Welcome to another episode of Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. Today, our special guest is Sam Jolman, author of the forthcoming book, "The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine Sexuality."
In this episode, Michael and Sam explore the genesis of Jolman's book and the pivotal discussions that underpin men's sexual health and well-being. Learn about the distinctive approach Jolman takes in his writing, offering prescriptive advice and a descriptive, story-rich exploration of masculinity and sexuality. Discover why Jolman believes that understanding male sexuality is crucial, especially in the wake of the Me Too movement, which has left many questioning the inherent goodness of male desire.
Tune in as we discuss the necessity for open, ongoing conversations about sexuality, the concept of men as lovers, and the true needs behind sexual desires. We'll also touch on the impact of shame and the need for a more nurturing, informed approach to sexual education. Whether you're a man seeking a deeper understanding of your own sexuality or someone wanting to support the men in your life, this episode is packed with insights and compassion.
Feeling stuck in your relationships? Discover insights into possible underlying reasons with our complimentary resource, "Five Ways Unresolved Trauma May Be Derailing Your Relationship." Download here -> https://restoringthesoul.com/our-resources/
ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com
Welcome to another episode of Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. Today, our special guest is Sam Jolman, author of the forthcoming book, "The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine Sexuality."
In this episode, Michael and Sam explore the genesis of Jolman's book and the pivotal discussions that underpin men's sexual health and well-being. Learn about the distinctive approach Jolman takes in his writing, offering prescriptive advice and a descriptive, story-rich exploration of masculinity and sexuality. Discover why Jolman believes that understanding male sexuality is crucial, especially in the wake of the Me Too movement, which has left many questioning the inherent goodness of male desire.
Tune in as we discuss the necessity for open, ongoing conversations about sexuality, the concept of men as lovers, and the true needs behind sexual desires. We'll also touch on the impact of shame and the need for a more nurturing, informed approach to sexual education. Whether you're a man seeking a deeper understanding of your own sexuality or someone wanting to support the men in your life, this episode is packed with insights and compassion.
Feeling stuck in your relationships? Discover insights into possible underlying reasons with our complimentary resource, "Five Ways Unresolved Trauma May Be Derailing Your Relationship." Download here -> https://restoringthesoul.com/our-resources/
ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com
Thanks for listening!
Well, Sam Joelman, welcome to the Restoring the Soul podcast. Thank you, Michael. It's so good to be here. I want to start out just by congratulating you on your new book, which comes out June 11, 2024. For those who will have listened to this two years down from the road, but it's now about three weeks out from the launch date. The book is called the sex talk you never got, reclaiming the heart of masculine sexuality. Wow. Congratulations. Thank you, Michael. So appreciate that you and I had. The pleasure of meeting for breakfast at Bruger's Bagels, midway between Colorado Springs and Denver. I'm guessing four years ago. I think it was pandemic time because the place was empty, but what a joy to just get to know you. I heard about your counseling practice as the go to counselor in Colorado Springs, people that have worked with you, but wow, how fun to be talking with you. I think you were germinating this book at that time and kind of dreaming of getting something down on paper. But let me just say, magnificent book. I really mean that. I have had a lot of authors on our program, and I love their books. This is not hyperbole. I'm not a Sam Joelman sycophant, but this book is going to change the world the same way that Wild at heart opened up new categories for men's masculinity. And I know that there are categories of listeners that have read about the damage that wild at heart has done, not really realizing that it invites men into their woundedness as opposed to just empowering masculinity that does damage. I believe that this book is going to open up all new categories around male sexuality that will just bring waves and waves of change. May it be. May it be. Yes. Thank you, Michael. First of all, that is very generous words from you. I don't know how to take that in from you. I have great respect for you and obviously your work in this field and your heart for men. And I sit with men who have participated in your retreats and have read your book and have grown immensely. And even as I had said to you recently, you had a client that said, I have no words for what happened to me in Michael's presence at his retreat. So thank you for your work here. Yes. My goodness. May it be that my heart is that there could be a different conversation in our world about men's sexuality, that it could be understood and experienced in a different way that's actually redemptive and healing to the world. Yeah, I wrote surfing for God, discovering the divine desire, but in sexual struggle a little over twelve years ago, and I tried to write a sequel, and it's just never come because I couldn't find the right words, I couldn't find the right message. And then, of course, our colleague Jay Stringer wrote unwanted. And I tell everybody that, you know, I've always said, you know, there's two books you should read