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How do you experience loving attachment when trauma leaves you feeling shattered?
In this incredibly profound and insightful episode, therapist and author of the brand new book, Sacred Attachment, Michael Cusick joins us to explore how our darkest moments of brokenness are not just moments of pain, but pivotal opportunities for forming a deeper, more secure attachment with God. Michael shares about his own healing journey as a result of complex trauma, and we unpack how our pain can bring us even closer to encounters with God’s love. Today’s episode is for everyone who has ever felt broken. We discuss. . .
*5 way of understanding brokenness (and why the "sin" paradigm falls short)
*Why mystical encounters are for all of us
*A jaw-dropping moment when Michael experienced God's love
*The role of imagination in healing
*How to restore exiled and wounded parts of us
Resources:
- Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love by Michael John Cusick
- Restoring the Soul, a trauma-informed, intensive counseling center in the beautiful mountains of Colorado
- Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle by Michael John Cusick
- Amazing Grace Hymn
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Isaiah 55
- An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison
- St. Francis of Assisi by GK Chesterton
- Jeremiah 1Ephesians 1:18John 7:36-38Isaiah 55
- Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation by Martin Laird
- restoringthesoul.commichaeljohncusick.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 16: What are Attachment Styles and Why Does it Matter?
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and Happy New Year! I'm so thrilled you've joined us for this week's episode of the Best of You Podcast. If you're a returning listener, I'm so glad you're back with us. We have an incredible lineup of guests along with some solo episodes on topics you've been asking for lined up for this new year.
If you're a new listener, we are so thrilled to have you with us, where every single week we come together to talk about a mental health topic using the best of current psychology research from a faith-based perspective. I'm so thrilled you're here for today's episode. This is an incredible episode that is hopeful and inspiring and empowering and so rich and meaty.
There's so much in this episode. We are diving into a powerful conversation, all about sacred attachment and how we forge a healthy, secure attachment with God, with others, and with the parts of ourselves. Joining me today is therapist and author, Michael Cusick. You'll hear Michael talk about his profound journey of healing from complex trauma and how he learned to restore the intimacy of a secure, loving attachment with God.
I love this quote from the episode where Michael says, “Our brokenness is not the barrier, but a bridge to where we want to be”. You're going to hear incredible examples of how God helped build that bridge in Michael's life from brokenness into these beautiful moments of being surprised by God's love.
There's one point in the episode where we both got chills at the way God showed up in some beautiful and surprising ways. And spoiler alert, often God shows up for us at the moments when we feel the least worthy.
As you are heading into the new year and you've been wanting to really dive into your healing journey and healing those places that still feel broken in your own life, whether with God, whether with loved ones, whether with the parts of yourselves, there is something for you in this episode.
Toward the end, Michael shares a real-time exercise that you can do right along with us. I do it with him in the episode. It’s about how the power of our imagination can help us heal and envision a life beyond our toughest challenges.
If you find something in this episode that is really helpful to you, I hope you'll share it with a friend or with a family member who might need some encouragement or practical tools along their own healing journeys.
Part of why I continue to create this content each week is because I believe we need practical tools and we need to hear each others’ stories of healing, so we learn how to name what's hard, but we also are inspired and encouraged and empowered by what's hopeful in our shared experiences. We need to hear about how these tools from psychology and from our faith keep us moving forward to restore these broken areas of our lives.
Michael John Cusick is a licensed professional counselor, spiritual director, speaker, and the author of two books, including his brand new book called Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love. It's out next week. It's such a good book. I hope you'll pick up a copy of it.
I know you will be blessed by both the practical tools and spiritual wisdom in the book. Having experienced the restoring touch of God in a deeply broken life and marriage, Michael's passion is to connect life's broken realities with the reality of the gospel. In addition to being a therapist, Michael leads Restoring the Soul, which is a trauma-informed, intensive counseling center in the beautiful mountains of Colorado.
He also equips Christian organizations around the world and formerly served as a professor at both Denver Seminary and Colorado Christian University. Michael holds a master's degree in both pastoral counseling and in counseling psychology. I'm so thrilled to bring you this beautiful, rich healing conversation with Michael John Cusick.
***
Alison Cook: Michael, I am so thrilled to have this conversation with you today. I read your new book. It's called Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love. I read an early copy of it and it really moved me, in a way that I hadn't been moved in a long time by a book, by your story, by how you frame love and his journey of attaching to God and healing. I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for joining us to talk about it.
Michael: Thank you. It's so good to talk with you and thank you for your kind words and for the wonderful endorsement that you gave for the book.
Alison Cook: I would love to start a little bit with your own story. Michael, the book really speaks to this gap between what we believe about God, what we want to believe about God, and the reality of our experiences.
You pull us right in at the beginning of the book by showing us some of these contrasting experiences in your own life. You share a story about being surprised by love. It's a really amazing story with your aunt, who's a Carmelite nun, and it’s juxtaposed with going back home into significant emotional and sexual and physical abuse.
Tell me a little bit about those competing stories and how they shaped your understanding of yourself and God.
Michael: Absolutely. I would love to. I've shared elsewhere and even in my book, Surfing for God, about being sexually abused as a child. Most of that I remember beginning around the age of eight, but around 2003, I started to have body memories, not images, but body memories and was diagnosed with complex post traumatic stress disorder.
That unfolded over a number of years and was, to this day, the hardest thing that I've gone through in my life–much more difficult than overcoming depression and various addictions in my life. My story started to be corroborated by various family members in my immediate family and beyond based on a lot of knowledge that was always known about an uncle.
He sexually abused me and a number of other family members, and I was trafficked to other men that he made me available to. Back then it wasn't called trafficking, but it filled in so many pieces in my story. My abuse wouldn't be dealt with, much less remembered in full, until I was released around probably 16 years old.
I was four years old when that abuse started and I had an aunt that was a cloistered Carmelite nun. Carmelites were cloistered, so they made a choice to live behind a wall and they could not have contact with the public, except through a metal grate, which was like a prison cell. So when I was four years old, it was always a scary thing to go visit the nuns.
I was the youngest of five Irish Catholic kids. On this particular day, my brother lifted me up into this cabinet, which was in the corner, in the space between visitors and the 17 or 20 nuns that were there. It's like prison bars, but it's a crosshatch. My brother lifted me into this cabinet and it spun around on a lazy susan so that food and gifts could be passed over back and forth to the nuns.
I spun around thinking, I'm going to die. I didn't like being dizzy or spun around. I was terrified. I remember this very acutely. Finally, the door opened and I thought my brother was there, but my aunt, this cloistered Carmelite nun, was on the other side and she gave me this big embrace. She took me on the other side of this grid where I was not supposed to be.
I remember being terrified even more then, of the Pope or the Bishop or some priest coming, and I'm in big trouble. It really became a metaphor for later, when I came to a very personal kind of faith. Although I was baptized and confirmed as a Catholic, for many years, for two decades, I saw God as someone who was catching me on the wrong side of things, where I was not supposed to be, not measuring up, not following the rules, and that I was going to be in trouble.
But what actually happened on the other side of that grid is that my aunt embraced me and kissed me and held me and rubbed her fingers through my hair. She couldn't even go to her own father's funeral about 10 years before this moment. Then other nuns came in and began to embrace me.
What ultimately happened was, they put me down on the floor and we created a circle and we started singing Ring Around The Rosie and dancing in a circle. That moment became this metaphor of spinning in life, where we're disoriented and we lose our bearings and yet there's this place where we're actually held and embraced by love.
I've come to see that in many cases with the people that we work with in our therapeutic and pastoral work. Maybe many of the listeners of this podcast are experiencing some kind of disconnect like that as well. They want to believe that love is there to embrace them, that love has them if you will, and yet there's an external reality where they're spinning, they're disoriented.
There's this disconnect between what they want to experience with God and what they were told the Christian life would actually be like, but what they actually experience is something very different from that. They don't have any idea how to connect those two or to close that gap.
Alison Cook: That was such a powerful story. It reminds me of the title of the classic CS Lewis book where he talks about being surprised by joy, and it's almost like being surprised by love in that moment. There was pure love for you from these women.
That metaphor is so powerful, and you talk about being surprised by love, where God comes into the unlikeliest of places in the book. You also talk about the long-term damage in your life as a result of the abuse that doesn't go away magically, even though you have these moments of love and grace.
Tell me a little bit about that. Once you began to realize the devastation that had occurred to you, what was that like? How did you try to heal? How did you try to address that? What worked? What didn't work?
Michael: Yeah, I had some very pronounced survival strategies that kicked in at a very young age. As the youngest of five, I was the family comedian or the mascot. I got a lot of my emotional needs met by making people laugh. I made this commitment very early on that I would be a people pleaser, that I would get people to like me, that I would try to mediate conflict and anxiety.
There was a lot of that in our home, and I mediated with humor. One of my earliest memories that I write about in the book as well, is when I was probably five years old. I would steal food out of our pantry and we were a blue collar, lower middle class family, and food wasn't always plentiful because the older people would eat it.
I stole a bag of Nestle chocolate chips and I went under my bed and I tucked them up underneath the mattress. Some of my earliest memories are going under that mattress and eating these sweets, rationing them out to myself to kill that emotional pain. That lasted through my whole life.
I currently attend a 12-step group for freedom from compulsive overeating. That has been really revolutionary. So today, for anybody who's listening, freedom and healing and integration are possible, but we always have to continue to do our work. There's no end point where we go, okay, I'm good. I'm whole.
I do believe that we can get to a place where we're whole, but we need to cultivate that in the same way that we have to cultivate a garden.
Alison Cook: I love that. In the book, you keep us on that journey with you. You have these moments of breakthrough. You have these moments of discovery and of healing, and also, it's an ongoing process of continuing to do the work. It's beautiful in that sense. It's so realistic and also so hopeful.
You've described brokenness, and this is a really powerful way to describe it, as a gateway to divine attachment. Tell us a little bit more about what you mean by that. You don't mean that glibly.
Michael: No. I believe that with all my heart. I described the gap as this Delta, and in science, a Delta is the triangle or the Greek symbol for the distance between where you are and where you want to be. It represents that gap, but a Delta is also like the Delta of the Mississippi, where two things come together to create something new.
The brackish water and the salt water in that Delta becomes something new. I believe in the “gospel reality”, when we bring our brokenness plus our hope and what we're actually made to be together, and something altogether new is formed. There's this third reality that is developed. We therapists talk about non-duality and dialectical behavior therapy; there's this other way, this third way, that's really based in paradox.
Our brokenness is not the barrier, but a bridge to where we want to be. What we often focus on as believers is, why do we struggle with X, Y, or Z? The average pastor, unfortunately, or the average person in the pews might say that it’s because we're sinners, but it's actually because we mishandle our pain and we mishandle the disconnection that is there spiritually, emotionally and relationally from others.
In that disconnection, we're going to move towards something that gives us that sense of being seen, soothed, safe, and secure, those four foundational elements, and behind it all is attachment.
Alison Cook: Pain becomes an opportunity. It's something deeper than simply healing the pain and making it go away. When we actually take the pain out and we face the brokenness and we continue to take that into relationship with God, something transcendent happens there. Something new is formed.
Michael: Absolutely. I'm not sure when this will be broadcast, but Advent starts in a week. Advent is all about becoming and waiting. It's the journey of Mary's Magnificat, of saying yes to God in this very unlikely situation, and it culminates in the birth of Christ.
We take that for granted. The birth of Christ and the Incarnation, as well as the conception in Mary by the Holy Spirit, is really one of the very first proofs in the New Testament that God loves to inhabit anything and everything that is seemingly unfavorable. A situation that is a crisis, a situation that is tragic, like the homelessness of the God of the universe, the fact that he was conceived in an unwed teenage peasant womb, all of those things are unfavorable.
They become precursors that in our life, all of those moments, God inhabits those things. That's the very first secure attachment, is that God is with us, God is in us. In Christ, we are in union with him. Like the Irish Celtic proverb that says, we can't put the ocean in a thimble, but we can put the thimble in the ocean. We are in the ocean of God's love.
We can't acquire that, we can't attain that, we don't have to strive for it–it's something we rest in, through spiritual practices and spiritual training, beginning with silence, solitude, stillness, and awareness of our body. Through so many of the things that you speak about and write about, Alison, we can actually begin to embody and to experience that kind of attachment in the midst of and through the brokenness and the pain and the suffering in our life.
Alison Cook: I love that. You give some very vivid examples of this in the book, and I've seen it in my own life. My husband and I had, for years, led Bible studies in a homeless shelter in Boston, where every single week we were with folks who were coming out of prison who, because of addiction, mental illness, all sorts of things where they'd inflicted harm on others, also were survivors of incredible trauma.
I've never felt such holy ground where God showed up. It wasn't because all the lives were suddenly cleaned up. Many of these folks were there, like I said, out of prison, in the unfavorability of those circumstances, where the Holy Spirit is invited in. There's a closeness of God when you feel like your life is at its lowest moment.
I've had moments of this in my own life, where God has shown up the most powerfully. I've turned toward him. Sure. But in the midst of some of my worst moments is when he's shown up the most powerfully.
Michael: Yeah, and he shows up and sometimes he doesn't say anything. It's merely his presence, which brings, occasionally, a sense of comfort, but not always an embodied sense of comfort, but the sense that it's going to be okay.
You're absolutely right. Especially if we read the Beatitudes, it's almost as if the worse a situation is and the less expected it is for God to be there, the more consistently he is there. Of course, he's everywhere, including when we visit the sick, when we take care of the homeless, when we see people in prison, what we've done unto the least of these, that's where God is. It's in the least of our situations, suffering, and circumstances, where God is as well.
Alison Cook: You talk about these five W's and I thought that was such a helpful and powerful framework. You talk about this in the book, because of your own woundedness, because of what was done to you, you did end up finding yourself in situations that hurt your wife, that hurt others.
This is this really hard thing for folks who are coming out of complex trauma, where we find ourselves doing things that harm others. You give us this framework of these five Ws and it's so important for us to understand all the nuances of that framework. Could you share that with us?
Michael: Absolutely. Hurting people hurt people. Pain that's not transformed is transmitted, as a number of spiritual writers have said. I took these five W's as a way of helping people to understand what's going on below the surface. I'm assuming that people who are coming from a Christian framework have been told, the problem is your sin, and you need to repent.
The problem is, that doesn't work, and that didn't work for me as a very disciplined, high-level willpower Christian early on in my faith. For the first 15 years, I was memorizing Scripture, studying the Bible, leading others to Christ, starting a Young Life Club in Cleveland, Ohio that is still running 40 years later, far beyond my expectations, and really doing a lot of the external things that I thought would somehow give me the grace.
That God would be appreciative or impressed, and that would somehow turn the lock in the door that would open into this life that was called the abundant life and freedom. That never worked.
I started to ask the question, what else could be going on here? I did therapy and I got some graduate degrees, and along the lines, I was approached by a professor. I've taken my own experience, my own understanding of the scriptures, and my own understanding of some of the best of psychological and spiritual writing.
The first of the W's, and I want to forewarn your listeners, this first W might be offensive, but it's the word wretched. We all know the word “wretched” from the song, Amazing Grace. It's interesting how many secular versions there are of this song, because it's such a classic song in melody, but also the lyrics.
Presumably, people that aren't even religious are moved by this song. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. If you look up the word wretch in the dictionary, it says something like despicable or vile. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a despicable, vile person like me.
Here's the good news. That's not actually what that word means. There's a small context where that’s what that means, but at the time that song was written, the word wretched meant impoverished. It meant homeless. One of the most poignant images is in Dickens’ writing in the 1800s, A Tale of Two Cities.
We all know A Christmas Carol, but in A Tale of Two Cities, he wrote of wretches as homeless children that were out on the corner begging. What if we thought about our personhood, because there was this sense of disconnection from God way back in the Garden of Eden, that we've lost our way, that we're homeless, and that we're impoverished?
I'll speak for myself, that all the resources I've used to try to make my life work, to try to manage my trauma and my pain, none of them work, and yet I keep thinking that if I spend my money, or spiritually, emotionally, relationally speaking, if I utilize my survival strategies, that somehow I can earn love.
The scriptures actually tell us that we are impoverished. It was St. Thérèse of Lisieux, that Doctor of the Church who passed away at age 24, who left behind this wonderful spirituality of childlike simplicity. She called it “the little way”. She once said that our poverty (and she was referring to spiritual poverty) alone is our capacity for God.
If I've got game, and if my credit card has $20,000 of spiritual spending power on it, and if my wallet is full of $100 bills, and if my piggy bank is full, then I really have no need for God. That's why in Isaiah 55, the prophet says, “Come all you who are thirsty, come and drink. You who have no money, come and buy wine, milk, and bread.”
We actually have to acknowledge that we're impoverished in order to experience the kingdom and to experience the love that is there. So I prefer, instead of talking about wickedness, which is another W, to talk about wretchedness, or our poverty.
The next W is our weakness, and that's simply our vulnerabilities and the human limitations we have. Jesus was weak; he emptied himself of divinity, and part of that meant that he had to sleep, he had to eat, he had to go to the bathroom. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he turned to his friends and said, hey, stay here and pray for me. Not once, but three times.
We tend to come into the world and reveal to others our strengths and our abilities and our gifts, but we take our vulnerabilities and our limitations and we hide them behind our back, or we relegate them to some faraway place. In IFS work, we call these exiles, the parts of us that get lost, the parts of us that get relegated.
People then love us, not based on who we really are, but based on who we think they want us to be, and we become performers, either getting larger than we actually are, or becoming smaller, either expanding our sense of self and performing, or dialing down who we are.
So there's wretchedness, there's weakness, then there's woundedness, and that includes trauma and wounds of presence, things that shouldn't have happened that did happen. But especially related to attachment, and oftentimes more difficult to address, are those things that didn't happen.
Long after I dealt with a lot of my complex trauma, I was left going, now I need to learn how to attach to people and how not to be anxious and avoidant in my pattern of attachment. So there's wretchedness, weakness, woundedness, and then there's warfare. By that, I don't mean devil possession or anything like that, but that we have an accuser who wants to tell us that love doesn't have us.
I believe that the ultimate goal of evil is to whisper in our ear and to shout in our face that we cannot trust love and that love doesn't have us. This is ultimately revealed in the person of Jesus on the cross.
Finally, the fifth W is wiring. So if I had those first four Ws listed, I would draw a circle around those other Ws and say that we are embodied people, that we have this neurobiology, and that our nervous systems are shaped and formed by living in the world and having all those experiences of the other five Ws.
In that inability to self-soothe or regulate or reacting in the world and in relationships, we mishandle our pain in an attempt to try to find that secure attachment, where we can rest and know deep in our body and in our being, not in our left brain and our intellect, that that the Lord is our shepherd and that we shall not want.
Alison Cook: What I love about that is it's so holistic. As I go through this process of sozo, this healing, this becoming more of my true self, I've got an eye on the wretchedness. When you said that about exiles, when I started doing parts work early on, those parts of me that I had shut out showed up in my system as little orphans that I was completely neglecting.
It was life-changing for me to realize, oh my goodness, I need to actually invite these parts of me in. I'm addressing my weaknesses, like you said, I'm addressing the reality of warfare. It is a reality. All of these things matter, and we're looking at things holistically. It's not one size fits all.
I love that you include that. So I thought that was really a powerful way to think about the complexity of healing, the complexity of restoring our relationship with our self God and others.
Michael: Yeah, thank you for pointing that out, because if things are not holistic and don’t represent all the different parts of our humanity, we end up believing that our faith makes us actually less human, and to be more spiritual is to become less human. But to become more spiritual is actually to become more fully human.
Alison Cook: In working with folks about those five W's, I am always thinking about what's going on here in this marriage that's hard or in this friendship that's hard. Is there some woundedness? Is there some wiring? Is there some warfare? It's really important to have a sense of the primary thing at the root of this. When we have that framework, we can be more astute and more discerning when we're trying to be in this space of healing and walking with the people we love.
Michael, you bring in both this really refined psychological lens with this deeply spiritually-informed contemplative lens of there's something bigger going on. We have to do the work - and also, there's something bigger going on. There are two things you talk about in the latter chapters of the book that I loved, because we don't talk about them enough.
The first is this word mysticism. I loved this. Tell us what you mean by that and why that's important in this journey of healing. This isn't something relegated to saints and hyper-religious people or hyper-spiritual people from the past; there's a mystical component to all of us that can really be a part of this journey.
Michael: Thank you for asking. In all the podcasts I've done about the book so far, no one has talked about this and I actually feel like it's one of the more important chapters, even though it's later in the book. Because it's really the goal of everything.
Attachment, even though we can now see on spect scans and MRIs and things like that what happens in the brain, and therefore we can have a scientific aspect to it, it's really fundamentally an imagination, mystical-driven process. So first, let me define mysticism.
A mystic is somebody who seeks inner experience with God. So they're seeking experience, which is a kind of knowledge biblically, but it's not left brain. It's not intellectual. It's not cognitive. It's not knowing about God. It's having an encounter with God. I would argue that's the whole point of why human beings were created–not to have more Bible studies and to learn more about God, but to live in that ocean of God's love.
I want to quote Karl Rahner, who was a German Catholic theologian, a philosopher. He wrote in the 1960s, “The devout Christian of the future will either be a mystic, one who has experienced something, or he will cease to be anything at all”.
I'm afraid that what's happening in the church today, is that many people who were Christians, who now can't use Christian language, or call themselves by certain identifiers like evangelical or even a Jesus follower, are ceasing to be anything at all, and yet their hearts are still longing for the transcendent. Their hearts are still longing to be attached to love.
Part of what I tried to do in writing about mysticism and in the whole book is to give people a new lens by which they can see their spirituality and their relationship to God in Christ. Also, to give a new language to speak about what's going on inside that blends the contemplative and the psychological and then ultimately to give people a path to experience God.
Mysticism and that conversation really is linked to the conversation around imagination. We can go there if you want to in a minute. When we start talking about mysticism, it makes the religious professionals and denominational leaders very on edge, because it feels woo-woo.
It feels like we're throwing out Scripture. But the more deeply I have delved into Scripture and seen Scripture with my imagination, and tried to place myself in the stories rather than try to learn facts about God, it not only brings more transformation and healing and spiritual and emotional rest inside of me, but it also draws me into more of a mystery.
So it feels like there's more experience of God, but there's less ability for me to explain Him, and there's less necessity for me to have to defend God, which I spent a lot of the first decades of my life in faith doing–apologetics and trying to convince people of something that they simply didn't believe.
Alison Cook: I love that. I often now have that experience in nature, hiking in the mountains. We have this horrible fire up here in the Rockies. That was devastating to so many of us. There was a large background to it, but I was walking in the mountains and I had a moment and it was what you described.
It wasn't like I was annoyed with God. I was trying to avoid God, but there was this moment outside, the leaves were crunching, where I felt that connection with love. It was palpable. I wrote about it. I sent it out into a blog. I usually write much more practical things. That blog got more responses, to your point.
There's something about, this isn't this woo-woo thing. We're trying to cultivate that experience of God with us. We don't always live there, but we want to feel that. We want to feel that experience of God with us, Emmanuel.
I love that you're naming all of this work that we do; our deep breathing, to learn how to soothe our nervous system, to work out hard things in our relationships, to heal from our past trauma–there are these moments, these glimmers, to use Deb Dana's word, of something divine, something beyond, and we can maybe put ourselves more and more in that path.
I'm curious, personally, how those moments have shown up for you and given you encouragement and kept you going on your own path.
Michael: I've had many moments like that, but I've had to develop awareness and attentiveness. Sometimes there's still a voice in my head. I would argue that the scriptures and disciplines and liturgy for people that are part of that background and community, that those are all really good and essential things, but we all hit seasons of our life, particularly when trauma and anxiety and dissociation and depression or other mental health disorders are there.
We can't walk in some of those same paths that we once did. We have to look for ways to experience beauty in the midst of our suffering. I have the strange habit of memorizing first lines of books, and Kay Redfield Jamison wrote a book called An Unquiet Mind. It's about bipolar disorder.
I've read all of her stuff, and the first line in her book, which is her memoir of bipolar, says, “People go mad in idiosyncratic ways”. Brilliant idea. There's no two people that develop a disorder, even if it's the same disorder, the same way. I've become fond of saying, “people heal in idiosyncratic ways”.
So when I was a brand new Christian and discipled by my Young Life leader, he sat down, he said, here's what you do. You have a quiet time and you pray this way and you read this way. That was really great for me, but within a couple of years, especially in the midst of my struggles, I needed something else, and there was no one who pointed that out to me.
One of the most profound examples of this is about 12 years ago, when I went to a family reunion. As you might imagine from some of the stories in my book, my family has been fraught with conflict for decades and there's been estrangement. This was the first time that we'd gotten together as a nuclear family.
We did this evening sunset cruise on Lake Michigan. We stayed in Saugatuck. There were about 250 people on this boat, and we went offshore far enough to not be able to see land, and the engines went out. I'm still coming out of my trauma at this time. I'm like, great, I'm going to die in the middle of Lake Michigan. This is probably a terrorist.
It was really quite irrational. Then the captain came over the loudspeaker and he said, ladies and gentlemen, turn to the other side of the boat, and the clouds parted and there was a beautiful sunset. It didn't always happen there because of the clouds. It was this flaming, orange ball that was one of the most intense, glorious sunsets, and it was high up in the sky.
As it lowered, people came closer together and huddled, these strangers in mass, and as it got right to the horizon, it became absolutely quiet. No one told us to be that way. It was an absolute hush. Then it went lower and lower. I have chills as I tell the story. As it disappeared behind the horizon, there were about two seconds of absolute silence. It's gone. Then spontaneously, the 250 people burst into applause and cheering.
Alison Cook: That's amazing.
Michael: It was as if they were saying, God, well done. I don't know if all the people were religious or if they were all atheists, but it doesn't really matter because it was so overwhelming and so sensory and compelling. About 250 of us were standing together, where it may not have been the same response if it was one person on a cliff or a beach, but it was absolutely glorious.
It was like there was a standing ovation for God. In the same way that if you see a symphony or a U2 show or something like that, you have to stand up and lift up your arms. That moment in the midst of this very tense, anxiety-producing, somewhat triggering several days with my family became like this kiss and hug from God saying, Michael, I've got you. I've got you. I show up, even here, miles away from the shoreline in one of the Great Lakes.
Alison Cook: That is so powerful. It’s hard, and that experience doesn't necessarily zap you right out of it, but it's God breaking through. There's that moment where something bigger is happening that gives you enough to keep going. It's beautiful. Before we wind down, Michael, I want to bring in this idea of the imagination.
When I got to that chapter in the book, I started weeping. When I stumbled upon Internal Family Systems, IFS, at the end of my doctoral work, I was on this quest for understanding of the soul. I didn't find it in my mind. I didn't find it in all the academic knowledge. I didn't find it in all the psychology theories.
Here was this model, IFS, that allowed me to connect with parts of myself using what CS Lewis calls, the baptized imagination. There's this holy ability to imagine something that takes me out of my head, that takes me out of my limited finite abilities. It was life-changing to me to this day.
Speaking of CS Lewis, his baptized imagination, Tolkien's baptized imagination, I will still sometimes go back and read the last battle, the last story in the Narnia series. He imagined this world that is rife with great theology, but it's the story in it that actually gives me hope, that helps me reconnect to God.
There's something about the world of the imagination that is holy and is so important for us in this work of healing trauma. We have to find a way to both incorporate it and imagine something bigger. Talk to me a little bit about that.
I found that chapter so personally moving because I can forget that. I can get back into my head. I can get back into good, spiritual formation habits and all that's important, but there's something transcendent that happens when we access that baptized imagination. Tell me a little bit about that and why that was important for you to include.
Michael: In 1996, I had the privilege of sitting down with Eugene and Jan Peterson for three hours in their home in Vancouver when he was at Regent College. So I was with Eugene and I asked him a silly question.
I was a contributing editor for the Mars Hill Review, no relation to the Mars Hill Church, which looked at the intersection of the visual arts, music, literature, poetry, theater, et cetera, with Christian faith. Back then, very few people were doing that. It was a cutting edge thing. Now, that's much, much more common.
Eugene, who had been speaking on the arts and the imagination for a long time, called what Lewis called the baptized imagination, the sanctified imagination. I said, why are the arts important? He looked at me like, that's a dumb question, but he's too kind, he didn't say that.
He said, Michael, we're dealing with the invisible. Everything about our faith is dealing with the invisible, and something clicked in me. I went, so I need to actually fan the flames that it's good that it's invisible, and I'm gonna have to use my imagination. I had read enough of Eugene's books, and The Message was about halfway out.
Part of the gift he gave us with The Message is the poetry there that allowed us to think beyond the normal words, because he believed that for disaffected outsiders and for bored insiders in the Church, that we needed new language to fire up the story so that we could actually understand the story.
Back to C. S. Lewis, I love what you said about his fiction, because throughout the world people know Narnia. All of the movies that are there are about the story of God. It is the story of creation and redemption, of birth and death and resurrection and ascension.
It's there. The names have been changed to draw in the innocent, if you will, and to make the guilty know that they're welcome at the table. But I want to read a quote from Lewis because he wrote this in the 1950s, I believe, long before we had the neuroscience that we now have today.
He said in regard to imagination, the two hemispheres of my mind were in sharp contrast. On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myths. On the other, a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all that I loved, I believed to be imaginary. Nearly all I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless.
What Lewis did with his work, and to a large degree even in his nonfiction work, is that he brought together the real and the imaginary. He helped us to see that we can actually see reality more with our imagination than with our rational mind.
I could ask you, what's five times five? 25. What's seven plus seven? 14. You could give me the answers, but if I said, why is five times five 25? We would have to use our imagination about that and we would not be able to use our left brain. I'll often ask people to tell me what their favorite food is.
Alison, what's your favorite food?
Alison Cook: I'm gonna say pizza.
Michael: Okay, what kind of pizza?
Alison Cook: Pepperoni.
Michael: All right, and do you like cheese on it?
Alison Cook: Yes.
Michael: Okay, so I'm gonna ask you right now to close your eyes, and I would like your listeners, unless they're driving a car or operating heavy machinery, to close their eyes, and to imagine a pizza. Imagine your favorite pizza from your favorite pizza shop or from the store, and imagine what that pizza looks like on top with the pepperoni, and how the juice has come out over the cheese, and imagine the crust.
