Jay Stringer
10 min read ⭑
“I want people to see that their biggest struggles often contain the beginnings of healing and growth. The obstacle they’re facing may actually be the path toward a more meaningful and passionate life.”
Jay Stringer helps people work through their greatest struggles — pornography, infidelity, addiction — to move toward wholeness, freedom and connection. A licensed mental health counselor, researcher and speaker, Jay believes our unwanted patterns aren’t a life sentence but rather a map to healing and growth. His award-winning book, Unwanted, and his latest project, Desire, spread this message of hope so people can discover lives of passion and purpose.
In today’s interview, he gets honest about his past struggles with food and shame and how he applies the principles of safety and connection to his own parenting. You’ll also be encouraged as he shares how God works through his tears and what desire can teach us about ourselves and who we were meant to be.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
Food is always about more than food; it’s also about home and people and love. So how does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
I loved food as a child. I loved it so much that before neighborhood barbecues, my excitement would trigger bowel movements purely from anticipation. But as my family life grew more complicated and middle school — my first prototype of hell — became harder, something shifted. Food became my primary comfort. That way of eating eventually earned me the nickname “Donut.” A civil war emerged that would rage for decades: food as refuge, food as shame.
By 21, I was a man struggling with bulimia. By 27, I was running marathons to burn off excess calories and master my body. Years later, while celebrating a birthday right before the launch of my first book, I was at a Michelin-starred restaurant when a dessert course arrived with a single word on the menu: Doughnut. It might sound strange, but I felt the Spirit of God whisper, “Suffer this comfort.”
Surrounded by friends, I took a bite and wept. I wasn’t eating in secrecy or isolation. I let myself enjoy it without bracing for what it would “cost.”
Now, New York City is home. On Saturday or Sunday mornings, I run to bakeries across the boroughs. These runs are about integration. I run with the 6-year-old who loved food, the 13-year-old bullied for his body, the young man who learned discipline through running and the 42-year-old who wants to bring pastry goodness home to his family.
When I walk into our apartment, my kids say, “Pastries?”
And I answer, “Oh yeah. But hold up — I need to use the bathroom first.”
Hemz; Pexels
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
What “nonspiritual” activity have you found to be quite spiritual, after all? What quirky proclivity, out-of-the-way interest or unexpected pursuit refreshes your soul?
About an hour north of New York City, my family bought a few acres of neglected land. It’s wild and aggressive. The property is overrun with winged euonymus — more commonly known as burning bush — an invasive plant that looks beautiful from a distance but slowly chokes the life out of everything around it. Vines wrap themselves around the maples, black walnuts and spruces like they’re trying to win by exhaustion.
Last year, I spent hundreds of hours out there with gloves, saws, shovels and a mattock, pulling roots until my body was defeated and fatigued. Over time, piles of vines and brush grew — 10 to 15 feet high and nearly 100 feet long. Eventually, I hired a landscaping company to chip them, and those chips became a half-mile trail I built across the land.
In my professional life, I spend my days with invisible root systems — trauma, shame, family patterns, desire. That work moves slowly. Progress can take years to become visible. On the land, I can see the impact of my labor immediately.
I didn’t plan for this work to become prayer or a mirror of my vocation. It just kept insisting. It took what’s implicit in my day-to-day work and made it physical.
I realized this is the work all of us are facing: cultivating beauty and comfort while confronting what is quietly killing us. Shame does that. Exhaustion does that. Our obsession with achievement does that. I don’t want people to avoid their problems or simply “get rid of them.” I want the invasives of their lives to become the footing — the trail — they learn to walk with family and friends.
Clearing land has taught me there’s dignity, misery and surprise in reclaiming a life. The invasive becomes the path. I hate that it’s true sometimes. But I don’t know another way to say it.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you confront its power?
My kryptonite is the gap between my professional competence and my private parenting.
I make a living teaching people to grow emotionally, become curious and feel seen, safe, soothed and secure. And I fail at this — regularly — inside my own home.
I’ll never forget the moment my daughter, when she was 7, looked at me during my anger and said, “Is this really the face you want me to remember of my dad?” It stopped me cold.
Or when my son wants to wear the same sweatshirt or T-shirt again and again. My body reacts before my mind does. I want him to change — not simply because he’s wearing his favorite clothes too often, but because my body remembers middle school. I was mocked for wearing too many Atlanta Braves shirts when I “should” have been wearing Stüssy or Tommy Hilfiger. I project my unfinished story onto him, convinced I’m protecting him when I’m really trying to hand him my survival strategy — and getting upset when he resists it.
Parenting has forced me to confront something I didn’t expect: I’m not just raising my kids. I’m learning to parent my younger self. And he still needs a more patient and capable adult than I often am.
My professional work has taught me that good parenting isn’t the absence of rupture; it’s participation in repair. Sometimes that repair happens out loud through an apology. More often, it requires tending my own unhealed stories so they don’t become my children’s inheritance. We talk a lot about financial inheritance, but I ache to give my kids something else: a father committed to his own redemption.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
For a long time, my work revolved around what people wanted to stop. With my first book “Unwanted,” over 100,000 readers discovered that their most troubling behaviors — like pornography, infidelity and compulsivity — weren’t random. They could often be traced back to stories of trauma and heartache that had never been engaged.
But stopping a behavior is not the same as starting a life.
Lately, what keeps showing up in my office is desire. I’ve come to believe most of us are living in a civil war with it. We’re taught to fear desire or follow it, but neither helps us understand it, much less form it.
That’s what led me to develop the Desire Assessment, built with Ph.D. researchers and based on research with over 4,000 men and women (which also provided the foundation for my latest book, “Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow”). It helps people see where their desires are overdeveloped, underdeveloped or aimed at things never meant to occupy so much of their time and attention.
