 Today, the topic recovery, integration, a life after addiction and trauma. Diana Lin, I've spoken to you several times over the past 20 years. What led you to writing your new book? Well, actually, Integrated was the first book I originally wanted to write, because when I first got out of the industry, I read a lot of material about women getting out, women, or just any material of the cycle ends or the addiction was stopped. But there wasn't a lot of material on how to live life after that stop happens. And so there was this huge gap. And so I thought maybe I could offer some of those experiences for those trying to transition from trauma to triumph to see what that tangibly looks like in everyday experiences. So when did you start work on this book? So books kind of just write themselves on my heart. And it's just a matter of when I sit down and let it pour out. And that actually happened January of this year, which was interesting considering my twins were eight months old. And we were in the middle of the pandemic. And my word for the year was steady. And I was like, okay, steady. Like we don't need to achieve anything. Like we can just go with the pace. But I talked to my husband and said, you know, what if I just did like an hour a day of writing and see what comes out? Or I actually asked for an hour a week and he said that's not enough time. And so he would get up an hour a day earlier so that the girls could be with him. And I could just focus on writing and we did it. So seven months ago. Great. And how much of the book was already written at that point? The only thing I had written was an outline. And I had done this outline probably when I was writing purchased actually. And it was just a matter of I wanted to add a chapter on stepping into motherhood. And so I knew that that was that was the piece that was missing. So I just I set the outline aside and had some like kind of ideas of scenes per chapter. And that was about it. Okay, great. And what did you learn from your first book? Why don't you give us an overview of your first book purchased leaving the sex trade? Sure. So the first book was the first book was a detailed account of what my life looked like when I chose to enter into the sex industry and kind of what the layers between being a victim and being a villain looked like for me. I often get dismissed of one of two categories. And so I wanted to offer people a chance to look at, okay, when that looked like an acceptable option for me. This is what my life looked like. And it just wasn't it wasn't a life that really had a lot of options, at least in my mind at the time. And so that was the first book and it's basically like 80% like I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying. This is the best I can do. And then it's like, ah, and then I'm free. And so I kind of wanted to detail a little bit more about what that freedom looked like in this book. And so at what point in your life does your new book begin you're getting you're getting a job at a gym so what year is this what place is this. So that would probably be let's see I graduated the program that I went into in 2012. And so I spent about a year serving various ministries. So probably about 2013 2014 is when I went into. Yeah, I think the end of 2013 is when I went into the first chapter of this book so it's about a year after I'm transitioning from a safe house back into society and learning how to relate to people in life again on life's terms. Interesting. So the material is, is going to be a little more difficult to dramatize or to make, you know, grab grab the grab the reader by the neck compared to the trauma of your first book. Yeah, that's actually a funny thing because the first chapter I had I think is now chapter seven and I went straight into some of our worst fears of when somebody hears of your story somebody that you want to accept you and love you and welcome you in and it just did not go that way and so I started like, like hitting the ground running and everybody was like whoa, let's back up a little bit. How did we get here. And so I actually had to do quite a few rewrites and thankfully I added my ghost writer in the process. From my last book, I added her in the beginning so that she can kind of guide me along the whole thing and I think that's why we were able to do that this year. So you've been interviewed many times. What number would you put on it and how would you divide it up between the time that you're in the industry and after the industry. How many times I've been interviewed since. Yeah, both during and since approximately. Gosh, I don't know. I think I do like a couple. Maybe like two a month 24 year. Wow is that like a couple hundred each each time. I probably did a lot more interviews in the industry. I think what's been helpful is that on this side of it we have a lot more technology available and so what happens is people reshare stuff that I've already made and that's been really helpful. Like spread hope and encouragement and and I can still spend time with my family. So, I've been thinking about the power of situation I used to do a lot of interviews on the red carpet in Hollywood and I noticed I could never get a deep interview on the red carpet that the situation just conduced to a superficial conversation and no other conversation was possible on the red carpet. But how would you compare and contrast the experience of being interviewed while you were in the industry, as opposed to being interviewed after you left the industry. Actually, some of those those experiences are a little similar because what I've noticed about myself is I have, I have like event Diana and and it's not that those experiences aren't true, or who I'm bringing isn't authentic. I think I just go into maybe like an extremely extroversion mode. And so I think that cuts off a little bit of the deeper stuff that I want to go into versus like now I like doing interviews from home and stuff we can kind of go wherever the conversation leads and I'm not distracted by like oh there's this person or oh there's this person. So, so there are some similarities and I think that's kind of some of the things that I wanted to go over in my book is like not everything was bad or not everything was fake. So kind of finding like what is okay like it's okay that I have different sides of myself that come out around different people you know not everybody's going to see like my, my most vulnerable sides, even though I can talk about experiences, you know, like they're not everybody's my family, you know. So I think I would kind of equate that to some of those experiences going from red carpet to events to doing interviews from home, where I have like more of the comfort and relaxation and less distraction. So I, I've conducted thousands of interviews in my life and I think of an interview as a transaction that the other person who's being interviewed, they get the pleasure of being listened to. And they get the pleasure of being somebody's focus of attention and they also get the ability to, to promote something and to share their story. And I get an interview I get information I get an experience I get something that I can shape either in video audio or written form. So to me, the interviews very transactional, but for many, I think more naive people they think that being interviewed is a sign that they're a star, or that the other person just adores them. And then then the interview becomes very frustrating because it becomes much more transactional than what they had anticipated. So what do you think about what do you think of the genre of the interview? Do you think of it as a transaction? How do you regard it? So I would say like the, because you know a little bit more about my story, and maybe not everybody does, that attention piece kind of brings up like a check in my spirit, because that's, that's not what I go for anymore. And so like now the difference would be like when I, when I get to do interviews and stuff like that is typically for the listener more so. And it's an opportunity to kind of give back to somebody else who maybe doesn't have the right words or the voice and stuff, whereas before it was very, very much about attention. I think that's something that people with my background have to be very careful of is trading one platform for another. And that's something that my husband and I and like my mentors and stuff that we're very prayerful about is what are our motivations between the interviews. I think the transactional piece though is something that we have to learn along the way. I did a section in the book about you know different media opportunities and sometimes you do feel kind of like a drive by story. And when you're going to places that are still maybe fresh, I think that maybe that's not always a good idea unless you have somebody to process the things that come up afterwards. Then the transactional piece I think is, is okay as long as people understand that that is what's happening versus, you know, like we don't always get to see the fruit of the interviews that we get to do, you know, we get to, we put it out there and we hope that it helps somebody but then we go back to living our lives and hope that that's something last. I remember once CNN booked me for their morning show so they sent a limo to pick me up at 4am. I got up at 3.30am and they were going to interview me live and then stuff came up and so they interviewed me on tape but they never showed it. So when you sit for an interview it doesn't necessarily turn out the way you expect. I think you mentioned in the book that you had scheduled an interview with someone and they cancelled on you at the last minute. Can you talk a little bit about what you learned from that interaction? Yeah, so that was really hard because as I mentioned I have like, I have worked Deanna and I have a vet Deanna and they're all different aspects of myself. But here I am, I'm applying for a doctorate program, I'm like weaving in and out of a research paper and I'm also working for this department called the Office of Faith Work and Economics and so, you know, that was a work that I was very passionate about while watching somebody's farm. And so I'm in this place and I'm working and I set aside this like to me like sacred time to be able to offer up like exposing some of the more harmful things that I had experienced. And so she calls me and you know and I haven't been on the West Coast in a while and that pace is very different for me having been in the Midwest for so long. And she like just went straight into it, asked me about like the worst moments and I'm talking about, you know, the ways that my pimp is grooming me and going into some detail that, you know, whatever's coming up. And then all of a sudden she's just like, I have to go. And just ends the conversation and so that left me like, whoa, like I'm, you know, when you had a history of exploitation, like we have to be careful in, you know, some of those feelings are similar. And so, you know, while I recognize like not everybody understands what it's like to be exploited and to just take what they want and like and go. Sometimes those bring back familiar memories and that's why I think it's important to process them with somebody. Now, I think she had kids and had to go. She really didn't have time to explain. It just happened to be that like, then I had to go back into work after like mid sentence of something like really traumatizing that we just brought up. Yeah, I remember I was interviewing an author of a book about mercenaries in the Iraq war American contractors and halfway through the interview. I realized that I'm going to vomit because I'm coming down with the flu. And so I say, I'm so sorry, I have to go. And it was nothing he said is he was thinking what did I do but I was very, very sick. And it just suddenly came on during the interview. So, so no one is impervious to the, to the frailties of human nature. Have you conducted interviews for, for journalistic reasons? I don't think that I have actually. I usually