"I'm so grateful I found Dr. Cook's work—she is the best of both worlds. I trust her and I don't even know her. Morally authentic and kind with really strong clinical chops. Thank you Dr. Alison for helping me to stay hopeful when I had almost given up."
"I can't say enough about this podcast and Dr. Alison. I have listened to every episode and can't wait for the next one. She has shed so much light onto my spiritual pain. . . I am learning how to heal and live the life God has planned for me."
"I started this podcast roughly a year ago from start to finish. I was struggling, had tried several other podcasts, several counselors, and I was just lost but really could not identify why. I started listening to this podcast in the mornings and my life has really changed. It gives me the tools in the morning to wake up my emotions and really dive into some topics that have made me more self aware without shame!"
"I have learned so many new perspectives and tools through this podcast!"
"There are so many takeaways that have changed my perspective, illuminated my circumstances, or simply encouraged me to tears. Thank you, Dr. Alison!"
“Dr. Alison’s compassion and understanding of psychology in tandem with Scripture is excellent and so very helpful. One episode is better than the next and I often listen more than once and share them!”
Choose a category to narrow your search
Are patterns from your past influencing how you show up in relationships today?
In this episode, we explore how early family dynamics—like criticism, control, & emotional immaturity—shape our adult relationships. This process isn’t about placing blame but about building awareness of behaviors that impact self-worth, boundaries, and relational health. By naming these patterns, we open a path to greater confidence, healthier connections, autonomy, and healing.
In this episode, we cover:
* The two essential ingredients for building secure parent-child attachment
* The role of enmeshment and individuation in emotional health
* 5 common parenting patterns that disrupt secure attachment
* 5 questions to assess how these patterns may be impacting you today
* Practical steps to heal and change
Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here.
Have questions or episode ideas? Leave them here.
If you enjoyed this episode, you'll love:
The Best of You: Break Free From Painful Patterns, Mend Your Past, and Discover Your True Self In God
Episode 109: Healing Burdens From the Past—How to Overcome Childhood Wounds and Heal Your Younger Self with Tammy Sollenberger
Resources:
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Episode 16: What are Attachment Styles and Why Does it Matter?
- Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay Gibson
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!
- Turn back time on the appearance of your skin with Purity Woods’s Age-Defying Dream Cream. Purity Woods is currently offering 17% off sitewide but we have an additional 10% discount for our listeners for a total savings of 27%! Go to puritywoods.com/BESTOFYOU or enter code BESTOFYOU at checkout for an additional 10% off your first order.
- 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: Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so thrilled to be with you today. We are diving into a topic that resonates with every single one of us. It's that parent-child relationship–particularly how our own parents shape us well into adulthood.
Please hear me say, we are not here to lay blame on parents today, because a lot of us are parents, and so we're very well aware of all of our own shortcomings. The minute we start looking back and looking at our own childhoods and looking at some of our own wounds, it can stir up some of that terror inside of us.Oh my goodness, I hope I'm not doing this to my own child.
This is very unique to all of us. Our generation of parenting, whether you're parenting young kids or teenagers, or maybe your own kids have already left the nest, we're so much more aware of these wounds that we all bring from childhood into adulthood. Again, we're not here to lay blame. As I like to say, we're here to name. We're not labeling other people, we’re naming patterns of behavior.
In this case, we're naming patterns of behavior that maybe occurred when we were children that have an influence over who we are today. These patterns of behavior are real. They affect us. And we need to be able to name them in order to understand their effect on us today and how we can heal and change things, not only in our own lives, but as we parent our own kids.
So remember, we're here to name, not blame, but it is so important to do this work so that we can heal from the past and move forward with confidence and clarity in claiming the life God has for us.
Many of you have written to me about various forms of challenges in your relationships with your own parents, whether you're caring for aging parents, or whether you're aware of some of the residual effects of your own childhood on your current life.
This question comes up in so many different ways. For example, Mary wrote to me that she really appreciated the episodes on emotional immaturity and that she would love to hear me talk about the specific challenges for children who are caring for aging parents who are emotionally immature.
Bernadette wrote that she's coming to terms as an adult with some insecurity issues that resulted in deficits from her imperfect parents. She wrote in parentheses, we’re all imperfect, which is exactly true. That's exactly right. We are all working to heal from some of these deficits, no matter how good or toxic your parents and primary caregivers were.
And then Leslie wrote this beautiful message, talking about how it's only been in the last two years that she has begun to realize that she is not a terrible person. The messages she received from a very critical and emotionally abusive mother were actually about her mother’s issues and her unresolved pain, and had absolutely nothing to do with the beautiful soul that she was.
Thank you for writing about that, Leslie. I'm so grateful that you are learning that you are worthy of love. You were worthy of care and you are finally learning that you were not the problem in that relationship.
Those are a few of the many messages I've received from people who are really trying to come to terms with the wounds from the past and then figure out, how do I heal myself now? How do I also ensure that I don't pass these wounds down on to the next generation? What about when I need to care for these people, especially aging parents who have actually been really harmful to me and, and now I have to figure out how to care for them?
Okay, so that's the lay of the land of this topic. We're not going to get into every single aspect of that today. I've got a couple of episodes coming up designed to address a lot of this. If you continue to have questions, you can always leave those questions for me on The Best of You Podcast question form. There's a link to it in this episode show notes. You can also go to my website, dralisoncook.com/podcast, and find that link on this episode's webpage.
I love hearing from you. It's really helpful for me to take in this information from you so I can see what you're grappling with. When I start to see themes emerge, it helps me understand, oh, we need to do some episodes on this. So thank you for taking the time to write to me about these topics.
Now listen, before we get started, some of you may have really healthy relationships with your parents. Maybe they're not perfect, but for the most part, your parents were reliable. They showed up for you, they support you. Even when there were ruptures, you knew that you could repair, you knew that you could find a way back to each other
For some of you listening, there's no relationship anymore with your parents. The relationship got so toxic and the trauma was so deep. You can't be in a relationship with those people. And that's so painful, when you have to remove yourself from those relationships.
For many of you listening, you're somewhere in the middle with your parents. There were some really good and supportive things that you got from your parents, and there were also some hard things, some things you're trying to unlearn no matter where you fall on that spectrum.
So there are two crucibles where we typically become aware of these childhood wounds. Number one is our intimate relationships. Our intimate relationships, especially our marriage relationships, are so often the relationships where suddenly we begin to notice our own patterns and we're like, oh my goodness, why can't I engage in a healthy conversation about conflict?
I tend to go into flight mode or I go into fight mode or I shut down or I withdraw. Oh my goodness, that's what I did in my family of origin. That's what I had to do in my family of origin to survive. That's great knowledge, but now I've got to figure out how to heal so that I can show up in this current relationship in a different way.
That's one of the gifts of intimate relationships; they bring to the surface some of these areas where we've got wounds from our past that we need to heal so that we can show up differently in the current relationship going forward.
The second big place where a lot of these wounds begin to surface is when we have kids of our own. We begin to realize, oh my goodness, I didn't even realize. Now I'm trying to parent this child. I want to do it differently. And suddenly I notice myself behaving in ways I don't like. I notice myself getting angry. I notice myself getting avoidant. I notice myself avoiding these hard conversations.
Or I notice myself having a really hard time figuring out how to set boundaries, or I notice myself having a really hard time when I need to let my child find their own way apart from me. We begin to notice some of these patterns that likely go all the way back to our own childhoods, when we begin to parent ourselves.
The stakes can feel really high, because we begin to realize, I've got to heal these patterns because I don't want to repeat them in these relationships I care so much about in this present day with my spouse, with my kids, with my friends. I want to say to you right at the top of this episode, the goal is not perfection.
This is a process of awareness–yeah, I've got some growing to do. I've got some things from the past I have to undo and it's going to take me a little while, but my ability to name those things and begin to even say some of those things to the people that I love, “Hey, I know I'm not great at conflict. I know sometimes I can actually flee any conflicts before it even surfaces.
And I want to let you know that I'm aware of that. And I may not be able to change that right away, but I'm going to work on it. And I promise you, I'm going to keep coming back.” Or you might need to say to those loved ones, “I know I've got some anger. I can get really angry and I'm becoming more and more aware of it and I want you to know that I see it and I'm working on it. When I notice it, I can become aware of it more quickly and I can come back to you and say, I'm sorry that didn't come out right. Can we do a take two on that conversation?”
There are lots of ways you can let your loved ones know, I'm healing some stuff here. These patterns go way back. I'm not going to change overnight, but I'm aware. I'm honoring that and I'm committed to growing and healing and moving forward in a new and better way.
When you give yourself that spaciousness, you're calming your nervous system, which allows you to show up more authentically, with more calm, with more courage, with more confidence. If your spouse or your friend came to you and said, hey, I know I still do this thing. It's got a long tail. It goes all the way back. This is deeply rooted. I'm aware. I'm sorry. I know that's hard for you. We don't expect people to change on a dime, but that awareness is a huge step toward health in all of our relationships.
So remember you're committing to this journey of healing. We often on the podcast use that Greek word, sozo, in the Bible that means salvation that can also be translated as healing. We are on this journey of sanctification. We are on this journey of being made more and more like Christ, which means being made more and more like that person who God wants us to become, the most beautiful version of ourselves.
This is a process that we will be on throughout our entire lifetime. But every single step you can take to own it, to honor it, to name it without shame, both to yourself and to your loved one, is a huge step and a success in and of itself.
I want to start off by naming some key anchoring terms, because I'm going to be using these terms a lot. And then I'm going to move into the five toxic patterns of behaviors that may have impacted you as a child and that you're carrying with you into adulthood.
The first word I want to name is enmeshment. Sometimes, the emotional bond between a parent and child becomes so intertwined that it's hard to distinguish who you are and your own feelings, your own thoughts, your own beliefs from that of your parents. This is what we mean by enmeshment. We can actually become too close, too enmeshed. We become so caught up in another person that we don't know where they end and I begin.
When you're a child, you are dependent on the adult who is caring for you to be the adult. It's the adult's responsibility to help honor that balance, that dance. I go deep into this topic in my book, The Best of You. I call it that dance between connection and autonomy, closeness and distance.
We need both in healthy relationships, and it's the parent's job to really delineate that dance of being close, but also honoring difference. I love you. You are my child, and, you're different from me. You're a unique individual. It's my job sometimes to step back and see you for who you are as someone different from me.
That's a really nuanced dance between parent and child. Enmeshment occurs when a parent begins to blur those lines, and typically the parent is depending too much on the child. They want to see the child as an extension of themselves. This creates a blurred boundary between parent and child.
Enmeshment can make the healthy process of what psychologists call individuation, the process of becoming your own person, really, really difficult. Even if you've created physical distance, that emotional hold can remain really strong. Someone who grew up in an enmeshed relationship where your parent kind of lived their life through you, even when you moved away from home, even when you got your own job, maybe even got married, even had kids or yourself, you might find yourself struggling to know what you think, know what you want, know your own feelings as separate from the people who raised you.
You might even feel guilty about that. That's because it's been really hard for you to individuate. A parent's job is to essentially raise your child to leave you. I think about this in nature. We see in moms that there's a point at which you're raising that child, you're nurturing that child, but eventually you aware that child has to leave the nest and learn to fly without you.
When you have that endgame in mind, when you understand that eventually your child needs to leave you, you're going to love that child, but you're also going to equip them to leave you to function on their own apart from you. That's your job. And when you do that well, your child will be delighted to continue to stay connected to you because those roles are clear.
You've built that trust. You've made yourself a safe place for your child to return to as an adult, because paradoxically, you've honored their need to leave you. You're not trying to keep them close to you in an unhealthy way. You get that your best way of staying close to your child is to honor that they need to leave you. It's a beautiful paradox.
Now, the other term I want to throw out here is attachment theory. Some of you might be thinking about attachment as I'm talking, and it can be a really helpful framework for understanding how our earliest bonds with our caregivers shape our future relationships.
I did a whole episode on attachment styles in episode 16, so you can go back and listen to that episode. We'll link to it in the show notes. But for today's purposes, it's important to understand that a secure attachment happens when your parents offer that consistent love and support, where they're allowing you to feel safe with them.
But here's the thing. They're allowing you to feel safe with them so that you can explore life independent from them. That's the essence of secure attachment. I'm safe enough with these people who love me that I can go out into the world and explore it on my own. And there are different milestones that I go through in The Best of You of how that happens at different junctures and different ages.
Throughout your developing years as a child, that's essentially what's happening–a healthy, secure attachment. There's that safety from those parents at home that allows you to go out and explore the world independently. And when that doesn't happen, we start to notice those anxious attachments, those avoidant attachments, those mixed attachments, where we don't have that safety at home.
