SPEAKER_00 0:05

All right. Here we are. We are going live. And I have Arthur here with me tonight. He's the little Bubby, Arthur Bubby. That's his name. Yes, and he's going to be helping us out. Aren't you? Are you gonna help Daddy out tonight? Yes, you are. So Arthur's here to help me out. Hopefully, we'll have a moderator on tonight. Maybe not. I'm gonna work on getting a moderator because people like to say bad things. And we don't want him to say bad things, do we, buddy? No, we don't want him to say nasty things on there. No. Trying to say that daddy does nasty things. So this is Stop Shrinking and Start Rising podcast with me, Asher Scott, otherwise, aka Dr. Scott Infante. And I am a former teacher. I am retired teacher. I am also a former ordained pastor, which I'm sure they would have thrown me out. And they haven't, if they haven't yet, they will. I'm also an adorable abomination. Praise the Lord. So the t-shirt comes from many of you heard it, but if in case you haven't, it's because my brother-in-law um basically called me an abomination and that they're praying for my repentance. And so I'm so excited. I'm so excited that the Christians are praying for my repentance. And um, they're gonna be waiting for a while. I can tell you that much. And so they're praying for my repentance, and um I guess I don't know what that looks like. I mean, it's gonna be very interesting. So, anyway, I'm gonna be an adorable abomination until then, okay? And so maybe I could get um I could get saved and you know, raptured right in the middle of this. Tonight I have blue lights and pink lights because I wanted to be a boy and a girl tonight, because I could be anything I want to be. I could be fully feminine, fully masculine, all of those things at one time. So I thought I would do blue and pink, which makes a nice purple. So I am excited that I have my studio set up. I have a production side, and I have this side, and I do have a website now with my podcast. It only has one podcast up there, but it's um it's actually me, Asher Scottrising. And that is my podcast website. That's the URL for it. There's only one up there, but I'm gonna take all of the ones that I've done, all of the lives, I download them on my phone, and I will put them up on there so they could be accessible later. Okay, so you can go to asher scottrising. Like I said, there's one up right now. Um, but I'm gonna be loading them all up here in the next couple of days. They will all be up there. And you can get the past lives as well. You know, the goal of what I want to do and my mission with the podcast is I'm gonna I mentioned this morning that I want to start interviewing some people. And so if you're interested in that, please, if you're interested, I'd like to have a conversation with you, of course, first, and uh make sure you're not gonna be one of these guys that gets on here and does the thing of they start saying like nasty things, like all of a sudden, you know, like they say gross things, they say racist things, they say all kinds of stuff, and they're just trying to get TikTok to flag the comments and say that the comments on this are bad, therefore, comma, we have to um basically um I'm being um anal retentive about making this thing straight, pun intended. But they're being anal retentive about, you know, um the algorithms don't understand. The algorithms don't understand that you could have a hater on here. And if the algorithm would look at what the actual output of the podcast is and see what people were saying, it would probably block them already. But I have to look through here and I have to occasionally look through the comments and make sure that somebody isn't saying that I'm effing some dildo or some crazy crap like that. You know, they they love to put stuff up here, and so when they do, I block them. And honestly, they don't know who they are, so it's okay. Uh, I forgive them ahead of time, right? And so, at any rate, so the podcasts are gonna all be up on my my site, Astroscott Rising, and that's gonna be um it's dot live, and you can find them there. So, my primary platform is YouTube. I mean, not YouTube. Oh, get this. So I tried to set up a YouTube channel, like separate, because I had a YouTube channel with all my Christian content on it. Remember, remember, ordained pastor here. I've had a long time audience with Christians as a speaker and a writer. And so, you know, I basically created a new Facebook page. Well, when I created the new Facebook page originally, I was in the process of coming out. Okay, I wasn't out yet. I mean, I was. I had already done my video that went to like 90,000, 90,100 views on TikTok. And I was talking about the shitstorm that had begun as I came out and all the things that were happening. It was like, oh my God, you know, family, oh my God. Which I'm gonna run through that because I know we have a lot of new people tonight. I'm gonna run through what happened like in like three weeks' time. Okay. So what happened was, what had happened was, as my students used to say, um, so I did a TikTok video. I had two major bridges to cross. When I came out late in life after being married for 27 years, to I'm a widower, my wife died of cancer. It was very traumatic, very painful. She was in a lot of pain, etc. It was horrible. Um, my first wife, I have three daughters from that marriage, and that ended because she had an affair and got pregnant, and I was in ministry at the time. So essentially, I have my two older daughters, don't talk to me. My younger daughter and my son, who's adopted, he's African American. He was one of my students, and he was my 10th grade student. He's married to a nurse practitioner, they live in Nashville, near Nashville, somewhere in that area, and they're doing phenomenal, right? Um, so four children. The two older ones are the ones that um did not show up to my wife's um celebration of life because they were going to behave badly, and so I told them not to come. They were already stirring up shit and they're bull and they're bullies, so I said, Don't come, then, if that's what you're gonna do. And so, you know, I've talked a lot about shame. Shame is that feeling that I am it's a pervasive thing, right? Guilt and shame are different. Guilt says I did something wrong, and guilt is resolved by confession, right? I tell you I'm sorry, I ask you to forgive me. I remember you we were running behind, oh, here we go. Behind Bonnie Bang Bus. Okay, here we go. I gotta delete my first person. Alright. It's interesting, you know, it's like whatever, like, do your thing. And um you know, why don't you live and let live? Um I'm just trying to live an authentic life as a gay man, and you don't want to come on here and talk about me being on the bang bus with you. I know what the bang bus is. I watch heterosexual porn too. Okay, so she didn't think I knew what that was. Um so essentially, my older two, okay, shame. I'm sorry, I got distracting. Shame is something that pervades the feeling that there's I'm defective, there's something wrong with me. Okay, gay men, we carry a lot of that. We've had a lot of rejection, we've had a lot of abandonment, we've had a lot of many of us have had a lot of abuse, etc. So the end product of all of those things is this core feeling that there's something wrong with me, that I'm unlovable, I'm unwantable, all of that. And so, because my daughters carry their own shame, shame is projected in two directions, okay? Outward onto another person, or inward as self-contempt, or both. The example I love to give is the rape of Tamar in the Bible because you know Amnon seduces his sister. Oh, my love is on. I can't say who it is though. Oh, I just love this person. Oh my god. I'm I just uh I'm having a moment here. I'm not allowed to say, but anyway, they're on, and I'm like enamored. Um like having that moment. I can't shit. I'm having a moment. I'm in love with somebody and they're on here. Um okay, I'm back. I'm back now. I'm okay. I promise. So Rape of Tamar, Amnon, seduces his sister into I need privacy. Um, no, I'm gonna be fine. I won't do anything obscene while I'm doing this live, right? Because that's not the context that we're doing here. Um, I might have to do something later when I get on the phone, but nonetheless, that's not for this show. This is a podcast about gay men being fully self-actualized, and sex is part of the sex actualizing. I just said sex is part of the sexual sex. I just said sex is part of the self-sexualizing process. I meant to say self-actualizing process. Let me get this right. Um, anyway, so shame. Amnon seduces the sister, projects onto her, makes her the devil, and sends her away. Okay. So he projects, same thing that Cain and Abel. In fact, Cain and Abel is one of my favorite stories because a lot of times when people are projecting on you, it's because they're jealous, okay? My older daughters were jealous because I had an authentic marriage with my wife. Are you saying, Scott, that you can function anywhere on the sexual? That's called pansexual. Duh. It's like, can you be somebody who functions on that? Oh, thank you, Gigi. You're like this unhinged version. Oh. So, yes, you could be a pansexual. What do you think gay men that come out after being married are considered? Really, they're more pansexual, right? Although in this stage of my life, I will not be a pan. I will not. I shall not be a pan. I will be full-on gay. Because here's the deal. I'm gonna get back to my daughter and her little shame. People think, well, how did you manage marriage with all this little gayness thing going on? You know, how did you do that? I better have a little cheers to that. I realized that it was when I did the vape the other night that TikTok was like, oh, we gotta restrict this. It's horrible. We can't let anybody under the age of 75 see your live. We're gonna have to restrict it because you just vaped. I was doing the patches, but I started vaping because I I my daughter vaped with me in Europe and she turned me on to it. But I'm gonna go back to the patches because it's a protocol, nicotine for tinnitus. You know the little part that rings in your ears? Yeah, that's the part right there. How's that again? Right. So if you don't like that sound, there's something there's something about nicotine. No, I'm not wasted, I promise. But there's something about nicotine that's supposed to help that woo sound. Okay. That wasn't me making fun of Native Americans, TikTok. I promise. I'm on my god, you know what I mean? Like cut me off, you know. Woo! You know, I say fart. It's like, oh, we gotta block it. We gotta block it. We gotta block it. He's he's talking he's um he's downgrading people who have farting problems. It's like, are you for real? A gay man doing a gay podcast about gay shit, right? I mean, come on. And if I make fun of myself, I know I can't see the three-letter F word because if you say that, oh, you're gone. You're gone for four days, gotta go to TikTok hell for four days, you know what I mean? Because you violated the policy. Are you out of your fucking mind? Violated the policy. If you looked at my page at all and looked at the title to my podcast, it's everything gay. How can a gay man violing violate the policy? I'm allowed to say I'm queer. Queer is okay. It's it's okay. I could be a queer, I'm queer, I'm queer. I could be gay, I could be homosexual. I can't be other things. I don't know if Fudgepacker gets a thing on the algorithm or not. We'll have to see. So, anyway, back to Amnon and Tamar. So he projects his shame. Oh, I know I was on Kane and Abel. I'm sorry. So sorry. So Kane and Abel, I love this story. Jealousy is one of the one of the biggest reasons people project onto you. My daughters, my older daughters, not my younger daughter, the one I went to Europe with who I love. And I bought two dresses for her today. I was so excited. I went into a dress shop in LAJ, and I was like, I mean, they were beautiful dresses. I was like, I want to buy my daughter some dresses because you know she went through a divorce with a Navy SEAL. She's a single woman, she's a teacher like me. And I'm like, I'm so fucking proud of you. And so I want to, you know what she said to me? She texted back, thank you, dad, for showing me what it is for a man to treat a woman really well. And I I'm the guy, remember, we're one with Jesus, right? The kingdom of God's inside of me. The divine is inside of me. If I have something in my head for two or three days, I don't ask, oh God, oh God, is this your will? If it's in my fucking head for three days, it's probably God. As long as the desire isn't to. If I'm one with Jesus and the divine is completely, I'm married to the divine, and we were all included in Christ before the foundation of the world. Who was excluded? We'll talk about that later. It blows hell and sin all to pieces and really does. Because if we were with Christ before the foundation of the world, then hell and sin is a concept created by the church in order to create the illusion of separation from God. And they need the separation because it fuels the shame. It goes hand in hand. It marries shame. Shame says I'm separated from you because I'm unlovable and unwantable. So if I'm shame in the church, that means I'm apart from God. I need to make my way back. How do I make my way back? I write a big fucking check. Big ass fucking check. That's how we get back with Jesus. The light show's gotta go on, guys. We gotta keep the light show going. We gotta keep the big band going. We gotta keep the lights and the smoke and machine going. We gotta keep it going. And we gotta keep the 40 staff that we have on in our multiple campuses. We gotta keep that going. So if we let the gays come in the church, it just fucks up the whole thing. Because then all the people that have the money, they start leaving. You let the queers in. That's what my brother called me. My brother-in-law, he's he used to refer to gays, he still does, as queers. If the shoe fits, then I'll just wear it. I'm an adorable abomination.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Yes, I am.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

So, anyway, back to shame. We don't want to leave, we don't want to leave our shame for too long. Cain and Abel, like, oh my god, I love this story. So it's a classic shame story because there's a rage that goes with rejection. And so Cain has it shows he has no regard. Abel brought the first fruits. Old Testament, you bring the first fruits, best of your best of the best. And Cain says he brought an offering, kind of like low-key fuck you. All right. So when I read the Bible, um, basically I do the Scott, the Asher Scott version, not the ESV, not the NIV, not the KJV. I do the the Asher Scott version, which is much more fun. Okay. So it says he brings an offering, any offering, which means he has no regard for what is required. And so he is rejected, but God says to him something interesting. He says, Cain, bro, listen, fuck nugget. If you do what's right, will you not be accepted? He's telling him the secret. Dude, you got rejected because you didn't give a shit about what you brought me. I love the Asher Scott version, it's so much more fun. Can you imagine reading this on Sunday morning? Open your Bibles, please, to the Asher Scott version. We're going to go to Genesis chapter four, and we're going to talk about Cain and Abel. And so, do you know how many years I've been in a religious fucking box for so many years? Do you know how many years I've wanted to come on my podcast? Because when I did religious podcasts, I couldn't say to people, wake the fuck up. Now I can say whatever I want to say. And it's like, oh my God, I almost came just saying that. So anyway, Cain has this opportunity. God says to him, Look, if you get it right, fuck nugget, you'll be accepted. Acceptance diminishes shame. Why? Because shame has to do with not being accepted or feeling accepted, loved, or wanted. If you do what's right, there's no shame in this. And you will feel love, accepted, and wanted by me. Now, Mr. Dumas, Mr. Dumas, Mr. Dumbass. If I had been given the opportunity, if God, if my father said to me, Look, fuck nugget, you didn't get it right, but if you get it right, I'll do you right. And you're gonna find love from me, I would figure out, wouldn't you? I'd be figuring out, like, how do I make it right? Like, what do I gotta do? Tell me what to do, and I'll do it. I mean, that's just normal common sense. If my lover, which I never had one, but I would well, I I do have somebody, I do have a man. But it's like, I never had, well, I've never had him, you know, had him, you know. Anyway, um we're talking. So, but if you had an opportunity to get it right, wouldn't anybody want to try to get it right? Children, parents are godlike figures in children's eyes, they have a desire to be loved, wanted, accepted by the parent. No matter how dysfunctional the parent is, we still have that desire. That's how sick it is, okay? But Cain doesn't, and so what God says to him, very interesting. He says, Sin is crouching at your door, but you have to master it. The Asher Scott translation Dude, if you don't deal with the rage that you feel because your brother got it right and you didn't, and you're jealous as fuck at him, if you don't deal with the rage and the shame that you feel, you You feel defective, unwanted, unloved, all of that, like there's something wrong with you because I rejected you. Rejection produces what? Rejection produces shame. Now, there's good shame and bad shame. When somebody is trying to touch my privates, and I'm 12 years old and they're 20 and I feel ashamed, then I say, stop, that's good shame. That's the shame that draws a boundary. Okay. The shame that's bad, shame, is when somebody violates me, crosses my boundary, or rejects me, or abandons me, or abuses me. That kind of shame is the toxic shame. It's the one that says, there's something got to be wrong with me that you can't love me right. Okay. So what he was saying to him was, dude, if you don't deal with your shame because you felt rejected