Latest / Intentional Guy / I'm No Longer Being Adopted
Transcript
- Michael Chestnut: Welcome back to the Intentional Guy. I'm Michael Chestnut. My guest today spent over a decade. behind a pulpit telling men how to walk with God. Then his own addiction got loud enough that he had to walk away from the pulpit to survive it. what he found on the other side wasn't another program to sit through. It was cold water, real silence, and other men willing to walk into the wilderness with him. Jason Lyle Welcome to the intentional guide. Thank you for being here today. Jason: Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. Michael Chestnut: I I'm really excited about it because our our stories really kinda in some ways lines up, it's funny, you you find people where they're similar stories, but the stories themselves have so many difference to them, but also I love it because I also see how God worked so differently. in those paths, even when it's the same addictions and other things like that. So first off what I'd like to do, Jason, if you tell my wouldn't mind sharing with my audience a little bit about you and and let's dive into your story. Tell us a little bit about that. Jason: Sure. I Jason Lyle grew up in East Point, Georgia. I was adopted when I was two weeks old and was adopted into kind of a leave it to beaver family. Dad went to work, mom stayed home, the whole thing. And but I always had this deep curiosity around spirituality, but also I had a a deep sense of just being untethered, not really having anywhere that I belong. That sense of being untethered led to a pretty serious sex addiction that began really when I was about probably 10 or 11 years old and followed me all the way through adulthoodhood. I grew up in a Baptist church. And so you really didn't talk about sex in a Baptist church or you didn't Michael Chestnut: No. Jason: talk about what it was for. You did, but I mean it was kind of understood it was for procreation and that was all, you know. And so Carried that forward, became a pastor in 2003, and fought that addiction for quite some time. Looking back on it, I think that going into the ministry, I felt like that if I gave my life over to God, that God would heal the addiction because I would be doing the Lord's work. and of course that that doesn't work out. And so in 2017, I had a 26-year-old girlfriend. I lived in her apartment with her. While my wife and kids, my wife at the time and kids, lived in my home and I would get up from my girlfriend's apartment on Sunday morning and drive to the church and preach sermons and then get out of church and drive back to my girlfriend's apartment. And of course that didn't last very long. That culminated in me stepping down and losing a job. Tried to reconcile with my wife and in the midst of that had another affair, which led me to a place of planning my own suicide. And that was my rock bottom. And that was when I really started the journey toward healing through nervous system regulation. I I didn't really even know anything about nervous system regulation. but I began to learn that for people who are adopted, they have pre-verbal trauma, there's a big part of what goes on inside of us that is in our body and it doesn't really have a voice. We can't really put words to it. But we can learn how to feel it and to regulate it and to learn how to recover from our addictions by regulating our nervous system. when your body gets dysregulated, you know, all signals start in the body. All of them. Pain, depression, anxiety, fear, all of them. Anger, joy, all of it starts in the body. You don't just decide in your prefrontal cortex, I'm gonna be angry now. You feel angry and so you get angry. You don't decide in your prefrontal cortex I'm gonna be happy now. You feel happy and then you think happy. It's the reason why we say you can't think yourself into a new way of being, but you can be yourself into a new way of thinking. So when my body was sending signals into my brain that was setting the alarms off in my brain, and they were false alarms, there's really nothing wrong. But I learned that those false alarms were what was causing me to run to my addiction. Now that's not an excuse. I still took responsibility for my actions. But once I started learning how to control those alarms, and that's the cold water immersion, yoga, breath work meditation, I started learning how to feel and control those alarms. I started learning how to rationally see what was actually going on and not make up things in my head that I thought was going on, but to rationally look at life, and that is nervous system regulations, expanding our capacity to be with uncomfortable feelings long enough to see them in a rational way. Paul Would have said take every thought captive and make it obedient, and that's what nervous system regulation is. Michael Chestnut: Okay. amazing. I just I had never heard of that before Jason: most people in Christian circles haven't heard of it. It it's but it's been around for quite some time. It's called Somatic Experiencing. a man named Basil van der Kolk wrote a book probably near about 20 years ago now called The Body Keeps the Score. We now know that you have as many neurons in your stomach that the average cat has in its brain. So the idea of a gut feeling is a real thing. It's not just a an abstract idea or a metaphor. You do have gut feelings or You know, the cold chills that run up your neck when somebody follows you down an alleyway, those