Latest / Typology / Transforming relationships with true intimacy, feat. Dr. Carol Tanksley

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Transforming relationships with true intimacy, feat. Dr. Carol Tanksley · Typology

0:02
Hey folks, and welcome to Typology, the
0:06
show on which we explore the mystery of the human personality
0:10
and the human adventure all through the lens of the Enneagram. My
0:14
name is Anthony Skinner. I'm your co-host and producer. So
0:18
happy to have you here, folks. Listen, we've got a great guest
0:21
today, and this is part two of an episode that
0:25
aired earlier, which was part one. And what happened was,
0:28
when we recorded that episode, we lost the back half due to
0:31
technical difficulties. In the first half, we talked with our guest all
0:35
about her discovering her Enneagram type and her journey, which
0:39
that episode is titled, Befriending Feelings to Find
0:43
Wholeness. befriending feelings to find wholeness. Today
0:46
we talk about her book, brand new book called Sexpectations. You
0:50
heard me right. Sexpectations, reframing your good and
0:54
not so good stories about God, love, and
0:57
relationships. I'm talking about Enneagram 5, wing
1:02
4, Dr. Carol Tanksley. She's back. Practiced medicine as
1:05
an OBGYN physician and reproductive endocrinologist for
1:09
over 29 years. She knows what she's talking about, folks. She
1:13
has a Master's of Divinity and a Doctor of Ministry. She
1:17
has, of course, the Dr. Carroll Show. We're so happy to
1:20
have her here so that we can finish the conversation that we started on the
1:23
previous podcast about her book, Sexpectations.
1:27
This is a deep dive. You'll definitely want to check this out. And
1:31
for reference, if you haven't heard it, go back and listen to
1:34
Befriending Feelings to Find Wholeness featuring Dr. Carol Tanksley.
1:38
Enneagram 5 wing 4. So glad you're here, folks.
1:41
That's it for me, Anthony Skinner. And now here is the host of our
1:53
All right, Carol, listen, I am so stoked to talk about your new
1:56
book, Sexpectations, because, you know, again, as I
1:59
said earlier in the program, in our last episode together, I
2:03
love that I'm doing this with a five because you all are that non-anxious presence.
2:08
You kind of come in and we're just going to talk about the facts and you sort of take
2:11
all the anxiety out of the conversation that
2:15
most people have when we start talking about intimacy and about sex and about sex
2:19
problems and sex All the stuff, right?
2:23
So what do you think are the two or three top misconceptions
2:29
That it's about bodies more than matters of the
2:32
heart. It involves our bodies. Well, yeah. But
2:36
I believe that when people focus just on behaviors and
2:39
things they do with their bodies, they miss the weight of
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it. And frankly, the beauty of it. So that
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would definitely be number one. Yeah.
2:50
All right. And another misconception I would
2:53
say is that a sexual encounter is
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primarily about getting my self-gratification, getting
3:01
my needs met. And I could wax eloquent for
3:04
probably more than a moment about some of the cultural messages and
3:08
the porn messages and whatever that lead to that. But
3:11
I believe the way God intended sex to be was to build
3:15
relationship between husband and wife. The doctor part
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of me knows just a little bit about the neurobiology and the chemicals
3:22
that get released. And there is a bonding that is more than
3:26
only physical. that becomes really
3:29
important. And the second, and maybe the third, is
3:33
that you are only a sexual being if you're having sex. I
3:37
am a widow since my husband passed away, but I am still a
3:40
sexual being. We are all sexual
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beings regardless of relationship status or whether you're having
3:47
sex or not. And that is something to steward and
3:56
So that actually raises an interesting question
3:59
because I'm sure I have lots of people that listen to the show
4:03
who are not sexually active and are not in a partnership for
4:07
whatever reason, right? How do you steward your
4:11
sexuality outside as a single
4:14
person? How does it express itself and
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I had to learn that in some respects the hard way, but what I
4:22
might first say is, how did Jesus steward
4:26
his sexuality? From everything we know from the Gospels and
4:30
church tradition, Jesus was never married, he never had sex, but
4:34
we also know he was fully human. And
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although the biblical text doesn't say specific words,
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I think we can say he had all the sex hormones, sex drives, sex
4:45
organs that any other fully alive human male
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would. How did he deal with that? Two ways that
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I would say for Jesus. One is he was an intimate daily
4:56
moment-to-moment connection with his heavenly father. We
4:59
are built for connection and primarily connection
5:03
with God. That's the air we were built to breathe in, Adam and
5:07
Eve in the garden, walking with
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God daily, face-to-face. And
5:14
also Jesus needed humans. So
5:18
when we confuse intimacy and sexuality, I think
5:22
we miss some of the deep intimacy needs that
5:26
God created us with. And so for Jesus, that
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looked like pursuing actively deep
5:33
heart-to-heart connection with a few other humans.
