TAKING A DEEPER DIVE INTO THE DIVINE LOVE STORY, THERAPISTS AND MARRIAGE, WITH DR. JULI SLATTERY | EP 55

[DAWN GABRIEL]
Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, your host of Faith Fringes podcast, recording live from Castle Rock, Colorado. I am a licensed professional counselor, owner of a counseling center and a sacred space holder for fellow therapists. This podcast is for those who want to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. I create intentional space to explore your own spiritual path, a space that allows doubt, questions and curiosity without the judgment or shame, a place to hear another story and dive deeper into how to have a genuine connection with God.

For my fellow therapist, listening, I will often pull back the curtain of our layered inner world that comes with our profession. I bring an authentic and experienced way to engage your spiritual journey in order to connect you with your deepest values for true renewal and soul care. But really this podcast is for anyone listening who’s desiring a deeper and genuine connection with God. For those of you wanting to engage your spirituality in new ways, Faith Fringes is for you. Welcome to the podcast.

Hi, this is Dawn Gabriel back with Faith Fringes. Thanks for listening. If you’re new to this podcast, thank you so much for joining us today and if you’ve been with me a long time, I so appreciate you journeying and listening in. So for those of you who know, I have been narrowing some of my podcast episodes to focus more on therapists as I just feel so strongly that we need to really create space for my profession, for them to get real with themselves. We spend so much time talking and creating space for other people that I really want this podcast to be a place where we can dig in and get some layers off and talk about our own personal lives and our spiritual lives, and to really dive into that.

So today I am very excited about my guest. I actually heard about her from one of my best friends. She said, “Hey, you need to listen to this podcast, Java with Juli. She records it in a coffee shop, there’s people all around, but she talks about really great stuff. She talks about all things sex from a Christian perspective.” I was like, I totally have to listen. At first, I was like, before I listened, I was like, I get really weary when they say Christian and sex or Christian in a certain controversial topic because I never know where the person’s going to land but as I listened, I really loved Juli’s perspective. She is a clinical psychologist so she definitely is from our background.

I just want to read a little bit about her, but I’m so excited. You’ll get to hear her heart and you’ll get to hear more about her today but before I do read that, I just want to say we are going to talk about a bunch of different things that I know some people may agree with, some people may not, but just listen in and see what you think. If it causes you to have more questions, that’s great. You can reach out to me. If you want to talk more about it, just drop me an email. I’d love to hear from you. Yes, whatever you think. I’m always curious. I always want this podcast to make us think and get curious. That’s one of my goals.

So let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Juli Slattery. She’s a clinical psychologist, author, speaker, and broadcast media professional with over 25 years of experience counseling and teaching women. She’s the president and co-founder of Authentic Intimacy, a unique ministry devoted to teaching God’s design for intimacy and sexuality. In 2020, Juli launched sexualdiscipleship.com a platform designed to help Christian leaders navigate sexual issues and questions with gospel-centered truth. She hosts a weekly podcast Java with Juli, where she answers tough questions about relationship, marriage and spiritual, emotional, and sexual intimacy. You can find her at www.authenticintimacy.com. Juli, welcome to the podcast.
[DR. JULI SLATTERY]
Thanks for having me on. I’m glad to be here with you.
[DAWN]
Yes, and I’m just really excited because in my line of work, actually in my podcast line of work, I find that there’s this balance I try to walk sometimes between, I feel like people are either saying you’re not Christian enough or you’re too Christiany and too spiritual but I feel like when I listen to your podcast, I really resonate. You speak truth but it’s not legalistic. It’s just very freeing. So to me, I feel like I couldn’t wait to get on here and talk to you about things
[DR. JULI]
Oh, well, good. I’m looking forward to it and thanks for that feedback. That’s encouraging.
[DAWN]
I think the number one topic that I had reached out to see if we could talk about was definitely talking about sex and marriage and sexuality, because I think sometimes it gets so misconstrued. That goes into also your new book that I want to give you time to talk about too, about women’s roles and submission. I feel like it gets so convoluted, but I’d love to just dive in. So maybe tell our, my listeners a little bit about, how did you get into this, these topics? These are some hardcore topics.
[DR. JULI]
They’re for sure, not by choice if it wasn’t like, I’m not in Enneagram 8 or anything where I’m looking for that challenge. So I grew up in a Christian home that story that I think a lot of people can resonate with, just Christian schools and church and yes, really having a commitment to God as a young child, but as we grow and we encounter life, especially in the counseling field, we encounter pain and we look at okay, well, what I learned in church isn’t exactly helpful in real life. Some of the examples of them are sort of that purity culture that we’re now pushing back on and saying, man, what I learned in church about sex actually has turned out to be harmful for me or for people that I know and love or marriage.

