Voice #7 - Yasser: "From Shame To Sobriety: A Revert's Journey through Faith, Addiction, and Healing"

A single moment on a church baseball field set a lifelong script: feeling invisible, unchosen, and unsure how to be a man. That early wound threads through this raw conversation with Yasser as we trace a path from strict Protestant roots and adolescent shame to marriage, internet-fueled addiction, nervous breakdown, and the long, messy search for wholeness. Along the way, deconstruction stripped away old beliefs, cultural pressure blurred lines, and “try harder” spirituality left the core problem untouched.

Everything pivots when a kind doctor offers Arabic lessons and Al-Fatiha's “Guide us to the Straight Path” cut through the noise. Conversion to Islam wasn’t a cure-all, but it became a solid frame for real change. We unpack what “horizontal healing” looks like: therapy that teaches naming feelings before acting out; brotherhood through Straight Struggle and Strong Support; experiential work with Brothers Road and Journey Into Manhood; and the daily structure of 12 Steps and Sexaholics Anonymous. The wins are humble and real: months of sobriety counted one day at a time, a marriage tempered by honesty, and a father-son bond strengthened by truth rather than performance.

This episode sits with the hard questions: Why does vertical faith fail when relationships are broken? How do grief and cultural narratives fuel relapse? What actually helps when willpower and prayer alone don’t? Yasser's story offers a hopeful vision: progress over perfection, surrender over secrecy, and service over shame.

Chapters

• 0:12 Early Wounds And Father Hunger
• 12:00 Religion, Addiction, And Avoiding Relationships
• 24:16 Childhood Faith, Shame, And Isolation
• 40:45 Adolescence, Bullying, And Belonging
• 49:16 Discovering Porn And Its Fallout
• 57:20 Love, Marriage, And Hidden Struggles
• 1:22:00 Internet Era And The Breaking Point
• 1:36:48 Deconstruction And Cultural Crosswinds
• 1:58:40 An Arabic Lesson Opens A Door
• 2:10:00 Embracing Islam And First Steps

Transcript

Waheed: 4:43

Assalamu alaikom warahmatullahi wabarakatuh, and welcome to a new episode of Voices from Beyond the Rainbow. I'm your host, Waheed Jensen, and thank you for joining me in today's episode. My guest today is Brother Yasser, who is joining us all the way from the United States to share with us his story. We talk about early childhood experiences, marriage, sexual addictions, and discovering Islam. We talk about healing and growth and recovery, as well as one's continued striving on the path towards Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Yasser has many gems to share with us today, and I cannot wait for you to listen to today's episode. So, Bismillah. 

Assalamu alaikom brother Yasser. How are you doing today?

Yasser: 5:41

Wa alaikom assalam warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Doing pretty well. A little, not nervous, but just a little apprehensive. But I'm very honored to be here and appreciative of just spending some time with you to talk about these issues.

Waheed: 5:57

Alhamdulillah, the honor is all mine, and I'm very happy to have you today. There are lots of beautiful things that we're going to be talking about today. And, you've expressed interest in giving back to the community. And one way that you would like to do that is by sharing your story in hopes that other people will find it beneficial, inshaAllah, in their own journeys. And I hope that inshaAllah it brings a lot of you know guidance and healing to so many people, inshaAllah, including yourself. So first things first, before we get started, would you mind introducing yourself to the audience?

Yasser: 6:29

Yeah, my name is Yasser. I'm between the age of 50 and 65, somewhere pretty much in the middle there, if you're trying to guess my age. And I was born and raised in the United States and became a Muslim less than 10 years ago, but closer to 10 years ago.

Waheed: 6:54

And, you are here to share with us your story about dealing with same-sex attraction, being a husband, a father, and someone who's done a lot of healing work, particularly in the past couple of years, and is on this journey of healing and recovery and recovery, mashaAllah. So I can't wait for everyone to listen to the beautiful messages and the beautiful story that you have to share with us today. So without further ado, let's get started, inshaAllah. And, just like with many stories that we've had on the podcast, you would like to share your story in a chronological order. So we're gonna go back way back and start from the early beginnings. So Bismillah, let's begin.

Yasser: 7:35

Bismillah. Well, I'm gonna give a little bit of introduction here that we had a little bit of a discussion offline, so please forgive me if I butcher the Arabic language when I do this, when I perform this dua. “Rabbi ishrah li sadri wa yassir li amri wahlul ‘uqdatan min lisani yafqahu qawli”. So my lord expand for me my chest, make my task easy for me, and untie the knot from my tongue, especially when I try to use Arabic words, so that they may understand my speech.

Waheed: 8:22

You've done a wonderful job, by the way.

Yasser: 8:24

Yeah, Arabic is a really cool language. I love it, but if I don't practice or I haven't run through things, I really need this prayer because my tongue really does get tied, probably worse.

Waheed: 8:41

No worries. Bismillah, let's begin.

Yasser: 8:44

So Bismillah, let's start out. I was born in, you know, for a lot of the guys in our group on the server, it must seem like a long time ago that I was born because just by way of background, you know, Johnson was president, etc. etc. So that's a heck of a long time ago. And the world was quite different at that time. I grew up in a solidly middle class family somewhere in the center of the country as a devout Christian, very fundamentalist, so very strict Christianity, but it was a mainly Protestant denomination. And the way I was raised was very good in so many ways because I was given a good moral upbringing with a lot of ethics. We were very devout in our family. I really took my Deen, my faith seriously, and I was very devout. So when I reached maybe the age of 14, I actually wanted to be a pastor in that denomination. But at the same time I was going into adolescence, and with adolescence, your body is changing, and I discovered masturbation, and I really did not know what to do with it because I was of the understanding that it was sinful, but I couldn't stop. I mean, once I started, I was hooked and I struggled and I experienced depression and all of the things that go on with that, and I was never one to really just sit down and accept the status quo, I would look for help. So I actually went to my pastor to ask him about it, what do I do? And he's like, Well, you just need to stop, and that was it. And so I was kind of, I felt kind of abandoned, I felt like I wasn't getting the advice that I needed. And on top of this, with this dilemma, and I thought this was the worst thing in the world, I was very attached to my faith, but my adolescence really was not a good time. I was very bad at sports. I was clumsy, I was not well adjusted, I wasn't coordinated, I think I had more in terms of intellectual abilities where I compensated through my studies, but I just never felt a part of the overall group of teenagers and stuff like that. But it was kind of like my life was running on parallel tracks in some ways, like in the church and within the youth group, I was very popular, but maybe not so much in school in general because I didn't have athletic prowess at all of these things. So I guess when I got to around age 14 or 15, there was just a lot going on in my family. My parents were really, really good people. So anything that I say about my parents, I want to qualify. They were just really good people, but they were tough. My parents grew up during the Great Depression. And so life was very, very harsh at that time. People lost their jobs. I mean, my mother talked about eating stewed tomatoes for one year in their household because they really didn't have any money to buy food. They lived out in rural areas. Their upbringing probably, if we were to classify it today, would be they were abused children because people were abused children. People used, parents used physical violence to get their children in line. And so I think they were probably abused on some level, not terribly abused, but you know, it was a tough existence. And then my father at the age of 12 lost his father. So he had lost like his secure male attachment. And so you can't really give what you don't have. And my father was very, very he was a good person, he was a very, very ethical person. Injustice would just send him through the ceiling. In terms of just rage, he would be very much against injustice, but he was a product of his time. So, you know, white people were white people were the best and other people weren't quite as good. And that was kind of their way of living and way of looking at things, and that didn't mean that like when he met people, he didn't treat them well, he treated everybody well regardless of race, color, creed, but you know, that was just the culture we grew up in. And I must say over the years they developed as people became more open and became more loving and became more accepting of differences, but it wasn't that way when I was growing up and so my life really evolved around the church and that became kind of like a place where I could feel safe, feel accepted, but there were always issues even in the church. For example, I tried to join the church baseball team and I, you know like I'll look at it objectively, I was not a good player, but I I but they wouldn't let, they left me standing there while other people played. Now that's disappointing for a religious community because the religious community really shouldn't be acting like the rest of the world. They're supposed to nurture people and help people along, but they were human beings too, so they had all the faults and foibles of any other group. And so why I bring this baseball team issue up, that was kind of at the height of this huge depression that I felt into when I was maybe 14 or 15 years old. And I remember just standing there, everybody playing, and the coach kind of walking up to me and saying, Oh, I didn't see you standing there, I didn't put you out there, which was just a BS answer. And my father just kind of stewed and didn't really stand up for me. And so that was I would say that that stands out in my mind is kind of like, well, my male figure did not stand up for me. You know, he seemed weak, he seemed ineffective, he seemed, I don't know, moody, and all of these things. And unfortunately, we learned from our parents. So actually, that's probably what I learned from my father in terms of being a male. And I would adopt these, I would adopt these attitudes later on in life, and it did not serve me well with my same sex attraction. You know, I felt abandoned, I felt shamed, I felt inadequate, and I fell into this deep depression. And kids don't really know you already have a lot going on in your life, so your body's changing. Now you know, you're doing things that you're not particularly proud of, and you don't understand why you're doing them, and this deep depression hit me at the same time. I guess my best friend's parents were divorcing, and he was depressed, so all of these things were going on, and I basically kind of lost it. And there was one incident where things kind of blew up in my family, and I was just, I was beside myself, and finally my father came to me and threatened me, saying we're gonna take you to a psychologist. It probably would have been the best thing for me, but that was held over my head as kind of a threat. And so I never really got, I never really had the opportunity to discuss these things with a counselor and try to work through the issues. It was more like just kind of suppress, suppress, suppress. And you know, it's kind of like you know, when you suppress the emotions come out and express themselves in other ways, and unfortunately, they ended up expressing themselves in really dysfunctional sexuality. And that's what happened to me. And so that was kind of my adolescence. We go on into kind of you know post-high school, that type of thing, and I buckled down and studied really, really hard and ended up studying in a European country, learning the language there. But this baggage just stayed with me. And I kind of overcompensated for my lack of I guess being able to be one of the guys by just kind of becoming very bookish and very kind of intellectual. I mean, I could tell you about what happened in whatever year in history or politics, but I couldn't hang a picture. I'd be afraid of putting a hole in the wall or crack in the wall because I just couldn't drive a nail. I mean, I wasn't doing a lot of these things that fathers teach their children. And at the same time I had a mother who oh my god, my mother was in so many ways incredible and in other ways just terrifying. My mother oh my god, how would I put this? My mother grew up on a farm and she was very, very intelligent. She's the only person in her family who ended up getting a college education, and she became a nurse. That was the first step in her education. She had worked on the farm with my grandfather, and she had a full-ride scholarship, and she had to turn down that scholarship because her father convinced her to do so so that she could stay and work on the farm one more year with him because she was so helpful. And then she gave up the scholarship and then put herself through college, and then went to evening school, got a bachelor's degree, and then went to evening school and got a master's degree. So I feel like I was much more influenced by my mother, but my mother could be like a holy terror. I don't know if I think a lot of people with our issues have kind of like an overbearing mother, kind of a distant and brooding father, that type of situation in the family. My mother worked with what she had. My father needed help too, and she was trying to keep everything together. So again, no blame is being assigned here, but I think I developed a personality, a personality that would always try to please my mother. I would do things to keep her happy because you know, I guess they say, there’s a saying in the United States or in English, you know, “Hell hath no wrath, but like that of a you know, an unhappy wife or mother”. And my mother could be just really, really tough. I think she had to be growing up, but it was very difficult for the kids. And so I don't want to just say I was completely the victim. What I did was I just did all kinds of crap behind their back because I was trying to get attention, I was trying to be heard.

