Transcript
0:00:00 Megan Owen: I’m so excited to have Doctor Andrew Bauman here. Of course, he and his powerful wife, Doctor Christy Baumann, have an incredible counseling practice where they dig in deep to help people heal in just about every way from the inside out. Deep healers, a lot going on. You can read more about it in the description with the podcast. And we’ve had Andrew before, so, Andrew, welcome. So glad to have you here.
0:00:30 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yeah, thanks for having me. Look forward to our conversation.
0:00:33 Megan Owen: Well, I was just telling Andrew right before we started that I’ve been digging into this Madonna whore complex more and more and realized that it really does align with patriarchy, misogyny. It’s very painful. We see it a lot in evangelical marriages. I’m sure you see it often, don’t you?
0:00:56 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. This concept was first introduced by Sigmund Freud. The idea, the Madonna, we don’t think of the pop star, but actually, you know. Yeah, yeah, mother of Jesus. And the idea that she is pure, virtuous, nurturing mother versus, you know, the whore, you know, corrupt, sexually available, and basically the splitting of women, which I believe goes back to, I mean, obviously way back. But I think in my history, at least growing up in the purity culture where and then also kind of that same time in the early nineties, the beginning of Internet pornography, accessing our, in our living rooms.
0:01:42 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: And to me, that is the modern day picture of the Madonna whore complex of kind of this, this purity culture idea that women are supposed to be this way pure, their value is in their virginity. And then this other idea where the majority of men, christian men, are secretly using pornography and kind of indulging, consuming women sexually as objects.
0:02:10 Megan Owen: Okay. So right out of the chute, we have this extreme dichotomy, right? We have two categories, and there’s nothing in between, right?
0:02:20 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes. And that’s how men are learning how to relate to the world. That’s how men, what I call the pornographic style of relating. And they end up kind of psychologically putting women in these two categories right up the friend zone or whatever you want to call it. These women. Oh, this is one I could bring home to mom, but this is the one I’m going to sexually devour. I don’t actually respect her as a human, but she’s what I want, in a sense. And it’s disgusting.
0:02:49 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: And the opposite of God honoring it.
0:02:52 Megan Owen: Is the opposite of God honoring. Anytime we slap a label on somebody, we have lost the dignity spark in that human right.
0:03:00 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes, exactly. Knowing that they are image bearers of God in the Imago Dei. Whenever there is objectification of the image of God, you’re no longer honoring and worshiping God, but you’re actually consuming and devouring God in a horrific way.
0:03:18 Megan Owen: Wow. That is profound. That is profound. And so I do want to say, as a woman, women feel this. We feel this objectification, right?
0:03:29 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Oh, yeah. And you can see it in men’s eyes, right? You can see it in the way they look and their face, you know, as you pass by, there’s an energy to it that feels. You get this.
0:03:40 Megan Owen: Yeah.
0:03:40 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: You get this look, like, you see this guy literally taking off your clothes with his eyes, and it’s like, ugh. Like I am just a prop for his masturbatory fantasies. It’s disgusting. And he doesn’t have my consent.
0:03:55 Megan Owen: Exactly. Exactly. And then I have to say, also with the Madonna extreme, you feel that, too. And that’s an icky, weird feeling, too, because you don’t want to be your spouse or your partner’s mother, right?
0:04:09 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You want to be a partner. You want to be an equal, and you don’t want to be either a God, right. Raised up as this idol, and you don’t want to be a piece of trash. You want to be an equal, and.
0:04:23 Megan Owen: You want to be seen as unique and human. And so when a man struggles with and suffers with this Madonna whore complex, he doesn’t see women as individuals, as being creative, having their own thoughts. Autonomy, you know? Yeah, autonomy.
0:04:45 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Well, that’s where. Yeah, that’s where it goes into that. The patriarchal and so much of the misogyny built into the church. And what I tackle in my newest book coming out called safe church. But I tackle this, the idea that it’s built into even our theological upbringing, it’s built into our theology, where we’ve kind of misconstrued what that means. A healthy femininity, a healthy masculinity, healthy equality, rather than this weird setup that’s actually not Christian at all.
0:05:16 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: And it’s completely just this hierarchy that I believe evil loves.