Imagine what it would be like to pick it up in your hand and to take a bite of the gooey cheese and the tomato sauce and the pepperoni and to taste the juice. Then imagine what it would be like to swallow it, and imagine that fullness in your stomach and the satisfaction between your taste buds and chemicals being released in your stomach saying, okay, satiety or fullness is starting to happen.
Then take a breath. What are you feeling right now as you imagine that pepperoni pizza?
Alison Cook: Hungry.
Michael: There you go.
Alison Cook: I have warm feelings. It put me back in a fun family gathering at my favorite pizza place. There's a lot to it.
Michael: If you were to go eat after this podcast, you'd probably be less likely to eat cornflakes and more likely to eat something akin to pepperoni pizza. Wouldn't it be strange if I said to you, Alison, that wasn't real. That's strange to ask if it's real. In GK Chesterton's biography of St. Francis, Chesterton wrote in the introduction that children tend to engage in make believe and adults look down upon that.
But children see far more of reality through make believe than the adults who live in rationalism. We have this capacity to imagine because God has made us in his image, and God is the first one full of imagination. The Trinity dreamt us up. In Jeremiah 1, it says, before I formed you, I knew you.
I'm not sure of the Hebrew word there, but one could paraphrase that as, before I actually imagined you, I knew something of you, and then I set you apart. That set-apartness was not put off on a shelf, but set apart for a time and a moment for his imagination to be fulfilled. I don't know that God ever imagined my life to take the detours that it did.
Some would argue that God knew all of those things. I would actually dispute that without denying his sovereignty. But I would argue that part of his imagination is to meet us at every single point of our brokenness, and by entering into, incarnating, and inhabiting that brokenness, his imagination expands and then creates these opportunities for transformation that is a collaborative process between us consenting and saying yes to God, and God's always generative, creative process to bring forth life.
That when God touches up and bumps up against brokenness, when we consent and say yes. There's no other alternative but for something that is life, and life-giving, and good, and true, and beautiful, to be generated out of that. So imagination is absolutely essential, and we all sing the song based on Ephesians 1:18, Open the eyes of my heart, Lord, open the eyes of my heart, I want to see you.
I regularly pray, God, open the eyes of my heart that I would know the hope to which I'm called, which is to say, open the eyes of my heart so that I can become what you have imagined for me and what I can become, what the imagination and the hope and the vision and the longing that you put in my own heart.
Alison Cook: We want that ability to imagine, when you're coming out of something like you've described, Michael, the atrocities. We want that capacity to imagine something beautiful, something good, something like that sunset that you saw.
Sometimes Aslan from the Narnia Tales gives me that, when I feel like I can't find God, but I can almost imagine Aslan, and I've learned there's something in that. There's something there. Because there's an essence there that is good. It is what keeps us going and gives us hope.
I love that you bring us toward that at the end of the book. I actually think it is a missing piece in this journey that is so powerful and so important.
Michael: Great summary of the importance of imagination, Alison, and I tried to unpack that in the book. I would add that even our human longing for the Scriptures are filled with this invitation to long for. Jesus said, blessed are the hungry and thirsty for righteousness.
He invited people to him in John 7, all you who are thirsty, come and streams of living water will flow. In Isaiah 55, you who are thirsty. Longing is a desire for something that is not yet. Every time we long for something, there's this imagination for something more, as it's related to our particular situation.
For more in my marriage. For more experience of God. For more self control. For me to say no to things that I don't want to be eating. For me to have self-control to go and exercise when I want to, instead of sleeping in. For more experience of life. For more time in the Rocky Mountains.
We cannot long for without imagination. Hopefully this gives people language for that.
Alison Cook: That's so good. It's not fantasy. It's a conscious and intentional posture of the heart. I love that opening of the heart to what might be possible. It's so good. Michael, this book, I cannot say more strongly to those listening to this. It's so readable.
You share a lot of your story but you bring in some incredibly rich resources from, as we've heard today, from our spiritual practices, from good psychology. It's such a good resource. Tell me a little bit about how people can find Sacred Attachment and what your hope is for folks who pick up a copy.
Michael: My hope is that people can experience a trauma-informed invitation to a whole new spiritual life. My hope is that people can reimagine a new kind of spiritual life with God, that's really based in rest and peace, and overflow, and that our service and our contribution and the way that we show up in the world that is life-giving.
That it comes out of a solid foundation inside of us, and that ultimately that every reader will understand that I can be securely attached to God, and that's a work that I do in relationship with others and in relationship with God, and most of all, that attachment has nothing to do with me.
Once again, I love this phrase borrowed from Martin Laird in his book, Into the Silent Land. He's a contemplative author and he says that most of us are like people fishing for minnows while standing on the back of a whale. This union or attachment with God that we're seeking and desiring is something that we never have to acquire or lose or attain or work up.
It's something that we fall back into. I would hope that people have healing of their brokenness, and my hope would be that people have healing of their experience and their image of God, especially toxic and unhealthy beliefs about God. My hope would be that it would bring joy and lightness of being to people.
Alison Cook: You did that. It certainly did that for me. I'm so grateful that you wrote it and that you took the time to walk us through some of your own story today. How can people find you and find your resources?
Michael: Yeah, my website is restoringthesoul.com. Restoring the Soul is a ministry in Denver, Colorado, where we do two-week intensive counseling with folks who are looking to get unstuck from trauma and significant relational issues. We work with couples and individuals, and you can find my personal website as well, michaeljohncusick.com.
The book is available on Amazon starting on January 7th, 2025, but it can be pre-ordered before then everywhere fine books are sold.
Alison Cook: I love it. I love it. I can't recommend it more to folks and so grateful for you and all the work that you've done to bring healing to others out of your own pain.
Michael: Thank you so much, Alison. Great being with you.
Feeling exhaustion or post-holiday blues? How can we step into the New Year feeling refreshed and empowered?
In this honest and vulnerable conversation, spiritual director and author Anjuli Paschall and I unpack our own journeys through holiday people-pleasing and how to reset for the New Year. As we close out the year, many of us grapple with a mix of relief and disappointment, compounded by the pressure of New Year's resolutions and the desire to start fresh. Anjuli offers her expert guidance on understanding these dynamics and introduces practical steps and spiritual practices to help us move forward with hope and clarity.
Here’s what we cover:
* How to break free from holiday people-pleasing
* The #1 way to stop trying to control other people’s feelings
* Why post-holiday let down happens & what to do
* How to develop and cultivate aspirational feelings in your body
* Why the hope of a new year sometimes hurts & how to navigate those feelings
* Prayers to move through complicated emotions
Resources:
- Episode 131: Navigating Holiday Emotions—An Honest, Heartfelt Conversation About Guilt, Nostalgia, and Exhaustion with Author & Spiritual Director Anjuli Paschall
- Feel: A Collection of Liturgies Offering Hope for Every Complicated Emotion
- Lovealways.anjuli on Instagram
- anjulipaschall.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 30: Protecting What’s Good Without Denying What’s Hard at the Holidays
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so thrilled to bring you today's episode with a repeat guest. If you've been following along, you might remember a beautiful conversation I had a few weeks ago around Thanksgiving with Anjuli Paschall.
Anjuli is a spiritual director and she's the author of the new book, Feel: A Collection of Liturgies Offering Hope for Every Complicated Emotion. I loved this conversation with Anjuli so much that I wanted her to come back to talk with us about some of these post-holiday emotions that we tend to feel.
In Episode 131, we talked about the emotions that tend to come up before the holidays. We talked about some of the guilt that you might feel, the pressure, the exhaustion, and the stress that many of us carry into the season. The words and the prayers that she offered to us in that episode were so powerful and were so helpful to me personally, that I knew I wanted to invite her back.
Today, Anjuli is here to help us explore what happens after the holidays. The decorations are coming down, the gatherings are over, and often we're left with some complicated post-holiday feelings. Together, we're going to dive into some of the post-holiday blues that can follow the hustle and bustle of the holidays.
We're going to talk about what it might look like to feel content after the holiday season, as opposed to exhausted and let down. We talk about some of the gloom that can linger when we're in between different seasons, when something good has ended, but something new hasn't yet quite become. We talk about the nuanced interplay of creativity and hope as we step into a new year.
In addition to being an author and spiritual director, Anjuli is the mom of five kids, and her voice is so vulnerable, insightful, and grounded in deep faith. I know you'll find her as encouraging and life-giving as I do. I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with Anjuli Paschall.
***
Alison Cook: I so loved our conversation about pre-holiday emotions, about all of the guilt and the exhaustion. It was so helpful to me personally. It was so helpful to many listeners, to process some of these specific emotions that get tangled up inside of us. In Feel, you've created this anthology of 75 emotions. I was thinking about post-holiday emotions, because I always feel a lot of emotions, especially that week after Christmas and before new year's.
I always feel emotions that I have complicated feelings about. I'm curious, what do you think are some of the emotions that come up after the holiday dust has settled–when you wake up after Christmas day or even into the week after?
Anjuli: Yeah, that is a great question. I think none of us go into the holidays thinking, oh, on the other side, I want to come out exhausted, overwhelmed, stressed, and depleted. We have great hopes that we will come out well, that we'll do it differently this year.
Alison Cook: Yeah, exactly.
Anjuli: I don't think we can do the holidays differently unless we understand what we're doing. I don't always think it's, I'll buy less, do less, participate in less. That can help, but I don't know if that's always the cure. Because you can do very little and still feel depleted, exhausted, stressed, and tired.
You have to explore, what's happening in my internal world, that year after year, I come out on the other side not the way I hoped I would be? I don't actually have this particular feeling in my book, there's one very closely connected to it, but one feeling I experience and I hear a lot of people experiencing is the feeling of relief.
You put all the Christmas stuff away and it feels clean. Your house is back to normal. You're in a regular routine again. All the house guests have gone. There's a new year. There's a sense of refresh and restart. The feeling I would connect to that is free. But it's an interesting feeling because it makes you wonder, what are you relieved of? What were you doing that makes you like, oh, thank God I made it through that?
Alison Cook: About putting away Christmas decorations–I want to talk about that. We'll come to that one later. I feel a real letdown because there's something about the festivities and the lights and the decorations. I feel so sad when we have to take them down. That might link to nostalgia, which we talked about last time. I'm not sure, but there can be that feeling of letdown.
It is so interesting when we talk about freedom or relief. What are we feeling it from? Several years ago, going into the holidays, I noticed a pattern that every year I would wipe myself out trying to get the perfect gifts, the perfect everything. By the time the day came, I was exhausted.
Even my family was like, why are you doing this? So I made a conscious choice. I began to notice that tipping point of, I can stop. My work is done. This is good enough. I began to notice that, and consciously over the next few years, I would make myself stop at a certain point. Stop buying more gifts, doing more things, and it worked.
I'm wondering if that gets at that “free from”. I noticed there was a part of me early on, when the kids are young and you want everything to be perfect, there was a part of me that was pushing me to do things that other parts of me could become aware of. We're not moving the needle on anybody's Christmas joy with these extra gifts. Nobody needed these.
I made myself consciously look at that and assess that and make a mental note that the next year, I was going to really notice the impulse to do more, take a pause, and take a deep breath. It really worked. I wonder if that's a little bit of what you're talking about–that pressure we put on ourselves. Where does that come from?
Anjuli: I think you nailed it. The sister to that is taking responsibility for things that are not your responsibility. It's even the joy of other people. “I'm responsible to give my children the greatest, magical, most beautiful experience of Christmas.” We take that responsibility.
I do this too. I think this is the tipping point for me year after year. I'm relieved because it's like, oh, I don't have to deal with my in-laws or my sister or brother, whoever it is. I don't have to carry the responsibility of their experience.
It was a relief for me. Oh, it's done. Okay, I don't have to do that anymore. And realizing I never actually had to do that in the first place. I took that responsibility upon myself.
Alison Cook: That part of you that feels so responsible for everyone's happiness or everyone's experience, what is it afraid would happen if you didn't work so hard?
Anjuli: I think it really links to some childhood stuff. There's chaos, but if I can be the one who brings joy or brings help or brings my personality or humor, it'll take the air out of the pressure.
And there's that deep belief of, I can help. I can be the one who minimizes the chaos.
Alison Cook: There's that conditioning of, I can be the one to make Christmas magical for everybody, which is beautiful—and—exhausting. Yeah.
Anjuli: For me, even heading into the holidays and coming out of it is like, okay. What am I responsible for? And giving people back their own feelings. Oh, actually, my mom is responsible for her joy and her sorrow and her disappointment. My brother-in-law is responsible for his anger. It's such a helpful thing to give back responsibility to the person who it's due.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Their joy is their responsibility. It's not actually yours.
Anjuli: Yeah. Let me ask you this question, because I bring this conversation up a lot with people, especially with feelings. Do you think that you can control how other people feel?
Alison Cook: So the more scientific, logical, rational part of me that knows the right answer says no, we can't control how other people feel. And also, I don't think it's a complete binary. It's tricky. I think it's nuanced. This is where codependency comes in.
It's so tricky because we do have the power to impact how someone feels. If I know that there's something that's really going to bring you joy and I do that thing out of the goodness of my heart and it brings that joy to you, I've played a part in your experience of joy. That's the healthy part of it. That's what I don't want to lose. This is why I think this is tricky, but I have to be so clear inside myself, what my motivation is.
Anjuli: Yeah.
Alison Cook: When I do this thing to bring you joy, do I have the bandwidth for it? And is it a free gift? When it's a free gift that I want to give with no strings attached, that's a beautiful thing, but it's a slippery slope. Because it could be, I'm going to use this word, manipulation. I want to orchestrate everybody around me because then I feel good about myself.
Or I want to feel good about myself because I've been the good daughter or I've been the good parent or I've been the good sibling. So I think it's really nuanced. I'm curious what you think.
Anjuli: I want to push back on people when I have this conversation. Because we can't control how people feel. I think there are nuances, but I think where I really want to press on people is that you actually could do everything in your power to do the thing you think that person needs or wants that will bring them joy.
But in the end, you could do handstands and you could give and give of yourself and you could break your back and you could do all the things and they could still not feel joy.
Alison Cook: 100 percent.
Anjuli: I think that's really hard for people to really embrace. Because we have so habituated ourselves, through what I even shared from my childhood, if I do these things, then this will be the result. What's so tricky is it probably worked in a lot of people's lives. If I'm the good daughter, sister, wife, then they won't be mad at me, or then there'll be peace.
It works to a degree until it doesn't work. Until you break down or that relationship breaks down, because it's fixated on the transactional relationship.
If we bring it back to the holidays, I do this and I know so many women do. There is a good desire in there to bless and love people. But I also think it's really hard to do some things without hooks in there. If I do this, it will bring a good Christmas, or then my kids will get along, or then they'll love me back or want to come visit again.
I think there is a real work of the soul and work of the heart to relinquish any power we think we have to really transform someone's experience of Christmas.
Alison Cook: I love this conversation because again, bringing up that word codependency–when you are recovering from being a people pleaser, being someone who takes your identity out of trying to control the emotions of others, it's really helpful to remind yourself, I cannot control anybody else's experience.
It forces you to that accountability. If I do this thing, am I doing it because I want to do it out of the overflow of my own heart, regardless of how it is received? But that's a recovery journey. I know in my own life, that has absolutely been a recovery journey, even to this day, of really getting quiet enough in my own soul, and asking what is motivating me here? Am I trying to earn love? Or is this something I wish to do for this human without any expectation of any outcome from them?
Anjuli: Sure. It's like the prayer that's so close to my heart. I am in recovery too, that God would give me a pure heart. In the Sermon on the Mount: blessed are the pure in heart. It's such a desire of mine to love from a pure heart, because what a gift we can give other people when we can do that.
Alison Cook: So bringing this back to those emotions we were talking about at the beginning of this, Anjuli, relief and freedom. There's this relief. I'm curious what you think from your inventory of emotions, what is the emotion that we feel when there is that purity of heart out of our giving? I think that's a really nuanced idea–what does that feel like when I do this?
It's the opposite of resentment. It's the opposite of martyrdom. I did this out of the joy in my own heart. Take it as you see fit. I am good. I am satisfied. What is that emotion that we feel on that pure side of giving?
Anjuli: I would say the closest ones that come to mind are contentment and gratitude. It's a piece that is not determined by circumstance. When things don't go the way we hoped they would go, or the way we intended they would go, it doesn't shake your security.
Alison Cook: So let's imagine for a minute if we could feel and tap into a sense of contentment post-holiday. What would that feel like for us? I'd love to hear some of your thoughts because that feels like an emotion that we strive for. Walk us through a little bit about what contentment feels like. How do we experience that?
Anjuli: Well, the first indicator is how you feel in your body. Your heart rate is at ease, your chest is relaxed, your throat isn't closed up, your mind isn't cluttered. Your palms are relaxed. It's the posture of open palms. I think when we pay attention to our body, it's definitely an indicator of what's going on in our heart.
It's really at peace. It's a place of surrender. It's a place of, your will be done, God. I think our contentment holds hands very closely with trust in God. When we trust God with surface level things all the way down to our very beings, the soul of our being, we can relax more.
Alison Cook: I love that. Even if we feel some of the let down, some of the disappointment, or even some of the exhaustion. For the listener who hasn't felt, after the holidays, this deep sense of a contentment (if we do, that's wonderful), I'm trying to imagine, what does that feel like? Sometimes as we imagine and tap into that in our bodies, it helps us have a target in a way.
Anjuli: That's a great thing that you brought up. I love the way this conversation is going, because that's not a feeling I would typically describe that we feel after the holidays, but what I think comes up for me is, gosh, isn't that the hope? That we're here in January and we can look backwards and be like, it was hard. It was messy. I can't believe that person did that. It didn't go the way I thought I did, but here I am today, moving into a new year.
Lord, I entrust what it was into your hands and know that you will use it. Even the pain, even the hardship, even the exhaustion, as seeds that you will water and grow in my life and hopefully in the lives of other people. You will use my not-enough, where I didn't live up to who I wanted to be, and you will grow contentment in my heart, but also in their hearts.
Alison Cook: love that. So our first emotion for post-holidays is aspirational. But if we have this idea of what if I could experience more contentment, it would require a little bit more of that releasing of the grip of both my own desires and also the people I love. I can't control them.
Anjuli: Letting what was to rest. Letting what did happen, happen, and coming to peace with it.
Alison Cook: I love that. I do feel like there's something to this idea of the post-holiday blues. I'm curious what your thoughts are on some of those types of emotions. Anjuli, I know you said in our last conversation that there's a component of sadness that you actually really don't mind. Is that right?
Anjuli: The feeling that actually comes up for me when I hear you talk is the feeling of gloomy.
Alison Cook: Oh, that's a great word.
Anjuli: You're not depressed. You're sad, but you're not crying in your bed at night.
Alison Cook: It's different. It's not quite grief. Gloomy is a good word.
Anjuli: It's funny, Alison. Gloomy was the very last feeling I added. I remember I emailed my publisher like, we have to add this feeling, because it's not as deep as sadness. But it's something we experience in seasons of transition, when there has been good. I finished a season with my son's volleyball team.
I don't know if anyone listening has had kids who played a sport, but for that season, there’s that little community, the people we saw four or five times a week. You see them more than your best friends, and you have this common bond of cheering for your children and wearing the same color and analyzing all the plays and talking trash about the referees.
You form this connection, and then when that season's done, it evaporates. It's gone, and you don't really see these people that come to be your friends anymore. The feeling of gloomy comes when a season changes and there's a loss.
Alison Cook: Oh, I love that. That is it. That's what I feel. I'm curious if the listener will relate, because it doesn't feel as deep nor as sad, but it feels gloomy. What a bummer. Yeah. So talk us through a little bit, how do you think through and pray through where there's a little gloominess?
Anjuli: The most important thing is that we name it, but then to acknowledge it, because it's a higher level feeling. It's a very easy one to neglect or minimize or dismiss. When you're furious, you can't really dismiss that. It's so obvious. Even disappointment, that's a mid-level feeling. It's hard to avoid disappointment. It sticks to you.
But gloominess, you could easily drink it away, Netflix it away, shop it away. I think it's important for us to name what it is and acknowledge, yeah, that was a really good thing. I am sad that it's ending and that it may never be the same again.
Alison Cook: I love that, because what that does is give credit to the good that you're now missing. Even in your example, with the end of a sports season, which I totally get–there's excitement around it, there's energy around it, there's vitality around it–when it's over, it's this weird feeling of, oh that's a bummer.
If you don't acknowledge that, you might miss what was good. The fact that you're aware of that feeling afterward helps you understand what was really good about what came before. Yeah. I love that.
Anjuli: Would it be helpful to read a little bit from that section?
Alison Cook: I would love that. It's one of my favorite parts. I love listening to you.
Anjuli: A liturgy for when I feel gloomy. I open my heart to you, God. I feel this gloominess in my body. I'm not sure what to do with my sadness today. Give me wisdom to know what in my heart needs to be processed and prayed. My gloominess comes and goes like fog.
I feel the ache move through me. I feel loss snagging my soul. I feel hesitant to camp here for too long. But here I am now. I trust that you care about my life. As insignificant as my sorrow may be, I believe that you do care. Life is changing. Seasons come and go. I can't hold anything still. I can't control the passage of time.
I refrain from thinking about my feelings. Instead, I feel them, hold them, and acknowledge them. I unfold my heart to you. I don't need to edit my words or feelings with you. God, in this place, you are my constant. Your spirit sorts through my spirit. Your spirit comforts my spirit. Your spirit consoles and welcomes me to come undone.
Sadness exists even when words do not. I trust that you will bring me understanding. Though I can't shake this feeling, I trust that you are unshaken by it. Though I can't make sense of all my circumstances, I trust that you will make my path straight in due time. As seasons change, so do my feelings.
I wait on you. I wait on the premise that this is not the end. I wait on the promises of your love to see me through. I know this feeling isn't final, but a passage place. It is a place I must move through in prayer, and it becomes a holy ground for hope to transpire. You are with me in this liminal space.
I trust that even here, you are forming my heart in love. Help me see what I need to let go of, help me see what to hold on to. Once again, I entrust my life and the lives of those I love into your care. As life changes, I believe with all of my being that you desire my good and you are forming me in your kindness.
The growing pains I feel now are growing me to be one who loves as I have been loved. As I feel my mood swing and sway, I lean on you. I allow my sadness to be the space where your love welcomes me to come undone. Lord, hear my prayer.
Alison Cook: I love that. As I was listening, I got these images of what you want to do on a gloomy day, or even in the gloom of post holiday. Take care of yourself, wrap up in a blanket, maybe watch a cozy movie, maybe have that cup of hot chocolate. When you do those things for yourself, after having honored what you feel, it means more. It’s about really being present and taking care of myself through it.
Anjuli: Yeah. There is a piece of it where it's with transition. With the gloominess that comes, I think there is such a power in asking God, what from that last season can I hold on to? The season is gone, December 25th is gone, but I want something to live on inside of me and I want to take that with me into the next season.
Maybe there are things I actually need to let go of. Okay, my kid will never be a baby again. This is my last year with a baby. Okay. I want to honor that and know that next year they'll be running around and saying words, and so I'm gonna let that season go, things like that. What can I hold on to and what can I let go of?
Alison Cook: I love that. I love thinking through these nuanced emotions. I love gloomy. That's a great word. The other thing I was thinking of, Anjuli, as you were describing that, are children's books and imagination. It gives you a category for that. I was thinking about the gloomy characters that have a place in our imaginations, and that takes the edge off of it.
Anjuli: So true. We need that.
Alison Cook: What's another emotion that you think of, whether for the post-holiday or the anticipation of the new year?
Anjuli: We could go either with exhausted or creative. The new year's resolutions, the thing I'm going to do, or we could even circle back to longing.
Alison Cook: Let’s do creative, because I think there's something about the liminality between seasons, after Christmas yet before the new year, that in-between place. I think there is a seedbed there for the creativity of the new year. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Anjuli: Yeah. What a clean slate. So in line with New Year's resolutions, I have a word of the year. Some people are like, this is the year. It's such a fresh motivation in that liminal space of change. It's the ambition, the power, and then for some people, it can also be a discouragement if we look at our lives and want to get things back on track.
If it's our weight, if it's our mental health, if it's our finances, that can be a very defeating feeling if you have failed again and again at becoming the person or being where you want to be in life. It can be a smack across the face of, why even try? But there is something about the new year that's rejuvenating.
I do feel pretty creative at the beginning of the year, even though I'm not a New Year's resolution person. I don’t really even want to have a word this year. Every time I see people do it, I think I’m totally going to do that this year. I'm going to have a word and a verse and this is the year.
But it sparks my imagination. How do I want to imagine this year going? What are some dreams I want to revisit? What are some longings that are there? There is a fresh energy when January rolls around.
Alison Cook: You're right about that, that there can be a double edged sword to the pressure on the new year. It can invite those parts of us that get really excited and set all the goals and then other parts. It reminds me a little bit of right before Christmas, where parts of us get overzealous in ways that aren't really integrated with the rest of us.
I love that word creativity, because even in that feeling, it's not a binary. It's not, I'm going to go for it with all my goals, nor is it, I'm always going to wind up back where I was, so why bother? Creativity is about imagination and what could be. How could I imagine something new this year?
Maybe it's a little bit different from what I've tried in the past. I like that. There's something to that rhythm, with the new year, in a healthy way that isn't about the pressure of new year's goals.
Anjuli: Yes. I love that so much. Do you make a new year's resolution?
Alison Cook: I kind of make resolutions. I found that the week after Christmas, because it is that gloomy time, I like the interplay of that with creativity. So what I do is I don't call it resolutions, but I do some planning. I map out what I think, and I try to be very realistic. There are the pie in the sky goals, but when I really look at it, I go, wait a minute.
I use that time to really dig deep. If I could do a couple of things, what would they be? That's something I feel like I've gotten better at. I've gotten better at being more grounded in my body. There's obviously the 10 pie in the sky things I'd love, but I think about what's really in front of me and what would be meaningful to me if I could actually move the needle a little bit.
I use that week for that kind of planning, which sounds less romantic. I can see by your face that you relate to me, but it actually feels good. It feels satisfying. Yeah. Because I actually usually do it.
Anjuli: It's such a great place to evaluate what's working and what's not working. How can we reinvent that to serve the purpose that we're hoping?
Alison Cook: Yeah. How do you look at that for yourself?
Anjuli: I am such a feeler that when I don't feel creativity, it's so hard to be creative. It’s this weird backwards thing for me that it actually requires some discipline. You want to run that marathon, you actually have to put some shoes on. I love the dreamy part of it.
And then when it gets hard, sometimes I'm like, I didn't really want to run that marathon. Even writing this liturgy was such a work of my heart, because there are nuances to creativity. There are some really beautiful, pure things about it. And then there's some things that can bleed into our creativity that can be harmful for us.
Even writing was such a journey for my own heart of, oh, I really can see the beauty and see the harm that can be done. So this is a liturgy for when I feel creative.
I feel creative and I feel it in my body. My creativity has a story. In some ways, it has been received, hidden, set aside, or caused me hurt. For a moment, I opened my heart to you, God. God, I feel a spark flickering inside of me. A small desire is growing.
I feel it. I can't stop imagining what could come. When I close my eyes, I see all the pieces falling into place and my soul accelerates. I feel something waking up inside of me. It's risky and right and everything I've been wanting. I can come alive. The anticipation of what could come is all consuming. I want to create something beautiful.
God, I believe my hands, heart, and pent up hope all have a purpose. I want to pour all of my time, energy, and affection into this new possibility. The spark wasn't a fire kindled by mere magic. It came to me. It was ignited by you. It started someplace else. In the beginning. God, you created. I want to use creativity to get beyond the beginning.
I believe creativity will take me forward someplace else, some place that is better. I try to build a structure that will transport me from my reality to a better one in the future. God, I resist using these ideas to bring me self-glorification or selfish gain. I resist using my creativity as a way of escaping reality. I resist ignoring the creative gifts you have given me because I am afraid of not succeeding.
Parts of my heart want to manipulate the gifts you've given me in a way that I think will fix or save me, creating me a clean heart. Lord, I willingly, cautiously, and courageously step into this call to create. I don't have to make something happen. Rather, I get to move into what you have asked me to do.
I don't have to figure everything out. I don't have to do anything but be faithful to the task before me. God, I relax into the wondrous creation of the world, those around me, and my own mysterious soul. I rest in your power, God.
You inspire me. I don't use my power to build beyond you, God. I use my power to be with you. God, above all, form in me a creative heart of love. Let all that my hands do become a doorway to participate and invite others into your indwelling presence. Lord, hear my prayer.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. As I listened to your prayer, that when we have felt thwarted creatively or we felt blocked, it's so closely tied to hope. It can hurt when we feel that flickering spark of hope, longing, that creative spark. We can feel mixed up about it.
Anjuli: Yes. It can remind us of our past failures. We're paralyzed. Oh, I already tried something. It didn't work. So I'm never going to try again to put myself out there or write the book, sing the song, paint the painting, start the business. We can stifle our creativity or we can use our creativity as a way to escape reality.
Alison Cook: The word that came to mind, it's so closely interwoven with imagination, but it’s the word fantasy. I used to create elaborate fantasies in my mind, as a kid, and I had a big imagination.
There's a lot of creativity, but the fantasy was often an escape hatch, and it had no connection to reality. In my adult life right now, sometimes I can go too far. I'll be really grounded, and within that, what I have found is that the goal is to let that fire burn even brighter inside, because it's so connected to what's real. It's different from that escape hatch. It's tricky to bring the real and the imagined together.
Anjuli: I think that's the intersection of entering into it with God, who is the great Creator. We create because God created. We don't create to get out of reality. We create to be with God in his reality.
Alison Cook: Yes. We are joining God in shaping reality for good and beauty, and that really fills your heart. But you're right, it's delicate. It's like a flame. I love how you use that metaphor of a spark. It's beautiful and vital and it's also delicate.
Anjuli: And it can burn you. Yeah. There's a witness with God in that. In whatever resolution you have, whatever the new dream is, if you allow yourself to reinvent something or change something in your life, it's not to get out of your life. It's actually to enter more deeply into the life you've been given.
Alison Cook: You've written such a beautiful book. It's called Feel, and you cover 75 different emotions. Each one has a liturgy and some thoughts, like what we've shared today. It's a beautiful resource. When you were saying you’re a feeler, I thought, you are using those gifts for good in partnership with God by bringing this beautiful book into the world and by joining us. Thank you so much.