just connect other people to other people and then let them do their thing. So, I've gotten some like when I've been asked questions all outsourced like like people who are still in the industry. I just recently did a panel for the National Center on sexual exploitation and fight the new drug and one of the questions was on something called only fans and that just wasn't something that was around that I knew of when I was in the industry. So I'll outsource questions and kind of ask them, you know, like what are the pros and cons of this and how does it affect the industry. And so in that sense, I interviewed people. So what's your guess of what is the experience like for the typical person who interviews you? What do you think is going on for them? What do you think they're hoping to achieve? And what do you think their experience is like? Most of the people that I interview for usually I feel like they have good motivations. They're wanting to either expose the truth. They're advocating for some social justice cause or they're trying to give people encouragement that there is hope. But unfortunately, no matter which side that's on, I've just found that there's a lot of sensationalism. When it comes to like my story or people's testimonies. And I think we have to be really careful that I've encountered interviews that want to get like just the worst information or sometimes even the opposite. I think maybe like in the industry, like where are the best moments, right? And I think that we need to just like come to the table and be able to talk about like, yes, there were some really hard times. These things do happen. These are the things that might keep someone around. And here's where like I ended up with all of it. And I think as far as the interviewer goes, they want a story sometimes. And so sometimes they will kind of highlight some of the more extreme stuff to get an audience. And I've had that kind of happen a lot actually. Some of the headlines will be very misleading and stuff. And what percentage of the time since you left the industry, have you been satisfied with the interviews you've given? I try not to stay on them too long. It's really kind of like an offering to me. Like I do an interview and like I offer it up. But I am trying to do like some of the more professional things and like help make connections to other people and other nonprofits and stuff. But I think only a handful of times have I been really like upset about the way somebody has portrayed my story. And honestly, even today I had an article, somebody who had wrote an article and they said it had like, you know, X amount of shares and they wanted to link my real or my name to the article instead of using a fake name. And there was a line in it that had said, I forget how they worded it, but it made it sound like something had like that exploitation had started way earlier in my journey than it did. As though like I was a child being exploited. And so I think we just have to be really careful about language that we use. But those are the only things that I really haven't been satisfied with is when I think my husband calls him like click bait titles. Yeah, I'm not real comfortable with but I mean all I can do is just offer up my experience and I honestly just pray about about where it goes. Because there's a widespread feeling among many people that or journalists are out to screw you over. And, and I think most people have a satisfactory relationship with with people who interviewed them, according to surveys I've seen it's about 70% because it's a transaction and both parties are trying to try to get something. So how do you protect yourself? I mean it's not going to be perfect, but how do you protect yourself and how do you sort out what interviews you do and what ones you don't? Listening, I just try to stay quiet and I pray over I talk to my husband I talk to my mentor. I see like what season of life I'm in how much is this going to take from my family. And, yeah, I just kind of look at the schedule and see like do I have the time to go there because for me, like it's not just like an hour aside like I like go into. It takes a kind of a different energy to do interviews than just like sitting around being with your family or working and stuff. So I do have to keep in mind like it will take a little bit of a toll and my family like getting the kids out of the house and stuff. I'm making sure that my husband is there to take him to the park or something. And besides question. And I assume you use pretty good judgment about people you'll get used I assume you research people before you say do an interview with a stranger. I actually don't. I don't do like a like a ton of research, because I think you can get. I don't know you can get really like stuck in the web and so I'm just real careful. Honestly, I really I bring it to prayer I think of the audience and I asked my mentors, like, you think this is a good idea and. I think what's helped me is with this whole integration process and the healing side of my journey is learning how to to connect both lives and like a healthy way and just and just trusting that, you know, not everybody is going to have my same values or my same motivations. But will they have somebody listening that might be able to receive a word of hope from me. I really have to consider that person. So I remember a lot of ex porn stars who who just absolutely giddy about that this new phase of their career where they where they, you know, turn their lives over to Christ and they want to tell everyone about it and and then there are others where I can hear the sobriety in their voice. So to me is fairly clear whether someone sober or not just just by the sound of their voice and by how they conduct themselves. How about for you do you find it fairly easy to to tell whether someone's sober or not. For the most part because I've been in the rooms of recovery for almost 15 years, and then having lived with addicts and stuff. And yeah, you can usually tell whether somebody's like actually living free. I think, I think their demeanor changes. I think they communicate in more ways than just words and stuff. I do understand you know like when you when you find freedom of course you want to shout it from the rooftops I even learned that in recovery like of course I wanted to tell everybody I was sober. And how I got there but the thing is is like I can't be the example for all, but if somebody's curious and it's like hey how did you do that. There's no problem talking to that person from there but I think for the most part I have pretty good discernment on that and then the rest of it I'm just like you know I can't really judge but I'm here to help as as much as you'll allow me to come in. And what's your experience being like as a public speaker I would assume it's primarily in a church context or tell me more. Because like my porn is no respecter of persons addictions no respecter of persons. I do get to have like more like conference arenas where they take out either like religion or legislation and I think that's helpful because like, like human thinking doesn't care about like what faith you are you know they don't they don't care what what culture ethnicity you come from and so I want to connect with people who are trying to find like how do I transition from tragedy to try because a lot of it. I think we can find a lot of common ground there. I do have more faith based opportunities, I would say, and that's really encouraging because I think that some people really want to love well, but aren't really sure like what it actually looks like out there and so I hope to help bridge that gap. And what kind of experience has it been. I'm not the most comfortable public speaker. It's actually it's it's very uncomfortable. I get like physically sick. And I don't do a lot of preparation at this point in my journey. It's like being present has been so beneficial for me that I really just try to meet the day's demands and I don't know if I mentioned this before in an interview but there was there was this line in a movie and he was like you know don't be clever just be content to tell the truth. So I just kind of pray and ask like like help me to access that truth like what whatever parts of my truth that people need to connect with today. I think if I prepared more I would probably be more nervous but even when I've had bad experiences where I felt like like they'll play a testimony video and all of a sudden like I realized like I'm overwhelmed with how much I've actually experienced. And I like connect with that part myself and I end up crying almost to the point of like having a panic attack. Not because I'm being re traumatized but sometimes it's just overwhelming to know how much you broken free from. And so like I have had experiences where that has happened and I felt like maybe maybe that's not the piece I want to talk about anymore. But I still walk with people that I've met from those places so even still like things have been worked out together for the good of those who came and for me for having shown up and being present so even when it's a bad experience there's still something good that comes out of it. And how have you learned to protect yourself when when fielding public speaking invites. Having somebody there that I know and trust processing like I said with a sponsor mentor counselor I have all three. And you know like I said I just kind of offer it up at the end of the day and say that that was the best that I could do with that and then tomorrow I'll just bring my whole self again. I think having some time to like heal from like extremely vulnerable moments is good because if I were to just do that over and over and over. You know, I think one of the things that's been most beneficial for me is is being able to actually live my life and not staying in one like specific place. So I do give myself time to like recover from the traveling, the energy it takes from the event and just re engage with my family. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember you always I've known you for almost 20 years I've known you to always have a huge work ethic. Is that accurate. That that is I that's something I got from my mom and my dad, like who I call my, my dad. He was in the military and my mom worked really hard maybe maybe not always to healthy levels which is something that I try to be aware of. But yeah, that that's something that I was raised with. I mean, you're a trooper in the industry. I mean, you take bucket on or whatever you needed to do to do your work. And I read your books and you're an absolute trooper in recovery as well. You have enormous reservoirs of willpower and also way above average intelligence on on how to accomplish. The things that you want to accomplish is kind of interesting seeing that that through line of intelligence and willpower and determination that I've seen through your life. Thank you that's, that's really encouraging because some of the settings that I'm in I, I don't feel very intelligent like I, I've been in some real academic settings and I'm like, yeah stuff. It doesn't like fully go over my head, but I'm definitely not the most comfortable in some of those situations. I feel very, very small in some of those circles. So correct me if I'm wrong, but you've gone from being the smartest person in the room to not being the smartest person in the room. Is that fair? Yes, or I mean, I don't know if I was the smartest person in the room before, but I don't know that I ever really, really compared myself to anyone else before. But I have been given like some pretty consistent feedback about like my ethics, even in different working situations where people, I honestly and I don't, I don't mean this to sound like insulting to, to like any geographical range or anything. You know, I had people tell me like, you don't really seem like you're from California. I just didn't have, I guess, whatever California it's had. Yeah, I don't know how to say that without being insulting because it was okay