11 | Michael John Cusick: The Light is Brighter Than it Seems

For men and women seeking recovery from unwanted sexual behavior, few people have been as influential or helpful as Michael John Cusick. Greg, Stacey, and Bobby all share some of our experiences with how Michael's book and podcast have been invaluable in our own path forward. Greg first met Michael in 2014 when he spoke at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, AL.

Michael is a therapist,  author, and Founder/CEO of Restoring the Soul, a counseling practice that provides opportunities for life-changing breakthrough with licensed and experienced therapists. Their holistic approach creates an atmosphere of safety and grace where people can explore their relationships, identity, emotions, and spirituality.

In 2012 Michael released the book Surfing For God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggles. It, along with Jay Stringer's book Unwanted, has been extraordinarily powerful in helping people discover what needs they are actually trying to meet when pursuing broken behavior. The book contains a story (that Greg and Michael talk about) that's part of the reason for our podcast's name!

Restoring the Soul offers individual and group intensive therapy experiences, as well as a blog, podcast, and other resources.

Check out Michael's links below, and PLEASE give us 5-stars and write a positive review wherever you get your podcasts!

 Restoring the Soul website
Restoring the Soul podcast
Surfing For God book (on Amazon)
Training Session at Beeson Divinity School (2014)

#MichaelJohnCusick #RestoringTheSoul #SurfingForGod #counseling #therapy #gospel #recovery #sexaddiction #pornaddiction #sexualaddiction #awaken #awakenrecovery #awakenpodcast #whatwereallywant #wwrw #grace #connection #conversation

Awaken website
Roots Retreat Men's Intensive
Roots Retreat Women's Workshop
Awaken Men & Women's support meeting info (including virtual)

Transcript

Greg: How do telemarketers do with your last name?

Michael John Cusick (MJC): So in high school, they used to call me Cue Stick Information, which was taken from the Rolling Stones song. “Got to get some Cue Stick Information to try to drive my imagination. I can't get no satisfaction.” And so I've literally heard Cue Stick, Cube Steak, Cossack, Cusick, Cube Stick, on and on and on.

Intro: Welcome to What We Really Want, Conversations About Connection. Settle in and get ready for a great conversation. Let's talk about what we really want.

Greg: Hey everybody, welcome to episode 11 of... I was about to say The Place We Find Ourselves.

Bobby & Stacey: (laughter)

Greg: Adam Young probably wouldn't appreciate that. Welcome to episode 11 of What We Really Want. Yeah, I only hope that this podcast one day has as many people listening to it. Bobby and Stacey and I are all here this morning. We're gonna talk a little bit in a minute about an exciting conversation I got to record a little while back with Michael John Cusick. 

So we got to do something pretty exciting this past weekend. We've always, in our Men's Awaken recovery meetings, had a short time where anybody who's there for the first time, we give them a quick orientation and have been feeling for a while now like that's not sufficient. We really tend to forget how confusing and disorienting it can be when you have not been in community and you first take a step into a meeting like that. 

So we've created something called Awaken 101, which is an orientation class where we slow things down and we help newcomers really get their bearings. What do we mean when we talk about addiction and recovery and sobriety and sponsorship and the 12 steps? And we did it for the first time this past weekend. And it was really great to have some newcomers there and some of the people who'd been in our community there for a while, so.
 
Bobby: Yeah, I hope I passed. (laughter)

Greg: It's really interesting how easy it is when you're in a community like a recovery meeting to forget how confusing it was at the beginning and how much we didn't know when we first walked in.

Bobby: Yeah, I remember the first time I started talking to a guy that was newer in recovery and just realizing, I could have an impact in this person's life. Just realizing, gosh, even just some of the simple stuff that this guy doesn't know that I know. Yeah, so that was pretty cool to get to see that this past weekend when we were doing that and having some of the other guys that have been in recovery a little bit longer be able to be a part of that too and contribute and also kind of realize, oh, these are some of the things I've forgotten.

Greg: Yeah, that's good stuff. Well, hey, I want to pivot a little bit and talk about our guest today. This is one that I've really been looking forward to. This is someone whose influence on my life and recovery, and I know all of ours has just been, it's probably not possible to overstate how influential and how helpful he's been.

Michael John Cusick, who's the author of a book called Surfing for God, Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggles. The book came out in 2012 and has just been the companion's guide to people who are in recovery from broken and unwanted sexual behavior. The book starts out with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it says, “The pursuit of purity is not about the suppression of lust, but about the reorientation of one's life to a larger goal.”

So there's so much alignment between what we're about and what Michael talks about in the book. In fact, a large reason why the podcast exists is because of people like Michael. Bobby, what do you remember about when you first read through Surfing for God, because it came out just a couple of years after you started in recovery.

Bobby: I think for me, one of the bigger messages I took away from Surfing for God was understanding that there was something deeper that I needed to get in touch with, that there was something driving me to look at pornography and to act out sexually, that there was something in my life that I was trying to... a void, that I was trying to fill. This kind of goes back to the conversation we had a few weeks ago with Drew Boa and the idea of outgrowing porn. I feel like this was just a continuation of that same message, that there's something that I'm looking for in life that I believe is going to fulfill me, is going to give me life. And it can work for a little bit, but ultimately it leads to destruction.

Greg: Hon, I know that you have appreciated not just Michael, but also his wife, Julianne.

Stacey: Yes, I don't know how many years ago I was introduced to Restoring the Soul Podcast and listened to a number of them. I love their dynamic, first of all, and just how they do the podcast. But she was sharing about an argument that they had had. And this was like a recent thing. So it wasn't like talking about years ago, which I really appreciate. Whatever it was, it triggered some of her past trauma. And she kind of had, I think a strong reaction. And I just appreciated the fact that she shared it, that it happened to her and that she shared it because they've been married a long time. I think kind of in the neighborhood of how long we've been married.

Greg: I think they got married a year before we did.

Stacey: And they've been in recovery a long time. And I just really appreciated that that was a current thing because that happens to me. And I just shame myself. And I think, oh my gosh, you have been in recovery for 15 years. You know better. Why are you still doing this? But rather than do that, just, you know, remember like what's going on and what it's connected to. And that's not what's happening now. And just all the things like that, it's just being kind to yourself. It's not about never having things happen or never being triggered. It's about learning what's going on, understanding, and then moving from that. So that was just, I was super encouraged by that.

Greg: The thing that I remember more than most anything else is a story that he tells about a graduate school class when the professor was being asked about masturbation and whether or not he did it. And even though he felt like the question was kind of asked by a smart aleck kid, he said, I'm going to go ahead and answer it. And what he said is, “I'm a better person when I don't because then I'm carrying more of the tension that we, all of us, should carry in this life. I'm a better person when I carry that tension.” 

And I recognize just that that resonated with me because so much of the triggers and the temptation to act out lifelong have been connected to stress and anxiety and tension that I perceived as a bad thing. And I wanted it to go away. What I've learned in recovery is, sitting in that tension is where the magic happens. It's where I discover things about myself and where I'm able to be vulnerable and tell people what I'm feeling. And what I end up getting is connection, which is something that acting out was never going to give me. It was going to give me a quick instant release to forget about it, but then all of the tension is going to flood back and now it's going to have more shame on top of it. So that was really helpful for me.
 
Well, one of the things I got to tell Michael in this interview was that a story he tells from Surfing for God is part of the reason why this podcast is called What We Really Want. And so I won't tell you exactly why that is. I'll make you listen and find out. But yeah, we hope that you will really enjoy and be encouraged and be strengthened and challenged and given things to think about by this conversation I have with one of my favorite authors of the book, Surfing for God, Michael John Cusick.

Greg: Michael John Cusick, I am really excited that we're talking today because it had been quite a while. It had been about 10 years, I think, since you and I had talked.

MJC: Yeah, that's right. We met in Birmingham. We had dinner at P.F. Chang's. I have a weird photographic memory for that kind of thing. I can't tell you what I ate, but I remember that evening well when I spoke at the Presbyterian Church and spoke at Beeson and Samford, and it was really a treat to be there, and it was great to meet you.

Greg: It was great for me as well, and I remember that I got the crispy honey shrimp. (laughter) And then when you were speaking at Beeson, after the chapel service, I remember you going into a classroom and a lot of the students stuck around because they wanted to do a Q&A. 

And you probably remember that, but one of the questions that you got was one that I've gotten a lot over the years, and that is when there's somebody who's in church or ministry leadership who has either confessed or been caught in sexually broken behavior, like what do you do? And I just remember, I mean, of course I don't remember word for word, but some of the things I remember about your answer was, well, one of the first things you want to say is, okay, first things first, we want to care for you. If you're married, we want to care for your spouse. We want to make sure that you have things in place around you to get you the support that you need. That's the first priority. And then I remember you saying, now you may or may not be able to keep your job, but we won't figure that out today. We'll figure that out at some point down the road. I mean, I'm sure those are things that you've been asked and have talked about a lot over the years, but that really stuck out to me, because at that point, it had been about five years since I had lost my job when my stuff came out. And just to hear somebody saying that, that doesn't have to necessarily be a square one action point, it was really refreshing to hear that. So I've always remembered that.
 