by me, because you didn't give a shit what you brought, but you still felt rejected. You knew the rules, but you decided not to follow them. And you went ahead and brought anything, and I said, no, that's not acceptable. And you felt rejected by me. He's kind of an arrogant little prick. Then you're going to project that shame onto your brother. He didn't say this, but I can hear him saying it. You're going to project that shame onto your brother. And you know what you're going to do with it? Because you're a narcissist. If a narcissist gets rejected, what do they do? They annihilate you. I have an ex-wife, for heaven's sakes. I know this one really well. A narcissist is a form of over-self-indulgence. It's a form of profound selfishness in many ways. Okay? A narcissist, ironically, has a ton of shame. Whatever they determine, whatever any of us determine, is death to us in our childhood. For example, if we are abandoned and we decide that that feeling of abandonment or rejection is death, meaning it feels like it has the power to suck the very breath out of my lungs, we build our defense mechanisms around that in such a way to keep ourselves from experiencing what we felt like was going to be death to us. Does that make sense? So, in order to not be rejected, here's where narcissism is born. Okay. Deep shame, deep, deep shame, a lot of rejection, a lot of abandonment, usually a lot of abuse as well. Okay. Physical, sexual, emotional, all of it. So in that deep shame and in that severe rejection and abandonment, we make a decision. It's not about what happens to us that determines who we become. It's about, oh, that was so deep. I'm gonna have to have a little drink. It's not about what happens, it's about how we respond to what happens. When we just respond defensively and we build the walls, if you want to know where the seed bed for mental illness is, where mental illness comes from, simple version, it comes out of our defense mechanisms to avoid pain. And the degree to which those mechanisms are complicated, complex, and well constructed is the degree usually that pushes us. I I see everything like continuums, okay? It pushes us along the mental illness continuum into various types of mental illness. Okay. So for the narcissist who usually has no conscience, okay, because they made a decision in response to shame that they could never be exposed again, because shame is an exposure. When I feel shame, for example, when the biological father walked out when I was five years old, the 18-year-old would have said, that was about daddy chasing a skirt. The five-year-old would have said, No, what's wrong with me that daddy doesn't love me? I feel exposed, naked, and vulnerable. Excuse me, the five-year-old perception is the one we carry into adulthood. We put our daddy's little head on God's shoulders and it becomes a problem. So it's those perceptions, right? When I basically, when the shame is pretty significant and pretty deep, right? And I basically I determined that that is the feeling that I don't want, I don't want to feel naked and I don't want to feel uncovered like that again, because that's what shame is. It's like ripping somebody's pants down around their ankles in public. What are they gonna feel? Shame. Especially if you're like me. If you're not a grower, I mean, if you're a grower, not a shower, and somebody pulls your ankles, I mean, pulls your pants down around your ankles, and it's like they're looking at your mahoosit and they're like, um, basically, oh, I oh I love you too. Um, you know, if you're gonna have your fucking pants stracked jerked down, um, I know. If you're gonna have your pants stracked down around your ankles, you want to be a shower, right? You want that thing to be flaccid and huge and heavy, right? But if it's not and it looks all shriveled up like it could turtle inside of you, you know what I'm saying? Then you're like, you feel a lot of shame. You know what I mean? You're like, oh shit, I feel naked and exposed. But if it was hanging out there, you'd be like, yeah, man, that's my dick. Yep, yep, that's my dick. You know, you can tell people like this. It's the guys that go to the urinal and then put their elbows up on it. Because it has so much fucking weight, it just hangs there. They don't have to direction it. The rest of us are like holding on to it, like, oh, I don't want to peel my shoes. I don't want to pee on my shoes. And so, you know, now let me just be fair to growers. I'm on a little tangent, but it's okay. Growers grow. I'm just saying, don't be fooled. You think that that thing, little shriveled up thing ain't nothing, but wait till it grows. It could be the fattest, biggest prick you've ever seen. You know what I'm saying? So just be, you know, you just hang, you just don't judge it. Don't judge it. But men, we don't give a shit. Our thing is it's what it looks like and what it seems like and what it appears like, and that's where we feel it fully exposed. So I had to use that example. So, I mean, all roads for a gay man lead to a penis. Don't be surprised, my god. Well, of course we love cock. I mean, come on, that's why we're gay. So, anyway, back to Cain and Abel. So he says to him, Don't you love the way I used to teach like this? I'm a pretty good speaker. So when I would teach on a Sunday morning in church, church, you gotta be good, church, I would talk, I would do rabbit trails, and then I would join them all together by the end. Be like, hold on, hold on, I ain't gonna leave you hanging there, pun intended. All right, so and I'm funny, I'm funny as shit. So anyway, not egotistical either. Um, Cain and Abel, for heaven's sake, Scott, finish the fucking story. So anyway, he says to Cain, look, if you don't deal with your jealousy and you're feeling exposed and you're shame, you're gonna project it onto him. You're gonna kill him. Narcissist, if you reject a narcissist, Matthew said, I've never in my life seen someone lounge on the bathroom partition. Right? I mean, everybody wants to peek over it. Okay, I