Season 1, Episode 34: Jay Stringer on Pornography Use During COVID

You can watch this conversation on YouTube. 

Jay Stringer is a licensed Mental Health Counselor, an ordained minister and the author of "Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness reveals the pathway to healing"

Danielle and Maggie check in with Jay to see how he and his family are doing during COVID:

Jay's family is doing great. It took a couple of weeks to figure it out but they have created new rhythms and figured out a new schedule where he and his wife take turns going into the office. A lot of what Jay does is speaking and teaching, but he hasn't been on a plane  since March 6th which he says is lovely. He has had to pivot his business to seeing clients online. 

Jay is the author of the book Unwanted, a book about healing from sexual brokenness and sexual addictions. Danielle asked about how Jay's sees sexual addictions and sexual brokenness playing out right now under COVID. 

Jay says from a 30,000 ft view, "any time of uncertainty, like the one we're in, is going to naturally increase powerlessness and anxiety." This leads people to lean on unwanted behaviors

Danielle mentioned that in Italy, Porn Hub has made it's premium content free.  Jay read part of an email that was out to other countries under quarantine that said, "Stay home and help flatten the curve. Since COVID-19 continues to impact us all, porn hub has decided to extend free porn hub premium  world wide." It's madness! We are now seeing a 10-25% increase in porn traffic. 

Jay explains that unwanted sexual behavior, like the use of pornography, infidelity, buying sex, hook ups... are  appealing because they offer some relief from what we're experiencing. "When you feel anxious, when you're distressed, you're going to look to another substance, behavior or process to begin to mitigate some of those feelings of discomfort."

Jay says in regards to unwanted sexual behavior (specifically the use of pornography and sex trafficking), we need to step into WHY we are we using another person's body for our own sexual gain in the midst of so much stress and anxiety we're experiencing. Unwanted sexual behavior will always offer that sense of escape. 

Maggie commented that Porn Hub has made it sound like they are providing a great service for people in their time of need, "these are hard times for us all" and they trying to appear caring. 

Jay speculates that as a result of easier access to pornography there will be increased levels of addiction. He believes that Porn Hub knows that and so providing premium content during the pandemic will produce more customers afterwards.  When someone begins to use sexual content in the midst of your own distress you decrease your ability to self sooth. 

Jay mentions Dan Siegel's The Window of Tolerance, which is the ability to regulate yourself. When you are in the "green zone,"  you're not necessarily no longer in distress but you are able to sooth yourself and your anxiety, to understand if I'm angry, to move into emotions rather than outsource them. So what the porn and sex industry is doing, Jay says, is teaching us to not build our window of tolerance, so we outsource the solution to something that has a lot of male gender-based violence to it. 

No matter the age, Jay says when you begin to think that you are entitled to, you deserve, to look at another human body in the midst of your distress because you need an escape, it sets you up for intimate partner violence.  This develops the inability of dealing with distress and creates a pattern of pursuing an orgasm at the expense of someone else's exploitation. "It's really troubling."

Danielle acknowledges that our anger can come out sideways. "You can numb it for a bit with food, alcohol or porn. For a time it is numb, but that doesn't mean it isn't going to come out." If we're not engaging the anger and what we're feeling, it will come out sideways. Anger needs to be engaged not numbed. 

Jay says one the main failures of the Evangelical community is that they view the use of pornography and other "sexual sin" as a matter of lust. The evangelical community then creates "lust management" with accountability partners and internet monitoring ...  but this only cuts off one tributary of unwanted sexual behavior. Anger is a big tributary of that river.  

Using Dan Siegel's language, "name it to tame it." The moment that we have proprioception (the ability to name what we're experiencing) it releases soothing neuro-chemicals into our limbic system,  the area in our body that is holding our anger and distress. 

Other wanted behaviors such as drinking or binge watching Netflix alert us: "When we are not taking of ourselves, and we are outsourcing the solution to something we know doesn't bear much significance or beauty of glory... we are going to feel like crap." Jay believes that people stay in unwanted sexual behavior, sometimes for a lifetime, not because sexual brokenness is self-medicating, but instead because it is  bound to a type of judgement against yourself.  "The more we do not like ourselves, the more we are going to pursue in behavior that confirms those core judgments against ourselves." You feel like crap, it drives you to porn which makes to feel like crap. It's a cycle. 

Danielle acknowledges that we're in a time of being trapped and not having many adrenaline options. Porn provides a high kick adrenaline; it's risky behavior that you didn't need to leave your house for. It's a compound effect with what we're already living through during COVID-19. 

Jay says, even though we're not working as much, everything feels full of difficulty and futility. Trying to work at home and also doing teach children school at home to kids. It's "stuck-ness." The appeal of porn then, using Genesis 3 language, gives you a world without thorns and thistles. It is an escape that takes away the difficulties of life and gives you exactly what you want when you want it. "Who's going to want to give that up when they're stuck at quarantine feeling so much futility?" 