MJC: Well, thank you. It sounds like really brilliant words that I said that day. (laughter) I don't remember that particular question, but that's not uncommon. And an interesting thing is I was looking for a video of something online and I found the video, they actually recorded that. So there's either an audio or a video recording of that Q&A there in that little side room in the chapel.

Greg: Okay, that's cool. I knew that they had recorded the chapel service. I didn't know about the other.

MJC: Yeah, they apologized in advance because it was for Global Missions Day that they brought me in. And they thought that somehow the pornography epidemic was affecting global missions, rightly so. And the sermon, they said, here's the title. You just talk about what you want. It was called “The Pornification of Global Societies in Missions.” So for people that want to see a fascinating talk. And I was standing in the pulpit of Beeson Divinity School, which of course is multi-denominational and these wooden carved heads of the reformers are there all around. It was this kind of surreal moment, but it was a neat time and great, great people.

Greg: Yeah, really great people. And there's one person who heads up their counseling program. They've just now introduced a new Master of Arts in Christian Counseling degree that you can get from Beeson. And Dr. Gordon Bals is heading that up.

MJC: Oh, Gordon and I went to school together!

Greg: Yeah, okay, so you know Gordon. He's become a really good friend and just love him to death and have such respect for him.

MJC: One of the greatest heads of hair.

Greg: Oh my gosh, yes.

MJC: You and I can look at Gordon and celebrate what a good man he is and then our envy kicks in for the follically challenged.

Greg: There are those for whom the hair turns gray and those for whom it turns loose, and you and I have both. 

So for people who don't know who Michael John Cusick is, tell them a little bit about yourself, where you live, your family, just anything that you'd want people to know about you.
 
MJC: Yeah, well, first of all, I live in Denver, Colorado. I've lived here 33 years. I consider Colorado my home. I've lived here longer than Cleveland, Ohio, where I grew up. I have a son that was born here, a daughter that was born in China, and we brought her home when she was a year old. 

My wife is Julianne. We are a miracle story of still being married at 33 years, because it was 30 years ago this July that I blew up my marriage when my double life came out, where I was in ministry, recent graduate from Colorado Christian University with a master's in biblical pastoral counseling. And through that time in the first three years of my marriage, I'd had a double life with a severe sex addiction, acting out in every possible way possible with sex for pay and hooking up or trying to hook up with other women and lots and lots of pornography and boundary crossing and a lot of alcohol abuse to try to medicate myself in that shame. And then I came home from work one day, and my wife asked me a question about where I was, and I got crossed up in my lies, and for the next 48 hours, everything came out.
 
And as is the case for so many of us, that was the worst day of my life and the best day of my life. It's where I encountered God for the very first time. I had been a Christian for 14 years, but I never really knew the love of God. And my salvation had really been about not wanting to go to hell, and wanting to go to heaven, and therefore I accepted Jesus, and I was all in, and I was an intense disciple, memorizing scripture, Bible study, evangelism, worked with Young Life as a volunteer leader. But I would say that that was a “Come to Jesus” day, where I really divide my description of how long I've been a person of faith between 1980, when I prayed the prayer to receive Christ, and then 1994, when I was broken for the first time, and that brokenness needed the grace of God.
 
Greg: Yeah. Boy, it's crazy how many of the elements of what you just shared in the last couple of minutes are very common, very similar to my story. Yeah, Stacey and I have been married 32 years. It took a little longer for mine to come out. We had been married 17 when I had what we call fan day, when you know what hits the fan. But yeah, gosh, just such a blessing. 

You said a "miracle marriage." And I'm grateful every day that she stuck around when she didn't have to, chose to, and even more than that, chose to do her own work, which is really something because a lot of, I know you know, a lot of times when there's one partner who's been betrayed significantly like that, it's so easy to focus all of the attention on getting the broken guy fixed and having kind of a disproportionate experience after that. So I'm really grateful both of our wives dove in to just being open to what God wanted to do.
 
I'm interested in a little bit of a timeline item for you. You shared a good bit very concisely about your own history with sexual brokenness. Where does it fall on the timeline when you began to have a desire to pursue a career as a counselor? Was the secret part of your life still going on while you were pursuing that? What were some of the desires and motives driving you in that direction with everything that was going on in your life?
 
MJC: Yeah, great question. I was pretty deep into the mental health counseling field when everything blew up. I grew up in an Irish Catholic family, Greg, and I went to my first AA meeting when I was five years old, where I started my first addiction. I had a styrofoam cup of coffee. I filled it halfway with AA sludge coffee, and I took a sugar container, and I poured sugar in until the coffee rose to the top. So I say that I got addicted to sugar and caffeine at the same time at age five.