gotta say this real quick. I used to be like a shy bladder person, okay? This is like interjection. Remind me to go back to Cain and Abel, okay? I was the guy that like if somebody was behind me, I couldn't pee. Can't pee. I'm gonna stand my dick out and not pee. And then if somebody walks up beside me, can't pee. Well, you know what cured me? You know what cured me? I know I need a boyfriend too, Jesus. I get it. Wait a minute. I I have one sort of, I can't really explain it. But anyway, um, what cured me was going to Europe. The partitions between the urinals are this big. I don't know what the fuck they're there for. If you're not gonna pull up and see somebody's dick, I mean, I mean, if you can't see their dick with the partition this big, and then you gotta pay to go to the bathroom. You gotta pay a dollar to go see a dick. Or for them to see yours, one of the two. And so it cured me. So I'm on a tour with all these guys, right? Oh, I think that was one of my lights that just fell on the floor. Um, I hit the back of the chair too hard. I hate when my head hits the back of the chair too hard. Anyway, um, so you go into the bathroom, and I just want to say this is just to be funny. Like, I was kind of glad that, like, all except one guy, I wasn't too sure. Although I did see his dick once, I I kind of felt like I wasn't like the littlest prick in the crowd, you know what I mean? So, like, if the whole tour bus of men, the men on the tour bus are gonna all run in and we're all gonna be in the same bathroom together, and the partition is this big and we're standing next to each other. At least when I pulled it out and, you know, stretched it a little bit, it was all right. You know what I mean? I didn't want to be too short. So, anyway, it cured my shy bladder problem completely. Because I had to, when you don't have a partition, you're just like peeing in a fucking trough. You might as well just put a trough out there, and everybody's got to pull their dick out because in Europe, nakedness, nakedness is not a big deal. For all of us exhibitionists, we would love Europe. I'm with we went to this department store one time, and I'm in the men's department, and these two men just take their pants off in the middle of the store. I thought, oh, this is interesting. I gotta peek around and see what this is all now. You know what I'm saying? Are they gonna fuck or what? What's the deal? They were trying on pants. There's no dressing room. If you want to put on something, right? If you want to put on something, um, try it on, you gotta take your pants off. So I started looking for things. I'm gonna I'm gonna try something on too. You know what I mean? If these guys got their pants off, it was my chance to get my pants off too, right in the middle of the store. But I couldn't read the sizes, they were all wrong. So I was like, I was screwed. So needless to say, I kept my britches on. All right. I digressed and talked about penises and bathrooms in Europe and shy bladder. I could pee anywhere now. I am healed. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord. So I'm totally healed. So Cain and Apple, narcissism. A narcissist is a self-indulgent, selfish person who can never be wrong and can never be exposed. That's the actual, actual issues right there. Scott Peck wrote a book called The People of the Lie. Psychiatrist work with people for years. I love Scott Peck. And and People of the Lie, with all his people that he worked with, he defined human evil as this. I was like, damn, he's smart. He's a smart one. Because he had patients that didn't get well. They were like permanent patients, they loved the process of being a patient. And there was this one particular patient that he calls Charlene that taught him this. She was always perpetual. I mean, it's one of the most profound books I've ever read in my life. He says, you know, we think of the axe murderer as human evil. Or if you're in the church, you put the axe murderer and the gay man and the pedophile and the rapist, we're all in the same boat. Right. So anyway, um, he said, basically, evil is the unwillingness to examine the human heart. I will not examine my own heart. I refuse. That, my friends, is a narcissist. The fear of exposure is so great that they will not examine their own heart, which means they can't be wrong. So when you get in a conversation, I was married to one, not my not my late wife. When you get in a conversation with a narcissist, you go in, and I'm just I'm just trying to say to you, the road of us travel is yes, I love that book, Ben. Love it. So you go in because you want to say, you were supposed to, you told me you were gonna take the trash out. And now the trash has already come, the trash man came, and now we have trash. I said, why didn't you do this? And all of a sudden they do this. Well, why is it my responsibility to take trash out? You know, like I uh, you know, when I was a you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so you nail them in one place and they spiral. You nail them with the truth over there and they spiral. And they start spouting off some other shit. They gaslight you, basically. And then they spiral, they spiral. You walk away from a conversation with a narcissist. I went in to ask you a simple question, like, why didn't you put the trash out? Right? And you walk away thinking, God, I'm really messed up. I really am the problem. There's something wrong with me. Because they run you in fucking circles and they gaslight you, and you walk away thinking you're the crazy one. That's what a narcissist does. They cannot examine their own heart. They can never be confronted with being wrong. They're never wrong. My ex-wife read every Christian self-help book on the planet, and I was the only person she ever saw in it. To this day, to this day, okay. I told you my older two daughters, you know, their shame factor is that they didn't come to my wife's celebration of life. Okay. They, my youngest daughter walked into mom's house, and the one daughter who lives