What I learned about marriage as a wife does like, when I get in the counseling room and I’m talking to a woman who is in an abusive relationship, like the church in many ways, that’s hurt her. So what do I do with that? In psychology we call that cognitive dissonance, like I’m encountering a new situation where my foundational beliefs are being challenged. I think we have a whole culture of people right now that are in that cognitive dissonance and many are, the buzz word deconstructing away from the Christian faith. But my heart is I know God, and I know his goodness. So how do I deconstruct and reconstruct more into the heart of God and leaning more into scripture and understanding that scripture is a whole lot more than a list of rules we were meant to follow? That’s been my framework, I think throughout my whole clinical career and now my focus on sexuality has been let’s study the scripture and teach the scripture from the heart of God. As Jesus even said you’re honoring man’s traditions and you’re actually disobeying me, like you’re missing it. I think so many times we know the chapter in verse, but our application of it totally misses the heart of who Jesus is and what he came to do.
[DAWN]
I love that. Yes. What he came to do is set us free, not put us more into slavery to something that doesn’t like you said, speak the heart of God. I think, I love that you said, yes, sitting with people changed me too as a therapist, just, I was like, I can’t hold on to some of these beliefs and sit with pain in how people process that. But yet I also know the truth of the freedom in Christ. So it was, I spent a long-time figuring things out as well. I’m still figuring, trying to figure things out like that, but yes, so that’s how you got into it was being a counselor, like being a therapist, you just sitting with people?
[DR. JULI]
Yes, and as far as the sexuality piece, having a really dramatic call from God to talk about sex. So that happened about 11 years ago, we started Authentic Intimacy a decade ago. So it’s been a journey of faith and honestly, a journey of obedience. This isn’t a topic that I was excited to talk about and had I known 10 years ago, the things we’d be talking about today out have been even less excited about saying yes, but, I just I tell our team, I’m like, I’m never bored. You’ll never be bored and I just am dependent on God every day because these issues are too big for any of us.
[DAWN]
Yes, and it’s quickly changing in this environment. In this day and age, sexuality has been super changing in the last couple years even, but on a side note, the thing I think is so funny is that sometimes when you record, you’re like in a coffee house or something, there’s people everywhere and I’m like how does she focus and talk about such deep stuff in the middle of a coffee house? I love it.
[DR. JULI]
Well, our little secret is that when we are in a coffee house, we usually have like a separate room so you can hear the coffee sounds but you, there’s more privacy. Because yes, sometimes we tried in the midst of a coffee shop in the beginning and we’d have this really tender moment and then somebody in the next table would laugh or a kid scream. So we found ways to control the noise and even add the ambient noise later if we need to.
[DAWN]
Oh, okay, that makes sense because I was like, wow, she stays really focused and talks. So going back to the sexual intimacy, I think I myself grew up in the purity culture movement, I would say in the eighties and nineties. That’s what I talk a lot about with clients, even trying to understand God’s design for sexuality and that is right there, just lit a fire. Everybody has different opinions on that, but where, I know from listening to you, but if you could just share with my listeners who maybe haven’t had a chance to hear, can you give like an overview on like yes, where you’re landing with that and more how you look at that?
[DR. JULI]
It’s been a journey for me. Everything I’m teaching today, I honestly didn’t know 10 years ago. So I’ve been on this learning journey of, like I said, pressing more deeply into scripture and realizing that the Bible is a story. It’s not a list of rules. When we talk about sexuality, what we tend to do is go to a dozen passages that talk specifically about sex. We go to the passages that define sexual immorality, we may go to the Song of Solomon, we may go to passages that talk about marriage, but you miss the application of this passages. If you don’t read them in context of the whole story, what is the story that God is telling from Genesis to revelation?

What we see in all of scripture is that God created the natural world to reveal the spiritual world. Everything about what he created is meant to be a form of revelation. So we see in the Bible and we’re so familiar with it, we don’t even connect the dots. You can’t read a chapter of the Bible without it referring to something in the physical world, whether it’s a tree or type of animal or the experience of being hungry or a family. So God created us, He created our natural world, everything with dynamic reflection of who he is. So then we have to ask the question, okay, well, why did he create sex? What is sex revealing about the nature of God? If you read Genesis through revelation, it jumps out at you. God is revealing how he loves his people with covenant love and how he pursues them, how he’s passionate about them, the importance of faithfulness in a covenant the importance of celebration in our covenant love, the nature of sacrificial giving within covenant, that we lay down ourselves for one another.