0:05:21 Megan Owen: Oh, I could not agree more. So I just kind of want to veer off for a second and talk about true Christianity as being God honoring, honoring of self, and honoring of those around us, which really is. That’s the relational, shalomic piece in Christianity. So if we can raise the bar for what Christianity actually is and what Jesus talked about, which was entirely relational, entirely love giving, life giving, dignity giving, this is a dogmatic script that humans in the church, often evangelical church, are raised with.
0:06:05 Megan Owen: Women are seen as the gatekeepers of sex. Thank you. Purity culture. Right. And they are either vilified or they are upheld based on the openness of the gate. But the issue here is that a woman’s esteem is tied up and locked up with the purity culture and being put in one of these two categories. And what it does, it ends up doing, which I know you’re going to agree with, this is it upholds what I like to call precarious masculinity, not real masculinity, precarious masculinity.
0:06:43 Megan Owen: And it really supports this narrative of patriarchal power and dominance. And it’s painful. It’s very painful to everybody.
0:06:51 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes. And this is where I feel like so many women are suffering from patriarchal stress disorder, or I call it patriarchal stress response, where they’re actually just responding to being in this system that has literally ripped the imago Dei out of their image and where they’ve lived in this pornified world that says, in this pornified theology that says they are less than that. They are here to serve rather than an idea of mutuality, that we are here to serve each other, to give and receive pleasure within our sexuality.
0:07:25 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: And it’s based on a mutuality rather than this gross hierarchy that literally traumatizes, and I believe it actually traumatizes both men and women. It’s just because of the power structure. The men, in a sense, have put themselves on top of the food chain. So their trauma looks much different, much more subversive than actual trauma that the women are receiving.
0:07:47 Megan Owen: Well, talk more, Andrew, about the trauma. What causes besides the dogmatic scripts that we receive growing up, maybe, and not just in churches, but in society. Right. There are social scripts, causes. Might there be talk about the trauma to men?
0:08:05 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it starts early on in the socialization of masculinity. So we have to realize what are our men being raised? So we. We are raised to view emotionality as weakness. Right. So I remember one of the biggest curses growing up was you’d be called a girl or you’d be called gay. Right. Basically two people, groups just annihilating them. But those were the biggest things. You didn’t want to be called a girl. You don’t want to be called gay. So any type of emotional intimacy, terrifying. So you can’t have eye contact.
0:08:37 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: So how do men face each other? Well, you can see it literally on the tv all the time. The only time they face each other is through fighting, through boxing, UFC, whatever. Their. Their hands are raised and they’re ready to go at it. That’s the only socially appropriate time that men are eye to eye, face to face in intimacy. We’re socialized, whereas, and you can speak to this, this more than me, but some of the socialization of femininity, it’s more acceptable to face and have intimate conversations. It’s more so girls are training, in a sense, to cultivate intimacy with each other, at least where men are socialized, the opposite. We’re faced to combat, to fight, to conquer, to devour.
0:09:18 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Right. And so you have that gendered social conditioning. That’s a big deal as far as our development, because we so desperately want to be seen as manly. We’re going to be isolated, we’re going to be competitive, we’re going to try to take, kill and drag home.
0:09:37 Megan Owen: Yeah.
0:09:37 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: And that creates trauma.
0:09:39 Megan Owen: It really does. Thank you for saying that. So we’re talking about relational trauma that is deep and it’s invisible. I think what you’re saying, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that it’s traumatic for a man to not be able to have emotional intimacy with those around him.
0:09:59 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yeah. Well, again, that’s the bind because it’s self induced, but it’s also a cultural, larger thing that we’ve been trained to do. But what I found, especially as I’m focusing solely on our work, on helping men outgrow destructive behaviors, and that includes a lot of the marriage intensives that we do. But working with people in abuse and emotional abuse, I’m so pleasantly surprised when men actually do the work and how capable they actually are.
0:10:27 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: We’ve set the bar so low for men. They’re somehow just like emotionally emotionless, caveman, like babies. It’s just like, well, if you could just talk to me for a sec. It’s just like, oh, it’s so gross. When they’re actually super capable of emotional intimacy, but they haven’t been trained. I mean, sadly, we have set the bar so low that no men are so capable. I believe in men so much, I want to call them to more because once they actually start training in emotional weightlifting, they can get really strong and actually meet their partner and play on the same field and play a very good game. I’m using the metaphor of relationship together, but so many times I see women are so much further along in their emotional development, emotional maturity, that they can no longer play the same game as their spouse because they have to, in a sense, go back to t ball when they’re playing in the major leagues.
