Restoring Wonder & Play in Intimacy—Navigating Sexual Brokenness, Safety, and Vulnerability with Therapist Sam Jolman
Episode Notes
Did you know that by adulthood, most people have experienced some form of sexual wounding?
Today’s conversation with Sam Jolman, therapist and author of the new book, "The Sex Talk You Never Got," is one of my absolute all-time favorites. Why? It truly surprised me.
It’s so rare to find a nuanced conversation about sex—especially in a world where we’re constantly tugged between a reductive view of “purity” and an equally reductive sense of “permissiveness.” This conversation is packed with absolute gems—there’s depth, wisdom, and healing in every moment that’s relevant to all of us, no matter our stories.
Here’s what we dive into:
- How to establish safety, consent, and trust in intimate relationships
- An eye-opening statistic from Harvard about what kids are really longing for when it comes to parenting and sex
- How to have a truly meaningful “sex talk” with your kids
- What God actually desires from us when it comes to sex (& it's not just "purity")
- Sam's advice for those who’ve experienced sexual wounding or brokenness and want to begin the healing process
Resources:
- The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine Sexuality by Sam Jolman, LPC
- samjolman.substack.com
- samjolman.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 125: Recovering From Purity Culture: Dismantle the Myths, Reject Shame-Based Sexuality, and Move Forward in Your Faith with Dr. Camden Morgante
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Fatty15 is on a mission to replenish your C15 levels and restore your long-term health. You can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription Starter Kit by going to fatty15.com/BESTOFYOU and using code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
- Get 40% off your first order of Sundays. Go to SundaysForDogs.com/BESTOFYOU or use code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
- Go to thrivemarket.com/bestofyou for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift!
- Whether you're exploring distant lands or enjoying a staycation at home, Cozy Earth has your back. Visit cozyearth.com and unlock an exclusive 35% off with code BESTOFYOU.
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here this week for the second part of our two part series on healthy sexuality. Last week, we took a deep dive into purity culture, and we explored the myths and some of the shame-based messaging so many of us internalized about sex.
Today, we're shifting our focus to looking at how we can heal from sexual trauma, change destructive patterns in our relationships, and how we can begin to have healthier, more honest conversations, especially with our kids about sex and sexuality. So for this conversation, I am thrilled to welcome therapist Sam Jolman to the show.
Sam is a licensed professional counselor with over 20 years of experience working with individuals and couples on issues related to trauma, relationships, and emotional health. He's the author of a brand new book called The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine Sexuality. It's a beautiful book that really honors the sacred nature of sex and sexuality while simultaneously demystifying it in a way that is so necessary for this culture that we live in, where we need to be having healthy conversations about sex.
Sam has a unique ability to blend clinical insight with deep compassion, and he's creating a space for all people to heal and grow in a way that integrates the mind, the body, and the spirit. He has specialized in working with both men and women on healing from sexual trauma, addressing dysfunctional patterns in relationships, and guiding parents on how to approach these sensitive topics with their children.
In today's conversation, we'll be talking about how we can move forward out of the ruins of sexual trauma and sexual wounding and move forward on a path of healing. We'll discuss how to create healthier patterns of intimacy in our lives. Sam offers some really important and valuable insight on how to talk with your kids about sex in ways that honor their vulnerability, but that also prepares them for the complexities of life, giving them the tools they need to develop a healthy, realistic, grounded understanding of sex.
So whether you've personally experienced sexual trauma or wounding, or whether you're working through issues in your relationship or simply want to look for better ways to have healthy conversations with your kids about sex, this episode is for everyone.
Sam Jolman is a trauma therapist with over 20 years of experience specializing in men's issues and sexual trauma recovery. He received his Master's in Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary and was further trained in narrative-focused trauma care through the Allender Center at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology.
Sam lives in Colorado with his wife and three sons. He's the author of the brand new book, The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine Sexuality. This is such a rich and beautiful conversation with Sam about this tender topic. While Sam's new book is specifically written for men, this conversation is for everyone. Please enjoy my conversation with therapist Sam Jolman.
***
Alison Cook: I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast, Sam. Thank you so much for joining us and really speaking into what is such an important topic for so many of us. Thank you for being here.