My dad died with 46 years of sobriety in AA, continuous. He had a slip up when I was in second grade, and he was one of seven Irish Catholic kids, and all of them were alcoholics except the one that was a nun in a cloister for 53 years. And when I was nine years old, my family moved across the country from Ohio to Florida to participate in a family drug rehab. My brother at age 15 was admitted to that program, and there were no other inpatient programs back in 1973. And then we started doing family counseling when I came home. And so all of that really set me up, plus being the youngest of five kids and being a highly verbal person.

I experimented with a lot of different majors in college, but as a youth minister, I knew that I wanted to somehow help people. So I got my master's in counseling at Colorado Christian University, and it was three years later where everything came out. But during my degree, unfortunately, I was acting out during a postgraduate internship year. I was acting out to some degree, and I was sober for part of that time behaviorally, but internally, I was still very much a dry drunk and "irritable, angry, and discontent," as they say in the Twelve Steps.

Greg: You know, something that's interesting about your family's story that I didn't specifically know until you just said it, a lot of people have similar experience where they had a parent who was an alcoholic or an older sibling who was addicted to drugs. In a lot of those stories, we hear that part of it was nobody really went and got any help, right? And so, you know, the cycle continued, and what was passed down to their generation, passed down to our generation, we just continued that cycle. What interests me about your story is, you know, your dad coming from a family with a lot of addiction, his own, was doing something about it and being involved with AA when your brother had a drug problem. I mean, the family engaged, and it just kind of strikes me that even having that element that a lot of people in recovery would like to be able to say that they had but didn't, that's still no guarantee that it's not going to be a part of our story, is it?

MJC: Yeah, I remember saying, you know, I will never become an alcoholic, and I had to stop drinking in 1998, four years after my fan day, when I realized that alcohol was putting me in danger and that it was really a compulsive issue. 

Let me just say two things about that. First of all, I work with a lot of people that they say, you know, we never want our kids to know our story. And I think that as it's appropriate age-wise and time-wise, that it's a great gift when parents tell their story, because my dad told my sister when he was literally in hospice for several weeks before he went unconscious, my dad said to my older sister who's 10 years older than me, you know, we've had a lot of problems in our family. We've had mental illness. We've had addiction. But the one thing about our family is though we have problems, we've always gotten help.
 
And I think that's the prerequisite for the gospel. It's “We all have broken things, but will we declare ourselves bankrupt and that we can't pay our way out of the situation?” And so, yeah, we always get help. One of my favorite podcasts of the, not to toot my own horn with my podcast, but I have 300 episodes. And my favorite episode is my dad at age 80, giving his AA story at a meeting with 200 people and somebody recorded it. And the reason I played it was because I think it's so hopeful for people to hear redemption stories, but also the very reason that you're talking about, the legacy, that when a man or woman gets sober of any kind, they change the trajectory, not only of their own life, but for all the lives to come.
 
Because I say today that if my dad never got sober when I was in second grade, he had five years of sobriety. And then literally, we were talking about "Fan days," when the “S...” hits the fan. We had an old collie, and my dad used to wake up at 3.30 in the morning to work in the steel mill, and he'd been sober five years, but had five kids, and he had two full-time jobs, and he got up and the dog had pooped on the carpeting between the bedroom and the bathroom, and he literally stepped in it. So talk about when the poop hits the fan. He stepped in it, and he disappeared for two weeks. Nobody knew where he was, and he went on a bender, and finally some AA friends found him, and he was hospitalized, and he was hospitalized, I think, for six weeks.
 
And I tell the story in Surfing for God, where during that time, a psychiatrist came up to him, and he was, interestingly, an Irish Catholic, straight-shooting guy with actually an Irish brogue, and he said, “Jimmy, I know what your problem is.” And my dad's like, “What?” And he was expecting this diagnosis, and the doctor said, “You're an alcoholic, you're immature, and you need to grow up!” And I thought, that's really what all recovery from addiction is about, is ultimately we have to get sober, but the focal point of getting sober is it allows us to grow up, to become whole, to move into who we're meant to be.

So all of this is not necessarily what you were going to talk about today, but it's all good stuff and it's interesting, and I love just the back and forth of the conversation.

Greg: Yeah, so good. I mean, the picture of sobriety as something necessary to have so that some of the distractions to becoming mature are cleared out of the way. You know, sobriety not being the end of recovery, but a means to the end is something we talk about a lot, and we weren't created for recovery. Recovery was created as a means to help us live the abundant life that Jesus told us he came to give us.

