Desire

The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow

De: Jay Stringer

Have you ever wondered why chasing love, success, or pleasure feels like an unending struggle? Or why the things you want are always out of reach?

Drawing on a new study of 4,000 people, renowned therapist and award-winning author Jay Stringer reveals how desire—the most powerful and misunderstood force in our lives—shapes everything: who we love, what we chase, and the life we create.

Desire drives our search for intimacy, meaning, and joy, but it can also lead to shame, betrayal, and self-sabotage. Too often we are encouraged to silence it, distort it, or treat surface-level symptoms like loneliness, low desire, or porn use—without listening to what our longings are really telling us.

In Desire, Stringer shows how to decode those clues and transform your story. Drawing on unforgettable stories from his clinical practice—individuals and couples navigating everything from childhood scars to purity culture, professional exhaustion to sexual difficulties, codependency to self-doubt—he shows you how to ask the questions you’ve been avoiding and move toward the healing you didn’t know how to seek.

This book doesn’t offer quick fixes. Through deep compassion and research, it offers something far more powerful: the invitation to approach your desires with curiosity, so you can stop unhealthy patterns and begin building a life of connection, purpose, and love.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Jay Stringer brilliantly invites us to a well-researched, richly imagined, and compellingly written understanding of what he calls the inner civil war of competing desires. His scholarship and personal honesty will give you a new path to offer kindness to your soul and the conflicts that have beset you. I say with no fear of exaggeration—this will be one of the most important books you will read for knowing yourself and others.”—Dan B. Allender, PhD, professor of counseling psychology, founding president of the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology

“A master class in caring for the human spirit, Desire turns the work of hospitality inward, changing how you understand love, purpose, and what it means to serve those around you, and yourself.”—Will Guidara, New York Times bestselling author of Unreasonable Hospitality

“We tend to treat desire as a problem to solve or a temptation to resist, but Jay Stringer’s new book argues it’s actually a signal—pointing us toward growth, wholeness, and connection. After reading Desire, you’ll learn to understand what your heart is trying to say and how to work with desire rather than against it. It’s insightful, healing, and genuinely helpful.”—Donald Miller, New York Times bestselling author, CEO of StoryBrand and Business Made Simple

“Stringer offers his readers empathy, understanding, and, surprisingly, a demand that desire be taken seriously in all with which God has imbued it and imagines for us. Read this and begin to practice living what it means for God to give you the desires of your heart.”—Curt Thompson, MD, psychiatrist, author of The Soul of Desire and The Deepest Place