Anjuli: Thank you for having me back. It's so great to be here with your audience and your people. You lead and you share and you guide so gently and so well. So thanks for having me back. What a gift.
Are you curious about how science and spirituality intersect in understanding and treating mental health conditions like OCD?
This week, therapist and spiritual director Ryan Kuja shares his incredible journey through the complex world of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). From a young age, Ryan battled intrusive thoughts and repetitive behaviors. Feeling isolated and overwhelmed, at 17, he cried out to God—a pivotal moment that launched him into an unexpected exploration of mysticism, neurobiology, and the intricacies of diagnosis. This episode is designed for everyone, whether you or someone you love is dealing with OCD, or you're simply interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the diverse human experience.
Here’s what we cover:
* Ryan recounts the pivotal moment at 17 when his struggle with OCD drove him to seek divine intervention
* The difference between OCD and common intrusive thoughts—what sets them apart?
* An overview of the latest and most effective treatments for OCD, from clinical approaches to innovative therapies
* Ryan shares the spiritual practices that have not only helped manage his OCD but also enriched his spiritual journey
Resources:
- Episode 129
- Brain Lock by Jeffrey Schwartz
- ryankuja.com
- Instagram @ryankuja
If you liked this episode, check out:
- Episode 129: Understanding Your Anxiety—A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Calm, Advocating For Yourself, and Cultivating Inner Resilience
- Episode 51: The 12 Common Thinking Traps, Mind Reading, Mental Filters, and How To Stop Taking Things Personally
Thanks to our sponsors:
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- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here with me this week. We have a beautiful and insightful and compassionate episode lined up for today. We're diving into a topic that touches so many lives, whether directly or indirectly, and that's OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder.
Now, if you listened to Episode 129, which was all about understanding your anxiety and different types of anxiety, you know that anxiety is really complex and nuanced. It has a lot of different manifestations, and OCD actually falls under the umbrella of an “anxiety disorder”. I don't always love the language of disorders, but that's the language that our current society uses.
I wanted to touch on OCD in that episode, but there are so many misconceptions about it and it's so misunderstood that I decided to dedicate a whole conversation to it, and that's exactly what we're going to do today. This episode is for all of us.
If you've been diagnosed with OCD, or if you've ever wondered if what you're experiencing might be OCD, maybe you have a loved one who struggles with it, or maybe you're simply curious about it and want to have a greater understanding of this shared experience of what it means to be human. There's something for everyone in this episode.
As you'll hear from our guest today, it can be incredibly freeing to realize there is a name for what I'm experiencing, and OCD is the right name. It can be equally as powerful as you listen today to realize, oh, this isn't what I'm experiencing. I may be dealing with something else.
Maybe I have some perfectionistic streaks. Maybe I have some generalized anxiety. Maybe I have some high sensitivity, as we'll touch on in today's episode. But what I'm dealing with actually isn't OCD. Either way, when we understand how to name something accurately, it can be really life giving and freeing and set us on a path toward healing.
Toward the end of the episode, we're also going to get into what effective treatments can look like, some of the most common misconceptions about OCD, and we're also going to talk about how spiritual practices can both help and sometimes hinder someone with OCD.
I'm so honored to have Ryan Kuja with me today. Ryan is a therapist, a writer, and a spiritual director who speaks openly about his own journey with OCD. His insights are so compassionate and so grounded in both his personal experience and professional expertise. You can learn more about Ryan at ryankuja.com or on Instagram @ryankuja.
Tune in for yourself, a loved one, or if you want to learn more about the complexity of the human experience and how God meets each and every one of us exactly where we need to be met. I know this conversation will leave you with a greater understanding and empathy. I am so thrilled to bring you my conversation with therapist Ryan Kuja.
***
Alison Cook: Ryan, thanks so much for joining us today. I am so thrilled for this chance to get to know a little bit more about your story, both personally and in your work as a therapist and how you approach things. I've come to have so much respect for you based on some of your writings online and through some mutual friends. I'm so glad you're here.
Ryan: Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here.
Alison Cook: I cannot wait to dig in, because you have such a beautiful way of describing what it means to be a healer. I love how you frame this work that we do that way. Before we get there, I would love to learn a little bit more about your journey
You talk about how you’ve been down this path and do this work out of healing what you've been through. You even write on your website, “by the time I was 24, I had been diagnosed with OCD, PTSD, depression, anxiety, and panic. I intimately know the affliction of mental health struggles”.
Can you take us back to your younger self, that pre-24, pre-diagnosed younger self? What were some of the cues and signals that you were experiencing that set you out on this journey?
Ryan: Yeah, so it goes way back. I think the seeds of some of the clinical issues that I mentioned, the OCD, the PTSD, depression, anxiety, I think the seeds of a lot of that was there when I was quite young. I remember worrying a lot as a kid and being highly sensitive. But it was really at age 10. My mom was in a car accident.
She was okay. She wasn't extensively injured or anything, but I experienced it as traumatic. Now, I wasn't with her, but following the car accident that she was in, these obsessions about her dying in a car accident developed. The obsessive terror was, mom is going to die in a car accident. There are compulsions that developed around that to try to reduce the anxiety.
I would flip on and off light switches. I would repeat odd phrases over and over in my head. I remember in fifth grade riding the bus to school, and at a certain point in the bus route, I would put on a certain hat at a certain time. I knew as a 10 year old that this didn't make sense. But I couldn't not do it.
I would even try to ride with her when she was in the car. If she was going to the grocery store, I'd always want to come. I remember having an understanding that accidents take place in these split second scenarios. So if you're three or four seconds earlier or later, you might avoid a car accident.
My mind would think, if mom leaves the house a few seconds later, maybe she won't get in a crash. Maybe I should delay her, but what if that actually is when the accident would happen? This would consume me. The OCD symptoms were the first clinical manifestation that I experienced.
Alison Cook: Boy, the way you describe that, I want to pause here for the listener. You're describing so clearly what's going on. Often people misunderstand OCD. You have the intrusive thoughts that something's going to happen to mom, but then it's followed by a compulsion. You have to do these behaviors, even though parts of you know they're not necessarily logical or rational.
Ryan: Exactly.
Alison Cook: I'm sure that was incredibly confusing at the time.
Ryan: Incredibly confusing. I had no category for it, no language for it. I thought I was weird. I thought I was crazy, doing these very strange things, and I hid it from everybody. So I didn't talk about it. I didn't bring it to anybody. I had no understanding that OCD existed.
It was very disorienting and confusing, and I felt this really strong sense of aloneness amidst this fairly overwhelming suffering. And it would wax and wane. There were years between age 10 and 17, and I can talk perhaps later about what happened when I was 17, that shifted things at least for a while.
So I didn't know that OCD existed. I had never heard of OCD. I didn't know other people suffered with this. I didn't know this was a neuropsychiatric condition that was diagnosable and treatable. So I felt the overwhelm of these symptoms plus isolation and loneliness in it.
Alison Cook: Yes. That makes so much sense that you're experiencing it and then you feel so isolated from other people. You didn't tell anybody until 17?
Ryan: I didn't tell anybody and I was a master at keeping it hidden. So for example, the flipping on and off of light switches. I would do that only in rooms that nobody else was in. You think, how does somebody hide this for all these years? It's certainly possible.
A lot of the compulsions I had were what's known as mental compulsions. Again, repeating certain phrases over and over in my head, or things that others and family members couldn’t necessarily pick up on.
Alison Cook: Yeah, you could keep them private, but again, that splitting off internally had to be incredibly painful. Ryan, you talk about a mystical experience that happened at 17. Could you tell us a little bit about what happened there? Because it seems as if that really set you off on a whole different exploration.
Ryan: Exactly. By the time I was 17, I was in the throes of this psychological affliction. I really felt like I was at the end of my rope. Like I said, it would wax and wane. I was a competitive cyclist during my teen years, and looking back, I think when I was training and cycling a lot, the exercise alone mitigated some of the intensity.
But as I got away from that, it became more severe, around age 17. I really hit a low point. I was in my bed one night, and for the first time in my life, I reached out to something, anything, God. I didn't grow up in a religious family, but we were culturally Catholic. We went to church during Christmas and Easter, but there wasn't a focus on God or spirituality or faith.
So this was something very new to me, something I hadn't done before, but it was really organic–like supplication, this reaching out from an afflictive space. Something profound happened. I felt infused by divine love. I felt God's presence enveloping me in this really clear embodied way, and I also heard a voice.
It wasn't audible, it was like a still small voice coming from within me or something. These mystical experiences are often hard to put into language by the nature of them, but the voice said, I'll take care of your mother. It was very clear, very simple, very direct. I'll take care of your mother.
I was infused with this love and this peace and it really catalyzed the healing of the fear. The obsession, of course, was terror that my mom was gonna die in a car accident. I sensed and really felt in my heart and in my body and in my mind this sense that this God who I didn't know existed, who I'm meeting in this very experiential way, is going to take care of my mom. I don't have to.
So it healed the fear. The obsession dropped away and the compulsions dropped away. I literally woke up the next morning and the OCD symptoms had vanished.
Alison Cook: Wow. So it was really a transformational encounter with God. Where do you go from there? Did you understand that it was God in this experience? How did you process that at such a young age?
Ryan: So it's interesting. I didn't tell anybody about it because I felt like it was a bit…there wasn't shame or anything around it, but it felt odd. We're not a religious family. I didn’t have religious friends. There's no mentor figure. What do I do with this?
Again, I was alone in it, but it was aloneness in the new freedom of this, versus the old kind of prison. I knew I wanted to start going to church. I knew I wanted to start reading the Bible. It instigated a fledgling faith and I became a Christian. I became a follower of Jesus through this event, on the heels of this mystical experience.
There was a short period of real freedom. This is April of 2000, when I was 17. So by the time I went off to college in August, a few months later, things had shifted. I still didn't know that the OCD had been healed. I thought that the fear had been healed. So I still didn't have a category or know that OCD was a thing.
I knew something happened that changed me deeply spiritually and psychologically, and I didn't yet have the language and the education around neurobiology and neuroscience and how the brain and nervous system were interplaying with some of these symptoms.
But all that to say, the OCD then returned with a vengeance. A different type of OCD, religious OCD, also known as scrupulosity. I became terrified of, for example, certain passages in the Bible that say to be perfect like your heavenly father is perfect.
It wasn't so much a terror of that passage. It was more of, oh, so this journey of becoming a Christian is about now being perfect. I became obsessed with sin. What is sin? What isn't sin? What is okay to do? What's not okay to do? And I'm going off to college, and is it okay to drink when you're under age? What's okay sexually?
All of this obsession with doing things right and doing things perfectly took root as religious OCD.
Alison Cook: Oh gosh, Ryan, when we put ourselves back, I think about those young versions of ourselves. At this age that you're at, we're processing really heavy stuff and we have no clue what we're processing. You're saying so much here.
First of all, I want to point out, and I had wanted to ask you about this, that all the isolation you experienced both with the OCD and then with the religious experience is in and of itself traumatic. Would you agree?
Ryan: Certainly.
Alison Cook: There's already some trauma to the system there, of all the ways you're having to hide these things. Then you have this beautiful experience. It's real. It changes your life. It removes symptoms, but then the symptoms come back and they come back in the form of religiosity.
I want to pause there because I think of so many people who have had a very transcendent experience with God. I had one in my early twenties, and it's so transformational and it's real and it's life changing.
Also, you still have to go into the healing work. It's not “one and done”. Yeah. That had to be so confusing, when it came back, as you said, with a vengeance.
Ryan: Absolutely. It was very confusing. There was a dichotomy between this divine love that I met in that mystical experience, but then I'm reading the Bible literally. I'm reading it literally because I have no idea that there's a historical cultural context.
Alison Cook: Like when Jesus has to pluck out your eyeball, it's not literal. You're not supposed to do that.
Ryan: Exactly. There is this sort of dichotomy around, what's real? Is that experience I had even trustworthy? Because this is what I'm reading. I'm also encountering authors and preachers who are saying things that are fear inducing. So the whole thing really consolidated around fear and shame versus the experience of God when I was 17 in my bed that night. There is this almost irreconcilable, what is real and what isn't?
Alison Cook: You had this real experience, and then when you start reading the Bible, you go to church, you're hearing people describe a more fear-based approach, and that kind of worked together with this predisposition to OCD.
Ryan: That's exactly right. Exactly.
Alison Cook: The fear-based religiosity works together with this part of you, mentally, that goes right back into the obsessions, and then I'm assuming compulsions. I'm curious, because I know some folks who struggle with religious scrupulosity, religious OCD, the compulsions become more like constant confession. They take on a religious tone.
Ryan: Yep. That was one of mine. Confession.
Alison Cook: What did that look like for you? You're trying to balance this dichotomy of wanting to have this loving God in your life, but now it has become this whole other beast.
Ryan: Yes. The beast overshadowed that experience almost completely for a number of years. It wasn’t until I was 18 or 19, after one or two years, until finally I open up a bit to my mother. And she's sensing, he's not doing well. By this time, depression has started to constellate OCD, which is so common.
In my clinical work, I've never met somebody with OCD who doesn't also struggle with depression. There's such a high comorbidity between those two, which makes sense for many different reasons.
Alison Cook: You can feel helpless. You feel trapped. Yeah.
Ryan: Yeah, the shame and the guilt, feeling like I'm not good enough, feeling like I'm this bad person, thinking like all my desires were wrong or broken. So there was a very deep seated sense of toxic shame and brokenness.
I went to see a psychotherapist, or it may have been a psychologist, and got diagnosed with OCD. I remember there being a little bit of weight lifted, a little bit of relief. I had these symptoms and my obsession with sin, and I remember thinking it was an absolute sin to miss church on a Sunday morning. There's no excuse, unless you're definitely sick or have something that is a manifestation of this disorder called OCD that other people have.
I started to read books about it. I remember reading a classic, Brain Lock by Jeffrey Schwartz, and some other books specifically on scrupulosity and religious OCD. I finally got language for my experience and found that there's treatment available. I did start an SSRI medication around that same time, and that helped some.
I remember sensing a little bit of freedom, that everything wasn't so serious. If you didn't go to church, oh, that's okay. You miss a Sunday, that's okay. I was starting to understand that the Bible with these difficult texts weren't necessarily meant to be read so literally. There is this sort of movement, a little bit of freedom there, in terms of theology and spiritual understanding and reading the text. The SSRI medication also helped some of the symptoms.
Alison Cook: So you started to have some relief. At what point did you decide that you wanted to go down this journey of becoming a therapist yourself?
Ryan: After these experiences, I'm thrust even further into interest in mental health. It was a need. It was like survival. I was reading everything I could get my hands on, with regard to not only OCD, but also I was experiencing lots of generalizing anxiety. I had been diagnosed with PTSD when I was 23, and I had encountered some pretty good EMDR therapy with a therapist in Denver.
I remember thinking around that time, I could see myself doing this. I could see myself in her chair. There's something about this one-to-one engaging with depth, and she may have been the first good therapist that I saw. Somebody who was very empathic, who I felt seen by, and also had a good map for the psyche and the brain and using EMDR.
We could also talk about theology and spirituality. There was more expansion and imagination in that realm and in the work with her. I was also going to spiritual direction around the same time. This is maybe 2008 in Denver. I also remember thinking about sitting in spiritual direction. I could see myself in the other chair. I could see myself doing this, but I didn't pursue it.
My first career was in international relief mission and development, and I still have this really strong drive and passion to live among and serve the economically marginalized, especially on the African continent that continued to feel like a calling for a long time. I think it was a calling. It eventually pivoted and it was time to step away from that.
It was a number of years of noticing subtle and not so subtle draws to do therapeutic work, which eventually led me back to seminary. I completed a theology degree because that interest was very strong, and then a spiritual direction certificate program. I then went back again to pursue clinical mental health counseling. So it was a winding, circuitous journey.
Alison Cook: Wow. As you're pursuing your own healing, you begin to notice the cues that you might actually take this and become someone who helps others.
Ryan: Exactly. Yes.
Alison Cook: So Ryan, put on your professional hat here for those listening. When you think about OCD now, how do you understand it and what feels important for you that other people understand about it?
Ryan: What first comes to mind is how many misconceptions there are out there. I hear and see all the time, whether it's on social media or somebody in passing, saying things like, I'm so OCD about how I have to organize my clothes. Or yeah, I'm a little bit OCD about X, Y, and Z.
There's no malice there, but it's so insensitive, and in a way, ignorant to the reality of suffering that occurs with people who do have OCD. I think OCD is still quite stigmatized. There are lots of stereotypes about it. There's lots of misrepresentation in popular culture, lots of caricatures of OCD.
It's looked at as somebody who's quirky, and it trivializes the pain of people who are actually facing OCD. Like we mentioned earlier, the hallmark of it are these recurring intrusive obsessions, which are associated with anxiety and distress. The compulsions act to reduce the anxiety generated, and it often interferes with people's daily functioning, their social and occupational functioning, and their relationships.
Often people spend hours every day as a result of OCD focused on obsessions and compulsions. There are many different types, from religious OCD to contamination OCD to harm OCD, where someone's really afraid they're going to commit harm to somebody. There can be sexually intrusive thoughts, P-OCD, which is pedophilia OCD, the fear of becoming a pedophile or acting in such a way, and relationship OCD, which is the need to have certainty around if you're in the right relationship or not.
A lot of OCD hinges around this need for complete certainty. Contamination OCD involves the need for complete certainty that there are no germs on my hands or whatever it may be. The obsessions are generally unwanted, they're intrusive, and the psychology term is ego dystonic–they don't align with a person's values or desires.
So for the person who has POCD, pedophilia OCD, that pedophilia for them is the most disgusting, grotesque, awful thing, basically, that they can imagine. Of course, that's the thing that has a charge and is sticky. That's the thing, because it is so ego dystonic. It sticks because it causes distress.
Things that don't carry a charge, these intrusive obsessions don't manifest around that. I've had a number of clients who have these intrusive violent thoughts about hurting their pet, their dog, and they love their pet.
Alison Cook: They would never hurt their pet.
Ryan: They're the type of person who would never hurt the dog, so that the hallmark of it is, it's unwanted, it's intrusive, it's ego dystonic.
Alison Cook: Even in your case with the religious obsessions, all you wanted was to be with this God who had showed up for you in such a loving way. The charge was, if I commit this sin, I'll go to hell. I'll go to hell. That had a charge for you. In fact, all you were trying to do was follow God.
Ryan: Exactly. Yeah, so the obsession with the anxiety and the distress of the performance of the compulsion, whether that's a ritual kind of outward behavior or an inner mental compulsion then brings temporary relief. The compulsion brings this temporary relief.
It lowers the anxiety, which is the whole function of the compulsion, but it's this loop that repeats again and again. It tends to strengthen over time, and it can really consume someone's life. It can really take over. Often people feel shame about it. They hide it.
What's interesting is that there's some research that's been done–I believe the number is like 90 percent of people in the general population have occasional intrusive thoughts. The thing about somebody with OCD is it sticks. There's repetition. There's an issue with stopping, and some of that is neurobiological.
It’s related to the OCD circuitry in the brain, but underlying this is something interesting that I've noticed. I'm not sure what research has been done in this realm, but there seem to be traits of high sensitivity in people with OCD, and I see that as the bedrock or the foundation on which OCD eventually develops.
One of the predispositions is this high sensitivity. Yeah. It could be moral sensitivity, a really strong sense of right and wrong, good and bad, values, that sort of thing, or heightened existential sensitivity, like an awareness of existential givens of life and death.
So there's this kind of temperament that underlies OCD. One way to think of it is like the soil on which the tree of OCD grows.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Not everybody who is highly sensitive will develop OCD, but it does make sense that if you have OCD, underneath that is this high sensitivity. It's beautiful. The clients who I've worked with who've had it, there's an incredible sensitivity to things that can be so beautiful. And yet it can also create a lot of suffering.
So with all that said, Ryan, how do you begin to break that cycle? I know you've talked about medication. I'd also love to hear about specific interventions. We talk a lot on the podcast about IFS, this idea of parts. Even as I'm listening to you, I wonder if there is a way in which it's helpful?
I would love for you to correct me if I'm wrong. A part of you is having the fear and the anxiety, and then the other part is coming in with the behaviors to try to resolve that. Is it helpful to work with the different parts? What have you found to be helpful for folks?
Ryan: Yeah. Really great question. The so-called gold standard in treatment is something called exposure response prevention, where in a controlled setting, in the office with the therapist as well as at home, the client is exposed to what activates the obsession/anxiety. Then they prevent the response. The response prevention is not allowing the compulsion.
The idea is, when you sit with the anxiety, when you allow the anxiety to be there without reducing it through the compulsion, it'll eventually lower. So ERP is the so-called gold standard. Now, it wasn't super helpful for me. The data shows that it's effective about 50 percent of the time, but there's high dropout rates and it's difficult.
It is evidence based and it does work with about half of people. The research says ERP plus SSRI medication is about 70 percent effective. But, it's interesting. The field seems to be shifting some for a while. I honestly experienced it from many clinicians, or hearing stories from clients with OCD who had seen these OCD experts who only did ERP, like it was ERP or nothing.
Like this is the only thing and this is what we have to stick with. This is the only thing that there's an evidence base for. There's no connection between OCD and trauma. Almost this therapeutic dogmatism or fundamentalism and now that's starting to shift. There's research that's starting to come out about the links between trauma and OCD.
There's nothing that says trauma causes OCD, but there certainly can be associations, especially with certain subtypes of OCD. But let's take the parts perspective. Yes, I think the parts perspective can be extremely helpful and we can weave in the parts perspective with things like ERP, with things like mindfulness based cognitive therapy, sometimes even EMDR.
There's some research that shows EMDR can be helpful. So from a parts perspective, for me, it's really quite simple. I think that it's about an extreme protective part. I see OCD as an extreme protective part that's overactive, that's really trying to help prevent whatever bad thing from happening.
I had a client who was terrified, basically, that if her hands weren't perfectly clean, she was going to cause a deadly illness to one of her family members. Obviously the role of the part is to protect the family, to make sure somebody doesn't get sick. So the way I understand it from a parts perspective is that it's this overactive, extreme protective part working really hard to try to help.
This part desires 100 percent certainty, which isn't really possible in our human experience. 100 percent certainty isn't possible, but we can learn to relate to this extreme protective part as one who is trying to help. So less resistance to it, less trying to overcome it, more compassionate engagement with the part.
My main role is as a trauma therapist, and I have a few clients I see who have OCD. I don't see myself as an OCD specialist, but obviously I work with it and it's deeply personal, as it's part of my story. I don't do much cognitive work, generally. I focus more on parts work and nervous system work and polyvagal theory and somatic work.
But with OCD, I think the cognitive work is really important. It's really important to weave that in, given that people are experiencing OCD generally up around their head as intrusive thoughts,
Alison Cook: Yeah. You can hear the beliefs. The all-or-nothing thinking, some of the thinking traps that you do have to attack, so that when you're present to that part, even understanding its good intention, you also have the self-led ability to gently let that part know that reframe of we might have a germ on us, but that doesn't mean someone else is going to get sick, or whatever it is. I could see how that is really vital combined with a lot of these other things.
Ryan, I could talk to you about this all day. You're such a wealth of wisdom and you see all this with such nuance. In your work now, in your own life, where does the role of spirituality come in? Because you talk about that powerful mystical experience that did give you relief.
How do spiritual practices help you to this day? How does your spirituality work together with what you understand about the brain now, and some of these different neurobiological aspects? How does that factor in?
Ryan: I think there's some really beautiful intersection there. I think the intersections between spirituality, neuroscience, and psychology are some of the most fun and the most powerful places to explore. New vistas open up. As I think about my own experience, spiritual experiences and conversations with that really wise priest have helped me immensely.
So things that weren't necessarily therapy brought about those sorts of experiences. Certainly given what we know about the brain, they brought about neurobiological changes. I also think about weaving in a little bit of little tiny touching into the nervous system. Those experiences catalyze safety and connection.
Those experiences allowed a tether back into the ventral vagal state of safety and connection. That state of home, at least what Chuck DeGroat would call home, where there's safety and connection. It's a sense of, I'm okay and the world's okay. It's not one of the self-protective states.
With OCD, there's a sympathetic dominance. There's a hyper-vigilance. Any time there's fear or anxiety, we're talking sympathetic. A lot of the spiritual experiences I've had, or even currently when I'm able to rest in a sense of connection to God, that’s movement back into a state of regulation, back into a state of connection. We've largely historically thought of certain practices that are more therapeutic and there are certain practices that are more spiritual. The reality is, there's so much interplay, and spirituality is going to impact our neurobiology and vice versa.
Alison Cook: I could imagine, from your earlier experiences, the simplicity of the deep breaths, where you're regulating that nervous system, but there's a contemplative approach to that might be more beneficial than perhaps something like scripture memorization.
I'm throwing that out there and it could be different for other people, but there are certain spiritual practices that might be more conducive to you finding that safety with God, that don't trigger the OCD.
Ryan: Absolutely. Yes. Having grown up Catholic, and I remained Catholic for quite a while, not anymore, but one of my practices used to be praying the rosary. Absolutely. I've experimented with returning to that, and it doesn't work.
It doesn't bring about that sense of safety, something about the recitation and the repetition. It just doesn't, but practicing the Examen, for example, doing the Ignatian spirituality contemplative practices really resonate with me. They often do facilitate a subtle shift away from sympathetic dominance more into a subtle place.
I think that authentic spirituality is embodied. I think authentic spirituality can, and in a way, maybe even should, lead us into a deeper connection to our body and our emotions, rather than bypassing. I found that's been really important in my process.
Alison Cook: I love that. As you've traveled this journey, I love how you describe yourself as a wounded healer. You've been through a lot. You are helping a lot of people. You've helped a lot of people by sharing your story today. What words of encouragement would you have for someone listening who has struggled with OCD?
Ryan: Yeah, I think so many things. Often folks struggling with OCD have tried several things and nothing's worked. For those folks, I would say there's hope. There's another approach out there. There are things that maybe could be helpful, a few things that come to mind that are maybe newer modalities that are shown to possibly be helpful.
Things like ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation. There's some research that says that can be helpful. Maybe you haven't tried an SSRI. That could be a good tool, even if for the short term. Things like neurofeedback, EMDR for OCD, IFS, usually there's something that we haven't tried.
I would say there's hope and maybe something else would be a good fit, something that you and your psyche, your soma, your nervous system actually could use and resonate with. I would also say, the words of John O'Donohue come to mind, try to be excessively gentle with yourself.
There can be so much self-judgment, especially when modalities we've tried haven't worked. There's either implicit or explicit messaging, whether it's from the therapist or being generated internally, that we must be doing something wrong. That's not the case. You're not doing something wrong.
As much as you can, try to remember to not fight your symptoms–they're communicating something important. They're not communicating that you're broken. Your mind and body aren't the enemy.
Alison Cook: I love that. Shame never helps. What would you say to that younger 17, 18, 19 year old? What would you say to him now? What would you want him to know?
Ryan: I would say to him, you don't have to hide this. You don't have to hide this. You don't have to be alone and suffer in silence and the pain isn't your fault. Everything you feel, all the symptoms at some level make sense. You're not broken, you're not crazy. What you're experiencing makes sense and you don't have to navigate it on your own.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I love that. Ryan, what is bringing out the best of you right now?
Ryan: Some really basic things like returning to the fundamentals of self care and trying to prioritize that and rest and even exercise. It's easy to get out of exercise rhythms, but understanding that is something that is really helpful for my mind and body. I think that's true of so many, but yeah, some of these really basic things.
Attuning to the needs of my body and trying to honor my limits and honor my capacity and the capacity of my nervous system. I spent many years, as a lot of us have, pushing too hard and going beyond that
Alison Cook: I love that. Is there anything else, Ryan, that you want to add, as we wind down?
Ryan: I want to say thank you for reaching out and setting this up and being able to have this time together to connect and connect with your listeners. Over the years, even before I became a therapist, I thought that maybe there's redemption here. Maybe this gospel idea of the redemption of wounds can be concretized in my life.
It can be real, and doing things, obviously sitting with clients every day in therapy is one thing, but doing things like this really bring that sense too. I can marinate in that sense of oh, that thing I used to wonder, can that happen? Here it is right now, having this conversation with you. Yeah. Thank you.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that. We had a conversation with David Kessler, who's a grief expert, and he talks about meaning. What I love about what he says, and it's what you're saying, it's, this is hard, we all have our challenges, but this is something I have to work through. And there's an opportunity for meaning.
It doesn't mean we're saying it's not hard that I had to go through this. What we're saying is, now how can I make meaning out of this part of my journey and out of this part of my story? You've done that today. I can hear all the light bulbs going off. I know it's going to be so helpful to so many people.
Ryan: I'm hopeful. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.
Alison Cook: Thank you, Ryan. Thanks for being here.
How do you move from feeling stuck to finding meaning and healing in your grief?
In today’s episode, I’m honored to speak with David Kessler, one of the world’s foremost experts on grief and the author who expanded Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s original five stages of grief by adding a sixth stage: meaning. We explore how common reactions like avoidance, blame, and bargaining are a normal part of the grieving process, and how finding meaning can be a transformative step toward healing. Whether you’re grieving a loss or supporting someone who is, this conversation will help you better understand the continuum of grief and the power of creating meaning.
Here’s what we cover:
* The 5 stages of grief and how different parts of us experience loss
* David’s 6th stage of grief and how it developed out of his own story
* The most important question to ask someone who is grieving
* David’s 7 guidelines for creating meaning after loss
* Why grief is intimately linked to joy
Resources:
- Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief Workbook–Tools for Releasing Pain and Remembering with Love by David Kessler
- Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief by David Kessler
- Other books by David Kessler:
- On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss, co-authored with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
- Life Lessons: Two Experts on Death and Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and Living co-authored with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
- The Needs of the Dying: A Guide for Bringing Hope, Comfort, and Love to Life's Final Chapter
- grief.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 98: I Shouldn’t Feel Alone in My Grief—Why Your Grief Matters & the #1 Most Important Support For Those Who Are Grieving
Thanks to our sponsors:
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- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here with me this week. Today, we are diving into a topic that touches every single one of us at some point in life. It’s grief, whether you've experienced the loss of a loved one, a job, a relationship, maybe the loss of health, either your own health or the health of a loved one.
There are so many different ways that we experience loss in this life. It's so important to honor the role of grief as an inescapable part of the human experience. We know that Jesus experienced loss. He felt the pain of grief when he wept at the tomb of his friend, Lazarus, even though he knew he would raise Lazarus from the dead. He knew the end of that story.
