Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] What if I told you that most times when people feel as though they have found a level of freedom from pornography or other unwanted sexual behavior, what they're simply experiencing is not actually freedom or healing, but the weight of secrecy being lifted off. I'm sure you've seen this or maybe experienced it yourself, that someone will come to the end of themselves. Maybe they're at a conference where things are talked about and finally it bubbles up and they're willing to share the sin that they've been living in. They've been looking at pornography or something. For the sake of this series, we'll use pornography as the illustration. Or maybe they just were tired of the life they were living and they reached out to a friend and started sharing about it and just sharing about it. Just getting to a place where you can talk about it and have people pray for you in it feels like a weightlifting off all of a sudden. The secrecy no longer has us bound. My father in law likes to say that the most dangerous part of lust or looking at pornography is the secrecy. When we hide it and keep it hidden in the darkness, that's when it has power over us. Another friend of mine used to kind of in jest talk about, he would tell people, hey, next time you're tempted to look at porn, invite me over and I'll come watch it with you. And of course that's provocative. It kind of gets people to be like, what? Serious. But the point is that the only power that pornography has is the fact. Or is the secrecy. The fact that we're doing it in high hiding. None of us feel like watching pornography with somebody else, right? Like that almost immediately dissolves the desire, the pull that it has is something secret. And so confessing feels like it's out in the open. We feel it's 80% of the journey in many ways, because now it's no longer secret, we're no longer keeping it hidden. And confession and, and prayer is so crucial to the journey toward true healing and freedom. But so many people stop there and they go home from the conference or after a few months of meeting with their friend and talking about it, all of a sudden sometimes it feels like out of nowhere the temptation comes back or they decide to look at it for a little bit again and they wonder what happened or why, what was going on? What, why did I fail? Why did I stumble?
[00:02:50] And so we might develop this kind of cycle and rhythm of confession, but then talking about it and then there's failure again. Maybe you're a part of an accountability Group where that kind of cycle tends to happen. We. We get together and we talk and we share openly with each other, but it seems like that's all we do. We. We share openly when we struggle, and then when we're not struggling, things are going well, but then we fall again. And so then we confess it. We pray for each other, but this cycle continues to happen. And the reason is because you're not actually taking the journey of healing.
[00:03:25] In the last episode, we talked about how porn is like an old friend. There's a lot of things we can do in life that quiet the friend, that cut off the friend, that say, no, we're not going to go the way of the friend.
[00:03:41] But especially when you've at some point in your life made it a habit to go to the friend, at some point, that friend's gonna come back and offer friendship and services again.
[00:03:52] Not because. And I don't even mean that you've given into it entirely, but the temptations will increase or the temptations will arise again.
[00:04:01] And the reason is because there's an emotional environment that happened, that was created that led you to become friends with pornography in the first place. And so we talked about halt, the acronym halt.
[00:04:17] Let's just stop and get curious. What's going on? Am I hungry? Is there something I'm angry about?
[00:04:24] Am I lonely? Am I tired?
[00:04:27] Just getting curious? And then we also talked about making the pivot so that instead of freaking out or panicking or even thinking that, like, true freedom means the friend never comes back. Because sometimes people talk about freedom. I even have talked about freedom at times in that way, as though the friend is gone for good. Well, the friend might offer its services again because the same emotional environment that was created where I became friends with it in the first place, that may happen, maybe a totally different setting and different situation, it may happen again, in which the friend might surface and be like, hey, I'm here. And so instead of panicking, rather making the pivot and acknowledging the friend is here. And in this episode, I want to walk through what it looks like to continually pursue emotional health and emotional wholeness, because that's what we want to get to. There's an environment that was created that caused us to. To become friends with pornography in the first place. It's an emotional environment. There's baggage, there's wounds, there's voids going on. And so how do we seek emotional health so that when things that happen outside of our control kind of recreate that environment and the friend shows up, we know how to navigate and say, no, I'm not going to go the way of the friend. Again. My name is Asher Whitmer.
[00:05:57] This is Unfeigned Christianity, where we are on a journey of becoming a people who are theologically anchored in Jesus, emotionally healthy and able to love and disciple others. Well, already mentioned in the last episode, I did part one of a series that I'm titling free for real, and the first episode was on how pornography is like an old friend.
[00:06:21] This episode, I want to walk through what it looks like to take the journey to pursue yourself. Emotional health. And what do I do when I realize I'm not emotionally healthy?