0:11:25 Megan Owen: Right. I love the analogy. So very very true. And most of my clients are women, as you know, I’m finding that women who have left abuse, maybe single moms. Most of my clients are single moms also. They’re just not interested anymore because they are tired of the emotional immaturity they don’t need that it’s like having another child. Yes, exactly.
0:11:53 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Exactly. And I mean, one thing that my business partner Trent says often, he says when men are living out of that young place, it actually turns their wives into pedophiles. Because you’re asking to have sex with a child. And it’s so true. It’s a graphic thought, and yet it’s so true. When we don’t develop ourselves into wise adult, we don’t heal the broken, wounded child. We’re calling our wives into relationship with children, and it doesn’t work. If your wife is in a relationship with and you’re internally, you’re six years old, like, it’s not going to go well.
0:12:32 Megan Owen: I promise it’s not going to go well. And you know, for women like me, we feel now in my fifties, after all these years, I feel if a man is using me in any way, if he’s using me to heal himself psychologically, if he’s using me because he actually needs to heal his relationship with his mother, if he’s using me just by looking at me a certain way, if he’s using me for some sort of fetishy supply that he needs, we feel that I’m very repelled by that.
0:13:09 Megan Owen: Very repelled.
0:13:10 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Well, it’s because you probably most likely experienced that so much of your life. And you know what that wound is. You know what that feels like. And you desperately want equality and you desperately want mutuality, and you’re tired of being someone’s prop, someone’s tylenol, whatever. Like you don’t want to be used for someone else to numb out of.
0:13:31 Megan Owen: Exactly. Yeah. Or to help them regulate. Right. We’re not here to help them regulate. The thing is that now, at this point, Andrew, since we know each other and we’ve been around with each other for a long time and worked together for a lot of years, I don’t need a man to tell me that I’m equal. I know I am. And if I start to feel that, I just walk away, you know, it’s just not for me.
0:13:57 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Boundaries. Boundaries are vital. And having a healthy relationship with yourself is so important.
0:14:06 Megan Owen: Yeah, it’s very underrated. So I’m going to go back to talking about what it’s like for women. So the social script for women becomes. And we all come by this honestly, right? It’s been around for thousands of years. We tend and befriend. That is the emotional intimacy that courses through our veins. If we’re not paying attention, we are pleasing, right? We’re people pleasers. If we don’t say, wait a minute, what am I doing?
0:14:36 Megan Owen: Where does this come from? Why am I doing it?
0:14:38 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes. And what. Can I ask you a question? What does that style of relating, what does that give you?
0:14:44 Megan Owen: I love that question. I believe that very often, almost every single time, a girl, a young girl makes a choice in our current social constructs. Because everybody needs to be loved. And it seems as though we can be loved as a girl by tending and befriending or being pleasing to a man. Or we can split off and be rebellious. I’m using air quotes. Rebellious. And here’s what happens in a girl’s mind, I believe, to aid and support the Madonna whore complex.
0:15:25 Megan Owen: I can be loved if I’m really, really good and pure and virginal. Or I can be loved if I’m totally rebellious, I’m like, no, I hate that stuff. I’m going to go over here. And so we also have these struggles and psychological hurdles to get over. To become fully integrated as women, as you know.
0:15:47 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes.
0:15:48 Megan Owen: And the tenement befriend may get us love and protection. Because then we’re worthy of it, you know? And then if we go the opposite direction and we become rebellious, we get sort of this false sense of love.
0:16:04 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Right, right.
0:16:06 Megan Owen: But we’re not worthy of protection.
0:16:08 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Great point.
0:16:11 Megan Owen: Now we have to think, how do we integrate in a man’s life? How do you help him to see women as human?
0:16:19 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yeah, yeah. It starts with doing the internal work of healing the wounded child. Right. We all have a very simplistic yet helpful thing that I use. And it’s from an internal family systems idea. But it’s that idea that we all have. That wounded little child. I often use the russian stacking dolls. And the littlest doll is the wounded child. To protect that wounded child, we develop an adaptive adolescent.
0:16:48 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: And that adaptive adolescent is our addictions, pornography, that it’s ways of being. You know what you just described in a woman’s woman’s life, right? The becoming super kind or becoming super rebellious. Like, that’s an adaptive way of being. And that protects our wounded child. So oftentimes, those adaptive ways of being, we bring them to a marriage, we bring them into our relationships. And we haven’t healed a wounded child. We’re still using ways of being that helped us survive, survive a rough childhood, but they no longer serve us in the way they did when we were children.