insulting. Sorry, I remember you as the smartest person in the room. So there. Well, thank you. And okay, so tell me you've mentioned some learning challenges. So tell me, for example, about a difficult book that you've read lately and where you had to work to understand it and what techniques you used. So in recovery, actually, I had learned the habit of just looking up words as the text book that I had used in my recovery program had a lot of words that were maybe used maybe more in like the 30s or something. And that encouraged the habit of just getting a dictionary and so going through seminary that's the same thing I would do that. So my husband and I read like a book a month like he he picks out a fiction book because he wants me to have like some more like imagination I'll usually pick out, you know, some some social justice issues and I like reading commentaries for fun. And so my professor, Dr. Craig Keener writes these wonderful commentaries and he has like, like a four volume like thousands of pages on one specific book and. And so I work through those and right now I'm going through his commentary on revelation. Because that's what I do I read his commentaries and and it's helpful for me because I can get into like the socio historical backgrounds and try to understand the context of what it meant to the people who were reading it at that time. And so just I have my dictionary ready and I have Greek translations and yeah I just have all the tools that I left with from seminary, which you know kind of left me with a feeling of wow I just I really don't know a lot. But they gave me a degree anyways. Tell me if you if head to what what you remember off the top of your head about the book of revelation because it's an incredible book. So for me, I think that the biggest thing that stands out to me is just like constantly being reminded to persevere till the end to. That this to me this this life just isn't my own and I think the biggest thing that stands out to me is I've just always got to be ready to meet my maker. And no matter how that happens I think, like as far as the book of revelation goes I think every generation has their idea of when the end is going to happen and in my faith I just don't like I don't think we're going to know that and tell that second coming. And so for me, I just live prepared. I think that's the biggest message I can take away from that is always be ready. I'm just going to look at something you said a little earlier and apply it to the book of revelation you said you want to know the context in which a book was written who wrote it and for what audience so I think the book was written around 95 or 100 AD but what do you know about the context of the book of john's audience. I think it was like a Greco Roman area. I think what I remember is that they had. I was just having this discussion the other day of. Oh, actually, I switched into another book my brain switched into another book. Because I was just reading on Colossians. Like literally just two days ago and how important it is to understand like like what the Greco Roman history was and and how how to live some of those principles today in in a mutuality but that's a whole other discussion but Yeah, now I can't tap into the revelation part. Can you ask the question again. So the book of revelation. I'll put I'll put forward to you one possibility that it was written by a human being around year 100 when when the followers of Jesus needed comfort and needed a way to understand the world around them, which was very confusing and Desperating. So does that does that sound accurate. Yeah, I think. Well, it's really cool about like the source documents of my faith is I feel like they're timeless so even though like he used language and use visual images that that they could relate to because I think there was like a lot of mythology back then and And other different practices. I think that we could still be blown away by. I'm just blown away by the possibilities of seeing such things and such supernatural activity going on around. Yes, I do believe that it was it would be encouraging. I think a lot of people walk away feeling a little bit like terrified but for me it's just it's comforting and knowing that Like, like, there is somebody who's in control. There is a plan like things will be worked together. There is a sense of urgency. I do believe In helping to to bring people hope. I think we are all going to answer to somebody. But as far as like the audience I think that generation after generation we can find comfort in knowing that like there is a plan there is hope there. I do believe there is salvation. What's your favorite book of the Bible. So, you know, it's funny is the whole the whole book is my favorite but I actually really enjoy Leviticus and I know that a lot of people make fun of that like you're like we're on Leviticus today aren't you excited you're here and I am because Like, I do like that I have a God of order. I do like that he had things in place that like they weren't just restricted for the sake of being restrictive like some of the things that have to do with like body and And honestly like sexuality and stuff like they were there for our protection and I found that a lot of the things in there just protected like the sanctity of life and And so while, like, you know, like we do have freedom. And I don't think we need to like add like any further the further yolks or anything. I do believe that a lot of them do point back to love like loving your neighbor and loving God and so I find them beautiful but I am also an enneagram one and so I, I do kind of like rules a little bit. But for the sake of bringing people together. Do you think that there are mistakes in the Bible or do you think the Bible is perfect. You know, it's funny is I was actually thinking like, for some reason. When I was thinking of this interview I had a feeling I was going to be like asked about like the doctrine of an air and see We're not we're not going to pull out our books. I feel like more and more is revealed and I do believe that I only know in part and that I will only know in part on the side of life, but to me like the Bible is a revelation. Is one consistent revelation. I do know that there's been many people who have translated I don't think that has affected the principles the structure. And I believe, I believe it reveals a person and and all things I feel like point to that way. So, in that sense, like I don't believe there's errors now is there human errors when you're copying like script after script. Sure, is there human errors in translation like I don't think we can fully understand the way they use some words and some systems back then I just, I don't think we have that that full revelation right now, but My father was a Protestant theologian and he taught me growing up that the Bible is perfect for its purpose, which is to bring people to Christ. I thought that was a pretty good answer. Yeah, perfect for his purpose. So yeah, I think people can get hung up on the details and it's like I think we have to ask like why, like, like what are you actually looking for here like are you looking for mistakes or like can we use verses out of context. And I like there's certain verses like I like I may use them out of context but it's it's like the overall message that it's giving to me so like even though the scriptures out of context it points to a character of my God that is consistent. And so to me that's not out of context. What do you do when people try to proof text you so I grew up a Christian something Adventist Christian and I remember that people love their proof text and they'd say you know what what do you do with Genesis 117 and I could say well what do you do with Deuteronomy 14 to well what do you do with Colossians one six and I didn't know if you experienced that joy. I do a little bit I think I my go to is just reminding people to. So like we have a text and you you understand it within its passage and then you understand that passage within its book and I think it's important to do more of like an inductive study. Where like how does this fit in with this passage this book and then within the context of the whole Bible. I think it's when we start separating things out that we that it gets really tricky. And starts becoming a little bit inconsistent. Now connected to this I had a lifelong struggle with idealizing and devaluing people like one day I put someone on a pedestal and the next day I put them in the trash. So I'm curious if this is something that you've experienced and to what extent you've been able to overcome it. Actually that's that's something that I've had to deal with with my family. Right. So like my like my dad the person who raised me. I did not want to see him in a bad light at all now he had done some things and treated me some ways that made me feel worthless at times. But like but he was there he was consistent he showed up he didn't leave he didn't abandon when he signed those adoption papers like he stuck it through. And so I kind of like had him on a pedestal was afraid to look at the whole picture so it was like all you know my mom did this and my mom did that and she did some horrible things that really affected me. But I think I got to a really healthy place when I was able to see like the whole thing so I went from that to I called a family meeting with my dad and said you know like why was pornography around so much like how did you come into it and you know why you know why didn't we call the cops when when mom was like trying to commit suicide like why are we covering that stuff up. And what happened is I ended up like hurting him because like just because I'm on a healing journey doesn't mean everybody in my family wants to go there. So like him and he got remarried and they have a great faith and a great life and they choose to just look forward they don't want to look back. And so they had told me you know Deanna you know I just hope that you can forgive us one day and and this is really hurting us by you constantly bringing up. And so I think for me it was really helpful to see people as whole people you know like my mom isn't the sum of all the bad things she did in my life you know like she had some really great things about her did those things have a lasting effect on me sure. But I think it's helpful when we can see people as people as right sized people. As you journey in your recovery and you start experiencing success. How have you dealt with other people's jealousy of you. Painful. I have to say I'm not a huge feeler but my whole life I've kind of experienced that and I don't understand it because like for me. I really kind of live by like these phrases like contentment fuel celebration and comparison fuels competition. And I feel like my whole life people have brought me into these unspoken competitions and I've lost friends over or they won't get close to me over it. And it's really painful and I understand you know like some of the underlying insecurities and stuff. And even in my healing journey I had that happen like my mentor would watch it happen over and over and people would say like really really mean things about me. And then later on say that they really just wanted to be my friend and they just didn't know how to connect with me in a way they felt like I was unapproachable and I really hate that. Because like I feel like I'm approachable but I think sometimes you know my perkiness or something can kind of throw people off people think it might be fake and stuff so. I try to pray over it and see if maybe like you know I always say like like correct me or correct them where's the seat of truth is there something that I can do like I can't manipulate myself to make everybody like me. And that's just unfortunate because there are there are some people that I really would love to get to know on a deeper level but they just won't let me in so I just show up and try to be consistent. What have you learned about an appropriate use of social media. I think social media is a really dangerous