Unwanted Quotes

“The gospel tells us that our belovedness will never change according to our wanderings. But our belovedness is intended to change our wanderings.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“Freedom is an often paradoxical and unexpected path that is found through kindness and curiosity. What would it mean for you to bless instead of curse your body for experiencing what it felt? Will you cry out with agony for how your desire was misused instead of remaining silent in your shame? Honesty and kindness change the human heart. Contempt for arousal and silence in our shame lead to continual pursuit of unwanted sexual behavior.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“When a religious community practices shaming, the eradication of desire, and silence, it colludes with the effects of sexual shame and trauma.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“If you want to understand why you are addicted to something, you have to understand the conditions that keep your addiction in place.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“The overwhelmingly standard evangelical response to sexual brokenness has been to address it through the lens of “lust management,” even declaring war against it. This approach has oversimplified and trivialized a far more complex issue within human sexuality.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“Growing up in a rigid family system begets children who are often split off as either good or bad. Whether you become the golden child or the black sheep, your life reveals the pathology of a rigid family system. The black sheep of the family may look out of control, but if you listen to what drives his behavior and defiance, you will hear an honesty that rivals the truth-telling capacity of a biblical prophet. He refuses to live in a family that demands unquestioned loyalty to the tyranny of rigidity and, sadly, often squanders much of his life in defiant protest long after he leaves home. The consequences of his actions will certainly need to be engaged, but the recovery process of the black sheep is far easier than the golden child’s journey out of a life of self-righteousness and hiding.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“Casagrande was asked what in the world he is supposed to do when a great white shark is swimming right at him. He answered that he must do something counterintuitive: swim directly at the shark with the camera. This action seems to trigger a defense mechanism in the shark. “Now they’re like, ‘Wait a second, everything in the ocean swims away from me.’ The reality is that if you don’t act like prey, they won’t treat you like prey.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“We look to the past not to find excuses for reprehensible behavior but because narrative holds the key to unlocking destructive patterns and implementing all future change.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“What an adolescent may actually need is for both parents to be present in his life and free him to pursue a type of life that fills him with meaning. When this does not happen, the enmeshed parent will inevitably set up another round of rebellion for the child.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“At this point in your journey, lust exposes your demand to be filled. But if you listen to your lust, it will reveal a holy desire for belonging. Anger now exposes your demand for control. But if you study your anger, you will find that it produces a remarkable radar for injustice.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“Unwanted sexual behavior is one of the most common avenues we pursue to reverse or reinforce the negative experiences we endured in childhood. Our goal is to study and grieve the conditions that led to our sexual brokeness, thereby reducing their power over our present.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“The madness that most people find, however, is that the solutions we pursue apart from God and community leave us more alone than we were at the beginning. Here, we double down our bet on lust and end up bankrupt.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“Lust blooms in the soil of disengagement. Disengagement plants the seeds of lust because the child, who is made to experience tenderness and delight, recognizes that familial love is not something that can be depended on.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“This is the razor edge of recovery: Your unwanted sexual behavior must change, but it also needs to be honored as a symbol of all the unprocessed anger of living in a dysfunctional system.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“Bottom line: Anger escalates in any system that does not tell the truth.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“How often has a spouse appeared kind, hardworking, even sacrificial, but in private indulged in unwanted sexual behavior? The issue may be hypocrisy, but far more often, the person is recreating the original dynamics from childhood. The script he received was to present a tame and sacrificial version of himself to the world. Tragically, his sexual desire and personal opinions remain buried. Devoid of care, his thoughts and emotions were unable to mature.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“The creation-forming power of erotic love highlights the Achilles’ heel of evil. Evil cannot create anything out of nothing. It can’t clothe a tree with an abundance of beautiful leaves, it can’t make hops or grain for beer or spirits, and it can’t create the beauty of a human life. But what it can do is promote deforestation, seduce us to drink to the point of alcoholism, and through the production of pornography degrade women and dissolve the integrity of men and women.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“We are born with dignity. Honor and honesty (not blaming or minimizing) both must be addressed within our family systems. Our sexual brokenness is not random.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“If you ceased striving for a lust-free life, what would you be left with? We can be so preoccupied with filling our lives with something to do rather than trusting that God wants to do something within us. Jesus’ invitation to go to him when we are weary and heavy laden is for our sexual failures, but even more so for the trauma beneath those failures. God looks beyond the outward appearance of unwanted sexual behavior and into the heart of what is driving men and women into captivity.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“When purity culture becomes synonymous with surveillance culture, it must be seen as bordering on heresy.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“When we condemn our God-given desire to be loved and accepted, we should be on high alert for the ways we will trash this longing through shameful behavior.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“There is an unspoken rule in many homes and churches that sex is not to be talked about unless the conversation serves to put the fear of God in children about their participation in sex before marriage. Talking about sex solely in the context of prohibition, however, sets a child up for madness. A child needs to hear sex talked about in a way that honors the natural, God-given changes and desires that will accompany them from childhood to”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“If we fail to engage the ways we were sexualized in the past, we leave open the high probability that these patterns will become more pronounced in the future.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“As we begin this journey, ask yourself, Where is it that I come from? And where is it that I am going? May your heart be curious as you study the great tragedy and beauty that your story reveals.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

“Rigidity sets the stage for anger because it consistently exposes us to the hypocrisy of the ones in the family, community, or workplace who have power. Like the client who was shamed by her dad during the family reunion speech, those who are scapegoated develop a highly tuned radar for the double standards of others.”
― Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing