeply honoring to me as a father. When my daughter pours out her anger at me, that honors me as a father because it tells me she feels safe enough to bring her true self to me. I had a similar experience with my daughter as well where she we were going through some work and I was doing the

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work around my own sexual brokenness and she was going to see a counselor and her counselor encouraged her. Just be honest with your dad. She cussed me out. I mean, she just blessed me with every profanity she could imagine. And then

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she asked me to leave and so I did. She's like, I just want to be safe. But right after that, to your point, I felt honored that she could be that vulnerable with me. And I also saw a distinct change in our relationship because she she now had the opportunity

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to say anything to dad. So, um, and and and and that came from, you know, listening to you at retreat we were at several years ago when you said honoring your parents is telling them the truth.

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It's not doing what they think is right. because that's what I had been taught by my dad was to simply just be good and tow the line for him and it was frankly. Yes. So let's um let's transition if we can kind of more into the sexual story. So,

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I think we've covered like, you know, and and you're did you intend to write the chapters in the book in kind of a sequence that lays out if you're going to think about engaging your story, these might be the kind of the sequence. Was that intentional or No, not necessarily. I I I

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not necessarily. I don't think you I would There's only one exception to that. I would invite people, particularly people that are confronted with sexual crisis, to look at what their family of origin story is with at least give as much time to that

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as they are to engaging their sexual brokenness. That's what I would say. Yeah. Because if you if you only focus on your sexuality, uh you can get in a culde sack of it's not naval gazing. It's just it's very myopic. And you are more than a sexual

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being. You're not less, but you're more. And I don't think you can understand your sexual story until you understand your broader stories. Agreed. So getting into the sexual story then what are some of the um categories that you introduce in that

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chapter on your sexual story to help men think about here are some you know kind of categories and maybe questions around the categories to engage your sexual story. Well the first category is like when you were a boy how did you first learn about sex and sexuality? Like we

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live in a culture that is devoid of initiation rights. We were meant as boys to be initiated into the mysteries of sexuality and the mysteries of manhood in our culture. For the most part, boys are not initiated into those mysteries.

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And so, how did you come to learn about sex and sexuality? Was it at school? Was it through neighbor kids? Was it through abuse? Was it through pornography? How what's your story with regard to the awakening of your sexuality? Because in adolescence, all of us are awakened to

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that. You need to write those stories. Those matter. They will give you an understanding of how you began to develop as a sexual being. And for many of us, sadly, those stories are very lonely and they are filled with some measure of shame and violation. And then is it is it a tendency then um

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to kind of go about repeating those experiences where I first experience arousal and or or sexual arousal is coming about and and I do do I uh then kind of go back to that pattern and act that out almost unconsciously. Is that what you Yes. We all have what you know

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for lack of a better term an arousal template. In other words, we have neurons that have been and that have been aroused, activated, that have fired with regard to our sexuality in particular ways. And so you need to know your what arouses you and you need to

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understand why like there's a reason you did it's not random. And so the way Jay Stringer puts it in the book Unwanted is that sexual struggles in the present can be like a road mapap to understanding past sexual harm. And you can draw an arrow from any present- day sexual

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struggle back to your past and specifically back to past wounding. You've got to name your wounds. Jeremiah 6 and8, it's one of my favorite passages. And God gets angry with the leaders of Israel. Why? Says this, because they dress the wounds of my people as though they were not serious.

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Peace. Peace. They say when there is no peace. Now, sadly, many of us do that with our own wounds. We dress our own wounds as as they were no big deal. We say, "That was 30 years ago. Yeah, that happened to me. Uh, and yeah, it was

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hard, but I don't think it's affecting me today." We dress our wounds as though they were not serious. We say peace, peace. Everything's fine. But everything's not fine. Everything's not fine. So, talk about this category of sexual harm. I've heard you say um and Dan

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Allen, too, that pretty much nobody gets into adulthood without experiencing sexual harm. What do you mean by that? What I mean is that there is a kingdom of evil in the world that's operative. And the kingdom of evil despises the goodness and the delight of your sexuality. And therefore, by the time

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you're 18 years old, you are going to experience some measure of sexual harm. Even if you come from quote unquote a great home, you are going to experience some meas here's a question. Talk about an experience of sexual shame that you felt. Everyone has an experience where

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they felt shame related to their sexuality. Now that might be in the extreme of sexual abuse or it might just be a story where you felt some measure of shame because your partner react you know an innocent adolescent crush where you're doing something sexual and you're mocked or

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you're humiliate. But people have sexual shame. I want to know if to know you. I need to know your stories where you felt sexual shame and then I need to know how did you make sense of that and how is that playing out in your adult life because it is. Yeah. We and a