It inhibits our ability to explore the world outside of us with confidence. So there are a lot of things that can disrupt secure attachment. Abuse disrupts secure attachment, neglect disrupts secure attachment, and enmeshment can disrupt secure attachment where it's not actually safe in the sense of that stable home base where this person loves you, but does not need you.
When enmeshment occurs, this person loves you to make themselves feel better. There's a sense of closeness that you learn to understand as comfort when you're doing what the caregiver wants and needs you to do for their sake. That feels like comfort, but it's not actually safety.
So here's what I want you to remember. Healthy parent-child relationships are built on two key building blocks. Connection and separation; both are necessary. A parent's job is to help you develop a strong sense of self while also supporting you as you learn to live your own life.
This involves encouraging you to learn how to trust your own instincts, how to make your own decisions, how to explore your own ideas and feelings. And that leads to healthy individuation. When enmeshment occurs, you can feel like you're betraying your caregiver. You can feel like you should defer your own needs, your own instincts, your own decision-making, to fulfill the perceived needs of the parent.
Now, there's a really good book–I've recommended this book before. It's a bestselling book by Lindsay Gibson. It's called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. And there's a reason this book is everywhere, because this text so clearly lays out what some of these patterns look like in emotionally immature parents.
I'm going to give a really condensed version of how I have noticed some of these behaviors of an emotionally immature parent showing up. But that's really what's happening here. It's where a parent doesn't have the maturity to do what the child needs to become a healthy autonomous adult.
Number one is unpredictability. When your parents’ emotional states are unpredictable, maybe they had an undiagnosed mental illness, maybe there was an addiction, maybe they had a lot of emotional outbursts, or any difficulty managing their own emotions, where they couldn't take responsibility for their own emotions.
That can leave a child with that anxious attachment. There isn't that sense of safety. It's like one day, mom is great. The next day, mom can't get out of bed. And there's nothing to explain that. I want to be clear. It's not that parents can't struggle while raising kids. We can, but we have to be able to name it for them. We have to be able to talk to our kids about that.
Listen, your dad struggles with depression. Sometimes you're going to notice that he has a hard time getting up. It has nothing to do with you. He's getting help for that. We're working on that. We love you. Here's what's happening. This isn't your fault.
It's in the absence of that communication and that honoring of what's truly happening that kids begin to make up stories. This is my fault. And kids start to connect dots that aren't meant to be connected when there's unpredictability. I come home from school and my mom is really sad today and she's not naming that. She's crying off in the corner and I can see that and that affects me, but she's not talking to me about it. I don't know what's happening.
So as a child, in my little brain, what I assume is, this is my fault. I have to come home from school every day, super duper happy, because somehow the way I'm coming home from school is making mom behave differently, even when that's not true.
So again, unpredictability is when a parent's emotional state is unpredictable and unaccounted for. The parent does not take responsibility for what's happening. Another example, a parent loses their temper and gets really angry. We don't love that. That's not great. That's hard for kids. But what makes it even harder is when it goes unaddressed and unnamed and unrepaired.
If a parent is struggling with an anger issue and they sometimes come down hard, the ability to come back and say, I got angry, I have a temper. That is not your fault. You did nothing to evoke that kind of reaction in me, that's my fault. That's my job, to work through that anger. That is not your fault.
We're naming it, which allows the child to release the pain of that and understand that it's not their fault and see an adult be an adult. An adult takes responsibility. An adult takes accountability and hopefully, presumably, the adult begins to make changes as well.
Unpredictability can also be part of neglect. Sometimes a parent is absent. They're not in the room. They might not be yelling. They might not be crying, but due to their own problems and their own heartaches and their own hardships, they're maybe going through the motions of sitting at the dinner table, of getting you to bed, getting you to school, but they're absent.
There's no emotional presence and it's erratic. Sometimes they're present. A lot of times they're not. Kids make up narratives in the absence of consistency. They will make up a narrative about that. Those narratives are almost always self-shaming. It's my fault. I'm the problem.
Number two, the other one I see so commonly, is what we call parentification. This occurs when the parent relies on the child to meet the parent's emotional needs. So if you were conditioned to take care of your parent's emotions, you became the parent for your parents, you may struggle to understand healthy boundaries in adult relationships.
You may feel like it's your job to be the adult in the room for everyone around you. You may take on more responsibility for other people's emotions than is your responsibility to take. It's really hard to change this pattern if you were parentified as a child. So for example, even with a well meaning parent, maybe you're a highly empathetic kid.
You're pretty precocious, and you can read the cues and you can tell that mom is sad, or dad is upset, and you go to them and you say, oh man, are you okay? Slowly, over time, mom or dad or whoever the person is caring for you begins to confide in you. This is really hard.
You actually have the ability to be there for them, to help them through those emotions, to cheer them up, to make them feel better. Maybe as you begin to get a little older, you might even have wisdom for them and slowly, you start parenting your parents.
Now listen, when you're in an adult relationship with your parents, this is going to happen a little more. We move into two-way relationships a little bit more with our parents as we become adults, although it's always really a one-way relationship, because a parent always has more power than the child, even in adult parent-child relationships.
But man, when you're a kid, if the primary means by which you're relating to a parent is that you're caring for them, it's a big problem, because two things are happening there.
Number one, you're learning how to always prioritize someone else over your own needs. And number two, you're not getting your needs met. Think about that. You're not getting your needs met as a child. Your parent isn't attuning to you and attuning to your emotional states and saying things like, I love your empathy. I love that you care about me, but I want you to know this is not your problem.
This is my problem. I'm the adult here. Thank you for noticing that I was sad. I appreciate that. And this is not your problem to solve. This is my problem. I'm an adult. I have other adults who will help me through this. I'm here for you. I want to know what's going on with you.
That's what a healthy parent does in those situations. It's not that we don't want to honor the empathy of our kids. It's beautiful, but we don't want to take that slippery slope down to letting our kids parent us. And it happens all the time. We have to watch that as parents, because two things are happening there.
They're overdeveloping that attunement muscle to other people, but they're also underdeveloping what it feels like to have someone else attune to them. And this sets you up for all kinds of issues in adult relationships. When you go into your adulthood, you don't know what it looks like to be in a relationship with someone who's there for you. You only know how to show up for other people, and that sets you up for a lot of codependency.
It sets you up to be taken advantage of by other people. It sets you up for one-way relationships that are unsatisfying, where a lack of intimacy occurs. So this is a big one to understand if you see some of those patterns in your adult life, where you really have a hard time receiving care from others, asking for what you need, even identifying what you need.
It may well be that you grew up in an environment where you had to be the adult. From a very young age, you were pretty good at assessing the needs around you, but you did not know how to be a child and receive the care of someone else. And that's really important in healthy relationships, the ability to both give out and receive care.
Thirdly, we're going to talk about criticism. If you grew up in a culture of constant criticism, this damages your core sense of self. It's really hard for a child to understand that all of this criticism around me is not actually about me. Because these are my parents. They know best. That's what kids think.
So all of this criticism that I'm getting, that must be the truth. I must be a bad kid. I must not be okay. They're criticizing me for a reason. This is really unhealthy. We don't grow up with a healthy sense of our goodness, of our God given worth, of the beauty in our soul.
We grow up feeling inferior, feeling insecure, feeling unworthy. We don't understand inherently that we are a beloved child of God. You can heal, but it is so important to begin to connect those dots and go, you know what? Part of the reason I can't actually believe in myself and believe that I'm worthy of good love is that I've never experienced it.
I've been told in one way or another that I was worthless, that I wouldn't amount to anything, that I was a failure, that I could never get anything right since the day I was born. I don't have any other memories. So how would I know what it's like to internalize an entirely different message, which is, “I am beloved. I am worthy of love. I'm not perfect. Of course, who is? And I am a beautiful soul made in the image of God”?
Number four, control. If you grew up in an environment that was highly controlled, again, sometimes well-intended parents want to keep you overly safe and they want to control everything. Sometimes it's out of a good intention, but they don't let you take enough healthy risks.
Sometimes it's coming from a selfish motivation, where they're more concerned about how they appear in the world. They control your behavior so they can look good in the world to their friends. They want you to go to the right school or play the right sport or have the right friends. And that's really more about them than it is about you.
So whether that's coming from a desire to keep you from harm and they control too much, or if it's coming from a more self-serving place, it makes it hard for you when you get into your adult world to understand how to take healthy risks. If you grew up in a highly controlled environment, you might go one of two directions.
You might take too many risks and overcorrect and kind of blow everything up. Or you might be really, really scared and stay really, really small because you've never learned how to develop that healthy resilience, that healthy tolerance for some of the uncertainty, some of the stressors, even some of even the hardships of life.
Lastly, I want to talk about rescuing, and I see this in certain types of families where the parents, out of usually a goodness of heart, they're constantly swooping in and rescuing kids out of any discomfort, out of any hardship. They're fighting their kids' battles. Now, sometimes as parents, we need to intervene on behalf of our kids. Something's happening that is wrong. There's an injustice and we need to intervene to protect our kids. That is absolutely true.
But in parents who are rescuing, it's those normal everyday incidents. I didn't get invited to this birthday party. No, they're not ganging up and bullying me, but they're not including me in their group, and it's really painful. As a parent, we have to help our kids honor that that's hard and also teach them how to tolerate the pain of that.
Two things can be true. You have to learn how to navigate challenges in life. You have to learn how to do that with your parents there as that safe anchor. They're never going to leave you, but they're also not always swooping in to rescue you out of it. Sometimes doing things that are hard or even doing things where we try and we're not successful at them are really important for our character and our growth.
Rescuing can also create a situation in which you arrive at adulthood without those necessary skills to tolerate the things that come our way in life as adults. There can sometimes be an entitlement, a constant kind of feeling disappointed by other people, when maybe those other people are actually exhibiting normal behaviors.
They're not taking responsibility for something that isn't theirs to take. It's actually yours to take responsibility for. So all of this comes down to that separation and connection. How do I stay connected to people while also understanding what's mine is mine and what's theirs is theirs?
So here are five questions that you might ask yourself. Maybe you ask a loved one or a trusted advisor to reflect on these five parenting patterns, if you suspect that they may have an impact on you today. These are some questions to think about and notice and wonder about and get curious about, because it will help you begin to frame your experience so that you can take brave steps toward healing.
Regarding unpredictability, how do I react when someone I care about is emotionally volatile or inconsistent? Do I find myself constantly trying to manage their feelings or walking on eggshells? If you notice that inside of you, when someone else is emotionally volatile or inconsistent, it triggers a part of you that's like, oh, I need to do something to fix that.
I need to change something about myself to fix their feelings. That's a cue that there's a wound there that you could begin to heal. The truth is, if someone else is emotionally volatile, that's their responsibility to work through that. It's your responsibility to be aware, to notice what happens inside of you, to take responsibility for yourself in that moment. It's not your responsibility to try to fix their emotions.
Number two, as it relates to parentification, do I feel responsible for taking care of others' emotional needs before my own in my adult relationships? Do I struggle to ask for help or set boundaries because I'm so used to always prioritizing others? Notice if that's true. My default is to immediately take care of them, immediately go to their needs, whether it's your friends, whether it's your spouse, whether it's your own parents.
I've got to take care of them. I've got to be the bigger person. I've got to do what they need, versus sitting with the sometimes uncomfortable feeling of, I wonder what I need in this situation for myself or from another person. And that may be beginning to notice the effects of that parentification in your own adult life.
And then number three, when it comes to criticism, how do I respond to feedback or criticism from others? Do I immediately internalize it? Criticize myself or feel like I need to perfect myself to avoid being judged? In other words, if I notice criticism around me or even any healthy feedback, do I immediately assume I'm at fault?
I must've gotten it wrong. I've got to do better. And if so, that's something to notice. What if instead I could take a deep breath and wonder, is it true? Is that criticism even about me? Or is it more about this other person? It's possible this has nothing to do with me. It's possible I haven't done anything wrong. You can begin to build up that new muscle.
Number four, control. Do I find it difficult to make decisions without seeking approval or validation from others? Am I able to pursue my own interests or do I feel pressure to live up to the expectations of others? And notice, if I were to vote a certain way, if I were to attend a certain church, if I were to wear a certain article of clothing as an adult, is there sort of this internal backlash?
Notice that. Begin to pay attention. What if I could challenge myself to take some small steps toward autonomy, toward doing some things that I like to do, even though they're different from what I was taught was okay? You might start with some low hanging fruit. It might start with something you wear, a food that you eat that's a little bit different from what you were allowed as a child.
And then number five, rescuing. When facing challenges, do I tend to rely on others to bail me out, to fix things for me? Or do I feel empowered to tackle problems on my own? How comfortable am I with allowing others to fail and learn from their mistakes? How often am I wanting to swoop in and rescue others?