place to be especially for people like with my background or people who might actually end up ending up in that background. I posed this question at the conference that this virtual conference that I'm a part of right now and you know with this this culture that has a need for likes and attention and constant validation. Like I feel like it's making it easier for for people to bring people into an industry where they can get all that at any cost. And so I think that that's very dangerous for me some things that I've learned is like like I don't accept strangers right. Even people that look like a girl that needs help or wants to connect with me like those could be fake profiles. So anytime I get something like that I'll either message them and I'll ask like you know like hey how do we know each other. Like what's the purpose of them wanting to connect with me on social media because my social media like my actual social media is is like this gratitude scrapbook of my life and my family and stuff. And so I I don't necessarily like share all that with the world. It's to stay connected with people I actually know. And so I've had situations where I've gone to like ministry leaders and I'll find like you know like people will try to be my friend but they're only friends with other graduates of like of the program that I went through. Now that's a little suspicious why are you only friends with X likes people who were stripping and in porn and in prostitution. So I'll ask the people and I'll ask like you know some ministry leaders like hey how do you know this person like I don't I just figured they needed help and I'm like why are we not asking people. Like who are you I get references on people like even pastors who try to send me a request. You know and not to say like like not to put them on a pedestal because there's there's a lot of brokenness in the world and so like a job title is not going to not going to prove somebody's character. But I do get references and I say like hey why do you think they would want to be my friend and so I just I try to keep it pretty private. But I did open some social media pages like some professional pages where people can follow like some of the work that I'm doing. A porn addiction is rampant in parts of the Jewish community that that I know how rampant are you hearing anecdotally is porn addiction within the Christian community. It's huge. It's something that happens behind closed doors. Not only that but depending on like somebody's theology. Some people don't don't think there's anything like inherently wrong with it and some of the disconnects that I've heard in class or like things like it's not real like they're not real people and I'm like OK. To you they're not real people because to you they're a screen but I'm here to tell you like that's a real person on the other side of the screen. And like here I am 10 years later 2010 is when I left 11 years later and I'm still like like I don't have like like it's like this ongoing consent that happened when I was 18 years old and I signed a contract and it's like you know like like even in marriage like there's there's this authentic consent right like I'm not like obliged to meet every need at every whim. But like I don't get a chance to give that consent to all the all the people that are using my body now from 11 years ago and 20 years ago. And I think it's because there's this huge disconnect of like it's not real. And it's like I think we need to clarify like know what you're seeing on camera is not real like like like people aren't having like this great time. They're cutting and stopping and you know and they're making it look like a lot of fun. That part's not real. But the people are real. And I think every community needs to hear that. So how does one sustain a Christian life and use porn at the same time. It would seem to me that eventually one is going to have to give. Yeah, I would think I try to stay very. I try to listen. I'm in like a sex therapist network and and there's people on both camps and you know my question like questions that I have posed like looking at you know the principles as a whole right. How are we like, like, like, aren't we perpetuating the problem like aren't we like continuing to keep people in a place of like what I don't feel like is empowerment, even though like we all say like we're being very empowered when we're in there. Like I like when we're using this media like like we're keeping people in there. And so, but again they're they're choosing to use it because like they have a choice and so there's that disconnect of like, I'm going to stand up for human trafficking because it's trendy or because it is a real problem. Depending on like what the motivation is, but I'm going to continue with my use of pornography because they have a choice and that's where like I want to come in and say okay. I don't have a choice anymore. I'm married. I have children. I'm like I go to a faith based school and and you're still using my body whenever you want like I don't have a choice anymore. And like the people that I know that were like trafficked by their family or or trafficked in maybe more ways that that you would understand trafficking to be like they were like pornography was used to groom them so there's like all these connections everywhere. But people want to just use it as like, you know, it's just the body, you know, like we're just bodies. I think some some people are uncomfortable with intimacy and vulnerability and they're afraid of their own capacity for empathy and so they have to dead in their capacity for empathy and vulnerability by doing things like pornography. Yeah. And I, I understand that I can put like intimacy was so uncomfortable for me like it made me sick like those butterflies that people talked about like I got nauseous. When I when I felt like somebody actually truly liked me. And so I can understand like why that would be such a huge barrier for somebody. You've probably heard of attachment theory with you more of the anxiously attached or the avoidant. It's like the theory to me. Oh, okay, so people with secure attachment. They, they naturally bond with people they like. And if someone's mean to them, then they, they, you know, they move on, they just naturally cut ties. So supposedly this is like 60% of the population. Then people such as myself have anxious attachment where we tend to obsess over our relationships because we're so obsessed about them. We tend to do them harm because we're really scared that I mean, I would sometimes get up at 2am in the morning to see if someone had unfriended me on Facebook. And so I would, I would be overly obsessed with my, my relationships. And then the avoidant proclaims that they have no need of relationships that they could just go their own way. And if you're going to interact with an avoidant, then it's going to have to be entirely on their terms. So we use someone who, who prior to recovery thought she didn't need relationships. We'll use someone who was say overly obsessed with the relationship and or how, when do you think your relationship was two relationships prior to getting recovery. Actually, I went in and out of all of those stages. Yeah, but I think I kind of touch touch on a principle in my book and I actually had read it in a book on poverty and I connected to relational poverty. And it was like, you know, a sign of true maturity is when somebody goes from like co dependency where it's like I need everyone like I need them I need them like I'm going to hold them hostage to independence which is like I don't need anybody I've got this I'm going to do this on my own to this beautiful interdependence and. And I think that was part of my journey was like learning how to have like an interdependence that wasn't codependent where like I wasn't like keeping people like this tight and like so afraid to lose them. But still enjoying the benefits of having a relationship right. I think in the industry I probably would have been more in the camp of independent like I don't need anybody. Some of the choices I made like even career choices was like like I didn't think anyone was going to stick around and I wanted to prove that I didn't need anybody and that I'd be able to raise a family on my own in case I ever had had kids on my own and like the people didn't stick the person didn't stick around. So when I came here like I had to like lean into this like uncomfortable. How do I build friendships that are mutual where it's like you know like I'm checking on you you're checking on me and like there's like no drama. There's no expectations like we're just simply kind of doing life together and selecting like just a few of those people and going from there I'd say is where I am now but I definitely went through all of those things. I assume prior to recovery it was very important to you to be a star. And then I assume that during the process of recovery, you were able to let that go and instead simply desired to be of service and to be a vessel and a vehicle for God maybe you could talk a little bit about that transition. Yeah, I just wanted to be somebody to somebody I didn't even really care who. I mean I did to a certain extent I probably. Yeah, like I would go after people that like I would think would protect me or something like that but I wanted to be somebody. And I think that being the star was like an avenue where I could be anybody but the person that I felt like I was. Whereas now it's like, I just kind of accept like who I am and you know I don't get too nervous anymore about like, like what's going to be exposed because I think that like as I grow like I come into knowing myself more and I understand like a little bit more and I can just accept that like this is what I know of me to be true of me in my life today. And just like offer my whole self and see, see if it helps somebody but I do think being a vehicle for service is really important and I think it comes back to checking those motives like what I'm doing these interviews. You know, what are what are my motivations behind them and also being careful like, you know, my husband like we don't read comments and stuff. But there was like this this article that posted in Australia and it was on Facebook and I thought it was like an encouraging site and I didn't realize like they were one of the ones that kind of had click baited some of my stuff. And I read some of the comments and I got engaged enough to be able to say like they were like okay well what's the point what is she doing now and I was like oh let me tell you. But then I started going back to see who else responded and then like I had to really like step back and say like how much do I engage with this because like I want to point people to the truth anybody who's actually interested. But in order to do that I have to filter through a lot of crap. That gets said, and it's just not good for my mind or my heart and so I think that's something that we start to be careful of today. Now at the beginning of your book when you're going to interview for a job at a gym, you seem to be thrilled at the idea of being a worker among workers and assisting somebody else is that accurate. Yes, it's such a freeing place to be to be a student among student, a learner among learners. And that's that's something that I learned in recovery is like I don't have to be the best I don't have to be the top I don't have to you know I don't have to be the worst either because there's there's sometimes a pride in and wanting to be the lowest as well. Like these like I had worse moments than you and I'm more unstable than you. And so to get to a place where it's just like I'm just here to serve and I don't need to take over a company I don't. I don't need to achieve like all these things like I just I just want to help your dream succeed and that's a really good place for me to be. And where are you at in your education currently. So my master's was 60 hours and like for an MDiv equivalent I would need 72 hours and that's what I need to apply for a doctor of ministry without any exceptions. And so I'm at I'm at 69 hours right now I need one more class and then I could I have all the requirements to apply for a doctor of ministry program, but you know we spent a lot of time we decided to kind of move forward with this book and I'm actually part of a fellowship where I get to be a children's leader, which is going to be a very new experience for me and so I think I'm going to spend my time kind of training and leadership in that area for a little while and school will always be there it's a fun, slightly expensive hobby of mine so I'm in no rush. What role if any did Christian baptism play in your healing. So I think I believe that I get a lot of pushback on this. So I believe that I accepted Christ in my life and that that he has been with me this whole time and I don't know if you remember but even in the industry like all like, like he died to you, right, that's all I knew. But I didn't make a public declaration of that work that I felt like was going on inside of me until 2008, but when I did make that declaration. It was still a long journey and I think what happens is people think like from there like we are radically like we're radically saved and different but the thing is is I wasn't discipled. I went back to the people that I called my family which was the industry and and that's who was around me and so I couldn't really grow in my faith. Even though like I did feel like I was cleansing and I knew that like I can't he can. So I describe that to be an experience of like that's when he offered himself to me. So I had another public declaration and it wasn't for like it didn't negate any salvation that I felt that I had accepted. But when I truly understood who it was that I was following. I did get baptized in my new church community and and that to me was more like a wedding. It was like these people that I had in the water with me were like bridesmaids and they were there to point me back to the one that I was committing to even when times got hard. And I think that we forget that part of being bridesmaids right like we we stand up before people and then things get hard and we're like talking trash about the husbands. And that's just like that's not my role at all like my role is to point you back to like here's why you married that person. And so I invited those people to do that with me and my relationship with God. And I hope that's like not sacrilegious to say something like that but that's what it meant to me. So that was I offered myself to him fully. So some people would say that for example that they got all the help they needed to overcome crack by giving their life to Jesus. How would you explain the benefits that you got from giving a life to to Christ. The benefits you got from psychotherapy and the benefits you got from 12 step programs. How would you how would you separate and explain the necessity of those three. Well I think it's it's kind of similar to like our actual physical health like I get some benefits from exercising and I get some benefits from eating really good foods and I get some benefits by taking supplements that that helped me to process those those two things that that I'm doing to help my body. And so with with a church and recovery and therapy it's like like I couldn't hear the truth without getting sober first. And so I needed to go to a place where I could arrest my alcoholism enough to be able to understand the message that was being communicated to me at church without like this this faulty perception that I had right so I'd like to see where religion is right. So so once I had the alcoholism under not under control but like arrested and I was free of that obsession I could like I had more room. But then there's trauma and there's like all these multifaceted things like like PTSD and and anxiety and stuff and so how do I come to a place where like yes I have this faith but like I haven't been healed on this side of all the consequences of my past life or anything. You know some of it could very well be genetic and and I haven't been fully healed and that's actually the area that I want to research is how trauma like informs our theology and what healing like does look like on this side. It just hasn't been my story that like I was baptized and I was completely healed of everything. But what it did give me what was hope and there are some people that yes like there's like we have a supernatural God like he can move in any way that he wants. But for me he's shown me how deliverance happens through the struggles. And so I have a part to play in that. So how did your husband and his family deal with this this book because you write a lot about them. My husband is great. He so like like their concern was like here like you know he when they when he left them he was this this you know man who was raised in a village with these good wholesome farmers values who was going off out of the state first one to like move away to become a pastor. And so then they see my testimony and they're like how is how is this going to affect your ministry like like who's going to give you a church and like his response was like I don't want to work for a church who doesn't understand redemption and transformation. You know, but on this side of the country, I have seen a lot of cultural faith. And so that's like the traditional I guess like there are certain times you show up to church and that wasn't a way of life. It wasn't like a whole experience. It was like a Sunday thing or a holiday thing. And so like he didn't want to lead a church that like was only in it for those reasons. Now me I was like yeah that's exactly the type of church that we need to lead because they need to see like what what like what resurrection looks like in somebody's life. And so, you know, he ended up being a chaplain which like everybody knew before him that he was going to be great at that. And he ended up not taking on a church at the end of seminary. But but I was willing and he is like so great with me sharing openly and we just kind of you know we constantly reevaluate like what does this mean for a family how public are we with pictures and stuff like that when we give them a choice about like what we talk about. And so we constantly have those conversations. His family is starting to come around a little bit like nobody really wants to talk about it. But they his mom did say something like you know when diana has a book signing you can drop the kids off and at grandma's and stuff and so that that was like this little piece of like acceptance that that I really needed his name. Could you talk a little bit about the process of making friends you described this quite eloquently at the beginning of this new book. Yeah. So I've had a lot of people tell me like I don't trust women. When I've had a lot of women say like they don't trust women and I just I find that so sad because women are great. And like I said like there are a lot of women that I did want to go deeper with but for some reason they just they just couldn't see to let me in. But I think it just starts with a few and. And so I started recovery helped me a lot because those were the few people that I learned to be completely myself and honest with so it wasn't like you know I go to work and I'm this person. And you know I come home and I'm this person it was like like this is everything I've been through this is every person I've tried to be up until now. And I didn't have to hold anything back and I think that was really helpful. Now do I need to do that with every person. No, that's something I learned along the way is. You know I think we think transparency is just being able to tell somebody all our stuff. And I think that's actually pretty easy compared to actually doing life with people. Because then they they kind of see like the consistencies and stuff they don't they don't get just the lessons you've learned they get they get you while you're learning the lessons. And that's hard and it's uncomfortable at times but I've learned that like you know I used to throw people away I don't do that anymore. Do I've learned that seasons kind of take people apart and sometimes like you're just not in similar seasons anymore and that's painful but doesn't mean you need to throw away the whole relationship sometimes you just go out to lunch once a year and have great conversations but. I think that's more transparency in our culture I think we've all just learned to be able to just throw everything out there. And I even tried that a few times you know like going to school moving in on campus and like here's my whole story I don't need to think I'm lying and they're just like I don't know what to do with this information. And and not everybody like not everybody can bear the weight of your story. And so I think as you grow in relationships you start to discern like this is how much more I can invite you in because like one they're meeting you there or two it's actually beneficial and you're not just like. Here's me I hope you like me take it or leave it like there's actually some some work that happens along the way. And what role did sponsorship play in your recovery of any sponsorship. So I've had two sponsors I had my one in California and and then when I came to Kentucky. I found somebody who I knew would would pull the covers over me if I even like thought because like like the stuff that that we deal with like gets a little bit more insidious right so like. I don't have like these boy and things that we're struggling with but there's like there's those moments of where like a bad motives like hidden under a good one and you need somebody to call you out on that stuff before it turns into something really bad. And so she, you know that she sponsored me in a different way we really went through the text and asked a lot of questions about like what our recovery was and went through that together and then it just started becoming like a weekly check in but now. Now we have a date every Friday and she connects with my girls and not everybody can be friends with their sponsors a lot of people need that separation but she ended up becoming a part of my family and and that's been almost almost 10 years now. Wow, that's that's amazing. So coming towards the end of the interview is there anything that you'd like to discuss that I haven't asked you about. So I think with just with the whole integration process. You know, coming from a background of being exploited and a career where like you learned to where I learned to disassociate to cope where it was like like this is me and this is her. It does get a little tricky when you come back around and you say like okay like now now I've discovered who I am, and I'm going to live into this and then you go out there in the world and you're like okay, but I have like 30 years of experiences of traumatic experiences and then you go out in the world and you think like I'm just going to dive right into relationships and it's bumpy. And and you start operating out of old memories because like you like you're you have no new memories and so I think it's just really important for people to learn that there is a transition process. We're going to fumble our way through it but I think what was most helpful for me is that like it's not just people with alcoholism it's not just because I'm an alcoholic and it's not just be because I sold sex for a living. This is a normal part of maturing like everybody has to learn how to move through the awkwardness and the vulnerabilities of life whether that's at the workplace at school or in relationships and so for me I had to learn like here's my new life and here's my values and I don't have any experience living into them I only have experience living the opposite way. It's going to collide sometimes and and I don't need to just like shove that other 30 years down like there's a lot that I can glean from those 30 years. And I think it was important for me to know that it's okay to be accepting of my whole self like I know we just want to like go ahead and