are all very real. And learning how to, and this, you know, the people from the Middle East and and in India and Asia, they kind of have they revolve their spirituality somewhat around these ideas, not that they get it perfect either, but the idea that we are more than just a brain and a body, we are this system. And you know, the Bible would say we're mind, body, and spirit. And I believe in all three of those things. I believe we do have a mind, we do have a body, and we certainly have a spirit. And that spirit dwells inside of the mind and the body. It's the spirit of truth. Jesus called it the paraclete or the helper, the one that comes along and helps us in our time of need. And when we learn how to really access our information that's in our brain and get it into our body, and the information that's in our body and get it into our brain, and the two start communicating with one another. Well then we start making loving decisions back toward ourselves and others and fulfill the greatest commandment. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Once we learn how to love ourselves, we can truly love our neighbor and then we are truly loving God. So it's a spiritual formation, but it's tied up in a lot of neuroscience as well. So I I love it because I have, you know, two seminary degrees and you know, I I've studied theology, studied the Bible. I could still pick it up today and preach your good old Southern Baptist three points in a poem sermon with no problem. But this gave me the neuroscience behind what it means to be able to access truth in your brain that you know and tie it to your actions in your body. And that's loving God with your heart, soul, mind, and your strength. Michael Chestnut: And and I do think that a lot of times we we leave the science out of things, especially in the faith world. and so like for me, I was a Baptist preacher's kid. And mine came from being molested as a child by a missionary. And like you said, we never talked about those things. and so I hid that until I was in my fifties. once I finally got to counseling, once I finally admitted it, once I finally all this other stuff and dealing with it, then it was like, Man, that's why you always came back to sex for for an answer or for an escape and so one of the things I'm realizing is that, and I and I think it's true for any addiction too, is that There's there's an underlying problem other than just the act itself that's taking place. And we Jason: Sure. Sure. Yeah. Michael Chestnut: don't look at the science or the counseling for that. so you found yourself divorced and you're picking up the pieces of your life. What did that look like? Jason: Well, here's the thing about cold water. I'll start there. Most men are living their life, making their next decision based off who they think they are and not who they actually are. That ties back into our conversation about believing that you're broken. But if you want to know who you actually are, you crawl out of the bed at five thirty AM and walk out on the back porch naked and get in forty five degree water for three minutes. That'll tell you who you actually are. But it's It's a way that we can set off every alarm in our body when we get in that ice cold water and we can calm ourselves with our own prefrontal cortex and we can go, I'm okay. It's only three minutes. I'm not going to die in three minutes. And I can tell you, Michael, there's never a day when I wake up at 5.30 a.m. and go, woo, I cannot wait to get in that cold water. I dread it every single morning. But equally, there's not a day that I get out and don't say, man, I sure am glad I did that. Because it is an amazing tool to use to learn how to regulate ourselves. So when I started putting my life back together, I was still married. I started doing cold water immersion every day in some version, whether it was a cold shower or it was a tub full of water. now I have a chiller and everything on my back porch. But I started doing yoga. I started learning what it feels like to put my body in these. uncomfortable poses, but sit with it long enough until I could feel a release. I started doing breath work with these really long breath holds, up to three minutes of holding my breath, training my mind and my body how to speak to one another through the breath. The Bible calls it the theos pneumas, the breath of God. Genesis says God leaned over and he breathed his breath into Adam and that's what gave him life. And it is our bridge between life and death and just Being with our breath and concentrating on our breath helps us contemplate our life and our death. Then meditation is very simply watching my thoughts go by and not grabbing them and becoming my thoughts, but learning how to detach from my thoughts. And through that process, I started to realize that everything that I had ever believed about myself as a man were constructs. you're adopted. That's a construct. You are disposable. That's a construct. Your parents, you were second choice. They would have rather had kids. Instead, they had to adopt you. That's a construct. You're eventually going to be given away again. That's a construct. Nobody could ever love you. That's a construct. I had to learn that until I started to take those constructs of my mind or patterns of this world, and maybe still have those thoughts, but just as quickly let those thoughts go. And until I learned how to do that, I would keep acting as if they were true. So nobody's