You know, I would gaslight my parents at times in the sense that I would say things that were outrageous just to elicit a response. But I was always looking for something for my parents that they could not give me, especially my father. And I'm thinking about like in our church, I would see kids' fathers playing basketball with them, and I didn't understand what I was thinking and why I was thinking it. But I always found that kind of strange because that wasn't what my father did. And so my father wasn't around to really teach me how to stand up for myself, how to assert myself in healthy ways. And later on in life, all of these issues came out in rather unhealthy ways, especially through my sexuality. And I cannot over-emphasize the importance of the role of parents in the life of their children. I think I adopted the attitude that you know, I never would want to do this, but we can fail our spouses, we can fail other people, but if you fail your children, I think that's that's particularly bad. So I've always tried to be there for my son and try and help him out as best as I can.

Waheed: 23:43

So just to kind of summarize for us to understand, mashaAllah, you've been you've you've described the situation growing up very well. So from what we understand is that you've had a physically present but emotionally absent father. And you know, your mother was the more domineering, the more overbearing, kind of overachieving parental figure. And, you were more attached to your mother. There was some sort of, you know, kind of over-identification with her, but you were also afraid of her. And at the same time, this is something that we, I mean, a lot of us identify with the idea that you were picked last during PE class, or you were never picked at all, as you've said, and it felt like you were invisible, right? You weren't even acknowledged, that you felt inadequate and that you're not good enough. And I think that this kind of created a perfect storm that many of us have experienced in one way or another. And so all of these feelings of shame and inadequacy kind of, you know, they're suppressed, and you would have to cope in some way with all of this negativity and all of this pain. And so one of the ways that you've coped is through masturbation and what you later describe as you know, kind of dysfunction in the sexual realm, as we shall see in a bit. But, so some other questions, so did you have any siblings at the time?

Yasser: 25:13

Yes, I had an older brother and an older sister.

Waheed: 25:19

And how was it with them, and your relationship with them? How was it growing up?

Yasser: 25:25

Good question. You know, I would have to really think about that. Both of them are good people. Both of them I'm in contact with to this day. I think there was a normal sibling rivalry. I think the oldest, who was my brother, kind of felt displaced when my sister and then later I came along. If I look at.. so the relationship was good, but it became quite distant over the years, not in the sense that we would never speak or we would never really see each other until recently things are coming back together. But I would say that my brother was kind of jealous of his siblings. I'd say, my sister, well, I've said this to myself many, many times. I think my parents were much more adept at raising my sister than they were at raising boys, and I think that's because of the dynamic of son-father relationships. I would say that my sister has been the most well adjusted of the three children. I don't know, and I don't think so. I don't believe my brother has SSA, but his, I guess his issues have probably manifested in other ways over the years. And so I would say that they were probably not so talented at raising boys and much more talented at raising their one daughter.

Waheed: 27:06

Right. And did you have any close friends growing up? like among your peers in your school?

Yasser: 27:15

I did, I'm really fortunate. So, my best friend from age nine remains one of my closest friends to this day. And again, we went through church and all of these things. So I was really, really fortunate in that regard. And we all had a lot of fun together, but there were things, you know, times we grew apart, times we got closer. But yeah, that's the one thing I will say that in my youth I had some good.. I did have some really good friends that I've remained in contact with over the years. And that's been a source of a lot of comfort because when I've been dealing with some of this SSA stuff, like even my best friend, he knew about it later on in life, not when he was growing up. But we've been close enough that I've been able to share that with him, and it hasn't really adversely affected the friendship in any way. If anything, he probably.. it made us closer because I was being honest and open with him.

Waheed: 28:30

And you describe being kind of on the outside looking in when it came to your peers and you know, like kind of physical activity or you know, like baseball, fathers being with their sons, and your father wasn't giving you that kind of reaction that you were hoping for. So that's as far as like being passively on the outside, but were you also kind of bullied, or were there any negative experiences from your peers? How did that look like?

Yasser: 28:59

You know, that's a really good question. Was I bullied? I mean, there were bullying incidents, but I don't think it was.. Now we're talking about the seventies, and if you really want to hear this, I'll digress into this. My elementary school was all white, and so everybody was pretty much the same, blah blah blah blah. And if there was any bullying, I think it happened in middle school, it would have happened in middle school, and this is because that school was integrated, and it took years of understanding what was going on. And this will be a little bit of a history lesson, maybe for some people, so that they can understand the American experience. So World War II and then the Korean War and all and Vietnam and that war all happened relatively close together, and during the Time America was going. The United States was going under this huge social transformation where it was at least trying to deal with the fallout of slavery and racism and the armed forces were integrated basically during kind of late in World War II and into the Korean War. And so you had a bunch of G.I. (U.S. Armed Forces). And so what happened to minority troops many times is they were used by the white folks as cannon fodders. So they would be in the army or whatever, the navy, and they were the first ones set to the part. They were given the most dangerous duty, etc. etc. And then these people had put their lives on the line for their country, and they came back to a highly racist and segregated country. And then things that were voted for veterans, some of these G.I. bills were not really given to the minorities. So the facilities for education, the facilities for buying a house, those were not offered on equal terms to minorities, and in many cases just outright denied. So what you had was you had a whole bunch of parents who were really PO'd with American society because they've been betrayed by our society, and they passed this on to the passed this on to the kids. And so when I went to this integrated school, okay, the kids were.. the minority kids were quite in many cases quite angry, and rightfully so. I would be too if my parents had been treated that way. And so they kind of took it out on the white kids. Whether they weren't gonna take it out on a white kid that, you know, was very muscular and very athletic. It would be kind of like someone like myself who was weaker or whatever. So there were a few incidents like that, and I think that was just because I really wasn't sports-minded and things like that. And what's kind of interesting is now, you know, many, many years later, we go to class reunions. It's like none of that stuff ever happened because you know, you may see in the press, and I don't want to discount some of the things you see in the press, but there has been a lot of healing between communities in the United States. So a lot of that animosity has dissipated because people moved on with their lives. You know, they came to understand other people and other contexts. But so I don't think I was bullied for like, being that much different. Maybe there was a little bit of bullying because I mean I could think of some incidents that I don't need to go into too much, but because of the racial issues more than anything else. And yeah, so but it all fed into that. Regardless of the motive behind it, it all fed into those feelings of inadequacy and being weaker and all that stuff. I'm not you know, well, an example would be, you know, some fathers, if they saw their kid like getting bullied or whatever, they would teach them how to fight, they'd teach them how to box, they teach them whatever, so that they could defend themselves. I didn't have that male support, and it wasn't, I mean, sometimes kids have a natural disposition not to be athletic, have a natural disposition for A, B, or C. But the parents gently nudged them into doing certain things because try it, you might like it, and I didn't have any of that guidance from above, so in that regard, yeah, it probably impacted me, but it wasn't like there was just this huge bully culture or anything like that was that was just driving me crazy. No, but you know, we have our regular tussles at school as well, right?

Waheed: 34:22

Of course. And, did you have any kind of positive male influence growing up? If your father wasn't able to provide that. Was there like another “father figure” in your life, like an uncle, a neighbor, you know, a family friend?

Yasser: 34:40

I want to say yes, but I have to say no. Okay. Over the years, after reflecting about my life situation, I could tell that that's exactly what I was looking for. And there were people who took an interest, a positive interest in me, but and so in in that way they were kind of a positive male figure for me, but they did not, and they tried to help within their limited capacity, but they weren't really there, you know, not like a big brother type thing, not like a program type thing, but there were some people that had a positive influence on me. And I and and what I would say is I did not know at the time because we're not in touch with our feelings enough when you're that young, you don't really know what's going on, and you don't have time to look back. You don't have the intellectual wherewithal to look back and say, “Hey, that's what I was looking for at that time”. And I had a youth group leader who's really, really cool. And I remember riding my bike over to the next town, it was probably four or five, six miles away to go spend time with them, maybe to get the heck out of my house. Okay, and so that's what I was looking for. And they were good people, and so I had some help, but it wasn't, you know, nothing really, really replaces a parent. And you know, I know that this deficit existed by how much the few times I did bond with my father, how strange it felt and how rewarding it was. And it was dumb. It wasn't like going out and doing sports or anything like that. I just had.. I mean this is so many years ago, but I remember God the dumbest thing, me being around the house and maybe helping around the house he wasn't working, like, he didn't work like Wednesday afternoons or something. And me helping around the house and being around the house and then us having lunch together, and he shared one of his favorite foods with me. And you know, that I really saw the humanity in my father. I was able to talk with him, but that was like one in a million, you know. That was really the huge exception to the rule, and so you know, those things affect you as you're growing up.