That might be another way this shows up. Notice that and maybe ask for feedback again from a trusted advisor because you're beginning to identify patterns. There's a reason you're this way. Likely this goes all the way back to childhood. So these questions should help you identify how these early patterns might still be affecting your adult life and your relationships.
I want you to remember this above all else: healing starts with you. No matter what happened in your past, you have the power to begin to change some of these patterns. You can do this inside of you.
It starts with beginning to notice and name some of these patterns and beginning to entertain the thought, what if it could be different? What if there was another way? You will begin to unlock the natural God-given healing inside of your soul. Because no matter what happened to you in the past, your body is designed with a bent toward healing.
Invite God's spirit into that process and ask God to begin to nudge you when one of those patterns is showing up in your life. And I promise you, you will begin to see numerous opportunities and numerous occasions to make a tiny change, one brave step at a time.
Did you know that by adulthood, most people have experienced some form of sexual wounding?
Today’s conversation with Sam Jolman, therapist and author of the new book, "The Sex Talk You Never Got," is one of my absolute all-time favorites. Why? It truly surprised me.
It’s so rare to find a nuanced conversation about sex—especially in a world where we’re constantly tugged between a reductive view of “purity” and an equally reductive sense of “permissiveness.” This conversation is packed with absolute gems—there’s depth, wisdom, and healing in every moment that’s relevant to all of us, no matter our stories.
Here’s what we dive into:
- How to establish safety, consent, and trust in intimate relationships
- An eye-opening statistic from Harvard about what kids are really longing for when it comes to parenting and sex
- How to have a truly meaningful “sex talk” with your kids
- What God actually desires from us when it comes to sex (& it's not just "purity")
- Sam's advice for those who’ve experienced sexual wounding or brokenness and want to begin the healing process
Resources:
- The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine Sexuality by Sam Jolman, LPC
- samjolman.substack.com
- samjolman.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 125: Recovering From Purity Culture: Dismantle the Myths, Reject Shame-Based Sexuality, and Move Forward in Your Faith with Dr. Camden Morgante
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- 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.
- Get 40% off your first order of Sundays. Go to SundaysForDogs.com/BESTOFYOU or use code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
- 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 back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here this week for the second part of our two part series on healthy sexuality. Last week, we took a deep dive into purity culture, and we explored the myths and some of the shame-based messaging so many of us internalized about sex.
Today, we're shifting our focus to looking at how we can heal from sexual trauma, change destructive patterns in our relationships, and how we can begin to have healthier, more honest conversations, especially with our kids about sex and sexuality. So for this conversation, I am thrilled to welcome therapist Sam Jolman to the show.
Sam is a licensed professional counselor with over 20 years of experience working with individuals and couples on issues related to trauma, relationships, and emotional health. He's the author of a brand new book called The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine Sexuality. It's a beautiful book that really honors the sacred nature of sex and sexuality while simultaneously demystifying it in a way that is so necessary for this culture that we live in, where we need to be having healthy conversations about sex.
Sam has a unique ability to blend clinical insight with deep compassion, and he's creating a space for all people to heal and grow in a way that integrates the mind, the body, and the spirit. He has specialized in working with both men and women on healing from sexual trauma, addressing dysfunctional patterns in relationships, and guiding parents on how to approach these sensitive topics with their children.
In today's conversation, we'll be talking about how we can move forward out of the ruins of sexual trauma and sexual wounding and move forward on a path of healing. We'll discuss how to create healthier patterns of intimacy in our lives. Sam offers some really important and valuable insight on how to talk with your kids about sex in ways that honor their vulnerability, but that also prepares them for the complexities of life, giving them the tools they need to develop a healthy, realistic, grounded understanding of sex.
So whether you've personally experienced sexual trauma or wounding, or whether you're working through issues in your relationship or simply want to look for better ways to have healthy conversations with your kids about sex, this episode is for everyone.
Sam Jolman is a trauma therapist with over 20 years of experience specializing in men's issues and sexual trauma recovery. He received his Master's in Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary and was further trained in narrative-focused trauma care through the Allender Center at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology.
Sam lives in Colorado with his wife and three sons. He's the author of the brand new book, The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine Sexuality. This is such a rich and beautiful conversation with Sam about this tender topic. While Sam's new book is specifically written for men, this conversation is for everyone. Please enjoy my conversation with therapist Sam Jolman.
***
Alison Cook: I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast, Sam. Thank you so much for joining us and really speaking into what is such an important topic for so many of us. Thank you for being here.
Sam: Alison, thank you for having me on and thank you for being willing and open to this important conversation.
Alison Cook: Yeah, it is. As I was preparing for this conversation, I bumped up against some of the parts of me that were raised in what we now talk about as purity culture. I didn't understand what that was at the time, and I was having to unpack some of my own internal resistances, even though as a therapist and a clinician and a parent, I've worked through so much of that.
I appreciate your willingness to walk us through this. You're a therapist who specializes primarily in men's issues and in marriage counseling. Is that right?
Sam: Yup. Men's issues, marriage counseling, and actually working with sexual trauma as well along with that.
Alison Cook: How did you find your way into that area of specialty?
Sam: I started, as probably most of us as therapists start, as a 19 year old going into my own counseling, and feeling what felt to me like magic. I sat with a really kind and skilled therapist who had a way of drawing me into my heart. I was managing depression at the time, and it felt pretty magical.
Like wow. What did you do? How did I end up in tears, and why are we talking about this, which feels unrelated to this? Yet here we are. There was the magic of it. Then there was a prayer there, where I thought God, if I could do this, if I could offer this to others, that would be amazing.
So it started there. My own story, again, of entering into my own story of sexual formation and understanding parts of it that were deeper–a lot of times sexuality, particularly from purity culture, there's a lot of conversation about behaving. Behave well. There's not a lot of conversation in the church about your story, and the impact of your story on your sexuality.
The experience you describe, try writing a book on sexuality, and that will certainly let you know where you still hold sexual shame. In writing this book I had to go back and do my own counseling and do some of my own EMDR to really keep doing layers of work here, because sexuality, there are certain things you can talk about in your head, maybe math or rock strata. I don't know.
But sexuality, you can't not be in your body and in your story. Your felt experience of sexuality when you talk about it is that vulnerable and close to us. It's that sacred.
Alison Cook: It's such a good point. It's really hard to have an abstract conversation about it. Maybe that's what purity culture was trying to do, is make it very abstract and disembodied. But you used a phrase that I want to tease out–sexual formation. I love that. We think about spiritual formation.
We think about the whole person, emotional health, forming our emotional lives, forming our spiritual lives. Tell me a little bit about what that means to you, that idea of sexual formation? Because it's a real thread throughout the book. You're really wanting us not to see it as the title of “the sex talk you never had”.
It's not a one and done. It's not a, “Okay, here's what it is. Here's the basics”. It's a whole process of becoming a whole person. So talk to me a little bit about what you mean by that.
Sam: Yeah. We do have this misnomer or this false idea that sexuality runs itself. Once you've got it explained, the birds and the bees, the mechanics, it's gonna do its thing. It creates, as I say in the book, an under-nurtured part of us. It's probably the place we've had the least meaningful conversations in our lives.
I would say even, particularly for men, the banter of locker room talk, as we say, or sex jokes, shows this idea of again, it's meant to work. The stats that I've read say 85 percent of couples will experience, even in the mechanics, even in the physicality of bodies, will experience some sort of sexual dysfunction at some point in their marriage.
85 percent saying the mechanics don't work. But along with that, I'm borrowing this line from Esther Perel, another writer on sexuality who says, there's the mechanics of sex, but then there's the poetics of sex. Which is this beautiful line that captures the desire side of things and the story that's around sexuality.
So the sex talk should also be the romance talk. One of my sons who is coming of age asked me, dad, how do you ask a girl out?
Alison Cook: Yes, that's right. Yeah.
Sam: There's a little moment of formation there, of buddy, here's how you might have a conversation like that.
Alison Cook: It's analogous to how we think about marriage. All right, you get married, you're done, go on and have a healthy relationship for the next 50 years. Are you kidding me? The marriage ceremony is a party that is the mark of a journey of growth and healing and work and thinking about things and processing things and changing and growing and this whole process that's going to last your whole lifetime.
It's the same with sexuality. It's a whole process that starts with, “How do I like a girl? What do I do? How do I talk to her?”
Sam: Yeah. And, as you're saying so well, you have to learn the dance of desire in a marriage. How do you incorporate this part? As I say in the book, sex, I believe, in its essence, is a form of play. It is a place our love plays. It's not the only place, it is. In fact, you need other places of play in marriage, like taking up dance or even card games.
My wife and I like reading a book together and talking about it. That can be a form of playful conversation. Or my wife and I did couples yoga for Valentine's Day a couple of years ago, and that was playful. It was a different way of learning how to be with each other and learn something other than task mode that we're so often in.
You’re business partners and co-parents and homeowners together, but sex is meant to be this other place that you play. And that takes learning. How do you like to play in here? What is your cadence of desire? What do you like and not? What brings you pleasure and not? That's a lot to learn.
Alison Cook: It is. It's a whole lifetime. It's a whole lifetime to learn and understand and grow and honor. I love the metaphor of the dance. You start out the book, Sam, with these stories. I think there's three stories where these characters, kids, are essentially giving these bids to their parents in some small way.
Gottman talks about how in couples, we give bids to our partner. That was so fascinating to me when I read about Gottman, because we do it all the time. “Oh look, I washed the dishes” is a bid for “Oh, thank you so much for washing the dishes” or “Oh, look at that beautiful bird” is a bid for “You're interested in that bird”.
So I looked at these stories as these kids giving subtle bids that they want to talk about this and they don't know how to talk about it. They're terrified to talk about it. In each of the stories, the parent, doing the best they can, either completely ignores it, shuts it down, or reveals their own shame and awkwardness about it.
In the stories that you're sharing, these kids aren’t getting what they really need, which is someone to come alongside them and say, let's talk about this. What are you really asking here? it was so profound to me because I thought, gosh, for so many of us who didn't get parented through that, we're demonstrating our own awkwardness in those moments.
We don't know that this is first of all, a bid from my child saying “I need to talk about this”. So I thought that was so powerful to even catch a glimpse through your eyes of this happening. We, as the parents, are responsible to watch for these bids and really engage with our kids.
Then you coupled that with some research from Harvard that talked about how 70 percent of young adults are saying they want more conversations with their parents about sexuality, about sex and romance. That was such a powerful way to open the book.
I'm curious at a broad brush stroke level, what are some ways that we as parents can be watching for? One, what is the work we need to do so that we're ready and prepared for those conversations? Two, what are some of the things we need to be watching out for to really help our young boys and our young girls so that we can be nurturing them into the fullness of this sexual formation?
Sam: Great questions. Yes. I love your language of bids, the bids for connection. You're right. Those are moments where they're asking for attachment. Lean in, read my face, read my curiosity, ask me the next question. I don't even know what I don't know, but stay with me. You're right.
I hadn't thought about it that way, but that really is the sense of these moments of being under-nurtured because of being missed. I would say at some level, again, you cannot talk about sexuality outside of your body. It is one of those topics that will bring you into your body and into your own felt experience.
First and foremost, before anything that you say or do with your children in terms of educating them, I think the most important thing you can do is address your own places of shame. Address your own sexual shame. Where does it haunt you? Where does it grip you? Because it will.
Some of those stories, one of them in particular, is a story of a father who dropped his face. He looked away from his son and broke eye contact. All of them at some level are the removal of the face, which is the universal sign of shame. We drop our face. We break our eye contact when we feel shame. Most likely these are not stories of terrible parents.
They're stories of parents with their own shame and feeling their own shutdown inside. Oh, it's awkward to talk about sex. It's vulnerable. What if I screw it up? Especially if you have your own sexual shame there, it will cause you to break contact or shut down. So please begin to be curious about your own story.
Where has shame held you? What are those stories? Literally get out a pad of paper and make a bullet point list of what are the 10 stories that shaped you? What's your sexual formation? My father in law very vulnerably said to me when I was telling him about this book, I didn't give my son a talk and I didn't get one. In other words, there's this generational neglect.
Sitting down and saying, what did shape you? What took the place of healthy conversation? That would be number one, and then how do you begin to approach your children? First of all, the pressure's off. It is not one talk. It is as one writer said, a hundred or a couple hundred one-minute conversations. You don't have to do the hour long, diagrammed lecture where you make sure you cover everything.
In fact, your children would not be able to bear that much at one time. It is vulnerable, even for them, even though they're hungry. Try to read them and read their hunger. Where are they asking questions? Answer their questions and go as far as it feels like their curiosity has been satiated. That they're okay. They're good.