0:17:21 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: And so the goal is for us to step into the final part of the russian stacking dolls is the wise adult. How do we step into actually who we’re meant to be centered and healed, and we no longer live out of those other parts of us. And I often say when you are arguing with your partner and they’re in their adaptive adolescent or they’re in their wounded child, it’s like arguing with a drunk person. Like, there’s no reason, like, it’s not going to go well. No matter what you say, no matter how brilliant you are, it doesn’t matter when they’re not centered in their wise adult, it’s. It’s not going to go well. And so you have to take responsibility for yourself, heal your wounds, do your own internal work so you can do healthy relationship.
0:18:10 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: And that’s. That’s it. I mean, that’s the key. And that still doesn’t guarantee your partner will choose the same. Your partner might not continue that journey. And then it’s. It’s incredibly lonely because you’re on this deep journey of understanding yourself. And also, I believe, understanding God because God is in us. So the deeper you know yourself and your story, the deeper you know God. Yes, but that’s the. That’s the work.
0:18:37 Megan Owen: Yes. That’s wonderful. And that’s what source is about. Right? The program that we offer once or twice a year is about connecting to your source, because God is in here inside of us. Okay, so as far as how Madonna whore complex affects women in marriage, I’d like to talk about that for just a minute. I mean, what you’re saying, really, essentially, is that when a man does that deep work, that inner child healing work, which you and Christy do together. Right, for your marriage.
0:19:12 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: For couples, yeah, for couples, we work together, and then for. Yeah, we have level one, level two groups for men.
0:19:19 Megan Owen: Okay. So it sounds as though if the male and the female, the husband and the wife, can take this journey together, there can be phenomenal results, like a very rich life together. Right? Because. Because now you’re firing on all cylinders. Sexual intimacy, emotional intimacy, spiritual intimacy, intellectual and the whole thing. And then you have this beautifully dynamic marriage. However, we do have free will, and one partner may decide they don’t want to take this journey. Right.
0:19:52 Megan Owen: Like, it works for them. Whatever’s happening works for them. They don’t want to do the work.
0:19:57 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes.
0:19:58 Megan Owen: Okay. So for women married to men who have Madonna whore complex, there’s a real stuntedness for her. She cannot. I wish you all could have seen Andrew’s. The look on his face just now, like, yeah, that’s an understatement. When you’re assigned a category as a woman, you’re not actually a human. You are a robot. You are either a nurturer or you are a sex object. And neither one of these honor God. We can’t grow as children of God into the unique individuals. Everybody is a unique individual.
0:20:38 Megan Owen: Women can’t be fully sexual with a man who’s deemed her Madonna if they’re married because he’s so very mixed up in his mind and maybe doesn’t want to have sex with her. So that’s hard for her. Right. This is just. It’s destructive. Everywhere you turn, it’s destructive. There’s a tremendous amount of pain because women feel objectified. And if we step out of the category in any way, then we are no longer worthy of love.
0:21:08 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes, yes. Well said and horrific. Incredibly traumatizing.
0:21:15 Megan Owen: And then it’s also sort of a cold, hard slap in the face to know and to hear and to understand and to wrap our minds around the fact that he doesn’t want to know us and never did know us. He wanted Madonna or to have his cake and eat it, too.
0:21:32 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Right.
0:21:32 Megan Owen: And that’s very painful for a woman to come to that realization after years and years and years of marriage. He doesn’t know me and he doesn’t want to.
0:21:39 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes, yes. And what he does want to do is to use you and dominate you so he can feel powerful and he can feel like a man. So to use sex or to use your body to affirm his insecurities, affirm his lack. And that’s what it feels like to be used and abused.
0:22:01 Megan Owen: It is. It’s awful. And you don’t have to stay in a marriage where you are being used and abused.
0:22:08 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes.
0:22:10 Megan Owen: So when you have these intensives and you’re working with men and the russian nesting dolls and all of the things that you do, do you find that most men decide they do want to have emotional intimacy? And then how do you remove the stigma for them to be able to say, no, this is good and okay. And it’s masculine.
0:22:33 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yeah.
0:22:33 Megan Owen: It’s real masculinity, not precarious masculinity. How do you remove that stigma?