in the town was there, and the other daughter was on FaceTime, and the two daughters and mom were having this conversation about, well, I can't believe he said that to you. And blah, blah, blah. I wouldn't go to that celebration in life, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's such an asshole, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she walked into that. She's the healthiest one of all. I'll tell you when she got healthy, when she got divorced from the Navy SEAL, she said, you know what? Some of the problems in that marriage were me. And when she said that, I said, Honey, I'm not worried about you. Because if you can acknowledge that you're part of the problem, I ain't worried about you. You're going to be just fine. Okay. They're going on and on. And she looks at them all and she's like, guys, somebody died here. They didn't care. All they could care about was that I said something to my oldest daughter because she was already stirring up shit. She had my mother crying outside my house before she went in because she was talking shit about my adopted son, Rodney. And my mom was upset because my son was in the house and she didn't feel like she could face him. I mean, it's wicked. Somebody died, and you're worried about talking shit about somebody else in the family, and you're getting my mom, my last living relative, pretty much, alive. You know what I mean? You're getting her upset. And so I said, if you're gonna do that kind of shit, don't come. So they're all doing this, and then she looks at them and says, because they all were stunned when she said, Somebody died here. She says, you know, for somebody you guys hate, you sure give them a lot of power. It's like 40 years later, 30 plus 10. Yeah. I'm still the problem. When you reject a narcissist, they will make it their life mission to annihilate you, and you will always be the problem for the rest of your life, and they will never see anything different. Now, I have forgiven. One of the things, you know, when all of this was happening during the celebration, getting ready for the celebration of life, my brother-in-law, before he thought I was an abomination, said to me, Um, he was really upset when my daughter did. And I said to him, Here's the deal. I've been doing this for years. I have made forgiveness my favorite sport. And when you're more mature and you're a little bit older, you realize number one, you forgive easy because the only person that's gonna get tied up in knots is you. Number two, you let go. You let it go. You don't have to be right, you don't have to always have something to say. When I was 40, I would have fucking cussed your fucking head off and I would have torn you to shreds at my more mature age. I'm not gonna say what it is, you know, because I'm old as fuck, I'm 110. You don't have to be right. What was interesting about my wife before she passed away what she said about the daughters, you know, because she was a stepmom that they despised because they projected. Here's what happens with projection too they had a narcissistic mom who they can never say anything to about how they felt because she could never be wrong, okay? So they projected onto my wife and made her the devil, and they were extremely jealous because they saw her as taking away whatever part of dad they were supposed to get. And she treated them like gold, she loved them and made sacrifices for them in places that they will never ever appreciate, okay? And this is what she said before she died because she wanted to relieve me of the pressure of trying to get them there for her latter part of her life and for you know, whatever. She said, Honey, they owe me nothing. They owe me nothing. She had so forgiven them, she said, I don't have to be right. When Jesus says, You'll know aspire love to love your neighbor as yourself, the biggest barometer of anybody's Christian faith ever. If you want to know if somebody is actually a Christian or not, it's all about the fruit on the tree. They can pipe their fucking bullshit all day long. They can give you religious garbage all day long. My barometer is how well do you love? And do you let the sun go down on your anger? Do you let go of your judgments and do you forgive? Are you loving and releasing of judgment or are you judgmental and critical? If you're the latter, honey, I've got to wonder about you. You know, and my daughter, my youngest daughter, was really confused because she would say to me, like, are they are they Christians? I said, I'm not the judge and jury on that. Above my pay grade, I don't judge hearts. But what I can say is just because they're religious, just because they're in church, and it's because they're charming and they smile a lot, does not mean that they are lovers of Jesus. Because if you are a lover of Jesus or you have any kind of faith thing going on in your life, then there's something inside of you that wants to be a lover of people. We love because he first loved us. If I don't love me and I don't accept me, how do I accept you and how do I love you? Can't. I can only go as far as I've received. I can only take anybody else as far as I've been. Number one rule in therapy: therapists can't take anybody beyond where they've been themselves. Because the only truth that's valid is the truth that's formed inside of you. Not the truth you hear, we can all hear it. It's the truth you know. The truth that I knew was after going through multiple custody battles and despising and hating with a passion a person because of the kind of hell that they could wreak in my life over and over again, because they had the power to do it and were court-empowered to do it. The misenying against men and court system, another topic for another day, okay? But I was eaten up with contempt, and then I got to the point where it was like, I can't afford this. The only one that's getting eaten alive by my unforgiveness is me. Jesus made that statement about how many times do you forgive your brother? Seven, seventy, seventy times seven. There's