MJC: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and the lack of sobriety or addiction and compulsion is not just the distraction from the maturity and the growing up and the wholeness, but it's actually a barrier that we arrest, that we freeze at one point. I've talked about this a fair amount in the last 18 months, but I have 30 years of sexual sobriety. I have 26 years of alcohol sobriety. And November 1st, 16 months ago, I went to my first Overeaters Anonymous meeting, and I had gotten up to 245 pounds, out of shape, went on a pilgrimage in Scotland, couldn't put my feet in my boots because my feet were so swollen. Really had to come to terms with a lifetime of compulsive eating.

And until I started to do 12-step work around food, I did not realize how much food was keeping me from growing spiritually. And because I have seminary training, and I'm, you know, articulate, and I can talk about the Bible and scripture and prayer, I was able to fake my way with myself to be self-deceived, to think God and I are good. And we were in terms of salvation and God's affection and love for me, but I had reached a limit where I wasn't going to go any further in my spiritual, emotional development until I dealt with food. And so I've had 16 months of abstinence from sugar and from alcoholic foods, and it's been really transformational. And oh, by the way, I've lost a bunch of weight, but that wasn't the goal. The goal was to break the addiction and compulsion. And it's been absolutely life-changing because I didn't know how much I needed healing until I was able to peel back the food and that behavior and realize what was underneath that was still a wounded little boy and a lot of pain and loneliness and still learning about that.

Greg: Well, that sounds an awful lot like some of the things you talk about in Surfing for God. If I didn't know that just before your last few sentences, you were talking about your relationship with food, I almost would have thought you were quoting from the book. It's interesting to me that on the surface, it didn't occur to you until it did that you were having an unhealthy relationship with food. But then once you started to pay attention to it, how many things with that struggle did you find were remarkably in common with alcohol or sex?

MJC: Oh, it was all the same. It's all the same. You know, so our addictions are like a smorgasbord. And most of us, we have a primary one. Like, okay, at a smorgasbord, here's the prime rib. And that's really why I'm there. But for me, sexual addiction was primary because, you know, it's the one way where we allegedly or seemingly can have a relationship. And all sexual addiction is, of course, non-intimate and non-relational, even if it's with a human being.

But then alcohol, it's like, well, I can't really have a relationship with alcohol, but I'm constantly saying that the definition of an addiction is an unhealthy, mood-altering relationship with a person's substance or process. And then with food, a little less so, but you have to eat, right? I can go without alcohol, I can go without sex, period, but you can't go without food. And it's so easy to justify, but it was so woven into the very same kinds of issues. It's about the deep desire inside of me and us. It's about the brokenness and the trauma and the wounding and then how I mishandled that pain.

That's really the triad of issues in every addiction and compulsion.

Greg: So here's what I love so much about what you're talking about right now. My hope, one of the prayers that I have for this podcast, is that people whose particular stories may not involve sexually acting out or having those types of compulsions wouldn't just tune out the things that we're talking about because the whole idea of pursuing healthy connections with God, myself, and with other people, there's nobody on planet Earth that wouldn't benefit from paying some attention to that.

Our entry ramp is sexual brokenness because that's what we do, but gosh, what you just said, anybody who's listening right now, if they're paying attention, heard something that they can relate to, if we're being honest.

MJC: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We all have deep desire, deep longings. We're all looking towards something that is ultimately not life-giving, but we believe it will be. The moment we turn toward that, which we believe is life-giving, and it really isn't, it begins to ensnare us, and then it masters us instead of us, instead of it serving us, it masters us.

Greg: Yeah. Well, I want to ask you a question about something on your bio on the Restoring the Soul website. And by the way, we're going to link to that so that people can find out more about you and what Restoring the Soul offers, as well as we'll find a link to that talk at Beeson and let people see that too.

But one of the things that your bio says is that your passion is “...to connect life's broken realities with the reality of the gospel.” And you've already shared enough from your own story to let us know what some of those broken realities were. But would you be willing to talk for a couple of minutes about what, while you were living in those broken realities, made it so hard to experience and resonate with the gospel?

MJC: Wow, what a great question. Because oftentimes in these interviews, it's just about the addiction or the compulsion or the brokenness, but you're actually kind of asking what's so compelling on the other side that it would draw me.

Well, the first thing is, let's define the gospel, and there's lots of ways of talking about it, and we often talk about the gospel in terms of, you know, I am a sinner, Jesus died for me because I'm a sinner, and so I need to believe that and then commit my life to it, ABC, or I need to, you know, look at the bridge illustration or something like that.

And I would say that that's actually inaccurate, and there may be people from certain denominations or seminaries that come and tell me why I'm wrong, but the gospel is about God, it's not about me. And so much of what we've made the gospel to be is that I have to realize to a certain degree about who I am and how bad I am when it's really simply about God.