From Genesis to revelation, that is the story of sex. That is the story of gender God reveals through gender. So now if we have that backdrop of that’s the purpose of our sexuality from a Biblical perspective, what does that mean as I wrestle through my sexual trauma? What does that mean as I deal with gender dysphoria? What does that mean if I can’t enjoy sex in my marriage? What does that mean as a single Christian who has these unmet longings? So a lot of what I try to do in teaching is really get to that big picture first, because I think so often we want to solve the problem, we want to get rid of the sin, we want to prove our point without connecting people to what is the heart of God here and what does it mean that he redeems everything that he’s created?
[DAWN]
That’s a huge question, especially when you were talking about trauma, like a lot of times people aren’t there yet. Like, I don’t want it to be redeemed. I’m just mad and hurt and angry and struggling. So can you talk more about that? What does that look like redeeming things that are broken?
[DR. JULI]
Yes. Boy, there’s so many different ways to tackle that, but I’ll just share with you one thing that I think the Lord showed me through. The craziest thing in the Bible, John chapter 11, which is the resurrection of Lazarus. You’re like, how do we get from sexual trauma to Lazarus? I have a weird way of reading the Bible sometimes.
[DAWN]
It’s okay. I love it.
[DR. JULI]
But what we see in that story is that Jesus is reviving. He’s bringing to life something that was dead and that’s the process of healing and redemption. Something has been killed. It’s dead, it’s rotten and God wants to breathe life into it. So what I see in that story is that there are these three roadblocks that I think every trauma survivor has to get through in order to experience the freedom and the life that God wants to speak into them. The first roadblock we see in that story is that God makes no sense. If you read the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead, I challenge you to read it and read it with the eyes of not knowing what Jesus is going to do. He sounds like a crazy man. He says, I love them so I’m not going to go and visit Lazarus. It is for your good that I stayed here and it’s for his good, and everybody’s good that he died. That doesn’t make any sense.

Or and when Mary and Martha both say to him, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. He doesn’t say, oh, I’m sorry. He doesn’t seem loving in his actions. That is something that every trauma victim will wrestle with on their journey of God. Where was he and why did he allow this? Why didn’t he stop it? Where is he now in my pain? So as therapists, we need to enter into those questions without answering and just being there and creating space for that very real question and navigating when I experience my resurrection, what I look back and say, wow, you were there? I just didn’t see it and there’s pieces of the story that I don’t know yet.

That’s the first one. The second on, when Jesus goes to speak life into Lazarus, he tells them to roll away the stone and Martha who is ever the practical one says, but Lord, he’s been dead for four days. It’s going to stink. That’s how we are in dealing with our trauma and our brokenness. God says, it’s time to heal. I want to speak life into these memories, into this wound and we have the objection. Like my life is working pretty well right now. If I’m honest about this, everything might fall apart. I have to confront things that are messy. I have to tell the truth about things that I feel like are better off hidden. So we have to have the courage to trust what Jesus said. If you will roll away the stone, you’re going to see the glory of God. You’re going to see the power of God. I feel like as therapists, we get to see that, we get to see when people are courageous enough to invite God into the messy spaces. There is a resurrection power that happens.