Waheed: 37:19

Absolutely, yeah. And when did you first discover your kind of same-sex attractions?

Yasser: 37:28

Right in.. right at adolescence.

Waheed: 37:30

Right at adolescence. And how did that look like for you?

Yasser: 37:34

How did that look? It was really just feeling an attraction to males, but I also have an attraction to females as well. So that was kind of the “aberrant side” of me, that the shadow that had to be avoided at all costs, that had to be suppressed, the shame that I carried around, the secret that I could not tell anybody except like someone.

Waheed: 38:01

And I'm assuming that at that time pornography wasn't available as well, at least not as much as it is.

Yasser: 38:09

My dear Waheed, you don't know American culture, do you?

Waheed: 38:12

I don't.

Yasser: 38:13

We are such good Protestants, but we've got the Playboys stashed someplace, buddy. Yeah, this is the.. and I laugh. I'm trying to be a little bit ironic because I think it's sadly hilarious. Let's just put it that way. Literally, I don't know what was going on with my parents, but a subscription to Playboy was a Christmas gift from my mother to my father! Okay? 

Waheed: 38:47

Oh wow. Okay.

Yasser: 38:48

These were these strict, I mean, you know, transfer that to, I mean, transfer that to an Islamic transfer that to an Islamic context. That's like saying, well, you know, on Eid, you know, mother gets.. you know, mother gives father pornography. I mean, it's you know, the birth of our savior, we're celebrating it with the gift of pornography. It's like freaking it's insane.

Waheed: 39:15

Yeah, yeah. Crazy.

Yasser: 39:16

It's insane, but that's American culture, man. That’s the paradox of American culture. Now, can I judge them? No, I can't. You know, a lot of things are dumped through Jahil (Ignorance), through ignorance, and you know, that's just the way things work sometimes.

Waheed: 39:36

Right. subhan Allah. Well, thanks for sharing all of that. I mean, I think the picture now is a bit clearer in terms of all of these different variables and how it was for you growing up.

Yasser: 39:48

I would like to interject something here though. Because you're bringing something up. That gift of pornography from my mother to my father became the source of my you know my masturbation. And so the importance of not even getting near these things cannot be.. I know a lot of our guys struggle with this, but to the extent that we I mean.. as parents, we have to keep our kids away from this stuff. It's almost impossible to do so because of the internet, right? You know, one miscalculation of having that stuff flying around the house can have just absolutely horrendous implications for a very long time for the kids.

Waheed: 40:52

You were telling us that you were living overseas in a European country. You learned the language, you integrated into that culture. So tell us more about that period of time.

Yasser: 41:03

Yeah, so we're still in the 80s. Still in the 80s now. I had wanted to be a diplomat, and so I wanted to learn one of the major diplomatic languages, and so I went and studied in the country where that language is spoken, and I ended up meeting and falling madly in love with my wife. During the course of our dating, I did tell her that I had had.. by that time I'd already had a same-sex encounter, I think only once. and I told her about it. I was very ashamed of it, and I told her that it was over. And I meant that, but I didn't really know what was going on inside of me. And it was anything but over. It was very well suppressed at that point in time. So I ended up dating my wife, doing a couple of years of long distance dating, and then actually getting married to her. She comes to the United States and is living with me. And about nine years into my marriage, I met someone I was very attracted to, which ended up in me, for all intents and purposes, ending up having a nervous breakdown.

Waheed: 42:36

So before we go into that, I just want to kind of ask you a bit about, kind of disclosing that to your wife. So was she the first person that you ever told about your same-sex attractions?

Yasser: 42:51

No. I happen to recall another.. Well, because you're surprising me with a question and I'm thinking about it.

Waheed: 42:59

Okay.

Yasser: 42:59

I'd actually gone to a pastor about it. Yeah. Moral of the story, don't think the clergy are gonna know about that.

Waheed: 43:08

So what did.. I'm curious now, what did the pastor say?

Yasser: 43:12

Well, he was very compassionate. I mean, this is the one thing I will not knock, I will not knock the pastors, but they were just not.. they're just not equipped to deal with it. And so what you know, in the cultural context of that time, okay, because this was really.. this shit was not celebrated like it is in sectors of our culture, I might as well have gone to him and said: “I'm an axe murderer who committed a murder for which I cannot be convicted. Help me”. I mean, this is how shocking it is to that culture! Now he was kind, he was very, very kind and handed me a little bit of literature that was published by the church, and that was basically it.

Waheed: 44:04

And did you kind of tell him about your attractions per se, or the fact that you had an encounter?

Yasser: 44:13

I told him no, I told him I had had an encounter.

Waheed: 44:16

I see, okay.

Yasser: 44:18

And that was kind of at the time when HIV was out of control.

unknown: 44:25

Right.

Yasser: 44:25

there was no cure for it. And that's another thing I could add in here during that time period, right, when HIV was out of control and everything, it acted for many, not for everybody, because a lot of people everybody's story is different, but at least in my context, it kind of kept me out of trouble, or it really limited my acting out because I was just so afraid of contracting HIV. And so it kept me out, it kept me, it really limited my encounters to just very, very few. But no, I told them I'd had an encounter, and I was afraid, although what I know about it now, what I had done was very low risk, but yeah, I was just terrified. This stuff tortured me because you know you have the guilt, shame, and hey, am I gonna die from something? So that's really not good. That's really not good for your mental health. So, yeah, that's how it was. You know, they don't know how.. they weren't equipped to deal with this stuff.

Waheed: 45:37

I mean that's fair. There's no judgment whatsoever. I mean, even now, like when you go to a random imam at the masjid and you tell him about this, I don't think many of them are even equipped to know how to counsel that. That's not a generalization, obviously, but things are getting much, much better than they used to be years ago. But still, I mean, yeah, this is not something that you would expect everyone to be able to counsel on or to be able to give you the right resources for.

Yasser: 46:02

Right, and that's, we have to be forgiving. I mean..

Waheed: 46:05

Of course.

Yasser: 46:06

The culture has changed so much over the years. You know, there's something to be said for that culture. It wasn't just accepting of everything. Now that's a two-edged sword, isn't it? Because accepting everything kind of gives license, but being so strict against it, you know, leads to the results that I and so many other people in our situation have encountered where there's just terrible shame, there's a lot of shaming of people, there's a lot of condemnation. So, I think it's really too, as we would say, as you would say in French facile, you know, too easy just to say these people were in the dark ages and they just didn't know what the hell they were doing. They were working with the information that they had at their disposition, at their fingertips or at their disposition at that time. And so it wasn't a whole hell of a lot of information. So when you're dealing with ignorance, obviously you're gonna make a lot of mistakes.

Waheed: 47:17

100%, no judgment whatsoever. And, I mean, bless the counselors and the clergy and the imams and everyone who's trying to do the best that they can with whatever resources that they have. Absolutely. But going back to your wife and kind of that dating period when you first told her about your attractions and the previous encounter, and you said, you know, you meant it when you said it's over, but obviously it wasn't over. But you know, for you it came out as as the truth because you you that was your intention that it was over, but you didn't know that the the underneath that the tip of the iceberg there was a large kind of corpus of issues that you haven't dealt hadn't at the time dealt with. So how did.. how did she take it at the time when you told her about that?

Yasser: 48:07

You know, we were so madly in love that she accepted me. I mean, she accepted me and she accepted my word that it was over. And for her it was over. Like it's not an issue. Like, “Oh, he said it's over, it's over”. So again, it came up years later, and let's just put it this way, it wasn't so well received. And so at that time it was I think both of us followed a cultural norm, you know, and just kind of swept it under the rug. I.. There's a musical that I would not recommend.. I'm ashamed to say that I saw this musical. It's The Book of Mormon. But there's a really freaking hilarious song in there about “pray it away” or something or like “suppress it”. I don't.. There's too much blasphemy in that movie, and I saw it before I was Muslim. Plus, I have a lot of Latter-day Saints friends that I would never want to offend with that movie, but there is a really funny song in that, and what is good about some of these musicals is the music really expresses the cultural norm of that time, and that was it, man. Just out of sight, out of mind, man, gone. And that that really pushed people who were dealing with all of this stuff into the closet, into a corner, into dysfunctionality, into shame, into cycles of acting out, because he you know these emotions have to go somewhere, and so that's exactly kind of what happened in my case.

Waheed: 50:09

I see. Okay, and so you said like nine years into the marriage, you meet someone who's quite attractive. Before we go into that, so, how were the first nine years of marriage? How would you describe them?

Yasser: 50:20

Good. I would say that they were good, and so I would call any same-sex stuff I would call them skirmishes. I didn't really have any involvement in same-sex activities. But there were a few things that happened in American society, and the first of them was the internet becoming widely available, and that kind of caused me to any latent or kind of underlying.. I guess I'd say underlying attractions or whatever, it made it nearly impossible for me to suppress anymore because then I had access to phonography, I had access to chat buttons, and then just kind of all hell broke loose, the first nine years were pretty good. And then the internet came on for it.

Waheed: 51:29

So, kind of the internet came at that time point, and it was like a gateway to mayhem. Okay, I understand.

Yasser: 51:40

Absolutely, and we see that even within, you know, we see the world, the internet in all of this and the modern evolution of it.

Waheed: 51:50

Yeah, 100%. Absolutely. So just kind of before we continue the story, because this is quite intriguing. Would you describe yourself, so from what I understand from you, and correct me if I'm wrong, you are someone who might describe himself as “bisexual”, correct? Like bisexual tendencies, or are you someone who..

Yasser: 52:12

I reject that, no, Waheed, I don't care, I reject all these freaking categories.

Waheed: 52:15

Yeah, I didn't mean..

Yasser: 52:17

I reject them 100%, but yes, if you're gonna go down that road, probably bisexual. Yeah.