Sam: Alison, thank you for having me on and thank you for being willing and open to this important conversation.
Alison Cook: Yeah, it is. As I was preparing for this conversation, I bumped up against some of the parts of me that were raised in what we now talk about as purity culture. I didn't understand what that was at the time, and I was having to unpack some of my own internal resistances, even though as a therapist and a clinician and a parent, I've worked through so much of that.
I appreciate your willingness to walk us through this. You're a therapist who specializes primarily in men's issues and in marriage counseling. Is that right?
Sam: Yup. Men's issues, marriage counseling, and actually working with sexual trauma as well along with that.
Alison Cook: How did you find your way into that area of specialty?
Sam: I started, as probably most of us as therapists start, as a 19 year old going into my own counseling, and feeling what felt to me like magic. I sat with a really kind and skilled therapist who had a way of drawing me into my heart. I was managing depression at the time, and it felt pretty magical.
Like wow. What did you do? How did I end up in tears, and why are we talking about this, which feels unrelated to this? Yet here we are. There was the magic of it. Then there was a prayer there, where I thought God, if I could do this, if I could offer this to others, that would be amazing.
So it started there. My own story, again, of entering into my own story of sexual formation and understanding parts of it that were deeper–a lot of times sexuality, particularly from purity culture, there's a lot of conversation about behaving. Behave well. There's not a lot of conversation in the church about your story, and the impact of your story on your sexuality.
The experience you describe, try writing a book on sexuality, and that will certainly let you know where you still hold sexual shame. In writing this book I had to go back and do my own counseling and do some of my own EMDR to really keep doing layers of work here, because sexuality, there are certain things you can talk about in your head, maybe math or rock strata. I don't know.
But sexuality, you can't not be in your body and in your story. Your felt experience of sexuality when you talk about it is that vulnerable and close to us. It's that sacred.
Alison Cook: It's such a good point. It's really hard to have an abstract conversation about it. Maybe that's what purity culture was trying to do, is make it very abstract and disembodied. But you used a phrase that I want to tease out–sexual formation. I love that. We think about spiritual formation.
We think about the whole person, emotional health, forming our emotional lives, forming our spiritual lives. Tell me a little bit about what that means to you, that idea of sexual formation? Because it's a real thread throughout the book. You're really wanting us not to see it as the title of “the sex talk you never had”.
It's not a one and done. It's not a, “Okay, here's what it is. Here's the basics”. It's a whole process of becoming a whole person. So talk to me a little bit about what you mean by that.
Sam: Yeah. We do have this misnomer or this false idea that sexuality runs itself. Once you've got it explained, the birds and the bees, the mechanics, it's gonna do its thing. It creates, as I say in the book, an under-nurtured part of us. It's probably the place we've had the least meaningful conversations in our lives.
I would say even, particularly for men, the banter of locker room talk, as we say, or sex jokes, shows this idea of again, it's meant to work. The stats that I've read say 85 percent of couples will experience, even in the mechanics, even in the physicality of bodies, will experience some sort of sexual dysfunction at some point in their marriage.
85 percent saying the mechanics don't work. But along with that, I'm borrowing this line from Esther Perel, another writer on sexuality who says, there's the mechanics of sex, but then there's the poetics of sex. Which is this beautiful line that captures the desire side of things and the story that's around sexuality.
So the sex talk should also be the romance talk. One of my sons who is coming of age asked me, dad, how do you ask a girl out?
Alison Cook: Yes, that's right. Yeah.
Sam: There's a little moment of formation there, of buddy, here's how you might have a conversation like that.
Alison Cook: It's analogous to how we think about marriage. All right, you get married, you're done, go on and have a healthy relationship for the next 50 years. Are you kidding me? The marriage ceremony is a party that is the mark of a journey of growth and healing and work and thinking about things and processing things and changing and growing and this whole process that's going to last your whole lifetime.
It's the same with sexuality. It's a whole process that starts with, “How do I like a girl? What do I do? How do I talk to her?”
Sam: Yeah. And, as you're saying so well, you have to learn the dance of desire in a marriage. How do you incorporate this part? As I say in the book, sex, I believe, in its essence, is a form of play. It is a place our love plays. It's not the only place, it is. In fact, you need other places of play in marriage, like taking up dance or even card games.