5:36
Certainly he had the crowd and even the 70 and the 12 disciples, but
5:39
Peter, James, and John. There was something deep and
5:43
human between them. It was messy. They
5:47
let him down. But Jesus pursued it anyway. He
5:50
needed that. There was a sense in which connection with this Heavenly Father wasn't,
5:54
air quotes, enough for Jesus. We
5:57
need that kind of connection also. So for me now, as
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an unmarried person who was not engaging in sexual activity, what
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does that mean? It means honoring myself
6:08
as a female, as a woman, that is connected
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with my sexuality. What does my femaleness mean? How
6:16
I bring myself to the world? It means that
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I deeply nourish, pay attention to
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my need for connection and intimacy with
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God and with a few others. That doesn't come natural to me. I'm
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naturally an introvert. So I have to exert conscious energy
6:35
to connect with a few others. When I do, it changes everything
6:39
about my soul and my life, but I have to
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How do you know when you've achieved non-sexual intimacy
6:49
Do you ever know that that's my first response, but
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I believe that paradigm of knowing and
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being known Seeing and being seen
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If I am with another person and I don't have to put on eggshells That
7:05
I can be the the good the bad the ugly the
7:10
neurobiological changes that does in my brain
7:15
is real. And we only do that, I believe, in
7:19
part in this world. I think of Paul's ending to
7:23
the love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13. You know, here I
7:26
see and know in part, then I will see and know even as
7:29
I am known. That's the hunger and desire for
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intimacy. We seek it as much as possible now, even
7:37
though we know that there's some messiness and incompleteness and
7:41
no human being can fill another up. but
7:45
to pursue seeing and being seen with
7:49
no emotional or spiritual walls in between. You cannot
7:53
experience intimacy just by taking the clothes off your body. And
7:57
that's part of the lie of sex, that if I just take my clothes off, I'm
8:00
gonna experience intimacy. No, I think there are
8:04
many of our listeners who would reflect on
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sexual experiences that weren't intimate if you just took
8:11
the clothes off your body. The coverings have to come
8:14
off your mind and heart and soul and that doesn't require
8:19
sexual activity, body parts touching. It
8:24
That's good. It's so interesting. I
8:29
am part of a 12-step community for people in recovery
8:33
for addictions to drugs and alcohol.
8:38
I was in a meeting last night, a Zoom meeting. You
8:43
know, I don't know the last names of these people, but I see them every week,
8:46
right? And what's so interesting is I went into the meeting kind
8:49
of sort of heavy hearted, not really wanting to
8:53
be there. The topic of the
8:56
meeting was spiritual awakenings, right? Because the
8:59
purpose of the 12 steps is to facilitate a spiritual awakening of
9:03
sufficient force that it renders the need for
9:06
an addictive behavior or substance unnecessary. When
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I got off the call, I felt such a lightness of
9:13
being. And this happens to me because I go to
9:16
three or four meetings a week. And what I realized is that I don't know outside
9:20
of my marriage, and I have a wonderful marriage to a beautiful woman now.
9:24
We've known each other 40 years. But in
9:27
these meetings, I experience a level of intimacy. And the word
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I would use, maybe the word that we could use, and tell
9:34
me if you agree, with intimacy is connection. this
9:38
group of 12 people who don't see each other at any other hour during
9:41
the week coming together and sharing at the deepest levels of
9:46
their lives. And it's not like we
9:50
get together and people say all kinds of shocking things about their
9:53
behaviors. There's tons of laughter in these meetings. There's
9:56
tons of laughter. It's not what anybody thinks, right?