something in that story that lets you know that forgiveness is a present, continuous process and ongoing, it's not an event. We forgive and we forgive and we forgive. Why is that important? Because forgiveness is directly linked to my ability to love. If you're bitter and you hold unforgiveness in your heart, how do you love another person? You don't. Not fully, not well, not as good as you could. So the three major barriers to personal wholeness are failure to forgive others, failure to forgive self, and failure to accept oneself. Those are the three arenas of the interior landscape that I'm always talking about. That when my circumstances cannot be the determinant of whether or not I'm a happy person. Happiness and finding joy in life is an internal landscape construct. You don't have the power with your words or your actions toward me to define me, nor do you have the power with your words or your actions to destroy me. If I let you destroy me, then that's me giving you power. And that's what my youngest daughter was saying to her two older sisters and their mother. For somebody that you hate, you give a lot of power to him. My thing, the reason I can have compassion on that is how bound up are you? How unforgiven, unforgived, you know, like your inability to forgive. My I say it this way: what we cannot forgive, we will become. I used to tell my students this story. You got two kids that grow up in the alcoholic family. Okay. Go home, walk on eggshells, mom gets beaten, kids get beaten, kid has to wipe up the blood. You never know when the good mood is, you never know when the mood in the house is, so you just walk on eggshells, right? One kid grows up and becomes a good father, a good community member, et cetera. The other kid becomes his father. What's the difference? I go back, remember, I told you when I talk, I do this rabbit trail, rabbit trail, rabbit trail, and then I put them all together. Because, and the kids will ultimately say, because he made a different choice, exactly right. It's not about what happens to you that determines who you are. It's how we respond. As gay men, the reason we have struggles in relationships and being loved and loving others and the things that we have and all of that, the struggles we have with all that, is because we're still living in reaction to something that's not healed. If I'm still living in reaction to rejection, that I'm gonna project that onto the person who's love that I'm loving. If I'm still angry at dad, I'm gonna project onto you. If I'm in other words, uh you know what a trigger is? A trigger is nothing more than when I have an emotion that's larger than the circumstance calls for. Okay? When I'm having this big reaction, that's a trigger. Trigger is nothing more than history being pulled into the present. Oh, it is. Why am I triggered? Why, when that person said that, was I triggered? Well, because it reminded me of something my dad said. Or my last boyfriend said. And I still haven't forgiven them. We get triggered by what we're still in reaction to. And what we're still in reaction to are the places that our heart is still not healed. And so my thing is the whole reason for this podcast, and what I'm doing, and my mission and my heart is I want us to be fully actualized gay men who are free to love ourselves rightly, to accept ourselves fully, and to be able to engage in ways that are loving with our partners, with people and life. I want us to be able to be fully actualized as gay men. I don't want to be the statistic that says gay men have an overwhelming perception that they cannot be happy as a gay man because they live between this juxtaposition between cookup culture and the desire for intimacy, which correlates to how they're actually made. You were made for love. So there's this tension, right? Because we weren't allowed to love or fall in love with the boy. So we, but we were, we did have sex with the boy. So we compartmentalized and we said sex is intimacy. Sex is intimacy. But I'll tell you what, the difference between making love and having sex is simply this sex is having the best orgasm we can possibly have, and I could do that with the hookup. I can. We can tantalize each other and torment each other in so many ways that we have the most freaky orgasm ever. But making love, which I would say is a much more powerful orgasm encounter than anything you could ever experience is body, soul, spirit intertwined. One vulnerability. Being in a relationship where I have full trust, fully vulnerable, fully exposed, no shame, no self-consciousness. Shame makes me self-conscious and want to hide. Lack of shame in the context of love and relationship, makes me not self-conscious. I'm not thinking about what you're thinking about my body. I'm simply using my body to love you in every way that I can. What happened? That's making love. And when two people are selfless and focused on the other, and not just trying to get my rocks off, guess what? It's fucking dynamite, it's off the chain. Unioned sex is much better, has the potential to be much more powerful. I'm not saying you can't get your rocks off by doing your favorite kink with your hookup. What I'm saying is that the body, soul, spirit connection with another man. I've only experienced this about this much of this. So I mean, I'm kind of like I'm being honest about that much of that. No, I've got most of the rest of it's all in here, okay? But I know it from the context of a marriage, too. I'm not like, I don't know what sex is. I was married. So, you know, in high school, in middle school, we just want to help kids transfer their skills. You know what I mean? We transfer the skills we learn over here in algebra, over here to this part over here in geometry or to into, you know, figuring how to measure a room, whatever. Same thing. Just because I wasn't married to a man doesn't know it. I mean, I don't know a thing about sex and intimacy because I just transfer my skills. You see what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01 55:00

Wink.