My wife and I like reading a book together and talking about it. That can be a form of playful conversation. Or my wife and I did couples yoga for Valentine's Day a couple of years ago, and that was playful. It was a different way of learning how to be with each other and learn something other than task mode that we're so often in.
You’re business partners and co-parents and homeowners together, but sex is meant to be this other place that you play. And that takes learning. How do you like to play in here? What is your cadence of desire? What do you like and not? What brings you pleasure and not? That's a lot to learn.
Alison Cook: It is. It's a whole lifetime. It's a whole lifetime to learn and understand and grow and honor. I love the metaphor of the dance. You start out the book, Sam, with these stories. I think there's three stories where these characters, kids, are essentially giving these bids to their parents in some small way.
Gottman talks about how in couples, we give bids to our partner. That was so fascinating to me when I read about Gottman, because we do it all the time. “Oh look, I washed the dishes” is a bid for “Oh, thank you so much for washing the dishes” or “Oh, look at that beautiful bird” is a bid for “You're interested in that bird”.
So I looked at these stories as these kids giving subtle bids that they want to talk about this and they don't know how to talk about it. They're terrified to talk about it. In each of the stories, the parent, doing the best they can, either completely ignores it, shuts it down, or reveals their own shame and awkwardness about it.
In the stories that you're sharing, these kids aren’t getting what they really need, which is someone to come alongside them and say, let's talk about this. What are you really asking here? it was so profound to me because I thought, gosh, for so many of us who didn't get parented through that, we're demonstrating our own awkwardness in those moments.
We don't know that this is first of all, a bid from my child saying “I need to talk about this”. So I thought that was so powerful to even catch a glimpse through your eyes of this happening. We, as the parents, are responsible to watch for these bids and really engage with our kids.
Then you coupled that with some research from Harvard that talked about how 70 percent of young adults are saying they want more conversations with their parents about sexuality, about sex and romance. That was such a powerful way to open the book.
I'm curious at a broad brush stroke level, what are some ways that we as parents can be watching for? One, what is the work we need to do so that we're ready and prepared for those conversations? Two, what are some of the things we need to be watching out for to really help our young boys and our young girls so that we can be nurturing them into the fullness of this sexual formation?
Sam: Great questions. Yes. I love your language of bids, the bids for connection. You're right. Those are moments where they're asking for attachment. Lean in, read my face, read my curiosity, ask me the next question. I don't even know what I don't know, but stay with me. You're right.
I hadn't thought about it that way, but that really is the sense of these moments of being under-nurtured because of being missed. I would say at some level, again, you cannot talk about sexuality outside of your body. It is one of those topics that will bring you into your body and into your own felt experience.
First and foremost, before anything that you say or do with your children in terms of educating them, I think the most important thing you can do is address your own places of shame. Address your own sexual shame. Where does it haunt you? Where does it grip you? Because it will.
Some of those stories, one of them in particular, is a story of a father who dropped his face. He looked away from his son and broke eye contact. All of them at some level are the removal of the face, which is the universal sign of shame. We drop our face. We break our eye contact when we feel shame. Most likely these are not stories of terrible parents.
They're stories of parents with their own shame and feeling their own shutdown inside. Oh, it's awkward to talk about sex. It's vulnerable. What if I screw it up? Especially if you have your own sexual shame there, it will cause you to break contact or shut down. So please begin to be curious about your own story.
Where has shame held you? What are those stories? Literally get out a pad of paper and make a bullet point list of what are the 10 stories that shaped you? What's your sexual formation? My father in law very vulnerably said to me when I was telling him about this book, I didn't give my son a talk and I didn't get one. In other words, there's this generational neglect.
Sitting down and saying, what did shape you? What took the place of healthy conversation? That would be number one, and then how do you begin to approach your children? First of all, the pressure's off. It is not one talk. It is as one writer said, a hundred or a couple hundred one-minute conversations. You don't have to do the hour long, diagrammed lecture where you make sure you cover everything.
In fact, your children would not be able to bear that much at one time. It is vulnerable, even for them, even though they're hungry. Try to read them and read their hunger. Where are they asking questions? Answer their questions and go as far as it feels like their curiosity has been satiated. That they're okay. They're good.