Jesus didn't bypass the pain of the moment. He fully entered into the sorrow and heartbreak of that moment as he mourned with those who loved Lazarus. He also grieved over the city of Jerusalem. He lamented its brokenness and resistance to God's love.
In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus also experienced deep anguish. He cried out to God in the face of his impending suffering. Again, Jesus knew what the end of these stories was going to be. He knew that all things work to good for those who love God.
Yet he entered into these moments of grief, reminding us that grief is not something to avoid or minimize. Instead, it's a sacred part of being human, one that Jesus embraces with us as we're honest and transparent and open about what we feel.
The holidays, while they bring joy and anticipation and excitement, can also heighten a sense of grief. I wanted to find a way to honor that paradox. Very often, two things can be true. At the very moment that you feel the joy and hope of the holiday season, you can also get hijacked by a painful memory.
Maybe a memory of someone you've lost, of a place you've loved and haven't been able to visit for a long time, or maybe even a dream that feels buried or lost. Those feelings of grief or loss that surface sometimes unexpectedly can be hard to figure out how to navigate.
That's why I wanted to invite today's guest, David Kessler, to talk with us through some practical ways he's found to help you navigate the very normal human experience of grief. David Kessler is one of the world's foremost experts on grief. He's met with the likes of Mother Teresa and worked with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and he's actually identified a sixth phase to expand upon Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief. He identifies meaning as that sixth stage.
He has a brand new workbook out, called Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief Workbook–Tools for Releasing Pain and Remembering with Love. I went through the workbook myself and it's such a great resource. I wanted to share it with you on the podcast today.
Before we dive into the conversation, I want to take a moment to first touch on the foundational framework of grief created by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, whose work deeply influenced David. These five stages aren't linear, as we'll talk about in today's episode, but they allow for different experiences and emotions that are closely related to the grieving process.
You may notice yourself feeling any one of these things. It could be so helpful to identify, oh, that's what's going on here. So here's a quick overview of those five stages of grief. Again, they're not linear. They don't go in any particular order, but they are very often linked to a process you may be experiencing as you think about a loss that you're grieving in your life.
The first one is denial. This is that initial shock or disbelief after a loss, where you might struggle to accept the reality of what has happened. It's really natural and normal to go through a stage of shock or disbelief. I don't know what to do with this, so I'm going to deny it or avoid it. You might notice this in your body more as avoidance or a refusal to process the events.
It's like a part of you knows, okay, I think something really painful or really hard happened here, but other parts of you are saying, no, we're not going there. We're not going to process this. This is really normal. It can be really helpful to name. Okay. Whatever this thing is that I'm going through that's really hard, I can't process it right now. This is a stage of grief that's normal and it's called denial.
Number two, you might notice yourself feeling unusually angry; the stage of anger hits as the reality of a loss sets in. As you begin to process it internally, you might notice a part of you feeling angry. I can't believe this happened. Whose fault is this? I want to blame somebody.
I want to believe that someone else could have prevented this. This anger might be directed at someone else, where you are so angry that someone else let this happen. You're looking for someone to blame, but it can also be directed at yourself. You might be so angry with yourself, either that you feel the way you feel or you might blame yourself for what happened.
Thirdly, you might be angry at God and you can't believe God let this painful thing happen. Again, anger is such a normal and necessary part of the grieving process. It's those frozen parts of you starting to wake up.
Initially, maybe you felt that denial. You've been avoiding the painful feelings that are associated with grief. Anger is sometimes one of the ways those parts of us start to wake up and break through to the surface. They start looking for someone to blame–either yourself, God, or someone else. If you can notice that and give yourself space to feel that anger, it can really help you move through those emotions and get to the other side.
Number three, you might notice yourself bargaining. This is where your parts of you are trying to regain control. Those painful emotions are starting to show up, and another part of you is starting to bargain with God.
God if I do this, would you do this? Or, if only I had done this, maybe you would have done this. You're trying to find a logic to your grief when you're bargaining, when so often there isn't a logic to the pain that you feel. Again, these are other parts of you that are beginning to wake up.
They're beginning to try to make sense of what happened. They think if you can bargain with God or with other people, or even with yourself, if I can be a better person, maybe I can avoid something like this in the future. Again, this is a necessary part of the process. You need to let yourself move through this bargaining, even as you're aware that this is one part of the overall grieving process.
The fourth stage is depression. This is where you begin to feel the sadness and the sorrow and the emotional pain of what you've experienced. Again, this is a necessary part of the grieving process. It can feel overwhelming. The anger and the denial and the bargaining are there in many ways, trying to protect you from feeling this deep sadness, this deep sorrow inside your soul.
And yet you won't be able to move through the grieving process if you don't also honor the sadness. We talked a little bit in today's episode about how you can honor the sadness with the help of structure and with the help of gentle boundaries so that sadness can be felt without completely taking you over.
Then number five, you move into acceptance. Acceptance doesn't mean that you're okay with what happened. Instead, it means that all of these parts of you, the parts of you that are angry, the parts of you that want to take control through bargaining, the parts of you that are avoiding through denial, and the parts of you that are so sad, reach a sort of truce.
They reach a sort of harmony around the table of your soul. You realize that all of those parts of you are valuable and that you're also finding your way through the pain, finding a way to move forward. That is where this beautiful sixth stage that David has identified, the stage of meaning, can really come into focus.
David describes this work of finding meaning so beautifully. It doesn't replace those other stages; it begins to point to a new way forward that both honors your loss and also honors a new reality.
This holiday season, I pray you'll find a way to honor each of these parts of you in partnership with God's spirit. With all that said, I'm so thrilled to bring you my conversation with David Kessler.
David Kessler is one of the world's foremost experts on grief and loss. He has authored multiple influential books on grief, including On Grief and Grieving and Life Lessons, both of which he co-authored with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. He also wrote The Needs of the Dying, a book praised by Mother Teresa.
His book, Finding Meaning, is an incredible exploration of what David identifies as the sixth stage of grief. He recently released his highly anticipated workbook, which provides tools for releasing pain and remembering with love. This workbook is a big hit and a beautiful resource.
David has such an incredible story. He has really lived what he teaches. I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with David Kessler.
***
Alison Cook: This is such a timely topic with so much going on in our world, David. Thank you so much for being here to talk with us about grief and about finding meaning.
David: Absolutely. I'm so excited to be with you, so thank you for having me.
Alison Cook: Your work on grief is so groundbreaking and I really want to get into the sixth phase that you've identified. I'm curious if you'd be willing to share with my listeners, what drew you to this work? How does it grow out of your own personal experiences?
David: I will tell you, I had a challenging childhood with lots of dysfunction. I hold my parents very dear in my heart. They were wounded. They didn't know a way and didn't have the resources we do today to heal. I learned early on that loss takes many forms.
You can feel the loss of safety. You can feel even the loss of your childhood. Then when I was 13, my mother was very sick and went into a hospital hours away. When she was dying, we were at the hotel across the street, and a fire broke out. People started yelling, fire! They evacuated.
We all ran out and on the 18th floor, there were flames coming out of the hotel. The fire trucks pulled up. I was finding it a little exciting at this point because I had been this bored teenager, and then all of a sudden shooting began.
Alison Cook: Oh my.
David: This wasn't just a fire, but also there was an active shooter. It went on for hours. It was one of the first mass shootings in the US. So my father got us out, we went across back to the hotel, back to the hospital, and in a couple of days, my mother died.
I wasn't allowed to be with her. She was in the ICU. I knew at such a young age, that there was a better way. The only advice I got was from a stranger in the staircase who said, “be strong”, which can feel like, “don't have feelings and take care of everyone else”.
The grief was never really mentioned again. I grew up down south, so I dealt with hurricanes and loss and the trauma of these events. I thought I was broken for life. It wasn't until I got to Community College that I realized, oh my gosh. There's a language for this.
I took a class and studied this woman, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who had written about these stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Little did I know, I would go on to work with her and learn from her and write two books with her. I always hear her whispering in my ear, “tell them the stages aren't linear”.
There's no one right way to do grief. There's no one right way to do this. Grief is an organic process. I always say, we come from a long line of dead people. All our ancestors have died. We know how to do this. It's our society that tells us often we're doing it wrong. So that's what initially got me into my work.
Alison Cook: I love that. Thank you so much for giving us that backdrop. How did you begin to develop this idea for the sixth stage? I love your caveat. I’ve never met Elisabeth, but I find myself also wanting to give that caveat every time I talk about the five stages.
David: Good, good.
Alison Cook: I love that you said that. Somehow you begin to recognize this need for a sixth, also not linear, but another really important piece of the grieving process. Tell us a little bit about how that began to emerge.
David: I have had this amazing, tremendous career of being of service to others and helping, and it has been my privilege. I got to be with Mother Teresa and spend time with her in her home in Calcutta for the dying and destitute. I've worked in a hospital system and was privileged to not only work in and oversee the end of life care and hospice, but also the clergy there and to work with them and see how our faith comes into this and how we can live our lives fully.
Even with the tragedies we had, I was to be of service and help others, and I did that for decades. I thought my personal grief was behind me. It wasn't until out of the blue, my younger son, at 21 years old, died unexpectedly…first of all, I was on the floor. I did not think I would get up.
I had to take my own medicine and go to a grief counselor and go to a grief group and sit in a group with a baseball cap and a group of bereaved parents. My books were on a table five feet away and I couldn't tell anyone that was me. I couldn't be the grief expert. I had to be the father that buried a child.
I also saw myself going through the process. Denial. Yep. Oh, I can't believe my son is gone. I was so angry at life, angry at my son, angry at God. Wait, I've tried to be of service and help people. Why me? Why would you do that? I had to really go there. Of course, with time, I eventually realized, number one, I knew my God was big enough to handle my anger.
I knew that I had seen people go through all these different places in their grief and that there was life on the other end for them. I wasn't sure how I would find it. I saw myself going through depression and bargaining, the guilt, and then I began to wrestle with the fact that I'm going to have to accept this someday.
That idea of accepting it was not enough. I thought, there has to be more. I remember that I had read Viktor Frankl's work on meaning, and I didn't quite understand how meaning and grief played together, because so many times people would trip over, there's no meaning in a horrible death, there's no meaning in all these tragedies we have in our lives, in breakup, divorce, betrayal, tragedy, murder, all these horrible things that happen to us.
What I realized is that meaning isn't in the horrible event–meaning is in us. It's what we do later, what we do after. It didn't take away my pain, but it gave me a cushion. I was so honored that the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross family gave me permission to add a sixth stage to her iconic stages. Because I think we're a generation that wants more–we’re wanting meaning.
Alison Cook: That is powerful. The meaning is not in the horrible set of circumstances. It's in what you do on the other side of that horrible event. That's so powerful. It strikes me, especially for people of faith. There's a ditch on both sides of the road of meaning. If you too quickly go to, “God has a reason for it”. That's not honoring the grief.
But the other side of it is, there's no meaning whatsoever. That can feel very empty and not enough. I love how you've articulated that for us. That's beautiful.
David: I think we have to hold the divine and we have to hold the human experience.
Alison Cook: Yes.
David: An amazing person called me two months in, maybe, and said, how are you doing today? I said, I am so angry! She heard and she said to me, I hear the anger. I hear the anger. She said, would you like to talk about the spiritual aspects of this or the human aspect? I said,
“Both, and start with the human”.
So she listened to me in my anger. She said to me, I'm surprised you're not breaking furniture. I thought, oh my gosh, she sees me. She sees that I could take my couch, my sofa, and snap it in half. She saw my anger and she heard me. I always say, anger is pain's bodyguard. She helped me release that anger in a safe way, in a safe place.
After she listened so lovingly and patiently, she said, are you ready to talk about the spiritual? I said, Yes. She goes, your son, David, can't die. That was his body, but he can't die. He's eternal. Sometimes, we can almost try to bypass the human experience and go right to the spiritual and go, oh, he's always with you. He's in a better place.
And we're feeling like I know that, but I want him here with me.
Alison Cook: Yes, that's so powerful. I love that she asked you that question. That's such a powerful thing for listeners to hear. Do you want to be human right now? Do you want to be human? Or do you want the spiritual? It might be a different answer on different days.
David: Absolutely. If I meet with my minister, I might be looking for the spiritual. That might be the context I'm looking for. Other times, we're in our human experience.
Alison Cook: Yeah. That's so powerful. What would you say, David, for people who feel stuck in an earlier stage? Maybe they can't come out of the anger, the denial, to even get to contemplating meaning. What would you say to those folks?
David: Two things. First of all, there is a reason for that. Maybe you're not supported in your life. Maybe it's not safe enough. There are people around us who say, get over it, move on. Grief takes many forms. It can be the loss of a job. It can be a relationship loss. It can be a pet loss.
There are so many different losses in our life, but people can easily say, get over it. It's often not like a cold or a flu that we recover from. We have to walk through it, and you might not be supported enough.
I have online groups. We have 26 different groups because grief is a unique time. Maybe your best friend, maybe your spouse, maybe your sister, your brother, that person who gets you, who is always there for you, doesn't understand this one.
Grief is a time when family and friends can feel like strangers, and strangers can become family and friends. So if our family doesn't get it, we need to go outside. We need to go to a local group or an online group. We need that. We can get stuck if we don't have that support, that community.
The other thing is, it's so important to understand what stuck means. For example, this side of the continuum is stuck. On the other end over here is chaos–it’s too much change. We were thrown into too much change with this loss, and we bounce all the way into stuck because stuck can feel safe.
Alison Cook: What you're saying reminds me that stuck might be where you need to be for that moment. In the IFS model that we talk about sometimes on the podcast, that part of you is there for a reason, protecting you.
David: That part might be saying, no more change. We're saying, walk forward into your new life. And that part might be saying, no more change. I've had it. We live in a grief illiterate world.
It's interesting. I have a grief certificate program where we train therapists and clergy, and so many coaches and even amazing clergy who are in our programs will say, I got trained on how to visit the sick. I got trained on how to do the funeral. No one taught me how to do the long walk with someone through their grief.
Alison Cook: That is so true. We live in a grief illiterate world. To your point, grief is not the problem. The problem is living in a culture that doesn't create spaces for it. So tell me a little bit more about this workbook that you have out now, David. It really focuses on the meaning part.
What are some of the practical ways you walk someone through this journey of grief, which includes this piece of creating meaning? Again, not necessarily finding meaning in something tragic, but finding meaning in that journey. How do you begin to walk people through that?
David: I almost feel like if I could go back and change the title, I might, because in a lot of ways, the workbook is really about excavating the pain. When you excavate the pain, the meaning gets revealed, but we have to go through the pain.
By the way, you can start with the workbook–you don't have to go back to any of the other books. It starts with telling our stories and realizing there's a way we tell our stories. But then I have the feelings wheel, and here's the thing: we can't heal what we don't feel. And we often think we have three feelings. I'm happy, mad, or sad. That's it.
So people get to choose from all these feelings to see and to understand, number one, we have judgment on our feelings. I do a lot of work there in uncovering the judgment. When I say to people, you have judgment on your feelings or grief, they're like, no, I don't.
But they'll go, I'm not crying enough. I'm crying too much. Those are actually judgments. They'll go, I should be further along. Oooh, that's a judgment. We're the first generation that has the luxury of feelings on feelings. We'll go, I'm angry, but anger is inappropriate. I'm sad, but there are worse things in the world. We have all these feelings that we sort of half-feel and throw behind us.
People say to me, if I start crying, I'll never stop. I'll say, oh dear one, I've sat with thousands of people. Everyone stops crying. We might cry again, but everyone stops crying. These feelings want to be felt. Feelings are not facts. They're information. They want to be felt. And then we go to the next feeling.
One of the tricks our mind plays with us that's so cruel, is our mind will make us feel like this feeling is final. You're devastated, and that's the rest of your life. You're broken hearted forever. You're lonely, always. Those may not be true.
Alison Cook: Do you think, David, that community or groups are essential for that kind of grief work, that feeling the feelings part? Or can somebody do that in the privacy of their own journal, in the privacy of their own prayer life? I'm curious about that, because I also think sometimes people are nervous about exposing raw feelings to other people.
David: That's one of my purposes in doing this. Because like I said, I wanted it to feel like we're at your kitchen table. I have an amazing co-author on this book. It's the person who sits down with it. They get to put their thoughts, their feelings, their heartbreak down on paper. They get to experience it, and they get to witness their own grief and see their pain. It helps us feel less alone.
Alison Cook: I love that. I love that. This could actually be one of your companions, this place that you've created where there's some structure to it. Somebody who knows what they're doing laid this out for me, and can help those parts of you that are nervously thinking, if I go there, I never will come back. No, I can do two pages today.
David: My goodness, there are some big open ended questions in the workbook, but there are also checklists. You could sit down in two minutes and go, oh, I didn't realize that. There's a place you could mark, do I have shame in my grief? There are some really easy exercises for someone who's afraid to open that book.
Alison, here's one of the challenges. Someone said to me, I bought the workbook, but I'm not ready to open it. I said, okay, I'm curious. Can you tell me more about that? She said, yes, I don't want to open the pain. I said to her, oh, if only you could skip the pain by not opening the book.
If only you could put that workbook in the closet, on a shelf with your pain. But the pain is not in the workbook. It's in you. The workbook is a way to move the pain from you
Alison Cook: That's so well stated. We treat it like a little box. Once we begin to do that, open the pain in ourselves through these questions, through excavating the pain, what's the alchemy? How does that process work? How might meaning begin to flow from that, in your experience?
Is it something that begins to take shape through looking at the pain? Tell me a little bit about what it begins to open us up to.
David: There are a few guidelines in there to help us think about this. There are seven of them. One, meaning is relative and personal. Two, meaning takes time. You may not find it for months or years after a loss. Three, meaning doesn't require understanding. It isn't necessary to understand why someone died in order to find the meaning.
So many times we get stuck in the why. I need a why to find my healing, to move through this grief. There are so many times in life where there isn't a why. Many times we end up getting a why. Maybe the doctor tells us why they died, what happened to their body. I tell people, even when you get a why, it's not a satisfying why. So we don't need the why to find the meaning.
Four, even when you do find your meaning, it won't be worth the cost. We'd always rather have our loved one back. I could become the greatest bestseller of all time, and I'd rather have my son.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
David: Five, and this is an important one, your loss is not a test, a lesson, something to handle, a gift, or a blessing. Loss is what happens in life. Meaning is what you make happen after the loss. Six, only you can find your own meaning. Seven, meaningful connections will heal painful memories.
I think people can easily get lost in that fifth one. It's not a lesson. It's not a blessing. So many times, people say to me, David, my family is cursed. I say, oh my gosh, tell me why. Oh, the grandparents have all died, there was a cousin, we've had so many deaths. I say, do you know what the death rate is in your family compared to others?
Oh, I'm sure we're high. What is the death rate in families? I said, 100%. On planet Earth, it has been designed, as far as I can see, that everyone who lives, dies someday. When we can recognize that that's the mystery and the way this world is set up, and be present in that and not fight with the reality, we can find a different life.
Alison Cook: It's a paradox, isn't it?
David: It is a paradox.
Alison Cook: There's life in making peace with the reality of death. What a paradox.
David: It's a strange thing. I live in a really sweet, cute little neighborhood. I ran into someone that I hadn't seen in a while. We worked together 30 years ago and she lives fairly close. She goes, oh, I've been following your work over the years and your career and all that. She goes, I'd like to be friends, but it would be too depressing. I said to her, that's okay. But you know, I don't have a depressed life. I have a really full life.
Here's where it's hard to understand. Most of my work now is online. But back in the day, when I would go to a hotel meeting room that had a few hundred people, I'd be teaching. Down the hall would be the realtors. Around the corner would be the nurses, then there'd be the Rotary Club.
After the day was over, the staff would say, hey, what were you teaching? I'd go, oh, why do you ask? They'd go, because your group was laughing the most. They'd go, wait a minute, I don't understand, what were you teaching? I'd go, grief. Now they're really confused.
Here's what people don't understand. Everyone in that room who had been through loss is confused. Many were helpers learning how to continue to help people. They absolutely had to go deeper into their pain. But what we don't realize is their bandwidth was also expanded for joy.
They laughed a little harder. We understand now, the most precious thing we have is our time. And when we hear this idea of meaning, we think, oh, is it a charity I'm supposed to start? What am I supposed to do? I tell people, meaning can be in those big events, but meaning is also in the small moments. This is one, we have to name it. This is a meaningful moment.
Someone might be listening that needs to hear this, or have someone they know that needs to hear this, to name those moments of meaning.
Alison Cook: I love that. I feel that. That's beautiful. Thank you so much for what you've done here. I have two questions for you, David, that I like to ask all my guests. The first one is, if you could go back and say something to that young boy in the hotel room, what would you want him to know now?
David: You're going to be okay. You're going to get through this. You're going to be okay.
Alison Cook: I love that. What's bringing out the best of you right now?
David: Walking with people through these tough times to help them find the light again.
Alison Cook: Where can we find more about your work, the workbook, and all that you're doing to help people journey through grief?
David: If you go to grief.com, you can find information on the workbook, all my books, as well as my Tender Hearts online grief program, the grief educator certificate program, and lots of free resources.
Alison Cook: It's really amazing. You're shining your light for so many people in, as you said, a world that doesn't always honor the genuineness of this process. It's something we all have to do on some level. It's normal. It doesn't mean it's easy, but I appreciate all that you're doing to help so many people. I appreciate your time coming on here today.
David: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Do you feel like you’re constantly caring for others, whether it’s aging parents, your kids, or even your career—and there’s little time left for you?
Women in the sandwich generation, particularly those aged 35-54, report higher stress levels than any other age group. If you’re juggling a heavy load of responsibilities as you care for others, you’re not alone. In this episode, you’ll gain practical tools to help you navigate this season with compassion and healthy boundaries, empowering you with the support and nourishment you need.
Here's what we cover:
* Why caring for others can stir up unresolved emotions and how to address them
* 3 key strategies to help you through stressful seasons
* The antidote for constant guilt
* How to set boundaries that protect your emotional well-being
* Practical ways to invite God into your daily routine
Resources:
- I Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
- PDF Questions for Reflection: 5 Steps to Calm Overwhelming Emotions
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 6: Do I Really Have an Inner Child? What It Means to Reparent Yourself
Thanks to our sponsors:
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here this week as we dive into a brand new topic. It's a topic we've never covered before on the podcast, but whenever I survey you or ask you what topics you'd like me to cover, this one today comes up.
The first way it comes up is simply taking care of aging parents. But then the second way it comes up is, how do I care for emotionally immature parents who neglected me, who weren't there for me when I was young? And now I have to take care of them.
This topic of caring for our own parents as they age also comes up in the context of, “I'm still raising my own kids”. I'm still trying to figure out how to launch my own kids, let alone heal myself, let alone care for my own parents.
Now there's a term for this. The term is “sandwich generation". This refers to adults who are simultaneously caring for their aging parents while supporting their own children. This could include young children, teenage children, or even young adult children. The point is, you're in a dual caregiving role.
You're sandwiched between two different generations who have a lot of needs and these needs are very different. The needs of your aging parents or your in-laws are very different from the needs of your children, whom you're trying to launch. Being a part of this sandwich generation presents a lot of really unique stressors as you can feel stuck between all the needs around you.
Some of you listening are still raising young kids. Maybe you're managing the morning chaos of packing lunches for your six year old or helping your nine year old finish a last minute school project. There's a lot of hands-on needs.
Meanwhile, you're also beginning to coordinate doctor's appointments, maybe for your mom or for your dad. Maybe they're starting to show signs of memory loss, or they have a condition that's developing. They might need your attention or your support, or they might need help with groceries or bills or getting health care insurance figured out.
Some of you listening might be launching young adult children. Maybe you've got a child who's off at college and while they're no longer under your roof, you're still very well aware that they're dealing with a lot of anxiety or a lot of social or academic stressors, and you're still very involved.
They still take up a lot of your mental capacity. Your parenting work is certainly not over once your kids go off to college. Maybe you even have kids who are out of college, who are working their first jobs, who are maybe getting engaged, maybe getting married, maybe starting to have children of their own.
Again, your work as a parent is still not finished. In fact, some of these major life decisions that our young adult children are making require even more of our mental bandwidth and emotional support, as they really need our help guiding them through some high-stakes decisions.
All the while, on the other side of it, you might have a parent or an in-law who's lost a spouse, and so they're dealing with a lot of new norms in their life. Maybe they're more lonely, there might be moves, there might be new financial issues that emerge as your parents age.
Some of you maybe don't have kids and yet you're still carrying the stress of figuring out, how am I going to care for my parents? I finally maybe got the life that I've wanted to have. And now I have to figure out how to take on their needs.
So no matter what your situation is, as you're listening, this sandwich generation, where you're looking at needs, both of the next generation coming up behind you and the older generation, the one ahead of you, it stirs up a lot of complicated emotions.
Today, I want to follow the framework that I lay out in my book, I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, this framework for navigating complicated emotions. Number one, we're going to name what's hard.
Naming what's really happening, both inside of ourselves, the emotions that we're feeling, in addition to the realities of the new stressors in our lives, can really help validate the reality of what you're experiencing.
As interpersonal neurobiologist Dr. Dan Siegel says, when you name something, you can tame it. It literally stops the firing of the emotional circuitry in your brain, and it helps you tap into the ordering part of your brain.
So you've named it. You can see it. This is what's happening now. I know what it is. It allows that prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain that can start making meaning that can start creating order, to come online. You start to bring order out of chaos.
We're going to do some naming work, and then we're going to do some framing work. In particular, I want to help you create a way to reframe the demands and stressors and complexities of what it means to be in these caretaking roles.
Lastly, I'm going to give you three strategies so you can brave a path through honoring your own needs, where you can love and honor others without losing yourself.
The bottom line is that navigating the sandwich generation where you're caring for your aging parents while supporting your own children is a complex and emotional journey, but it's also an opportunity. It's an opportunity to create healthier patterns for yourself and for your own family.
I'm going to walk you through how to turn this really challenging season into an opportunity to go even deeper into this work of figuring out how to honor your own needs while providing meaningful care for others, all without losing yourself.
Number one, we're going to start by naming what's hard. So, first of all, let's talk about some of the unique challenges and stressors and emotions that being part of this sandwich generation can stir up inside of us.
The first one is guilt. Often, when we struggle with too many caretaking responsibilities, we start to beat ourselves up. Guilt can get really loud. You might start to notice messages like, what's wrong with me? Why can't I get it together? Why is this so hard when it doesn't seem like it's hard for anyone else? I'm not organized enough, I'm not giving enough, I'm too selfish, whatever the thing is.
Often when we have too many caretaking responsibilities, it can kick up a lot of guilt. I say this a lot, but I'm going to say it again. The presence of guilt does not always mean you've done something wrong. It might mean you're doing something brave, something uncomfortable, something hard.
Guilt is an emotion. It is not necessarily a direct message from God. When we're overwhelmed and we have too much on our plate and when there are more needs than would be humanly possible for us to meet, guilt often steps in like an old clingy friend. The truth is, guilt is often masking other more vulnerable emotions.
Guilt is so closely tied to grief. It's so closely tied to fear. It's so closely tied to helplessness. It comes up when what we're actually feeling is overwhelm and helplessness. This is so hard. We don't know how to face those more vulnerable feelings. Sometimes it's easier for a part of us to constantly berate and guilt trip ourselves.
It can feel easier in some ways to beat ourselves up, as if we could be doing better than we are, than to face the reality of those more vulnerable emotions, which is “this is hard, this is painful, I'm struggling, I'm scared, I’m lonely”. So often, those more vulnerable emotions are hiding underneath the constant guilt, especially when we're overwhelmed.
Secondly, you may notice more anxiety, a constant feeling of being unsettled, chaotic, not able to really find that calm, clear place inside, that deep breath where you can really exhale at some point during your day.
Maybe you notice that you have a hard time going to sleep at night or your thoughts are racing. You're finding it hard to wind down and rest or relax or log off for a little bit. There's too much on your mind. Oftentimes, when you have a lot of these caretaking responsibilities, you'll see an uptick in some of that anxiety.
You might notice more stress in your body. Maybe you feel more agitated, like you're more inclined to go into that fight flight response. There's a good reason for that stress. The American Psychological Association notes that especially women who are part of the sandwich generation, particularly those who are aged 35 to 54, report significantly higher stress levels than any other age group.
This stress might be about managing time. How do I get everything done that I need to get done today? It might be the fatigue of managing complicated medical appointments, phone calls, attending school events for children, driving children, and also sometimes aging parents.
You might be worried about how to keep your own job while you're taking care of all the people who need you in your life. Oftentimes, there's a financial strain as caregivers face increased expenses related to health care, and their own kids' education. All of this can impact your own financial stability and your own retirement planning.
So there's a lot of added stress that can start to ratchet up the cortisol, where you're having a harder time finding rest, finding calm, finding those moments of deep exhale. And this can creep up on you. It doesn't happen overnight, but suddenly, and this gets to our last thing that you might notice–numbing.
You might start noticing that you've resorted to old patterns from the past. Maybe even patterns that you thought you'd kicked, patterns that you thought were well behind you, but suddenly maybe you notice yourself reaching for the extra glass of wine or reaching for the extra bag of cookies or binge watching Netflix more than you have been for a long time, or trying to drown out your own feelings in whatever way that you can.
You might notice those behaviors and then that leads you right back up to the guilt. You might feel guilty. What's wrong with me? Why can't I get it together?
But the reality is that the overwhelm that you're facing is real. It's not your fault. Something's happened that is hard. There's a lot on your plate. There are a lot of demands on your time. Of course, you're overwhelmed. Of course, you're trying to find quick ways to soothe yourself late at night.
Of course, you cannot bear to make one more phone call to a doctor on your to do list. Of course, you're getting short fused with your own kids or with your own parents. This is normal when we're overwhelmed. And beating yourself up and shaming yourself doesn't help. If there's nothing else you take away today from this episode, it's that you are not alone.
There are millions of other women in particular who are feeling the same way that you feel, and I wish we could all get together and sit around a table for a minute and share what's hard about caring for other people, the fatigue that we feel, the frustration, and even sometimes the grief.
It can feel like time is passing us by, and it can feel like we're on a hamster wheel instead of fully able to enjoy these seasons of our lives. If we were gathered together, we would probably cry out so many of our frustrations. And then I know without a doubt what we would do.