Then the third is a very practical roadblock is that when Lazarus walks out of the tomb, he still wrapped in the linen of death. He still smells like death. He’s doing the mommy shuffle. He can’t really walk and Jesus doesn’t tell him to unwrap himself. He tells the people around Lazarus, unwrap him, set him free. Every one of us in our brokenness and in our recovery, we can’t unwrap ourselves. Like even though God has begun to speak life, we need community around us that are willing to get their hands dirty, that will be patient with a process. So again, that’s a very long answer to your question, but I see that the scripture speaks into even what we’re doing in helping people with a very practical journey of recovering from trauma and other forms of brokenness.
[DAWN]
I’m sitting here trying to absorb that all in. That’s a totally different way. I’ve looked at the story of Lazarus and I love it. I’ve never thought of it that way, but it’s so true, the not making sense, the need for community. But this is going to stink God. Like, yes, I want to hide. That does speak so much to sitting with people and what we do as therapists, I love that analogy. I’m going to definitely, I need time to think through that. I feel like though, that’s a lot, there.
[DR. JULI]
It is a lot to unpack, but I love reading God’s word and see that, like, he had made a way for people to get healing before we ever coin the term psychology or trauma. His truth is there but again we have to be willing to sit with the scripture and sit with a heart of God and not just read black and white words on a page and try to slap them on people.
[DAWN]
Yes. I was just listening to another podcast actually with Richard Ro and Brené Brown. They were talking about, Richard Ro was saying, or Father Richard was saying how, when he encounters people who really know the heart of God or really like have searched for God, they, they are in love. They have found a lover, not a dictator. That just has been sitting with me. It’s like what you said so many times, I feel like religion, or sometimes our faith has brought us up to be way more religious and following rules, but the, I feel like the older I get and the more people I interact with, it’s more about, yes, just entering in and sitting. It’s more of like a slowing down and getting to know the heart of God more. It’s so different than this. This is how you do it. It’s more a way of being and yes, I feel like that’s what you’re saying too. It’s just so much more of a, it’s a relationship. It’s like diving in deeper to this story, and the person’s story and what God’s doing in their lives rather than, well, they should stop doing this. They should start doing this. It’s like, we’ve got it all wrong.
[DR. JULI]
We do. Absolutely we do. I think we’ve all been in that space before, like early in our faith journey where it is about following the rules and behavior and why isn’t, even God’s behavior, why isn’t he performing the way I think he should and having to break all that down and sit with who is God, and do I believe him and do I know his love? Am I in love with him? That’s a journey I’ve been on as well that has changed everything about how I see my faith and how I practice my faith and how I understand the issues that God has called me to teach on now.
[DAWN]
Yes. You said you weren’t expecting to be called to teach on some of this 11 years ago and here you are. I think, but we need voices like yours, who hold truth and can still talk about scripture and God, because sometimes I feel like when people deconstruct, I’ve seen people go way away from God where my experience was more, I want to deconstruct some things, but I still want to hold. I don’t want to lose Jesus. I want to hold on to the goodness and the love I know, but all the other stuff I want to hold. So I just appreciate that perspective of still grounding it in scriptural truth and looking at a story.
[DR. JULI]
Honestly, I don’t know where else to go? It’s like the disciple said, they wanted to deconstruct too and Jesus said, are you going to leave too? They said, we’d like to, but where else can we find the words of truth? There’s no other solid foundation. We’re seeing that in our world that there are a lot of other foundations, but none of them are solid. So I hang on to my faith and who God is and I want to know him more deeply and trust that he’s good in all things, even in the things that I don’t understand.
[DAWN]