Alison Cook: What you're saying. It's a series of moments of being very attuned to the moment. Even with your son, “how do I ask a girl out” is a moment to engage. Oh, tell me about that. What's the girl like, how are you feeling about her? What are you thinking? Not jumping ahead of where they are, but really staying with them.
I love what you're saying. If we're okay, if we've done our own work and we're okay, it's not that we have to have all the right answers or the right formulas. We're being with them. They'll come to us. They'll come to us and then we'll get to be with them on that journey.
You said something I want to ask you about that I thought was really powerful. You said, if no one has talked to you, where did you get that information? My mind went, oh wow, you're right. We're getting shaped from somewhere. Where are we getting shaped if we're not talking about it in our homes with our parents?
Sam: Yeah. Your sexuality doesn't sit on a shelf, waiting until you bring it out and talk about it or get the formation. It is living your story right with you. It is in your body. It is a part of you. Nowadays, children are going to Google, their peers, pornography. I sat with a couple and they've given me permission to share this–their 14 year old son came to them scared.
Because he had discovered internet pornography, but through this really innocent question, he was hearing some friends at school talk about being interested in girls. He thought to himself, I don't know how to kiss a girl. Again, another part of the sex talk. He went to Google and typed in, how do you kiss a girl?
Can you hear the innocent lover heart of this young man at 14? Again, sadly, what showed was pornography. Google is not a safe place to get your sex education. Unless you're very careful, obviously. So he fell headlong into this journey, this battle with pornography. Thankfully, he came to his parents and they were very open to him, and did not shame him.
They entered into that space with him to get him help and then started unwinding some of what he had learned there. Sadly, there are many of us that have had our sexuality awakened in sexual harm, which is a very tragic thing to recognize, but there are stats saying that women who experience sexual abuse begin menstruation earlier.
In other words, there's this sense that something in their body is that impacted by sexual abuse. It awakens something. What a heavy thing to have your sexuality awakened in the context of harm.
That is very tender work, but beginning to recognize that there wasn't the story of innocence and romance and love. There was manipulation and harm. So that's a place to go, because the realm of evil would love for you to believe that your abuse is your fault. Even your curiosity that led you to pornography, you think that's his fault. Something's twisted or perverted about him. But oh my goodness, it was your innocence that led you there.
And so being able to recover that sense of innocence for your own sexuality. Those are the stories that shape us.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Again, as parents, being really aware and attuned in a culture where there are so many messages. And then in our faith communities, you talk in the book about how both culture and church have shaped our sexuality for bad and for good. Can you speak a little bit about that side of it?
Sam: Again, there's obviously purity culture. We could talk for hours about that. But generally speaking, that sense of, hey, here's the basic anatomy and then quickly a rush to, but don't feel this. Don't do anything. There's no real exploration. There's this shutdown approach. There's not really a blessing of, this is actually really good.
Your body was made for pleasure. Isn't that cool, what that says about God and our design? There's not the questions about the cultural things being brought up, so that's the sense of shut it down that creates this animosity with your own body.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
Sam: Because then when you begin to feel arousal, which is not the same as lust, and you experience being awakened in your own sexuality, you have that sense of, this must be wrong. It creates this animosity or even suspicion of your own body. You end up repenting of a body rather than repenting of the flesh.
Alison Cook: That’s a good word. Yeah, you're repenting for a bodily mechanism that God designed you to have.
Sam: Yeah, so obviously that's the church. Outside of the church, a lot could be said as well, but as I say in the book, there's not really a sense of sacredness or awe. I would say it is a false blessing. Wow, I'm blessed to do what I want. That permissiveness is not integrating sexuality with love. Again, this is person to person, but that general sense of permissiveness is not a blessing. It’s not nurturing.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I hear what you're saying. There's a ditch on both sides of the road. In my own journey, I remember thinking, oh at least in the secular culture, I can get the information that I need and not the shame and not the stigma. Yet also there's a reductive component to it. And then the other side shut it down. It's like a switch you can flip and you flip it at one point in life and then you're good to go.
In your book, you're talking to men, but I think it's true for all of us: at the base, at the core, you're a lover. We're lovers. This is a beautiful part of our God-given design. You then go into this idea that God most wants your awe, not your purity. Wow. God most wants your awe, which gets at what you're saying. There's something very deep here, but it's bigger and deeper, far richer and far more beautiful than purity. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Sam: Yeah, so if purity isn't the goal, as I'm obviously saying, it can be harmful as a message in itself. Obviously, there's a way in which we're called to purity, but not as the goal. What then is it? What is this vision? The best definition I read was, it's in the upper reaches of pleasure on the edge of fear.
We don't often associate fear next to pleasure as emotions, but it's something that you're both afraid of, but drawn to. I think of asking my wife out for the first time. That was definitely a moment where I felt fear, but also an incredible amount of draw to my wife. Right there, there was a moment of awe. The word I would use there is, there's a reverence.
You think of a beautiful waterfall. It is thundering and powerful, and yet it is moving. What is that capacity to receive people in the same way? There's a researcher, Dacher Keltner, who thought, what moves us most with awe would be nature or even religious experience. He said, we are most moved by other human beings in what he would call moral beauty.
Living good stories moves us the most. So I'm inviting this fuller sense of beauty to take in the full person. We sometimes have such an emaciated view of human beauty. We think it's this very strict set of standards for what's attractive. I really believe God made every single person full of his glory. We are all beautiful.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I agree. The human spirit, the human soul, the human body, is gorgeous in all of its manifestations. And worthy of awe. I love that. I love what you're saying. That idea of awe as this reverence, respect, and wonder–we have lost so much of that. As you're saying that, my mind is popping in every direction. We've lost that wonder at the goodness and beauty, as you're saying of our human creation.
Sam: Yeah, and we have this little glimpse in the Olympics. We're in the Olympic season as we're recording, and we don't necessarily use this language, but it is all about human awe. The whole point is to watch people pushing the edges of what is possible in the human body and doing it so gracefully.
But also the stories of these athletes and what they've overcome. We're so drawn to that. Again, the word I would use there is awe.
Alison Cook: Yeah that's really powerful. And then to think about that as it relates to desire and honoring sexual desire. That's a powerful reframe. To bring in my name, frame, brave framework, we're naming what it's not, and then reframing it something much bigger.
When you were defining awe, you said something about, it's something we're drawn to, but also fearful of in that holy, healthy way. I think about God, where there's that reverence, and I also was thinking, as you said that, of when there's been abuse or trauma, it goes awry. Because there's the fear, there's the draw to something that you fear, that gets really contaminated and harmed.
Sam: Right. That is so well said. Again, it is such tender ground to even bring fear and sex together. How could you mix those that and that ever be good? Because we think of safety. Again, I'm borrowing a little bit from even things that Andy Colbert wrote on play.
Play is this mixed state in the body. Play is one of the good ones where you have both parasympathetic soothing, but you also have sympathetic uprising. You're near fight or flight, but you're also in activation. So it's on this edge of fear. Again, I'm saying edge. If you are in terror, and again, even in the research on awe, they would say too much terror shuts you down and you cannot experience pleasure.
But think about the vulnerability of disrobing. Again, I've been married 21 years and in the vulnerability of unveiling my body to my wife, there's still a sense of, okay, here I am. It's this openness and intimacy.
Alison Cook: Again, this is where we have to do our own work. It reminds me of what you're saying, that fine line of play and vulnerability. I had a conversation with Beth McCord, she's an Enneagram coach on the podcast, and she was talking about watching her kids and her husband play wrangle.
It was very activating to her because she'd been bullied, and it took her a long time to be able to sit with them and even ask them, are you guys okay with this? They'd say, we love it. We're having fun. We're right on that edge, kind of what you're saying. But for her, that felt dangerous and scary because of her background. It's a little bit of a different context, but it reminds me of that line of awe and wonder and vulnerability.
Learning how to ride a bike is exhilarating and also terrifying and that is healthy. I'm thinking of the listener, and man, I have tears in my eyes. I want that for you. I want that for you. Also, it could take a minute to really retrain your system to recognize the healthy version of that. And that's okay.
Sam: Again, it can only happen in a context where you feel the empowerment to say no. That you can say stop.
Alison Cook: Or to say, this might even be healthy, but I'm not comfortable with it. To have the other person honor that and say, that's ok. Because that's what creates safety.
Sam: That's such a good example. Little children know this. They know that they need to honor consent. Do you want to play? It's an invitation of consent. It's such a vulnerable risk. I want to play, but do you, and that they know when somebody says, I don't, don't do that, I don't like that.
They have more freedom to vocalize when something's too much or I didn't like that. That empowerment is what you need to be able to take some of these steps towards risking that vulnerability.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that's good. That's really a beautiful picture. I love that picture. There's a lot of nuance to it. That's the hope. We want that. We want that experience our whole lives. All right, let's go for a bike ride, and wherever we are on that journey is the place at which we have to start.
And then as we do that work, we're going to help our kids retain that innocence as they get to learn, and sometimes they'll fumble and fall, but we're going to be there for them so that they're not alone. I love that. That's really beautiful.
Sam: I was remembering a story of when I taught my wife how to mountain bike. We live in Colorado and she wanted me to teach her. There was this moment, and it's still a significant rupture moment for us and our marriage, where I took her on this bike ride and I'm trying to coach her and she's trying to figure it out.
We had a bit of a fight. I pulled ahead on the trail. And she followed me. I didn't realize she was following me on this technical section and she crashed her bike. I ran up to help her and we got her cared for. But there was this rupture of, I trusted you and you took me too far. It was past what I could handle on this bike ride, and it really became this thing we had to work through in terms of her trust in me taking her into play.
This might sound strange, but that actually impacted our intimacy, our sex life as well, of, can I trust your play? Can I trust your passion, Sam? It makes sense now. Of course those two are connected. If I couldn't trust you in this play, can I trust you over here in this sexual play? There are those moments, not your past story, but maybe even the stories in your marriage of, you didn't play well with me here. How can I trust you here?
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love this. Thank you so much for what you're naming. What would you say to the listener? First of all, I would say read the book. There's so much in it that is practical. You've done such a beautiful job painting a beautiful picture, giving us a different vision, and then giving us practical steps and ways to approach ourselves and our kids.
What would you say to the listener, as we're winding down, who is listening going, oh my gosh, the suitcase is so full of shame. There's so much there. Where do I start? I don't even know where to start with my kid, let alone with myself. What would you say to that listener?
Sam: I've been amazed, when I sit down with victims of sexual harm, that one of the things that seems to make them most tender in the conversation is, they'll use the language of, I felt like my innocence was taken. Or I felt like my innocence was stolen in some way.
They might be able to grapple with the pain. They understand that this is painful. I've got to work through it. But there's such hopelessness and devastation around it. I've seen too much. I've suffered too much. How in the world can I be made innocent again?
You're talking about playfulness and wonder. Good. But yeah that's not gonna happen. What I would want you to hear is that your innocence is not lost. It is not lost to what's happened to you. It's not lost to what you've done. In fact, I would say, God desires to help you recover that innocence.
That is always the profound joy in walking with victims of traumas, watching that innocence as they brave the pain, come back to them along with the playful parts of them and the parts that can receive pleasure again and risk that and wonder and awe. So I would invite you to think of that young self, that place of innocence. She is not gone. He is not gone. You can get that part of you back.
Alison Cook: That is so beautiful. This is from someone, for those of you listening, who has worked in the trenches with this for 20 years. So you've seen some things and for you to be able to give us that is a beautiful statement of hope. You're not saying that idly. You've seen it.
So I want everyone to hear that deeply. It’s a Holy Spirit infused message for you–this is what God wants for each and every one of us. Sometimes the journey is longer than others to healing, and you start where you are. I love what you're saying. It's such a worthwhile endeavor and you're worthy of it.
Thank you so much. Sam, tell us where people can find you, more about your work, and resources to continue on this journey that you're taking us on.
Sam: Yeah. Thank you, Alison. I would love for you to read the book wherever you buy your books. I'm also a writer on Substack, so you can find me at samjolman.substack.com or my website, samjolman.com, where you can still get some order bonuses for buying the book and find out more about me there.
Alison Cook: That's great. It's brave work you're doing. Thank you for doing it. Thanks for being here.
Sam: Thanks for having the conversation with me.
Today's episode is a fascinating conversation about the phenomenon of "purity culture." You've heard the phrase, but my guest today, licensed therapist and purity culture expert, Dr. Camden Morgante, is here to explain exactly what it was and how it created a culture of shame, fear, and coercion around sex, especially for women.