10:00
But there is a kind of sacrality to
10:03
it, right? People will share very deeply
10:07
and then there's a long silence and no one's allowed to
10:10
crosstalk or fix anybody or jump in and
10:13
make everything right or have an answer. Everybody
10:17
just sits in the silence and actually just bears witness
10:22
to another person's story in the day. I
10:25
don't understand it entirely except to say
10:29
that there's so much healing in it that I
10:37
Somebody that I believe you and I both know and love, Dr. Kurt
10:40
Thompson, talks about, he uses the word confessional communities,
10:44
but the idea is what happens in our very
10:48
physical nervous systems when we experience that
10:52
kind of seeing and being seen, that kind of connection. I
10:57
believe our contemporary culture, and
11:00
sadly, in my opinion, even much of the contemporary Christian
11:04
church does not facilitate that well. And
11:09
it's tragic, I believe, because we need
11:13
it. It's not just a nice to have, we have to have
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12:48
I have a story, I have a friend of mine, I'll change his name, obviously,
12:53
Philip, was the pastor of a large
12:57
conservative evangelical church, had
13:00
a hidden drinking problem at home by
13:03
himself, you know, until he showed up at church one Sunday morning completely
13:07
potted. And they figured this out
13:11
about five minutes into the sermon. He
13:14
thought the poor guy is sozzled, and they
13:18
let him out. And instead of, you know, they did everything
13:21
wrong you could do, right? They fired him, which was the wrong thing to
13:24
do, right? And I remember seeing him
13:28
once in the basement after a meeting one night.
13:31
He said, you know, it's so ironic, he said, in the
13:34
basement of the church, I find grace and
13:38
mercy and acceptance and laughter and forgiveness
13:43
and hope and that I never got upstairs. You
13:47
know, I go to AA meetings in the basement of a church where I get everything I
13:52
Isn't that crazy? It is. And for whatever
13:56
success various 12-step programs have had, and they've had a lot, I
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believe that is one of the primary keys. And
14:03
the body of Christ It was intended to
14:07
do that, and we can do a lot better at that. I
14:12
think the point is that because of
14:15
that deep need we as humans have, when we
14:18
don't have that need addressed or
14:22
met, we will go to something else to try
14:27
Yes, and that is exactly what we're taught about in
14:31
12-step meetings. That is the teaching of
14:34
the big book that we use, right? That is what it
14:37
teaches. It teaches that you were looking for God, you
14:41
were looking for connection, you had a problem, drinking
14:45
or drugs or whatever your thing is, became the solution that eventually became
14:49
a bigger problem than the solution. And so the only way
14:52
back is to be reconnected to God and to others. right? And
14:56
to yourself in deeper and deeper ways. So you
15:00
say that all of us as human beings have been sexually harmed
15:03
in some way. And of course, there's lots
15:07
of open conversation about this now, thank goodness. How
15:13
Certainly there are the gross ways, sexual abuse in
15:17
childhood especially, rape and all of
15:20
that stuff. But it's much broader than that.
15:24
Early sexualization where a young girl or
15:27
a young boy gets the message that my value is
15:31
my sex appeal. or that my body is
15:34
my power without my heart being
15:38
seen, or that it's dangerous to
15:42
connect with another person. You
15:46
learn stuff, all of us did, the proverbial you,
15:50
before you knew you were learning anything about sex, before the birds and
15:53
the bees talk. your caretakers or
15:56
early sexual experiences or porn. A lot
16:00
of people have been sexually discipled by porn. So
16:04
that objectification becomes a
16:08
way to, as we were talking about just a minute ago, get that
16:11
hole in me filled up. So there are significant
16:15
numbers of people that sex is what they try to do to get
16:19
that hole filled up. And like fast food, Maybe
16:23
it satisfies your stomach churning for a moment, but it's empty
16:27
calories and it only destroys you and kills you slower and
16:30
more painfully. Other parts of sexual
16:34
harm is triangulation, for example, in
16:37
a family where the parents do not have a healthy relationship and
16:41
one of the children is made emotionally a
16:46
spouse to the parent, that's sexual harm. Whether
16:50
or not physical sexual behaviors go
16:53
in between. And there can be all kinds of
16:57
variations of this. Sex becomes either
17:03
too small or too large. I believe part of the healing and
17:07
transformation God would invite all of us to among the
17:10
results is that sex becomes right-sized. It's
17:14
important. It's not something we ignore. We don't put away the
17:17
sexual part of our being, which we can't, but we may try and
17:20
split it off. Neither does it become a god. Neither
17:25
is healthy. It becomes right-sized. And so part of the
17:28
sexual harm is the disorder of that. The sexual
17:32
harm can include religious messages. that sex by
17:36
its very nature is dirty and corrupting. The
17:40
only book in the Bible devoted to one single subject is
17:44
Song of Songs, devoted to sex, glorious, between
17:48
husband and wife, and it's all unadulterated goodness. The
17:52
Bible is also just as open about really bad and ugly sex.
