Story Matters Podcast
In the Story Matters Podcast, Hosts Ryan and Emily Baker discuss the intersection between theology and psychology helping listeners to better grasp how their particular stories have shaped them.
Story Matters Podcast
37. Are You At War With Desire?
A simple question can expose a lifetime of scripts: what do you want? We unpack why that prompt can feel threatening, trivial, or strangely blank, and trace the roots back to childhood moments where wanting was ignored, shamed, or made expensive. From birthday wishes to high-stakes life decisions, we show how many of us learned to kill off desire or tailor it to others’ capacity—and why that strategy leaves us numb.
Together we explore how faith, psychology, and story work meet at the crossroads of desire. We reflect on C.S. Lewis’s image of mud pies versus the holiday at the sea. Drawing from James, the language of epithumia, and Psalm 27’s gaze upon beauty, we challenge the reflex to label all longing as dangerous and instead offer a path to form desire toward God, beauty, and connection. We also talk about arousal in the broad, embodied sense—what it means when the body wakes toward goodness—and why that energy can feel confusing after the purity culture or sexual abuse.
We address longings that can’t be met right now and why grief—not denial or impulsivity—is the way desire grows up. If you’ve ever said “I don’t care” to avoid disappointment, this is your invitation to care again with wisdom, limits, and hope.
We are forming Story Groups that will begin in January 2026, all the information is on our website StoryMattersCoaching.com or email us with any questions!
Welcome to the Story Matters Podcast. I'm Ryan Baker.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm Emily Baker.
SPEAKER_01:We believe people grow and heal through understanding how our stories are rooted in God's redemptive story.
SPEAKER_00:We hope our conversations encourage you to engage your story in the world around you with a new lens.
SPEAKER_01:We're glad you're here.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, before we get started on today's episode, we wanted to let you know that we are forming story groups for early 2026. We would love for you to join us. These story groups meet weekly on Zoom two hours each week. They usually run somewhere between 12 and 14 weeks. That'll be mid-January through mid-April. Now, as just a reminder, we offer individual counseling, marriage counseling, and our story groups. We understand that some people are intimidated by group work. However, we have found many of our clients have joined these and had an experience like no other. If you are in ministry or you lead small groups of some kind, this is a very unique experience. Our website has all the details that you'll need, storymatterscoaching.com. Also, if you just want to ask questions, reach out or on the podcast app that you're listening to, you should see a button that says send us a text. Now it will be anonymous, but you can let us know that you're interested. And if you want to just give us your email address through that, we can be in contact that way. All right, let's get started with the episode you're tuning in for. How easily do you answer this question? And the question is, what do you want? What is our relationship like with this question?
SPEAKER_01:What do I want? When you first hear it, at first blush, it's super easy to answer. But I have a feeling for most of our listeners, it's probably a lot harder to answer. I think of examples of like birthdays. Every year, somebody, hopefully in your life, if not currently, at least growing up, might ask you, hey, what do you want for your birthday? Or what do you want to do for your birthday? And something that I'm aware of more my adult years, but I do think it goes back as far as I can remember, is that I'm torn. Part of me just wants to go, oh, nothing. I don't really need anything. But there's another part of me that's kind of like, what's the limit here?
SPEAKER_00:Or like, I don't really know because you want the other person to just somehow know you and go find the perfect gift. But I am curious, how often were we asked that in our childhood? Because there really are people that don't recall their mom or their dad or anyone that they grew up with really asking. And so I think that does shape the way we interact with that question.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. If you sort of zoom out a little bit further, as you grew up, whatever context you're in, how much was what you wanted part of your daily life? Did it matter? There are some people that they got everything they wanted. In fact, we use the language I never wanted for anything. And that almost always means materially food, shelter, clothing, toys. But it does beg the question, how about attunement? How about meeting your deeper needs? But then on the other extreme, it's fair to say there are people who are raised in situations where it was like, that question's never going to be asked, maybe not even on your birthday.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, and then there's a little bit of a complexity of people that I know who were raised in homes that they really were asked, what do you want? And we will make it happen. But then the parents would use that as leverage to do shaming behavior and comments, like you're so spoiled, maybe demanding.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I do a lot for you.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Or I'm so glad you had a wonderful time. I'm exhausted because it took my whole week. Not so subtle comments that make the child find themselves having a push-pull with it's gonna cost me something to want, you know.