We explore the damaging myths purity culture perpetuated and the ways it continues to affect women and married couples, especially around issues of intimacy and self-worth. Dr. Camden shares essential insights on how to heal from these harmful messages and move forward in faith, while also offering practical advice for anyone struggling with shame-based sexuality.
Key Takeaways:
- What purity culture is and its lasting impact on Millennials and Gen X
- The 5 damaging myths, including the "gatekeeper," "damaged goods," & "flipped switch" myths
- The most important strategy for couples dealing with disappointment around sex
- The real meaning of intimacy beyond physical connection
- Dr. Camden’s practical advice for overcoming shame and reclaiming your faith
Resources:
- Recovering from Purity Culture: Dismantle the Myths, Reject Shame-Based Sexuality, and Move Forward in Your Faith by Dr. Camden Morgante
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- drcamden.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 48: Loving Your Body as a Spiritual Practice, Why the Flesh Isn’t the Body, and 3 Heresies We Kind of Believe
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Turn back time on the appearance of your skin with Purity Woods’s Age-Defying Dream Cream. Purity Woods is currently offering 17% off sitewide but we have an additional 10% discount for our listeners for a total savings of 27%! Go to puritywoods.com/BESTOFYOU or enter code BESTOFYOU at checkout for an additional 10% off your first order.
- 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 AquaTru.com and enter code BESTOFYOU at checkout to get 20% OFF any AquaTru purifier!
- 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 back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here this week. I'm so glad to be here with you. Many of you get my weekly email or you follow me on socials, and you know we've had a really rough couple of weeks here in Wyoming with some pretty intense wildfires.
So we have really appreciated your prayers for that. And I'm also mindful of all of you, especially in the Southeast, who are still reeling from the effects of both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. These are really devastating times. I'm so grateful for so many of you out there shining your light so brightly, even when the world can feel so dark, scary, and overwhelming.
Your courage, your hope, your prayers, your incredible acts of kindness, no matter how tiny, matter. They matter to God, they matter to the other people in your life, and they matter to the parts of your soul who need to see us fighting for the goodness and the beauty and the dignity of every human life and every part of God's creation. My prayers are with you as we continue to hold forth faith and hope and light in this world
Today we're diving into the first of a two-part series on the topic of sexuality. This is such an important topic. It's a topic I've been wanting to bring to the podcast, but I wanted to find the right experts to talk with us about such a nuanced topic, such a tender topic, a topic that is so deeply vulnerable for so many of us.
So many of us have been hurt in this area. So many of us are struggling in this area. So many of us are struggling to figure out how to have healthy conversations about sex and sexuality in our world, where there are so many toxic messages coming at us from every single angle, including some messages from within our own faith communities.
Here's the thing–in order to move forward into a healthier understanding of this beautiful gift of sexuality that God has given us to enjoy, sometimes we have to first look back and untangle the knots of the toxic messages we've received. That's where we're going to start in this series with today's episode.
Today's guest is a therapist and an expert, especially on the phenomena of purity culture, that so many of us grew up a part of. And she's here to help name the myths and toxic messages that so many of us internalized as millennials or Gen Xers, especially within the context of church culture.
Purity culture was so much more than a message about abstinence and purity. It actually shaped how we viewed ourselves, our relationships, and our sense of worth. And the problem, as you'll hear from my guest today, was that sex wasn't discussed in a way that allowed us to understand the nuances and the complexity and embrace our sexuality as a natural, integral part of how God designed us.
Many of us as a result, experienced fear, shame, and disconnection from our bodies in ways that don't disappear with adulthood or even in the context of marriage. Many people are still grappling with the effects of not really being brought into the fullness of a healthy sexuality, and it can feel embarrassing or even shameful to ask questions about sex, even years into healthy marriages.
So what does it look like to reclaim a healthy, holistic view of sexuality? And how do we unlearn the shame and embrace both our faith and our sexuality in a way that's life-giving? To help us navigate these questions, I am honored to welcome Dr. Camden Morgante to the show.
Dr. Morgante is a licensed clinical psychologist and coach who specializes in helping people recover from the effects of purity culture. She's passionate about guiding individuals through the process of identifying harmful beliefs around sexuality and helping them build a healthier, more integrated understanding of sex. One that aligns both with their faith and their personal growth.
Dr. Morgante's personal experience as a millennial who grew up within the context of purity culture combined with her professional expertise makes her uniquely qualified to guide us through this topic. She's been featured in numerous publications and podcasts where she speaks on the intersection of faith, sexuality, and mental health.
Her compassionate, nuanced, thoughtful approach to the conversation acknowledges both some well-meaning intentions behind purity culture and the real harm it's caused. Dr. Morgante's work is grounded in the belief that sexuality is a core part of who we are as human beings and that God created us to embrace this part of ourselves fully and without shame.
She has a brand new book out this week. It's called Recovering from Purity Culture: Dismantle the Myths, Reject Shame-Based Sexuality, and Move Forward in Your Faith. It's such an incredibly rich and empowering deep dive into the nuances of how we think about sexuality. I am so thrilled to bring you my conversation today with Dr. Camden Morgante.
***
Hi, Dr. Camden. I am so thrilled to have you here today on the podcast. We've been following each other online for a little while and it's really fun to have this conversation with you about this new book you have coming out.
Dr. Camden: Yes. Thank you, Dr. Alison. I'm thrilled to be here and to see you again and connect with you again.
Alison Cook: You were so kind to do an Instagram live with me, I think it was about The Best of You. Is that right? Yeah. You've been great. I think it was a DM you sent me that said, it is so refreshing to see people talking about these topics who are still Christian. I see you as well, really fighting for your faith, even as you're trying to disentangle from some of the toxic messages that so many of us have gotten.
To that point, you've got this new book coming out all about purity culture. We've seen that phrase thrown around, but you're really an expert on it. You're a psychologist. You've studied this. Talk to us a little bit today as we're getting started. What is this thing, purity culture? We're naming something, and it's important to name things accurately. So we've got this name–purity culture. What do we mean by that? What are we actually trying to identify in that term?
Dr. Camden: Yeah. There's different ways people define it, but the way I define it in my book and in my work is that it was a largely evangelical movement that peaked in the 1990s to 2000s that attempted to persuade young people especially to avoid premarital sex using shame and fear as tools of control and coercion.
So I distinguish between the belief in waiting until marriage for sex, which I call a traditional Christian sexual ethic, I distinguish between that and purity culture. To me, those are two different things. What really separates those is that purity culture added the shame and fear and control.
It wasn't really a thoughtful choice that people could make, to wait for marriage to have sex. It was really coerced out of them with shame. And that's the distinction I make. Not many other books on purity culture make that same distinction.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I really appreciated that about your book. There's a lot of nuance in it. We're talking about a movement, and it's less about what was taught, although some folks might completely disagree with everything that they were taught, but I heard you saying in your book, a lot of it is about how it was taught–using coercion and fear. Tell me a little bit more about that.
Dr. Camden: Yeah, it was really the myths, the false promises and the messages that were used to try to persuade young people that has caused so much harm. Because again, it's different from holding that belief and holding that value for yourself.
It's about offering these false promises of what you'll get if you believe. It's about what I call “the myths of purity culture” that didn't come from the Bible, but yet were taught to us as if they were biblical truth. It peaked in the 1990s to 2000s, because that's really when millennials like myself were going through high school sex ed and youth group at church, and reading these books that were geared towards especially teen girls and purity and modesty and things like that.
The true love waits movement. And that's also why it's a culture and not a belief; a culture involves things like purity rings, making a “true love waits” pledge. Some people went to rallies, some people had purity balls. It's like this whole culture of books and speakers and conferences and sermons solely focused on this topic.
That's what it was built around. Our faith became entirely built on this concept of purity.
Alison Cook: Interesting. Okay. I'm Gen X, more raised in the eighties, college in the nineties. So it's really interesting to hear you make that distinction because I definitely had some of that. I remember being at a Christian conference in ‘88 and we all had to stand up and take the pledge to wait until we were married.
But I will say, a lot of that stuff you're describing, the books that started to come out around it, the movements, the culture, I think the era was a little bit more local. So there might be some slight differences, but definitely the seeds of it, I caught early on. I'll have conversations with my friends about, gosh, wouldn't it have been nice if we'd had some conversations about a whole-being sexuality?
Not “wait until you're married” and then you're expected (and you use this word in the book) to flip the switch. That's one of the myths.
Dr. Camden: Yeah, I would say my Gen X clients usually got these messages either later in high school or in college. Maybe from a college ministry or around the time that I Kissed Dating Goodbye was released. I think that was like ‘93 or so. So if they're in college around that time, it may have informed their choices to get married or who they married.
But the reason why I say it affected millennials specifically, is because abstinence-only sex ed was also a part of the public school curriculum when we were growing up. And we got it not in religious settings, but also in public school.
Also, it happened during more of those formative years, like the middle school and early high school years for us. It really shaped our understanding of our bodies and of sexuality and even of relationships in a different way than I see with Gen X or even Gen Z coming up, because they got some of it too.
Alison Cook: It hasn't been fantastic for a long time. And yes, it affects different generations differently. That makes sense to me. Tell me a little bit about in your practice, how do you see the residual effects on particularly women, but also on couples, on folks who not only missed a whole gap in their human development, but also got some of these toxic messages around sex.
And again, I want to be clear. We're not necessarily saying the toxic messages have to do with premarital abstinence. You talk about that in the book. It’s the way that was pushed, the way it was talked about. So how do you see the residual harm of some of those methods?
Dr. Camden: I'm a licensed psychologist, so I have a private practice where I see women and couples in my therapy practice. And then I also do coaching online, specifically for purity culture recovery. I see couples all over the country and women for that. And the ways that I see it mainly manifesting is causing problems in one's faith, sexuality, and relationships.
Those big three key areas. It causes a lot of faith struggles for a lot of people, faith doubts, periods of disillusionment, or feeling distrusting or distant from God. It causes problems in sexuality, and we can get into the specifics, but sexual pain, low sexual pleasure, low desire, difficulty connecting with their spouse once they're married, and flipping the switch.
And then problems in relationships, and that can be with others, like in a marriage, because there were very limited roles and stereotypes that purity culture used that can limit the ways that husband and wife interact in marriage. Also your relationship to yourself, your own mental health, your body image, and shame about your body and your sexuality. Those are the three main areas I see the effects showing up.
Alison Cook: Why do you think that is? What are some of these messages that are subtle and that people might not even realize? They've internalized these shaming messages. When you're doing work with folks, what are you trying to get to the root of?
Dr. Camden: Yeah, I'm trying to get to the root of what are your beliefs and where did those come from? And if you can identify who it was that taught you this or what book you read it in, where did it come from? That can help them start to disentangle it a little bit to see that this wasn't biblical. There were parts of it that were biblical, but a lot of it came from humans who are fallible.
We had good intentions for the most part. These people that taught us purity culture had good intentions, but there were a lot of unanticipated consequences that didn't show up until 10 or 20 years later that we couldn't have expected. So I'm trying to get to the root of that and see, yeah, your faith, your sexuality, and your relationships got so entangled with this and how do we find a healthy path forward?
Alison Cook: This gets to some of those myths you talk about. What are some of those myths that people have internalized that really wreak havoc on a healthy sexual and spiritual identity?
Dr. Camden: Yeah, you mentioned the flip switch myth, so I can start with that one. This idea that as soon as you get married, you flip a switch and sex is going to be instantly pleasurable and easy, only if you wait for it…that really affects people's sexuality because they realize sex takes a lot more education than we were ever given.
It takes communication, it takes teamwork, it takes a compromise. There's a lot that goes into it. But it is not an overnight success. It takes work like any other skill in marriage. And it also affects people's faith because they were given this false promise and told that God promised them this.
So then when it doesn't happen, I see people have a lot of disappointment and that distrust in God, like, why did I wait, if this is what I'm getting? Where's my reward? And that's also very connected with the fairytale myth, which is if you wait, then you'll have a fairytale marriage. You'll find your spouse.
And for many people who are single much longer than they wanted to be, or who are in very unhappy, unhealthy, or even abusive marriages, and maybe go through a divorce or who are widowed, that promise does so much harm. That's really the myth that affected me the most, as I share in the book.
It affected my faith the most, because I thought, where's the reward I get for waiting? Why haven't I met my husband? Because I met him a little bit later than I expected to. I was single for almost all my twenties, which was very different in my cultural background and upbringing; in my religious community that was considered pretty unique, to be single throughout my twenties. So that was the myth that affected me the most and affected my faith.
Alison Cook: That's interesting. There's a promise of, if you do this for God, God will do this for you. And then when that doesn't happen, it's devastating. It makes a lot of sense. It's interesting when you talk about the myths you use this word, and I have a lot of feelings about this word, and I think the word gets misunderstood, but I actually think it's the right word in this context.