17:56
You can find all of that in the Bible. So part
18:00
of our sexual harm can be only taking the negative messages
18:04
about sex, which the church in significant
18:08
measures, in significant seasons, has gotten very good at
18:11
putting the bad messages there without giving any messages
18:15
about how do we steward this well? or helping
18:19
people understand the need for intimacy, perhaps
18:22
especially if they're unmarried. How do we connect to get
18:25
some of those holes filled? I think even that
18:39
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Podcast. You
20:52
know, it's interesting. Something that you say in your book is that when a person
20:56
is experiencing some form of sexual
21:00
sin, let's call it an affair or something of that kind, that
21:04
most people believe forgiveness of the sin is enough. But
21:09
Tell us more. Thank God for forgiveness, and it is real.
21:13
If all your past acts went away and
21:17
were wiped clean, would you want to stay the way that you are? I
21:22
think probably any thoughtful person would have to
21:25
acknowledge, I'm not okay the way I am. If all
21:29
the negative sexual messages and everything else from the world, and if the devil,
21:32
if that went away, my brain is still
21:36
in need of healing and transformation and
21:40
integration and becoming. That's
21:43
the beauty of the gospel. Thank God for forgiveness,
21:47
but also thank God it doesn't stop there. If
21:50
it did stop there, would I just be white-knuckling on
21:53
not to engage in some behavior? To take the 12-step analogy
21:57
in drugs and alcohol that you've been open about, Ian,
22:01
would you want to be pulled to the bottle just as
22:05
badly now and just as isolated and
22:09
self-contempt? No, there's a change that's possible and
22:16
So let me ask you a question that Anthony and I talk about a lot. How do
22:20
people change? It's a big question, Carol. In
22:25
other words, it's easy and it's frustrating as
22:33
Most people know pretty well what the problem
22:40
I would reference our mutual friend, Dr. Kurt Thompson again, by
22:45
being around other humans who are in the same process. We
22:48
need other brains to learn to become human. And
22:52
when you are seen and felt and known, change
22:56
becomes possible. It's building the new brain pathways. And
23:01
I believe that that is the way the
23:05
presence of God changes us as well. It's
23:08
not just stuffing more facts about God into my left brain.
23:13
I have to come to the place where my walls are down enough
23:17
so that Jesus through his spirit enters in
23:20
and I am seen and known
23:23
by him. I feel felt by
23:27
him. That's how I begin to
23:34
Yeah, so it's not a media process, and maybe this is, I'm
23:38
talking about the accelerant here, but it seems to
23:41
me that most people are able
23:44
to settle for as little transformation as will get them by because
23:50
they have not been blessed with the gift of desperation. So,
23:55
for lots of people, Jesus is a preference, not a
23:58
need. You know, my church gives me a nice social life.
24:02
My kids go to the youth group. I play on the softball team.
24:05
It's nice. It's nice. I like it. But
24:09
there's not this transformative relationship born. See,
24:12
that's the thing about 12-step programs. God
24:16
is not a preference. When you get there, it's either
24:19
God is everything or God is not at all, and you're dead. That's pretty
24:22
much the options when you come into that room. So
24:26
all of a sudden, desperation has a way of
24:30
removing any other option. And then the openness to transformation Desperation
24:37
opens you up to a level of transformation I have never seen upstairs in
24:41
the sanctuary. Like I've just never seen it anywhere else, right?