Yasser: 52:23

But you know, as I read the literature, you know, because I started reading literature on this stuff, okay? And someone gave when I had that when I had that breakdown, I've never been really good at hiding my freaking nervous breakdowns even at work. And I was in maybe as a blessing or it was a curse, I was in, I was in a very progressive work environment. So this.. for some of my co-workers who were very, very liberal, this was like, oh, he's finally liberating himself and all this stuff. And I was given literature on same-sex attraction, history of homosexuality in the West, and things like that. But one of the things that stood out in the literature is they surveyed people who were initially kind of in opposite sex relationships and then kind of tried out same-sex relationships. And so many of these people were kind of migrating towards that. And I think these gender.. I mean, and even the literature at that time identified women as being more fluid in these types of attractions and everything. But I think that that's, I honestly think that probably a bias. I think we're all very fluid in our attractions. And given the right set of circumstances, people do almost anything.

Waheed: 54:05

So yeah, I mean it depends, obviously depends on the context. And there's a lot of literature that says that women kind of are actually, there is a high propensity for them to experience sexual fluidity compared to men. And I mean, there are a lot of variables that go into that for sure. But in your specific case, it's safe to assume the reason I'm asking is because it's safe to assume that you had opposite sex attractions as well as same-sex attractions and not just exclusive. Yeah, not just exclusive same-sex attractions going into the marriage. Right. So that makes a big difference for sure. So, like in the sexual realm, like when it comes to like, your relationship with your wife, there were no issues within kind of the marriage sphere, particularly like in the first nine years. Correct. Correct. Okay. So that's good to understand. Okay, so guide us through what happened after those nine years. So there was this kind of introduction into the internet, and then kind of things started to change for you. So what happened?

Yasser: 55:03

Okay, so what happens after this is I get through this nervous breakdown. I go to really limited counseling, very limited things.

Waheed: 55:13

Okay, can you tell us a bit about the nervous breakdown? Why did it happen? How did it happen before?

Yasser: 55:17

Well, I couldn't deal with it. I just couldn't deal with the fact that I could feel this attracted to someone of the same sex. So it was like..

Waheed 55:24

Who was that person? 

Yasser: 55:16

Want a name?

Waheed: 55:29

No, no, no, no. Like, was he a coworker? Was he like someone you know?

Yasser: 55:32

No, actually it was a person that I met kind of cruising on the street.

Waheed: 55:38

Okay.

Yasser: 55:39

I mean, it's so freaking weird because I don't know. I naturally learned how to cruise. Nobody had to tell me that. And so I caught his eye, talked to him, and yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. We weren't intimate, it never went anywhere, but the fact that I felt that strongly about him really just blew me away.

Waheed: 56:07

And why do you call it a nervous breakdown? So what was the aftermath of that?

Yasser: 56:09

Crying in the office you know, total nervous breakdown. I mean I don't know what a nervous.. I don't know what the clinical definition and what the nervous breakdown is like, but let's just put it this way. It caused me to really kind of lose it emotionally and become almost dysfunctional. I don't know what the I I didn't have to be put into to a psych ward or anything like that, but, and thank God I didn't become suicidal, but it it was just it was probably one of the darkest times in my life where I just couldn't handle the emotions, I didn't know what to do with the emotions, I didn't know why I felt this way. And I guess part of it was that I just really, I didn't want to feel this way, but there's another part of me that wanted to feel this way, so there was a lot of cognitive dissonance, and I just didn’t.. when you don't know what to do with something, then it just leads to tremendous, tremendous internal turmoil, just crazy thoughts from the mind and stuff like that. So I don't know if that would be a nervous breakdown, but that's about as close as I ever want to get to one, I’ll put it to you that way.

Waheed: 57:39

Right, right. Yeah, that's understandable. So how did you cope with that? How did that manifest?

Yasser: 57:46

Well, you know, there's this thing called what is it.. the Pink Cloud or whatever. So I get through this, I go to this counseling, I have maybe two, three sessions, and then I feel like I've kind of calibrated again. Okay. And I feel like that was a weird incident. And I was kind of on the when we talk about in the addiction context of Pink Cloud, like people go into a 12-step program, and it's like: “Oh shoot, I don't feel tempted at all”. And then all of a sudden everything will hit them like a ton of bricks. I went into kind of that Pink Cloud type thing. I go into the counselor and I'm like: “Oh, I’m fine, right, this must have been something.. I feel fine”, and I walked away from it, but it was anything but fine. It was just horrendous later on, and you know, so it just had terrible implications for me.

Waheed: 58:47

So what were these implications? What happened?

Yasser: 58:50

Well, I think that now that I'd really entertained these feelings, I felt them for a while. Then, it was like something was unleashed in me. And even though I wasn't necessarily acting out at that point in time, I felt that it was.. maybe it was just trying to heal or trying to come to terms with what was going on in my.. I guess the best way to put it is suppressing it wasn't gonna work anymore after that.

Yasser: 59:32

I couldn't suppress it. I could struggle against it, but it was very hard to suppress. And it's like trying to subdue maybe a wild animal, and you had them totally subdued, and then now two of their legs are free and they're kicking, it's moving around. You know, it's kind of like that type thing psychologically. So it was more active, the thoughts were more active. It's like something you got reactivated or released within me. So that's probably the best way of putting it.

Waheed: 1:00:07

So just by talking to that person and kind of having that, you know, innocent, let's say, encounter, it kind of awakened something that was very dormant in you at the time, and then it was unleashed and it wasn't controllable anymore.

Yasser: 1:00:24

It wasn't, it was less controllable. And that would probably, and I went more deeply into my religious faith. I became more.. I go into a form of Christianity that becomes more charismatic, more experiential of God. So thinking maybe it's because I had too rigid of a view of God, and so when we were prepping this, we talked about what charismatic Christianity is. I can provide your listeners a kind of what that context was.

Waheed: 1:01:06

Yes, please.

Yasser: 1:01:08

So it's kind of like, let's say it in a nice way. It's kind of like the unleashed Christianity that one sees where people are kind of speaking gibberish because they speak in tongues, and they get hit on their forehead and they fall backwards, and they give lots of money to the church and all that stuff. But it's not that people are looking to do those things. What charismatic Christianity offers is a sense of God being involved in your life and kind of talking directly to you, and so you can imagine what that does for people if they feel like they have like a phone line to the Almighty where you just compile the number and get an answer. It's very, very attractive, and it's very attractive to people with mental issues because people are struggling, they're looking for answers, they have all of these conflictive emotions, and so yeah, charismatic Christianity seemed to be where it was at. But then you know you're living this double life, you have internet forums, you've got online chat rooms, you know, it's just these are gateways to addiction, and you're trying to you're not addressing the problem, you're trying to reformat your life to accommodate the problem, I would say, and it just ends up not working. And that was my experience with it. You try to deal with it through more Christianity-based religion, and it just didn't help.

Waheed: 1:02:54

So to me, it appears that, you know, you were trying to suppress something that was causing you a lot of discomfort. So you went into religion, but you tried to go into a different flavor of Christianity, but that wasn't working out for you either. Right?

Yasser: 1:03:10

That's very well put. Exactly like that.

Waheed: 1:03:12

And at the same time, you were dealing with kind of the addictive behavior of pornography and other things, probably at the same time. Was that correct?

Yasser: 1:03:22

Right.

Waheed: 1:03:23

Okay. Would you like to tell us more about that or just leave it at that?

Yasser: 1:03:26

Well, I mean, it was a pain, it was a pain in the neck, but it wasn't, you know, I don't want to.. One thing I had to learn in dealing with this stuff, like we have people when you escalate your activities, okay? I mean, this is terrible. When you escalate and you go further and further into this stuff, you know, like when you hear about people who are dealing with porn and stuff like that, you're like: “Ah, just porn. If I'd just done that.” you know. But you need what you need to understand, or I need to understand, and we all need to understand, is that whether someone is acting out with another person or ten other people, or they're stuck, they're hooked on porn and they can't get away with it. I think that the psychological effect is pretty much the same. They're suffering just like you are suffering. And I didn't understand that until I got guided to recovery. But what that also means is when you're when you're doing internet porn and things like that, and you're not doing what they you know, hooking up with people, it's kind of easier to kind of push that off in the corner and say, well, that's just my little thing, and that you know, we'll keep it under control there. But that's kind of where I was for a few years. But it was just feeding the addiction. It was just.. it was bound to go sideways, even get worse, at least in my experience, and it did. It got a lot worse.

Waheed: 1:05:07

So you were having extramarital affairs at the time, correct?

Yasser: 1:05:11

At that point, no.

Waheed: 1:05:14

So it was limited to pornography mainly, and chat-rooms.

Yasser: 1:05:17

Right. Yeah, I mean I'd had some same-sex encounters, but they were not ongoing. So I guess you could say that if you're talking about infidelity, yes. Was I having ongoing affairs? No. Were my encounters frequent? No.

Waheed: 1:05:34

I see, I see.

Yasser: 1:05:34

That kind of thing.

Waheed: 1:05:36

Okay, so better put there were acts of infidelity that were taking place. Yeah. And your wife had no idea what was happening.

Yasser: 1:05:44

We become really good liars. And we become really good at lying, cover up all that stuff. That's.. it makes us into what we don't want to be.

Waheed: 1:06:00

Yeah. And this is something they hear a lot about in the healing and recovery community from people who have been through that, that you lead double lives, that there is this kind of very compartmentalized existence where you have one version of you that is acting out and doing all these things, but then when you're back home and you're with your family or your significant other, it's like a completely different person. But then at some point something explodes and you know that compartment pours into the other one at some point. So tell us more about that. So, how did that.. you know, the situation exacerbated, as you said, you know, after that. So, can you tell us more about that?