[00:06:34] I don't know that that's a very brilliant revelation that some of us aren't emotionally healthy. Actually, none of us are automatically emotionally healthy. We all have to do work in growing and maturing in emotional health. But we're gonna walk through what that looks like and why that's important in. In becoming a whole and healthy human being. Now, if you follow the podcast and if you've been waiting for this episode, as I know some of you have, you realize it's been over two weeks since I released the last episode.
[00:07:07] Just a Little Housekeeping. I Soon after releasing the last episode, I was hit with allergies. I think at first I thought I was getting a cold, but then my died and my physically I was fine. Like, I didn't get stuffiness, had a little bit of a cough, but not much. And my voice for a while was. Was not good and still feels a little bit on the verge. I'll probably have to take breaks as I record this and. And drink some water and make sure my throat is moist. But a couple of days ago my voice was feeling better and I sat and recorded an eloquent episode for all y' all got to the end of it.
[00:07:56] I had spent 45 minutes recording I don't know, and went back to replay it and realized my mic was on mute the whole time. And so everything. Oh, that's so disheartening. So frustrating when I've poured out my soul. And then I realized none of that was recorded.
[00:08:15] There's video of me waving my hands and talking, but there's nothing for the audio. So this is round two. And I know my mic is on. I can see it on my computer. It's being recorded. Hopefully my voice lasts. We're gonna dive in. What does it look like to pursue emotional health?
[00:08:36] There was someone I was talking to recently who was referencing some things that had happened in their church Years ago, when they were children and some different dynamics that had happened even within family.
[00:08:51] And it all kind of had to do with each other. And years later, they were asking some of those people about the things, you know, the stuff that had happened. And those people were not really ready to share and talk about. And the comments were made like, that's water under the bridge. Why. Why do we have to talk about it again?
[00:09:14] And the person sharing with me said that he felt that the stuff that had gone on had to do with what they were then experiencing, even though it was 20, 15, 20 years later. And there is this mindset, this posture of life, as though, like, we just.
[00:09:36] We can just move on and just ignore things or even if we don't use the language of ignore, I think sometimes we make it Christianese. And it's like we've prayed over this. This was. This was confessed, and we prayed over it, and now it's behind. We're. We're moving it. We're not worrying about what's in the past. We're going to strive for what's ahead. And the reality is, especially when you're bumping into things continually over and over again, and there's patterns. And this is true, obviously, for the purposes of this series, we're talking about sexual healing and freedom. But this is true for other types of behaviors that are damaging and not healthy. When we see patterns rising up, there's something going on.
[00:10:23] There's something that has to do probably with years ago.
[00:10:28] And so why. It seems like water under the bridge. Why would we dig it back up? Because the reality is it's not water under the bridge. The reality is it's surfacing again.
[00:10:39] In fact, for some people, they may feel like they've moved on and I just live by faith. And they don't realize they might even be blind to some of the ways that they're damaging people around them because they haven't actually stopped to address the thing in the past.
[00:11:00] Maybe they prayed over it. And I think it reminds me of the Pete Scazzero quote. It's actually the subtitle of the book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. It is impossible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.
[00:11:17] I think Pete is right. I think he's correct.
[00:11:21] When we do these spiritual disciplines of praying over and reading our Bible and attending church, all these. These different things, if we're not becoming emotionally healthy in the process, we may still be someone who's struggling with lust. We may still be someone who gives into the flesh here and there. We may still be someone who's not patient, who's not kind, who's not loving.
[00:11:49] It is impossible to be spiritually mature. We may do the disciplines of being spiritually mature, of reading and memorizing and praying and all this, but if we're not willing to take the emotional journey of growing in emotional health and maturity, then we're always going to stay stuck.
[00:12:09] And so confession is such a crucial piece. If you're here watching this or listening to this, you're probably someone who has confessed. And good for you, that's the place to start. We need to confess. We need to pray for one another.
[00:12:26] But those are not the totality of finding healing and freedom. When you look at the teachings of Jesus, he doesn't talk about us just learning how to confess and pray. He goes on. You read the Sermon on the Mount. He talks about a way of life where we are embodying the fruit of the Spirit, where we are living out and hungering and thirsting for righteousness.
[00:12:51] And that's not a hunger and thirst. Just like all of us, you know, we can so long for righteousness that righteousness would rain while sinning in our closet. Perhaps. But this hunger and thirst that Jesus is talking about is one that we would pursue and conform our lives into.
[00:13:12] And so the question is, what leads some of us, anyone, to.