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great example of that is we have a lot of guys that struggle with body shame particularly around maybe how their penis was cursed in one way or another and they just thought it was a mocking incident and yet it it damages their view of their identity and their sexuality way into adulthood. Right. So

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absolutely one quick little you know uh chiding comment in the locker room can really damage a guy for the rest of his life. Yes. So for me, when I was in eighth grade, ninth grade, I didn't have

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a lot of hair on my legs. And there was a rumor that went around the school that I shaved my legs. And that was one of the most tormenting seasons of my life because I felt so much humiliation about not being a man, not being masculine, and I didn't know how to contain the rumor. I didn't know how to

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fight back. And so I felt powerlessness, and I felt humiliation. That's a a story about me in my masculinity. For for people that are listening, what are your stories where you felt humiliation or shame or terror, but what are your stories around sexuality because you have them

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and your body and your body. So, um, hey Scott, why don't we ask the question right now? We had a we had a caller I mean a listener um write in about his sexual story. He said, "In high school, while working in a store in a mall, I discovered glory holes in the men's restroom. I engaged in sexual

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activity at these glory holes a few times, presumably with adult males. Does that mean I was sexually abused? How would you make sense of a story like that?" Oh boy. Here's the reality of sexual abuse. Whenever there is a power differential between you and someone else. The person

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could be your exact same age. If there is a power differential either in size, physical size, authority, uh presence, emotional presence, if there's a power differential, if if you felt here's the essence of abuse, powerlessness

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combined with abandonment by potentially protective caregivers. In other words, something happened to you when you experienced powerlessness. You might also have experienced pleasure, arousal, but you experienced powerlessness. And

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then there was no one to run home to and say, "This happened to me and I'm not sure how I feel about it." And you didn't receive any care, you were alone in the aftermath of the awful event,

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even if there was pleasure in the event, because there always is with sexuality, that is properly called sexual abuse. Yeah. And I think the the implication of this guy and the ongoing conversations I had with him is well, I went into that

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bathroom because I knew that was going on. Now, typically what I find when I start digging into a guy's story is not only did he not know that was going to happen the first time, it came as a complete surprise to him, but it's

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again, it's occurring in the context of, well, I'm not getting a lot of attention from my dad. And so when these older guys show me a lot of attention, even if it comes with sexual strings attached, what am I going to do with that? Yes,

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that's so well said, Scott. That is so important for people to understand that connection, attunement, affection, being seen, being chosen is so core to who we are as people, especially as boys, as girls. We need to be chosen. And if that comes with the price of

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abuse, we will very often endure that cost and then blame ourselves for it. That's right. And that's that's the the threat of what's called complicity. The sense that I somehow voluntarily participated in my abuse. And right

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around the corner from that sentence is this accusation. I wanted it. I wanted it. So talk about now as as probably listeners are thinking about their own sexual story and maybe begin. We we hear this all the time like I didn't really think I was

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abused until I started listening to you guys talk about it, right? And so even in the case where um you're talking about your story of the rumors spreading around school, you clearly could not go home to your dad who is targeting you with his hostility and have a

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conversation with your father about masculine development at that point. That's right. I was alone in the powerlessness in the school bullying. I couldn't go to my father. I tried and it went awful and I couldn't go to my mother. I tried and it didn't go well at

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all. And so the sense of I am alone in this that is so overwhelming and that's the core of trauma is it's not the bad event itself. It's being alone without care in the midst of the bad event. So then talk about the role that I have to play

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in reversing that tendency to condemn myself to judge myself to give me like like you say harshness from myself to myself. What's the antidote? The antidote is kindness. The antidote is reaching out. I'm I'm extending my hand. reaching out to other people who are mature enough and have

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done enough work that they can hold your story well and they can be with you in it. In other words, we need the care of others and the kindness of others to heal the wounds of self-contempt. We need the presence of kind, empathetic

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fellow warriors who will go into the horror of the story with us. Who will hear it? Who will rage with us, weep with us, name us well, but be in the heat with us. Because these stories of abuse are intense. There is a heat to them. Shame,

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arousal, terror, all of it. There's an emotional intensity and we need someone to be with us in that because it was overwhelming when we were 14 and all alone in it. Well, Adam, I think one of the things

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that that uh was resonating with is the way you ended your book was about finding hope. is that we we talk to a lot of guys that are struggling to find hope and it seems like in this work and even in the culture it there's not a lot

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there to to really hang your hat on. Where would you point a guy who comes to you and says, "Listen, I have all these stories in my life, all these things that I'm wrestling with and I just don't feel like there's any hope for me." Uh

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where can I turn to to begin to imagine a life that actually might have what you said that calling, that meaning, that vision, that goodness? The biblical narrative starts with hopelessness. It starts with barrenness. And that theme continues over and over