Yasser: 1:06:37

Yeah, well, you know, I think there are certain events in your life that really impact you. And the bad part about addiction and all these things is you don't know how they're impacting you. So my parents, they die at a relatively young age. My father was 69 and my mother was 66. And even my wife said to me at one point, you know, when your parents died, it felt like all hell broke loose. And I agree with that. I think that that is a good assessment of it. You know, I always kind of dealt with a little bit.. a feeling of abandonment, and this was the ultimate abandonment. The two of them died like a month apart. And then we were in this charismatic church, and that falls apart, because of a sexual scandal that got out. Not involving me, but involving one of my close friends, and his wife was having an affair, I believe, with the pastor. And just my whole life starts falling apart, and we just pack up and move across the country, and I'm trying to deal with this, and now we're getting into the time period where the propaganda campaign in American society, and I think Western society in general, starts ramping up. Okay, and what do I mean by that? Love is love. You know, certain states were beginning to just flirt with the idea of legalizing same-sex marriage. And this was a big thing. This was going into the.. this was going, you know, you're probably talking 2005, 2006, 2007. You know, this you're getting you're you're getting hit with constant propaganda, like, you know, this is a natural thing, it's always existed. Society has repressed it. All these famous people did this and this and this and this. And you know, you're being bombarded with it. You don't even realize the messaging that is coming your way. And then in the meantime, since the church broke up and all this stuff, I start this process of what I would call religious deconstruction. And what I mean by that is I then started, and and there are always mixed motives here, so I then started looking at Christianity and deconstructing. What do I mean by that? Well, is the Bible true? Oh, look at all these, look at all these contradictions between the gospel, as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You know, things that are diametrically opposed to each other in the details, like both cannot be true at the same time. You know, was Jesus God or was this mythology that was made up, etc. etc. Part of the reason for that was to maybe give myself liberty to do what I wanted, but also, I mean, we have to credit ourselves, our motives can be very mixed. I also kind of wanted to know the truth. Okay, so you're dealing with both of these things at the same time, and I would say at that point in time, that's when everything went really, really bad. Because then I'm like, okay, now I think I'm gonna experiment with this stuff. I'm gonna see who am I really? You know, I took the message, who are you really? Maybe you're just born this way, maybe you should just live this life, and I think I think that sometimes people psychologically want to have some sort.. I think my wife sensed that this was going on, and she encouraged us to go to a gay affirming church, and that like kind of.. was crazy. And I think because it's almost like you almost I don't want to call it a death wish, but it's a wish for closure, even on a subconscious level. I think she was knowing that I was dealing with this stuff, and she wanted to kind of test the waters and see what was gonna happen.

Waheed: 1:11:24

But she never confronted you, I mean, until that point in time. She never actually asked you whether you were having relations with other men or you were exposing yourself to certain types of pornography or any of that, no?

Yasser: 1:11:36

No, not really, but she knew that.. I mean we'd have discussions about whether you know whether it was really a sin, homosexual sex was really a sin, things like that. So it was always in the back, I'm sure it was always in the back of her mind. And I could you know, suppress, suppress, suppress, you know. And, so..

Waheed: 1:11:56

No, while you were talking, just sorry to interrupt, but I was kind of thinking about your relationship with religion. And to me, I mean, this is my own kind of analysis, if you will. Feel free to disagree and to correct me if I'm wrong. But the way that I see it, as you've been telling us your story so far, that really well, at least Christianity has been a sort of a crutch for you. So, like growing up, you wanted to become a minister, as you said, and you were kind of attached to the idea of religion, but it wasn't a sort of a healthy attachment because it was a means for suppression, as in not Christianity per se, but the idea that you've used religion to as a particular mask or like a source of, you know what, “I'm gonna suppress my feelings and not deal with them. So I'm just gonna put on this front of I'm gonna be the perfect Christian as much as I can”. And then when things started to kind of, you know, go downhill, you tried to re go back to Christianity, but with using a different flavor because you were like, okay, well, that version didn't work for me, so let me try this version and that version brought, I mean, disintegrated. And so you were like, and but at the same time in parallel, there was this kind of explosion of sexuality that was taking place in society and acceptance of same-sex relations and what have you, and the propaganda as you've described it. And at the same time, like the kind of, the thread of the idea of Christianity and all of that was kind of disintegrating very fast to the point that you were questioning the relevance or the reality of that particular you know belief system. And so I think there is.. it's like in parallel to me, it seems like religiosity and psychology were moving in parallel, that when things were going out of control psychologically, even the religious sphere was kind of disintegrating at the same time. Does that make sense?

Waheed: 1:13:52

Yeah, I think it makes sense.

Yasser: 1:13:54

The only thing I would say that I.. For me, when the term mask seems to portend some desire to deceive, and I sincerely believed in it, so I don't think there was the idea of deception there, but I would say that it was it was a way of trying to shelter myself and find solace and escape. I would say it was definitely an escape. And I think what happens is people conflate religion with healthy psychology, and it's kind of like, I'll even hand this to Christianity and Islam. Some people may take umbrage at this, but they, it's kind of like they are at the end of the equation, okay? But all the stuff that goes into the equation to get to that ideal state is not found within the religious institutions. And so when we say, when we say as a Muslim, I am going, I need to submit and to surrender to God, Christianity will tell you the same thing, but they won't tell you how to do it. Okay, they'll say, well, you know, do Dhikr, or whatever. Or a Christian will say, you know, say the Lord's Prayer or do whatever, read some more scripture, you know. That's not gonna get you there. It's not. Because you're not dealing with what's going on in your life. And that always kind of mystified me because we get these, like, if you watch the movies and stuff, you get these, you see these people who have a religious experience like “Ah”, the halo or the beams emanating from behind their head, and that's Hollywood. You know, in short terms, that's bullshit. Okay, basically, what happens is.. the mystery didn't get solved for me until I got into some of the recovery literature, and it said the reason religious people can really suffer from addiction is because everything is vertical, not horizontal. They're looking to God, this concept that they have of God, or the, you know, their higher what we call a higher power, but they're not dealing with the relational problems. And so churches, synagogues, Masajid, whatever, Buddha, Buddhist houses of prayer, whatever, are teaching people lots of great rituals, and and on some level, these rituals and these practices may help a little bit. But if you're not dealing with your relational problems, which all of these faiths have been terribly bad at teaching people to do, then you're just gonna be kind of going around the mountain a thousand times. And so we really digress there, but I think it's a valid point. Yes, La Ilaha Illallah Muhammad Rasulullah, but you know, doing Dhikr is not gonna make this go away.

Waheed: 1:17:26

Right, because underneath this, as we said, you know, the tip of the iceberg, there is a large, you know, existence of so many issues and ailments that need to be addressed. And so, yes, having a spiritual life, a healthy spiritual life and healthy connection with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is foundational, but also Allah has given us tools and resources and people to help us through this, you know, and and this is what we always say, you know, kind of having a holistic approach is necessary. We can't rely on one thing and neglect another thing. Some people over-rely on spirituality and neglect everything else in life. It doesn't function that way. And some people neglect the spiritual life, which is the opposite, and they focus on only psychology, and that it doesn't also help on the long run as well. So I think having that balance is absolutely necessary. So thanks for pointing that out. 

So what happened after that? You said that things went crazy. So just walk us through that period of life.

Yasser: 1:18:29

Yeah, things went crazy because then I went into full addiction mode and I just acted out. I basically gave myself license because I said if I can't control this stuff, I'm just gonna go head on and into it. And I did. And when I learned, I gave myself license to do whatever I wanted, became very addicted. But you know, some of us are blessed. I mean, some people, I don't believe this about many people, but I would say I don't want to assign a percentage to it, but I would say the majority of people know that when they're acting out and they're doing these things, it's just not the right thing to be doing. I believe that our fitra does exist. We may weaken it or strengthen it by certain things that we do in life, but kind of there's a residuum of that fundamental, you know, God-given nature that sticks with us. And so I could never reconcile myself to doing what I knew was wrong. And so again, I kind of looked for other solutions. I became Roman Catholic for a very short period of time. I tried Buddhism for a short period of time. I remember driving up and down a street where they were building a mosque and thinking to myself: “I want my son to be able to decide his religion, but I hope he doesn't become Muslim.” Because I have my cultural biases after 9-11 and all that stuff. And I thought Islam was just too rigid. But I was acting out like crazy. And then..

Waheed: 1:20:20

And then before we get into that, can you I want to ask you a question here. What were you looking for? Like genuinely deep down. What were you looking for in terms of acting out?

Yasser: 1:20:32

I think the best answer to these types of questions, Waheed, is the first answer that comes to your head and not try to overanalyze it. I think I was looking for wholeness. I think I was looking for somebody or something to make me whole and feel better with all of the brokenness inside. I think that is exactly what I was looking for. And it's bound to come up short. It's not gonna work. And even if I feel a period of even today, if I feel a time of tremendous temptation, I have to tell myself, this ain't gonna solve the problem, buddy. So it acts as a preventative, but it took a long time to get to that point.

Waheed: 1:21:19

Beautifully said. Thank you. Yeah, so there was something else about post-9-11 and brainwashing. So yeah, how did things change from that mindset to you being who you are right now?

