How Desire and Shame Can Lead You Toward Healing

Blog by Unhurried Living Team

Most of us have learned to treat our desires as problems to manage rather than messages worth hearing. In this conversation, Alan Fadling, co-founder of Unhurried Living, sits down with Jay Stringer, licensed therapist, ordained minister, and author of Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow, to explore why desire and shame so often travel together and what it looks like to move from suppression toward honest, grounded healing. The thesis of this episode is simple but quietly radical: your desires, even the ones that trouble you most, are not your enemies. They are invitations.

Every person carries what Jay Stringer calls a "civil war" of desire. The same interior life that produces your deepest loves and callings also produces your most confusing and sometimes destructive patterns. Most people land in one of two camps: either chasing every desire without discernment, or suppressing desire out of fear that it cannot be trusted. Neither path leads to flourishing. What this conversation offers instead is a third way, one that takes desire seriously enough to actually listen to it.

How Desire Formation Shapes the Person You Are Becoming

Desire formation is not a concept most people encounter in ordinary life. Yet Jay Stringer, drawing from years of clinical practice and research, makes the case that unformed desire is at the root of much of what derails people quietly over time. His framework begins with the parable of the talents: the master entrusts gifts to his servants, and the one who buries his is the one who draws the sharpest response. Stringer reads that parable as a mirror for how many people treat their desires, burying them rather than cultivating them, not out of laziness, but out of fear.

Desire formation, Stringer argues, is not about indulging every impulse or suppressing every inconvenient feeling. It is about developing the interior capacity to want well. Theologian Ronald Rolheiser describes children as being born with "raw desires," and the job of family and community is not to eliminate those desires but to help connect them to something larger and more life-giving. A child who wants the truck at the playground does not need to be shamed for wanting; the desire itself needs to be shaped, not condemned. Desire formation is the long, patient work of that shaping.

Stringer identifies five core desires that every person carries: a desire for wholeness, for personal growth, for intimacy, for pleasure, and for meaning. These are not optional menu items. When one desire is developed in isolation from the others, something begins to break down. The leader who overindexes on meaning but neglects personal growth ends up driving an organization on fumes that should have been addressed years earlier in their own story.

A grounding practice for this week: write down three moments in your life when you felt most fully alive. Notice what those moments have in common. That pattern is a clue to where your desire formation needs tending.

If you are ready to go deeper into this kind of unhurried self-reflection, the Unhurried Living weekly email offers steady, grounded companionship for exactly this kind of inner work — sign up here.

What Conflicting Desires Are Actually Trying to Tell You

One of the most disorienting experiences in the interior life is carrying conflicting desires simultaneously. Jay Stringer names this plainly: he has desired to love his wife and children well, and he has also desired to be free of that responsibility entirely. He has desired things he would call holy and beautiful, and he has also struggled with pornography and disordered eating. The point is not confession for its own sake. The point is that conflicting desires are not evidence of a broken person; they are evidence of a human one.

Stringer draws on the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who argued that every symptom is what he called a sinthome (from the French, meaning "holy man"): a messenger trying to get your attention. The symptom will keep speaking until someone learns to listen. Most people, Stringer observes, would rather take Tylenol than ask what the headache is trying to say. The research behind his book found that even the most troubling unwanted behaviors are not random. Embedded within the very pattern a person is trying to escape are clues pointing toward healing and growth.

For example, Stringer's research found that men struggling with specific patterns of pornography use often shared three common drivers: a strict and controlling father, a lack of purpose, and high levels of internalized shame. The behavior was not primarily about lust; it was about powerlessness, futility, and the desperate need to feel agency somewhere. The conflicting desires were messengers. Treating them as enemies only silenced the message without addressing the wound.

A grounding practice: instead of trying to stop an unwanted behavior through willpower alone, spend five minutes writing the honest question "What is this pattern trying to tell me?" without answering it. Let the question breathe.

You do not have to figure this out alone; trained spiritual directors at Unhurried Living are ready to walk alongside you — explore it here.

Why Shame Healing Is the Ground Beneath Every Other Change

If desire formation is the long work, then shame healing is what makes that work possible. Jay Stringer offers a striking image from neuroscience: shame operates in the soul the way a manual transmission car operates when someone slams the brake without using the clutch. The engine does not gently slow; it jolts, shears, lurches forward in a different direction. Children are born with well-developed sympathetic nervous systems (the gas pedal) and underdeveloped parasympathetic ones (the brake). They need parents and caregivers to apply the brake with the clutch of kindness. When that kindness is absent, when the brake is applied harshly through contempt or dismissal, the damage runs deep.