0:22:38 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yeah. And so I would say it probably goes like this out of, you know, we’ll have over 100 men go through our program this year. I would say probably 60% come through our level one program and change their life, change their life forever, and dive in and do the hard work of healing their wounds, grieving, learning new ways to engage intimacy and connection. I’d say other 20% do some good work, but then they go back to their normal lives and they stop.
0:23:07 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: They stop doing the work, they stop pursuing their inner world. You know, after a month or two, they’ll go back and kind of let the darkness seep back in of kind of this patriarchal, toxic thinking. And then the other 20%, I’d say, don’t want to go there. They see the edge, they see the crucifixion, and they’re like, oh, no, no, thank you. I do not want to feel painous. I do not want to hurt. I do not want to take this journey. I am just going to be a coward.
0:23:37 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: And in a sense, I can respect that. When they blatantly choose, like, no, I’m just going to lack integrity. So I would say that’s probably folks coming through our program. And yet many of the men, I mean, it encourages me so much. But here’s the problem. Let me back up a little bit. Sadly, I would probably say 80% of the men that come to our program is because they finally lost everything. It’s because their wife finally said no.
0:24:07 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Finally said, get out of the house. Finally said, I’m divorcing you unless you go see Andrew and do his program. Like, it’s crazy how many men are like, I didn’t even feel anything until I started losing my family, until I got caught cheating, you know, till, you know, found infidelity with my secretary, found that. I mean, I’ve heard it all, porn use. And I lied about to my wife for 25 years about how much porn I used. And it’s just like, and then I got caught, and then she got mad, and then that’s why I’m here. And so it’s like so many men are so hard headed that they don’t actually come get help until they’ve lost almost everything. And at that point, too much. Sometimes too much damage has already been done, right?
0:24:51 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Like, no, you can’t be a coward for 30 years. And then all of a sudden, like, oh, I’m going to be courageous now? It’s like, okay, it’s not about what you say. It’s what you believe. It’s how you live is what you believe. So how are you going to live a courageous life from this moment on? And do the work you need to do. So that becomes core to who you are.
0:25:11 Megan Owen: Okay. I love how you’re connecting it to courage, which is actually real humanity. It’s like the best part of humanity is to be human. If we’re going to talk in any sort of binary terms of what’s masculine to me, that’s it right there. It is not the precarious masculinity of, oh, I have dominance and control, so I’m masculine. It is actually, I’m going to be very courageous and do the healing work and vulnerable. Yeah, exactly. So. And I talk to these women who say, too little, too late, you’re just doing this because you’re going to lose me now. But I’ve been asking you to do this for 20 years, right? You know, for women, 20 years or 30 years or even one year of feeling devalued, it’s too much.
0:26:00 Megan Owen: It’s too much for a woman to not know why he doesn’t desire her for decades, thinking that it’s her problem, hearing messages from evangelicalism that she is not thin enough or beautiful enough or reading terrible books like every man’s battle, where she’s just supposed to take his sin upon her shoulders. So theologically, here’s what you’re saying. And I love where we’re about to go right now. Traditionally, in the past several years, because of purity, culture, and a thousand other reasons, women in marriages, and it’s not just evangelicalism, it’s a lot of world religions.
0:26:43 Megan Owen: They take on the burden and the responsibility for his complexes. If he looks at porn, that falls on her shoulders, which it never was meant to fall there. No human is built to carry somebody else’s sin problems. There’s only one human in history who was barely able to withstand that. So theologically, I’m over here with women saying, not your responsibility. Not your responsibility. It’s not about how you look. It’s not about how submissive you are, which I think that’s a kink, submission and all of that.
0:27:22 Megan Owen: Not your responsibility. It’s his. And you’re calling men to walk into what you call the crucifixion or the cruciform idea and saying, you know what? You face your own stuff.
0:27:34 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes.
0:27:35 Megan Owen: And this is, this is the ultimate healing, is to say, no more enmeshment, please. Women can’t be responsible for men’s porn issues or his promiscuity or his Madonna whore complex that’s on his shoulders. And you’re saying, come join me. It’s going to be brutal right. It’s going to be hard because anytime we’re undone, it’s awful. You think you’re just going to die, but when you do the work, there’s a rising resurrection piece as well.