24:44
Amen. And I keep thinking to myself, how do
24:48
you create an atmosphere or
24:52
a something, I'm not sure what it is, that helps
24:55
people get in touch with the depth of their need for
25:01
A seminary professor, when I went to seminary, used
25:04
to say, we are too often in
25:07
the business of dishing out Rolaids instead of letting their hearts
25:11
burn as Jesus did. We in
25:14
the body of Christ who are trying to help others have
25:18
a part to play in not whitewashing
25:22
and minimizing symptoms. Walking
25:26
alongside people doesn't mean saying everything
25:30
is okay, but it does mean accepting. I
25:33
love your 12-step analogy
25:37
that you keep coming back to, Ian, because, yeah, that's
25:41
a picture of transformation that I don't know if
25:44
I've seen happen upstairs. To bring that into the sexuality arena,
25:50
If I think, oh, maybe I should cut down on my porn use. Eh,
25:53
it's more than I really like. Good luck with that. You can try harder
25:56
for a little bit, but yeah, how's that gonna work for you? When
26:00
I see that this is actually going to kill me, or
26:04
maybe if I'm married, it's going to kill my marriage, that
26:08
kind of desperateness, to use
26:14
You bet. I just wish other people, this is
26:18
weird to say, I just wish sometimes that other
26:22
people had been blessed with
26:26
an experience of desperation. Because though
26:30
it is highly unpleasant, it
26:33
is the beginning of the beginning. Like, like, like
26:37
when people first come into the rooms, and by the way, you know,
26:40
I will say it's about like, porn has never been my issue. I will say that
26:44
right up front. I've had plenty of others. Trust me. That
26:47
has not been, that has not been one of them. But I
26:50
mean, Carol, I know so many people who live lives
26:54
of quiet desperation. because of their addiction
26:58
to porn. Every time a guy calls me who I
27:01
haven't spoken to for a year or two, and they say, hey man, can we get
27:04
together and talk? I go, it's porn. I just, I
27:07
just know what we're going to do. It's like, it is so common now. It's
27:10
like, and they're like, they're like, Oh, this is the most horrible thing ever. It's like, you're the fourth
27:14
guy this week. What are you talking about? Like, like you are
27:17
like pedestrian at this point, but it is, it
27:22
And church people, pastors, same
27:26
thing. Yeah, the largest single
27:30
portion of people who come to me and our resources and
27:34
asking for help are married people and their sex life
27:37
is disordered. I no longer ask if porn is
27:41
an issue. I ask how and where is
27:44
porn been a part of your life or
27:48
your spouse's life or both? What role is it having? Not
27:51
is it having a role? Because it's our culture. Other
27:56
kinds of, you know, desperateness. A
27:59
person who has been sexually traumatized ends
28:02
up acting out sexually, going from one
28:06
hookup to another. Quite common, actually.
28:10
Perhaps because I'm a woman, I hear more of those stories from
28:14
women, but I'd say, I'm never gonna do that again. I'm
28:18
not gonna do that again. And then 10 days later, okay, you're in
28:21
somebody else's bed. And you have to get desperate enough
28:25
that steps one, two, and three, I can't stop this on my own.
28:29
Something is disordered and I have to
28:33
do something different. And God is the only place I
28:37
can think of an answer, but it's more than just stuffing facts
28:40
about God into your left brain. This has to be a spiritual awakening to
28:44
use the 12-step language. It has to allow him in. And
28:47
here's another thing. It can't be robotic telehealth surgery
28:51
from across the state or the town. Jesus
28:55
has to come in. Sometimes we
28:58
would like God to just drop healing on us from on
29:01
high. There may be moments when he
29:05
does, but he rarely, if ever, operates
29:09
that way. And frankly, that doesn't bring the kind of transformation. To
29:13
become a different person, I truly long to be, he
29:17
actually has to come in. And that can be terrifying. Absolutely
29:21
terrifying. And I am offered the choice. I get to
29:24
choose. I can say no, but I'm going
29:28
to stay in my soup if I do. And so I'm
29:32
eventually presented with, I have to
29:35
allow him in to do the heart surgery if I want to
29:40
So, we've talked a lot about or around this
29:44
topic of sexual history. Everybody has
29:48
a, anyone who's a human, I think, has
29:53
a broken sexual history. Agreed. And
29:56
some people have very in-depth broken sexual histories.