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and over. Sarah and Abram are barren. Rachel, Rebecca, the the theme of barrenness is a metaphor for hopelessness. So look, you have you are not alone if you war with hopelessness. What you are is you're in very good

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company with biblical people, characters, including all of Israel. Isaiah 54 says, "Israel is barren." So our faith tradition assumes barrenness. It assumes hopelessness. And in the words of Walter Bugamin, a theologian that's been so meaningful to me, barrenness is the

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arena of God's lifegiving action. In other words, when you look at the incarnation, you look at God getting involved in the barrenness and showing up to rescue. Now, how that plays out for each one of us is always different, but you need not give into despair if

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you wrestle with hopelessness. Hopelessness means you're paying attention to the realities of how harsh this world is. Hopelessness means that you actually have a fair measure of hope

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and you're not fond of it because you've been met with so much disappointment in the past, but hopelessness doesn't need to lead to despair. That's so good. So on that on that vein, what would you say to a guy as most of our guys are later in life and they're just now waking up to this idea of, you

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know, I I need to tell my story. I need to start doing some of this work. What would you say to them? Especially the guys who have older kids and you know are thinking well I I ruined my kids and

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so what's the point in trying to do this work because nothing I do now is really going to change them. Oh uh you can have a child who's 58 years old and repair is possible in the land of the living. You have to understand that because of the

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resurrection of Jesus Christ, the coming of the Holy Spirit, repair is possible. Healing is possible. Dialogue with those you've harmed is possible. And it can be not just a dialogue, but it can result in healing for both of you. In other words, there is a way forward in the land of the

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living, like before heaven. And that starts with naming what was true and having some measure of saying to your 58 or 8-year-old son, here's some of the things the ways that I failed you and I want to make that right and I want

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to start by hearing what it was like for you. That is one of the holiest invitations that you can give to a to a child whether they're a son or a daughter. Yeah. What a gift. What a gift. But I've heard you say this too and I just want to stress it like that work cannot be done until you've first

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worked on your own story. Absolutely. Absolutely. You need to not be in a position where you are requiring something of your child to absolve you of your guilt. You need to have engaged your own story, your own shame to enough

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of a degree that you are going to your child with an openhandedness that says, "I want to hear from you and I do not need any absolution or forgiveness from you." That's not the point of this. The

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point of this is for me to hear how I failed you and for me to make it right to the degree that I can. And the same would you say the same thing is true in a relationship with a spouse. if you've if there's infidelity involved and Yes.

45:31

Yes. Absolutely. However, with a spouse, I think you have the right to expect and hope for in time forgiveness. Forgiveness. Because it both of us are are are sinners. We're both broken. We're both sinners. We both have failed each other. I don't care what the

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situation is, infidelity, affairs, part both partners in a marriage have glory and have sin, dignity and depravity and both need to name that. And because of what Jesus has done, forgiveness is a real thing and it's possible in the land in your marriage, no matter how much brokenness there is.

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And I think it's holy for you to hope that you will be received again, forgiven, and not made to pay. And that takes a season. That may take years, but it's something to hope for. And and just to plug Dan and Steve Call's new

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book, uh, Deeprooted Marriage. That that book is all about engaging stories in the context of your relationship with your spouse. Highly recommend it. And uh yeah, so so so many great points. Well,

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okay, so we're wrapping up now, Chris. Yeah, it's time to wrap up. Adam, thanks so much for all the work that you do and thank you for most of all for sharing your story. That's one of the beautiful things we get to enjoy is uh people come

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on and be very vulnerable. I just feel like I'm more connected with you. I know the listeners do as well. So, thank you so much for doing that. Check out Adam Young at adamyouungcounseling.com. You can buy us book on all major book

47:23

sites and audible sites. Uh make sense of your story. Uh you've got a a live call coming up with Jay Stringer uh this Friday, right? Is that correct? This Friday, a free webinar and then Saturday, May 3rd, Jay and I are doing the sexual attachment conference which

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is livereamed or in person in Mesa, Arizona. That's great. That's awesome. Well, Adam, it's been a it has been a joy to have you on here. Um, I've enjoyed interacting with you at the

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things that we've done over the last couple years and look forward to more in the future and we just want to bless your ministry and how you're helping other people. I know a lot of other people love this book and uh so we're so grateful that you could be with us

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today. That's it. And guys, if you find you find value in this uh like this this uh video, I'm going to share this video on my social media. I think it's a great conversation for anybody to hear. So,

2883sAdd a noteJump to

48:16

uh, if you do that as well, we'd love for you to promote, uh, what we're doing here at We Got Balls and the work of Adam Young as many places as you can because it's very valuable because we're always in significantly changed when we

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engage with people who have balls just like us. Thanks, guys. See you.