[00:13:18] To violate some fundamental values for a temporary pleasure? My guess is, and I don't know where you're at, maybe you've been a Christian or grew up in a Christian family, you've been in the church and you're a little disillusioned with God. You're not really sure what all, but you kind of like some of the things that I've said or written or whatever. And so you're watching this because you know that you probably shouldn't be looking at pornography or whatever, but maybe you're not entirely sure what to do with God. I don't know, maybe you're here and you've stumbled upon or somebody really suggested that you watch this and you're not a Christian. You didn't grow up in the Christian community. And so faith. You're not even sure what to think of God or Jesus and what to do with that. I don't know. I welcome you. You're welcome here.
[00:14:09] Don't. I'm not going to pressure you to figure out what to do with God. And just in this episode, we're going to talk about something and we're going to talk a lot about God, but just know that you're welcome to come and listen, participate in the conversation even.
[00:14:27] But I'm assuming from what I know of my audience, the vast majority of you are Christians.
[00:14:35] You're attending church pretty regularly, if not every week.
[00:14:40] You're reading your Bible, at least to an extent of you want to follow the way of Jesus.
[00:14:48] And that's how I was. I was a pastor's kid, so I was very familiar with scripture and what Jesus taught. And we went to church every time the church was open.
[00:14:59] Now I'm a part of the leadership team of my church and my kids are experiencing that. Right. I'm very much in the Christian world and yet even within that found myself in pornography. And that happens. You may be surprised how many Christians struggle with hidden sins even outside of pornography. But there's a lot of Christians that struggle even with pornography. It's been a number of years ago, but the Barna group had partnered with Proven Men Ministries and they discovered that I've, if my memory serves me right, I believe this survey had been done in 2012 or so and they had discovered 63% of evangelical Christian men self identifying evangelical Christian men. And at that time they defined evangelical Christians as people who believed in new birth evangelical Christians. Men confessed to viewing pornography at least monthly.
[00:15:57] That's a frequent amount of time.
[00:16:00] Maybe it's not technically an addiction.
[00:16:03] At that rate, it may not be hindering your ability to function in society and at life. But for people who claim to follow Jesus and believe in a new birth, to look at pornography monthly is a lot, even if you go a few months between, which was kind of the cycle that I got into pornography first when I was 13 years old. And it was a battle that I dealt with for the rest of my youth. And it wasn't until I was 19. Goodness, I have to do my math.
[00:16:37] No, I was 20, 20 years old when I started. When I realized I had gone a number of months and hadn't even really felt tempted. And I wrote a book about it, Live Free. I'll have it in the description below.
[00:16:51] But the cycle that I had found myself in throughout my youth was yeah, I would go a few months and not look at it, but then I would stumble and have a few days where I was really into it. Then I'd go a number of months and I did the things I had accountability partners. I was transparent and confession and open with people in my life and had software on my computers. At that stage I didn't have a smartphone, but on my laptop that I got when I graduated high school at 18.
[00:17:24] I had the stuff, and it helped to a degree. I prayed through bondage breaking prayers, went through seminars that were to help set you free forever from.
[00:17:37] From any kind of addiction. And I would still go through that cycle. Yes, it. It felt meaningful, and it was.
[00:17:44] And the thing that I talk about in my book is the Sudoku puzzle of how all of those different things are. Like putting the numbers in a sudoku puzzle or if you play the color sudoku, like getting the different. You. You have colors that have to line up within a row, and then there's another row this way, and then you have within the smaller box, and you need one of each color on the row both ways and within the box.
[00:18:14] And sometimes you get everything together just nicely, and then you realize one's in the wrong place. And the journey of healing and growth and freedom is a little bit like a sudoku puzzle.
[00:18:26] Things come together. It feels revolutionary. This is amazing. This helps me.
[00:18:31] And then a while down the road, I realized, oh, I'm still. I'm still missing something. And that's a little bit what life has continued to be like for me. Because while I found tremendous freedom and healing in my early 20s, and I went about a decade without genuinely not even really being tempted, that's maybe putting it a little strong. I know I was tempted, but it wasn't like in my youth, between those moments of failure where when I would be tempted, it would almost be all consuming, and it'd feel like this real battle that I have to fight. And, yeah, I could fight it, and it kind of go. But then, you know, every few months, I'd give in again. It wasn't like that at all. Like, it was just a very easy.
[00:19:19] I'd see something or someone dressed in a certain way that previously may have kind of triggered some lustful thoughts. And instead it was like, no, that's not mine to take pleasure in. This is somebody made in the image of God. Obviously, if it's a real person, if it's an image or something, I would just be like, no, that's not what I'm gonna give my attention to.