SPEAKER_01:And so as we come to this topic for particularly the setting of counseling, not that everybody listening to this is, but an example of a therapeutic setting is a client comes with usually something of an area of brokenness, an area of need, of stress, of anxiety. Oftentimes clients may present by just saying, I feel stuck. But regardless of which one of those you may find yourself in, that we're moving now beyond the layer of I really love a new set of golf clubs. We're moving into a little bit of a deeper layer of what do you want? And when that is asked, it is my experience, not only from how I've observed the clients I work with, but also I have felt it when I was asked. It's sort of like too much. Hmm. You know, this is unsettling. Wow, what do I want?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, receiving care, desire, want, what do you feel like you need? Those are all very synonymous and they can all feel uncomfortable. I mean, I I get tears quite a bit from people I work with when I do ask things like that because it's it's like, wait, what did you just ask me? Like, I don't know that anyone's been asking me that lately or ever.
SPEAKER_01:And so when it comes to like someone actually asking you this question, it's very complex because there's something of this burning, like, can I trust you? You're entering the inner chambers of my soul. And if I'm willing to go into those places, like what's gonna happen?
SPEAKER_00:You mean like if you shared what you wanted with someone?
SPEAKER_01:I I mean, just using the example of like, oh, what do I want for dinner? I really want a steak. And then come to find out that's probably a little too far. I feel duped. And if you want to dial it in a little bit more, when you're thinking about growing up, developing any kind of a true longing or desire was dangerous if it went beyond the capacity of your parents. And so we sort of tailor often our desires based on their capacity. And by that I mean what they actually can do or what they seem to want to do.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I can feel really childish and shaming to say what you want, and then the person gives you a look like that's not that. So I I do think we're often reading the room or reading the face of like, what are my parameters here?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm thinking of the parable where Jesus says, Who among you, if your child asked for an egg, would give a scorpion, or asked for bread would give a stone. Right? And he goes on to say, if you who are evil know how to give good gifts, how much more will your father in heaven give you? First of all, the child's asking for something, which is very vulnerable. But the basic thing Jesus is really doing is saying you can trust your heavenly father, but the reason he has to say that is, and we all carry within us doubt. And we believe you're born into the world, separated from God, and born into some form of a family of origin. We'd call that the fall, right? Original sin. But the manifestation of that takes shape in our actual experiences. How were needs met? How were you seen? Were your needs anticipated? When you had a desire, was it taken seriously? Did a parent look you in the eyes and seem to really want to meet a need, even if it was going to be hard for them? You know, these are the deep things of desire that when not cultivated would mean would lead us to banish. It's too painful when a parent won't meet a need, won't even ask. So what that would lead to is a, and we use this phrase sometimes, a banishing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, killing off of desire. We see it happen in so many of our stories, conversations. You'll hear it. It's very subtle, but once you kind of have the category for it, you'll start to see it a lot more. We've touched on this in previous episodes about when we have to tell ourselves we don't want things or don't like things. It's often out of this killing off of desires, like you were just talking about. And I I watched it happen a few years ago with a little girl that lives in our neighborhood, and we had invited her to go to the roller skating rink with us. We were doing some things on the driveway, and she clearly loved roller skating. And I said, Well, we would love to have you come with us. We're gonna go tomorrow. And she said, Well, let me ride my bike home and go ask. She was so excited. It was like a field trip with the girls, you know, we're gonna go roller skating at the real rink. And she rode her bike home to go ask. And within 10 minutes, she's riding back and she looks completely dejected, completely down. She pulls her bike up and she says, I can't go. And I said, Oh no, what happened? And she said, My stepdad said no, and he won't budge. And he said, If I ask again, I'll get grounded. And I just was so sad for her in that moment. But then the next statement was what we see in so many of our clients later in life. And she said, It's okay. I don't even like roller skating rings anyway. I hate roller skating rings.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. Yeah, I remember when you shared that story then and and then just hearing it again freshly. It's a perfect example uh uh of what we do. When a caregiver tells us something is not an option, I don't mean a one-off like you can't have candy, but if it becomes clear somehow in your being, and this is what you shared, like there's no chance of this happening. It would seem that a very common response by the body would be rename that desire or rename it by killing it or rewriting the narrative.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it gave her a little bit of power in the midst of powerlessness that stepfather took away her longing and her excitement, and he just stole it in that moment. And yeah, we knew him to be a pretty cruel, distant, unloving person that had a consistency with that. So, I mean, she was already. This is not a like I caught him in a bad time, but it was so sad to watch because as a nine-year-old little girl, she would rather be in control of what was gonna feel bad, the pain of hearing no. And so it felt better for her to say she didn't like it.