Yasser: 1:21:30

Okay, even though I was kind of anti-Muslim and anti-Islam, I wasn't a total a-hole, you know. I didn't hate Muslims, I just didn't think that Islam was the thing. And, and so I was really upset when Trump started running for president and he started picking on Arabs and Muslims and all that stuff. So we're talking about 2015-2016 time frame. And essentially I speak a couple of other languages. I speak two other languages fluently, and so I prided myself on being able to learn languages. And so I said, what the heck, you know, Trump's running for president, maybe it's time for me to learn Arabic. I mean, actually I'd always wanted to learn Arabic. That's another story for another day. But so I'm on the internet, I'm on Facebook, I'm at this hub where a lot, there's a lot of religious.. a particular person where there's a lot of religious back and forth and banter between Christians and Muslims and everything. And I was really into Facebook. And some of the things that the Christians were saying to the Muslims were just shocking, you know. Very, very anti-Islam and everything. So being one, partaking the side of the underdog, I really kind of would argue with these Christians and everything. And I met a guy on there on this on this particular Facebook page who was participating in these discussions, and he was very friendly. He's from a Middle Eastern country that sends a lot of physicians to Saudi Arabia, and he was just very nice to me, and he said, and I told him I wanted to learn Arabic, and he's like, I'll teach you Arabic, no problem. And I'm like: “Oh, good, free Arabic lessons, and he's nice too”. And he's very it's a platonic relationship, not none of this attraction or anything. I mean, I would say that he's a good looking guy, but I didn't feel that way with him. He's just super, super nice, and it was just a really good healthy relationship, and so he starts teaching me Arabic, and the first thing he teaches me is “Ihdina Al-Sirat Al-Mustaqim”. So that he's like, keep saying those words, keep saying those words, which we all know because we pray this all the time, it comes from the Quran, it comes from the Fatiha. And I just thought there was a bit of irony in it because I'm dealing with I'm dealing with this, with you know, homosexuality and dealing with same-sex attractions, and there's that whole thing about being straight and not straight. And so praying a prayer, the the irony of praying a prayer or reading something that's telling me to get on the straight path certainly wasn't wasn't lost on me. And so our friendship continues, you know, on and on for about a year and a half after that, and I start studying Islam, and I see all of the suppression of Islamic history in Western history books. I see how there have been so many lies you know advanced against Islam in my own culture, how Islam was written out of history books, and I start getting this real genuine interest in Islam because by that time I didn't believe in anything, I was spiritual but not religious, acting out without any ethics, etc. etc. And like I said just before, I don't think my Fitra died. I think I I was never at peace with just doing whatever I wanted. And so over the next year and a half, we had many, many discussions on the internet, you know, through Facebook with my friend about Islam. And I remember just saying to God: “Do I take a chance on you again?”. It's just very.. I think it's gratitude more than anything, but it's very emotive for me. I said I'll take that chance. And so I ended up saying Shahada and becoming Muslim. And it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, but it wasn't the silver bullet that killed the werewolf of my same-sex attraction, but it was the beginning of healing, and it was the beginning of actually having a religion, a faith that I could believe in. It did not reject Jesus Christ PBUH. It really kind of confirmed, kind of some of the things I learned in like deconstruction. Islam has an utter, utter respect, reverence for Allah, and it doesn't insult my intelligence. And so it was a good fit for me. It was a good fit for me, but that was the beginning of I would say my recovery. I think I was so so angry at God for my perception of His abandoning me to my own desires and acting out. And so it was a big step for me, but you know, I think I wrote this here, Surat al-Imran, you know, and you can say “wa makaru wa makarallah wallahu khairul makirin”, and which is God is the best of plotters. I think he was the best of plotters, best of planners. He put people on my path that were going to help me get to wholeness, and Islam was a keystone in that, but Islam.. I was still acting out quite a bit after I embraced Islam. I would act out even during Ramadan, you know, and so it goes back to that horizontal versus vertical line. I wasn't really dealing with relationships, I didn't understand how to deal with relationships. And so.. But it gave me the framework, for God's sake. It gave me the framework. And so it was very helpful. You know Islam tells us to use our reason. Other religions, ones I was in as well, accept this a mystery, et cetera, et cetera. Well, there are a lot of mysteries like how everything came into existence. But when just logical fallacies are peddled off as a mystery that you have to accept, it causes in some people, at least of my psychological disposition, just this cognitive dissonance. And I couldn't deal with it. And so Islam gave me the base upon which my recovery could take place. That's the best way I would put it.

Waheed: 1:30:29

Beautifully said. So it was a foundational kind of step that you felt was necessary for you. And it made perfect sense and it was a perfect fit, as you said, subhan Allah. So I mean, usually I ask, and this is something that I asked Ishaq earlier in the season because he's also a fellow reverse to Islam, and I asked him what was that attracted you, or made sense to you about Islam. And I think you've perfectly answered this question already with what you described for us. Would you like to add something else to that?

Yasser: 1:31:03

No, no, other than to say that that was one heck of a podcast as well. I really enjoyed Ishaq.

Waheed: 1:31:09

Yeah, mashaAllah. Amazing brother. And all guests, mashaAllah.

Yasser: 1:31:14

All guests, but that one, I guess, because I have a bias for reverts being one myself.

Waheed: 1:31:19

Right, absolutely. No, no, subhan Allah.

Yasser: 1:31:34

You know, there was the predecessor to the Discord group, which was the Yahoo group. I was kind of involved in that. I know that's where a lot of the people who are really active on our Discord sort of.. they came through that Yahoo group. And I found out about the Yahoo group for Straight Struggle through, I believe Yasir Qadhi had given Khutba about same-sex attraction and everything. And I think maybe I don't know how it happened. I think maybe he gave an email or something, and I got in touch with Yousef Salam. and he put me into the group. I didn't.. I always thought that the Yahoo group was kind of clunky and hard to deal with and all that, so I wasn't very active in it, but I was there.

Waheed: 1:32:28

Right.

Yasser: 1:32:29

And then, so then because the Yahoo group was clunky, I think I just kind of let it go. I let it go and then I think the Yahoo Group's whole thing was just dumped by Yahoo because the technology was so old in terms of the internet that people aren't gonna be using it anymore.

Waheed: 1:32:52

Right, right. They were retired completely.

Yasser: 1:32:55

So yeah, and then and then about two years after becoming a Muslim, and this happened to me a lot. I had a really spiritual experience. Like obviously, Yasser is not on my birth certificate, but I had a dream, like that that was my name. Okay, and that's how I got this name. I had a dream. I thought that you know, with my biases, with my biases growing up, by the way, Yasser Arafat, I would have to say is one of my heroes, by the way, in a lot of ways. I'm not gonna go into politics because I think that there are misgivings about the way things ended up, but I mean he fought a lot for Palestine. But that guy was not my favorite guy growing up, I'll tell you that, with my Midwest conservative Protestantism. So I think God had, Allah had a sense of humor by telling me that that was gonna be my name later on when I became Muslim because I actually had a dream. Sometimes you have these darn dreams, and you're like: “Is that freaking real? You know, did that really happen?”. So I called my friend, you know, who was my brother from another mother who led me to Islam, and I’m like: “Did I tell you I had this dream, man?”. He's like: “Yeah, you told me that.” And I'm like, okay, I guess it's real. Because after a while this stuff seems so unreal. It's like, what the heck happened to me? So anyway, about two years into it, and I'm not one who has a lot of dreams like this, but I had a vivid dream of the Kaaba. And I'm like, okay, time to time to go to Mecca. And my wife, she was just like: “You ain't going to the Middle East, man. I'm afraid of stuff over there.” She watches the news.

Waheed: 1:34:44

So before you decided to visit Mecca, like you obviously you told her that you had become Muslim, or at least like you were planning on becoming Muslim. You took your shahada. Obviously, you became Muslim, she had to know, how was her reaction, by the way, when you told her that you were considering Islam?

Yasser: 1:34:59

Well, probably worse than worse than same-sex attractions.

Waheed: 1:35:04

Oh god.

Yasser: 1:35:06

Those who know history, she comes from two of the most two of the countries, and I'll rule out Great Britain from this equation. Two of the countries that are the most anti-Islamic and have had the worst colonial histories with the Muslim world. That should just tell you what her countries are. She's born in one, her parents are from the other. And my wife is the sweetest person, so please, I'm not disparaging from.. She had the cultural bias of these countries. Now, my wife is the sweetest person. She would never treat anybody badly. She's had Iftars at my house and everything. But my son told me that when I became Muslim, that's the time he thought the two of us were going to divorce. Not in any of this SSA stuff. So my wife took it really, really hard. My wife is a Christian. Now, I wouldn't consider her to be too orthodox of a Christian. She has a lot of different beliefs. But this is kind of like changing tribes, man. You know, what team are you on? And this is the way humanity, I learned this is the way humanity analyzes things. They don't want to hear all this, they don't want to hear all this esoteric stuff about Tawba and whether the scriptures were altered. For most people, they couldn't give a whiff less. And unfortunately, that's kind of the way it's been analyzed in that context with her. And so, like, you know, Ramadan is set up to be very disruptive, you know.

Waheed: 1:36:52

Right.

Yasser: 1:36:52

And I, if I had my brothers, I would send her to one of those two countries during the entire month of Ramadan. So she's not feeling excluded, she's not feeling lonely because your schedule gets changed, everything changes. But in any event, she didn't take it too well and everything. And then plus, on top of that, I have this dream. I don't tell her it's based upon a dream, but I'm like, I'm going to Saudi and I'm going in February, and I'm going to stop two days in Cairo to recover and see the pyramids. I mean, I'm very specific. And she's like: “Oh, okay, go ahead”. So then it turns out we have a really close friend who is from Egypt originally, and Christian, who's a travel agent, and she's like: “Oh, you're going to Egypt, you have to bring your wife”. And so we ended up making that a big vacation, and we went down the Nile and all that stuff, and saw life in Egypt, and then she flew to one of those two countries to see her mother. But anyway, so I go and I visit Mecca the first time, and I meet my brother from another mother. This is a healthy male relationship.

Waheed: 1:38:05

This is the first time that you've met him face to face.

Yasser: 1:38:08

First time! He freaking picks me up at the airport, brings his family. So I go to Medina and then I go to Mecca, and we start the Umrah and everything, and he says to me, the first time you meet you see the Kaaba, you know, live, make Dua. Make Dua for anything you want from Allah, He'll grant you. Which I don't know how Sunnah that is, but sounded nice. And so I do, and I don't ask for a million bucks, I don't ask for this or that. I ask for healing from my, you know, my same-sex attractions, healing from all the you know, harm I've done and all that stuff and how it's harmed me. So that's where my heart has been. And so, you know, I'll take, you know, I'll say, look, you know, I maybe have done some really messed up things, but like, you know, it's not like I was, you know, some horrible thing. And that's what I would say to all of us. We're not just.. we have a problem, but we're basically good people. We just don't know how to deal with this problem. And that's borne out for me by this being my prayer. You know, I could have prayed for a million bucks, and I wish I had them today to get the heck out of this country, but, you know, that was where my heart was. And so I do my Umrah, it's fantastic, it's great. We also go up Jabal An Nur and all that stuff. I mean, and then that's right after I get back, I mean, that's when COVID hits, man. I mean, CNN that's going crazy with COVID when I when I was over in Saudi Arabia and everything. And so COVID hits, and that's when I'm kind of grounded like everybody else is, and I'm like, well, you know, I'm just the umrah, and I need to get help, man. I need to get help. This is not working. And I reach out to Yousef Salam again. I think I have an email for him, and he puts me onto the Discord server.