on the subject, mine and Jay's, and now there's. There's three. And I'm bumping your book up to the top of the list because you give this 30,000 foot perspective of the story of sexuality and the story of God and what he wants to do. But then you also bring it down to the very particular in an inviting way. And your book is the book that I never could have written and never should have written, because it's your story and your style and in your language, and dare I say, as a soon to be 60 year old, your generation, because I think you're about 15 years younger than me. And there's a language and a way of just kind of speaking, not like it's hip language or anything, but you're so immersed in the story idea that I think is far more a natural part of men that are a generation behind me. So I just can't say enough about it. And I just got to the end. You know, you and I have gone back and forth about where I got the wrong copy of the book and so on and so forth, but it took my brain breath away at the end, and I won't do a spoiler alert, but you shared some very personal story and information that just made my heartbreak and celebrate for the glory and the ruin therein. So let's jump in. Okay, that sounds great. So, Sam, first of all, you wrote in the book, and about 60% of the listeners of the restoring the soul program are women. And so there was this line that I thought would be very important to start with. You said, I'm deeply aware of the dangers close at hand in writing a book to rouse and bless male sexuality. And I thought that was so sensitive because women who have been victimized, and those numbers seem to be endless by male sexuality, whether it's been a physical assault or words or catcalling or pornography use, why would they want you and I to throw gas on the fire of male sexuality? Right? Because it's already done enough damage. So why did you start there? Or why was that part of that introduction? Well, in a lot of ways, that the me too movement was a threshold moment for even me, because the world at that time was really asking, it seems like, at least implicitly, is male sexuality just this fundamentally broken thing? Right? Is there something monstrous inherent to male sexuality? And understandably, as we know, 90% of abusers are men. It's not to say 90% of men are abusers, but 90% of abusers in people's stories are men. And the me too movement obviously revealed there's this plethora of harm that may not fit into the category of sexual abuse, but is this sexualizing or objectifying that the world has suffered? So I think I stood at that moment asking, and as I sit in counseling, as I know you surely do, sitting with men who themselves are asking of their own sexuality, gosh, am I just twisted? Am I just broken? Fundamentally, it's hard to imagine anything of original goodness here to male sexuality. Like, God made this good, right? So what is that good? Because we know that God stood in the garden of Eden and said, this is very good. Of Adam. Of Adam and his sexuality, along with all of creation. So I felt that tension so acutely after the me too movement. If it's meant to be good, why all of this pervasive harm in the name of it? So I think entering into the book, I actually wanted the word roused in the subtitle. My publisher settled for reclaiming. But the idea of rousing a man could feel incredibly scary. And why would we want to do that? Setting a lion free from the zoo? What are we doing here? So, wanting to hold the tension of, look, I'm aware something has gone really wrong here, but I do believe why they wrote the book, that there's something we've lost. And it's not. The broken thing in male sexuality is not too much sexual desire per se. Right. It's not that that's inherently wrong. It's that something of the heart of masculinity, something of the heart of sexuality and men has gone gone wrong, gone awry, has been lost. And that heart is what I sought to recover through the book. Thank you for all of that. Thanks again for the sensitivity to women. I know a lot of women are going to read this book, and again, at the outset, and this is redundant, I acknowledge this book is categorically different from every other book that listeners will read about sexuality. One of the frames I put around it is that instead of being prescriptive, do this, do that. Look at this first. Try to bounce your eyes. Your book is descriptive. It's describing the story of God. It's describing the soul and what we're created for. It's describing masculinity. It's describing all the variants and the levels of sexuality. It's describing the barriers to us accessing that and living in that. And then it's describing a path forward. And I think that it's so compelling, if you will. I think you're giving a framework and a model for being wholehearted men. And you also. This was one of the very first paragraphs in the introduction. You said, as men, our sexuality is one of the most neglected and abandoned parts of us. And I got that right away as a counselor. But I know that there's going to be people that hear that and think it's counterintuitive, right. Because the man who's struggling with porn or sex addiction, or the couple that is having intimacy issues, or the man that shut down sexually and has completely lost his heart and his desire. The problem seems to be a preoccupation with our sexuality. And you're actually saying that it's neglected and poorly understood. Yes. Right. So the tension that we all live in at some level is that we are over sexualized and under sexually nurtured. In other words, if you think about it, sexuality for most men is probably the place they had the least meaningful conversations in their life and their development. You know, we have, um, the proverbial locker room talk or sex jokes. But, um, sexuality, it's. We've