The gospel, the good news, is a declaration from on high from God about who he is, and the most profound way that he has communicated who he is, is in the person of Jesus. So we've very subtly said that the gospel is not some kind of transaction where I can do X and God does Y, but it's become a transaction where in a very sophisticated way I have to acknowledge something about myself and then do something like pray, and then God will accept me. And I want to say, let's step back and just say, maybe there's a gospel before that, and that is that God revealed in Jesus, John 15, Jesus said that if you've seen me, you've seen the Father, so if you want to know what God is like, you look to Jesus.

The big declaration from on high is God is acquainted with our suffering. God is acquainted with our brokenness. God enters into all that is unfavorable and dark and painful and twisted, and he shows up there. That's what he did at Christmas. That's what he does over and over and over again.

So what is so compelling about that is that in the broken places, as one writer has said, “God breaks through, and I break out.” You know, the real me that is behind the mask, that is behind the wall, that has been relegated, that's been lost, that's been abused, that's been traumatized, or frankly, the me that's just been so sinful because of all those things that I've run so far away, that part of me comes back. It rises to the surface and then God breaks in.

And that's not even accurate language because Christ is already there within, in our inmost being. It's in him that we live and move and have our being. But when I was broken and when I saw for the first time that my gifting, that my intelligence, that my ability to talk, that my ability to recommit to God, to redouble my efforts, that that could not help me on that day in July 1994, the only thing left was God's love.

Someone who is bigger than me, better than me, who had no skin in the game, so to speak, other than his own broken heart on my behalf, because I like to say that God loves us at the expense of his own broken heart. That God was there for me. And over time, beginning on that day, off and on, off and on, off and on, that truth that I am deeply loved, that I am fully known, and that God had a plan for me, not despite, but because of my brokenness and suffering and pain and failure, that became something that to this day is just overwhelming.

It's stunning to think that God doesn't use my strength and my gifting, but my weakness and my failure. And frankly, I think that that's a message that a lot of people that don't know God and know the God that looks like Jesus or the true Christian message, that people would be compelled by that as opposed to a lot of the judgment and the infighting that we have back and forth.

Greg: Yeah, that is so good. And I think that what you just said in describing the gospel, if people can realize that isn't just for other people, that's for me. And not in spite of, but because of my brokenness, like you said. I'd love for people to hang on to that.

So I want to talk about the book, and I want to talk about a couple of things. The book I'm referring to, of course, is Surfing for God. A couple of things from it. First, I just want to say thank you for writing it. I mean, the book came out in 2012. I'd been in recovery myself for about three years at that point, and it really tied together just a ton of what I had been learning about myself.

I know that it wasn't the first book written by or for Christians that portrayed desire in a positive way, but I feel like it was probably one of the first ones to tie sexual struggles to good, godly desires in a way that not only didn't curse desire, but it really blessed it. I still think that books like yours are some of the most important gifts and resources for people to read who have struggled with unwanted sexual behavior. I just wanted to start out any conversation about the book by saying thank you for writing it.

MJC: Well, you're welcome. And thank you. Those are kind words, and it's hard to believe that it's coming up about 13 years since it's been out. It feels like yesterday.

Greg: Right. I want to talk to you about a story that you tell in the book. It's actually part of the reason why we're calling this podcast What We Really Want. There's a quote, and it's going to take a second, but I want to read it and then just get you to talk about it for a second if you would.

“Can we spend some time together, Larry?” I ask, (...and the I is you in this. I'm reading from the book.) “I'm struggling with sexual temptation, and I'd like to talk to you about it.” While serving a postgraduate internship with author and psychologist Larry Crabb, I'd finally some of the courage to ask for help. Fortunately, he said yes. Unfortunately, I applied the “97% Rule,” which states that when sharing with a fellow Christian about your sexual sin, make sure you never share the most intimate 3%.
 
 Despite my outright deception, our conversation planted seeds in my heart that could not bear fruit until they were buried in the ground and died. “I'm really, really struggling with lust and wanting to look at pornography,” I admitted. By then I'd done a whole lot more than that, but being transparent was a big deal for me. Larry could see I was torn over my struggle, so he asked me some probing questions about my life story and sexual history.
 
 At the end of our conversation, he caught me totally off guard.
 
 “If what you really want to do is look at porn, he said, then go ahead and look at porn.” Yeah, right, like I'm really going to do that, I chuckled cynically. Larry just looked at me, dead serious, and repeated himself. “If what you really want to do is look at porn and masturbate, then go ahead and do it.” I could tell he wasn't being flippant, but I also knew his integrity, so I launched back at him.
 