[00:19:41] And I would move on. I wasn't undressing people mentally or anything. There was a real, genuine healing. And the thing I talk about in my live free is the power of working through father wounds. But then I was blindsided a few years later because a bunch of those temptations came back, and it was at a really low season of my life. And that's when, as I mentioned in the last episode, in Talking with my counselor where he made the comment, porn is like an old friend. And one of the things that I've realized is that I had found a renewed identity in Christ where no longer I wasn't viewing myself through the lens of my father and the wounds that had been created not to vilify my father at all, but just. Parents have a powerful impact on kids in their early years. And sometimes messages that we don't intend to communicate land on children, and we live from that message.
[00:20:42] And so there had been healing from that wound. And that was not something I was struggling with bitterness in. But new situations happened in my adult life where a similar kind of message began to creep in to my psyche. I suppose, for instance, one of the messages that I struggled with was this sense that I don't have anything of value to offer.
[00:21:11] And so in sharing my story and writing a book about it and blogging and ministry and helping people walk in freedom and so forth, like, all of a sudden, I began to see value that I was offering the world, and so I found purpose in it. The fact that I was seeing this value in my work, I mistook that for purpose.
[00:21:33] So what is my purpose? I help young men who find freedom from pornography or whatever.
[00:21:39] But our purpose is never found in what we do. Our purpose is found in whose we are. And a couple of years ago, I went through a health crisis that stopped everything. I did the work that I did, everything. And I praise God that it did not turn out to be as bad as it looked like it could be initially.
[00:22:01] But it did force us and kind of motivated us to reset.
[00:22:08] And for me, I was off work for a solid six weeks. And then even after that, I just slowly started putting back in pieces. I wasn't back blogging and writing for over a year after that. And initially it was hard to sit still, but then after I was sitting still for a while, then it became this sort of thing of like, well, nobody's missing me.
[00:22:30] And then you couple on that other dynamics in life going on. And all of a sudden I began to live out of this message of like, I don't have anything that's needed because I had tethered my identity to what I did, and now that was gone. And so what am I? Who am I? What do I have to bring?
[00:22:53] And there was a real. Just to be fully transparent, in that time, there was a point where it was my kids. The fact that I did not want to abandon my kids or to be a dad who checked out or whatever, that's What I was going to say kept me in. I think the Holy Spirit was gracious toward us as a family.
[00:23:20] But that was the thing that kept my will engaged in this whole struggle.
[00:23:26] Because there was a lot of this, like, you know, especially after some of those temptations came back, it's like, here I'm the guy that wrote a book about live free and spoke about this, and here I'm dealing with that again. Well, what. Maybe, maybe the things that I taught just are a joke, like weren't even true or real. And I'm grateful that I had actually started counseling before then. It had been something my wife and I had wanted to do for a number of years and when everything kind of came to a halt, and even just as a little bit, because there was a five month period where we weren't really sure what was going on with me. Was it physical or was it emotional and everything. And so all of that just kind of became the excuse to start counseling.
[00:24:09] And then I had started been in counseling and some of these other stuff started surfacing. And that was probably part of it as well, is just digging into your story and unpacking that has a way of bringing a bunch of junk to the surface. And, and like the friend that I was telling you about, a lot of people think it's like, that's water under the bridge. I don't want to go back there. Let me just posit this out there. I don't know that this should be a rule. It's not scientific in any sense necessarily. But if you are afraid of looking at something, you're not healed there. If you're afraid of a discussion around a topic or around an event or around a time, you're not healed there. We talk about triggers. And understanding triggers is so crucial. Whether we're talking about things that trigger arousal and lust, or things that trigger the fight or flight response, that is crucial that helps us to begin to, you know, reverse engineer kind of back, you know, peel back the layers of like, how did what.
[00:25:13] What kind of message are we believing or what's going on in our psyche.
[00:25:18] But triggers are an indication that we are not healthy.
[00:25:22] We're not healthy. And understanding triggers really has no value unless you're gonna actually do something about them and pursue health in.
[00:25:33] And again, the goal isn't necessarily that we're no longer triggered. The goal is like you're being triggered because of events in your life.
[00:25:44] And the goal is having healing for those events. There are things where I have named and talked about with my counselor And I've identified that's an event that has triggered me.
[00:25:57] And so we've prayed over that, we've talked about that, we've processed that in counseling. But I'll still sometimes find myself triggered. Maybe I'm in a conversation or something's happening and I kind of think why am I feeling triggered all this? And I can re realize like it's, it's still tied back to that event.
