A Little Extra Helping with Crystal Renaud Day (Bonus Episode)

Sometimes there's just too much good stuff to fit it all into an episode! This is what it felt like when Stacey and I - with our friend Stevi - talked with Crystal Renaud Day about her work with women who struggle with unwanted sexual behavior.

One part of the conversation we didn't want to get lost was when Crystal talked about the work she does with teenage and pre-teen girls and their parents. What a refreshing thought...to address threats to safety and sexuality before they get out of control!

For parents who desire to protect your kids while you prepare your kids to be on their own, this is a great part of the conversation you'll want to listen to. Be sure to also listen to our other episodes focusing on how you can protect and disciple your kids' innocence and sexuality.

Please keep listening in...we'll be giving you new conversations every other Tuesday. Also, please support us by writing  a positive review and giving us 5 stars where you get your podcasts.

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Transcript

Why This Bonus Conversation Matters

Greg 0:02

Let's talk about what we really want. Hey everybody, welcome to a little extra helping of what we really want. Hopefully, you have had a chance to listen to last week's episode featuring Crystal Day talking about her work with women who struggle with compulsive or unwanted sexual behavior. It was called Understanding the Drivers. Crystal has been working for more than 15 years, coming out of her own story of healing and recovery and helping other women find the same thing. This little extra helping today is covering a part of the conversation that we couldn't fit. Well, we could have fit, but we decided to let it be a standalone because we didn't want it to get lost. It's so important. One of the things that Crystal offers through Living on Purpose, which is the coaching and counseling portion of what she does, is offer help for teenage and preteen girls, which is so important because to pay attention to this struggle before it has become addictive, it's just giving a lot more young women an opportunity to live a life free from this being just a weight that drags them down. So we wanted to let you hear about a 10-minute portion of the conversation that was not included last week. And uh here it is. Hope you enjoy it. You talk about childhood wounds, and that that takes me to something else I wanted to ask you about. It was really exciting when I saw it on your website. You not only do coaching and offer resources for adult women, but you have help for teenage and even for preteen girls. And that was just really exciting for me. And as a Stevie, as I listened to you talk about your experiences at eight, and we have a daughter too, whose porn exposure came at age eight. I'm also thankful as somebody whose recovery started in 2009 that there's so much more available to help now than there used to be, and there's more help for parents to know how to engage these conversations with their kids than there used to be. But there's also a whole lot of parents who are trying to reinvent a wheel that they never saw modeled in their own homes. And so they need these resources. And sometimes, you know, they're just not aware of what's out there. You offer help for preteen girls and teenage girls. Could you tell me a little bit about what that looks like? Because I mean, obviously there's awareness that there's something that needs to have attention paid to it, but before it's gone too far, like tell tell us how that got started and what that looks like.

Digital Safety Beyond Filters

Crystal Renaud Day 2:31

Yeah. So typically with that age group, it's delicate because we can't just see them without parental consent. Like so there's there's a need to have their parents involved. And so that and that's what kind of makes it special and unique is like we have, you know, a mom, or maybe we've had dads, you know, reach out to us. You know, I just discovered that my daughter was sending pictures to a boy, or my daughter was, you know, we found her history on her tablet. And so they're freaking out and they're online looking for support because they don't know what how to have these conversations. They don't know what to do. And of course, most I would say most parents don't handle it well when they first, you know, discover something like that. And and I think it's important that there's opportunities for moderated conversations or or you know, to have somebody that's with you to walk you through that process. Um so for for the teens, we have our teens and preteens, we have from time to time virtual groups where they're meeting with other team girls as part of that. And so they're meeting with a group curriculum meeting together for that, but then we also have the parents meeting together and having them talk about what they're doing and and how it's going and all of those things. But aside from that, it would be kind of like one-on-one coaching or counseling that these girls can experience too. And in that environment, nothing is secret to the parents. So um, it's very important to me. Like there are some things that we can keep sacred, you know, there's some things that that between coach and coachy or counselor and counselee can can stay private, but for the most, it's about helping them to communicate as parent and child so that they know what what they're struggling with, they know what's been going on, they know that deeper work needs to be done. But even before all of that, one of my favorite things to do is from time to time we do trainings on like teaching your, you know, protecting your kids from technology and just helping parents to navigate not just, you know, accountability or filtering's not enough. Like you can't just turn on filters and think your kids aren't going to be exposed to something or won't have someone reach out to them who's inappropriate or whatever, but about helping them navigate technology apps and consoles and that have if it has internet on it, then there's porn attached to it, or there's risk attached to it. And so helping them to navigate that as well. It's not our primary service like to help teens and young girls, but um, it is something that we offer as the need arises, as we have people come to us and ask for that support.

Greg 5:14

And you know, for the parents who are listening who are like, oh shoot, I freaked out when I caught my kid, I didn't handle that very well. I just want to extend some grace and maybe an invitation to some of the parents, because in a sense, of course, you didn't handle that well. Because when you discover as a parent that your child is doing things that you didn't know they were doing, and you understand more than they do the vulnerability and the risk that they're taking, I mean, that creates danger and your brain starts, you know, firing off cortisol and your your amygdala starts going going nuts. And so you do get very reactive. And so when you freak out about it, like that's that can have negative impact. But what if your intent is, I want to protect my child? And so that is a that's a wonderful desire. It's a wonderful intention. What we need help with from people who have the ability to be objective is just to channel that, you know, to channel that desire and that motivation into ways that are going to keep the door open and keep our kids feeling like we're a safe person to bring it to. Nobody's gonna bat a thousand, and you don't have to. You just have to work on getting it right as much as you can. And when you get it wrong, let them know you get it wrong because there's there's rupture, but there's also repair. And this is a great, it's a it's a terrible thing to be walking through as a family, but it's a wonderful thing that God can use to bring a family close together and heal.