30:04
As Jesus dealt with people when he was here on
30:07
earth, including those who had a messed up
30:11
sexual history and story, it was a message
30:14
of, here, let's deal with this. It was
30:18
complete honesty, nothing whitewashed, and
30:25
I love how you, I'm sorry, I thought you were done, the
30:36
Jesus meets this woman at the well outside in Samaria, and
30:40
she had a dark sexual history. Some of the church have
30:44
assumed that that was because she had been
30:47
divorced five times, maybe. She was living with
30:51
someone who wasn't her husband. But divorce was very
30:54
easy in those days and largely the power of the
30:57
man. So she might have had one or more husbands
31:01
who put her away because they didn't It
31:06
might have been that one or more of her husbands had died. War, disease,
31:11
that was very common in those days. Whatever, she
31:15
had been deeply wounded. And when Jesus said, go call your
31:18
husband, and she responded, I don't have one. And Jesus said, you're right,
31:22
you've had five, and the one you have now is not your husband. That wasn't
31:25
Jesus condemning. It was saying, I see you. I
31:29
truly see you. And this is the place to
31:32
deal with this. This is the it. He
31:36
put his finger on the it. And I
31:40
think that's what has to happen for each of us. How
31:43
to find healing, to experience Jesus
31:47
through the spirit saying, this is the it and
31:51
come into the light, lay it bare, honest with
31:55
compassion. We experience that through other
31:59
people and through time alone with God. Part
32:03
of the way Jesus works that I have
32:06
experienced myself and seen in working with other people is
32:10
that the memories can change, not the facts, but
32:14
the meaning can change when I bring my
32:19
memory of whatever, either something that happened to me
32:22
or that I did into the light and somebody else
32:25
sees me and doesn't leave the room when I
32:29
let that part of me be seen or same with Jesus. God
32:32
exists outside of time. Trauma is
32:35
such a big part of our stories as humans and sexual trauma
32:40
being huge. I can, in my memory,
32:44
experience being in that place. Trauma is like it's
32:47
still happening. So whatever is still happening,
32:51
something that happened to me or something I did, to go to that place
32:55
and then see Jesus in the room or
32:59
wherever, in that place, see Jesus physically in
33:03
my imagination there. What would he say? What
33:07
would the look on his face be? What would
33:10
the sound of his voice be? What might he want me to
33:14
see or understand? I have over and over
33:17
seen people healed in
33:21
the sense that their memories lose their sting. The
33:24
facts don't go away, but the sting is
33:28
gone. And experiencing Jesus seeing
33:34
To me, that is what's so beautiful about the woman at the well, because, I
33:38
mean, in my wildest imaginations, I can't imagine her running back to town
33:42
saying, he's seen all the horrible things I've done. She
33:46
was seen. Yes. She was beheld, but
33:50
she wasn't shamed. Right. He sat with
33:53
her in whatever that it was, like you said. She
33:57
was running back saying, he's seen all of me. Yes.
34:02
Yes. You know, she was the first evangelist. There are
34:05
some church traditions that call her the first evangelist. And
34:09
the marketing proposition she went and hailed to everybody is,
34:12
this man told me everything about me. And that
34:16
was not only what healed her, but it's then what she went and
34:23
Wow. Carol Tanksley, you are the best. I
34:27
love having you on the show. First of all, I love all of your
34:30
energy. I love that you're a balanced voice.
34:34
You don't have this sort of overly, in
34:38
an unhealthy way, some sort of weird, overly
34:41
effusive histrionic energy around the topic. You're
34:45
just a very kind, balanced presence. I really,
34:49
really appreciate both of our conversations. This one has been great.
34:52
I want to remind everybody about the name of your book, which is Sexpectations, and
34:58
I want everybody to check it out. The subtitle is Reframing Your Good and
35:01
Not-So-Good Stories About God, Love, and Relationships, again, by
35:04
Carol Tanksley, MDD. Man,
35:09
Well, thank you. I will say yes in advance. I
35:14
Hurrah, hurrah. Well, I'm leaving today just
35:17
feeling full and encouraged and really
35:21
just in awe of the good things that you're doing. And Anthony, brother, I love
35:25
you. Love you. And I love our listenership.
35:29
We love you guys, all of you in the Typology family. May you have
35:32
love, may you have joy, may you have peace, may you have healing, may