The assessment is designed to show people that the problems of their lives are less like a prison sentence and more like a map. I want people to see that their biggest struggles often contain the beginnings of healing and growth. The obstacle they’re facing may actually be the path toward a more meaningful and passionate life.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Whether we’re cashiers or CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need God’s love flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
Some of the clearest encounters I’ve had with God didn’t arrive as insight. They arrived as tears.
In middle school, I cried on the bus because of the bullying and confusion no one was helping me navigate. In the evenings, I’d take our golden retriever behind the house and find tears falling down my face again.
One day in seventh grade, looking out the bus window on a warm, sunny afternoon, I had a sudden awareness that these tears would become an essential part of my work in the world. Not that God would eliminate them, but that he was holding them, teaching me what it means to honor the pain inside of people with a compassionate witness.
That sense still animates my life.
Another moment I knew God was directing my steps came when a professor introduced me as a sex-trafficking expert before I even knew what the term meant. A year or two later, I was counseling men arrested for buying sex and helping cities across the U.S. address sexual harm at its roots.
These experiences have given me a steady confidence that, while I work hard to develop my life and vocation, I will be led far more than I will ever control my future. I’ve learned the Spirit of God seems far more committed to me, and to those I serve, than I am even on my best day. That’s humbling. And it’s also what allows me to rest.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
Nearly every morning, I sit in the sauna at my local gym wearing a Nordic felt hat that makes city people stare.
I use the time to journal. I write down my fear, hope and dreams — what the poet David Whyte calls “cargoes of revelation.” I pay attention to what needs to leave me: the residue of the previous day, the tension I didn’t realize I was carrying. I also notice what wants to grow.
Within minutes, my body mirrors that awareness. Toxins are sweated out. Even good things like electrolytes are lost, cultivating thirst and the need for restoration.
After the sauna, I take a shower before I head home to walk my kids to school. The cold water always feels a bit aggressive, but if I can calm my body, the water becomes restorative.
This rhythm teaches me how to begin a day: cleansing and replenishment. It reminds me that much within me needs to be released and that meaningful work will require ongoing restoration. My sense is the gospel is something like this, too. It’s an inferno that draws out what is harmful and awakens me to my deepest thirst in this world.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and changed your heart?
First, Dan Allender. He was the first Christian voice I encountered who told the truth about suffering without rushing redemption. Growing up, I assumed following Jesus meant becoming an Easter Sunday person: announcing joy and new life. Dan taught me that following Jesus also requires knowing Good Friday and Holy Saturday. These are days of trauma, heartache and hell. I learned that those stories don’t diminish Easter. They deepen it.
Second, Tim Keller. He was my audio father. My first 20-gig iPod was filled mostly with his sermons. His voice continues to shape my spiritual formation and imagination.
Third, watching two incredibly gifted people enter a partnership undoes me every time. A few examples: I remember hearing Michael Jordan talk about Kobe Bryant calling him late at night for advice and how relentless Kobe could be to learn. Or this past year, my daughter watched a Taylor Swift documentary where they showed the behind-the-scenes of Taylor collaborating with Sabrina Carpenter. Although my work looks different, I want that kind of friendship, collaboration and life with everything in me.
Certain things can be godsends, helping us survive, even thrive, in our fast-paced world. Does technology ever help you this way? Has an app ever boosted your spiritual growth? If so, how?
Last year, I started wearing a WHOOP device, and I’m ambivalent about it.
I don’t like being tracked. But I do like being understood.
This wearable technology helped me notice how my body carries stress, why some mornings feel heavy before my mind can explain it. It’s taught me that what I wake up feeling isn’t always random. It invites me to pay attention to how I sleep, eat, drink, recover and move.
Like all tools, though, it runs the risk of hypervigilance. Metrics can breed a narrow focus. Used poorly, they shape not only what we see, but how we see ourselves and the world. I’m grateful the data can teach me wisdom, but it can’t lead me into the fullness of wonder. It’s a reminder that I can learn from technology, but the heart and body God gave to us is always far more remarkable.
QUESTION #8: dream
God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
I’m beginning to write about the male body.
My sense is that men inherit narrow scripts: use your body for productivity or sculpt it into something impressive. I’ve lived in a civil war with my own body — dysmorphia, eating disorders, addiction, optimization, shame, a hunger for mastery and the pressure to keep producing money for my family.
With “Unwanted,” I wrote from a place of professional research and personal growth around my own sexual struggles. With “Desire,” I wrote from accompaniment — walking alongside others, drawing from research and clinical insight. This next project feels different. The body has been the most confusing and unresolved territory of my life.
I don’t come with answers so much as questions. I want to be a student — to learn from wisdom traditions, embodied practices and voices across the world. I don’t know what I’m going to discover about myself or the topic, and that is both unsettling and exciting.
That’s how I know I’m supposed to write it.
There’s an undercurrent of belief in our culture that men and tears don’t mix. Men aren’t supposed to cry, it says. They’re supposed to suck it up, put on a brave face, push through the pain.
In other words: man up.
Jesus stands in stark contrast to that way of thinking. One of the most powerfully emotional moments in the Gospels is when Jesus visits his friends Mary and Martha after their brother has died. He hurts with them. He aches for his friend’s life cut short. His heart breaks at the pain death has brought to the ones he loves.
And so … “Jesus wept” (John 11:35, ESV).
To be a man — or to be strong in any capacity — is not to stifle tears. It’s to grieve over what our heavenly Father grieves over. To weep with those who weep.
Jay Stringer is a licensed mental health counselor, researcher and speaker who helps people uncover the unexpected meaning in life’s hardest challenges. He is the author of Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow (March 2026) and the award-winning Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing.