Hello there, good listener. I am your host, Nick Stumbo, and you are listening to The Pure Desire podcast, your biblically based and clinically informed approach to healing from betrayal trauma and breaking free from all forms of compulsive sexual behavior.

And whether today is your first episode or your 10,000th, I hope you'll find that this is a safe

place to hear conversations, maybe that you've never gotten to be a part of before.

All this month, we've been having great conversations with people on their story of healing

called The Gift of Recovery.

And today is episode 442, part four of five in this series.

And here joining me as my co-host, as he has been throughout this series, is the excellent

Mr. John Beggeman. John, good to see you again. Thanks, Nick. It is always a gift to be here.

Now, in the magic world of recording, we're not recording these in order. I think we've done the first couple of them quite a few months ago. Do you recall in any of the other episodes, did you like sing or have you just become like a normal guest now or you just say hello? I can't remember. I brought it back to normalcy. I just had too many moments of like part humiliation of like not knowing the person who actually saying it or yeah, I'm like, is this next thing is not. Anyways, I've just reverted back to normalcy. Before we jump in a little bit to talking about today's guest, you know, this is the month of December. And so we're, some people might be listening to this on Christmas Day. True.

And it can be awkward to think about like, why are we talking about sexual addiction and

Christmas?

What, what connections do you see of like telling stories of healing in December?

Because that's become our habit now the last two, three years.

Totally.

And this might be too simple, but I just really think that hearing somebody's story is quite literally a sacred gift.

And so when we think about Christmas, right, we think about giving others gifts, whether it's underneath the Christmas tree or an exchange party.

And I think our story, when stewarded well, can be a gift to others and to the world. And today we get the privilege

of hearing my roommate, Brian Wolfe, join us on the podcast and give us not only you and I, Nick,

but truly anybody listening in really the world, the gift of his raw vulnerability. I'm not quite for

sure we've ever had an episode with this level of

rawness. You can correct me. You've been on way more of them than I have. But Brian goes to

places today in his story that I don't know if we've ever been before in the podcast. Yeah. Yeah,

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