[00:26:21] And so it's another opportunity to just continue that journey. If it, if it's a wound where there needs to be forgiveness, I can forgive again.
[00:26:29] The thing about wounds is you can forgive, but the person who wounded you may be someone in your life, like a family member, and they may not have changed. And true forgiveness is really kind of a one sided thing.
[00:26:46] I think it's helpful to differentiate between trust and forgiveness. Sometimes, like I can forgive without the offender even saying I'm sorry, right? But whether I can actually trust that person again, that's on the offender. He's going to have to demonstrate trustworthiness.
[00:27:02] And so we're going to bump into experiences in life again that are probably wounding in a way. And we feel those triggers. For the purposes of this series, we're going to bump into things.
[00:27:16] There's going to be emotional environments again created where the sexual temptations surface again re triggering. And the question that we want to pursue is how do we pursue emotional health? Instead of being controlled by the triggers or by the temptation, what does it look like to pursue wholeness and how do we pursue health in that process? A framework that I've discovered, my counselor who shared it with me and I've found it to be really helpful, is called internal family systems ifs. And it works from the understanding that we are not monolithic beings or we're not just one self as a whole and healthy person. Our true self, to use internal family system language, I think we are, we're integrated. We're aware of our emotional and psychological and spiritual makeup and how things are doing.
[00:28:18] I think the true self is someone who is filled with the spirit of God and yielded to him through every situation in life and letting him transform how we engage the world and we begin to bear the fruit of the spirit in our relationships, in our work, as we navigate throughout the world. But as human beings, there are different parts of us, especially as broken human beings. There's the exile, the childhood wound that happens at some point along a message comes and that communicates something that brings shame. I was going to say it communicates a wound. But I think the language of shame is perhaps better because wounds kind of assume that somebody did something or said something to us. And really what we're trying to hide in life is the shame. Now, that wound creates a sense of shame, but somebody not doing something can also create shame.
[00:29:19] I talked with a man once whose parents did not help him learn how to drive, did not help him figure out the process of getting his driver's license. And that's just one example of how he had to figure things out on his own. His family is loving. His parents always provided a home. They allowed him and empowered him to go into different kinds of ministry or whatever. But in crucial points of life where he needed help discovering and knowing what to do, they weren't there.
[00:29:49] And so his sense of shame had to do around this abandonment of sorts of like, I'm all alone, I gotta figure it out myself. And there's different things that happen in life. Maybe there's a. We're going through a time of purposelessness and we don't feel purpose. And the thing about something like looking at pornography or any kind of sexual sin is it awakens dopamine within us. And dopamine creates this facade of adventure.
[00:30:19] And anytime we can take an adventure for a split moment, we feel a sense of purpose. And so we're continually looking for that dopamine hit, that dopamine hit or whatever, but it hides the shame that we're feeling. And shame comes from the childhood event and experience the exile, as internal family systems calls it. And so we learn how to manage the exile, right? We learn how to. Whatever message that was communicated, you don't have anything of value to bring. Well, Asher learned how to manage that, right? And we have different ways of managing that. For me, it was by accomplishing things and succeeding at things. And so when I was able to quickly.
[00:31:08] My brother and I quickly throw the tar paper on the garage that we were needing to shingle while dad was at a one hour meeting, like, that felt like that could hide the shame. All of us have something that we lean into, something we learned in life that people appreciate. People like Julie Slattery talks about our private selves and our public selves and how we early on in life realize that there is a part of us that people accept, and then there's a part of us that. That people don't like. And so we learn how to present that public self, that acceptable self, and hide the shameful self, the exile. But eventually the manager's not going to work. And in the illustration of Putting tar paper on the garage. My dad comes and we had a lot of wrinkles in it, in the tar paper because we had done it too quickly. I had pushed my brother to do it quickly. And then dad is frustrated that it's wrinkled and it's not sealed properly and all of that. And the point being that eventually internal family systems works with the understanding that eventually the manager's not going to work, the exile still gets exposed. And then the firefighter part comes in to just put out the fire. And that's the egregious looking at pornography or substance abuse. That's the addictive part that we get into. The really damaging thing that we would. In a normal time of life, when we're not feeling the shame, we would declare, we would never do that. We don't want to do that at all.
[00:32:42] But then there's something that triggers.
[00:32:45] That causes us to give in to the firefighter that comes in and puts out. At least we think that's the thing about all of this and brokenness is that when you give in to the firefighter, it only brings more shame.