ever going to love you, so I better love as many people as I can. You're eventually going to be given away, so I better have as many options as I can for somebody to hang on to me. You're disposable, so I better make myself indisposable by being useful to everybody and then resent them for the fact that I'm doing it. So all of my sexual acting out, all of the porn use, all of the finding these women and having sex with them, all the things that I did. All of those things were me trying to turn off the alarm that was set off when I was born. Now, once again, I don't want your listeners to hear me make excuses. I'm not making excuses. This is neuroscience. But once I learn how to find that switch in and of myself and turn the alarm off and go, wait a minute, is the house really on fire? No, the house is not on fire. Then I learn how to take command of my own decisions. And as long as we keep farming that out to things that happened to us in the past and people who did the thing to us and the the reason we were given away, we just keep having the same behaviors without ever saying, you know what, that happened and that is not my fault, but it is my responsibility. Until then, we just keep making decisions based off the thing that wasn't our fault. And we stay a captor to our previous per our perpetrator instead of going, you know what? That happened. I'm not going to live there anymore. I'm going to move forward making decisions for my own life. And once we learn how to do that, then we start living as free people. That's the reason why Jesus said you'll know the truth. And it's the truth that sets you free. And the truth Michael Chestnut: Mm. Jason: is I'm no longer being adopted. I was I was adopted, but I'm not being adopted right now. The truth is I'm in a loving relationship. The truth is I have two children who love me. The truth is I am Perfectly whole in and of myself, those are the truth, and that sets me free to live as such. Michael Chestnut: Wow. Well, you also are you allowed the wilderness and other things in your life that that seem to have changed you have a different approach is what I guess what I'm looking at. And reading on some of the things that you've done, it's more than a you've you've gone through more than just like a twelve step process. You you You know, you got the cold bath, but also the deep breathing, but also your you know, some of the wilderness like i explain that to me is that just getting out into the nature. Jason: Yeah, so I leave on Sunday morning headed to Colorado elk hunting and I'm taking two guys with me. I do this every year. as soon as I get back, I'm taking a group out backpacking for three days. And then when I get back from that, I take another group out backpacking for three days. One of them is a group of four men, the other one's a group of eight men. But the wilderness really teaches us that we're not in control. I mean, I'm an avid mountain biker and rock climber. I've been doing those things for years. I enjoy doing those. But being outside in nature let the helps it teaches us really, really fast you're not in control, right? If you're sleeping Michael Chestnut: Mm-hmm. Jason: outside for three nights, you don't walk over and turn the thermostat down, you just deal with whatever temperature it is. If it starts raining, you just get in your tent or you get under a shelter or you get wet. If you get if you have to go to the bathroom, you go dig a hole in the ground so you have somewhere to poop. If you need water, you have to purify it. You're eating food out of a bag, you have to. build a fire to heat to cook. So all those things teach us that we're not in control because most of us live in a situation where I can flip a switch and turn a light on. I can turn a thermostat down and turn the air conditioner on. I can go to the refrigerator and grab something to eat that's already cooked. I can go to the faucet and turn the water on. I can go to the bathroom and use the bathroom. We live in these environments that we can control. But when we go into the wilderness and we realize that we're in an environment that we cannot control, we learned that we're not the biggest thing on the face of the planet. And so it's one of the greatest teachers that we have. Michael Chestnut: when you're taking these men up there, what what is what is one of the main things that you guys are that you're trying to instill? Jason: To be still. Yeah. To be still and let life happen instead of always moving and trying to run from life. Michael Chestnut: Jason, so I'm I'm gonna pick your brain a Jason: Yeah. Michael Chestnut: little bit, okay, with it. You know, w let's just be honest. Me and you, I think we can understand this better because of our history, right? the church is full of of people right now who are caught up in sexual addiction. but the church is full. We never know what the person sitting next to us is going through. And so what would you say to that guy that's sitting there that i is just what I just said to you? He doesn't know there is no one for him to go talk to. Maybe he's stuck in one of those churches. There is nowhere right now for someone For him to go talk to you. What what do you say to him? Jason: Just to stop. Get on the phone. G email me, jason. Lyle at the sacredgrit.com. Do something, but you gotta stop. Because here's the thing. Living a life on the outside that is not conducive with who you are on the inside is causing you to split in half. And that