You use the word “deconstructing” for some of these myths, and what I want to say to the listener is that it is really important to understand this word in context. Bracket all the things you've heard about this word--because it gets so misused and so misunderstood. But honestly, I had to deconstruct some of the messages I got about sexuality from religious communities.
I also had to deconstruct messages I got from Hollywood movies about sex and love. And that's why I like the use of that word in this context and how you use it in the book, because you're really saying exactly what that word is.
We have to look at these messages and deconstruct them. We have to pick them apart and go, what is really at the root of that? That doesn't make sense. This isn't logical or theologically sound. For example, to your point, this idea that God rewards people–if you do X, Y will happen– isn't a biblical or theologically sound assumption.
Dr. Camden: Yeah, I use the word deconstruct because we're taking it apart and then seeing what part is biblical and true and good and beautiful and from God and consistent with our faith and values. And then what part was wrongly interpreted or handed to us by people with maybe good intentions, but it's not true.
I talk about deconstruction on this kind of spectrum of home repairs. Not everybody demolishes their house with a wrecking ball. And that's what we sometimes hear about deconstruction: that it's a wrecking ball to your faith or to your belief system.
But it can be a remodeling of seeing what parts of this house are still working and what parts aren't, what parts are no longer serving us well, or they need to be updated because they were good materials back in the seventies or eighties and they're not now. So you can deconstruct and still hold on to some parts of it too.
Another misconception is that when you deconstruct, you throw it all away, and you completely start over from scratch. But that's not what it's looked like for me. It's looked like a careful and methodical process of picking apart what is true and what's unbiblical, and still leaving a foundation of truth in there.
Alison Cook: I love that. I love that, Dr. Camden. And you really talk about that in the book. You actually say in the book, "what's interesting is that some critics of purity culture may say that my own beliefs represent purity culture 2.0, since I still hold on to an ethic of premarital sexual abstinence, but the belief itself is not what makes something purity culture."
I love this argument. It's how we believe what we believe and why we believe what we believe and what is underneath what we believe in. It’s how you're talking about it with your spouse, with your kids, with your friends, that you're bringing a whole body and your whole being into it.
And you're also not assuming that your own perspective is the perspective for all people at all times, in all places either. There's a humility. One of the things I really like about what you do in the book is you provide a framework. You talk about Kohlberg's theory of moral reasoning and Fowler's phases of spiritual development.
It’s this idea that as we develop emotionally, as we develop more emotional maturity, as we develop cognitively, as we develop more cognitive maturity, we develop more critical thinking skills. We're also going to be developing in our moral reasoning, and we may arrive at the same conclusions, but the way we've reasoned through those hard issues looks very different.
It leads to more, again, humility, a more robust, whole body, you use the word “empowered”, being. Talk to me a little bit about that. I thought that was a really helpful reframing.
Dr. Camden: Yeah, as we develop cognitively with the ability to have abstract thought, critical thought, instead of concrete black and white thinking, that goes hand in hand with our spiritual and our moral development too, because we're thinking about things in more nuanced ways.
We're thinking about the gray areas. We're thinking about complexity. My goal for the book was really to help people think of how to think differently, and give some tools and some frameworks for doing that without telling them what to believe. I really wanted to give people the tools to try to figure that out for themselves because we didn't get that in purity culture.
We were told what to believe, what to do, what not to do. It was handed to us, and that didn't allow us as teenagers or young adults to apply the critical thinking that's necessary in order to make these really complex moral decisions about sexuality. And, like you said, to have a holistic and integrated sexuality, which I think is what the Bible supports.
Alison Cook: That's so good. And the book is filled with tools. One of the things I really like about what you do in the book is you say very clearly, look, I'm going to give you a wide list of tools, list of resources. I don't necessarily even agree with all of these lists of resources, but I believe in reading widely.
And I thought that was an example of what you're trying to teach. Listen, We don't have to be so threatened. We can listen to numerous perspectives and arrive at our own sexual ethic, at our own moral reasoning that's biblically informed. There was this phrase I used to love in graduate school.
One of my professors would always say, there are a lot of issues out there about which reasonable people can reasonably disagree. You're not trying in the book to tell people, as you said, what to believe. You're trying to say, listen, here's a bunch of different ideas about this. It's complicated. It's hard. Let's engage in it. Let's not be afraid of it.
And that's going to lead to this more wholehearted, more holistic way. I am curious toward this end. I know listeners are going to be thinking, okay, this is great. This is great for me. And I'm already married. I've figured it out. Oh my gosh, this is a lot of work and it's hard, but I'm already living this ethic, so how do I talk about it with my kids?
Dr. Camden: Yeah, that was the last chapter of the book because that's pivoting to, where do we go from here? And I will have some clients that will say, like, why do I even need to rethink my sexual ethic? Because as you said I'm married, I'm monogamous with my spouse. This doesn't really matter anymore, what I believe.
But I argue that it really does because doing the work to think through it yourself and arrive at a place where you feel confident and you feel like it's congruent with your theology and your faith and your values is empowering. So that's the first reason to do it. The second would be to teach your kids, because we have to know what our values are in order to communicate those to our kids.
At the same time, knowing that they're going to have autonomy to make their own decisions one day and arrive at their own conclusions to their own thought process and respecting their critical thinking and their journey in this.
But I want to teach my kids my beliefs and my values about sexuality. I also want to equip them with some critical thinking skills for them to think through how to apply this in their own life and the unique challenges that they're going to face in our changing world with media and all that kind of stuff.
Alison Cook: So what are some examples of how you might engage those conversations with your kids or how you might teach or how you might coach some of your clients through those conversations?
Dr. Camden: Yeah, we start with basic things, because I really think this can start from birth. Sex-ed is not a one and done talk, and that's how it was for me. Many of us growing up may have had this big talk, with our same-sex parent. I was sent to read a book and “come back if you have any questions”.
But it's really an ongoing conversation that starts when they're young, talking about their bodies and non-shaming ways, using correct names for body parts, modeling consent, empowering them to be able to say no if they don't want hugs and kisses and and things like that. So it starts really young with those kinds of concepts.
And then as they get older, infusing conversations with your family's values, making this part of your everyday conversation of when things come up. Ask your kids questions when something happens on TV, on a show. What do you think about that? Here's what we might think about this, or here's what we think the Bible says about this.
Why do you think that is? I think those open-ended questions can really help foster some of that critical thinking.
Alison Cook: Oh, that's really good, to actually use the media instead of turning it off. We don't watch this. This is bad. Instead saying, okay, this is interesting. What do you think about this? Because in that conversation, you're also”deconstructing” some of the cultural messages or the media messages about sexuality. You're having those conversations with your kids and together normalizing and demystifying. We need to talk about this.
Dr. Camden: I think those natural opportunities that arise are the best time to talk about it. When a new baby is born in the family, that's a time to talk about how the baby gets out and maybe how it got in there. With my little kids, that's what I would talk about.
How do you make decisions about when you know you're in love or when you feel safe with someone? What does that feel like? Those are some of the more nuanced questions I might have with older children and teenagers. Yeah. Looking for those opportunities every day, I think, rather than making it that “one and done” talk.
Alison Cook: Yeah. That's great. That's super practical. What do you say to folks who are really struggling with the disappointment, whether spiritual disappointment or disappointment in marriage, who are finding themselves like, man, this is not what I thought it was going to be? How do you talk with folks through some of those challenges?
Dr. Camden: The heartbreaking clients I work with are those that waited until they were married to have sex and maybe even waited to kiss until their wedding day because they thought that was the holiest choice. They courted instead of dated and they got married young and now they've been married 20 years and their sex life has never been enjoyable. It causes a lot of disconnection between them because they can't seem to make it work.
And they've got guilt and shame and then maybe some resentment too. And it's heartbreaking because they'll say, we did everything right. We followed all the rules. Why has it turned out this way? And I really make space to validate those feelings of disappointment without spiritually bypassing them. You've taught me that term of like, saying something like, everything works out for the good, or trust God.
But no, really allowing you to grieve that. When I work with couples, I'm really big on, this is not a mere you-problem. This is an us-problem. And this is something that is outside of ourselves. It's a third thing outside of the two of us that we can unite together to fight against.
And we can recognize that you didn't cause these problems. These are problems outside of ourselves that we had very little control or choice over, and we can have empathy for ourselves and each other because of that.
Alison Cook: I love that. That's really non-shaming. Let's come together in this, which also then leads to greater intimacy, which is truly what leads to healthier sexuality. It’s that ability to connect with each other through the pain of that.
Dr. Camden: Yeah, I hope by not seeing each other as adversaries, but as we're on the same team together and we're grieving together on how this problem has affected us and the pain that it's caused us over all these years. I hope by doing that, that they can feel closer and connected to each other.
And my definition of intimacy is anything that makes you feel close and connected to your spouse or your partner or another person. Often intimacy gets very narrowly defined as sex or physicality. The emphasis gets so put on that, like we're not having sex enough or we need to have more sex or I have low sex drive, when really it's more holistic.
Are you feeling emotionally connected? Are you socially connecting, having fun together and doing activities together? Are you spiritually connected through praying together, serving at your church together? And then are you intellectually connected, talking about your thoughts and feelings and reading books together or whatever it looks like for that couple?
There's so much more to intimacy than sex. When we focus on those other areas, couples will naturally feel closer. And sometimes that has an effect on their sexual desire and their connection.
Alison Cook: What would you say to the listener who, especially as a woman, wants so much to be a good wife and has internalized a lot of messages and feels a lot of guilt and shame for that part of her marriage? What words of encouragement or wisdom would you have for her?
Dr. Camden: I believe shame is not from God. God does not use shame as a tool to try to get us to change. I really differentiate in the book between guilt and shame, and I know you've talked about that too. We all borrow from Brene Brown with that too, of guilt as “I've done something wrong” and shame as “I am wrong”.
Women have a lot of both, but especially shame about their sexuality. Something about my sexuality is wrong or bad, or I'm not measuring up as a wife. If we can separate those two and really eliminate the shame part, and then examine the guilt part, are you acting in alignment with your values and beliefs?
If so, then the guilt is also not justified. That's one of the tools I use to help people to deal with their shame, and helping women feel that they're allowed to say no to sex. They're allowed to not always feel like they have to give their husband sex because again, it's not a give and take, it's a sharing.
We're sharing this experience together. We're sharing intimacy in our bodies together. But that was a very prominent teaching in purity culture and really broader than just Christian culture, this idea that men need sex and women have to be available and serve their husband's needs.
I want to empower couples to feel like they can say no in a gracious way and that they can navigate that together without resentment and bitterness towards each other and without guilt and shame.
Alison Cook: Yeah. You talk about in the book, the need for embodiment. In many ways, the purity culture messages around sex were very disembodied. Talk a little bit about how we can regain that sense of embodiment as an avenue for healthier sexuality.
Dr. Camden: That's an area I'm still working on, too. Hilary McBride has taught me a lot about embodiment, and I quote her in the book. That's very much still in process for me, is getting my mind and body integrated and aligned and really paying attention to my body. But I offer some suggestions in the book of ways that people can embrace and enjoy sensuality and being connected to their body and their senses, even if they are single or choosing to be abstinent.
You can still affirm your sexuality and recognize your desires. That doesn't mean you have to act on them. We can experience pleasure and express gratitude to God for that pleasure, that he made our bodies with the capacity for all sorts of pleasure. I'm not talking about sexual pleasure, but the pleasure of good tasting food or pleasant smells or sights in nature and things like that.
So really getting in touch with your five senses helps with that embodiment, and checking in with your body. That's a practice I'm trying to work on, of checking in with how my body feels and what information it’s giving me about my emotions or about my mental state or about my needs. Does this mean I need to eat? Does this mean I need to rest? Our body gives us such good information and many times we've been taught to ignore it.
Alison Cook: . Yeah. That's such a great thread that you pulled. And I agree. It's hard for most of us women. We have struggled with that embodiment piece. There's definitely the purity culture messages that I got as well, held in tension with what it’s supposed to look like in a Hollywood movie.
And I don't always feel like I’m in a Hollywood movie. Sex is not always like a Hollywood movie. Again, it seems so important to honor the bodies God gave us in a non-shaming way.
I love how you're describing the ability to teach couples to look at this as something they're in together, as opposed to against each other. I think playfulness can be so helpful with that, finding the humor in these bodies that God gave us and the play that leads to that intimacy you're describing.
It isn't Hollywood glam, and passion isn't always part of it. Sometimes, it's laughing together. It's enjoying each other, and even laughing at the absurdity of it all at times.