Waheed: 1:40:25

and shout out to Brother Yousef, by the way.

Yasser: 1:40:29

Shout out to him, man. Shout out to all you guys, all you guys, man. You guys helped me out so much. So, anyway, I'm on this Discord server, and I'm still acting out, and we have this term for this, we call this dumping. So I feel like shit. And I get on there and “I acted out, I did this”, and I think you, I think you were one, and a couple of other people kind of took me to the side and said, You called me, you talked to me on the phone. I can remember that, and you're like: “You gotta get help, brother, you gotta get into some sort of therapy, you gotta do something”. And so then I start the journey, and I didn't realize how tough it was and how much I needed it. I start with Ali Jaffery, to whom I am just eternally grateful.

Waheed: 1:41:27

Shout out to Brother Ali as well.

Yasser: 1:41:30

Yeah, cool guy, cool guy. I think he took me for I want to say about a year and a half. You know, I'll tell you, you know I know how screwed up I was? How screwed up I was. If I was on a Zoom call with him and he would hang up. When we're getting done with the session, if he hung up before I did, I would feel rejected. That's how much of a freaking mess I was. And how irrational can I be. I mean that's how deep this stuff goes. And so why do I tell this? Not to say: “Well, hey, that's really messed up”, but brothers, you know, you're gonna have these feelings, you're gonna have these irrational feelings, and years later though, you'll say to yourself, what the hell was that? But they're real, you know, these are real feelings. And so in summary, what happened is I was you know, all the counseling that I did was basically kind of to unravel all the or unpeel all of these layers that were on, you know, that were just laid over these wounds. And you know, the level of my self-awareness when we started was oh, you acted out, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I acted out again. And it'd be like, well, why did you act out? What were you feeling before that? And I'd be like, hey, dummy, I felt horny, all right? I mean, that's the level of my self-introspection, and the process, and I tell this because this is the way a lot of people feel. I even see it on the show, this is the way they feel, and it's normal because they haven't been walked through the therapy to get themselves to be in touch with what's going on inside of them, and so the therapy is required to help people work with introspection and work with work at understanding because at some level it's good that we understand all this trauma, right? Great, dad was absent, mom was a pain in the neck, mean at times, good at times, great parents, but you know, imperfect. But the idea of all this analysis is to make us understand what is going on inside of us. So when we have this crappy feeling, we don't then turn to know illicit sex to mask it, to overcome it, and it makes us accountable for our actions because now we have a way to deal with it, but it takes a long time, it's not overnight, it takes a long time. I don't know if I could do it. I don't know if I could be a therapist, because I don't know if I could sit there all day long and listen to these stories. It is truly a vocation, it is truly a calling. But I am just so grateful for the patience that has been and the compassion and the kindness that has been extended to me as I was falling and falling and you know, relapsing and you know. I mean, we got to one session with Ali that I was so hopeless. And I think for Ali, the only thing he could say was: “Well, you did something, you showed up today”. I mean, that's about all he can say that was positive because I was so down, but just showing up is an act in favor of your recovery.

Waheed: 1:45:23

Absolutely.

Yasser: 1:45:24

Just showing up when everything seems hopeless.

Waheed: 1:45:28

100%. So you talked to us about being on the server, you know, interacting with other brothers, kind of finding support in that, starting therapy and counseling. What else has also helped you on this journey?

Yasser: 1:45:42

Well, we got to the point with Ali. Now Ali can differ on this, but I felt.. you know, one of the things that happens with same-sex attractive people is they're very, very prone to codependency. And I don't know if Ali felt this way, but I felt this way kind of at the end of our counseling relationship. He said to me, we've gotten to a point, I can only take you to this point. I think you need to get somebody else. And I knew that the time had come too. I think I was slipping almost into a codependency with Ali. And so I ended up going to Brothers Road to Rich Wyler. And a lot of the people here, now there's another person that has to be really commended here is Adam on the server. Adam Ramsey.

Waheed: 1:46:51

Shout out to Brother Adam.

Yasser: 1:46:53

Yeah, that guy has done more for more people on the server than a lot of people. Yeah, so then I ended up going to Brothers on a Road to a support group with Rich Wyler and then doing one-on-one counseling with Rich Wyler. Rich said that on average it took three to five years for people to really kind of start healing and having some sense of self-control. I think I was closer to the five-year plan than the three-year plan, although I would have rather been on the three-year plan. And, yeah, so then I end up going to a JIM (Journey Into Manhood) weekend, start progressively getting better, but still acting out, and then I guess we had a major incident about six months ago, and Rich said to me, This is enough of this. If you keep up with this, you will be.. you're looking at being institutionalized. I don't know if you ever cut any of this out. And I went into SA (Sexaholics Anonymous). Yeah, and you're the one who texted me the link for all the meetings, the online meetings.

Waheed: 1:48:20

Yeah, because I remember, like at the time you were struggling going to like face-to-face meetings or kind of with regards to privacy and all these issues.

Yasser: 1:48:28

And I've gotten a lot of help. I've gotten a lot of help just doing the online meetings. The online meetings, depending upon your need, and you know, every case is different, but the online meetings have been life-saving. So I'm approaching six months of sobriety, but it's one day at a time. So the question always for me is am I sober today, am I sober right now? But things have gotten a lot better. I did it, I think I said I did a JIM weekend in April of this year. Again, JIM is Journey into Manhood, and it's basically run by an interfaith group, so there are a lot of Jewish brothers there, there are a lot of Latter-day Saints brothers there, there are a lot of Evangelical Christians there, there are Muslims there. And that was quite eye-opening for me, and it was really, really healing. And for me, the journey into manhood weekend would not have been enough. I could see where I would have acted out easily after that, but what I took from Journey into Manhood and Sexaholics Anonymous has been just really helpful for me. And it's also kind of expanded my spiritual horizons to see that you know God acts through other faith groups and he's helped me and it's been just really, really healing for me. So I'm on the road to recovery one day at a time. It hasn't been easy, it seemed pretty darn hopeless at times, but there's hope and there is healing, there is recovery, and I think these are the first six months of of recovery, but I think actually recovery started when I got onto the Discord server, and it's just been progressively better and better all along, but it's not a linear path. You have your ups and your downs, and that's where I am today.

Waheed: 1:50:51

Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah. Beautiful, beautiful, Jazak Allah khair, and congratulations on your six months and inshaAllah for many more months and years to come ahead.

So if I were to ask you, you know, you've shared with us your story, mashaAllah, with a lot of courage and and and vulnerability, we really appreciate that. And, you've learned so much about yourself, particularly in the last couple of years, through the Discord server, through strong support and brother Ali, through Rich Wyler and Journey into Manhood, and and the friendships that you've had with other men from different faith backgrounds. And now with SA, and as I know you have a sponsor, you're working through the 12 steps, mashaAllah. So, all of these different resources and different support groups from all of them and and your experience so far on your healing and and recovery journey, what have you learned about your SSA and your addiction? What are some, you know insights that you can share with us?

Yasser: 1:52:03

In my case, and I can only speak for myself, and I'm very, very careful because I want to be very careful about anything that I say because I don't want somebody to latch on and say, well, he's different or whatever, or if what he says is true, and so now I can't recover. That would be the worst outcome of this podcast, because Adam Ramsey told me something very early on, and he said, recovery from this stuff is like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what stinks. And if there was one size that fits all, then we could probably just pack up our bags and go home. But the solutions to this are as varied as the people who experience it. So anything that worked for me may not work for whoever may be listening to this. But I would say that in a lot of ways, this journey is the journey that I've had to take. And it's the one that God set out for me. And like I say, he's the best of planners, he's the one who knows. He's the one who knows what is needed for me and what I need. And so he's been there for me, and he knew, he knew when I went before.. When I stood in front of the comma and asked for healing, he knew I was gonna act out a lot more after that, but he didn't give up on me. And you know, he knew that I was going there were gonna be a lot of things that took place in my life that would be very upsetting and very difficult. But he also knew that he was gonna he was going to be there for me, and he knew what was on the other side. So I don't.. The spiritual journey, I guess this is my journey, this is our journey. And you know, we we're not gonna we're not gonna write like al-Ghazali, we're not gonna, we're not an Ibn-Arabi, we're not a great, none of us are gonna probably be these great leaders, but our journey is here to help one another recover and to be there for one another, and we'll receive our reward for that in the afterlife if we stay faithful to Allah.

Waheed: 1:54:34

Alhamdulillah. Beautiful Jazak Allah khair for sharing that. Can I just.. I really want to say something because I was reflecting when you were talking about everything, and I was just kind of like in the backdrop of everything that you've been telling us. I was kind of imagining your wife, you know, she's been a comrade. She's been there with you almost every step of the way without even realizing it. I would say like any other woman would have been like, you know what, I'm packing my bags and leaving, whether it's it has to do with either you know the fact that you told her about SSA or the fact that maybe she discovered the fact that you were acting out or that you became Muslim, for example, she could have been like, you know what, this is the end of it. This is we're calling it quits, we're gonna get a divorce. But you know, you said she's been with you through thick and thin, and she's been there. So how's your relationship with her? Can you tell me more about that right now? Like, how are things with you?

Yasser: 1:55:27

Yeah, but I kind of laugh. I love my wife. She's the greatest person. I could not have had a better wife than my wife. Having said that, my wife has a very strong personality.

Waheed: 1:55:43

You've married your mom, right?

Yasser: 1:55:47

No, well, if I have, I certainly resist her much more than I resisted my mother. But now I'm probably giving too much information, but she has a very Latin personality, very she can be very hot-tempered. And I am of German origin, and so it's like oil and water at times. She has a great deal of patience. She's a wonderful person. I could not say more good things about her. And she's very, let's just face it, she's very long-suffering. She put up with a lot. Now, having said that, she also has dealt with her own biases. It took a long time for her to understand that I needed to get help. And she had some of these biases that were displayed in my youth about getting psychological help. And so, in some ways, that worked against us. Because I think when she saw how distraught I was, I think she kind of got shocked. It's like, you know, this guy needs help. And so she kind of came around. And so she knows about the SSA because she knows I went to the JIM weekend, things like that. She knows that I would I'm more than willing to volunteer for a JIM weekend. On some level, I feel that it's part of my life mission now to at least be there for other people who are suffering from sexual addiction and from you know all the fallout of SSA.