0:28:06 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Exactly. And that is the only way to resurrection is through crucifixion. So many men want to this work without the suffering, you know, it’s like, yeah, good luck. Good luck with that. The only way to resurrection is through crucifixion. And I think of, you know, when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, you know, before it literally just becomes, you know, it’s like some pull, like, I forgot what they call it, but it’s like this goo.
0:28:30 Megan Owen: It’s like literally like, we call it the goo stage. Yeah, yeah.
0:28:35 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: That imagery is so potent, and that’s the goo. And that goo hurts and it’s painful, but there’s such beauty after it. There’s such beauty if you can do the work, and then after all that, then it’s time to tend to the marriage. And that’s a whole other podcast we can do later of, you know, after that process. So many people try to do marriage work first, but to reclaim your marriage, your marriage, you’re right, it has to be tended to, but there’s a stage to it. And so it’s after this crucifixion work, after both have gone through this individual healing, then the marriage, then it’s time to do deep marriage work to try to recover what’s been so damaged and so harmed in the marriage relationship.
0:29:18 Megan Owen: And I love that you’re saying that. That’s a whole different story. So in the vein of that being a completely different chapter, which we could totally do another podcast on, what would you say to men who say, I want to do the work, I’m doing the work, and it’s my wife’s job to hold me accountable because I know what I say to women who say, well, I try to see when he’s being tempted and then I try to help him through that. What do you say to that?
0:29:43 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: I would say, you’re not twelve. She’s not your mommy. What type of man do you want to be? Is it your integrity or is it hers? I think you’re responsible for your own integrity. So I often say, if you are going to objectify women, if you want to go and devour women and look at tons of porn, then go for it. That’s your choice. But just do it with integrity. Just say it, you know, here I am, I’m going to go pick up a prostitute. I’m going to go to strip clubs and I’m going to look at porn and I’m going to devour women. That’s the type of man I’m going to be.
0:30:16 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Okay? There’s part of me that can respect that. At least you’re honest with your hatred of women. But what’s worse is this nice christian guy who’s like, no, I honor women. I respect all women. And then they secretly abuse and devour, gaslight, their wife. It’s just like, no, be fully the same person. Be fully integrated. Live out what you say you believe. If you say you respect women, you’re not going to be devouring and objectifying women.
0:30:47 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Sorry. You can’t have it both ways.
0:30:50 Megan Owen: You cannot. And that is the essence of the Madonna whore complex, is that having it both ways when actually you could have an integrated relationship with your partner that is incredibly powerful and beautiful and better than you ever imagined, and that there is hope for that. And I think what you’re saying, along with the inner child work, is we have to get to the narratives of where did this come from?
0:31:16 Megan Owen: Where did it start? What narratives have we been fed men and women that put us in these categories and get us to that place where we feel devoured? Because I know personally, and then all the women that I’ve worked with over the years, we know what it feels like to wake up and say, I have nothing left to give, because he has devoured all of it. And you wake up in the morning and he does it again, and then you go to bed exhausted and he does it again.
0:31:48 Megan Owen: By the way, there’s a blog post on our website called on the topic of devouring women, if you guys are interested in reading that. But it is a lot of work, it sounds like, to get to the narrative, the scripts, the constructs of understanding wholeness and how God meant for us to be. And shalom. And then doing that wounded inner child work, working on those coping skills that we developed that we may still be doing.
0:32:20 Megan Owen: So going back to that teenager and saying, hey, I get it. I understand why you are doing this and you don’t have to do it anymore. And guess what? You can actually have a very fulfilling relationship.
0:32:32 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Exactly. Yeah. That partnership that we all long for.
0:32:35 Megan Owen: Right?
0:32:35 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And we all long for that connection.
0:32:41 Megan Owen: That’s right. And so all of these things that numb out, numb us out, which can be substances, it can be humans, it can be Internet, it can be shopping, it can be spending. It can be so many things. All of that is a need for connection, right?
0:32:57 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yes, exactly. We’re just looking in the wrong places, right? We’re using these things to get a quick hit rather than the hard work.
0:33:05 Megan Owen: Yes. Yes. So good. Well, Andrew, gosh, I am so grateful that we can talk so openly about this prevalent disorder. I’m sure there are other terms for it, but it’s very prevalent within patriarchy. It’s power and control. It’s precarious manhood. And you and Christy are doing amazing work over there. I really look forward to our next discussion. I’m grateful that you could be our guest today.
0:33:30 Dr. Andrew J. Bauman: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