forget everything that's behind but but I learned a lot along the way. And who I was wasn't bad and I think like what you said in that one interview was like so meaningful to me like I was just damaged. I was damaged but like I still loved people and I still as a good person. I just didn't know how to fully step into that and really embrace myself in those times. And so I would just encourage everybody to to bring their whole self forward and that doesn't mean you have to tell everybody everything about yourself at all times. It just means like like really listen to what parts of yourself are coming up and how to have compassion for yourself because then you can really give it to others. What you just talked about it reminded me of the enormous role that self loading played in my life. How did you overcome if that was a problem in your life. I think the way that I overcame that is you know sometimes that's actually like in recovery like we learn that that's attached to pride like it's another form of pride, even though like like we're just like the worst people right. And the reason that I had overcome it is because in my faith like somebody died and gave up his life to show me the opposite. And I'm like like if he did that knowing everything I ever did and still said yes I pick you like you are included who am I to say like no no I'm too far gone. No like I can't be forgiven. And so I just I just kind of took his example and said okay how do I live into this. And how do you react to an increasingly non-Christian America. I don't think it's really my this is going to sound opposite to my faith. I don't think it's my role to convert everybody to what I believe. I definitely like there there's a role like evangelism plays and stuff. I think first my faith community needs to get healthy and then I think we'll have something attractive enough that people will say like oh like your God is real he is authentic he is good. But until we are until we are a healthy body as a whole and not so divided I don't know that we really can say anything to America and how America lives. I think I think we have some some turning back to do of our own. Okay great thank you so much Diana it was great to talk to you. Yes thanks for having me back. Okay good good to see you thank you so much. You're welcome. Take care now. So Diana Lynn's new book is integrated living beyond the sex trade it was just released a week ago you can get it on amazon.com. And her proceeding book was purchased leaving the sex trade by Diana Lynn. So I did two interviews with her in 2020 they're linked in this video description. I'm going to move on with my solo show now get a little bit from Brian McLean a hand here talking about why an American nation cannot be salvaged. Lots of great stuff out there to support the show and click on that shop tab and get my logo and all kinds of cool stuff. Lots of great ways to support the show of course shared around social media right where you get your podcast let people know you're thinking locally and acting locally. That's how we grow the audience. We had a really good podcast yesterday with on Glenn Elmer's and this idea of a refounding of America. The thing that they miss and all of this of course is that the Lincolnian vision that they have is destructive to the original founding not to support about it. That the United States is not a proposition nation in any way whatsoever. In fact the founders weren't really committed to that phrase all men are created equal at all they weren't committed to it in any way. And what they meant by it as I mentioned in the piece that I wrote for the Chronicles magazine which is a great magazine. And I use Hamilton and Adams John Adams to define it essentially political equality among citizens. So once you're a citizen you have that I think Elmer's by saying that these people that are not supportive of MAGA or not American citizens anymore are not American citizens anymore. I think that's a faulty analysis when he doesn't recognize that there's always been dispute among citizens in the United States because there are cultural differences among all these people. There's never been one American people or one American nation as John Taylor of Caroline said that would be like utopia for utopians right so we don't have that. And I think David Hackett Fisher's book Albion Seed I go back to it a lot published in the late 90s just a tremendous book because he clearly shows this. There are certain cultural divisions in America that will never go away as long as these things are passed down. And I think what Trump was able to capitalize on with some of these cultural tendencies in America particularly in the heartland what Elmer's is rightly pointing out the heartland. That's populist country that's Jeffersonian country more than anything else. And when you look at who populated those areas it makes sense culturally and so what I want to do today is talk about David Hackett Fisher in Albion Seed. I'm going to go to the very end of the book to last a little bit of the conclusion. This is a nearly a 900 page book it's a monster but you need to get it. Yeah it's a monster book but I finally read it in the past month absolutely worth it. So Tom Brady was speaking at the White House today. Well not a lot of people think that we could have won and in fact I think about 40 percent of the people still don't think we won. I understand that Mr. President. And personally you know it's nice for me to be back here. We had a game in Chicago where I forgot what down it was. I lost track of one down in 21 years of playing and they started calling me Sleepy Tom. We got on a roll. Sleepy Tom. That's a good one. Okay a little bit more here from Brian McClendon. David Hackett Fisher's Albion Seed. I talk about it a lot at McLean Academy in several of the courses I've mentioned on this show before. But I want to go to the last little bit of the book and read some of this because I think if we understand the cultural differences then the Federal Republic makes sense. The idea that you had a central government, a general government for general purposes only. I can't say this enough. Commerce and defense that was it. Everything else was left to the States is exactly how it was sold to the States during ratification and how we should adhere to the Constitution today. Nothing has changed that. Not even the 14th Amendment. Nothing has changed that. What we still have is a Federal Republic and if we actually just adhere to that I think you'd see a lot more peace and stability in the United States. The problem is you got people like Glenn Elmer saying well no, we need to have a Lincolnian Revolution. One people. We got these 75 million people that are a nation. You got these other people who are a nation. Well how about within those 75 million people? You don't think there's differences there? That maybe we could look at, I mean maybe a confederacy from those people and the confederacy in another way would work. But the real problem is that we do have a situation. We have incompatible things. Governor Morris pointed this out during the Philadelphia Convention. He said look if we've got incompatible things now let's just separate. But if we don't let's stay together. But I think that the point was there were people that recognized in 1787 and 1788 that we had incompatible things. In Massachusetts and Connecticut and South Carolina. They recognized in Virginia. They talked about it. In New York. We actually have these things. Let's not force this union because it's going to create civil war eventually. And that's what it did. And we had those things. Culturally. We still have those things. So the best thing we could do is keep a federal republic. I think a union is not a bad idea for defense. If you had 50 separate states you would have some problems I think overall that could be solved by having a loose union of these states. With the power to enforce when it comes to defense or to enforce a free trade zone between the states. But not all the regulatory power and everything else. For example the CDC. The CDC is not a legislative body. It can't make rules. But yet it does. And we just saw this in Florida. Ron DeSantis is trying to allow cruise ships to operate there without any restrictions. And a federal judge says oh the CDC makes rules. No it doesn't. That's illegal. According to all legislative powers invested in the Congress in the United States. Not in the Congress of the United States and the CDC. This is ridiculous. But anyways. Let me get into this part of David Hackett Fisher's Albion Seed. So he says in the conclusion this is on page 895. I'm going to read from page 895 to page 898. So just a few pages here. So bear with me. He says persistent regionalism problems of cause. He says why have regional cultures persisted for so long a period in Anglo-America? Now first of all just by calling it Anglo-America today we get you in trouble. But this is what we have. We have Anglo-America. And I constantly point this out. We live in the Anglo-American tradition. He says how does any culture persist? This problem has long been negotiated. Neglected by historians and social scientists. Barrington more observes there is a widespread assumption in modern social science that social continuity requires no explanation. Supposedly it is not problematical. Change is what requires explanation. The assumption of inertia that cultural and social continuity do not require explanation. Obliterates the fact that both have to be reenacted. I'm sorry recreated anew in each generation often with great pain and suffering. So I'm a big fan of the philosopher John M. Doris. So I just want to read a little bit and discuss his highly respected 2005 book lack of character, personality and moral development, moral behavior. So he writes, I regard this renaissance of virtue with concern. Like many others I find the law of virtue deeply compelling. Yet I cannot help noticing that much of this law rests on psychological theory that is 2,500 years old. Psychology is not bad simply because it is old. But in this case developments of more recent vintage suggest that the old ideas are in trouble. In particular modern experimental psychology has discovered that circumstance has surprising more to do with how people behave than traditional images of character and virtue allow. So it's commonly presumed that good character inoculates against shifting fortune. And English has a rich vocabulary for expressing this belief. Steady, dependable, steadfast, unwavering, unflinching. Conversely the language generously supplies terms of abuse marking lack of character. Weak, fickle, disloyal, faithless, irresolute. So such locutions imply that character will have regular behavioral manifestations but the person of good character will do well even under substantial pressure to moral failure. While the person of bad character is someone on whom it would be foolish to rely. So in this view it's character more than circumstance that decides the moral texture of a life. So character is destiny. Now behavior, contrary to the old saw about character and destiny, behavior is extraordinarily sensitive to variation in circumstance. Minor situational variations have powerful effects on behavior. So if you're in a hurry you're going to be much less considerate of other people. You're going to be much more transactional. People typically lack character. People's behavior is usually determined by circumstance, by situation. Now when compared with advances in the natural sciences, psychology seems to exhibit little uncontroversial progress. So it's hard to avoid the conclusion that psychology is a kind of shambling, poor relation to the natural sciences. So if this is the self-image of psychologists, why should philosophers look to them for help? Now the natural sciences have generally enjoyed far more progress than the human sciences because natural sciences predict their subject phenomenon more accurately and manipulate them more effectively. Now the subject matter of soft psychology is much harder than