Alison Cook: What you're saying. It's a series of moments of being very attuned to the moment. Even with your son, “how do I ask a girl out” is a moment to engage. Oh, tell me about that. What's the girl like, how are you feeling about her? What are you thinking? Not jumping ahead of where they are, but really staying with them.
I love what you're saying. If we're okay, if we've done our own work and we're okay, it's not that we have to have all the right answers or the right formulas. We're being with them. They'll come to us. They'll come to us and then we'll get to be with them on that journey.
You said something I want to ask you about that I thought was really powerful. You said, if no one has talked to you, where did you get that information? My mind went, oh wow, you're right. We're getting shaped from somewhere. Where are we getting shaped if we're not talking about it in our homes with our parents?
Sam: Yeah. Your sexuality doesn't sit on a shelf, waiting until you bring it out and talk about it or get the formation. It is living your story right with you. It is in your body. It is a part of you. Nowadays, children are going to Google, their peers, pornography. I sat with a couple and they've given me permission to share this–their 14 year old son came to them scared.
Because he had discovered internet pornography, but through this really innocent question, he was hearing some friends at school talk about being interested in girls. He thought to himself, I don't know how to kiss a girl. Again, another part of the sex talk. He went to Google and typed in, how do you kiss a girl?
Can you hear the innocent lover heart of this young man at 14? Again, sadly, what showed was pornography. Google is not a safe place to get your sex education. Unless you're very careful, obviously. So he fell headlong into this journey, this battle with pornography. Thankfully, he came to his parents and they were very open to him, and did not shame him.
They entered into that space with him to get him help and then started unwinding some of what he had learned there. Sadly, there are many of us that have had our sexuality awakened in sexual harm, which is a very tragic thing to recognize, but there are stats saying that women who experience sexual abuse begin menstruation earlier.
In other words, there's this sense that something in their body is that impacted by sexual abuse. It awakens something. What a heavy thing to have your sexuality awakened in the context of harm.
That is very tender work, but beginning to recognize that there wasn't the story of innocence and romance and love. There was manipulation and harm. So that's a place to go, because the realm of evil would love for you to believe that your abuse is your fault. Even your curiosity that led you to pornography, you think that's his fault. Something's twisted or perverted about him. But oh my goodness, it was your innocence that led you there.
And so being able to recover that sense of innocence for your own sexuality. Those are the stories that shape us.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Again, as parents, being really aware and attuned in a culture where there are so many messages. And then in our faith communities, you talk in the book about how both culture and church have shaped our sexuality for bad and for good. Can you speak a little bit about that side of it?
Sam: Again, there's obviously purity culture. We could talk for hours about that. But generally speaking, that sense of, hey, here's the basic anatomy and then quickly a rush to, but don't feel this. Don't do anything. There's no real exploration. There's this shutdown approach. There's not really a blessing of, this is actually really good.
Your body was made for pleasure. Isn't that cool, what that says about God and our design? There's not the questions about the cultural things being brought up, so that's the sense of shut it down that creates this animosity with your own body.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
Sam: Because then when you begin to feel arousal, which is not the same as lust, and you experience being awakened in your own sexuality, you have that sense of, this must be wrong. It creates this animosity or even suspicion of your own body. You end up repenting of a body rather than repenting of the flesh.
Alison Cook: That’s a good word. Yeah, you're repenting for a bodily mechanism that God designed you to have.
Sam: Yeah, so obviously that's the church. Outside of the church, a lot could be said as well, but as I say in the book, there's not really a sense of sacredness or awe. I would say it is a false blessing. Wow, I'm blessed to do what I want. That permissiveness is not integrating sexuality with love. Again, this is person to person, but that general sense of permissiveness is not a blessing. It’s not nurturing.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I hear what you're saying. There's a ditch on both sides of the road. In my own journey, I remember thinking, oh at least in the secular culture, I can get the information that I need and not the shame and not the stigma. Yet also there's a reductive component to it. And then the other side shut it down. It's like a switch you can flip and you flip it at one point in life and then you're good to go.
In your book, you're talking to men, but I think it's true for all of us: at the base, at the core, you're a lover. We're lovers. This is a beautiful part of our God-given design. You then go into this idea that God most wants your awe, not your purity. Wow. God most wants your awe, which gets at what you're saying. There's something very deep here, but it's bigger and deeper, far richer and far more beautiful than purity. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Sam: Yeah, so if purity isn't the goal, as I'm obviously saying, it can be harmful as a message in itself. Obviously, there's a way in which we're called to purity, but not as the goal. What then is it? What is this vision? The best definition I read was, it's in the upper reaches of pleasure on the edge of fear.
We don't often associate fear next to pleasure as emotions, but it's something that you're both afraid of, but drawn to. I think of asking my wife out for the first time. That was definitely a moment where I felt fear, but also an incredible amount of draw to my wife. Right there, there was a moment of awe. The word I would use there is, there's a reverence.
You think of a beautiful waterfall. It is thundering and powerful, and yet it is moving. What is that capacity to receive people in the same way? There's a researcher, Dacher Keltner, who thought, what moves us most with awe would be nature or even religious experience. He said, we are most moved by other human beings in what he would call moral beauty.
Living good stories moves us the most. So I'm inviting this fuller sense of beauty to take in the full person. We sometimes have such an emaciated view of human beauty. We think it's this very strict set of standards for what's attractive. I really believe God made every single person full of his glory. We are all beautiful.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I agree. The human spirit, the human soul, the human body, is gorgeous in all of its manifestations. And worthy of awe. I love that. I love what you're saying. That idea of awe as this reverence, respect, and wonder–we have lost so much of that. As you're saying that, my mind is popping in every direction. We've lost that wonder at the goodness and beauty, as you're saying of our human creation.
Sam: Yeah, and we have this little glimpse in the Olympics. We're in the Olympic season as we're recording, and we don't necessarily use this language, but it is all about human awe. The whole point is to watch people pushing the edges of what is possible in the human body and doing it so gracefully.
But also the stories of these athletes and what they've overcome. We're so drawn to that. Again, the word I would use there is awe.
Alison Cook: Yeah that's really powerful. And then to think about that as it relates to desire and honoring sexual desire. That's a powerful reframe. To bring in my name, frame, brave framework, we're naming what it's not, and then reframing it something much bigger.
When you were defining awe, you said something about, it's something we're drawn to, but also fearful of in that holy, healthy way. I think about God, where there's that reverence, and I also was thinking, as you said that, of when there's been abuse or trauma, it goes awry. Because there's the fear, there's the draw to something that you fear, that gets really contaminated and harmed.
Sam: Right. That is so well said. Again, it is such tender ground to even bring fear and sex together. How could you mix those that and that ever be good? Because we think of safety. Again, I'm borrowing a little bit from even things that Andy Colbert wrote on play.
Play is this mixed state in the body. Play is one of the good ones where you have both parasympathetic soothing, but you also have sympathetic uprising. You're near fight or flight, but you're also in activation. So it's on this edge of fear. Again, I'm saying edge. If you are in terror, and again, even in the research on awe, they would say too much terror shuts you down and you cannot experience pleasure.
But think about the vulnerability of disrobing. Again, I've been married 21 years and in the vulnerability of unveiling my body to my wife, there's still a sense of, okay, here I am. It's this openness and intimacy.
Alison Cook: Again, this is where we have to do our own work. It reminds me of what you're saying, that fine line of play and vulnerability. I had a conversation with Beth McCord, she's an Enneagram coach on the podcast, and she was talking about watching her kids and her husband play wrangle.
It was very activating to her because she'd been bullied, and it took her a long time to be able to sit with them and even ask them, are you guys okay with this? They'd say, we love it. We're having fun. We're right on that edge, kind of what you're saying. But for her, that felt dangerous and scary because of her background. It's a little bit of a different context, but it reminds me of that line of awe and wonder and vulnerability.
Learning how to ride a bike is exhilarating and also terrifying and that is healthy. I'm thinking of the listener, and man, I have tears in my eyes. I want that for you. I want that for you. Also, it could take a minute to really retrain your system to recognize the healthy version of that. And that's okay.
Sam: Again, it can only happen in a context where you feel the empowerment to say no. That you can say stop.