Waheed: 1:57:31

And how does she take that? What does she think about all of these efforts that you're undertaking?

Yasser: 1:57:38

Well, you have to understand it's been a we didn't go into this, but even during kind of the height of this, she offered me my freedom. I mean, she's like, well, you know, maybe you want to go out and just live your life. And I'm like, no, I know what that life is like, and that is not for me. I think our relationship is stronger now than ever before. That doesn't mean it's without problems.

Waheed: 1:58:08

Of course.

Yasser: 1:58:09

But you know I think people have to be realistic about marriage. Marriage, I think it kind of surprised me in Islam marriage seemed to be just kind of like a contract, which I think that's an oversimplification, probably coming from my cultural background, not completely understanding Islam, but it just seems very, very contractual. What I think also, however, is on some level it's very, very realistic when it comes to Islam. You know, in the Western culture we have this, you know, Romeo and Juliet type view of a romantic, eternally romantic relationship, and that's just not gonna happen in any marriage. So she's my partner, she's you know, and so she understands me better, a lot of times better than I understand myself. And so she has come to terms with this, but I think she's probably much happier now than ever since this issue has reared its head because now it's finally being addressed.

Waheed: 1:59:28

Alhamdulillah. Alhamdulillah. I'm glad to hear that. What about so you said you have one child, correct?

Yasser: 1:59:36

Yeah.

Waheed: 1:59:37

And how's your relationship with him, your son?

Yasser: 1:59:40

Excellent. Excellent. because one thing that didn't happen is.. with my child is that I did not hide from him my struggles.

Speaker 2: 1:59:57

Okay.

Yasser: 1:59:57

So I mean I didn't go into great detail. Obviously, he doesn't know that to go into the woods of the details, but he knows that I have struggled. And so it has made it better for him when he has struggled with some of the things that kids struggle with on the internet to come to me and say, I have this problem now. What do I do?

Waheed: 2:00:22

Well done.

Yasser: 2:00:24

So that is a reward of being, you know, being honest and open with your kids and not putting up a moral front, like, you know, your shit doesn't stick. And just being honest.

Waheed: 2:00:39

MashaAllah, you shared with us so many beautiful things, and I am very, very grateful for you being a guest on the podcast. I want to ask you, where do you find yourself right now and where do you hope to be in the future, inshaAllah?

Yasser: 2:00:55

Well, I find myself sober, but only after I've sobered up can I start dealing with some of the underlying issues because what happens in my experience, and again, I can only speak for myself: we get into a loop. We're in a loop when we're acting out, and we're too busy dealing with the fallout or the acting out. So on some levels a bit of a paradox. You can only begin really, in my opinion, you can only begin real deep healing when you achieve sobriety, but there's such a thing as a dry talk. And so that's a person who stops drinking, but it's never really dealt with the underlying causes. So I'm doing a lot of still deeper work through the steps. and so I see continued recovery, continued growth, which I think will last the rest of my life because I think once we stop growing, we spiritually die. Where do I see myself going? The good thing is, you know, and there's this other verse. I know, I may want you to read it. It's from a Hujurat, 49th chapter of the Quran, verse 13. But it's talking about mankind and how Allah has made them male and female and made them into nations and tribes that they may know one another. I am really dedicated to inner faith stuff. I am a believing Muslim. I make every effort to do what I have to do, my five times a day. Try to make it a Juma. I try to do the things, I try to learn. But I also am a bit of a person who believes that God has a plan for everybody and that He will sort out our differences in the last day. I'm not one who believes that everybody else is lost, and that we can work together. And I received a lot from people of other faiths, and I want to work with them, especially on this issue, because I think this is where this is where I've been called. This is where I get called, and if I can help anybody out, I will help them out. So that's where I think I'm headed.

Waheed: 2:03:28

Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah. Alhamdulillah. May Allah give you lots and lots of barakah and tawfeeq. Any take-home messages you would like to share with us in addition to the beautiful gems that you've shared with us so far?

Yasser: 2:03:40

The only thing that I'll say is there is healing available to everybody. You know, in the Christian tradition, Issa PBUH says “Knock and the door shall be opened to you”. Seek and you shall find. What you heard here may not apply to.. what I've said has helped me may not help you. But if you seek Allah and work with the community, I am convinced you'll find healing if that's what you want in your heart. But our hearts have to be right. And that's not to say you can fall and slip that your heart is not right, because that's absolutely the worst takeaway you can have from what I'm saying. But get up, you know, Rumi says, you know, come back, come back a thousand times. And in our dilemma, you may be coming back a thousand times with how difficult this issue is, but come back, come back. God loves you every single time, and he knows every single time you’re looking to act out, and he still loves you, and he decided to create you even knowing that. So that's what I would say.

Waheed: 2:04:58

Beautiful. Absolutely. So towards the end of every episode, I like to ask my guests about what they would say to someone who is dear to them in their lives that they wish they could tell that person if they were alive or deceased, had they had the chance to do that. And if I were to ask you, if your parents were alive, what is something you wish you could tell them? Or have, you know, going back in time, let's say, and when they were still alive, what is something you wish you could have told your mother and father had you had the chance to do so?

Yasser: 2:05:34

I guess what I would tell them without being over dramatic or anything like that, is don't worry. God has it under control. If you're able to see me from up there, please I hope you close your eyes and God has it under control and it's okay. It's okay. Anything that happened, even if there were shortcomings in your parenting, they all have shortcomings. It's okay. God had a plan and we're making it, and I love you very much.

Waheed: 2:06:11

Beautiful. What about your amazing wife?

Yasser: 2:06:16

Oh that, no, she's the best. She's the best. Thank you. Thank you for your kindness, thank you for your patience. And thank you for taking some of the rougher edges off of me. Because I couldn't have done it without you.

Waheed: 2:06:32

Shout out to your wife, mashaAllah. She is a warrior. MashaAllah. I'm in so much awe of her. May Allah bless her and keep her safe and keep her happy, inshaAllah, and bless your marriage as well. You guys have been through so much, but inshaAllah, may good things come out of this, and they have come out of all of this, alhamdulillah. May they continue to do so. But about your son, what is something you wish you could tell your son if you had the chance?

Yasser: 2:06:59

To my son, I would just say that I'm just really proud of him. and I’m really proud of you, and you know, I'm there for you. And I love you, and that's it. That's pretty much what I would say. And I'm sorry for any harm that I did to your mom.

Waheed: 2:07:19

And to your younger self, just imagine Yasser being, I don't know, like the teenager who was first discovering his SSA, and, or you know, the young adult who was, you know, getting married and then had to discover a whole host of issues that came all at once,, or kind of growing up and and facing all of these kind of, you know, all of these kind of problems came one after the other. What would you tell that younger version of you?

Yasser: 2:07:49

There's the kind of grown-up side of me that says, Well, you made it, you're gonna make it, God is with you. And then there's kind of the immature side of myself that just wants to say, buckle up because you're in for a hell of a right.

Waheed: 2:08:02

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, Subhan Allah.

Yasser: 2:08:11

I do want to get to the who else, and I hope we get this out. Thank you to the community, thank you to you, thank you to Adam Ramsey, thank you to Yousef Salam. Thank you to Ali Jaffery. Thank you to everybody for just being there for me because I, you know you were put there by Allah to help me, and I am you talked to me, you told me what I needed to do, and you took my calls and helped me. So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And to even Rich Wyler, who isn't, I don't think, on the Discord server, but thank you to that community. Thank you to Mushi who's been really, really good to me. Just so many, many good people. I can't even name them all. I just cannot even name them all. So Martin, I mean Martin, you know, I've had a little bit of back and forth with the Spanish language as well. just so many people. I mean, just so many great people. Just fantastic people.

Waheed: 2:09:33

Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah. Shout out to all of the wonderful men and women who are in all of these.

Yasser: 2:09:38

And anybody I forgot, please, it's the nerves of the moment that I can't remember everybody, but such cool people. If I didn't have the SSA, I wouldn't have gotten to meet them all!

Waheed: 2:09:53

Yeah, there you go. Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah. Brother Yasser, this has been a wonderful episode. I sincerely thank you from the bottom of my heart for you know, sharing with us all of these pieces of your life. I am very grateful to be there with you, to know you throughout all of these years, to help you share your story with the world. May Allah bless you, may Allah facilitate wonderful things for you in your life as He has always been by your side, as you said. Alhamdulillah, these are wonderful blessings that Allah has placed in your life. This journey, as you said, is not a linear journey, it's filled, it's filled with ups and downs and all sorts of unexpected things, but alhamdulillah, it's all part of the process and it's all beautiful in and of itself. We do our best and Allah takes care of the rest. So, inshaAllah, may Allah give you lots of tawfeeq and lots of strength and patience. And may He always, you know bless you and your family, your wife, your son, all of the people you love and care about. And may he keep you steadfast and may he give you light in your heart and in your path to keep moving forward in the best of ways. So Jazak Allah khair, and I really appreciate your time and your effort.

Yasser: 2:11:03

Thank you so much. Shukran lak.

Waheed: 2:11:05

And with that we come to the end of today's episode. I hope you have enjoyed it and found value in the content. I would like to kindly ask you to hit the subscribe button, if you have not done so already, to make sure that you don't miss any episodes. And if you have enjoyed the podcast so far, please make sure to give us a good rating, as that helps make the podcast more visible for people. And if you or anyone you know would like to be a guest on the podcast, roll over the link in the episode show notes and fill out the form. And if you have any questions or comments or suggestions, feel free to email me anytime on voicesfrombeyondtherainbow@proton.me. Talk to you in the next episode, inshaAllah. This has been Waheed Jensen in “Voices from Beyond the Rainbow”, assalamu alaikom wa rahmatullahi wabarakatuh.