Shame healing requires more than behavioral correction. Stringer describes how shame does not simply make people want to escape; it causes people to pursue behaviors that actually reinforce the core messages shame has already written about them. If shame says "you are unwanted," a person will unconsciously arrange circumstances that confirm that story. The brain, as Stringer puts it, is "an anticipation machine": it creates what it expects to find. This is why shame healing cannot happen through willpower or self-management. It has to begin with curiosity and kindness turned inward.

Stringer shares his own story: he was nicknamed "Donut" in middle school after a jelly donut dripped on his shirt on the first day of seventh grade. A classmate humiliated him in front of everyone at the bus stop. But that moment did not create his shame from nothing; it confirmed what was already forming in him, a belief that he was unwanted and unlovable. Decades of behaviors followed, all of them attempts to reinforce or escape that original story. Shame healing began when he turned toward the story with kindness rather than contempt.

A grounding practice: identify one core message shame has been telling you about who you are. Then ask, without contempt, what story first gave that message its power.

What Does Understanding and Healing Desire Actually Look Like?

The conversation between Alan Fadling and Jay Stringer consistently resists the two most common approaches to desire: indulgence and suppression. Here is how those approaches compare with the path Stringer describes:

Where Leaders Who Are Running on Empty Find What They Actually Need

Many of the people drawn to this conversation are not struggling in visible ways. They are functioning well enough on the outside while carrying a quiet interior exhaustion that has been building for years. The leaders, pastors, coaches, and ministry workers who make up much of the Unhurried Living community know what it is to keep showing up for others while their own interior life has gone largely unattended. Desire formation and shame healing are not self-indulgent detours from the work of ministry; they are the ground the whole work stands on. A leader who has never honestly engaged their own conflicting desires will, over time, export that unresolved civil war into every organization and relationship they touch.

Unhurried Living exists precisely for this moment: when the pace of ministry has outrun the interior life that sustains it, and something deeper is needed than another productivity strategy or leadership framework.

Your Desires Are Not the Enemy; They Are the Way Forward

Desire and shame are not obstacles to a life with God; they are often the very path through which God draws a person toward greater honesty, freedom, and wholeness. Jay Stringer's closing invitation in this episode is worth sitting with: "Offer radical hospitality to everything inside you that is broken, hurting, and undone, and you will have a very dramatically different life than the one you currently have." That is not a self-help promise. It is a description of what becomes possible when a person stops running from their own interior life and begins, slowly, to listen.

Start with the Unhurried Daily Email, a 40-day devotional sequence designed to slow you down and help you go deeper into this kind of honest self-reflection — get started here.

When you are ready for a longer journey alongside others, the PACE certificate program offers 21 months of guided training in spiritual leadership and soul care — find it here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why do I struggle with unwanted behaviors even when I genuinely want to stop? A: Jay Stringer's research suggests that unwanted behaviors are rarely random. They are often driven by unaddressed realities in a person's story, including experiences of powerlessness, shame, or unmet longing. The behavior itself contains clues about what the deeper need actually is. Rather than fighting the behavior directly, Stringer recommends getting curious about what is driving it.

Q: How can shame affect my spiritual growth? A: Shame does not simply make a person feel bad; it actively distorts the way they relate to God, others, and themselves. Stringer describes shame as what cancer is to the body: it erodes desire from the inside. When shame is the dominant voice in a person's interior life, it narrates their story with the worst possible explanation and causes them to pursue behaviors that confirm those negative beliefs, making genuine spiritual growth very difficult.

Q: How do I begin to understand my conflicting desires? A: The first step is replacing contempt with curiosity. Instead of asking "What is wrong with me?" in a tone of self-condemnation, ask the same question with genuine openness. Stringer also recommends paying attention to what he calls "bell moments," times when you felt most alive and most like yourself, as a way of identifying where healthy desire is already present and waiting to be developed.

Q: What are the five core desires Jay Stringer identifies, and why do they matter? A: Stringer identifies five core desires that every person carries: a desire for wholeness, for personal growth, for intimacy, for pleasure, and for meaning. These are not optional; neglecting any one of them tends to create symptoms elsewhere in life. A person who develops intimacy without first doing the work of personal growth, for example, will find that their relationships cannot bear the weight they are placing on them.

Q: How is the Unhurried Living approach to desire different from self-help or therapy? A: Unhurried Living situates the work of desire formation and shame healing within a theological framework: desire is God's idea, and the formation of desire is a spiritual practice, not simply a psychological one. Alan Fadling and his guests consistently hold together clinical insight and spiritual wisdom, inviting leaders to engage their interior lives not as a self-improvement project but as a response to the unhurried life modeled by Jesus himself.