Yes, that is hard. I know when I first started getting trained in therapy 20 years ago sitting with trauma was so hard for me, because it really made me doubt and question and just feel depressed. And even working with trauma for so long, sometimes you have to back up and be like, I need to be around some goodness right now. Because this is really hard and yucky and I’m done and or burned out. So it’s like, I need to be around people who believe in God, because sometimes you go down that rabbit trail with them, with your clients and it’s like, no, wait, I have to stay strong. I mean, it’s hard as therapists. We get affected by all the stories we hear.
[DR. JULI]
Yes. I remember one time, particularly like hearing some stories of deep, deep trauma of like Satan ritual abuse and just horrible things. It was like, I thought that evil could be contained within a certain territory. It was like, the evil got so far out of that territory. I’m like, things you can’t even conceive of happening. As I was wrestling with the Lord, it was like, he said to me, as much as your understanding of evil is expanding. I want to show you that your understanding of my goodness needs to expand and my power needs to expand. We do need that. We need that from the Lord. We need that from our Christian community. We need to borrow sometimes the faith of other people when ours is being shaken. And people that are on the front lines and working in that space every day, it’s easy to get discouraged and ask, where are you God? But even the presence of evil is a testimony that there is a God, there is a good, and there is an evil.
[DAWN]
Yes, that’s true. I talk with my team, I have a team of eight therapists and we talk about we need each other because sometimes when we’re in that we don’t realize how much the evil is impacting our psyche and our beliefs. We have to be real. I think one thing I often talk about with therapists is we’re not being real enough with our own self because then let’s say we go through our own trauma as we’re sitting with people, like if there’s a death in our family or an addiction or something big, and we don’t deal with it because we’re so used to sitting there for other people. Our own self, we hide away. And I think we need to enter into that, but sometimes we’re just so tired.
[DR. JULI]
And honestly, I do this. We build a persona of being the helper and it’s a great defense. Nobody ever asks you how you’re doing. If you just say fine, they believe you, nobody wants this deep, more deeply. So I need people in my life who won’t take fine for an answer, who will push me to process my stuff. That’s sort of the artificialness of what we have as current day clinicians. We’re supposed to do life together. It’s not supposed to be like, I’m the helper and you’re the helpee. I have no problems and you have all problems
[DAWN]
And I would tell you how to fix them. I often find that that has come into my relationship with God too of no, God, I got this. I got the coping skills. I can like make this look good. I had someone, a spiritual director share with me the verse in Isaiah 50:10 and 11, where it talks about lighting your own torches in the darkness. But the verse, like Isaiah’s saying no trust God in the darkness and God says, if you light your own torches, fine, but you’re going to perish. I mean, that’s very paraphrased, but I was like, oh my gosh, I’m a torch lighter. I take that torch and light it for other people even But God is calling me to put that torch down and stay in the darkness sometimes and trust in the darkness. I’m like, I don’t like that.
[DR. JULI]
No, no. That’s a beautiful picture though.
[DAWN]
I realized like, I remember, I don’t know how many years ago, like recent, within five years I realized me being a therapist has hindered my soul relationship with God because I’m not entering into that place that I need to with him.
[DR. JULI]
Yes. I think, yes, that’s definitely true of me at times. Like I said, I need those people who, like who’s the counselor for the counselor.
[DAWN]
So true. Well, I actually offer sole care retreats for therapists to let go of that and just process just so you know.
[DR. JULI]
I got to find out about that.
[DAWN]
No, because it’s mainly me being accountable to myself too, like we got to be real here.
[DAWN]
If you’re a therapist and you are feeling burned out or just needing a break and being around other therapists who really understand what you’re going through, or if you are feeling like you just need some space to connect with God and get grounded back into what really matters to you and your spirituality, I would like to invite you to come to a soul care retreat for therapists, exclusively for therapists. I host soul care retreats for therapists, and I just love holding sacred space for you to just reconnect with yourself, reconnect with God and connect with others who are in the same profession and have probably experienced similar things as you have. So I’m inviting you. My next retreat is September 23rd through the 25th, 2022 in Colorado.