[00:33:02] Which, again, reminds us of the exile. The manager tries to do it, can't handle it. So we need the firefighter again. And it's this crazy cycle that is the emotional environment that is set.
[00:33:14] We need to confess, and we need to pray over it, pray through things.
[00:33:19] But the reason we gave in to pornography is because there was an emotional environment that was created where we were willing to give up something we deeply valued, and that's sexual purity, in exchange for this temporary hit in pleasure. That's the firefighter. And so what do we do?
[00:33:41] How do we figure out what emotional environment is created? Pursuing emotional health means that we start paying attention to these things. It means that we get curious and we begin. We're not just gonna. It's water under the bridge. We're not gonna look back. No, we're gonna be willing to look at it again. But when I realized, okay, I'm being triggered, this is happening again. So what do I do? You do story work. You unpack your story.
[00:34:07] What's playing on? What is your exile self?
[00:34:10] What is your manager? And then the firefighter, what are you going to. Obviously, if you're watching this, it probably has something to do with pornography, but maybe there are other things. And when we can name those things, we can begin to understand our story and the parts of our story that maybe we haven't fully let Jesus into yet.
[00:34:33] So some questions I want to leave you with as you begin this journey and start doing the story work yourself. A question that I have for you is the last time you gave in to unwanted sexual behavior, last time you looked at pornography, what were you feeling? And maybe even so, maybe in the moment you might talk about feeling something, but try to retrace, if you can, even the events leading up to that day, like what was going on in the broader context, what was going on in life? And then the second question, as you're pondering that is, how do you typically handle those feelings? Because my guess is you're not going to pornography every time.
[00:35:16] Maybe this feeling of not having anything of value to bring, or this feeling of just being alone, and I have to figure it out on myself, like those kinds of messages, maybe, maybe that surfaces in other ways and it causes us to. For me, my manager is work, working more, accomplishing more, getting. You know, trying to over, over exceed and impress people and prove that I have something that I can bring.
[00:35:46] And so for me, I'm very aware of when I'm starting to feel that message that I don't have anything of value to bring, because I'll notice an uptick in my desire to do more work. Right. Yours, it might be something different, but how do you typically handle those feelings?
[00:36:04] And then lastly, I'm curious, and you should be curious, when was the first time you remember bumping into that feeling?
[00:36:13] Because when we can identify the answers to these questions, that helps us retrace the steps and helps us go back in our journey to see where it all began.
[00:36:25] Because that's going to tell us something about what needs healed. In fact, Jay Stringer talks about how we, in our unwanted sexual behavior, we are acting out a story.
[00:36:38] And so we should be curious, not condemning of our unwanted sexual behavior. That feels kind of counterintuitive. I used to, when I would commit unwanted sexual behavior, such as looking at pornography and masturbating, I used to kind of self condemn myself and just. I literally pound my chest, oh, God have mercy on me. And it was kind of this little ritual that I would go through to feel like I'm forgiven again or whatever. But a significant change can happen when instead of condemning yourself for it, you sit up and you say, huh? Why did I just do that?
[00:37:14] Not why did I sin?
[00:37:16] Right? We know that we're broken and we're sin. Why did you do the specific thing you just did? Why did you look at the specific thing that you just did that's telling you something about your story? And that as we unpack our stories, we will begin to find the avenue of healing almost just in that journey itself.
[00:37:41] Now I'm going to save an example of my own life for the next episode. What does it look like to do story work? You're going to have to come back for episode three and I'll demonstrate how I've learned to do story work even in real time and just as full transparency. We're not going to be perfect humans and so sometimes we respond out of our unhealth and we do hurt each other and we have to repair. But learning how to do story work and learning how to do this process helps us to possibly be able to do it in real time and avoid the damage, but it also helps us to know how to repair. And that's what we're going to get into in the next episode. If you have found this meaningful, I'd love to hear about it first of all, so leave a comment. If you're watching this on YouTube, if you if you have my email address, maybe you're on my email list and you got the email about it, go ahead and shoot a response. It means a lot. Some of you have already responded. I really appreciate that. If you're on social media, leave a comment. Share this with others if you found this helpful, just share it and say, hey, I found this helpful. Hopefully you can find it helpful as well. Maybe you know someone specifically wrestling with this or needing it. Share it with them and you can begin to take the journey deeper with them as you walk together in finding freedom and healing. Till next time, my name is Asher Whitmer. Grace and Peace.