SPEAKER_01:I think the question then, I mean, I think all of us can relate. That's what makes that story initially super sad when we lived it and saw it. But then on some level, it kind of opens the eyes to like, what things have I decided I don't like because they weren't either an option, or if I did at one point have that desire, it was quickly squelched. And by the way, it can be done in many different ways, right? It can be an overbearing stepfather who just says no. And so she rewrote it in the sense that she's now coming back with a new narrative of I don't actually even like that anymore. I never did. And and of course, it's not true, so it was painful to see. But there's also ways that I think we can be manipulated into that new narrative, you know? You mean into our different desires? Yeah, so you have a desire to do something. Um, I want to be an architect. Mm-hmm. Well, okay. Did you know there's a lot of math? What do you what? Yes. Okay, and then pretty soon you don't like it.
SPEAKER_00:Well, you're not good at math, so maybe you should try just to be an artist.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. And so you now have a new narrative, and that spark was extinguished almost immediately.
SPEAKER_00:So parents, even siblings, can kind of what you're saying is reshape our desires without us knowing it, so that later in life we're like, oh yeah, I used to want to be that. I wonder what happened to that. We don't really give it thought because it just kind of got reshaped. I want to go back to the mother and the father that might say yes, so they're not the neglecting, squelching parent that says no, the parent that says yes, what do you want? Like, let's do it. But then they shame their child later, or there's a cost to the child having a desire. I think that's the more subtle story work to do as to why is your relationship to desire kind of a push-pull? Like, I would love to have a birthday party. I don't want to have a birthday party. My mom's willing to have a birthday party for me. I don't want to deal with what it's going to be like for the week afterwards and all the shame that I'm going to get.
SPEAKER_01:So we're inviting you, obviously, in light of some of these illustrations, to look at your own family of origin. But we also are asking that you begin to pay attention to the potential of that deeper longing, deeper desire that we're afraid to tap into, right? You know, C.S. Lewis famously says it's not that our desires are too big, it's that they're too small. So, in a way, what he's saying is we've dumbed them down. And then famously, many of you have probably heard his quote that we busy ourselves playing with mud pies in an alley, you know, a back alley, but all the while God has offered us the holiday at the beach. And what he's saying there and what we've been processing is we are made for desire and a desire for God and for beauty and for glory that is so big that if we had just a whiff of it once a day, knowing it was possible, it would be transformative. And yet, because of these early wounds, because of the world we live in, so much of that's been banished and we've sort of set our mark, our goals, our hopes on, you know, and he even said you'd be busy around with things like food and sex and whatever. Again, those are the mud pies. It's not that those things are wrong in their essence, but often what we've done is we've set a goal as if it's the the end. That's the thing we want, but it's it's very small, and you get to it and it's not enough. And so you have to set the next goal, and your desire kind of like keeps moving like a mirage or like the rainbow, you know, it's just the bot, it keeps moving with as you move toward it. When what we've been offered is something so intimate, like it's literal intimacy to name a desire before another, and God is another, just as our spouse is another, is so vulnerable. And so we almost kill even that. Maybe we turn sex into something that takes just a few moments, and we turn food into something that's just a quick drive-thru.