We will have about 10 rooms to ourselves in this little beautiful retreat center in the Black Hills Forest. The, we have three hot tubs, there’s trails around there, we can see the mountains. It’s so peaceful there. I just want to invite you to come, come and just experience what it’s like to have soul care. We do some guided exercises as a group. We also do guided exercises as individuals. I have a workbook that can help walk you through what do I do with all this downtime. Because I know, even though we are longing for the downtime, sometimes it’s hard to get there.

Sometimes we get anxious when we’re there. Sometimes we get scared. So I will have a workbook that helps you walk through that, that gives you exercises to connect with God and figure out what’s really going on inside you. We also have, there’s great food here. We have great conversations and there’s plenty of time to connect with one another and we have a lot of fun. So if you’re interested, send me an email dawn@faithfringes.com. I only have 10 spots available for this retreat. We like to keep it small and intimate. Again, it’s September 23rd through 25th and that will be in Colorado. Reach out to me, dawn@faithfringes.com to find out more information today.
[DAWN GABRIEL]
I’d love to go into talking about marriage because I know, I’m married and I joke that our husbands need a support group for being husbands of therapists because of everything we just said and because our marriages have real issues. So I’d love to jump into where your new book is. If you want to tell us the title and a little bit about your book, I feel like that’ll bring it up.
[DR. JULI]
It’s called Finding the Hero in Your Husband, Revisited. The reason it’s revisited is because 20 years ago I wrote the original version of this book. It was my first book
[DAWN]
Oh, I didn’t know that.
[DR. JULI]
I was really wrestling as a young wife and as a young therapist with the issues of marriage that I was seeing. So that book over the years I sold well, it helped some people and man, as I was looking through it over the last few years, I’m like, there’s some good things in here, but I would say it so much differently today. I learned so much, I would nuance it differently, so I actually got the chance to go and not just edit it. I rewrote it from the ground up.
[DAWN]
Oh my gosh.
[DR. JULI]
Which was very interesting. It was quite a project, but it really is about helping women understand their power in marriage. I think most women know that they have a lot of power in marriage. Some don’t, some feel like doormats or like they have no voice, but I think most of us know, like I elude to that old movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, that famous, the man made me the head, but the woman’s the neck and she can turn the head anywhere she wants. She’s alluding to that power that can be good and was meant to be good, but can also be manipulative. It can be overbearing. When I was wrestling in my own marriage, as well as seeing so many other women wrestling it all boiled down to this issue of power and do I know I have power? Do I know it’s God given? Do I know how to use it? Do I recognize the ways that I’m misusing it? So that’s the theme of the book.
[DAWN]
Even as you’re talking, I could feel it bubbling up in me, like knowing the power, but sometimes slipping into the flesh and the spirit, because it’s like the same side of the coin or the flip side of the coin of. That can go either way for me. Sometimes I can trick myself in the midst of it. So can you say more like what, when you say power, can you dive into that a little more?
[DR. JULI]
Yes. So first of all, I think we all misuse our power. Nobody’s going to do this well. We need God’s wisdom to do it well, but our power essentially comes from what our husbands need most from us. So we think our power comes in focusing on what we need but really relational power comes when somebody needs something from me. So to use just a physical example, if you have an illness and I’m the one who has the cure for that illness, you’re willing to do whatever I ask. You’ll pay whatever amount of money. You’ll do whatever because you need what I have. The same thing plays out in relational power when you can meet someone’s needs, especially if it’s an exclusive meeting of needs that gives you great power. So in the book, I look at three areas where husbands have great need and it gives women power. So I’m wondering if you can guess what those are
[DAWN]
Yes, I’m guessing.
[DAWN]
Well of course sex. I was trying to think of the other two. This is just me, I’m an extrovert, so I process everything out loud. I think I was thinking more along the lines, and I don’t know what the word is for it, but there’s like this social connection, like sometimes husband or at least my husband needs me, but I need more women too. You know what I mean, like that emotional, deep, emotional knowing so I don’t know how you’d say that and then I feel like this is more of a Sunday school answer, respect.
[DR. JULI]
It’s a Sunday school answer, but as a clinician, do you see a reality there?
[DAWN]
Yes, yes. When you look at, when you dive deep into the power, I would say respect, but it goes deeper than what people probably react to.
[DR. JULI]
No, you’re so right. So you hit all three of them. The first one is respect, which we can unpack a little bit because I do think it’s way misunderstood. The second one, I just call it, they need help. They need their wives’ influence. They need you to be a teammate. They need your perspective whether that’s I challenge my husband to go deeper, I help him with relationships, like God said, it’s not good for man to be alone, that I’m going to create a woman who brings what he’s missing. So he needs that teammate. The third one, again, the easy way of seeing it is sex, which is the way I said it in the first book 20 years ago. But now I’ve learned to nuance it a whole lot more that he actually needs you to journey with him in his sexuality. It’s not just about sex. I think again, we miss it when we just say, oh, he needs sex. So I feel like the respect and the sex one are the Sunday school answers, but we’ve made them so superficial that we miss the significance of what they actually mean.
[DAWN]
So yes, what have you seen the difference, I know this could go on, we could have like two hours, but what do you see the difference, like the Sunday school answer versus, okay, I’ve said it differently, even in this new book? Can you let’s dive into that a little bit.
[DR. JULI]
So like with respect, I think the Sunday school answer is, oh, my husband like needs me to affirm his every decision and I have to muster up this sense of, oh, you’re the best. That’s I think the big and it’s like, how do I respect somebody I don’t respect, like women will say? I think what we need to understand is that men more so than women struggle with a sense of confidence. If you work with men in the therapy room that for many men, they always feel like they’re just one mistake away from being exposed as a failure. Competence is a huge part of the journey of manhood of am I okay? Do you believe in me?

And some research would show that the majority of men would rather be respected than loved by their wives. Respect is really their love language. So men are waking up every day and this is generalizing, but I think it’s a fair generalization saying, not saying to their wives, do you love me but do you believe in me? Like you know all my weaknesses, you’ve seen me fail, you know my faults, but do you believe in me? Do you believe in me as a dad, do you believe in me as provider, whatever that might be? Do you believe in me as somebody who makes good decisions and women are so fearful of trusting a man or trusting anyone, but especially in marriage that often without realizing it, the answer is no.