SPEAKER_00 55:02

So, but that's what making love is. So the the power that is in being fully connected, body, soul, and spirit, completely vulnerable, naked and unashamed, not self-conscious, but fully present emotionally, sexually, physically to another person is the the context for having the most intense sexual pleasure ever. I don't know how we got on sexual pleasure. It must be a topic I love. This is the unhinged version of Asher Scott. Here we go. I'm completely unhinged. I told you when I do this podcast, I will always be authentic. I will always be real, I will always be, I will walk through the process with you. I am not coming to anybody as the expert. My main goal is to have the dialogue and to walk through it with you as one who's in the middle of it myself. The thing that I can talk about with any kind of authority is the thing that I'm actually living. My story. Your story is powerful for the same reason. It's your story. It's you talking about who you are. And when we live authentically as ourselves in relationship, then that becomes a truth that we have authority in because it's my truth. It's like the woman who has been raped has much more compassion for the other woman who has the same experience. Why? Because she's already walked through it and healed from it. You can only give away what you've received, which is why I need to be whole. I want to give away something really good. So I need to be fully actualized as a person. I have to fully be able to love myself and be fully um accept myself, be at home in my own skin, to the degree that that's a reality for me, I can help that become a reality for somebody else. I can give it away. The only truth you can give away is the one you've experienced. Knowing it here. Not enough. Knowing it here because you've experienced it. Now that's truth. Alright, I'm gonna leave it there. It's 8 05. I've been doing this for an hour. So I'll wrap us with this thought. Shame is the blanket that covers us that hides us. As gay men, we want to shed that blanket. We want to come out of from under the blanket, and we want to be standing in pure light, unashamed, unself-conscious. If I have an investment in shaming myself, not accepting myself, or not loving myself, I have to ask myself the question why? Because to be fully actualized, I have to let go and forgive myself for things that I didn't go right. Forgive myself for places I feel like I really fucked it up. I have to let go of past failures or perceived failures. I have to let go of regret. The reason I have to let go of regret is regret is just another form of self-contempt. I have to let go of the past. I should have, could have, whatever. There's nothing productive in holding on to that. Let it go. The same reason that when my brother-in-law asked me why I wasn't undone when my daughter was being a shit about my wife's celebration service is the same thing as all this is. We have to become seasoned veterans and make forgiveness our favorite sport. And we have to learn to let go of things that we couldn't control that weren't our fault. We have to let ourselves off the hook in the places that we thought it was our fault. Sometimes things are just messy, and it is what it is. Sometimes it's just a shitty mess. And over evaluating that mess and trying to blame yourself for it, it is what it is sometimes. Sometimes the best thing that I can do is let it go. I don't have to understand it all. I don't have to go back and relive it. I don't have to figure out what went wrong. There's no productive energy in that unless I'm trying to learn something that I grow from. But be but but but that's not usually what we're doing. This disease of introspection, this painful looking in, is not helpful. That's not growth. That's me ripping myself to shreds all the time by this disease of introspection, always looking in. There's a looking in that leads to life, and there's a looking in that leads to death. The looking in that leads to life is the one that says, Oh, I want to see something different. I'm gonna let myself off the hook for that, and I'm gonna do something different here, and I'm gonna celebrate it. The death one looks in and always sees everything that I did wrong and is ripping myself to shreds because of it. All behavior has a goal. What's the goal behind my self-contempt? Keep asking the question. So then, why do I do that? Why do I do that? You will come down to the core belief that you believe about yourself if you keep asking those questions. When you get to the core belief, what you really believe, I'm not wanted, I don't matter, I'm unlovable, I'm not attractive, whatever it is, then you have to take that belief and say, Am I willing to be unattached to that in order to grow? Because the whole thing is always about growth. Self actualization is about growing and growing into greater awareness, growing into places of being able to love rightly myself and others. So, anyway, I will leave it there. Blessings. Love you guys.