Crystal Renaud Day 6:38

Absolutely. And I think that there's there's there's no too young to start having these conversations. There's a great resource out there called Defend Young Minds. Yeah. And it's Kristen Jensen. She's written, you know, good pictures, bad pictures. She just released one for girls.

Greg 6:55

Yep. I saw that.

Crystal Renaud Day 6:56

Yeah. And so to help you have age-appropriate conversations with your children about pornography so that it can become a thing where if they do find it, if they do stumble upon it, if somebody at school shows it to them, right, they know that we've always had this conversation. Oh, I know about this. This is something that my parents warned me about. And I can then go tell them and yeah, and and know what to do. Because you can tell them, come to me, tell me this happened. Like you're I'm not you're not gonna get mad, I'm not gonna have you know, I'm not gonna shame you, like, I'm not gonna judge you. Like you come to me and tell me because we've already had this conversation. And so for kids, like when they find porn with that understanding, it's less shocking too. Because I think about what it did to my system at 10 years old, like it rocked my world in a way that nothing since then has. Yeah, you know, and so and I was I was scared and I was intrigued and I was excited, like there was uh such a rush of different emotions and you're not thinking clearly because you can't. You're like you talked about before, your frontal cortex is mush, like there's nothing there yet. Yeah, you can't you can't make good decisions.

Shame Free Body Language

Greg 8:02

Well, and even if your prefrontal cortex is as it is as developed as it could possibly be for the age that you are, you're still the age that you are, and you still don't have the capacity to process the world that you will have later. And if these things are happening to you in great excess when you're young, when you are older, your capacity then is going to be diminished because of the the ongoing impact of what happened when you were young.

Crystal Renaud Day 8:25

100%.

Stacey 8:26

And I think I think that this is such a simple thing, but I think it's huge, is we get asked, like, how do how do we help our two and three-year-old? Well, you can't be talking very much at all about any of this. But like just the very simple calling the body parts what they are is I think a game changer because you are automatically putting shame, introducing shame when you have nicknames for or when you slap their hand away when they're touching themselves innocently. Or anything like that. So we did not do that well when our kids were little, but just and our oldest has a little boy, our grandson, he's four, and they are doing a beautiful job about that. And I just chuckle inside because the the there's no shame there. He can just bump it and he just says it's like, Oh, I hurt my penis. And it's like it's like I hurt my elbow. You might have to edit that. I don't know.

Greg 9:20

But um it's what it's called.

Stacey 9:22

Okay.

Greg 9:23

But yeah, I mean, I'm not ashamed to talk about my elbow.

Stacey 9:27

If we complicated the elbow, would the elbow then be like this? Oh, I don't want to say elbow. I don't know.

Greg 9:33

Let's let's like deep thoughts with Jim Candy.

Stacey 9:36

I just I think it is sometimes, but anyway, I think that's a real simple, it's probably not easy, but a simple thing to do is just let's demystify these, you know, our body parts.

Crystal Renaud Day 9:48

And to your point, Stacey, in our communities at She Recovery, and now it's the same for men and men's communities, but like we see P and M written more than anything else because for some reason they can't type pornography, they can't type masturbation, they can't type the things that they're doing, but they can do them. The M word. But there's so there's much M word. There's just so much about words that have that that really the you know, the enemy is taking hold of these words that are real and a real experience and a real part of your struggle. And if you can't say them, how are you gonna stop doing it?

Greg 10:25

Yeah, for sure.

Crystal Renaud Day 10:26

For some of them, you can't even say it.

Greg 10:28

For some people, I know it's a shorthand, it's a part of a longer conversation. But if it's not that, you know, if you're saying, well, I abbreviate because I'm scared to say it, then yeah, just pay attention to that. And what would it be like to find a place where you could actually say the words and people aren't gonna gasp and people are gonna nod and just say, yep. And it's it's it is more impactful in a positive way than anybody understands until they experience it.

Stacey 10:54

Well, and I would say that if you are somebody that's in a position where you would be talking about these things, you know, if you say the words, I make up that people struggling may not come to you, but they sure would be more likely to come to that person than others because they're able to say these things. That that's what it says to me anyway.

Resources For Parents And Next Steps

Greg 11:16

What a great conversation. It was such a good time with Crystal Day, and we're thankful for our friend Stevie for joining us. For parents who are listening, if this bonus episode has given you a little motivation to take a look at how you are communicating with your kids, just know that we have other episodes that have dealt with the same type of thing. If you go back to episode 21, that was with Kristen Miele, who has created a curriculum called Sex Ed Reclaimed, which is such a helpful resource offering parents some really great guided conversations that are age appropriate to help give your kids a really healthy perspective on sex and sexuality. And then also more recently, episode 55 with Chris McKenna, so many helpful resources for parents who want to be as protective as they can while their kids are still under their care. You also heard Crystal mention Kristen Jensen, who is the author of Good Pictures, Bad Pictures book series. We're gonna be having a conversation with Kristen in the very near future, and so we just would encourage you to be on the lookout for that. Just a lot of great resources out there for parents who want to offer more help, more conversation, more openness, and helping their kids feel a safe place to discuss sexuality, the world around them, the things that they're exposed to. So thanks for listening in to this little extra helping with Crystal Day. Hope you have a great week. Be sure to join us next Tuesday for an all new episode of What We Really Want. We'll see you then.