Like, no I’d rather do it myself. No, I parent the kids better than you do. No, I’m not sure I trust you on that. So that’s where the power dynamic plays out without realizing it, start using that power to erode trust in marriage, because we don’t believe in him instead of using that power to say God help me believe in this man. I want to trust you. I want to build my husband’s confidence rather than being a source of somebody who’s always chipping away at it. So that would be how that respect piece, I think, is far more complicated than it’s been presented probably in our Sunday schools.
[DAWN]
As you were saying that I was thinking to my husband, we often talk about, because we’ve been married going on 13, 14 years this summer and one of our biggest fights or our cyclical fights is coming back to when I get really independent. But I think it’s what you’re saying where I’m like, I’ll just do this all on my own. Like what I was saying with God, God, I got this. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll light my torch. I do that with my husband too.
[DR. JULI]
I do too. That’s that title of that book, Finding the Hero in Your Husband. Your husband wants to be your hero, but if you never show him need, then there’s no place for him to be hero. I think in today’s day and age, we want to be so independent that we don’t want to need. Then our husbands never really grow and flourish in what they bring to us.
[DAWN]
When my husband and I were dating, we dated older, like in our mid to late thirties and got married, we both talked about, do we need each other? We’re like, well, let’s break that down because need, we don’t want to be like those needy people but on a deep intimate level, we do need each other. That’s okay but we don’t want to be like, needy needy. We’re like big end or little end need. We wanted to make sure like, no, this is a mutual entering into this —
[DR. JULI]
It’s an interdependence.
[DAWN]
You’re my person and I’m going to let you into this inner circle.
[DR. JULI]
There’s no intimacy without need.
[DAWN]
Yes.
[DR. JULI]
It’s just, you can function as a married couple, but you won’t experience intimacy unless there’s that vulnerability of I’m letting you into my needs and trusting you with them.
[DAWN]
Yes. I could see, so that was the respect one. The other two, I’m sure it plays right into both of those two.
[DR. JULI]
Yes, I think the help one, so many women will say oh, I want my husband to be the spiritual leader or they’ll make these kinds of comments without realizing that again, this is the old paradigm of women respect their husbands. You also have to see that God has created you a male and female to be interdependent, to help each other. So a wife that knows how to respect her husband, but doesn’t know how to help him is setting up a very unhealthy dynamic in her marriage. We see this in, for example, abusive marriages where the wife is like, oh, I just, I never confront him. He just needs me to believe in him. Part of helping is accountability. It’s that friend who loves so much your willing to wound, it’s using your voice, it’s giving your perspective.

So I see this respect and help needs as like two wings on an airplane. They have to be level and if you’re just helping and not respecting, you’re in trouble, and if you’re just respecting and not helping you’re in trouble. There are some women who really need to hear this. This is again where I think the clinical aspect comes in. A lot of our jobs as a clinician is to give appropriate voice to people that are in hard situations, including marriages. To say, that’s not right. You need to stand up for yourself or no, don’t go along with that behavior just because your husband says, you have to submit to me. That’s an unbiblical application of that. So really helping women realize that you have a God-given power, both in how you build this hero and your husband and encourage him, but also in how you are his sister in Christ and how you speak truth and how you bring your strength and your voice into the relationship and into the family.
[DAWN]
Yes. So when you’re saying male and female, I know today it’s so hard, not that we have to go off on this topic, but I feel like we do have to mention it when people are so confused with male and female, and there’s a continuum and the gender, continuum. How do you, could you speak to that just a moment on what you’re seeing and finding?
[DR. JULI]
Yes. Going back to what I’ve said earlier, I really do believe that God reveals through everything I believe reading this scripture that there is male and female that God did create male and female, but I also see that that first of all, we live in a fallen world but second of all, that I think we’ve really narrowly defined what male and female is, where it’s becoming prescriptive it’s role-based instead of the essence of what it is to be male or female and giving room for example, I don’t fit many stereotypes about women and I’ve had to get comfortable with that.