Alison Cook: Or to say, this might even be healthy, but I'm not comfortable with it. To have the other person honor that and say, that's ok. Because that's what creates safety.
Sam: That's such a good example. Little children know this. They know that they need to honor consent. Do you want to play? It's an invitation of consent. It's such a vulnerable risk. I want to play, but do you, and that they know when somebody says, I don't, don't do that, I don't like that.
They have more freedom to vocalize when something's too much or I didn't like that. That empowerment is what you need to be able to take some of these steps towards risking that vulnerability.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that's good. That's really a beautiful picture. I love that picture. There's a lot of nuance to it. That's the hope. We want that. We want that experience our whole lives. All right, let's go for a bike ride, and wherever we are on that journey is the place at which we have to start.
And then as we do that work, we're going to help our kids retain that innocence as they get to learn, and sometimes they'll fumble and fall, but we're going to be there for them so that they're not alone. I love that. That's really beautiful.
Sam: I was remembering a story of when I taught my wife how to mountain bike. We live in Colorado and she wanted me to teach her. There was this moment, and it's still a significant rupture moment for us and our marriage, where I took her on this bike ride and I'm trying to coach her and she's trying to figure it out.
We had a bit of a fight. I pulled ahead on the trail. And she followed me. I didn't realize she was following me on this technical section and she crashed her bike. I ran up to help her and we got her cared for. But there was this rupture of, I trusted you and you took me too far. It was past what I could handle on this bike ride, and it really became this thing we had to work through in terms of her trust in me taking her into play.
This might sound strange, but that actually impacted our intimacy, our sex life as well, of, can I trust your play? Can I trust your passion, Sam? It makes sense now. Of course those two are connected. If I couldn't trust you in this play, can I trust you over here in this sexual play? There are those moments, not your past story, but maybe even the stories in your marriage of, you didn't play well with me here. How can I trust you here?
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love this. Thank you so much for what you're naming. What would you say to the listener? First of all, I would say read the book. There's so much in it that is practical. You've done such a beautiful job painting a beautiful picture, giving us a different vision, and then giving us practical steps and ways to approach ourselves and our kids.
What would you say to the listener, as we're winding down, who is listening going, oh my gosh, the suitcase is so full of shame. There's so much there. Where do I start? I don't even know where to start with my kid, let alone with myself. What would you say to that listener?
Sam: I've been amazed, when I sit down with victims of sexual harm, that one of the things that seems to make them most tender in the conversation is, they'll use the language of, I felt like my innocence was taken. Or I felt like my innocence was stolen in some way.
They might be able to grapple with the pain. They understand that this is painful. I've got to work through it. But there's such hopelessness and devastation around it. I've seen too much. I've suffered too much. How in the world can I be made innocent again?
You're talking about playfulness and wonder. Good. But yeah that's not gonna happen. What I would want you to hear is that your innocence is not lost. It is not lost to what's happened to you. It's not lost to what you've done. In fact, I would say, God desires to help you recover that innocence.
That is always the profound joy in walking with victims of traumas, watching that innocence as they brave the pain, come back to them along with the playful parts of them and the parts that can receive pleasure again and risk that and wonder and awe. So I would invite you to think of that young self, that place of innocence. She is not gone. He is not gone. You can get that part of you back.
Alison Cook: That is so beautiful. This is from someone, for those of you listening, who has worked in the trenches with this for 20 years. So you've seen some things and for you to be able to give us that is a beautiful statement of hope. You're not saying that idly. You've seen it.
So I want everyone to hear that deeply. It’s a Holy Spirit infused message for you–this is what God wants for each and every one of us. Sometimes the journey is longer than others to healing, and you start where you are. I love what you're saying. It's such a worthwhile endeavor and you're worthy of it.
Thank you so much. Sam, tell us where people can find you, more about your work, and resources to continue on this journey that you're taking us on.
Sam: Yeah. Thank you, Alison. I would love for you to read the book wherever you buy your books. I'm also a writer on Substack, so you can find me at samjolman.substack.com or my website, samjolman.com, where you can still get some order bonuses for buying the book and find out more about me there.
Alison Cook: That's great. It's brave work you're doing. Thank you for doing it. Thanks for being here.
Sam: Thanks for having the conversation with me.