 “I know this must be some kind of reverse psychology or paradoxical treatment that you're trying on me, right?” The look on his face, however, told me this was not his intention. “I don't get it,” I exclaimed. “Why are you telling me to go ahead and look at porn and masturbate?” In frustration, I hit my fist against the armchair and shouted, “That's not what I want to do!”
 
 Larry's eyes sparkled with delight. “Exactly,” he cheered. “That's the point. Looking at pornography and masturbating is not what you really want to do.”
 
 I was speechless. Could it really be true? Despite my out-of-control passions, could a passion for God inside me run deeper than my desire for sex and porn?

Greg: So it's been a long time since that happened.

MJC: Yeah, it was 1994.

Greg: 1994. So as I read it again, it seems like one of those super important moments in life. It's like a marker. As you reflect back on it now, what did that conversation with Larry Crabb awaken in you that led to what happened not too long after that?

MJC: Yeah, well, let me say that that was January of 1994, and everything came out in July of 1994. So for many people, they think that there's a moment that happens where we get sober. And for me, I had been in counseling, then I was in a graduate program, and I had been in men's community. And in July of 1994, when everything came out, there was a dramatic shift inside of me. But it began long before that.

We were sitting in Marietta, Georgia, in a Marriott Hotel, doing a conference. Dan Allender was there, but Larry and I were having this conversation late at night. And I summoned the courage to talk to him about it. And, you know, I called it the “97% Rule,” but I could put any percentage there. But I was absolutely committed then, there's a part of my story that he cannot know.

And I would just say that if someone has that inner vow or belief that there's, you know, they're going to go to their grave with a part of their story, you probably won't. I'll just tell you now. And so you can either be humbled or you can humble yourself. Because if I had shared with Larry that other 3%, I probably would have lost my job, but I would have saved my wife a lot of pain, and I would have saved myself a lot of pain.

But that was a moment when I really realized, experientially, that I wanted something deeper than sin. I wanted something deeper than relief. I wanted something deeper than a sense of power over my powerlessness and sense of inadequacy. It was really a profound moment. I knew in my head that idea, but before then, I hadn't really come to a place of accepting that. And it was just a couple weeks after that where I tell the story in Surfing for God as well.
 
I drove to a part of Denver where there was this adult bookstore and a bar that I used to go to, and I would always have to drink alcohol in order to then go act out. And if I went through this door to my right, I would have gone into the adult bookstore. But if I turned left, less than half a block away was the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. And it was a big deal because Pope John Paul had been there and said mass. 

But I ended up turning left, and I walked into that cathedral, and I was there alone, and I walked over and lit a candle. And I wrote this little lyric in my journal, and I'll just quote the words.
 
 It says, “In my audacious wandering, I presumed another sunrise and exhumed a life of ancient lies, then buried all my dreams. But lately, I've been pondering and seeing with my blind eyes the light that I'm defined by, and it's brighter than it seems.”
 
And that came out of that conversation with Larry, that there was a light in me that was deeper and brighter than it seemed at that given moment. And the corollary to that is that there is a desire in me and in every one of our listeners that is deeper and more pure and more holy than anything that they settle for. And this is why Aquinas said, and I've heard you quote this before as well, that beneath every sinful behavior, we could say for the non-religious person, beneath every unhealthy behavior is a legitimate God-given appetite. And I'm almost prepared to say that there are no sinful desires, there are no unholy desires, there are only godly desires that are misdirected and mishandled.
 
Greg: Yeah, and that's so important because our experience with them has gone sideways to a distorted place so often, then it sometimes can feel like a good solution to just kill our desire. But I don't think we're really able to do that. You know, even that is an exercise in futility and hopelessness. And so to see the difference between the good desire and the bad places where it has gone for a number of understandable reasons, that's when we really, by becoming curious and doing what your subtitle of your book says, is discovering the divine desire beneath sexual struggles.

I mean, that discovery process can't happen if we're not curious about it. If we're only judgmental and not curious, we're never going to find the goldmine of coming to know ourselves. And coming to know ourselves, do you believe there's a link between that and healthy self-agency, deciding what I want to do? And maybe talk a little bit about why self-awareness and understanding is so necessary for the development of healthy agency.

MJC: Well, it's impossible to develop healthy agency, which means that we're actually empowered to choose in a conscious way versus to be reactive or to be compulsive. And there's two kinds of people in the world, people that eat chocolate cake for breakfast and wish they wouldn't, that's always been me, or people that shudder at the thought of eating chocolate cake for breakfast, and they should probably try it. They're so uptight and they're so afraid of making the wrong move. And, you know, I've always eaten chocolate cake for breakfast. I'm that kind of guy, Mr. Addicted to Everything.