split in half is what causes all of the problems. you have to get your insides to match your outsides. And the only way to do that is by confessing, but that is strategic. Michael, you don't just start walking around telling everybody what you've done. You need to start with one trusted brother that you can say, man, let me tell you everything that's going on. And then you can start to untangle the process from there. But as long as you're living in secrecy, it's just, you know, the darkness flees from the light, man. I mean, it's as simple as that. And Michael Chestnut: Mm-hmm. Jason: the light is truth. And so you got to get on the phone with somebody. You got to tell them what you're doing. You have to get it light on it. And it doesn't mean that like I did, you have to blow your whole life up tomorrow, but it does mean you need some good, solid wisdom around it to start putting your life back together. Michael Chestnut: I totally agree with that. That's when healing started for me. I got on a plane, left Chicago, came to the last place I wanted to be, which was Pensacola, Florida, where my parents lived. But God ordained that moment because two hours later, this pastor I had never met in my life, but somehow through my sister, he came by, picked me up, took me to Wendy's. And I don't know, there's something about this man that I'd never seen before. And next thing you know, For the next four hours sitting in in there, I just regurgitated all this stuff for the first time. And he is the reason I was able to find freedom. Because he didn't flinch at anything I told him. He didn't sit there and go, my. You know, he's he sat there with kindness. in his eyes and just listened. You know, but I think the the hardest part for some of the men maybe listening to us, I had never seen a man like that before. God had to take me to Florida, from Chicago to Florida to find him. You know. But that's Jason: Yeah. Yeah. But here's the thing, man. What what what I do with my guys w when they initially reach out, a lot of them find me through either my book or my podcast and I'll tell just book a call. It's free. You don't have to pay me a dime. And they'll book that first call and we just throw all in the floor, you know, and then I'll when it's all laying in the floor, I'll say, All right, well, right here's where we need to start and we start putting the pieces together. And some of take off from there and flourish on their own and some of them book calls after that so we can continue to put their lives back together. But you can't do it alone. And generally speaking, you're not going to call somebody that you know really close and they're going to be able to see it objectively as well. Like you need somebody who's on the outside. Whether Michael Chestnut: Mm-hmm. Jason: you go to a SA, NA, AA meeting and get a sponsor, or whether you go to a therapist or whether you call somebody like me who's a spiritual coach, no matter what you do, You gotta figure out somebody that you can get all this stuff out to and they can help you make sense out of it and put your life back together. Michael Chestnut: Yeah, and if you think there's a non embarrassing way to do it, you're fooling yourself. Th there's not, Jason: There's not. Yeah, there's not. Michael Chestnut: you know. And I rem I went to SA, that was the Jason: Now here's the thing, Michael. They're they're making a bigger deal out of it than it actually is. There's Michael Chestnut: Mm-hmm. Jason: nothing I've not heard. They tell me anything. They tell me they, you know, whatever. And I won't say some of the things I've heard before, but I mean it's it's crazy. Some of the stuff I've heard. It doesn't matter. You know, the only thing that stopped me from doing things that were completely illegal and getting myself thrown in prison was just I just didn't get wired that way. We had a guy that used to come to SA meetings. He had just got out of prison. for child pornography and he we had to sign this paperwork for him and some of the other guys were really hard on him, like look, let me tell you something, man. I could have been that guy. I'm not Michael Chestnut: Mm-hmm. Jason: gonna judge it because I could have one hundred percent been that guy had my brain wired me in that direction. So there's no judgment, man. Michael Chestnut: Yeah. And by the by the grace of God, that's the one thing I agree with in my Baptist heritage was by the grace of God go I because when you're in an addiction with pornography, it's progressive. And how many lines did Jason: Yeah, it's very progressive. Michael Chestnut: I say I'm not gonna cross? And I cross. Yeah, you know. Jason: Probably a bunch of Yeah. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Michael Chestnut: But I think the pivotal moment is what you just said. I mean, w you gotta tell you gotta call brother. You gotta call someone. And I I think I agree with you. I I It probably isn't gonna be someone that you know. They need to give someone like you or me a call that maybe they don't know and who Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Michael Chestnut: who doesn't have a a dog in the show and can actually be honest with them and say, Hey, it's gonna be okay. This this is not something new that God has not been able to to transform. You're you know, you're not. I thought I was inherently unique and not fixable. You know, that that was what was in my mind. And then, you know, I went to SA and I remember the first time in SA, Jason, and it was the most embarrassing day of my life. I'm sitting here in sex a holics anonymous. How did I get here? Jason: Yeah. Michael Chestnut: And they did what they did was which you would be aware of it, but for my wit listeners knowing. When a new person would show up, they would do what was called a new members class. And they would go around and Jason: Newcomers meeting. Yep. Michael Chestnut: they would tell their stories. And I remember sitting there thinking, by the time they got done with it, I wasn't alone anymore. I Jason: That's right. Michael Chestnut: and then I remember they looked at me and they said, You're welcome to share or you're welcome not to. But do you d now that you heard our story, and I remember saying, you know, I'm Mike and I heard those words coming out, I'm a sexaholic. Wow. freeing, but painful too. And but Jason: Yeah. Yeah. But true, and the truth sets you free. Michael Chestnut: yeah. Jason, tell me tell us a little bit about your book. Tell us about that. Jason: So it's Sacred Grit, a pastor's story of faith collapse and re-graiming the nervous system. It's the whole story. I kind of start at the beginning when I'm you know, laying in a pool of vomit and on my twenty-six-year-old girlfriend's bathroom floor and it walks you all the way through to pretty much today or within the last year or so and all the steps I took. I wrote it to men specifically. it's you know, short. Chapters. I mean it's a very short book. It's only a hundred, I think a hundred and forty something pages, maybe. It's a I call it a toilet read. You know, you sit on the back of the toilet and pick it up, read a chapter. And yeah, it's it's my story. And I'm working on the second book now called Taming the Beast, and it is all about nervous system regulation. it'll come out sometime next year. But yeah, it can be found on Amazon, it's on Kindle paperback, and it's on an audio book as well. Michael Chestnut: We'll make sure we put that in the description. And then you Jason: Thank you. Michael Chestnut: you also do counseling or coaching with men. Jason: Yep, I do spiritual coaching. Yep. One on one. And all that information is on my website at the Sacred Grit dot com. or they could just reach me, Jason Dotlile at the sacred grit dot com and I'll be glad to respond to any email they send. but yeah, I have multiple programs. Some guys I do twelve week programs with, some guys we just do one on one calls. I lead retreats and hiking trips and mountain biking trips and rock climbing trips and fishing trips and hunting trips and All manner of things. So no matter what medium they want to choose, I've I've got something to help them out. Michael Chestnut: So I'm gonna ask you a weird question, but I know this would be my question. And you know this, the first step is the scariest one. The first step is the scariest one. So Jason: Sure. Michael Chestnut: that first step would be them reaching out to you. Can you tell them what does that look like? So maybe Jason: Yeah. Michael Chestnut: that will make it a little easier for them to do it. Jason: Yeah. They reach out, send me an email, kind of give me a bit of their story. We'll book a consultation call. It's a one-hour Zoom call. And we just hop on the phone and they can just spill their guts. And if they and I have this happen a lot, they may never call me again. I may never hear from them again. But some guys just need to get it all out. others we put a game plan together and they move forward with that game plan. And others go ahead and book multiple sessions so they can start working on themselves. But it's it's just I mean, it's just a moment to get it all out and hear yourself say it to somebody else and that is that is the first step and it is the hardest one. Michael Chestnut: It and it is. And I do think having a a good life coach or counselor in your life going through something like this is really important because strategy is everything. what a lot of what got us to where we are was because of a lot of bad thinking, things we didn't we don't even realize it's good to have someone from the outside. be able to look at things and point things out to you that you would normally not know or seen before to help you move forward. So I think what you're doing is is really great and I appreciate it. That that's that's awesome, man. So Jason: Thank you. Thank you. Michael Chestnut: well and I want to thank you. Thank you again for being on the show today. He Jason: Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. Michael Chestnut: Jason has been very patient with me. I I had three surgeries in two months. And it's funny because one lady was like, I had no clue because I see you online every week. And I'm like, well those are pre-recorded. Thank God. I had those pre re pre recorded. So this is actually the first one since having surgery. So trying to get back into it. But I I want to thank you again for You know, not giving up on me and rescheduling this because honestly, everything we talked about w hits a lot of my audience that's listening Jason: Absolutely. Michael Chestnut: here today. So again, thank you for Jason: Yeah, man. Michael Chestnut: that. And we'll make sure that we have everything for you in the bio. And to my guys, listen, if you're struggling, it and I say it all the time, let's get coffee, you know, let's sit down. Let me be your brother. You don't have to walk this alone. And until next time, just keep being intentional.