We would get busy figuring out how to help each other find a better way through. Since we can't all get together, I want to spend the next portion of this episode talking you through some practical strategies or ways that you can begin to find some peace out of all these crazy pieces of your life, to find some calm out of all the chaos.
I want to give you what I call a holy reframe. In I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, I walk you through how to create them. It's a way of examining all the complexity of what's hard and creating a bigger, more robust, understanding of the situation. And what I think is sometimes the most powerful way to reframe a hard situation is this reality that two things can be true.
This is incredibly hard. And, there's an invitation here for me, for my own healing and growth.
I'm frustrated with all the people who need me and I want to do right by them.
I need more space for myself and I want to show up for the people I love.
As you begin to honor the both-and, you create a bigger frame. You create more spaciousness inside your soul. I'm frustrated and I'm committed.
I'm scared I don't have what it takes, and I have confidence I can get through this.
I'm mad at myself and I see how hard I'm working
You slow yourself down and you start to make room for all of what's true about your situation. When we're dealing with so many legitimate needs all around us, it really becomes a crucible. If you think about that word crucible and what it means, I like to think of it in terms of pottery.
For those of you who are into pottery, you'll know what I mean. But when you create a carefully shaped item out of clay, maybe you create a beautiful mug, and it looks really cool and you've gotten it exactly how you want, the next thing you do is you take that creation and you put it in what's called a kiln.
That kiln exposes that object you've created to extreme heat. And that heat transforms the clay into something really strong and durable. When that mug comes out of the kiln and it's survived all that heat and that extreme pressure, it actually becomes more resilient, more durable.
It's ready for everyday use. You can use it every single day and it becomes something really precious. If you never put that mug in the kiln, it would stay really fragile and it would easily crumble. It wouldn't have a lot of use to yourself or to other people.
Similarly, a crucible in our lives represents a challenging situation, like being the caregiver for a lot of different people. When you're in that situation, there's pressure applied. You can feel pressure from everybody around you. But if you're smart about how you walk through that crucible, it can ultimately strengthen you and shape you into an even more vibrant, more resilient, more refined version of yourself.
When you're in this sandwich generation, you're under a lot of emotional, relational, and logistical pressure, and that can start to feel like it's going to break you. When you really honor that process, and you do some of the things we're going to talk about today, it can help you dig even deeper into personal growth.
You can learn how to take even better care of yourself, have even stronger boundaries with other people, and learn to heal parts of you that are going to come up to the surface as a result of the pressure. This process can be used for good.
Now, I’m not saying it's easy. I do not want to minimize what you're going through. And, I want to encourage you that as you name what's hard and you frame your reality and you apply some of the steps we're going to talk about today, you can come through this season, this fire, this crucible, even stronger than you were before.
Here are three primary strategies I want you to think about as you imagine yourself in this crucible, in this high pressure situation that you're in. I'm going to give you three words to orient yourself as you think about how to allow this challenging season to do its work for good inside of you.
Number one: re-parenting. Crucibles are an opportunity for your own healing. It may not feel that way, but I'm going to show you how that's true.
Number two: boundaries. A crucible is an amazing opportunity to take inventory of your own boundary lines and get crystal clear about them. You do not have the margin during this season to take on anything that is not yours to take on, and so this is your chance. If you've ever wanted to really work on your boundaries, this is the time to do it.
And then number three: surrender. What I mean by that term surrender is the spiritual antidote to guilt. Surrender is the spiritual antidote to guilt. You're going to work on reparenting. You're going to work on your boundaries, and then you're going to let it all go and surrender. That's how you ultimately beat the guilt.
So number one, what do I mean by reparenting? Well, the work of caregiving for others, whether it's our kids or our own parents, often is a seedbed for reactivating our own wounds. Often when we're caring for our own children, there are really beautiful opportunities to do things differently. We can do for our own kids the things that were never done for us.
And that can be really life giving as a parent, to reparent the parts of you through providing for your own kids the things that you yearned to have for yourself. But here's the thing. As you also step into caring for your own parents as they age, it is another opportunity for you to reparent parts of you.
Often, as our parents age, their old patterns get magnified. So if you have a parent who likes to guilt trip you or criticize you or constantly give you advice, those patterns are going to intensify. Or if you have a parent who is in avoidance, who doesn't like to deal directly with their physical ailments, or who doesn't like to deal directly with conflict or who is in denial about their own emotions, that is also going to intensify as they age.
Those patterns don't tend to go away. They tend to intensify as people age, and so you're going to be right back in that proverbial soup in which you were cooked, where mom is criticizing you or dad is in complete denial about his needs.
You're going to feel frustrated, you're going to feel annoyed, you're going to notice old parts of you come to the surface that you may not have seen for a long time. You might start noticing that fawn response, where you start trying to please them in order to avoid their criticism, in order to avoid their irritation.
Parts of you are going to be like, what is wrong with me? I am an adult. Why am I defaulting to this old childlike behavior with my parent? It's so normal, please hear me say. And it is an opportunity for even deeper healing, if you notice that irritation, that agitation, maybe you're going into fight mode more, maybe you notice yourself going into that people pleasing mode more.
You want to shut it out, even though other parts of you feel that you actually need to show up for your parent right now, no matter what they did or didn't do in the past. So you've got to deal with a part that wants to check out and not deal with this. This is an opportunity to re-parent that part of you that's showing up.
How do you do that?
The first thing you do is get curious about it. Notice it without shame. What's the impulse that you're noticing? For example, I can't stop pleasing my mom. I can't say no to her, even when I know it's not logical. I wonder what that's about. Or I am so irritable with my dad! I don't want to be, but I am. I want to get curious about that.
That part of me is like a child trying to scurry around to make mom happy. I wonder what that's about. What is she afraid would happen if I say to my mom, I can't do this today. I'll get back to you tomorrow. What is she afraid would happen if dad was irritated with me?
And then notice, where do you feel that impulse, that urge in your body? Are you hunched over? Are you tense? How old does that part of you feel? Is she 16 afraid of getting in trouble? Is she a five year old part of you afraid of losing their love?
It is so normal for these young parts of you to show back up in these stressful situations. Get curious about those parts of you.
Number two, extend those parts of you compassion. You want to let those parts of you know, I get it. Dad's temper was scary back then. Mom's criticism hurts. It is hard to feel like I can't make them happy. Whatever it is that those parts of you feel, honor the validity of those feelings.
Simultaneously, let those parts of you know that you're here now and that you know how to manage yourself and your parents in ways those young parts of you never did. Update them about all the things you've accomplished in your adult life, that you know how to speak up for yourself.
If someone is criticizing you, you know how to set healthy boundaries and tell someone, no, I can't help you with that right now. I'll get back to you in a couple of days when I can. Let those parts of you know that there's an adult in the room who can handle this and that they don't have to.
You might ask yourself, what are those parts of me afraid might happen in this moment, if I don't get it right, if I don't make everyone happy, if I can't solve the problems in front of me? If I can't make all of my family members content at all times, what am I afraid might happen? Am I afraid of losing love? Am I afraid of being a failure? What am I afraid might happen?
Honor the fears that come up. And then as you're noticing these parts of you that are anxious or scared or stressed out or fearful, what might happen if you invite God to be with those parts of you? What burdens from long ago need to be released into the arms of God?
Do they need to release any burdens of wanting to be perfect, of wanting to earn love, of wanting to keep the peace at all costs, of feeling responsible for everybody else's problems? Imagine yourself letting go of those burdens and taking a deep breath.
As you work with these young parts of yourself, you're learning to reparent yourself in ways. These parts of you need you to show up for them. They need you to make time for them every single day to ensure that you're not placing burdens on them that were never theirs to bear.
You will take care of these other people in your life. You will. But you will care for them so much more wisely, more strategically, more sustainably, if you first tend to these tender, vulnerable, young parts who still live inside of you.
This work of reparenting yourself is a practice every single day, and I've got some resources for you, some questions that might be helpful for you. I will post a link in this episode’s show notes, where you can do some work of tending to these young parts of you who show up in the face of overwhelm, especially when you're giving out so much care to others.
Number two: boundaries. As you do that inner work of identifying misplaced burdens that were never yours to bear, you're also going to want to set some external boundaries to help safeguard some spaciousness for yourself. You will not be able to meet all of these needs around you if you don't take some time to renegotiate your external boundaries.
Some practical ways to do that, number one, I want you to think about making a weekly self-care appointment. That could be with a therapist. It could be with a pastor. It could be with a spiritual director. It could be with a sibling or a good friend. But I want you to set aside some time regularly to check-in with someone about your own needs.
When you're caring for a lot of other people, it's incredibly important to make sure that you set apart time for someone else to check in on you. Number two, you might need some sort of daily practice such as journaling, where you give yourself space to write out all the things you feel you don't want to lose touch with yourself.
Often what I'll say to people is, set a timer. Don't overwhelm yourself. 10 minutes every day, five minutes every day, to write down your stream of consciousness. This is hard. I'm struggling. I'm mad at these people. I hate this. Whatever it is that you're feeling, give yourself permission to feel it.
And then number three, make a list of all your commitments, including the caregiving commitments that are in front of you. I want you to rank them and I want you to cut out the commitments that are not essential. Especially those things that are not life-giving.
Now's the time to cull your schedule. If there are a few things you've got lingering on and you don't really enjoy it, you don't really feel called to it anymore, maybe you've taken on an optional responsibility at work that you could let go of. Maybe you're doing some volunteer work or you're on a committee at church and you feel responsible for it.
But honestly, it's hard. It's a drag on your time and you don't have the bandwidth for it right now. Now's the time. Now's the time to take that off your plate and to say the hard no’s. You've got a lot you need to say yes to in your life right now. So you've got to get extra clear about your no’s. I have a ton of resources about how to figure out your yes’ and no's in my book, The Best of You, if you want to go deeper on that. It's a super practical resource on boundary setting.
Now's the time to cull if there are relationships that are a drain. Now might be the time to say to that person, I care about you and I have so much on my plate that you may not hear from me for a while. And I want you to know that this is what I've got going on. I may not be available.
So this is a time with boundary setting to schedule time for yourself intentionally. To make sure you've got some sort of daily practice where you're giving yourself permission to feel what you feel, such as journaling.
Number three, culling your schedule and taking things off that you don't have the bandwidth for. You're increasing the amount of time with people and activities that are life-giving for you and you are decreasing the amount of time with the people and activities that are life-draining for you.
Lastly, this word surrender. God meets us when we are hurting the most. God meets us in our overwhelm. Now, listen, we have to do our part. We have to work at our boundaries, we have to work at our inner lives, at reparenting ourselves, and noticing what's going on inside of us.
That's our part of the equation. But the third part is God's. And God meets us when we are overwhelmed. God meets us, especially as folks who are giving so much care to others. And that word surrender, it doesn't mean we're giving up. In fact, I believe surrender is the antidote to false guilt.
Guilt tells us, I'm letting everybody down. But surrender says, I am limited, but God is big enough for all of us.
Guilt tells us, I have to be perfect, but surrender says, I'll never be perfect. And God's grace is enough.
Guilt tells us, I should be doing more, but surrender says, I'll give it my best and I'll trust God with the rest.
The antidote to guilt is a radical acceptance of our dependence on a good and kind God. It's choosing to bravely work out what we can, what is in our control, and leaving the rest to God. God, I don't want to disappoint this other person. I don't want to make a mistake. I don't want to let anyone down.
But I have to be brave. I have to make decisions. I have to live within the limits of my finances, of my time, of my own humanity. There is a profound shift that happens when we surrender, when we glimpse the end of ourselves and we reach the boundaries of our own capacity. A moment of surrender is quite possibly one of the most profound moments we experience this side of heaven.
It's not that our challenges magically resolve themselves. It's that when we become aware of our own frailties, of our own finitude, of our own human limitations, we discover that that's where God loves to enter in. It's where we stumble upon a deeper strength, one that doesn't come from inside of us. It's bigger than that.
We're doing everything in our power, and yet these problems are too much for us at times. We've reflected, we've prayed, we've journaled, we've set boundaries. We've done our part. We throw ourselves into the arms of grace and in that moment of surrender, all that mental work, all that anguish, all that stress, all that worry comes grinding to a halt.
We stop. We breathe. We release our grip. And in that moment, something miraculous happens. Our loving God, who has been there all along, breaks through a little bit. That divide between where we are and where God is disappears for a moment, and our minds calm. Something inside our body shifts. We take a break.
We take a walk. We might call a friend. We might let the tears fall, dance to a favorite song, or laugh out loud at the absurdity of this life at times. And then we get back up, and with God's help, we take it one brave step at a time.
If you are feeling overwhelmed by the needs of everyone around you, you're sandwiched between caring for different generations, including your own soul, right in the middle of it all, I want you to remember these three words: re-parenting, boundaries, and surrender.
Reparenting turns pressure and stress into an opportunity to nurture and care for the younger parts of you that still carry wounds from the past. When caregiving triggers those old fears or reactions, it's an invitation to pause and get curious.
What is this part of me afraid might happen? As you show compassion for those younger parts of you and invite God to be near, you'll begin to care for yourself even as you give out care to others.
Boundaries will help you navigate this season with strength and clarity. Setting limits doesn't mean you love others less. It means protecting your capacity so you can give out in a sustainable way. Sustainable boundaries will help you avoid burnout and allow you to care for others in legitimate ways without sacrificing your own wellbeing.
Lastly, surrender. No matter how hard we try, we can't fix everything or control the outcomes for other people. Surrender invites us to release what is not ours to control and trust that God is present in the midst of the mess. It's about doing your best and letting go of the rest, knowing that God's grace has no limits.
In my experience, God loves to surprise us by showing up in those moments when we feel the most defeated, the most overwhelmed, when we throw ourselves into the arms of his love and his kindness. He reminds us that we're never actually alone. And he cares so much more than we do about these other people and about the parts of our own souls in need of his care.
Do the holidays bring a mix of joy and complicated emotions for you?
We're "supposed" to feel grateful, and parts of us do. But other parts of us feel nostalgic, driven by guilt, exhausted, or even angry. In this honest, vulnerable conversation, author and spiritual director Anjuli Paschall joins me to explore the emotions that surface during the holiday season. We talk about how to navigate these feelings with grace for ourselves, and how these emotions can be gifts in disguise. We cover. . .
Here’s what we cover:
* How to distinguish between true guilt and false guilt
* The surprising connection between anger and exhaustion
* Why nostalgia can be both comforting and bittersweet
* Practical ways to honor all your feelings during this emotionally complex season
* Anjuli’s practice of praying through complicated emotions and finding God’s presence in them
Resources:
- Feel: A Collection of Liturgies Offering Hope for Every Complicated Emotion by Anjuli Paschall
- I Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
- Lovealways.anjuli on Instagram
- anjulipaschall.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 30: Protecting What’s Good Without Denying What’s Hard at the Holidays
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Go to thrivemarket.com/bestofyou for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift!
- Whether you're exploring distant lands or enjoying a staycation at home, Cozy Earth has your back. Visit cozyearth.com and unlock an exclusive 35% off with code BESTOFYOU.
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey, everyone, and welcome to this very special Thanksgiving episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so thrilled to be with you on this special day and the days that follow Thanksgiving for this well-timed episode.
I recorded this conversation a while back and realized it was the perfect episode to share with you today. This is a day when we often feel like we should feel all the things, like gratitude, joy, peace, and serenity. But the truth is, other emotions often show up on the holidays.
It's so normal to feel a variety of different emotions on a day like Thanksgiving, or the day after Thanksgiving, or days when your kids are not at school, or days when you're spending lots of time with family members that you love, but also bring up complicated feelings inside of you.
In honor of all the emotions you might be feeling this Thanksgiving, I'm thrilled to invite you into this conversation I had with Anjuli Paschall. She's a spiritual director and she's written a beautiful book called Feel: A Collection of Liturgies Offering Hope for Every Complicated Emotion.
What I love about this resource is she goes through 75 different emotions, offering a way to name them and also a way to bring those different emotions into your conversation with God. If you've read my book, I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, I talk about the importance of naming tools.
We need ways to name the different things that we feel. Sometimes it's so elusive. We don't even really recognize the uncomfortable feeling or sensation that's tugging at the corner of our soul. We don't even realize we're feeling it until after we've had a meltdown or after we've lashed out at someone or after the day is over, oh my gosh, I was agitated all day long.
In this book, she's offering you a way into your different emotions so that you can take charge of your emotions, not the other way around.
I found this conversation with Anjuli to be so therapeutic for my own soul. We dive into three emotions in particular that tend to surface unbidden at the holidays. We talk about guilt, including true guilt versus false guilt.
We talk about nostalgia, which is such an interesting emotion. I loved what Anjuli and I stumbled upon as we talked about the role of nostalgia in our lives. we also talk about anger, which often shows up unexpectedly spoiler alert.
It's closely linked to exhaustion. it's so important to recognize the tug of anger on our soul before it takes us over.
This is a beautiful conversation. That's real. It's raw. also deeply prayerful. I love the language through which Anjuli honors these emotions, even as she's constantly bringing them into conversation with God.
I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Anjuli Pascal.
***
Alison Cook: Anjuli, I am so thrilled that you are here today. I'm so thrilled to have this conversation with you. You've written this beautiful book, all about feelings. I'm so curious to dive into a little bit of your own relationship with feelings. You talk about how we want to avoid, run away from, and control them. You also talk about wanting to indulge certain feelings.
Tell me a little bit about your younger self, whether it was your early twenties, before you had kids, or as an early young mom. What has your relationship with your emotions been like in the past?
Anjuli: Yeah, that is a great question. I grew up in a pretty typical evangelical church and home. My parents were very connected to ministry and so I grew up really with this idea that there are good feelings and bad feelings. The good feelings are happiness, creativity, joy, and then bad feelings like anger and fear, even disgust.
I spent a lot of my life focusing on how to get to the good feelings. Because I even grew up thinking that anger and fear and disgust were sinful too. In my childhood, I was so happy. It was this optimism, happiness, and focus on good things. If anything bad comes up inside of me, get rid of it, or something's wrong with me, or it's sin.
It took a lot of time to start unpacking, realizing that feelings are not bad or good, they're true. They're not always right, but they're true.
Alison Cook: Say a little bit more about that. What do you mean by that? I could hear some folks going, what do you mean by true? Let's say I'm feeling really mad at a friend or really resentful of someone. How can that be true?
Anjuli: That feeling is a true feeling. I recently went through an experience where there was a lot of misunderstanding in a relationship. The feeling of being misunderstood is very uncomfortable. It is a true feeling. But it's not necessarily right. There could be different causes or different reasons, or I don't know the whole story. I can interpret the feeling incorrectly. But the feeling itself is true.
Alison Cook: I think you're saying something so wise. The feeling is something to be honored. There's something true, and we can misinterpret the feeling. I might feel misunderstood because my friend in fact misunderstood me. I might feel misunderstood and she in fact did understand me and I didn't understand her reply to me.
Anjuli: I think it has taken a lot of work to untangle the family dynamics that I grew up in, but also untangle some of the messages that I heard from the pulpit or from church, well-intended or not. I came to believe if it's good, present it, speak it, perform it. If it's bad, stuff it, ignore it, pretend it isn't there.
That really got me in a world of trouble. It works when you're young, you can get away with pretending and performing, but eventually it catches up with you. I think probably in my mid-twenties, it really caught up with me. Turns out you can't really outrun anger. Turns out you can't really stuff fear.
It'll catch up with you eventually. My mid-twenties when I was actually in seminary, and I had to confront these feelings that had been stuffed for so long. It really felt like a serious breakdown. You can only keep that ball underwater for so long until it then becomes like a bomb. That's what it felt like, this bomb going off inside of me.
Until I was really doing some internal deep dive work and letting some of those feelings that had been ignored or suppressed come up, was I able to actually find integration in a healthy way.
Alison Cook: That makes so much sense. You hit that rock bottom of the overwhelm of the feeling, and there's no way out but through. I love that you're saying that you began to untangle the knots of your emotions. Then you go into becoming a mom. You're also a spiritual director.
In both of those roles, similar to me as a therapist, our job in many ways is to keep our feelings on the back burner, as we are present to the feelings of others, whether it's our kids, whether it's someone you're mentoring, a spiritual directee, someone you're sitting with for me as a therapist.
It's my job to keep my feelings a little bit in the back as I am helping others navigate their way through feelings. I think that's a really interesting role where you're learning to honor your own feelings, but not necessarily have them be front and center in some of those roles. How do you navigate that inside of yourself as you try to stay healthy emotionally, internally?
Anjuli: That's a really great question. I would say it looked a lot like stumbling. It looked a lot like confusion. It looked a lot like the question, what's wrong with me? I think especially becoming a mom, I had already done so much previous training in soul care. I thought, I know what I'm doing. I have all these tools now.
Becoming a mom really was a shift for me. It took some time to integrate real life with heart knowledge. I think what really became the outlet for me is honesty. Because you know about all the shoulds. And, becoming a mom, I should be happy. I should love every minute of this. I should be grateful. I should not want another life.
I bumped up against all these “shoulds” when I had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 kids. Especially when I had one or two kids, I noticed how lonely I was, but I shouldn't be lonely. Because this is my dream. This is what I've always wanted. But I'd go to parks and just, I remember being weepy.
It seems like everybody else is having the best time pushing their kid on the swing while I'm over here being like, this is slow, boring work. I don't really know how to play. I don't know how to do this motherhood thing.
When I say honesty, Alison, I’m talking about those feelings of loneliness and sadness and grief and even some helplessness and connecting to my feelings. Being honest with them and actually feeling them, giving myself permission to feel them and then to speak them, be it online or with my friend or at my MOPS group table, it actually became the means for intimacy and connection with other people.
I guess I wouldn't look at it like I'm attending to others as one thing and I attend to myself as another thing, but as I attend to myself and my heart and honor that, I'm actually able to attend to others and my kids and make space for them in a much better way.
Alison Cook: Attuning to your own emotions, you are actually more able to attend to theirs. When you started being more honest, what were some of the reactions you got, both negative and positive?
Anjuli: I'll give you a personal one. When I shared about my early mid 20s, when I started to notice, what is this feeling? What is this fear and anxiety? Oh my goodness, anxiety. I remember sitting in a parking lot with my best friend and sharing that with her, how actually really scared I was. I was sweating. I was like, dripping sweating fear.
She looks at me and says, yeah, of course you feel scared. And I was so empowered then. Oh, I'm not gonna be rejected in my fear, but also I'm gonna find friendship. I can also find more words for it, which led to so much more community.
With motherhood, that's where I started writing online. I was talking about this honest place of motherhood for me. People came out of the woodworks, like me too. Oh my gosh. I'd get these messages from moms weeping and feeling the depth of their own shame and guilt. It actually became such a bridge for relationships.
Alison Cook: You have an amazing presence, both in person and online, and you really do have a ministry. You're so authentic. You show up so honestly, so vulnerably, in a way that invites others to feel seen. It's a very beautiful gift that I hear from what you're saying came out of your own experience of, I have to be honest about this. I have to be honest.
Anjuli: And I'm scared to death. It's the scariest thing ever to step into vulnerability, but it's also true.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's true. The truth sets us free.
Anjuli: Turns out.
Alison Cook: Yeah. So, your book highlights 75 different emotions. First of all, I want to know, how did you come up with your list? Second of all, I'm curious, which ones were the hardest for you to write about and pray through as you led us through them?
Anjuli: I broke the book down into the six core emotions, which are surprise, fear, anger, happiness, disgust, and sadness. You can find variations of the core emotions, but those are the ones I really stuck to. Under each core emotion are subcategories of feelings. Each one was challenging for me, but probably the hardest was, it sounds so funny now that I say it, but playful was a really hard one to write.
Another hard one was anxiety. However you feel, you can open up to that chapter and the first section is language for your feeling. Because oftentimes, we don't even know how or why we feel what we feel.
I did my best to take from my own journals, my own diaries, if you will, of how I experienced that feeling, to help the reader connect to their own feeling of agitation or worry or guilt. The next section is a liturgy of that feeling, opening the heart to God. Anxiety was tricky, because anxiety itself is really the fear of not feeling other feelings.
It was hard to name and write because not everybody, but a lot of people feel anxiety, and they feel it very differently. I didn't want to miss somebody and neglect or dismiss their feeling. But I also didn't want to overshoot it either. So I rewrote anxiety like 18 times.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I could see that, because anxiety is very familiar, but it also surfaces in so many different ways. I thought it was beautiful. I'd love to even hear maybe a snippet of one to think through, man, I'm feeling this and now I can go use this tool to walk myself through it.
Anjuli: Yeah, if you are feeling anxiety, you would open up to the chapter on “Anxious”, and it gives a general definition: it's the feeling of avoiding other important emotions. In the language for feeling anxious, this is how I begin.
“I can't even recall when this feeling began. My body can't settle down. Everything itches. A slow growing panic pulsing through me makes it difficult to breathe. I am anxious. I can manage many things, but not this.
Fear races through me, and I can't rationalize, organize, or talk myself out of my escalated state of anxiety. It has a mind of its own. It is the boss. Trying to regain right thinking, a right posture, a right plan, is exhausting. There is a war within me.”
I go on for another paragraph, “I want to manage it and control it, or I want to suppress it, or I fall prey and let it take over sometimes, and I don't have a way out.”
Then the next section is a liturgy for when I feel anxious. I want people to pay attention to feelings in their body. I think that's really important. But ultimately, for people to open their heart to God with how they feel.
“God, when have I felt this in my story before? God, please do your deep healing work in my life. Help me, God, to be curious about my pain and the wounds that remain in me. Help me be kind to myself as I enter and feel all that remains unfelt in my soul. Gift me words for my heart. God, this anxiety takes me on a journey that is rather painful, mysterious, and unknown.
But God, you are here with compassion and care and understanding. With you is an ocean of compassion. With you is a dwelling place for comfort. With you, I am made clean.”
It goes on to share more about opening your heart in prayer and then every chapter ends with a simple verse about prayer and meeting with God and your feeling.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. Is there an audiobook version and do you read it?
Anjuli: It's coming! Alison, it’s coming! Unfortunately, I don't get to read it this time. I've had a lot of vocal cord issues, but I got a good reader and she's awesome and I'm entrusting the Lord to that.
Alison Cook: Yeah, because it's beautiful to hear it. I actually wonder, we're going into the holiday season, which is a time when a lot of emotions get stirred up. What's a section of the book that might speak to the listener, who is feeling maybe some sadness, maybe some frustration, even some anger, and feels like they shouldn't feel that way going into the holiday season?
Anjuli: The two that come up for me are nostalgic–I feel really nostalgic during the holidays–or definitely as moms, guilty. Like we can never do enough.
Alison Cook: We need to have a live poll here. I'm very curious about nostalgia, but I think guilt is so baseline around the holidays.
Anjuli: Always. That's why I'm telling you, we go into debt every December, because oh, one more thing, one more gift, one more party, one more stocking stuffer. Yeah, guilt is very related to fear. Fearing that punishment awaits you for a crime or wrongdoing you have committed.
I think it's so important to pay attention to true guilt versus false guilt. False guilt comes with a lot of shoulds. Have you actually done something wrong?
Alison Cook: Exactly.
Anjuli: I'll read an excerpt from that. I want to invite people to pay attention instead of reacting. Especially with guilt. Like I said, we can go into a lot of unnecessary debt because of guilt. When we stop and pay attention to ooh, what is that thing I feel? I'm afraid of losing relationships with a spouse or a kid or a parent or a sibling. We react by doing something. Pay attention: am I actually doing something wrong?
When that guilt comes up, pay attention to even your temptations in it. Do I power through it by buying more gifts and doing more things and always saying yes, so that hopefully the guilt monster will go away? That's one temptation: we power through.
Do I suppress it? Do I push it down and ignore it, stay busy, avoid it, don't look at it? Don't pay any attention to it. Just stay busy. That's another temptation. Then the other temptation is, we fall prey to it. We let it consume us and we lose all of our agency.
Instead of powering through, suppressing, or falling prey to the feeling, I want to invite people to name it. Oh, there's that guilt again. There it is. I see you. I see you there. The second thing I want to invite people to do is actually feel it. Feel it. Where do I feel it in my body, in my chest, my neck, my back, my throat?
Give yourself permission, for a moment, to feel what you feel. Then lastly, I want to invite people to give your feeling a sound. If it's a sigh, if it's an exhale, if it's tears, and if you're even able to give it some words–hopefully, this book will be a resource that gives you some words for your guilt.
Here, I'll read a little part.
“God, I feel guilty. Search my heart, oh God. Help me listen. Right now, all I can hear is my guilt and it plagues me. I'm afraid of being found out. I'm afraid of punishment or condemnation. Help me know if this guilt is from you or from another source. I want to know if I'm feeling false guilt. Am I trying to keep laws and rules that you didn't ask me to obey?
If I haven't, if I have not actually broken a command of yours, this guilt is not from you, but from a false god in my life. God, if I did something that is truly wrong, I seek forgiveness. Help me accept forgiveness. God, forgive me for my wrong. Yet even as I speak these words, conflict is provoked within me.
I want to atone for my own guilt, be it pride or vanity or greed or self-righteousness. Deep within my will, it is incredibly hard to accept that I can't save myself. I want to prove myself, restore myself, and I hate that I can't. God, you invite me to feel my fear. Guilt at its core is about fear. This is painful.
When fear emerges, help me greet this feeling with gentleness instead of hiding. Let fear be what leads me to you instead of lying, covering, and pretending. Lord, no fear can separate me from your love. Your love lives at the core of my existence. May I be with you even here as you are with me.”
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. That's so good. These are naming tools. These are tools to help give us language for what we're feeling. You're helping us get in there. What is it? What's connected to it? It's through a conversation with God, where it's totally safe to tease out the threads of the knot of emotion.
I'm curious to hear a little bit, whether you want to read or share, tell me a little bit about nostalgia. I think that's such an interesting feeling that is sometimes hard to pinpoint. I think sometimes nostalgia, especially around the holidays, can be tinged with grief, but sometimes it can also be life-giving. I can find myself sometimes wanting to bathe in nostalgia, kind of wanting to let it linger over me.
I'm like, is that healthy? Is that not healthy? So let's talk a little bit about nostalgia. I think that's a really powerful name.
Anjuli: Yeah. It's interesting because it's such a nuanced feeling. Sadness is sadness. There's a purity to it. Anger is anger. It's all the way through. There is frustration and rage in there. But nostalgia–imagine a skier, a downhill skier, the slalom skier. It goes back and forth. It goes between sadness, it goes into fear, and then it goes back into happiness.