the subject matter of the hard sciences. So given the complexity of social, psychological and neural systems, humanity is a trickier subject than rocks, plants or rats. So the scientific study of human beings faces distinctive obstacles including the ethical concerns that does not limit how much you can test people. So we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the medicalization of psychological disorders, but there are no biological tests for diagnosis of mental illness. There is no periodic table for the structurally determinative elements of behavior. Now physics and chemistry is impressive as they are. Do not purport to tell us about human behavior. Now neuroscience and evolutionary biology have made a deep impression on philosophers, but neither discipline is presently in a position to provide anything even distantly like a comprehensive accounting of human functioning if they ever will. So psychology like philosophy is a remarkably heterogeneous field. So sweeping verdicts on the discipline of psychology are unlikely to accurately reflect what different sub-fields are accomplishing or failing to accomplish. Now character and personality traits are often evoked to explain what people do and how they live. We say Peter did not mingle at the party because he is shy and Sandra succeeds in her work because she is diligent. Okay, so we got Adam wants to come on the show, so let me try to arrange that here. The thing before this he brought up, let me say this, he points out a couple of things. One is violence. Let me read a couple of pages before that. The lowest levels were in the southern highlands of West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. This regional pattern did not correlate with urbanization or public spending on higher education. Once again, primary determinants were traditional attitudes towards learning in these various regions. So he is saying this is all cultural. Similar regional differences also persist in attitudes towards gender. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as we have seen, the status of women was comparatively high in New England and the Delaware Valley, low in Virginia and lowest in the back country. These regional differences persisted throughout four centuries. The northern states supported women's suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries, while the south and especially the southwest consistently opposed the enfranchisement of women. In the late 20th century, precise of the same pattern appeared in voting on the Equal Rights Amendment. Every state in the northern tier voted in favor of this measure. All the states in the southern highlands voted against it. The fact that this pattern has persisted for so long a time is evidence that it cannot be explained merely as a temporary cultural lag. It is produced by deep-seated differences in regional cultures. Yet another pattern persistence appears in the public life of the major regional cultural regions. In every region, the dominant forms of local government are descended from institutions which were introduced in the 17th and early 18th century. Most Lincoln communities still govern themselves through town meetings. This system has spread throughout the northern tier to New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas. Pennsylvania preserves its county commissions. Virginia and the coastal south are still controlled by county courthouse elites. The tone of government in these regions has remained remarkably stable throughout many generations. Further levels of government activity measured by public spending have remained relatively the same for three centuries. In the mid-18th century, levels of taxation for state and local governments were roughly twice as high in New England as in Virginia, with the Delaware Valley somewhere between and the back country below all other regions. Precisely the same patterns still appear today even when controlled by population and wealth. In 1981, for example, a family of four had an income with an income of $75,000, paid state and local taxes of $10,900 in Boston, $7,000 in Philadelphia, $5,700 in Norfolk, $4,800 in Louisville, and $4,600 in Houston. Relative levels of taxing and spending by region have changed remarkably little in many generations. So this is important because as Elmers is talking about, we have one American people, we clearly don't. Regional culture matters, and some of these groups might see eye to eye more than others, but you can see that New England is not going to see eye to eye with Houston or Texas. It's just not going to happen. Now as people move from New England to Texas because they just want to get away from New England, they certainly bring New England with them. This is a problem. The process of cultural persistence may be studied from many different perspectives. One observation approach centers on the ways in which individual people learn their social roles. Some of the most important instruments of cultural persistence operate within schools, churches and families where children learn to do what is expected of them. Other institutions continue the socializing process through every stage of life. Each of the four cultural regions of British America, as we have seen, kept its own customs of enculturation for many generations. And anyone that's ever traveled or lived in different parts of the United States has seen this. And I often would ask my students who come from all over the United States and the world when they get to the area where I teach, is the South different. And they'll all say yes, even those from other parts of the South will say that where we are is different. And so these are cultural norms that are established from generation to generation. These aren't things that go away. And I think that we miss that by saying, we're all Americans with a common identity, a common nationality, a common this and a common that. Well, there might be some truth to that in some ways. I look at Boston and I look at the heritage there from the American War for Independence. Well, certainly, I would say, well, that's great. I mean, those people were interesting. You know, you have Joseph Warren and the Adamses and all of that goes on in Boston. And then, of course, the Battle of Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord, all of that, that sounds great. That's all interesting stuff. And as an American with that common history of that area, but it's not really my history. It's in the fact that my people participated in that because they didn't. That was uniquely Massachusetts. Just like the people of Massachusetts can say, well, they have a common history with the Battle of Cowpens or the Battle of Kings Mountain. But did they really have that? It's not really their history. It's part of that war, but that was a whole different theater of operations. And there really weren't any new Englanders down there. So this is all these are these are two different things. And while the common part of it is breaking away from the British Empire and certainly the declaration, we can say, well, that's it's got every signature on it from every state, a signature from every state on it. That's still that's the commonality or the Articles of Confederation. Okay, back to this terrific book by philosopher John M. Doris. So character and personality traits are frequently invoked to explain what people do and how they live. Peter didn't mingle at the party because he is shy. Sandra succeeds in her work because she's diligent. Traits also figure in prediction. Peggy would join in because she's impulsive or Brian will forget our meeting because he's absent minded. And so too for those rarefied traits called virtues, James stood his ground because he's brave. Catherine will not over-endorge because she's temperate. So recognizing the domain specificity of practical endeavor, it helps explain how the upstanding public servant can simultaneously be a faithless husband. But the marital and the political are different practical domains and people may engage in very different cognitive, motivational and evaluative structures. We can also understand how there can, how there may be considerable integration within a practical domain. So a scholar must be both diligent and honest in her research if she's to do commendable work. But this does not entail that she exhibit the same qualities in her teaching. So these essentialist or globalist conceptions of personality are based on the existence of substantial behavioral consistency. But the requisite consistency has not been empirically demonstrated. So we have various studies showing that across similar situations, honest and dishonest behavior were displayed inconsistently. So these academics concluded that honesty is not an inner entity. Instead it is a function of the situation. So we've got a further study that introversion and extroversion is not so much a matter of traits, but is highly situation-specific and inconsistent. So someone's extroverted in this circumstance, introverted on that circumstance. So we simply don't have much empirical evidence for essentialist or globalist conceptions of personality traits. So that's why we've got situationism, which has three central theoretical commitments. So a qualified rejection of globalism, a concern with behavioral variation at the nature of traits and personality organization. So behavioral variation across a population has more to situational differences than dispositional differences among individuals. So individual dispositional differences are not so behaviorally individuating as might have been supposed. So we can predict that a person likely will behave in a similar fashion in similar circumstances. So people typically behave inconsistently with respect to the attributive standards associated with the trait. So people tend to exhibit behavioral regularity over trials of substantially similar situations alone. And personality does not tend to be integrated for a given person. The dispositions that operate in one situation may not operate in a different situation. So many different dispositions will tend to exist in the single personality. So we can say with certitude what type of person assisted in the Holocaust, because we can say with certitude that anyone who refused to participate in the Holocaust was not sent to a concentration camp, was not punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews. Nevertheless, many major criminals did exhibit conflicts. So a major trap commander of a unit slaughtered Jews in occupied Poland was reported to have wept after issuing murderous commands. Among men who carried out his orders, heavy drinking was common because such a life was quite intolerable sober. Nazi doctors drank excessively when performing selections. Same goes for the SS Einsatzgruppen death squads. Einsatzgruppen shot thousands of Jews in the back of the neck one by one, so there's very close contact with the victims. The Einsatzgruppen were expected to work for only an hour at a time, even though this task was not physically demanding and they were liberally provided with alcohol. The Nazi propaganda often took the form of exhortations to onerous but necessary work. Evidently the masses were not expected to flock eagerly to their genocidal calling. So the Muslim guy Adam, he hasn't been able to figure out how to join the show, so we will have to soldier on bravely together. So what often happens, what is once unthinkable becomes unremarkable. So I notice for most people once they set foot on a pawn set within 20 minutes, everything that was going on in that pawn set started seeming perfectly normal to them. So both individuals and groups and religions and nations are all subject to moral drift, meaning a slide into evil as individuals and groups gradually become acclimated to destructive norms. That's why it's so important to say, hey, the January 6th riots on Capitol Hill, that's unacceptable and the Black Lives Matter riots unacceptable and the Antifa riots unacceptable because if we allow groups to slide into evil, society