Dr. Camden: Yeah, it doesn't have to look like a movie set all the time. This is real life, and real bodies, and kids, and jobs, and the house, and physical health, and lots of life that we deal with. But I had a client the other day tell me, when she went through premarital counseling, the pastor told her she was supposed to be a tigress in bed.
That planted the seed of “I'm not good enough”. That planted the shame of I'm not a tigress. I don't feel that uninhibited and constant sexual desire, whatever the tigress means. She felt a lot of shame about that. And it was like, your husband married you for you.
If he is a good and healthy and loving and godly man, he accepts you for who you are and your body for how it is. And he loves you for that. You can feel safe to share that experience with him.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that. I love that. I think it's such important work that you're doing. You're really naming it and you're really helping people reframe it and arrive at a healthier, better place, which is how God wanted it. I'd love to circle back to the rest of these myths. What are some of these other myths that you keep encountering with folks?
Dr. Camden: Yeah, another one is the damaged goods myth, and that's the one that causes the most shame. Because for people who do have premarital sex, for people who are sexually abused and didn't choose that, they are called damaged goods. They are told they have less to offer their future spouse.
And that's so damaging and so not biblical. God doesn't look at us and see a damaged rose. He looks at us and sees his beloved children, his beloved image bearers. He offers us forgiveness. He offers us restoration and wholeness. I think that myth is probably the most damaging.
The gatekeepers myth is really pitting women and men against each other and creating this sense where women are the gatekeepers of sexuality. That they have to be the ones to set boundaries before marriage and constantly monitor how far we are going. But then after marriage they always have to be sexually available and meet their husband's needs.
That's the one I see causing the most problems in a marriage, in a relationship, but also sexually, because it's hard for women to turn that off and to really be in their bodies, to be embodied, and to enjoy the sexual experience with their spouse.
Then the last one, the spiritual barometer myth, where we are better Christians and our spirituality is measured by our virginity prior to marriage. That affects my clients in that sometimes they get married and they think, am I no longer pure because now I've had sex? Does this mean I'm dirty? And it still feels wrong and dirty.
Or I feel like I've lost this part of my identity. Virginity became so much a part of your identity, your purpose, your worth. And I also don't think that's biblical, because our purpose and worth and identity is found in Christ and what he's done for us and our relationship with him and following and serving him.
It's not about this narrow definition of purity as virginity, it's about serving God with our minds, heart, bodies, and souls.
Alison Cook: I love that you're naming that. Those are really helpful namings for people listening who are suffering with residual shame. And I'm curious as we close, Dr. Camden, you talked a little bit about your own journey through your twenties, carrying some of these messages. What would you say to that younger single you now, with all that you know now? What would you want her to know? What would you say to her?
Dr. Camden: Yeah, I have a different vantage point now because I am married and I have two children and I feel very blessed. I no longer see it as an if-then, because I followed the rules, then I'm blessed. I see these blessings as God's grace to me, this unmerited gift.
I wrote my dissertation on grace and couples, and that really made an impact on my faith and being able to reconceptualize that these are all gifts of God that I didn't earn. I didn't perform to get them, and so I think I would go back and tell myself, this is God's grace. Whether you're single, whether you're married, whether you have children or not, whether life hasn't turned out the way you expected, or whether you feel like you're living your best life–this is God's grace to you, and really trusting him in that.
Alison Cook: Yeah, there's no hierarchy of grace, whether you're single, whether you're divorced, whether you're married, whether you're struggling. God's grace is right there for you. He loves you. I know what you're saying. For so many of us, there was this hierarchy, and there still is, to a large degree.
It flies in the face of the gospel. I love that you would be able to give her that message now, that she's not trying to earn something from God.
Dr. Camden: And with that, I want to be sensitive to, if you're in a state where you've been through abuse or a really traumatic divorce or something where you think, how is this God's grace? I don't mean to say that God caused that or that God will work it for good, any of those kinds of things. I mean it to say that even so, God's grace is with you. God's grace is available to you. He loves and sees you. And he's with you in your pain, too. I really believe that he sees our pain. He's with us in it and through it.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I know what you're saying. It's a subtle distinction. I think about my own single years, where there was so much turmoil. I was also married into my 30s. And it's not to say that this is God's grace. It's to say, whatever your circumstances, God is there with you. There is a subtle shift there; even if the circumstances are really hard and I don't want this set of circumstances it's not that I've done something wrong to be in this situation.
Nor is it that I can do something to earn something different. Sometimes we find ourselves in hard situations, whether married, single, sexually active, not sexually active. Sometimes things are hard.
Dr. Camden: And that doesn't mean God's punishing you. I think there was this sense that this must be God's punishment that we're struggling in our sex life, because we did have premarital sex or something like that. And I don't believe we serve a God that arbitrarily punishes us and causes that suffering to happen.
I think the world is hard, life can be really hard, and hard things happen. Suffering is there, but He's with us even in the midst of it.
Alison Cook: That's right. And sex is complicated and hard to figure out and that has nothing to do with God's punishment. I love that you've written the book. It's such a helpful resource. I think there's a lot of people who've been hurt by this, but don't know how to rethink their sexual ethic and what they really believe and what they want to claim and what they want to reclaim.
And you're really giving people tools to do that for themselves and also to do that as they parent kids and move into healthy relationships. It's such a great resource. Tell people where they can find you, where they can find your work, the book, all the things.
Dr. Camden: Okay. Yeah. My book is Recovering from Purity Culture. It's available on October 15th. You can find it wherever books are sold. And my name is Camden Morgante. You can find me on my website, drcamden.com, and on all the social medias @DrCamden.
Alison Cook: Thank you. It's been a wonderful conversation. Super grateful for your work and thanks for giving us your time
Dr. Camden: And I'm thankful for your work too, Dr. Alison, because even though you don't use the word deconstruction, you've really helped us to see that some of these teachings need to be deconstructed. Like turn the other cheek–you've taught me about that one. You've helped us see, what does God really mean by that? How can we have a healthy spirituality and healthy emotional life?
Alison Cook: Thank you. I've appreciated your encouragement along the way. Pick up a copy of Recovering from Purity Culture anywhere books are sold. Thank you again.
If you’ve ever struggled to set boundaries or wondered why it’s so hard to respect them in others, this episode is for you. We dive deep into how to set and receive healthy boundaries, and why so many of us confuse healthy limits with toxic behaviors. Spoiler: setting boundaries isn’t selfish—it’s necessary for healthy, thriving relationships.
But that’s not all. When our boundaries are shaky, complicated emotions—like guilt, resentment, or anxiety—often arise. And instead of dealing with them, many of us reach for quick fixes: we numb. We avoid confronting those tough feelings that boundaries bring to the surface. Today, I’ll break down why we numb, how to recognize it, and the steps you can take to stop avoiding your emotions and start healing.
This episode covers:
* The difference between healthy boundaries and toxic behaviors
* How to communicate boundaries without guilt or shame
* Practical ways to receive boundaries from others gracefully
* How to recognize when you’re numbing emotions (and what to do about it)
* Why boundaries and emotional numbing are deeply connected—and how to untangle them
You deserve relationships that nourish you, not drain you. This episode will help you understand the power of boundaries and guide you toward emotional freedom.
Resources:
- The Best of You Podcast question form
- DrAlisonCook.com/podcast
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 36: An Update on My Social Media Detox & How to Create Boundaries With Toxic Distractions, Numbing, & Unhealthy Coping Tactics
- Episode 24: Boundaries, the Spectrum of Toxicity, and a Note About Evil
- Episode 26: How to say "No" to toxicity
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- It’s never too late to start healing. God’s heart is always ready to help you find your way Home. Healing What's Within by Chuck DeGroat is now available wherever books are sold.
- 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.
- Get 40% off your first order of Sundays. Go to SundaysForDogs.com/BESTOFYOU or use code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
- 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 back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here this week. I have so appreciated the questions you've been leaving in The Best of You Podcast question form. You can find that question form in today's show notes or at DrAlisonCook.com/podcast.
Click on today's episode and you'll find that link if you have questions for me. It is so helpful to read through what you're thinking about, what's on your mind, so that I can think about and prayerfully discern how best to serve you with this podcast. I'm always thinking about how to combine faith-based wisdom and science-backed research from the field of psychology.
I've noticed a theme in some of the questions these past few weeks about two important and connected topics. The first is numbing, and the second is healthy boundaries. And it got me thinking about how these topics overlap, and so I want to address some of those questions today as we discuss both topics.
We all have moments in life when we turn to numbing behaviors. We wanna numb the emotions that we're experiencing. But here's the thing about numbing that occurred to me as I was reading through some of your questions. Oftentimes, those painful emotions that we end up trying to numb are evoked as a result of boundaries issues in our relationships
Here's what I mean by that. Whether we're the ones who need to be more assertive with our boundaries in a relationship, whether it's a relationship with your kids, in your marriage, with your friends, whatever the case may be, that tends to evoke uncomfortable emotions inside of us.
But what's also true is that when other people assert boundaries with us, whether they do that really well, or whether they do that in an unkind or cruel way, which as you'll hear me explain in this episode, I don't actually think is what we mean by the term boundaries. Sometimes boundaries get conflated with toxic behaviors.
But regardless, when someone else sets a boundary with us, whether it's healthy or whether there's a toxic component to how they do it, that also evokes a lot of complicated feelings inside of us.
Relational boundaries really evoke a lot of emotions inside of us. That's why I think boundary setting is so complicated, especially if you're someone who's high in empathy, especially if you're someone who's highly sensitive or intuitive about how other people feel.
This is why I wrote The Best of You, especially for women who are high in empathy and who are very much in tune with the emotions of other people. Because I think it makes boundary setting particularly hard for us. I put myself in that category.
Either way, whether it's because we are struggling with feeling hurt by someone else's boundaries, or we're really struggling because we need to say a healthy no, or we need to reduce our capacity or set a limit in a certain relationship, or even within an organization, numbing those emotions isn’t helpful, but it is often what we do.
Today we're going to explore how to manage the discomfort that comes with other people's boundaries, how to discern between healthy limits and harmful behavior, and finally, how to make wiser choices when we notice those uncomfortable emotions surfacing.
So let's start with boundaries, because whether we're setting them or receiving them, boundaries stir up sometimes painful, always uncomfortable emotions. Laura wrote in, and I thought this was such a great question, Laura. Thank you for taking the time to write. You wrote this:
“You speak a lot on how to set boundaries with people, but it could be interesting and helpful to learn how to respect boundaries that others have placed on you without being offended”.
I love this question, Laura. I love the honesty in it. There is so much truth in what you're saying. So often when other people set boundaries with us, we can feel that offense. We might feel hurt. We might feel annoyed. We might feel indignant. How dare they? We might feel rejected. There's so many feelings that can stir up inside of us.
When someone else says no, states a limit, backs out of something, that can be really uncomfortable for us. So I love that you're highlighting this, Laura. And what I love about it is this: if we want to be people who are setting healthy boundaries with others, we do have to do our own work with those emotions that we feel when other people might set a healthy boundary with us.
This all comes down to learning how to untangle the knots of those uncomfortable emotions. So to answer your question, Laura, I want to turn to the framework that I lay out in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way–how to name, frame, and brave those internal reactions to other people's boundaries.
Before we get there, it is so important to distinguish between two kinds of boundaries. The first is a healthy boundary. A healthy boundary is a clear, respectful, and yes, sometimes assertive communication of a personal limit.
It's about protecting your wellbeing while maintaining mutual respect in a relationship. A healthy boundary is inherently respectful. It's rooted in self-awareness and self-respect and consideration for others. A healthy boundary is calm. It might be assertive and confident, but it's not confrontational.
It's not trying to make a point. It's not trying to belittle you. It's not about insulting you. It's about calmly stating a need that I have. It focuses on what I need in this situation and what I'm feeling in this situation instead of blaming or attacking you.
So here's an example of a healthy boundary. I need time to myself after work to unwind, so I won't be able to talk on the phone or take phone calls in the evening hours. That's a simple statement of, this is what's true for me.
Another example of a healthy boundary: I really value our friendship, but I've got so much on my plate right now. I'd love to get together later this week, later this month, later this year, whatever feels right when I have some bandwidth.
You're taking ownership of the fact that your need is to step back. Now that can be really hurtful for the other person. We're going to get to that, but you're not saying anything cruel or selfish or mean. There's a statement of need in that.
Another example of a healthy boundary is, someone says, I'd love to help you out with your nonprofit or with your ministry needs. I'd love to help you out with this need that you have. And I can't do it right now. I really hope you find some people who can give you the support that you need. So there's not even really an excuse there. I can't serve in this way. I can't do it. That's a healthy boundary.