Alison Cook: To gratitude.
Anjuli: Yes! Yes!
Alison Cook: There are a lot of ways nostalgia can go.
Anjuli: As I was doing the research for this book, it really, at the core, was happiness. Even though it can feel many different things. So I kept it in that category. But really, nostalgia is the longing for home. And that's what the holidays do to us, doesn't it?
If it's your childhood home, those young memories of youthfulness, where there was safety, where everything was as it should be. I think the word “bathing in nostalgia” is actually pretty accurate, because there's a soothingness, even though there's sorrow. There's comfort in it.
Alison Cook: I love this naming because I actually will seek it out sometimes to soothe. I'll go seek it out, if I've been working too hard or if I'm a little burnt out or if I can't get out of my head. Because that's part of my bent–it's hard for me to sink into my emotions.
I'll go drive past an old memory. I talk about this in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. I went back and found an old apartment and those memories flooded over me. It takes me to a different time. There's something very soothing about that. I sometimes have to chase it. I have to pursue it.
It's so interesting to hear you name that, because I've not put that name on it. It's a tug at my heart, and it's exactly what you said, for something elusive, some memory that brings me to a different place that is soothing.
That's a great word for it. It's soothing. I think happiness is the right category for it, because even though there's a little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of, oh, what was is no longer, it doesn't take me down. It does something inside my body that feels soothing. I think that's an interesting naming. I love that.
Anjuli: It's comfort. Especially the holidays, when we have that cocoa that we had when we were little kids, or we sit in front of the Christmas tree and remember what it was like to be a little kid and looking up at a tree instead of at the tree, and these songs that just take us to the core of our being.
I think with nostalgia there's still those temptations. We can power through it. We are going to feel this, we're going to have this amazing memory-making experience and you're gonna go down memory lane with me.
Or we ignore it because there is a sorrow to it. Just keep the ball under the water. Don't look at it.
Alison Cook: It feels like too much maybe, so we want to avoid it.
Anjuli: Yeah, especially if there's been a lot of trauma since that experience. If you've lost a loved one, that can be painful. Then there's indulging in it. I tend to do that with nostalgia. I hear what you're saying. I drive past all my old houses all the time. My kids, I drive them crazy. They're like, mom, can we go home?
Alison Cook: I'm a little bit of a nostalgia junkie.
Anjuli: I love that. We need a shirt.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's very comforting, but I understand what you're saying. It can also evoke sadness. I get why. The thing for me is sometimes other folks like in my family aren't as much and I get it. It's because some of those memories also have a lot of pain. It's not that mine don't, but for whatever reason, the way I'm wired, tapping on it doesn't evoke the pain. It evokes comfort.
What are some other ones that surprised you or that you noticed yourself particularly drawn to? Maybe even ones you were like, I don't want to go there. I don't like that one.
Anjuli: You may have noticed we have not even talked about anger because man, anger. I could live in sadness. I could swim in sadness. I find consolation in sadness. It's like my long lost friend, but anger is terrifying. Anger is very vulnerable. Growing up in the church and in my family, anger was dangerous.
If someone was angry, something was being thrown, something was being slammed, someone was driving away. In the church, it was like, don't let the sun go down in your anger. So I was like, okay I guess I'll suppress it and pretend it's not there because the sun is setting. Anger was so hard for me to write because that's probably the one I've resisted experiencing in my life the most, because it was bad or sinful or scary.
Alison Cook: In writing it, you have to tap into it.
Anjuli: Yeah. Anger can be as small as laziness. That surprised me. I know that turned my head. Laziness is anger turned under; it is anger suppressed. You push your anger way down. it actually numbs you out and you become lazy.
Anger goes from such a range, from laziness to furious anger. That is a range of feeling. Alison, actually, vulnerability was why my vocal cords are so damaged. It was because I went through a pretty traumatic experience a couple months ago.
For me, screaming was absolutely necessary for me to find healing. It was this experience for over a week. It was like a discipline. I had to force myself to get my anger out. So I'd go for drives and scream and it was scary and hard, but you know what? It was freedom, getting it out of me. It was one of the greatest gifts God has given me, my anger.
Alison Cook: It's mobilizing, it's empowering, it's hard. Like you said, it's so scary. I can only imagine putting myself with you in that car. There's something about a car. I've noticed for me, I'm the opposite. I don't love anger, but I have a hard time with sadness and I've noticed when I really need to cry it out.
This is a thing I've since learned. I will get in my car because there's a container. There's something about a car that's contained, or the shower is another one people talk about. There's like a time limit. You can't be there forever. But you can get it all out. I can sob it out and then I'm going to get out of my car and close the door.
I could see for anger, getting in your car and screaming it out. I could feel it in my body. There's a containment for it. There's going to be an end when you're going to get out of the car. That's really powerful. But you are allowing that emotion to flow through you versus stifling it or indulging it, letting it live with you all the time.
Anjuli: And it’s so painful to do that. Then it leaks on all the people you love the most.
Alison Cook: How did you feel afterward?
Anjuli: Gosh, aren't feelings in so many ways quite mysterious. Most of the time after I would scream, I would start crying. It's weird. I think for other people it's the other way around. Sometimes they cry and it leads to screaming. But it's certainly a journey of the body and the heart of processing and moving through true pain.
Ultimately brought an immense amount of freedom. It was like breaking out of jail. It felt free. My hands were tied and then I was free.
Alison Cook: That's powerful. My sister used to always say to me, when I would go through seasons. She has a higher tolerance for the big emotions, which I'm super grateful for. She becomes one of those people that can help me when I need to feel something, but I don't want to.
She used to say to me, anger is going to kick in the butt on the way out. That's what you're saying. You got to get it out, and then often on the other side is oh, now I'm hurt. You also need to feel that. As we close down today, I would love to hear some of your words that you speak to God through anger.
Anjuli: Let me find some.
Alison Cook: I love this. I could do this all day.
Anjuli: I could do resentful, furious, exhausted–exhausted as anger, isn't that interesting?
Alison Cook: Tell me more about that.
Anjuli: Exhausted is beyond tired and it's like you are exhausted to the point of anger. It's a tight, deep tiredness that aggravates your bones.
Alison Cook: I’m thinking of the holidays. This is another thing we hear. I'm exhausted. It's so interesting, even tying together what we've been talking about. I call it guilt-driven love. I've been guilty. So I'm doing. Then I'm exhausted and angry.
Anjuli: This is how it comes out and I will do this with my husband. I buy all the presents. I'm the buyer. I purchase them, I pick them, I get them, I store them, I hide them, then I have to wrap them, which is the thing I hate more than anything in the world. Wrapping a bazillion presents.
They're all under the tree. Then I'm so exhausted. Now I'm not exhausted. I'm angry at my husband as though it's somehow his fault, that I took it all on myself, but that's where it turns to him. It's anger.
Alison Cook: Even at your kids for their existence, and it's nobody else's fault. That's a really powerful naming again. That level of exhaustion can be a form of anger. This is so interesting. The three emotions we picked, guilt, nostalgia and anger. There's that anger guilt thing at the holidays. I'm feeling it. I'm seeing the pattern in my own life.
Anjuli: Happy holidays. Gear up.
Alison Cook: I had a conversation with Alli Worthington on the podcast about her new book about parenting. She talked about the bitterness of family holidays, and she didn't want to bring that into her own holidays. It's what we're talking about–sacrificing everything for you and then I'm mad at you.
Anjuli: Totally. Yes, I'm making you this amazing dinner, which no one asked me to make. Spending all this money on the food, making the table as beautiful as ever, having the right music on, and then the kids don't eat it, and then I'm mad at them. That's exhaustion. Deep tiredness that fuels anger. Maybe I'll close with that.
Alison Cook: I think that's good.
Anjuli: “God, help me believe in the good of the journey I am on. The good is for others in my care. The good is for the spreading of the gospel. The good is for the healing of my own pain. God, help me endure because I can't do it on my own anymore. I can't carry this cross alone. It's harder than I imagined. It is hard to not harbor anger.
It is hard to forgive. It is hard to let go. It is hard to relax. It is hard to surrender. It is hard to believe that you care about my life more than I do. You understand exhaustion. You took space to be with your Father when your soul and body were weary. May I learn from you how to rest in God's love.
If it would be your will, please deliver me from this pain because it is hard to bear. If my circumstances do not change, may your grace be enough to sustain me. I pray it would be one moment at a time. What you have entrusted to me, I entrust back to you. I give you my life. Even as weary as I am, may my life be an offering to you, Lord. Hear my prayer.”
Alison Cook: Beautiful. I could listen to you read those prayers all day long. What a beautiful gift to give to people, to tease out the nuances of each feeling in conversation with God. I'm so grateful for you for sharing it with us today. You cover so many different emotions and I love what you're saying. You could pick it up to the one that stands out to you, maybe it's a surprise, maybe you're not sure.
So you flip through the pages and see which one leaps out at you and go into it. I think it's going to help a lot of people and I'm really grateful that you are here with us today.
Anjuli: Thank you for endorsing it and your friendship and always championing other people. Such a gift.
Alison Cook: Before we close, two questions I like to ask, sometimes I forget, but I like to ask 90 percent of my guests–
Anjuli: That's good. 90 percent is good.
Alison Cook: What would you say to that younger you back when the bottom was falling out from suppressed emotions? What would you want to say to her now?
Anjuli: I would probably say, and even in light of this conversation, anger is a gift. Because it leads you to hope and the love of God.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. What is bringing out the best of you right now?
Anjuli: Backyard fire pit conversations. We go out there and sometimes a kid joins us and sometimes they don't. But I feel like when it's dark and there's the glow, the warmth of the fire, it brings out the best in me. Great question.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. I love it. Thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you? Where can they find your work?
Anjuli: Yeah. I'm on Instagram a lot, so it's lovealways.anjuli or my website where I have a few courses that I offer, anjulipaschall.com.
Alison Cook: Check it out. Thank you so much again.
Anjuli: Yay. Thanks, Alison.
Have you ever wondered if someone you know might be on the autism spectrum—or even questioned it about yourself?
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or even missed entirely, especially in those who don’t fit common stereotypes. In this episode, neuropsychologist Dr. Donna Henderson joins us to unpack the complexities of autism, neurodiversity, and how we can better understand and support those around us.
What You’ll Learn:
* The 7 key criteria for identifying autism
* When to pursue a neuropsychological evaluation
* Why talk therapy often falls short for neurodivergent individuals
* How someone can exhibit an "autistic nervous system" without having ASD
* Practical ways to support loved ones
This conversation will deepen your understanding of neurodiversity and help you see the world—and those you love—in a new light.
Resources:
- The Best of You Podcast question form
- Episode 129: Understanding Anxiety—A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Calm, Advocating For Yourself, and Cultivating Inner Resilience
- psychologytoday.com
- Episode 71: All About Therapy—Do I Need a Therapist, How Do I Find One, and What Type of Therapy Works Best?
- Is This Autism? A Guide for Clinicians and Everyone Else by Dr. Donna Henderson and Sarah Wayland
- isthisautism.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 85: The Goal of a Healthy Family & 6 Roles We Take On In Dysfunction
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
- Go to thrivemarket.com/bestofyou for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift!
- Fatty15 is on a mission to replenish your C15 levels and restore your long-term health. You can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription Starter Kit by going to fatty15.com/BESTOFYOU and using code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
- Whether you're exploring distant lands or enjoying a staycation at home, Cozy Earth has your back. Visit cozyearth.com and unlock an exclusive 35% off with code BESTOFYOU.
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here with me this week and every week, but especially this week, as we are diving into a topic that I know so many of you are eager to learn about, and that's neurodiversity, especially focusing on the autism spectrum.
I recently ran a poll. I have a doc. It's called The Best of You Podcast question form doc. It's not fancy at all. It's a Google doc. We'll link to it in the show notes. But in that doc, I asked you what specific diagnostic categories you wanted to learn about.
This was a couple of months ago, and neurodiversity was your top choice by far for a specific diagnostic category that you wanted me to cover. I am thrilled to bring this conversation to you, especially with today's guest neuropsychologist, Dr. Donna Henderson, who brings an incredible wealth of knowledge and expertise in this area.
What I love about Donna is she is clear. I learned so much through this conversation. She breaks things down so simply and so clearly. I'm so excited for you to hear from her today. If you listened to last week's episode, Episode 129, we talked all about anxiety and the different things that drive anxiety and how to better understand it and manage it.
One of the things I mentioned is that sometimes a root cause of anxiety comes from another condition, meaning that anxiety isn't the primary condition that we need to treat. It's actually secondary. There's something else going on underneath the anxiety. Neurodivergent individuals, especially those on the autism spectrum, tend to experience anxiety more frequently.
I am thrilled again, to take this deeper dive into that specific area with Donna today. I want to start briefly to touch on some of the key terms in case they're not familiar to you. Neuropsychological testing is Donna's area of expertise. This is a comprehensive evaluation that helps uncover the strengths and challenges specifically in your brain function.
It's often used to identify conditions like autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, and other neurodevelopmental disorders. And this type of testing really plays a crucial role in understanding how your brain functions and its unique ways of processing information and engaging with the world.
So it can be so helpful in getting to the root of some of the problems or the challenges that we're facing. If you are listening to today's episode and you're interested in finding a professional who does neuropsychological testing, there's a filter for these specialists on the website, psychologytoday.com.
You can go back to Episode 71, where I walk you through step by step how to locate specific types of therapists in your zip code, in your region. And one of the things I walk you through is how to use psychologytoday.com in the first place. There are filters on it to find these types of specialists, and one of those filters is testing and evaluation.
So you can go filter for people who specialize in testing and evaluation, like our guest Donna does, if you're interested in learning more about neuropsychological testing. Feel free to go back to Episode 71 to learn more about how to find a specialist like this in your area.
Without further ado, I want to introduce you to today's guest, Dr. Donna Henderson. Donna is a licensed clinical neuropsychologist who has dedicated her career to understanding and supporting neurodivergent individuals, particularly those on the autism spectrum.
She's been working with clients for over 30 years, and she is the author of the book, Is This Autism? A Guide for Clinicians and Everyone Else. This is an incredible resource for everyone. As the title would indicate, it's not just for clinicians, it's for anyone who identifies as autistic or who loves someone who is autistic. I am so excited to share with you today's conversation with Dr. Donna Henderson.
***
Donna, I am so thrilled that you agreed to join me today and join the podcast to share with us your expertise. I have a million questions to ask you. But the first thing I want to touch on here on the front end is this work that you do in neuropsychological evaluations.
From my own experience as a clinician, one of the things I've noticed is the more precise we can get diagnostically, the better we can help people. Often, people get categorized or pigeonholed with a diagnostic label that doesn't fit well. I talk about well-fitting names. If we name something and it's not the right name, it really has big implications and repercussions, whether we're working with children or loved ones or spouses or family members or ourselves.
I would love to hear a little bit about your perspective on what is a neuropsychological evaluation? What does it mean? What are you looking for when people come to you for an evaluation?
Donna: Sure. First of all, thank you for having me. I am really excited to be here and talk about this. The way I often explain a neuropsych eval is that I describe myself as a detective and the mystery is that some person, whether it's a child, an adolescent or an adult, is struggling with some aspect of their life.
Maybe they have anxiety or depression or big emotions, or they're struggling in school, or they're not able to meet their social needs, whatever arena they're struggling in. And I have to figure out what's going on there and how can I help them? I look for clues by interacting with people mostly.
Interviewing the parents, interviewing the individual, having them do different tasks with me so I can see what makes them tick. A neuropsych eval includes interviews, it usually includes rating scales where people answer questions, pen and paper sort of thing. And it usually includes some testing, which may be IQ testing, memory, language, executive functioning, attention, different aspects of functioning and social cognition as well.
To me, the idea is not to get a diagnosis, although it often does end in a diagnosis or maybe even more than one diagnosis. To me, the real idea is to figure out, what the heck is going on here? What makes this person tick? How do they move through the world? What works for them? What doesn't work for them? What are their strengths?
And when it comes to all of that and the diagnoses, I think it should resonate with the child or the individual, with the parents. We should all be on the same page. To me, it feels like it should be a very collaborative process where it makes sense at the end of the day, where we all feel like we solve the mystery and we have a roadmap to move forward.
Alison Cook: I love that once we get a healthier understanding of what's happening, we can find a better path toward helping the individual thrive. What are some of the primary things you're looking for, especially when we're thinking about things that get missed. I think about kids that either that I've worked with or long ago, when I was brand new, and a parent would be exasperated by a child's behavior.
“They can't pay attention in school. They're acting out”. They're getting labeled as a problem child. And this was decades before it was more common to think about the brain, to think about functioning, to think about neurodiversity. To use your detective metaphor, I would think to myself, there's something else going on here.
This is a good kid. This kid isn't trying to cause trouble. What's going on there? I remember one time, I had a young teenage client, and a family member ended up giving her an IQ test and her IQ was off the charts. There was some explanation there for some of her boredom in class, for some of her anxiety.
It does require that detective mindset. What are some of the things you're looking for? And what are some of the primary diagnostic categories that you see getting missed or falling through the cracks with individuals?
Donna: So when you were asking that question, one thing that ran through my mind, and I wish I could remember who said this, but it might have even been my co-author and friend, Sarah Wayland. Kids aren't giving you a hard time. They're having a hard time. Often, when parents bring kids in, it's because there may be behavioral problems or the kids aren't meeting expectations or aren't being compliant in different ways.
The parents have this experience of God, he or she is giving me a hard time. But really, the child is having a hard time. And when I think about it, I do think about it mostly from a brain point of view. Back in the day, we didn't think about that as much. We used to think more about was there trauma in the child?
I actually worked with a family this morning with a six year old who is flipping over desks in school and eloping from school. He has very supportive schools, super supportive parents, no trauma history. And everyone keeps saying he's anxious. He's anxious. He's anxious.
Sure. But to me, the real question is why is he anxious? There is no good reason that we can see for him to be anxious. He hasn't experienced trauma or a negative household situation or anything like that. There's something in his nervous system that is driving that anxiety. So I'm trying to get underneath to see what's going on.
A lot of the time that means understanding their sensory functioning. What's going on with their sensory needs or their sensory overwhelm? What's going on with their social functioning? Are they misperceiving cues? Are they confused by basic interactions? I'm looking at some of that stuff.
Alison Cook: That's so interesting. That's helpful because we're trying to be trauma-informed. We're always trying to look to the past. We're always trying to look at the system. And you said something really powerful there. When we've turned over all the rocks and there's nothing really there, and this child is still really having a hard time, you're coming in and really looking at those internal mechanisms, the nervous system, the brain to try to figure out some of these patterns.
I'm assuming you're looking a lot for patterns. Is that part of it?
Donna: Yeah, absolutely. Patterns. I'm looking at the big picture. When I train other clinicians, I always say, when you're gathering information, it's all about the details. So ask for another story, ask for another example, really get down into the nitty gritty of it all. But once you've collected all your information, then it's not about the details.
Then it's about the big picture, stepping back and looking at this child as a whole. This relates to the other question you asked about what diagnoses tend to get missed, and autism is a big one. The reason is that so often, no clinician is looking at the big picture of that child.
You might have an occupational therapist diagnosing the sensory processing disorder. And then maybe a year or two later, you'll have a speech therapist diagnosing social pragmatic communication disorder. And then at some point you might get a psychologist or psychiatrist saying, oh, there's some ADHD here.
And then a few years later, you might have another therapist saying, oh, you have anxiety. Everybody's seeing one little part and these all may or may not be accurate. Quite often they are, but nobody's stepping back and putting all those pieces together and looking at the individual as a whole. And that's what a neuropsych does.
Alison Cook: That's a really helpful way to put it because any one of those little pieces could have truth in it, but we're trying to get to the root. What is actually, for the most part, as best we can tell, driving all of these different things? Because if we're treating the anxiety and there's actually an autism spectrum diagnosis up here, we're going to be missing a part of that path toward health.
Donna: 100%.
Alison Cook: As far as getting a neuropsych eval, when would you encourage somebody to take that route? At what point in the journey would you encourage someone?
Donna: Oooh, I don't know if I could give you a good answer for that because it's so individualized. It really depends so much on what the problems are and what they've already tried to do, what is working, what isn't working, how much distress there is for the child and for the parents, how available a neuropsych is for them.
I will say, I think in most areas of the country, you have to get on a waiting list to get a good neuropsych eval. If you're thinking about it, it's probably worth making some calls before you think you're fully ready, because you may have to wait anywhere from three months to well over a year in some places.
So people should be aware of that, because very frequently at my practice, for instance, I get phone calls where people are at a breaking point, at a crisis point, or feeling really ready now. And then they're very disappointed when they find out they have to wait. That's a common experience.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that's a really great tip. I guess from my vantage point, when I see people who are struggling with something complicated, the downside is the cost and the wait time if it's not covered by insurance. But other than that, it's hard for me to find a downside because you're getting into the details and that whole holistic approach, which can save you time and money in the long run, from going down rabbit trails that don't get you to where you want to go. So I've found it to be incredibly helpful to see those results.
Donna: It's my experience as well. And I will say, I think most of the people we work with at the end of the evaluation say, we wish we had done this sooner. I hear that very frequently.
Alison Cook: Let's dive into the autism spectrum. Tell me a little bit about how you speak about autism spectrum diagnoses.
Donna: There are probably 140 million autistic people on this planet, if I look at the population of the world at the current prevalence rate of 2.77%, That's a really huge number of people. And that's a really wide spectrum of people from, people who require 24 hour, seven day a week, very close support for every little thing and very close supervision, all the way to people who are fully happy and functional in their lives and are getting their social needs met and are contributing to the world in a million different ways and have interesting careers and whatever their life goals are.
It's really hard to talk about 140 million people in one way. And that's where I think we're having a lot of difficulty now, finding wording that makes everybody feel comfortable. I would say a few things. In the DSM, the technical diagnosis is autism spectrum disorder. When we're talking about medical documentation, applying for disability, those sorts of official things, that's the language that we use.
A lot of the people I work with tend to be autistic people with average to above average intelligence, many of them having later diagnoses in adolescence or well into adulthood. Many of them prefer autistic person over person with autism, because person with autism is a medical model. It's putting the person ahead of the problem.
So you might say it's a person with diabetes, not a diabetic person. But for this group of people particularly, they feel like this is not a medical problem. This is part of my identity. It's part of who I am. So I prefer autistic person. And so that's the language that I tend to use–autistic person.
It's also true that somebody can be autistic, meaning having this kind of nervous system, but not have autism spectrum disorder, if they are living their life and they're fine, they're meeting their own social needs, they're doing, meeting their goals, doing whatever it is they need and want to do in this world. There's tons of people out there like that. They happen to be autistic, but they don't have autism spectrum disorder.
Alison Cook: Okay. So let's dive in there a little bit, because there's so much to what you said. You said, having the features of an autistic nervous system without necessarily having what would meet the criteria for a quote unquote disorder. Tell me a little bit about what you mean by that.
Donna: So there are seven core criteria for being diagnosed with autism, plus one. When I say someone's autistic, but doesn't have autism spectrum disorder, they meet enough of the seven. You don't have to meet all of them, but they meet enough of those core seven so I know that, okay, you have that kind of brain, you have that kind of nervous system. But the plus one is, there's some kind of functional impairment related to it.
Alison Cook: Okay.
Donna: The people I'm saying are autistic, but don't need a diagnosis are the ones who move through the world this way. They have this type of nervous system, but they don't have any functional impairment. They're not super anxious or having trouble meeting their social needs or whatever it is. So that's the difference, that functional impairment
Alison Cook: That makes a lot of sense. Can you give us a sort of bird's eye view of those seven characteristics?
Donna: The first category are differences in someone's social or communication skills. There are three criteria in this category, and somebody has to meet all three. At any point in their life, it could be current, it could be by history. It doesn't have to be both.
The first of the three is all about the back and forth flow of interactions. Intuitively knowing how to greet people, how to share personal information, showing interpersonal curiosity, being reciprocal in conversation. Meaning, if you say, oh, something weird happened to me this weekend. I say something related to that.
There's not one right answer. I could say, what happened? Or I could say, my God, something weird is always happening to you. Or I could say, oh, I had a weird weekend too, but it has to be related. And as part of this first criterion, there's also the ability to take somebody else's perspective to intuitively understand somebody else's intentions, for example, what's going through somebody else's mind to some extent.
So it's not whether or not somebody has these skills, but how effortful it is. So some of these people with less obvious autism can pull off socially typical looking interactions, but they are unbelievably exhausted by them. They can do it for a short period of time. These are kids who may camouflage at school, come home completely melted down or go to sleep for many hours. That's the first criterion.
The second one in this category of social and communication differences is nonverbal communication. That's everything about communicating except for the words. So facial expressions, tone of voice, gesturing, body language, personal space, volume, all of that stuff, paying attention to and understanding other people's. So if a teacher speaks in a stern tone of voice, knowing the teacher is not yelling, that's a stern tone of voice.
Being able to discern all these little differences and also giving off your own non-verbals that are typical and easy for most people to read. Eye contact is in this one too. Much of this is about understanding the subjective experience of the individual, because a lot of these kids learn at a pretty early age how to make typical eye contact, but if you ask them their experience of it, they may tell you, oh, I hate it.
I hate looking at eyes. They creep me out or I can't concentrate, but I forced myself to do it because I know everybody expects me to. It's not intuitive or comfortable for them as much, a lot of autistic people will tell you that.
Alison Cook: And this is where in these two, and maybe in the next one, I thought it was interesting what you said, even when the person has figured out how to do it, they're exhausted by it. We're not talking about introversion, but exhaustion. We're not talking about, I'm peopled out.
It's a level of sensory overload. And I think you even use the word meltdown where there's something pretty significant. It's not a typical response to a day with other people or to a social event.
Donna: It is absolute exhaustion. I had one college autistic college professor once say to me, Hey, I can go to the department party and be there for 45 minutes and look perfectly typical and completely blend in. And what people don't know is then I'm in bed for a day and a half recovering from that 45 minutes a day.
We all can get a little tired after socializing, especially post COVID. We all got out of the habit for a while, but this is next level. There's also often a confusion or effort piece to it. They're not intuitively moving through social interactions, but they're thinking, oh, I should smile now. I should put on a smile.
Oh, I haven't spoken in 60 seconds. It might be my turn to speak. Is it my turn to speak? I probably should speak now. There's a very conscious thought process, which is probably in part why they're so exhausted.
Alison Cook: I want to finish getting through the list, but I want to ask you later about specifically therapy for individuals who are autistic, because there is that component of putting on a mask. We talk a lot in traditional therapy about being authentic, figuring out how to show up authentically.
There's a way in which that could create some dissonance for someone who is autistic–for me to function in a social setting in order to fit in or in order not to be negatively perceived as anything from socially shy to rude especially in an extroverted world, I have to go through these motions. I have to learn these skills.
It makes a therapeutic intervention a little bit different. And I've learned that a little bit as well. So I want to come back to that, but I want to bookmark that.
Donna: Yes. It's really hard for me not to jump into that right now, but I agree. We should get through the criteria. Okay, so we're doing the first of the two categories, social and communication differences. There are three. The first one, interactions. The second one, non verbals. The third one is relationship management.
Making friends, deepening friendships, keeping friendships, maintaining them over time, understanding relationships. If a kindergartner tells you everyone in their class is their friend, that's socially typical, but if a 5th grader thinks everyone in their class is their friend, that shows they're not having a typical understanding of social relationships.
Or if they think teachers are their friends, that sort of thing. Conflict management comes into this category of social motivation. People can be autistic and very socially motivated, really want friends, romantic relationships, all that. Or people can be autistic and have very low social motivation. And I've had more than one autistic kid say, no, seriously, I would like to live in a cabin in the woods in Alaska and not see anyone, but my parents can come visit for one day a year kind of thing. And they mean it.
So if somebody is very socially motivated, that does not preclude autism. That's the first category of interactions, relationships, and nonverbals, and you have to meet all three currently or by history. For example, if you have a 15 year old who makes typical eye contact, but they didn't make typical eye contact until they figured it out, say in fourth or fifth grade, then that still counts towards diagnosis.
Alison Cook: Which is probably also how it can get missed because, yeah, they figured it out.
Donna: Exactly. And the other main way it gets missed is the timeline is different from what a lot of people think. Many people have this wrong idea that it has to be fully evident by age three. And that's not true. For a lot of really smart autistic people, particularly girls, it becomes evident around fifth grade.
That's when we really start to see it. And if you look back, you can see the signs, but it wasn't ever big enough for people to take note until somewhere between fourth and sixth grade typically.
So that's the first category. The second category of the criteria are repetitive and restricted behaviors, RRBs. There are four in this category. You only have to meet two of the four. So that confuses people. They think if they don't meet one of them, they're not autistic, but nope, two out of four. The first one is what we informally call stimming. So that is behavior that is repetitive or atypical. It can be any kind of movement.
So in the more stereotypical presentation of autism, you might have kids flapping their arms or flicking their hands. A lot of these kids, repetitive picking, repetitive hair pulling or twirling, pacing back and forth repeatedly, countless different kinds of movements. It can be repetitive speech or unusual speech, like formal language.
My own daughter with whom I have a very warm relationship calls me mother, that formal language. It can be repetitive use of objects. Watching the same TV show over and over and over again, not two or three times. I've had kids who say, yeah, I watched Despicable Me 84 times so far in a row or reading the same book over and over again, drawing the same thing over and over again.
So that's number one, repetitive behavior. Number two is inflexibility. And it doesn't necessarily mean that they're being behaviorally difficult all day, every day. There's pockets of inflexibility. They might have difficulty with change or transitions. They might get stuck in their thinking, stuck in loops or stuck in their perceptions.
They might have very rigid black and white thinking. If they don't like someone, that person's evil. Black and white thinking about other people. They might be perfectionistic. A lot of these girls are highly perfectionistic. So that's the second one, flexibility challenges.
The third one is interests. In the stereotypical presentation of autism, they tend to have atypical interests. Airport codes or orange traffic cones, that sort of thing. But in this less obvious presentation of autism, you tend to have typical interests that get really intense. So it can be animals, either animals in general, or a particular animal.