SPEAKER_00:Like we we dumb down beauty and glory because it can feel too much to well, like some people are mocked if they enjoy something too much, or you know, they get a gift and they immediately want to put it on. There's the oh, well, okay, calm down. There's shame in enjoyment. I don't want to desire that because I would get so excited. People didn't join me in that in my childhood.
SPEAKER_01:I was like, what you're even saying is that mocking, it exposes the hope deferred, right? The moment you begin to enjoy it, there's something of of mockery, which is to say your hope was misplaced. If you're a Christian, you've probably been raised in some way or taught that the word desire is almost evil. Like it's not even something that we should foster. So if you have anything you want, something might be a little bit off in you.
SPEAKER_00:Once you bring in kind of the religious, not necessarily Christianity, but just kind of this wet blanket statement of, you know, all desire is dangerous. It's going to lead you to bad things. So we should just become robotic, obedient humans. Desire is all passion, and passion is all sin.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. In fact, you we see that in an incorrect reading from James. There's that place where he says, But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. But there, of course, he's referring now to not a godly desire, but the desire based and built around the temptation. A little bit later, James also picks up with what causes quarrels and fights among you. Is it not this that you that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask.
SPEAKER_00:Not ask is a very isolating orphan mentality. I'm not going to ask my father because I feel ashamed to even want.
SPEAKER_01:When we have overdesire, epithemia, covet, when we're no longer seeking God in the desire, then it's deformed and it's dangerous, and it's a cistern, right? It's not a flowing stream of water. But that doesn't mean desire is wrong if anything. That means it's naming that desire is so important, it's got to be pure, it's got to be flowing from and toward the Lord. And one of the books that I would recommend is Kurt Thompson's third book and his trilogy, It's Anatomy of the Soul, The Soul of Shame. And then he writes The Soul of Desire. My guess is, and I don't know if he's ever said this, it has the least volume sold, maybe, because I have found, I mean, man, I can read about shame all day long, but to read about desire feels a little scandalous. He gives an example from one client who's had an affair and who's just fixated on it, how he is ignoring, and I think we all can relate to some degree, our deeper longings for true fulfillment and true pleasure that only can come in and through a relationship with God. And he also spends a lot of time in Psalm 27, verse 4. The one thing I've asked of the Lord, that which I seek after, is that I would dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, gazing upon his beauty and inquiring in the temple. And I have read the book and I remember reading that in it, and since then loving that verse. But even after all of that, feeling a little wince around gazing upon his beauty. I'm great with I'm in the house because I'm safe. We talk about safety and my love. Can I learn? I'm safe because I'm in the house. Inquiring in his temple means I'm meditating, I'm really learning, I'm growing in my knowledge. I love that. But gazing upon his beauty, it almost feels voyeuristic. Like I'm just standing over here, kind of cowering in a corner, and there he is. I can already tell my own story, my own narratives off. Like, what is my relationship? And listener, what is your relationship to beauty and especially God's beauty, but all beauty that comes from God? And is it something we move toward in a healthy way? Or are we cowering voyeuristically, or are we cutting off and running from? And what Thompson does is he moves toward creativity and creating. We are made in God's image, and we are made to love beauty and glory. Makoto Fujimuro writes the preface talking about his art, but it's Kitsugi art, which you love, and about how that really was born out of him rediscovering beauty. I think what we're wanting to just name in this podcast is it feels like there's a dominant message out there that anything you want is probably too much. You need to just cut it back a little bit, be realistic, and that will kind of help you get through this life. Or if you come into counseling and there's problems, you're just trying to kind of get things back to something. But that's not God's way.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So God did make us to flourish. When I'm suggesting a practice to someone, or we've been discussing their desires, and I say something, I can feel the protector come up when they say, Well, I'm afraid if I do that, it won't work. I've heard that that's a great idea, but uh I'm afraid if I do it, it won't work. And what they're really saying, and that's something I hear all the time, is desire or even hope is so dangerous. If I fail, if it doesn't work for me, I could be back at Yes, I think that's a hundred percent true.