I’m a thinker, I’m not a feeler, I’m logical, I’m competitive, I love sports, just all those things that if I were growing up in today’s culture, I probably would question my gender instead of saying, there are a lot of ways to be female and to glorify God as a woman. My husband is the talker, he’s the crier. So it’s not prescriptive, but it’s how do we tap into the essence of what it means to be male and female with the full range of the personalities that God has given us and the strengths he’s given us. So I think we don’t want to abandon that there’s something divine about male and female but we also don’t, we need to let go of a lot of these prescriptive roles and stereotypes that we’ve grown up with.
[DAWN]
Let it be more expansive of what that means. Like you said, so when you’re saying you are more, not your typical, stereotypical female, how does that enter into still finding the hero in your husband? How does that play out? Does that make sense?
[DR. JULI]
It does. I’m the type A, he was laid back and actually that’s what prompted me to write this book 20 years ago, was like, I got to figure this out. I’m the leader. My personality is leading. So how do I do this, based on what I’m learning in church. Part of it is like realizing that there are many ways to lead. So there are ways that my husband Mike was leading me that I didn’t recognize because it didn’t fit stereotype. For example, I can be compulsive and driven and not stop and so he would try to convince me to take a nap on Sunday or to do something goofy or to eat hot dogs instead of just tofu and I would push back on all that early in our marriage. Then God began to show me that that’s Mike’s way of leading. He is God’s provision for my needs and when my husband says, hey, let’s rest your working too hard that I need to recognize that as a gift from God in a form of leadership and speak that to my husband like, “Thank you. That’s an area where I’m weak and I need you.” So it’s been a lot of paradigm shifts for me, again, really going down to those essence of even when all the details of our marriage might be different than somebody else, we still have those essential needs like I’ve mentioned a husband has those three needs. I think a wife has two essential needs that we all have regardless of our personalities or Enneagram type.
[DAWN]
What are they? Now I have to know.
[JULI]
So I should make you guess this one.
[DAWN]
Well, it was funny because when you first said a man wakes up saying all this stuff about me, am I respected? But in my head I’m like, am I still loved? I’m like, oh no, no, that’s my question. So I do feel like, do you still love me?
[JULI]
That’s the question. Yes, some women may ask it differently, but it’s this sense of, we want to be cherished. Like I want to know that I’m first for my husband and the way I sometimes describe this, when I’m speaking is if this auditorium were filled with a thousand women, I still want to know my husband will walk in and say, I choose you.
[DAWN]
That’s beautiful.
[JULI]
So all the things that hurt women are when men look at pornography or they choose work or their hobbies over being with their wife or they won’t listen, but it all gets at that fundamental need. So that is the first one that is universal.
[DAWN]
I really don’t know the second one.
[JULI]
The second one is going to push a little against culture, but I really think women in order to experience intimacy, need to feel protected. So you can be married and have a workable marriage and not feel protected, insecure, but you can’t have an intimate marriage. And to be female to be feminine means at some level to be at risk. Like relationship means I’m investing in people. I’m not looking at dangers in the world. To mother is incredibly vulnerable. To have sex for a woman is opening yourself up. It’s way more vulnerable than it’s for a man. So again, where we see women either hurt or disappointed in marriage is he loves me, but he won’t step up. he won’t provide, he won’t defend me. So I do think that we have that inherent, longing to have a man who is strong enough to hold us and loving enough to do that in a way that protects us rather than wounding us.
[DAWN]
I love that. And like you were saying, I have similar personality traits, like type A. I’m Enneagram Three, I’m a leader and so it took me a lot, Chris and I’m like, Chris, you’re one of the few men that can stand up to me and fight me for me because usually people will back down. Even though we fight, it’s like, okay, I do need this. I need someone. Yes, but I do, it’s like a, still a protective, he can stand up to me for me. So I get that what you’re saying. For strong personality women, you still need to feel, I would agree with that.
[JULI]
Or like, you watch all the old romcoms and there’s always a character who loves the girl, but he’s a dork. Then the prince, the prince walks in that loves her and is a competent person? So there’s nothing romantic about a guy who’s head over heels with you, but can’t hold down a job or —
[DAWN]
Yes. Well, Juli, I feel like I could talk to you for more hours, but I want to respect our time and I did want to, you said you had a resource for therapists. I forget, what’s that called again?
[JULI]
So our main ministry website is authenticintimacy.com. That’s where you find lots of resources for just people that need help or are hurting. But we have a second website, it’s sexualdiscipleship.com and that is specifically for Christian leaders, including therapists, counselors, pastors, missionaries, who want to learn how to integrate the gospel into sexual issues and discipleship. So it’s again going beyond the list of what you shouldn’t be doing and behavior and modification and really getting to the heart of what are the spiritual questions that are underneath the sexual issues.
[DAWN]
I love that. We’ll put all this in the show notes so people can just go there and click the links. When is your book, is it out? Yes, it came out October 19th, 2021, Finding the Hero in Your Husband Book.
[JULI]
I actually have a new one coming out next couple weeks. This one is called Gods Sex and Your Marriage and that one comes out June 7th.
[DAWN]
So, oh, I love it. This will be out before then, so that’s great.
[DAWN]
Cool. Then you also have Java with Julie, that’s how I found you, was on that podcast and you dive into all subjects sex. I love it. So people can find you at all those places, anywhere else I’m missing?
[JULI]
You really can find everything at authenticintimacy.com, the leader platform and podcast and all of it there. That’s the main hub.
[DAWN]
Well, thank you so much for your time. I really have enjoyed this.
[JULI]
Me too. It’s been a great conversation. Thanks for having me on
[DAWN]
Thank you.
[DAWN]
Thank you for listening today to the Faith Fringes podcast. For those of you wanting to take a deeper dive into your own faith journey, you can grab my free email course, Spiritual Reflections on my website, faithfringes.com. If you’re a therapist and would want to work with me, I offer sacred space holding for you through my consulting as well as my soul care retreats. To find out more, go to my website or email me at dawn@faithfringes.com.

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