It can be reading, a K-pop band, any pop star, makeup, typical stuff, but they do a much deeper dive than most kids do. And then the last of the four is sensory differences, not the sensitivities that everyone is aware of or the sensory seeking, but less known sensory differences, and a big one is called interoception, which is knowing what your body is telling you, knowing if you have to use the bathroom, knowing if you're hungry, knowing if you're anxious, knowing if you're cold or hot, being able to read those signals from your body as one of the sensory differences.
So the second category has four. Number one, repetitive behavior. Number two, inflexibility or need for sameness. Number three, interests that are intense or atypical. Number four, sensory differences.
Alison Cook: And those are all of the categories. In that second one, you need to have two of the four.
Donna: Correct.
Alison Cook: Okay. So you might have someone listening and they're going, oh my goodness, I see this in myself. I see this in my spouse. I see this in my child. That would indicate an autistic pattern of thinking, an autistic brain for lack of a better way to put it.
Donna: Maybe so. When I do live trainings, people always come up to me afterwards to chat and ask questions. And inevitably there are one or two people that say, I think I might be autistic, or I think my child might be. They have that instant whoa, a lot of what you said resonated with me.
I can divide those people into two categories. For some of them, it's a passing thought, because one or two things I said resonated with them. So I'll put myself in that category–once or twice a year. I have a moment of, wait, maybe I'm autistic and I've never identified as autistic. And I'm not autistic.
But once or twice a year it crosses my mind because I have some sensory sensitivities and my husband tells me I can be rigid at times. Little things, nothing major. It passes very quickly. The more I think about it, the more I realize, nope, I have one or two things in common with autistic people.
But for that other group, the more they read about it, the more they learn, the more they think about it, the more deeply it resonates either for themselves or their child or both. These things are genetically driven. And for that group, then I think they should take it seriously.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love how you're saying that again, back to this big picture piece. Because me too. I heard a couple of things in what you said, and I was like, oh, the interoception, I have a really hard time with that. But we have to put that against the larger picture of the whole constellation, the overall pattern.
We're going to have some things in common, but that doesn't mean we actually have this whole style going into the world. And then you add that seventh criteria, there's impaired functioning in some domain of my life.
Donna: If anyone comes into my office for a neuropsych eval or a consultation, by definition, there's some functional impairment. Something made them call me and make an appointment. And that's true for you, for any mental health clinician. People don't come in for the heck of it.
They come in because they're anxious or they're depressed or they're lonely or they're not doing well in school or at work or whatever it is. So that part is automatic to me, pretty more or less once they're in my office for the most part. And to be clear, that's number eight.
We have seven. So there's the three social criteria and the four repetitive restrictive criteria. So there's seven core ones. This would be number eight, not number seven. Yeah.
Alison Cook: Okay. This is so helpful, to get the lay of the land where there's a large pattern and it's more than one thing. There's a spectrum. If I had a dime for every time somebody who either themselves or a loved one has been diagnosed with autism said to me, I thought it looked like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. And it doesn't.
Donna: A white male who is overtly odd and has massive difficulty managing day to day life. There are college professors who are autistic people. There are comedians. There are professional athletes, happily married people, certainly activists out in the community. There are pastors and ministers and rabbis and teachers and there is an entire lost generation of autistic adults who don't know they're autistic.
Alison Cook: I love that you're naming that and this is where I want to move as we wind down. I want to honor your time. How do we approach therapy, and in addition to that, how do we approach it when we know somebody has this? I heard a comedian, to your point about comedians, Hannah Gadsby, talk, and it was so stunning.
I thought this was a great metaphor. She said, it's like if someone is colorblind, she said, that's how it feels for me going into a social setting. And she said, you don't tell somebody who's colorblind, see color. Here's all you need to do. They can't go in and see the social nuances.
We live, especially in American culture, in such a socially oriented world. There is such a high premium on that kind of traditional interpersonal skill. I have a real soft spot in my heart for folks who are feeling sidelined and marginalized because to use her metaphor, they feel colorblind and they're being told there's something wrong with you or figure it out.
With that backdrop, what would you say? What kind of therapy might be most helpful if you're someone who you or your loved one is in this category and how can we come alongside those who have this style, this way of being in the world and to help be a kinder, gentler, more community oriented world?
Donna: Yeah, I love that. Historically, once somebody was identified as autistic, the goal of all the adults around them was, let's help make them look less autistic. Let's teach them how to make “better” eye contact. There's no such thing as better or worse eye contact or good or bad eye contact.
There's typical and less typical. And all that was doing, and I'm not saying there isn't a place for something like that–we all have to learn how to be somewhat functional in the world. But the core of therapy should absolutely not be about that. To me, it's about helping, especially if we're talking about children here and adolescents, helping them understand who they are through the lens of neurodiversity.
Not, you have a disorder called autism spectrum disorder, but you have a different kind of brain than most people have. You're in a minority group. And anytime you're in a minority group, that makes life a little bit more challenging. That's not a problem within you, but it is a problem for you. And we're going to work together to help you understand this, to help me understand your experience, to help them understand it.
Ideally, they also will have a group experience with other bright autistic kids their age too. We all want to connect with other people who understand our experience. Truly. I think that can be really helpful as well. These kids are so misunderstood for so much of their lives and there often is a trauma piece.
I don't necessarily mean trauma with a capital T, although autistic kids are more likely to have trauma with a capital T, negative life experiences, parents getting divorced, that sort of thing. But they're also more likely to experience typical life events as traumatic. Walking into the school building can be traumatic for them. Having that trauma lens, that autism trauma lens in therapy can be very helpful as well.
Alison Cook: That's interesting. Even when you said how it can be hard to detect the nuances of tone for a child or even an adult, I think about a work setting where someone maybe is having a bad day and has a stern tone of voice, they experience that as being yelled at, and they might go to that black and white thinking.
That would weigh more heavily on that person than someone who understands, oh, they had a bad day. They used a sarcastic tone of voice with me. It makes it a little bit harder to move through the day and move through the world.
Donna: A lot harder. We could sit here and talk for many hours about the many different ways that it is harder to move through the world as an autistic person. I'll give you one super quick example. It's such a minor one, but it's one of a thousand. Around my dinner table, on my side of the table, is me–I'm a non autistic ADHD person–and my youngest daughter who has the same neurotype.
And then across the dinner table are my two older kids who are both autistic. They live off at college and my husband sits at the head of the table. One day, my youngest was telling a story and my older two weren't making any eye contact. As a non autistic person, I experienced that as rude and it bothered me.
At one point I said, hey, you guys, how about some eye contact over here for the non-autistic people? Because that's how we talked to each other in my family and they laughed and then they put me in my place, rightfully, and said, why should we have to make eye contact because it feels more natural to you?
We know we have to do it out there in the world. We get that and we accept it, but we shouldn't have to come home and do it here in our own home when it's uncomfortable to us. And that doesn't mean it was wrong for me to want eye contact either. Nobody's right. Nobody's wrong. It's a matter of talking openly and leading with curiosity about our differences and having communication about it.
And I think that is probably the most helpful thing of all.
Alison Cook: I love that. You said right before we started recording something about a family of different neurotypes. Every family is a family of different neurotypes. And in your family, you each know your type, and there's a way in which then you're negotiating. One of you is saying, I'm done with eye contact for the day. Another is saying I need some eye contact.
This is a family. And I love that because this whole podcast is all about how we come together for the good of the whole. We bring our individual selves, we bring our individual neurotypes, whether we're neurotypical or atypical, whatever the diagnosis, whatever the framework is, but we're coming together, trying to create harmony, which doesn't mean normalizing one over the other. It means each person learning how to honor the other.
That's true in relationships. That's true in a family. I love that. The knowledge really helps. You can each name it, and that really helps with the understanding and with the communication.
Donna: Oh, it makes all the difference in the world. I'm actually working on a training right now with a brilliant autistic psychologist named Megan Anna Neff and she's autistic, I'm not, and we're working on a training that is all about cross-neurotype communication. Because once you understand everybody's neurotypes and how they communicate differently, verbally and non verbally, because both are super important, then so much of conflict and hurt feelings and anger falls away when you understand.
Alison Cook: It's so good. We make so many assumptions about people based on the subtext, the cues, the eye contact, the questions that someone asks or doesn't ask, instead of really seeking that deep understanding and that deep knowledge that we have the power to gain now through people like you who are doing this work.
I could keep diving into this but I want to honor your time. Tell everyone where they can find you. You've got some amazing resources to really help people with this. Where can people find you, Donna, and the work that you're doing?
Donna: Sure. I've co-authored two books and the first one is called, Is This Autism? A Guide for Clinicians and Everyone Else. We realized that a lot of clinicians didn't understand the less obvious presentation of autism and decided to write a book about it. And I gradually realized, oh, nobody understands this. It's not just for clinicians. That's why it's called a guide for clinicians and everyone else.
That's with my co-authors Sarah Wayland and Jamell White. And then there's a companion guide for clinicians that I do recommend for clinicians, but for parents or people who are wondering if they or their child is autistic, it's the first book. It's the guide for clinicians and everyone else.
Our website is isthisautism.com and we also do have some videos there, so if people are more into listening than reading, they can access the same information more or less that's in the book in those videos,
Alison Cook: I highly recommend it if you've been listening and some things have stood out to you. If you're aware of man, we've tried everything but nothing's working, and some of the things you listed really rang true about your loved one or about yourself, or trying to understand some behaviors that don't make sense to you, start getting curious. Is it possible there's something in the brain going on here?
Or the clinicians listening, is there possibly something here that might fall in this category of neurodiversity or autism? Because it can be so helpful to understanding, to clarity, and to finding, as you said, that path through, so thank you so much for what you're doing and really appreciate your time today.
Donna: Thank you so much for having me.
Do you ever feel stuck in anxious thoughts?
Are you longing for more moments of calm throughout your day?
Every single one of us has a relationship with anxiety. The goal isn't to eradicate anxiety; it’s to work with anxiety to create more peace and balance in our lives. In this episode, I guide you through a clear, step-by-step understanding of your relationship with anxiety. Whether you’re navigating your own anxious moments or supporting loved ones, you'll learn how to identify root causes and key insights needed to find calm and clarity.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
* How to understand your unique experience with anxiety
* Key root causes of anxiety, including genetics, personality, and environment
* The impact of High Sensitivity (HSP) and neurodivergence on anxiety
* 3 practical techniques to calm anxiety and cultivate strong internal leadership
Resources:
- Episode 71: All About Therapy—Do I Need a Therapist, How Do I Find One, and What Type of Therapy Works Best?
- Episode 54: Can I Pray My Anxiety Away? A Surprising Approach to the Anxiety Pandemic & How to Walk Yourself & Your Kids Through It with Curtis Chang
- Episode 109: Healing Burdens From the Past—How to Overcome Childhood Wounds and Heal Your Younger Self with Tammy Sollenberger
- Episode 97: I Shouldn't Feel This Anxious—Insights on Trauma & Healing with Monique Koven
- Episode 49: Personality, the Big Five Traits, and Why Are We So Obsessed With Personality Types?
- I Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
- 2 Corinthians 10:5
- Psalm 46:10
- 1 Peter 5:7
Thanks to our sponsors:
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so thrilled to be here with you to dive into this healing work we do together every single week. I like to think of this work as soul mending. I see us as soul menders.
What I mean by that is I see us as people who are rooting ourselves primarily in this work of healing our hearts, our minds, our souls, our nervous systems, and I'm using this word healing as it relates to the Greek word sozo that's used in the Bible. It’s a word that is often translated as salvation–working out your salvation with fear and trembling, but can also be translated as healing.
We're here to work out our healing. We want to be people who are healing and we want to be people who are bringing more healing into our families, into our neighborhoods, into our country and into this entire world that God has created. I've never believed more deeply in this work of sozo, this work of healing, more than at this present moment.
I believe that this work of healing every part of who we are in partnership with God's spirit is the work. It's the most important work that every single one of us is called to do, not only to transform our own inner lives, but also to bring healing to this world.
This is the work that Jesus calls us to embrace as we follow him, this work of deeper healing, so that we can bring more healing to everyone around us. Truly, every single one of us who is trying to follow Jesus is called in our own way to this work of becoming healers. And we start this work of healing with the parts of our own selves first.
Toward that end, today, I want to dive into this topic of anxiety. It's a really timely topic. It's a really relevant topic, whether you are dealing with anxiety yourself, whether you're parenting kids who are feeling anxious, or whether your spouse or friends or loved ones are feeling anxious.
Most of us in this day and age are well acquainted with that feeling of anxiety, that inner tension of tightness in our bodies. We can't calm ourselves down. We can't find that clear, calm space inside. Maybe your thoughts are racing or convoluted or maybe they're even keeping you awake at night.
Maybe you sense that constant sort of nagging worry, tugging at the corners of your mind. And you're finding that sense of calm, that sense of clarity, a little bit harder to access in your life. There's so many different ways that anxiety shows up. Today, I want to give you a little bit of insight into how I approach anxiety.
As someone who has sat with so many people over time, where I begin to try to understand that anxious part of them and the different root causes for it, I can share some thoughts on what's going to work best to help restore that reservoir of peace, of calm, of clarity inside of us that we know is the place from which we actually bring more of God's goodness, more of God's healing, more of God's beauty into this world around us.
Today we're going to look at how anxiety shows up differently, the gifts that it brings us, as well as the burdens. We're going to explore the roots of anxiety, which are often misunderstood and often mismanaged, and we're also going to explore some really practical steps you can take both from the field of psychology and from our spiritual resources, the resources that we have in Christ, to help us heal and lead these anxious parts of us wisely,
Remember, these anxious parts that we all have are not bad. They're parts of us that need our attention and our compassion, especially when they start to operate in overdrive.
Before we get started, a couple of more resources for you from prior episodes. If you're listening and you think, man, I could really use a therapist to help me through this, Episode 71 is called All About Therapy, and I cover in that episode: how do you know if you need a therapist, how do you find a therapist and what type of therapy might work best for your needs.
It's super practical. So you can check out that episode. I also had a fascinating conversation with Curtis Chang all about anxiety. It's Episode 54 called, can I pray my anxiety away? And then lastly, in Episode 109, I had a conversation with IFS therapist, Tammy Sollenberger, and we talked all about the new Inside Out 2 movie where anxiety is the central character. There's a lot to learn from that movie and we dive into it in that episode. It's a great resource for you.
So what is anxiety? Well, in its simplest terms, anxiety is a natural reaction to stress. Sometimes we need our anxiety. When those parts of us that carry anxiety are in balance within our soul, feeling anxious can be constructive. It's part of how God designed us to protect us from danger.
So for example, feeling anxious before a job interview or a big deadline can give you energy to focus. It can help you stay alert. That kind of anxiety is actually constructive and it can help you prepare and respond to normal stressors in life.
Another example: you might feel anxious when you're with someone who's actually unsafe. Maybe they say something cruel or they use a toxic strategy to try to guilt trip you or manipulate you or diminish you, and a part of you starts to feel anxious. You feel uncomfortable. Maybe that fight, flight, flight response kicks in and you want to get away from them or you actually want to fight back and defend yourself.
In this case, anxiety is functioning as it should. It's cuing you to danger in front of you that actually needs your attention. Another example where anxiety can be constructive is before or during a major life change or event. You might feel anxious about a move or about getting married or about having a child or about parenting a child or about starting a new job.
It's normal to feel anxious when there are stressors around you. Again, we don't want to eradicate anxiety altogether. We also don't want that anxiety to become extreme. We don't want to let it take us over. Anxiety is a cue, not to go into overdrive, but instead to downshift a little bit so that you can pay closer attention to what your body, what your heart, what your soul needs from you to get through a stressful time.
A healthy amount of anxiety can kick in to help us focus, to help us pay attention, to remind us that we need to slow things down and proceed with caution, to be careful, to take good care of ourselves because something hard is happening that's going to require more from us. Maybe we need to take a few other things off our plate, or it might be a cue that something is actually dangerous or unsafe, and we need to figure out how to extract ourselves from that situation or that relationship.
It might be a cue that we need more support from people who love us and will walk with us through a challenging season. Sometimes anxiety is a cue that you've overextended your capacity, that maybe your own sensitivities or your own limitations or simply your own tank of fuel is running on empty.
You've exceeded your God given capacity. And in this case, anxiety provides a cue that it's time to step back, to downshift, to reduce some of those external pressures as best you can.
So most importantly, when you think about anxiety, what I want you to understand is that number one, we all have a relationship with anxiety. Every single one of us has anxious parts of us at its best. Anxiety is trying to help. It's a cue to pay attention. When you name anxiety for what it is, you can get some healthy distance from it, and then you can lead your anxiety instead of letting anxiety take you over.
You can learn to let anxiety work for your good instead of against you. But here's the thing: the process of learning to establish that healthy relationship with those parts of you that get anxious takes some time. And when anxiety goes unchecked inside your system, it gets extreme. You start to see the world through the lens of that anxiety.
Here are some ways that shows up. Number one, you might start to feel tense and agitated and restless in your body all the time. Anxiety often manifests physically. You might notice yourself ruminating. You can't control your anxious thoughts. You might not be able to sleep well.
You might not be able to enjoy other people or social contexts because you notice a hyper vigilance. Maybe you're always on guard with other people. You're always seeing the danger all around you, even when it's actually safer than those anxious parts of you feel.
Sometimes we get stuck in that nervous system fight-flight state, where it's really hard to access that feeling of calm during your day. It's usually not the entire day, but you have those moments where you feel calm, where you feel clear, where you have perspective, where you can release the tension in your body, where you can make good decisions, where you feel connected to other people.
When anxiety takes over, it robs you of that feeling of calm clarity inside, more days than not. You're in that anxious state where you cannot tap into that calm or that clarity, even when you do those things where typically you can find that spaciousness inside.
When it's in its proper balance, you might notice anxious feelings, anxious thoughts, but you're able to find your way back to that calm, clear place inside. But when those anxious parts of us take over and they get extreme, and they're starting to take the steering wheel. We can start to feel overwhelmed and even paralyzed. It can be really hard to get through your day when that anxiety runs big in your life.
No matter what you're experiencing when it comes to anxiety right now, whether it's fairly small in your life and you've got it in a good place, or whether you're someone who's really in anxiety's grip, I want you to hear me say, anxiety is one part of who you are. It is not all of who you are, no matter how much it feels like it is.
It's not inherent to your being. And you can find ways to get a healthy distance from anxiety so that your calm, clear, grounded, wise self can start to lead. In order to establish that healthier, relationship with anxiety. We've got to get to the root. We've got to get to the root of the different types of anxiety that you might be experiencing
Anxiety can stem from a variety of sources. When you don't pinpoint the underlying cause of it, the healing treatment for that anxiety might actually miss the mark. This happens all the time. I want to explore several common roots of anxiety. Each one has its own unique needs when it comes to softening that anxious part of you.
Number one, trauma-related anxiety. For some people, anxiety is rooted in past trauma. In these cases, anxiety acts as a survival response. It's activated by triggers from outside of you that remind you of past experiences. And a great example of this was a story shared by my guest Monique Koven back in Episode 97.
She told her story of experiencing intense anxiety and fight or flight response in her kitchen that was actually rooted in her childhood trauma. And what happened for Monique is when she went to seek help for that anxiety, the treatment that she got didn't help.
They didn't recognize that this response was rooted in trauma, in her childhood wounds. The treatment they gave her actually exacerbated her anxiety. If that's been your experience, go back and listen to Episode 97. It's super helpful to see how sometimes what people tell us we should do for our anxiety is not in fact helpful.
I really want you to understand this throughout this episode–you are your best expert about your own anxiety. Take in information from other people and from other experts, but really notice, is this working for me or is this not?
Because if it's not, I'll give it a little time, but this may not be the best way for me to work through my anxiety. Listen to your own system and notice what works, what doesn't work. Anxiety will show you–if the anxiety goes up, notice that. If the anxiety goes down, notice that.
I talk about a season in my life in my thirties where I struggled with a lot of anxiety. It was rooted situationally, and it definitely met the criteria for an anxiety disorder. I could not get it under control by myself. And I did use medication to intervene during that season for about six months, but I also tried a number of other interventions that friends and therapists and other people tried to offer me.
I'll tell you what, that was a crucible of learning about my own relationship to anxiety because some of the things that were offered to me made that anxiety worse. Very quickly, I would turn away from that approach. Other things really helped my anxiety and I started to move toward those.
Through that experience with anxiety, as painful as it was, I learned what works for me and what doesn't. And I have taken that information and incorporated it into my self-understanding to this day, so that when I notice my anxiety move from small to medium, I far more quickly know what it is exactly that I need to keep that anxiety from becoming big.
You want to become an expert and a student of your own anxiety so that you begin to understand what works for you and what doesn't. If you're seeking therapy for anxiety and you suspect that it's rooted in trauma from your past, you will want to look for trauma-informed therapeutic approaches.
Some of the best are EMDR or IFS or somatic approaches. These are approaches that understand the complex nature of anxiety and how it shows up in different people. When you identify and understand that trauma might be at the root of your anxiety, it allows for a more compassionate and holistic approach to healing that focuses on restoring that sense of internalized safety so that you begin to experience what a calm nervous system feels like.
Number two, anxiety is sometimes rooted in a biological predisposition. Some people are biologically predisposed to experience higher levels of anxiety. It doesn't mean you'll struggle with anxiety your whole life. It means you might struggle with it more than someone else.
This kind of sensitivity often shows up early in life. Maybe you have a child where you notice they're very easily startled or highly responsive to environmental changes. And this can happen when there is trauma or when there isn't trauma. There's this inherent responsiveness to the environment.
A key concept here that you may have heard is the highly sensitive person. Sometimes it's shortened to HSP. This is a term for individuals who have a heightened sensory processing sensitivity. An HSP, which I am one, tends to be more attuned to subtle changes in their surroundings. They tend to pick up on other's emotions more readily. They tend to feel overwhelmed by busy or chaotic environments.
A school day can be harder for a highly sensitive child. A work day can be harder for a highly sensitive person. I notice when I go into parties, I pick up on so much data. Even though I'm not an introvert, I still can leave feeling very exhausted and overwhelmed because I'm processing so much sensory data.
This sensitivity is a gift in many ways. I wouldn't trade it for the world, but it can also make you more prone to anxiety in response to everyday stressors. So it's incredibly invaluable information to understand about yourself. If it's true, this is how I am. There's no shame in that. But when I know how I am, I can adjust my lifestyle. I can adjust my patterns. I can adjust my capacity accordingly.
Another example of what they think to be biological predispositions are found in personality traits. We talked about these back in Episode 49, the big five personality traits that have been researched significantly that tend to be inherent. Those who score high in the trait of neuroticism, which is a trait associated with emotional sensitivity, emotional complexity and worry, these folks are going to be more likely to experience anxiety.
Again, there's a gift in that. There's a soft underbelly to being a more sensitive, finely tuned person. Introversion is another personality trait that can be linked to heightened social and situational anxiety.
Now, it doesn't mean this is true for every introvert, but it does mean that introverted individuals might feel more anxious in social settings or in high stimulation environments where they may experience sensory overload or feel drained more quickly.
So again, we're trying to get at the root here. If you're someone who notices, man, I feel really anxious in social settings. Do I have trauma in my history? Well, maybe it's possible, but maybe not. Maybe you fall in this category of someone who's an HSP or somebody who's high on one of these personality traits,
That's actually been part of your wiring since you were very young. And to name that without shame helps you accept that about yourself, honor the gift in that, and take the steps that you need to pay attention to so that you don't overload your capacity.
For people with a biological predisposition to anxiety, whether it's due to high sensitivity, personality traits, or a general heightened response to stimuli, managing anxiety often involves lifestyle adjustments.
You might need to be more careful about your commitments. You might practice stress reduction activities like mindfulness and prayer. You might rely on medication from time to time, because you have to be in an overstimulating environment for a period of time. By acknowledging the reality of your God given design, you are empowered to take steps to support as much as possible that calm place inside.
Sometimes anxiety arises as a secondary symptom of another medical or psychological condition. In psychology, we call these co-occurring conditions or rule out conditions, where anxiety is there, but it's actually not the primary issue. There's something else going on. And this is so important if you're a clinician listening.
It is so important to get to the root of what's actually causing the anxiety. And if you're not a clinician listening, this is something to talk about with a therapist, with a doctor, with your friends. What's really at the root of this anxiety? Is it trauma? Is it some sort of predisposition? Is it situational or is there something else going on here?
And some examples of that are this whole category of neurodivergence diagnoses. So for example, autism spectrum disorder. Many people on the autism spectrum experience anxiety often due to their sensory sensitivities, and their challenges with social interactions. We're going to have an episode on that, coming up next week, that I cannot wait for you to hear.
It's so important if there is anxiety to look under the engine and see what else might be going on there. Another one is ADHD. There's often heightened anxiety with ADHD where there's a challenge of managing focus and managing impulsivity. There are incredible organizational demands that are on our kids and on us, and there can be anxiety because of something happening in the brain that doesn't let me do those things very easily.
There are also other sensory processing disorders that can lead to anxiety. So again, that's what we mean by these co-occurring conditions, where you want to be sure what's really at the root of the anxiety. It's not always trauma. It's not always thought patterns that are out of whack. It's not always a predisposition. Sometimes there's something else going on that really needs to be understood.
Lastly, many of us deal with situation-specific anxiety. Maybe anxiety has not been a constant presence in your life, but it emerges in response to a specific situation or stressor. And that was my case. When I went through that bout of anxiety, it lasted a good year and it was very debilitating. It was very real, but it was also very situational.
I learned a lot through that, that I can now apply, and I haven't had symptoms that extreme since then. Situation specific anxiety often appears in specific contexts, whether it's things like public speaking or performance, or it's significant life events, whether good or bad. Sometimes moving can kick up a lot of anxiety.
Sometimes getting married can kick it up. Having children can kick it up. Sometimes really hard things kick it up. Going through a divorce, going through a relationship betrayal. These are situations that understandably will kick up anxiety. And sometimes that anxiety response exceeds your ability to cope with it.
In these cases, you may want to consider increasing your support. You might consider medication, you might consider developing better self-care practices to help support you through this challenging season.
That's a very broad overview of some of the roots of anxiety so that if you experience anxiety, you can begin to wonder, what's going on here? I wonder what this is about. And as you begin to get curious about your anxiety, you're going to be in a better position to help yourself move through it more effectively.
To close today's episode, I want to walk you through three practical approaches for working with anxious parts of you. The first relates to our thoughts. It's the cognitive approach. Cognitive approaches to anxiety are what we call top-down approaches. We're going to start with our thoughts. We're going to assume that at the root of our anxiety is our anxious thoughts.
Now, again, sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's not. If it is true, cognitive approaches will really help you. If that's not the root of your anxiety, they're not going to help you that much. You are the best student expert of your own soul.
Here's what we're trying to do with these cognitive approaches. The assumption here is that anxiety amplifies negative thoughts. We're prompted to imagine worst case scenarios through anxiety. One way to calm this anxious part of us that's spinning out all the worst case scenarios and the negative thoughts and the worries incessantly is to begin to notice those thoughts and gently question their accuracy.
So for example, if you catch yourself ruminating about all the things that might go wrong with this new job or with this relationship, and you can't stop those anxious thoughts, a cognitive approach would encourage you to capture that thought, name it, notice it. What is the thought? And then try to reframe it.
I go through a bunch of these in chapter five of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. I call them thinking traps. Let's say you are trapped in an all or nothing thought pattern. For example, if I'm not the very best at this, I'm going to fail.
That's an anxious thought. If I'm not the very best parent in the world, my kids are going to turn out horrible. If I'm not the very best at this new job, I'm going to be a complete failure. That's an all or nothing thinking trap. As you begin to notice that thought pattern, you can then reframe it.
What if I'm not the best, but I'm also not the worst? What if I'm doing my best at this moment, and that's enough? What if it's not going to be the best case scenario, but it's also not going to be the worst case scenario? What if things turn out better than ?
You're not trying to gaslight yourself when you reframe an anxious thought. You're trying to name the anxious thought, and you're trying to say, listen, this is what's happening. This is what I feel, but what's true is maybe this isn't going as well as I would have liked, but I'm also hanging in there. I'm doing okay. And every single day I'm getting it a little bit better.
You start to talk yourself down to what's actually true. When you make that mental shift, it eases your anxious thoughts and can bring in a more grounded, hopeful, realistic perspective. This can be super helpful and it's especially helpful to do in partnership with someone else.
You can even talk through to someone else, hey, I'm catastrophizing. I'm going to the worst case scenario. Can you talk me down and talk me through to what is actually realistic? It's a holistic, grounded thing that's going on here. When you do that, it's really empowering because you can then take brave steps to address the reality of your situation, instead of that catastrophizing or that worst case scenario.
So basic questions to ask yourself, if you're noticing some of these anxious thoughts: is this thought true? Is it accurate or am I preparing for the worst? And if it's the latter, what is the worst thing that actually could happen? And is that even likely? And ask a third party objective, a trusted advisor to help you with that. What's actually true here? What's actually going on?
Facing the truth, even of things that are hard, empowers you to take brave steps through. The best scripture that supports this work of really noticing the content of your thoughts is 2 Corinthians 10:5, to take captive every thought, and examine it under the light of Christ's truth.
You can use that verse as a reminder to stop and do what I call “mind your mind”. Notice what it is that I'm thinking about. What is it that I'm worried about? I'm not doing that to shame myself. I'm doing that with a posture of curiosity. I'm trying to discern what is actually true here.
Number two are somatic approaches. Somatic approaches are bottom up approaches. We start at the body level. This can be super effective with anxiety. Anxiety tends to be in our minds. It tends to live in our heads. Sometimes, fighting fire with fire doesn't work. If you're fighting anxious thoughts with thoughts, sometimes that's too much. It doesn't work.
These bottom up approaches, starting with your body and moving up, can really be helpful. Anxiety tends to make our bodies tense up. It tends to make our breath short. It tends to make our pulse race. Anything that we can do physically to reverse those states helps reduce our anxious thoughts.
You might try grounding techniques, which means you connect with things you can see. What do I see? What do I taste? What do I smell? What do I feel underneath my feet? What do I hear? Really start to attune to those bodily senses. Another thing that helps so much to return to calm is taking deep breaths. This really works. I do this all the time. You take that deep breath, breathe in deeply, breathe out.
Right there is a physiological intervention that begins to slow down the firing of those anxious thoughts. Simply taking a walk, being outside, and movement can help to change the physiology of your body. Sometimes people will grab ice or cold water to interrupt the anxious firing, and it can really help bring you out of your anxious mind and into your body.