SPEAKER_01:And would you also agree there is such shame or potential shame around receiving any pleasure? I mean, we talk a lot about the purity culture, but I don't think it's just the purity culture, but certainly it capitalized on that reality. That part of the way shame works is don't sit here and enjoy, keep moving forward, right? Um, shame also conflates guilt with things that are not wrong. So you can feel bad not only toward something that you that isn't wrong, but then of course we'd say that shame is I am wrong. Well, if that commingles with desire because of the way it played out in your family of origin, then if your experience of beauty is it's sinful to find so to be aroused. It is sinful to like something, it is sinful to be drawn. I mean, by the word aroused, of course there's sexual arousal, but there's like I'm drawn to. And and many of us, if we're honest, would say that's either neutral at best. It's sort of like in the category of time wasting, you know, I love Netflix, but it's probably not the best use of my time, you know, or it's bad. I shouldn't be doing this. What should you be doing? I should probably be at Bible study, I should probably be like sharing the gospel, but no one is saying those things, thinking of delighting in that moment. It's not like I really want that. So we say, what is your relationship to desire, right? How does it feel to want something? The next question is like, what is your relationship with arousal when your body feels desire?
SPEAKER_00:Well, that's a huge can of worms that we probably should open and probably have several conversations about it because we do deal a lot with sexual abuse. We've never talked about it on the podcast, but there's a lot of confusion around desire when it gets into not just sexual abuse, but non-touch psychological abuse.
SPEAKER_01:So I think what we're wanting to do to close this discussion off is just cause you to think about what you want. Like even just ask yourself the question. I will promise you, if you ask it the way we intend it to be asked, it's not an easy answer. Have you really named the particularity of what you want? It's tempting and easy to just kind of throw out the lofty, you know, I want to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Of course. But does that connect to your physiology? Does that connect to your current story, your current situation? Is that something that you have ever put into words in such a way that it ties into the current stressors in your life?
SPEAKER_00:You mentioned James earlier, because that's the big go-to for like, you know, all desire is wrong. It's gonna always lead you to sin. So stop desiring. That's a purity culture in a nutshell. It was all about kill off the desire and then you won't have sex before you're married. And then all of a sudden, on your wedding night, turn the buttons back on. The critique of it all is we weren't naming well that God designed our bodies with sexual organs to have desire. What do we do with it when we're 15? There's room for wrong desires and desires that can lead us to sin, but denying them isn't what our philosophy would be. So when you look at like even Psalm 145, he satisfies the desires of every living thing. The Lord is near to all who call him. So he's saying every living thing has desires. We can ask him. Now, the James verse that you mentioned was we don't have because we don't ask. There's another really good, short but powerful phrase in Proverbs that says, Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire. So in isolation, our desires can be very dangerous to lead us away from our Creator. But the answer isn't kill off desire. The answer is can we name our deep longings, our unmet longings, and can we ask the Lord to fulfill them so that they don't get fulfilled in these very secretive, sinful ways because we've just tried to deny them. It's like the beach ball that you can't keep underneath the water. It's gonna keep trying to pop up in every direction possible. So why don't we at least say, Lord, I've got this beach ball, I don't know what to do with this.
SPEAKER_01:So there's a category that has to be named. Okay. The word epithumia, which is the word for covet in the Greek, is an inordinate desire. So it's actually assuming healthy, you know, there's the thumia, there's a healthy desire, but then there's the misplaced desire.