will go up in flames. So Joseph Mengele exhibited all sorts of paradoxes. He was capable of being incredibly kind to children. Some children became fond of Dr. Mengele. He would bring them sugar. He would think of small details in their daily lives and he would do things that most people would genuinely admire and then he'd send his same children to the crematoria. So the descent into evil is usually a step at a time. So to the ascent to heroism is often a step at a time. So beginning with acts of ordinary decency, rescuers progress to something extraordinary. So ordinary people may be swept up in evil, but they may also be swept up in heroism. So when persons and situations interact, results may be inspiring or atrocious, depending in large measure on the situation or the circumstance. So behavioral reliability is highly specific. So we can only expect the usual in people in the usual circumstances. So like most personality psychology, it's not verifiable. It's basically people reporting their traits. So personality psychology is a major field, but its research is basically of the pen and paper, pencil and paper variety where people are just self-reporting. So each individual infuses his particular environment with his own distinctive meanings. So his behavior will be ordered according to those distinctive meanings rather than any kind of objective taxonomy of situations and traits. Now attitudes influence how people behave, but the relationship between attitudes and overt behavior is not always clear. So one can probably expect correlations of no more than a modest magnitude between attitudes and behavior. So someone can say a lot of racist things, but not do anything egregious. And someone can say all these beautiful non-racist things, but that doesn't really predict how they're going to behave. So people can talk a tough game online, but there's very low predictive ability correlating between how people talk online and how people conduct themselves in daily life. There's not much predictive ability between what people say in daily life and how they behave. So most of us tend to inflate the importance of attitudes, dispositions, and we tend to neglect the importance of situations in explaining behavior. So this is often called the fundamental attribution error. So 40, he's just fundamentally dishonest. So Andy Nowicki would say 40 is fundamentally intellectually dishonest. Well, I think it's more accurate to say in certain situations I'm honest and in other situations I'm dishonest. Right, so this is called the fundamental attribution error or the correspondence bias or over attribution. I like that over attribution. So how well does performance in job interviews correlate with subsequent measures of job performance? Right, at point one. So an association little better than chance. Now, it is our natural disposition to be put off by personal inconsistency. And so what do we do when people all around us are constantly behaving inconsistently? Well, we devote considerable ingenuity to reorganizing or the incongruent stimuli into an integrated whole. But that integration only exists in our minds, in our imaginations, in our fantasies, in our desires. So there's usually a considerable disparity between actual and expected behavioral consistency. So without these fantasies, without these delusions that we build up in our heads about how people are consistent, we would be constantly surprised and disappointed by the behavior of other people. And if that's your experience, it's very hard to go on happily. But people go on blithely in the face of the constant disappointment and surprise that they would experience because they're happier that way. People are happier being oblivious because people are blithe. We are remarkably untroubled by experiences that should cause us to doubt what we believe. We seem rather limited in our ability to assimilate disconfirming information. So for the purpose of living, one has to assume that people have character traits, that the personality is solid, that the self is an entity, and we need to ignore or contrary evidence or it's disturbing. So biographical narrative is a common way that people make sense of their lives. So early disappointment in his career is what your Donald's ruthless ambition, Angela's betrayal at the hands of Max, is what makes us slow to trust. Now these narratives seem relevant to descriptive psychology, but they are also implicated in ethical practices like exhortation and transformation. The whole interpretive process is a vehicle for determining what needs to be changed and how to change it. So these locutions sound clinical. Clinical narratives in psychology like ethical narratives may be interpretive, evaluative or transformative. Now clinicians often aspire to neutrality, but psychotherapy and behavioral medicine are inevitably value-laden because notions of health and pathology are freighted with such evaluative commitments. So ethical discourse is usually concerned with the regulation of interpersonal behavior and sentiment. Therapeutic discourse is generally concerned with functioning social relationships. So ethical practice is a sort of informal group therapy, one that serves to maintain and repair the social fabric. So therapeutic transformation depends on narrative intelligibility and how do we make an intelligible narrative with smooth or the awkward corners. So narrative intelligibility, like making sense of our lives in psychology, in conversion, religious discourses, in psychological narratives, all these transformations, 12-step narratives, they all depend on a narrative intelligibility that our story makes sense. And to make our story make sense, we have to distort it. It's all based on character discourse and moral character doesn't really exist because there's no true self. Therapeutic transformation, religious transformation, 12-step transformation, they all depend on character discourse. So there is some evidence for the effectiveness of psychotherapy, but there is no evidence of differing effectiveness among different types of psychotherapies. The whole ability of the therapist to establish an intimate and supportive relationship is related to the positive outcomes. History of psychiatry is replete with examples of theoretical hoaxing and forming spectacular purists that people often get mesmerized by the charisma of their psychologist, psychiatrist, or therapist. What is the relative efficacies of different approaches to moral education? There's no evidence that any approach to moral education makes any difference. We don't have any empirical research showing that one type of moral education works better than another, or that some moral education works better than no moral education. There's a great quote, there are crowds of things which operate within ourselves without our will. So John Doris urges a redirection of our ethical attention rather than striving to develop characters that would determine our behavior in ways substantially independent of circumstance. We should invest more of our energies in attending to our environment to those parts of our situations that influence behavioral outcomes. Here's a little more from Brian McLenahan. Not because of the Jeffersonianism which he blames it on, but because of the nationalism that became prominent. Virginia didn't flower anymore because it couldn't be Virginia. It wasn't allowed in any way. A second and very different perspective on persistence centers on the functional interdependence of a cultural's various parts. Material and ethical structures, for example, tend to be mutually reinforcing. To change a culture in any fundamental way, one must transform many things at once. No easy task. As many a reformer has learned, social institutions tend to perpetuate themselves and have their own meanings of doing so. Institutional imperatives are powerful instruments of continuity in a cultural system. So it's hard to change culture. It has inertia to it. The Cavalier culture that dominated the Tidewater region of Virginia in certain parts of the Carolinas, that would then spread and that has inertia to it. Same thing with the backcountry culture or the Quaker culture or the Puritan culture. There's an inertia to this. You can't take the Yankee from the Yankee. It just doesn't go away. And they're taught these things over generations. It doesn't go away. Yet another perspective on cultural persistence focuses on the conduct of elites. There is a cultural equivalent of the iron law of oligarchy. Small groups dominate every cultural system. They tend to do so by controlling institutions and processes so that they become the governors of a culture in both a political and mechanical sense. This is why today I mean the 1619 project is so important because what they're trying to do is force themselves into the elite structure where they then control the culture. And so once you take the schools, you take those over and Yankees knew this, New Englanders knew this. When you take over the schools, you change the structure of society. So by teaching 1619 project and teaching critical race theory and teaching all this stuff, teaching history differently, you're going to change the way people think about society. And it's already... Let's get a little bit more here from John M. Doris. So when people flirt, they flirt with disaster. The way to get things right is by attending to the determinative features of situations. We should be avoiding near occasions for sin. We should try to avoid ethically dangerous circumstances. And we should seek near occasions for happier behaviors, situations conducive to ethically desirable conduct. So one study of homicide in South Central Los Angeles showed that running with the wrong crowd might be a relatively harmless indulgence for suburban use, but in South Central, it frequently amounted to a death sentence. John M. Doris notes, a touch of bellyache or headache can often mean the difference between courage and cowardice. So the difference between fame and infamy, honor and disgrace depends less on the exceptional features of the person than on whether ubiquitous situational liabilities see the light of day. So commitment to essentialism, to moral globalism threatens to poison understandings of self and others with disappointment and resentment on the one hand and delusion and hero worship on the other. Engaging situationism enables loving relationships because affection for others does not depend on their conformity to unrealistic standards of character. So with luck, a situationist tuning of the emotions increases our ever-short supply of compassion, forgiveness and fair-mindedness. That's the moral case for situationism as opposed to essentialism and globalism. It's happening because people don't want to rock the boat. If they're taught this in school, this is what they get. This is what the wise people are telling them. The elites are telling them all this stuff. Well, this is true. And so then we really accept it. This becomes what we learn. This becomes institutionalized. People are institutionalized in America. We can't have our free thinkers. This is why we can't have free speech. This is why we can't have dissent. This is why, eventually, I think some of these separatist things like homeschooling and other things are going to be crushed. You can't have that. That's free thinkers. You can't have these people. This iron law of cultural elites is an historical constant, but the relation between elites and other cultural groups is highly variable. Every culture might be seen as a system of bargaining in which elites maintain the hegemony by concessions to other groups. These bargaining processes work differently in the four regions of British America. New England's town system, for example, gave each community a high degree of autonomy and also a common interest in supporting the system itself. Pennsylvania's system of reciprocal liberty became a basis for bargaining among different groups. In the back settlements, the idea of natural liberty functioned as Okay, that won't do it for today.