You might ask yourself, what physical sensations am I noticing? Do I notice myself taking short breaths? Do I notice tension in my shoulders? Do I notice that my heart is racing? And you begin to intervene physiologically.
When I think about these somatic interventions, these bottom up interventions, I think about Psalm 46:10, not as a shaming mandate, but as a reminder to take that deep breath and be still and know that I am God. That takes us into our bodies. Be still, be still. How do we become still?
We have to sink into our bodies. We have to take that deep breath. We have to release the tension in our bodies. That stillness is something we do physiologically to drop down out of our minds and into our bodies. And when we train ourselves to do that, we teach ourselves how to move out of that anxious state.
And then lastly, emotional interventions. We need to sometimes understand that anxiety is often masking deeper, more vulnerable emotions. And this is what IFS really teaches us. Anxiety is a manager part, trying to protect us from those more vulnerable emotions like sadness, like loneliness, like fear.
You can begin to notice anxiety and ask yourself, what do I fear would happen if I was a little less anxious? You will notice those more vulnerable emotions bubble up to the surface. You might start crying, you might notice grief, you might notice an incredible sorrow, you might notice feelings of pain.
You might notice some of those deeper emotions that actually need to find their way out, and anxiety has been keeping you from honoring the validity of those emotions. When you're using an emotional intervention, you might need to give yourself some space to acknowledge the more tender parts of you underneath, realizing that they're real, they're valid.
Honoring the fact that man, I'm scared. This is hard. I am really lonely. And I don't want to admit that, but it's true. Or I'm really sad about this. When you begin to honor those more vulnerable emotions underneath, paradoxically, anxiety loosens its grip.
Now, it's so important to honor those more vulnerable emotions in a safe environment, especially if you're new to this work, to talk to a friend, to talk to a therapist. Often underneath the urgency of anxiety is a tender emotion in need of your care and God's kindness. And for this one, I think about 1 Peter 5:7, to cast our anxiety, and in this case, that anxious part of us, on God, because he cares for those heavy burdens that you carry.
Whether through honoring your body, whether through capturing anxious thoughts, or whether through learning to honor those deeper places of vulnerability that exist inside all of us, the process involves continually inviting God's loving presence to be near every single part of who you are.
To be near that anxious part of you, to be near those more tender parts of you underneath that are scared, sad, or hurting, and to be very near that power that you have at the core of who you are, to regulate your breath, to regulate your movements, to ground yourself. It's incredibly empowering to do this work in partnership with God's spirit.
As you get to the root of your anxiety, you honor it, you name it without shame, and you gently invite God's presence to meet you in that place. You will begin to see the next brave steps you need to take. And with each brave step, you'll be strengthened, encouraged in a sense of your own agency, and in trust in God.
You'll begin to lead those anxious parts of you instead of the other way around. You're stepping into this place of integration where anxiety has a seat at the table, but it is no longer leading the control board of your life. Instead, you're leading with strength, and with wisdom, and you're bringing more of that strength, that wisdom, and that goodness to the other people in your life.
Are you carrying burdens that aren't entirely your own? Could understanding your family's past be the key to unlocking a healthier future?
In this powerful episode, we dive into the concept of generational trauma with my guest, Gina Birkemeier, therapist and author of the book & workbook, “Generations Deep”. Gina shares her personal and professional insights on how deep-seated family issues can affect us and how both faith and therapy play pivotal roles in healing and breaking these cycles.
You'll learn. . .
* What generational trauma is and how it subtly influences our lives
* Why Gina realized that she needed therapy and Jesus
* What epigenetics is and how our genes remember & sometimes inherit the trauma of previous generations
* How to understand cycle breaking & to end the cycle of dysfunction
* About the legacy burdens we carry from our family's past.
Resources:
- The Best of You Podcast question form
- DrAlisonCook.com/podcast
- Generations Deep: Unmasking Inherited Dysfunction and Trauma to Rewrite Our Stories Through Faith and Therapy by Gina Birkemeier
- Deuteronomy 5:9
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- GinaBirkemeier.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 101: I Shouldn’t Feel Angry—Exploring the Violence that Shapes Our Family Stories & How to Heal with Lisa Jo Baker
- Episode 127: Healing Childhood Wounds—The Enmeshed Family & 5 Toxic Patterns that Affect Your Ability to Thrive in Adult Relationships
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so delighted that you're here today for this week's episode. We are going to be diving even deeper into the theme of healing childhood wounds. We're going to focus today on an especially powerful area, and that's the area of generational trauma.
Please don't forget to leave me your questions or ideas for any future episodes on The Best of You Podcast question form. You can find that link in today's episode show notes or on my website, podcast, DrAlisonCook.com/podcast. So In last week's episode, we explored themes of enmeshment and individuation, and we went through five toxic patterns of behavior that can thwart the process of secure attachment and make it challenging for us to develop healthy relationships in adulthood.
Today, I wanted to explore how these wounds sometimes run deeper than our individual experiences. They're formed as part of a larger story passed down through generations. That's why I'm thrilled to have Gina Birkemeier with us. Gina is a licensed professional counselor with a master's degree in both psychology and theology, along with advanced training in trauma and therapeutic techniques.
She's the author of Generations Deep: Unmasking Inherited Dysfunction and Trauma to Rewrite Our Stories Through Faith and Therapy, and she brings invaluable insights into what it means to be a cycle breaker, someone who identifies, confronts, and heals generational trauma within their family.
Gina also facilitates Generations Deep Story Groups to support people in their healing journeys. Today's episode is a fascinating deep dive. We discuss a couple of really new topics to the podcast. One is the topic of epigenetics, which is this idea that external factors in life experiences can influence how our DNA is expressed. It's a really incredible field of study.
We also discuss the related concept of legacy burdens. For those of you familiar with internal family systems, the IFS model of therapy, these are those beliefs or fears or emotional patterns that are passed down through our family, sometimes through numerous generations without us even realizing it or even having direct experience of the painful events. These are really important concepts to understand because they can affect us.
They can feel like these invisible weights that we carry that keep us stuck in the past. But when you begin to identify and address these generational patterns, we can begin to break cycles of pain and create a healthier legacy, not only for ourselves, but for future generations. Please enjoy my conversation with Gina Birkemeier.
***
I'm so glad you're here today, Gina, I've known about your work for a little while and I'm so thrilled to have this conversation with you today about generational trauma and what you call “inherited dysfunction”. I think that's such an interesting way to look at it. Welcome.
Gina: Thank you. It's great to be with you today.
Alison Cook: I know your work comes from a very personal place. I'd love for you to share with us, what do you mean? By inherited dysfunction, by generational trauma. And if you're willing, I'd love to hear a little bit about that in the context of your own personal story.
Gina: I can't ever think of a time when, for some reason or another, those dots weren’t connected for me that there was something happening generationally. When I talk about that, I'm talking about the trauma and the dysfunction. A lot of times we think of trauma as these really big things, and that is true, but then also there are these identity wounds, these core wounds, that hit us in such a way that it really forms and informs what we believe about ourselves, other people, the world, and even God.
The story that I tell in the book is my personal journey and my professional journey combined . I start back with my great grandparents who immigrated over from Italy. Some of the relational trauma and dysfunction that had happened all the way back then with my great grandmother and her first marriage, how that ended, and how she ended up with my great grandfather.
And then what that perpetuated in terms of a cycle of abandonment issues with regard to the children that she had before she met my great-grandfather. And then moving into my grandparents. The story of my grandparents and how that sort of molded some things. My grandmother had some identity issues that then led her to get involved with my grandfather at a very young age, 14, and having my mom at 15.
And then the great grandparents tried to interject and how terribly wrong that went. As my mom grew up, things that she began to believe about herself that were impacted by the generation before her. And then how my mother then perpetuated that cycle once again and got pregnant with me at a very young age and was not able to roll into that parenting, nurturing role.
She ended up giving me up for adoption twice. She gave me up for adoption, took me back, then gave me up again. All before the age of two. It stayed in the family. So that complicated a lot of things as I grew up. There were a lot of secrets around me and the energy that created around me, the tones of voice that I felt directed at me, and then my adopted parents separating…there was a lot of dysfunction there.
Throughout this, there was fatherlessness, neglect, emotional neglect, emotional immaturity. There were some borderline tendencies that we can see woven through a couple of the generations, some deep heart wounds particularly in the women in my family.
That came over into my life and with me not knowing who my biological father was, my adopted father being somewhat distant, and my adopted mother having a lot of issues with prescription drugs and alcohol. There had also been a history of that in the family as well.
In my life, as I got older, I started to perpetuate some of the same exact cycles. I had an issue of sexual abuse in two occurrences, one with some kids my age and a couple instances when I was older as well in the family. One outside the family, one in the family, and how all of these things, this dysfunction, affects our sense of self, sense of others, how we connect, how we nurture, how we protect.
All of those things passed down from one generation to the next, culminating in my life and coming to a point where–I can't take any credit, I have to give God all the credit for it–it became, it has to end here.
I have this line in the book that says, it's like telling the raging trauma of the past, “You cannot come beyond this point”. It's like building a dam against those rapids, saying, you cannot rage beyond here. It ends here. And then going into that journey of what does that even look like? To first uncover what they are.
I think it was a lot of cutting the heads off of dandelions for a while, but not really pulling them up by the root, because I didn't understand what the root was. It took a lot of therapy and a lot of Jesus to get me there. Yeah.
Alison Cook: We hear this word “cycle-breaker”. What does it mean to you? You're saying in your story that this ends here. I hear that cycle-breaking. And that word is really powerful. It also can put a lot of pressure on a person. What do you mean by I'm a cycle breaker? And what does that look like in your life?
Gina: Yes, so I would say it can look like pressure, if it's coming externally. It can really feel like pressure. But what I teach in my Generations Deep Groups is that it isn't about putting pressure on yourself. It's actually about releasing a pressure valve, because there's a lot of pressure when we're carrying all the things that have been passed down to us.
We're holding on to them, and we're absorbing them. But if we can release them and let them go, there is a freedom in that. And it's a very empowering position to be in, to say, I'm breaking the cycle. Now, remember, ideally, we want to break it for the generations that come after us.
But as they grow, that's their responsibility. We can only take so much responsibility for the generations that come after us. And there's room to talk about what we need to own, and how maybe we have perpetuated some cycles with them, and how we want to do better. We may need to own some things, apologize for some things, leave room for them to tell us how things we've done have impacted them.
But really, cycle breaking is about saying, I recognize what I missed. I recognize the harm that was done to me. Thank you. I recognize the harm that maybe I did to myself, and I'm moving into a place now where I'm healing from those things. And I'm moving forward in a space of wisdom and discernment with Holy Spirit led relationships and actions.
And it feels like this big heavy term, but often it's really in the little details. It's in the little things that you do differently. I point this out in my groups a lot. I'll have participants in the group say, this is what I'm doing. And I'll say, let's slow that down. That's a cycle breaking that's going on right there.
That's a cycle breaking. Yes. And then to literally watch their posture and countenance change–oh, I can do this. I'm already doing it. I didn't even realize. I tell people often, you picked up the book, you're working through it, and looking at what the next step is. That alone makes you a cycle breaker.
Alison Cook: You're naming things. Just that very step of naming what happened. Yeah, that's really good, Gina. I want to back up a little bit, back into your story. You get into your twenties, you're becoming a young adult. Is there a moment when it occurred to you that whatever it was that you were doing, maybe it's when you become a parent yourself, where you realize, oh my gosh, this is something I've got to deal with.
Was there a moment or a couple of moments that really began to be a cycle breaking moment for you, before you even knew all of the language?
Gina: Yeah. Oh for sure before I knew the language. Absolutely. I appreciate this question. There were a couple of them. I had my daughter very young. Like I said, I started to perpetuate the same cycles that had happened before me, and it was with her. I was in so much pain and so much dysfunction.
I was actually also in a couple of abusive relationships at the time, and things were not going well in my life. I could not be the mom that she needed. I could not be present for her. And then not too long after that, I started to get my feet underneath me and then ended up pregnant with my son.
Alison Cook: How old were you at this time?
Gina: When I was pregnant with my son, I was 23 and able to say, okay, I can't do this anymore. I was in an abusive relationship and I remember this moment where I was on my knees on the bed after a night of drinking to try to numb everything in my world. I shook my fist at God and said, either you kill me, or you take over my life, because I cannot do this anymore.
Thank God that he decided in his mercy to take over instead of the alternative. That's not a formula that I'm giving. It's what happened in my life. And I will, in all transparency, admit that the next morning I woke up and said, I didn't mean it. Let me take that back. I want to take that prayer back. It was too late. He knew that I really did mean it. That in that moment of desperation, that was the most real, raw, true me. And that is who he began to minister to.
Alison Cook: There was a turning point there, when you started to reach out for help, because maybe you became aware, okay, something's got to change. Did you go to a therapist? At this point, did you go to a church community? And what kind of help did you receive at that time that was both helpful and maybe not so helpful?
Gina: Yes. I appreciate the both-and of that. So I first went to a church. It was in me to say, that's where I need to go. I went and found this church, and I will say there were a lot of really sweet, kind things about the church, but the church was very much an, okay, you had all those things in your past. You need to hurry up and clean them up and come be a part of this.
The struggle is over. You're here now. And it was a name it and claim it, no room for the process church. I came from this super chaotic, dysfunctional life, and I'm still carrying all these wounds. I use this term often–triage discharge. Now you're here and you're good to go.
I was not good to go.
Alison Cook: Zap of the wand theology.
Gina: Zap of the wand. Yeah. A lot of spiritual bypassing, a lot of hyper-spiritualization. Well-intentioned, don't get me wrong. But it was another place where I felt like I didn't fit in. I can't do this. Quite frankly, it was just, I suck at this. What is wrong with me? Why can't I do this the right way?
Alison Cook: It becomes shaming that you can't get it together enough, because you should be good now. Yeah. So you turned on yourself.
Gina: The tendency particularly for women is, they turn it on themselves. I definitely turned it on myself and slowly backed out of that church. I wouldn't say I dove back into my old ways, but I did a little bit because it was too much.
It was too much pain and I was looking for a way to numb it. And I thought, no, you can't go back to where you were. What about counseling? What does that look like? And something within me knew even then. I didn't really know what it was, I didn't know how you did it, I didn't know what it looked like, but I started looking in the phone book.
By the way, phone books used to be books with phone numbers.
Alison Cook: I remember them well.
Gina: So I started this therapy journey and I learned a lot. And it was really good. I started changing my lens and rewriting my story. I found the stones, as we say in narrative therapy, or the parts of me that I was trying to lock away, those vulnerable parts from IFS, those exiles. I was like, nope, you go away, you're too vulnerable, you're going to get us hurt. Stay over there, stay away.
I really started that journey. I was like, okay, but this isn't enough either. This all-in church thing, ignore everything that happened, that didn't do it. And then this all-in therapy thing, buy all the self-help books, do all of the things, that's not really doing it either.
I still feel like something's not right. Something's missing. It was really the intersection of the two, and finding another church, finding someone who actually became a mentor and is now a lifelong friend who was faith-informed and trauma-informed. To be able to bring the two journeys together, that was really where I was like okay, this is how you do it.
Alison Cook: That integration piece of bringing God's power and God's presence into the therapeutic process…wow. Wow. So really a journey there. One more question about your story, because what I'm hearing is, there were lots of phases, lots of trial and error, lots of reaching out for. Two steps forward, one step back, maybe another step forward, three more steps back.
That is the nature of healing. I want the listener to hear that, especially when there's a lot going on there. That's really normal. And that's what is sometimes so devastating, is when you take those steps forward and then you find yourself taking this step back, it could be tempting to give up altogether.
What I hear there is a real persistence to keep going. Okay, I got to get back up and try. As you kept doing that and as you got to that therapist that really was able to help you integrate, what was a breakthrough moment where maybe you really saw some truths? Or there was a naming that, again, it doesn't come in a moment, we'll say it was a miracle.
Yes, it was a miracle. Also, it came as a result of all of that persistence through the two steps forward, one step back. Did you have a moment like that when you got to that integrated piece?
Gina: Yeah, so I will say I think it was a lot of little moments that came together. And I also want to say something else about that whole idea of the forward and the back and the forward and the back. It took me a little while to realize that what felt like backwards wasn't really backwards.
It actually was, I have all these things that are really painful, and it feels like I'm back there again, but I have a new level of awareness. I have a new level of accountability, a new level of recognition, a new level of ability to grieve. It isn't always backward.
Sometimes it's because you've stepped forward and now, something else has been revealed to you and that can sometimes feel like backward, but that doesn't mean it is.
Alison Cook: That’s good. That's really powerful. That's a huge breakthrough right there.
Gina: Yeah. And that was a huge piece for me. And even realizing some of those things in the moment and being like, okay, but no, you're not actually doing what you used to do. You're not having that old response, or at least not at that level. You're not actually where you were and you have new tools.
One of the things that kept empowering the journey forward was how I did begin to see how things we’re talking about in therapy go really well with what scripture says. Oh, my emotions are actually not the enemy. We’re created in the image of an emotional God. We see it in scripture, the whole gamut of emotion, and that's part of our image-bearing.
Then to be able to say, now I recognize the top-down and the bottom-up of it all. And how we can even see that in scripture. The integration was the fuel, and grace. I don't want to leave that out of the conversation. Yes, embracing God's grace, believing in his grace for me, but also learning how to have some grace for myself.
One of the most effective ways that came was in learning how to have grace for the generations before me. And I don't mean letting them off the hook, or minimizing what happened, or how it impacted me. But about having that grace.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that's what I was curious about. In that journey, I'm sure boundaries became a part of it. And forgiveness, which is always a really challenging word when we are recognizing and naming really hard things that happen to us, especially with our families.
That both-and of naming really honestly, because we have to see the truth in order to be set free, and also figuring out the boundaries. I imagine that was also a huge part of this journey.
Gina: As far as boundaries are concerned, I talk about this one a lot because this can be really hard. I want to say a couple of really important things about boundaries from my perspective. What I walk through with clients and what we talk about in Generations Deep groups is that boundaries are important, but the way you make the boundaries might even be more important.
We don't make them out of anger. We don't make them out of fear. Because when we're no longer afraid and we're no longer angry, we have a tendency to then not hold the boundary. And then we teach people that we don't mean what we say. We open ourselves up to these boundary violations all the time.
I think that's something to be careful of. The other thing is that you get pressure from family. Blood is thicker than water. Blood is thicker than water. You are supposed to keep this tie, no matter what. And I'm laughing a little bit because every time in group, I will say, that was told to me too. Blood is thicker than water, blood is thicker than water.
And then typically I will say, do you know what that whole phrase is? Do you know where blood is thicker than water comes from? It's, “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”.
Alison Cook: Whoa.
Gina: It's actually the reverse. It actually means something completely different. So as people are telling you, blood is thicker than water, blood is thicker than water. It's actually that the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.
It is saying in those covenantal relationships, whether they're genetic or not, that is the strong bond. That is where the strength is. It isn't about the DNA imprints.
Alison Cook: It's the new family you've created.
Gina: That God has given us. Absolutely.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that's powerful. That's really powerful. So tell us a little bit, you've clearly at some point decided to become a therapist and to go into the work of helping others heal. How did you make that decision? And now you're doing all this amazing work to help others.
How did you make that decision? And what was that like for you to become a guide for others through their healing journeys?
Gina: It started in pastoral care. I started there, and then pretty quickly realized I wanted to do more. I wanted to walk further along with people than what pastoral care afforded me the opportunity to do. I did a lot of crisis things with women in domestic violence situations, women coming out of prison, single moms, homeless moms.
I did a lot of that work initially, a lot of outreach, and then my mentor who had been a part of my life that I met through church said, I think you need to move forward and go formally get educated and go do this. I was like, okay, sure. It was not really going to happen.
I'll do it because this person I respect is asking me to do it. I thought, I'll figure it out. But the more I learned about it, I was like, no, I actually could do more. I actually could do more. And God opened the door for me to do that pretty quickly. I started to have the idea for the book while I was in my Master's program.
Because like I had said, for some reason, my brain always connected those dots of transgenerational dysfunction and trauma. I knew I wanted to write a book about it. So in getting my education as a therapist and also getting educated on epigenetic influences and what that has to do with trauma, and then bringing those things together eventually led me to do the book.
I was doing the generational trauma work long before the book came out. But then the book came out and God has been so kind and ridiculously generous with how he has allowed me to help other people and walk with other people.
He has allowed, not nationally, but internationally, for the book to be used in Guatemala and Nicaragua and Zimbabwe, and across the US. It has been amazing. Pretty quickly from there, I had people asking, because there's questions in the book, but I would get a lot of feedback.
Are you going to do a separate workbook where we can put the answers to the questions? That's when the workbook was born along with the Audible version of the book. And then I guess it was maybe not even a whole year after that, that we had Generations Deep groups that were launched.
We do those, and I train other therapists on how to run the Generations Deep groups as well. It's been really incredible.
Alison Cook: That's amazing. What do we mean by this term, epigenetics? It's really fascinating. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Gina: For a long time we believed that our DNA was it. You get what you get and that's it. If you have fill in the blank, whatever you have, if you get diabetes, if you have. Alcoholism, depression, it could be whatever. Those were things that were passed to you genetically and you would have to deal with that genetic soup that we're all given.
What we now know is that it's far less about genetics and it's more about epigenetics. So epi, think above. Above the DNA, the thing that influences the DNA. We all have these epigenetic influencers in our lives. They can be anything from our nutrition, our environment, what we're consuming holistically, how we are raised, what has formed and informed us.
There are some interesting twin studies out there where two twins are separated and one's raised one way and one's raised another and they come back together. While they have the same DNA, they have completely different lives. And we've seen this in research they did in Emory, where that cortical response to fear of a negative stimuli can be passed down from the mice in this generation to the next without even introducing them to that negative stimuli.
They're born afraid of these certain things because of that. But the really cool and fascinating thing is that we also know from epigenetics that it doesn't have to be that way. God, in his infinite wisdom, did not give us a trauma box. There's not this place in our brain where the trauma has to always live there and we carry it around like this boulder on our back.
We're actually wired for healing. We're not wired for the harm that comes. Epigenetically, we have this power to influence our lives, the lives of our children, the lives of our grandchildren, our great grandchildren, to afford something different for the generations to come.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that's so good. There's always been biblically this idea of the sins of the generations being passed down. There's a way in which now, science is almost upholding that. Sometimes sin doesn't feel like the right word for it, but the trauma of the generations is passed down.
I love that example of that fear response–it can be part of your DNA. And that doesn't mean you're locked into it. That doesn't mean it can't change. We can also have these restorative experiences.
Gina: That's really how I opened the book. The sins of the father visited to the third and fourth generation. A couple of things about that. I used to hate that verse so much, because I thought, back when I was deep in my own wounding, how does a loving God crack a whip that leaves a mark three and four generations out?
Why is that a thing? As I started healing and learning about all of this, what I realized is no, that's not what's being said. What's being said is if you don't own it and do something with it, it has the potential to affect three and four generations. And I thought, wow that's so interesting, especially as I learned about epigenetics.
What we know is that if there is no intervention, like I talked about with that born trauma response, if there is no intervention, it will take three to four generations for that to naturally be evolved out of the generations.
It takes three to four generations for that to naturally subside. But with intervention, it can change rapidly. Which brings me to the other scripture that talks about the fathers having eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. That appears I think twice in scripture, and people will quote that as proof of oh, it's passed down, but actually the prophets around them were saying, stop saying that.
That's not true. That's not true. Stop saying that. even to know that there was that interjection of hope, even then, it's not true. It doesn't have to be true. We can do something else.
Alison Cook: I love that. I think you're saying something really important. Number one, those scriptural sayings, it's not God's punishment or declaration of, this is how I'm going to punish you. It's almost a warning, of fact. This is what's going to happen. If we don't deal with this, it will be passed down.
You're not only hurting yourself, you are hurting the next generations. It widens the lens and it can be a really helpful motivation to be a cycle breaker. To your point, it's not just about me. My life has ripple effects. It matters.
And that's not pressure in that sense of, you better get it right. It's a truth that can propel us to yearn to do the work because the work is hard and it can be frustrating. It's not easy. In IFS there's a term called legacy burdens. Are you familiar with that?
Gina: Very much. Yes.
Alison Cook: For the listener, a legacy burden in IFS terminology is basically that we have these burdens that we pick up from our past, the parts of us that have been wounded. They carry a deep pain that isn't in the present moment. So you might become aware that you have a burden if you completely lash out at a friend or at your sister or at your kids.
It's way disproportionate to the offense that occurred, and you might be tapping into a wounded part of you that's lashing out from decades of pain versus the pain of the present moment. Part of the work of IFS is going and finding these exiles that carry these burdens and unburdening them.
One of the things in IFS that Dick Schwartz and others began to notice is that sometimes, legacy burdens don't originate in your own story. They originate in your family history. You might have a legacy burden as it relates to alcoholism, even if you were not an alcoholic yourself. You might have a legacy burden as it relates to your ancestors who were slaves, even if you were not a slave yourself.
You might carry some of that pain inside of you, even if that specific thing didn't happen to you. Tell me a little bit about how you view legacy burdens and how that weaves into this conversation about epigenetics and generational trauma.
Gina: I would say a legacy burden is a really great example of epigenetics. That's something that's been passed down, not even so much in DNA, but what influenced the DNA. I say in the book that shame can be a legacy. Shame can be a legacy.
There's a part in the book where I say, some of this you might be wondering, is this connected to something in my past? Or I have this struggle that I can't really name. I know that this is how I feel when these things happen. And I don't really know where it came from and I don't think I had an experience like that.
That's probably time to think about how you're carrying something that most likely is from the generations before you. But what's beautiful is when we do the work, it's a past, present, future work. We do the work here and now, but the work is effective for the past, present, and future. What we've carried is what's being addressed, the past. We're doing it in the present of our life, and then we're passing that on to the future.
Alison Cook: That's so good. That's so good. What's one piece of wisdom, Gina, you would give to someone listening who's maybe in those early stages of healing, of recognizing some of these burdens. They’re maybe feeling discouraged because they're having that experience of getting a little help and then falling right back into old ways.
What's one piece of wisdom you would offer to that listener?
Gina: I would say that I understand that feeling, and just because it feels like you're falling back doesn't necessarily mean that you are. Take inventory of what you know to be true that you have learned, that is different from what you had then.
What you're doing now, we know from all of the science, from all of the research, that your brain is wired for that new capacity. You can do this, but have grace for yourself in the process and do not do it alone, because that isolation thing will feed the shame and the shame will feed the cycle of dysfunction.
You want to find that safe space of community. In terms of the generational piece, when you're trying to figure out, am I passing down something I don't want to pass down, or I think I am, and how do I change it? That's the time to say, even thinking about some of your work, Alison, in Boundaries For Your Soul, that's the time to think about, okay, what did I miss, or what harmed me as a child?
Have I been able to heal from that? And have I been able to give myself what I need to accept it from God, from the relationships around me? And if I haven't, then I need to go get some help in doing that. There's no shame in that. When I can say, yes, I've been able to name what I missed and name what harmed me and do this work of healing, you will naturally then pass something different onto your kids because you're different inside.
Alison Cook: I love that. That's so hopeful. Just that naming is so hopeful. I love that. Tell us a little bit more about your book, the workbook, and these groups and other things that you're doing to help people heal for those who want to learn more.
Gina: Generations Deep and the workbook are great for people to do with their therapist, one on one. Read the book, it's a great way to dip a toe in the water. I take a pretty gentle approach in the book, and the idea is bringing them through my story first.
I think that kind of feels like a fellow traveler thing. The feedback that we've received is that it really feels like walking with. The second half talks a little bit more about the therapy side of it. It talks about what it is, being with Jesus and being with a therapist and those two things integrated together. What does that even mean?
I think that it's appropriate for a lot of people who might not be ready, but also for people who are on the journey and they're looking for the next step. The groups, you can reach out through my website, GinaBirkemeier.com and find out about the groups. We have them online. We have them in person.
Also, I do training for therapists who want to either do the one on one work with my book and workbook, or if they want to actually do groups themselves. I train therapists on how to do that as well. And then there's an Audible version that has some extras, some interviews with people and those interviews have been helpful to a lot of listeners.
They’re some extra things to think about in terms of this journey of healing. In my practice, we have started something called the Collaborative Care Initiative, which has been a long term dream of mine to bring multiple practitioners under one roof to truly provide that holistic model of care. And to make it available to a broad socioeconomic base.
So we have all of our therapists, 43 therapists, and then we're bringing on spiritual directors, nurse practitioners, psychiatric nurse practitioners, trauma-informed somatic release and body practices. We have a whole variety of people that we're bringing on and are really excited about the growth.
We have neurofeedback, and it's been really great to bring all of these people under one roof. These adjunct practitioners, I bring them in to do educational pieces for our therapists. So it's really for the therapists to learn how to be holistically-minded as well.
It's been a little bit “ready fire aim” rather than “ready aim fire”, but it's been great. And our hope is that we'll be able to build a model that might be replicable for other practices around the country.
Alison Cook: Is it mostly online?
Gina: No, it's mostly in person, but there are online options.
Alison Cook: And where are you located?
Gina: We're in Missouri.
Alison Cook: That's incredible. What a vision. Wow. Where could people find you if they want to learn more about your work and about this collective?
Gina: Find me at GinaBirkemeier.com and I'm on the socials. They can find me @myoutloudvoice on the socials.
Alison Cook: Gina, what would you say to that younger you, 23, 24, 25, what would you want her to know from where you are now?
Gina: That makes me a little teary. I think I would want her to know not to give up. That she was worth more than what she realized. And not to do it alone, to stop trying to do it alone. That God had so much more for her, for us. That there would come a time when she could look back and say, the work was hard, but the work was good.
Alison Cook: I love that. I love that. And what's bringing out the best of you right now?
Gina: Oh gosh. Family things, new grandchildren, this collaborative care. I'm also working on my PhD right now. The doctoral program is incredible. It brings out, I would say, the good, the bad and the ugly, but in a great way.
I'm having the privilege of working with clinicians in Ukraine right now, and that has really been an incredible humbling experience. God is meeting me in ways that I had not anticipated through all of those things and I'm so grateful and I think it is bringing out the best in me and it is also calling me to refinement in other areas as well, which I hope He will continue to do while I'm here on this earth.
Alison Cook: That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us for all that you're doing. I'm so grateful to have this conversation with you today.
Gina: Thanks, Alison.
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