SPEAKER_00:And misplaced. You mentioned that one time about like you have you want what you cannot have.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So it says do not covet like your neighbor's home, the tenth commandment, right? That's in the Hebrew, what later the Septuagint came in the Greek, it's the epithumia. But it's not saying that you shouldn't think that that home is beautiful, nor would it be saying, and this may be controversial, that you can't find that the neighbor's wife's an attractive person. The the issue is what happens with that when it meshes with like ownership and taking ownership of misplaced desire. That's ironically the true killing of desire. You're actually crushing its intended purpose and it's killing that and you at the same time. But here's what we're getting at. So what happens then when you have a desire that can't be fulfilled in the moment? Say you're single and you want to be married, right? Or maybe you're struggling to have children. There's all sorts of desires that don't seem to be met in this life, and we must introduce grief again, because if you don't grieve, the only other option is to kill desire.
SPEAKER_00:That's precisely what we watched with the little girl. That's where we all, as little children and teenagers, when we were met with the heartache of not getting what we wanted, instead of grieving, we reshaped the narrative into, well, I don't even like it anyway.
SPEAKER_01:And by grief, let's just be clear, we're saying it's a lament going to God. And even in a way, almost a pounding on the chest of why not? That is actually strengthening desire. To grieve is to say, I want this to not be the way it is. I love the beauty that is not being received. And I am having imagination for this. Like I to just pretend like the thing is not a loss, to just cut it off to make it easier on yourself is not good, nor is going out and taking it from places that aren't yours. So desire within the bounds of what God's given us leads to the flourishing. It's a very tough topic, but we just want to really keep emphasizing pay attention to the question and to the difficulty of answering it. You know, imagine yourself speaking to somebody about a current situation, and imagine that person lovingly looking at you and saying, What is it you really want? And my sense would be if you're doing that correctly, there will be a moment of just, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and I've worked with people that they honestly will never say what they want. They won't, as simple as be the person in the group to say which restaurant they would like to go to or what movie they want to see. Because growing up, they had to learn that to bring shalom into their family of origin was not to have a desire and just to go with the flow. And so even that would I think deserve care because we want to bring back online what do you want? You do have desires to act like I don't really have desires. I'm just like the most easygoing person. I just do what everyone else. That's a lack of containment. God made each person to have a set of their own desires. The things that draw us to our calling were uniquely made. And I do think it's a great question. You know, and it's funny as we began to say, Hey, let's go have a conversation for the podcast about desire or what do you want? Immediately, you know, spice girls, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. Or like, you know, YouTube, desire. It's like, how many songs are about desire or what do you want? It's a core human faculty.
SPEAKER_01:What's keeping you from naming what you want? And I think a couple of conversations we would love to come back to in future podcasts. The first is sometimes we're at war with our own arousal. So we're gonna talk about arousals in the future. Sometimes it can even feel wrong. But another one we're gonna need to address is why would I want to waste my time and energy wanting something I know I can't get? Which leads us to grief. We've talked about grief, and it leads us to a topic we need to cover more clearly. As Christians, we hold both death and resurrection. And what that means, and we'll get into it later, that just because something can't be had right now doesn't mean it won't be had in the future. And so we move toward that longing, which can feel really bad. I mean, it'd be impossible, but imagine a young girl saying, Here's the situation. I would love to go. I still love roller skating. Like that's still my favorite thing. Unfortunately, my stepfather won't let me go. So I'm really, really sad. And I'm hoping that in the future I can go another time. But I understand that in this particular time I'm not gonna go, but I love it still. That's a grief. That's I'm lamenting or grieving, but I'm not killing. But I'm also not gonna sneak out and go against their will or something else. So the point is we need to be able to hold that intention, trusting that God, as we said earlier from the parable, how much more will your father in heaven give you? And in one of the places he says, give you the Holy Spirit. And when we ask God, he delights to give us the Holy Spirit that is connection to him.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks again for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed the conversation. If you have any questions or thoughts about the topics today, we'd love to hear from you. We can be reached through our website, emails, and social media. Just go to Story Matters Initiative. If you're interested in doing individual or group work, we'd love to discuss that with you as well.