treated it like this thing that sort of clicks on and just sort of runs itself and just sort of works. Um, you know, and obviously by my use of the title, um, just inherent, even in our neglect of the sex talk, which, you know, for most men was either brief or non existent from my experience of my personal experience in my own story, but also the men that I talk with and even generations of men that I talk with, it's just a place we haven't had any meaningful conversation in an ongoing dialogue. Right. It's not just one sex talk. And then it's over. Because sometimes what men get is a kind of shoddy anatomy lesson and then pretty quickly, like a purity lecture, and that's it, right? And so the sex talk's done, but it doesn't explain. It's not an ongoing dialogue that integrates sexuality into our lives and lets it be a part of life and a part of our growth. And we don't have, for example, even the romance talk as a part of the sex talk. We don't talk about the heart of sexuality. We talk a lot about how the parts work and that's where it kind of ends. So if you think about it, I think a statistic I read is that we get about 6 hours of formal sex education in school through, like, a health class or a sex focused education, but far less, it seems, at home than even 6 hours over a lifetime. So with our parents. So, yes, men are over sexualized. We're sold everything through sexual titillation. Right. Or the pervasive presence of pornography in the world. Absolutely. Men are over sexualized. And the point I'm making is, it's not a need for more sex per se. Right. It's a need for the cultivation of something deep within a man that gets overlooked. You talk about how at the beginning of the book that we are lovers, and you go through different chapters. One of them is, what is sexual? Will you take a minute and describe what seems to be, on one level, very, very obvious, what is sex? It's obviously way more than what we do with our genitals. But unpack that idea a little bit as we move a little deeper into the book. Yeah. So what I say is the thing that often gets overlooked in a man is his love or heart. We don't have a category for men as lovers, or at least not an honoring one. Right. It's sort of, you know, I don't hear men out there claiming to be lovers very overtly out loud. Right. We know men to be hard workers or warriors. Right. Like men who suffer and push through hard things and get a job done and, you know, put their life on the lines, even. Right. And those are very respectable things about men, that they would be willing to put their life in service to a greater cause. But that's kind of where the image of masculinity seems to stop, right. That men are. Men are tough, they push through, they have resilience. But we don't have a lot of category, for men are also lovers, that men need to give and receive love, even as simple as with their dog, let alone their family. And we know that baby boys and boys, as they grow up, are held less statistically than our girls. So there's this sense that there's this neglected category we have from men, which is that they need to give and receive love. We don't know how to talk about that well, in masculine culture. So, you know, what I make very clear in the book is that every man is a lover, meaning you love and you want to receive love. I've never met a man in counseling who doesn't want love, who doesn't need love, right. At his deepest self and doesn't want to give love. Certainly we have tough pictures of men, but those fall short of what's true of all men in general. So I often have men in my office say to me things like, I feel like I'm more like the woman in the relationship because I actually need the emotional stuff, actually want connection. Why does a man have to almost hide it in a counseling office? His need for care and love. So that's something that I think every man has to learn to step into and grow into his desire and need for love. And that's the place that, as I say in the book, your sexuality is meant to flow from. Your heart is a lover, you're a lover. So your sexuality fits within that category, so to speak. And as I say, then, what is sex? Well, it's the giving and receiving of love. It's an act of love making. At its heart, it's meant to be that. But as I say in the book, love, sex itself, is actually a form of play. I think that's the essence of sex, is it's a place our love is meant to play. It's certainly not the only place. In fact, if it's the only place your romance or your love plays, something becomes missing in your life. But sex is a form of play at its essence. It follows the sort of rules and design of play. Thank you. That's so good. And I love how you talk about the lover, the heart of the lover, and you start out the book as a single chapter, but that's woven all throughout, and you especially bring it back at the end about how the world needs men to be lovers, to bring about the kingdom of God, and to make the good news real. But it's also important because it sets the context that sex is not a need. And you have a big section on that. And you and I both know Sheila Gregoire, who wrote the great sex rescue and other books. And that's something she talks a lot about. And I know that some of the background of her research has influenced your book. But will you just touch on knowing that we can't talk about every subject, this idea that sex is a need and a drive versus it's a want. Yes. You know. Yeah. Sheila's work has heavily influenced some of my thoughts on this. But as well, Emily Ngoski, who is a writer on sexuality, more in the secular vein. But she has a great book where she describes sex. We call it a drive, but it's not a drive. A drive in the body is for things like food, oxygen, water, sleep. And certainly love is in the category