Jay believes that freedom from sexual brokenness then comes from honoring the unwanted sexual behaviors that have provided an escape, a place of comfort, but then to name that you feel more judgement afterwards and not beauty or rest.  We need to step into the grief, "I want something better for my life and for my family than behavior that fuels the judgement against myself."

Maggie resonated with Jay's commentary on the Evangelical Communities viewing porn use as something to be addressed with lust management. But using pornography is just a symptom of a much deeper problem. She mentioned that Jay in his book Unwanted believes the key to unlocking sexual brokenness is to "listen your lust." Our fantasies have something to teach us. 

Jay says, the opposite of the lust management of the evangelical community is the "Sex positive" movement. His says a lot of what they are trying to do is good but his one critic is their approach is "shame manage." They say, "if we can just reduce the shame and stigma associated with people's sexual choices then people will naturally develop healthier behaviors." Jay says that turns out to not be true nor doesn't deal with human trafficking or sexual exploitation or consent issues.  

The purpose of his book then is to carve out a third way by exploring people's stories. What were the formative adverse childhood experiences and how do those shape the trajectory of our sexual lives. Jay analyzed Porn Hub's published  user search data and found that the things people searched for when looking for pornography could be predicted based on their life story. This has huge implications! Jay says, our sexual brokenness is not a life sentence to shame or addiction, But instead is a life altering invitation to purse healing. "Our sexual brokeness is a roadmap to healing."

"Listen to lust" comes from wanting to engage your sex life which a sense of curiosity.  Jay gives an example from his book about men who look for a smaller build woman  of a race that suggested some level of subservience. The date showed they had predictable stories of a strict father, has high level of lack of purpose in their life, and had high levels of shame.  These men then go to porn to find power over another human being. 

Jay quotes Franscian Richard Rohr, "The pain that you do not transform, you transmit." That is to say someone else has to suffer so I don't have to. Instead, we actually need to suffer the harm of our stories so we don't transmit it to others. We need to ask ourselves; What am I doing with my grief? What am I doing with my anger? 

Another data point Jay mentions is when he looked at those who were the most significant users of pornography compared to people who do not view pornography at all, they had sexual abuse scores that were 24% higher, both men and women. Jay says so much of the tragedy is that sexual abuse sets the template in the lives of boys and girls. Unengaged harm from sexual abuse sets up reenactment where a person is pursuing sexual behavior that mirrors their own abuse.  

"How do we allow our present struggles to open the doors to the wider themes of grief and heartache that we haven't attended to in our lives?"

Danielle says the first thing that comes to her as she's listening is a new level compassion for porn users: they have real stories.  Engaging compassion is the call of the church. 

She mentions Resmaa Menekem's book on racialize trauma, where he says that when one unsettled body encounters another body, the bodies become unsettled. This is the difference between  processing a "clean pain" vs. a "dirty pain."  It's not that you are meaning to reenact your trauma on someone else, but when you are triggered it comes out sideways.  The pathway through this is holding on to grief. Grief is not a sprint, it's a marathon. "And it's re-suffering and who wants to do that?" 

Jay loves the distinction between "dirty pain" and "clean pain." So much of unwanted sexual behavior is dirty pain: I don't like myself, I don't like were I'm at, i'm pissed off at my partner. When we don't move through that to understand our stories to find what brought that, we'll be in dirty pain. We need to study our lives, investigate where our unwanted behavior is coming from and lean in to why I have unresolved anger that is triggered in almost every relationship. Clean pain is the invitation to study the debris behind you.

Jay says this is the core invitation of COVID-19: The coronavirus is not creating us brand new issues for us to deal with [there's nuance there], but for the majority of us coronavirus is revealing the core foundations of our lives, our rhythms of self-care. It's revealing racism in America and the foundations of other unpleasant realities of our collective lives. 

"Don't try to have integrity with porn... have integrity to turn and face the themes in your life that you haven't yet wanted to deal with" as individuals and as a collective. 

Danielles says COVID has been like the removing of a band-aide to find that your knee is still bleeding. Jay acknowledges, "And we've been treating this with bandaids for far too long."

Connect with Jay at: https://jay-stringer.com/

On his website he provides resources, both as a therapist and as an ordained minister to help individuals, groups and churches to engage unwanted sexual behavior: 

The Sexual Behavior Self Assessment - A deep dive into the formative experiences that impact your sexual fantasies and behaviors. It provides a 40 page report of what could be contributing to your unwanted sexual behavior. 

Online course called "The Journey"  which is an 18 week program for churches and small groups that engages story, family systems, theology of sex, how to listen to lust, how to get out of here.

Jay is reading: Always reading research on sex

Jay is listening to: audio books. Educated by Tara Westover, Brother's K by David James Duncan

Jay is inspired by: Re-reading his grad school class notes and the core curriculum.  He went to grad school when he was 22. Our brains not fully developed until 26 so he feels like he's going back to grad school with a brain now. Back then he only thought about himself, not having any clients or much life experience so to be able to go back now has been inspiring. 

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.