Greg: Just not so much lately.

MJC: Not so much lately. Especially with food. Thanks be to God. If I don't know who I am, I don't know what I really want. And I know that you and I both sat with countless men and asked the question in different forms, what do you want? What do you long for? What are you thirsty for? What does your heart desire? 

And nine times out of ten men go, "I have no idea. I have no idea." And then when I give them an exercise to actually begin to have categories to think about that, it's often, I want things for other people. You know, “I want my kids to have a good life.” “I want to go on nice vacations with my wife.” But there's very little sense of what our deep longings are.
 
And in Psalm 38, verse 9, King David, the man after God's own heart, says, “All my longings lie open before you, O God, my sighing is not hidden from you.” And I think one of the reasons why David is the man after God's own heart, despite his own brokenness, failure, and wreck of a life and family, if you will, is because he had a very accurate self-awareness and self-perception. If humility is being precisely who we are before God and other people, as Thomas Merton said, and then the True-Face guys picked up, then King David was incredibly humble in that he trusted God. He could actually be who he was, and he didn't have to be any more or any less.
 
So I would say that self-awareness and an accurate sense of self-knowledge is really important to freedom, to a life of freedom.
 
Greg: I was thinking and reading through some of my favorite parts of the book again earlier today before we talked, and a thought came to me. Are there any things that you have been thinking about in your work over the years since the book came out that if you were writing it today, you would add or change?

MJC: You know, I've thought about this a lot over 12 years, because when it was the 10-year anniversary, as that was approaching, I approached the publisher and talked about a revised edition, maybe adding a chapter on each end.

And we know a whole lot more about trauma. We know a whole lot more about attachment. But I think there's a very neurotic part of me that would go back and change everything. And then there's another part of me that says, that's the person who I was at that particular time. That's the language that I used.

And what I have done, rather than rewrite it, is I have a new book coming out in either late fall of ‘24 or early 2025 with InterVarsity. It's called Sacred Attachment, Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting Divine Love. And so I would talk more in Surfing for God if I added Sacred Attachment in, about what it actually means to taste and see that God is good, what it actually means to be still and know that He is God.

I've since gotten two tattoos. They're the only tattoos I have, but they're on the inside of my forearms. I got it with my son on my right arm. That's my strength because I'm right-handed. It says “Be still.” So Michael, chill in your strength and in your place of being able to grasp and take hold. And then my left-handed, which I'm very awkward with, it says “Be loved.”

And there again is the gospel, right? “Be still” is you're impoverished. You can't bring anything to the table to make God love you. And then the “Be loved” is all my brokenness and shame and things I've had to work so hard to trust God with. Those are the things that become barriers to actually being loved. So the hard work of sanctification is not doing something for God, but it's positioning ourselves, positioning myself to be loved by God. And all that said is I would go the direction of what Jay Stringer did in Unwanted, and that's talking about attachment.

I've often, just like you, I said patting myself on the back, but also Jay, there's two books I always recommend, and I think that everything else doesn't necessarily address the core issue around pornography in particular, but attachment is so key, and I'm constantly talking about the four S's of: You are seen, you are soothed, you are safe, you are secure in God. And that that becomes a rubric for me thinking about God and thinking about what we're looking for in God.

And another definition of the gospel would be, because of God's heart and how he's revealed himself in Christ, I am seen, soothed, safe, and secure. Something that he's done, and all I need to do is to receive it. So, I just think people need... I'll close with this. In Proverbs 27-7, there's a verse that I wish I had included in the book, and that is that the one who is full loathes honey, but to the one who is hungry, even what is bitter tastes sweet.

And I think what I would have done is written a chapter about how to be full and how to overcome a Christianity that many of us have inherited that really starves us because it puts us into a mode of doing and performance and serving, and the soul withers. As Eugene Peterson said, that if that's all we have in our faith, that our soul will wither and become impoverished.

Greg: God bless you, Michael. I'm so grateful for you spending some time. Thank you for telling us about your tattoos. Nothing we can bring to the table can make God love us, and nothing that we fear bringing to the table can make him stop. And thanks for that reminder of what we have if we know him.

MJC: You're welcome. Greg, it's so good to talk with you. Thank you for inviting me on your podcast. Good luck and congratulations with it. I know how hard it is to do this, and I'm glad that your message is out in the world.

Greg: Well, thank you. Y'all be sure to check out Restoring the Soul. We'll make some show notes to let you know how to do that. Michael, a whole lot of what we do is owing a lot to you and your work. So thank you. God bless you.

MJC: Bless you. Take care.