of a drive, right? You need love, you need care. But sex, as she says, no one's ever died for lack of sex, right? You will die for lack of oxygen, but you won't die for lack of sex. In other words, it's a desire. It's a want, not a need. And the good news about that is that you can interact with it more. You can have a relationship in a conversation with your sexuality. It's not this urge. I think, especially in the church, men who treat sexuality as an urge, you end up having this very confused relationship with your body, which is, I have to meet this need. I'm a slave to my urge. I have to get released somehow. And it fuels life or death. Maybe in that confusion. A lot of times, as I say in the book, I'm convinced when men feel their sexuality as a need, it's often because actually, what they need is some form of soothing. A lot of times, men's sexuality gets joined to their need for parasympathetic soothing. And, yes, sex is a relaxer. It does soothe you. It can soothe you, at least. It does release hormones, chemicals into your blood, relaxants that do relax you. And you do feel oxytocin, which is a hormone which brings comfort. So that's true that sex can comfort you, but the real need is probably more in the category of you need soothing, which we as men, again, we don't have a lot of categories for. Okay, men, what do you do to soothe? It tends to fall into categories of like, alcohol or addiction tends to be where men try to get soothing for their nervous systems. So that's what I see often, is this confusion of, well, I need sex. Well, you probably need soothing, actually. Right. And sex feels like the way to get that quick. Yeah. I've worked with countless men who have said it feels like if I don't have sex that I'm going to die. It feels like I'm not going to be able to live with myself. I've worked with probably dozens and dozens of men who cannot fall asleep sometimes, and many who cannot fall asleep, literally on a nightly basis without masturbating, sometimes with or without looking at porn. And we won't get into the controversy of masturbation. Is it a sin? But it's certainly not. If it's done or needed to be done every day, then that falls under the category of it's at least not helpful, or it might be keeping you out of relationship. But when you talk about soothing, we both work with people in our practice who come and say, maybe their presenting issue is, I'm just kind of spiritually lost and I can't ever feel God or have never experienced God. And asking the question and being curious about, well, where do you go for your soothing? And not being able to be present to their own pain, their own nervous system that is activated. How can they possibly be present to God or present to being able to receive love? So that work of learning how to soothe ourselves, it's so important. And thankfully, we both live and practice in a time when the language and the tools and the framework is there to be able to work with people's bodies in that kind of embodied way. And I was so glad that you had a section in the book on embodied sexuality and what it means to practice soothing ourselves on an embodied level. I want to then turn to. Your book is called the sex talk you never got. And, gosh, right away that catches my attention, because I didn't get one. My sex talk was through pornography and the neighborhood. But then you have a chapter called your real sex education. And that has to do with our story that our sexuality is all storied. So jump into that. Yeah, we've tended, it seems to treat, again, sexuality as this thing that comes in a box to you, and boom, there's your sexuality. It is what it is. It's sort of unaffected by life. It exists in a realm that isn't concurrent with your story, so to speak, or impacted by your story. But as I know you know very well, so much of our story plays out in our sexuality. And our sexuality is storied. Not just oriented, but storied. It is impacted by what I call our sexual formation, which is not just what did you learn in the 6 hours of health class or the awkward ten minutes with your parents, but every sexual experience, including our attachment story, our embodiment story, all of that impacts how we embody our sexuality. That's what makes our sexuality storied. And as I say in that chapter, it's not simply that. I think it's true for all of us. One day, you sort of awaken, and sexuality is this character, this mysterious character that's suddenly with you in your body at puberty, suddenly have the hormonal presence, like your sexuality is clicked on, right? And it's with you as this force in your body. But along with that, wouldn't it be great if for all of us, that process of getting to know our sexuality was one of innocence and awe and discovery, right? And if there was a kind of welcoming to our coming of age and a blessing of our bodies designed for desire and pleasure. Right? Wouldn't that be great? But as we all know, as I say in that chapter, the other character that seems almost instantly present as well in our stories is the category of evil. And that evil seeks, at some level, to join all of our stories of sexuality, to sow some sort of shame into all those stories so that what we're left with is stories of shame. Not stories of innocence and discovery. Right. But stories of shame that we want to shut down and bury. Sam, this is a good place to wrap up part one of this conversation as we talk about shame and the barrier that that is and the way that that plays out and the way that evil seeks to create that sense of shame and distance from God and from one another. And then on part two, let's step into, as we come back, the idea of shame versus innocence and what the path forward is. So thank you so much for your time today, and we'll talk again in part two. That would be.