Now on the other hand, an unhealthy boundary, and this really isn't even a boundary, I think these are examples of toxic behaviors. These are actually attacks. This is when boundaries get weaponized, when somebody uses a boundary as a weapon to try to hurt someone else or try to go on the attack.
It's often reactive or aggressive. It's often controlling, manipulative, and designed to be hurtful. It's not inadvertently hurtful. It's trying to hurt someone under the guise of a boundary. So instead of communicating a need, an unhealthy boundary tries to exert power over the other person or blame the other person for how you feel.
The purpose of an unhealthy boundary isn't to protect my own emotional, spiritual, and physical needs. It's in fact, to try to control, punish, manipulate, hurt someone else. And that's not actually a boundary.
Again, these are toxic behaviors, but oftentimes they show up under the guise of a boundary. Here are some examples of these unhealthy boundaries. If you were to say to someone, you're always interrupting me and I can't stand being around you anymore. That's hurtful. That's an attack. That's saying there's something wrong with you, therefore, I'm not into this anymore. That's an attack on you.
If there's really truth in that, a healthy version of that might be to say to someone very calmly, maybe you take some time with your own emotions, and you go to that person and you say, I noticed that when we're talking, I don't always get to finish my thoughts.
I'd love it if we could please be really careful to ensure that we're both able to fully express ourselves during the conversation. What if we each take turns? Because we both get excited. What if we are really careful to take turns. Maybe we even set a timer.
Here's another example of an unhealthy boundary that's really all about control. If you don't cancel your plans and come to my event, I'm going to be really hurt, and I don't know if we're going to stay close after that.
There's a threat there. You're trying to control someone else's behavior, trying to manipulate them with a threat of removing your affection for them. Again, a healthy boundary in this case would be to say, I'm so bummed you can't come, but I completely understand. You're acknowledging that you're hurt, but you're not putting it on the other person.
Finally another example of an unhealthy boundary. If you're having a hard conversation and you say something like, I'm done talking to you. This is over. If you don't agree with me right now, if you don't stop right now. This is over. You never listen anyway. I'm done. This is an extreme shutting down of a conversation.
A healthy boundary might be to say something like, we're getting heated. I can tell I'm getting agitated. I need a few minutes. I need to calm down before continuing this conversation. A healthy boundary takes personal responsibility, takes ownership. It doesn't put it on the other person.
To answer your question about how to respect other people's boundaries, it does involve some discernment about what you're feeling in response to the boundary that's been set. I want to talk you through that very practically using the three step process I lay out in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. This is the three step process for navigating our own emotions, these emotions that come up in this case in response to someone else's boundary.
Number one, the first thing is to name it. What am I feeling? I got this text. I got this phone call. I got this email, and I don't like how I feel. Notice that inside your own self first. Name what's hard. Start with yourself. I say over and over again, we're not going to react to the other person. We're going to notice, man, I'm feeling offended.
And that's an okay thing to feel. The fact that you feel offended isn't the problem. It's what you do with that feeling that could become a problem. So the fact that you feel offended at someone else's boundary is something to notice initially. I feel offended. I wonder what that's about.
Get curious about it. Maybe you feel angry. I'm really angry. How dare they set this boundary with me when I've been bending over backwards to show up for them! That's another feeling. It's a normal feeling to feel when someone sets a boundary with us. We don't like it. These are feelings we need to notice and name.
We don't need to exile them. We don't need to shove them aside. We need to be honest with ourselves and with God about what the boundary stirs up inside of us. Maybe we feel guilt. Oh, I must've done something wrong. That's why they set that boundary. I must be a terrible person. Maybe shame gets stirred up.
That often happens when someone else sets a boundary with us. Oooh, there must be something wrong with me. The whole purpose of the name, frame, brave framework is that we don't know yet what those emotions mean, but we do need to honor them.
What I feel when someone else sets a boundary with me is shame. I feel like I'm the problem. I feel like I did something wrong. The feeling of being offended, that feeling of anger, that feeling of shame, these are really common emotions that we feel when other people set boundaries with us. So we're naming that. We're getting curious about that.
Isn't that interesting? This is what I feel inside. And then we've got to move into that second step, the frame it. We've got to frame what actually happened. We have to take some time. We have to create that pause, that place in between, to get curious about what really happened. We have to discern. What actually happened?
If you think about that word offended, when we are offended, we feel like somebody has wronged us. We feel like somebody has disrespected something we stand for or disrespected our personhood. It can feel like somebody has demeaned us, belittled us. It can feel like somebody has rejected us. Again, these are all feelings that we have to discern.
Did that actually happen? Maybe that person did do something offensive. To feel offended is the correct emotion in that situation. Maybe the person did reject us. The fact that we feel rejected actually makes sense, but maybe they didn't.
So often our emotions are a combination of what's happening in the present moment, right in front of us, and what's happened to us 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, all of our past wounds, all the times we've been rejected, hurt or offended, all get intertwined with what's happening in the present moment.
So we have to give ourselves a minute as we frame it and ask ourselves, what are the facts? What really happened? What did they actually say? How did they actually say it? What was the tone of it? What do I know to be true about this person's character? Have they been consistently hurting me over time? Is there a pattern here or does this feel really out of character?
Maybe something else is going on. We have to really think about it. Now, the key question when you're feeling offended is, did they actually do something wrong and would an objective third party think that they actually did something wrong? And this is where we all need really good friends to help us discern what we feel when someone else sets a boundary with us.
When someone else says, no, I can't do that. Or somebody else even lets us down in a relationship. We need those really good friends who will say, I get why that hurts. I get why you feel the way you do, and, I don't think that person did anything wrong. I think they're bumping up against their own limitations. It hurts and I get it and that's hard and I'm here for you in that hurt.
I don't think you can blame that other person in this. I think they did the best they could. I think they're genuinely dealing with their own limits. That's a really good friend who can help you discern that.
So when we're framing it, we're trying to figure out, did that person actually do something wrong? Or were they stating a healthy limit? And yes, it hurts. Yes, I feel rejected, but they didn't do anything wrong. And when we frame it in that way, we're going to brave those uncomfortable feelings differently.
Let's say you're somebody who's inclined towards shame. When someone sets a boundary with you, you feel like a terrible person. Same kind of principle applies. What are the facts? Did I actually do something wrong? Was I being insensitive to them? Was I interrupting all the time? Did I in fact expect more of them than maybe was fair or maybe more than they promised?
Can I face that and go, ooh, that hurts to see that. I wish I hadn't done that, but I'm also not a terrible person. I'm a good friend. I'm a good spouse. I'm a good parent. And I sometimes make mistakes. So we have to reframe that. If you're someone who's inclined towards shame, you have to really look at the facts.
I don't like it that this person had to speak up about this. It induces shame. And it doesn't mean I'm a terrible person. It means I'm human and maybe I made a mistake or maybe I had a blind spot there. That is such an important skill to be able to bring into relationships, to be able to see our own stuff.
We have to be able to sit with the pain of that and simultaneously keep the shame at bay because shame doesn't help. It doesn't help us go, yeah, I'm sorry. I have been jumping in a lot in our conversations. I need to listen better. It doesn't lead us to that healthier conclusion.
It might even be that nobody did anything wrong. You didn't do anything wrong. They didn't do anything wrong. They can't meet that need or that expectation that you have. And it's not because you did anything wrong. It's because we're humans and that person can't show up for me. That happens.
So we really have to do that work of framing when it comes to other people's boundaries. What really happened here? Did they do something wrong? Were they hurtful? Were they harmful? Were they being cruel, controlling, or manipulative? Or were they setting a healthy boundary and I've got to deal with that?
I can feel what I feel, but I can't take it out on them. I can't blame them for that. Or we have to ask ourselves, did I do anything wrong? Maybe I didn't do anything wrong. I was being myself and that person said no, or can't do that thing I want them to do.
So I've got to learn how to grow resilience. Sometimes that hurts, but I didn't do anything wrong. They're not doing anything wrong. We're not lining up or aligning on this particular issue or in this particular situation. It doesn't mean that anything wrong or bad has happened.
Sometimes it might mean I did do something wrong and I actually need to honor and respect the boundary and their limitations. And I need to grow and learn and change. And this gets a little bit into the distinction I make in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way about false guilt and true guilt.
Did I actually do something wrong or am I feeling guilty when in fact I am not to blame? It's such an important distinction if you're somebody who struggles with self-blame and self-shame.
Finally, we get into braving. So now we've owned the emotions that we feel. We've framed them. We've discerned what really happened. And now we can take the next brave step. If you're feeling offended or hurt, but the other person didn't actually do anything wrong, that's what I like to call clean grief. We can grieve it. We can say, oh, I didn't like it. That hurt.
When someone sets a healthy boundary with us, it can cause that temporary emotional discomfort, especially if we're not used to hearing no, or if we expected more than that other person can give us. And it hurts, but it's rooted in our own disappointment, our own unmet expectations.
It's not because they actually did something wrong. The pain in those situations comes from realizing that people have limits and that's disappointing. The brave path in this situation is to honor the part of you that feels bummed out, that feels disappointed, that is aware that, man, people do let us down.
Even the best of people. Honor that. And also be really clear with the other part of you that they didn't do anything wrong and I'm going to respect them. This is the magic of the “two things can be true” reframe.
We take a deep breath. We open our palms to God and we say, God, two things are true here. I'm disappointed and they didn't do anything wrong. And, there's this beauty of surrender here. It's a really spiritual practice of surrendering the both-and. I'm disappointed, and, they didn't do anything wrong.
I've got to let this go. Two things can be true. Now, if you're dealing with a situation where the other person was cruel, was manipulative, was trying to control you, you might feel a more complicated set of emotions, including betrayal, anger, or deep emotional pain, which arises because the person's actions or words are intended to belittle, control, or hurt you.
They're calling it a boundary, but really they're being cruel and that cruelty adds a whole layer of toxicity to what you're feeling inside. When someone is cruel, it feels personal. It feels intentional. It was designed to attack you. It's not based on mutual respect or healthy communication.
So you feel betrayed. And in this case, you might feel offended because there was in fact an offense. if you're feeling those betrayal emotions, you're going to need to brave a more significant path of talking about it with someone, letting other people into the complexity of those emotions, maybe seeing a therapist, maybe talking to a really good friend so that you can untangle the knots of those emotions
That's going to take more time and attention to heal from when there's actually been a betrayal. So that was a long-winded answer to your question, Laura, but the answer to that question, how do we not feel offended when other people set boundaries with us, begs this larger process of why am I feeling offended?
What actually happened? Did they do something wrong? Or do I need to work with God to release these uncomfortable feelings that are normal, but really aren't reflective of what actually happened?
This whole conversation about complicated feelings leads into several questions that I got about numbing. We are so inclined to numb when we get hit with any of these uncomfortable emotions.
I got questions from Haley, from Sierra, from Emily, all about struggling with numbness. Now, there are a lot of reasons that we numb. Sometimes there's more chronic numbness with almost a dissociative quality that we've learned how to do as a result of deep trauma.
Sometimes we are numbing on a more day to day basis. Ooh, I don't like what I'm feeling, so I am going to check out. In my book Boundaries For Your Soul, we describe the three categories of the parts of the soul. It's based on the internal family systems, the IFS model, that there are three categories of parts.
The second category of parts are protective parts. Richard Schwartz, the founder of the model, calls them firefighters. Why are these parts of us called firefighters? It's because they get active after the flame of pain surfaces. These parts of us detect pain. They detect complicated feelings. They detect anger. They detect that betrayal that we were talking about.
And their job is to put the flames of that pain out, no matter what. And these are the parts of us that immediately reach for the Netflix binge. They reach for the potato chips. They reach for the food. They reach for the scrolling. Scrolling is such a fast and quick way to numb out, to douse those emotions with whatever is at our easiest disposal.
These are parts of every single one of us. We all have these firefighter parts of us. That is their job. They detect pain and they check us out. Now, when they get extreme, they can go for booze. They can go for drugs. They can go for self-harming behaviors like cutting. They can become addicted. They can turn into sex addictions, drug addictions.
They can get really extreme, but they also are parts of us that on any given day are like, I don't want to feel this way and this bag of potato chips or this binge watching shows for six hours tonight after work is the path I'm going to take. I'm going to take that path because I do not want to sit here and face the uncomfortable emotions inside of me.
Doing the work of facing our uncomfortable emotions can be hard at times. We don't want to do it. I want to let you know, there is no shame in these numbing parts of us, especially if there's been trauma. These are parts of you that have helped you to survive. They've helped you to survive more pain than you could tolerate.
You didn't know how to tolerate this kind of pain, especially as a kid. You learned how to drown it out with whatever was at your disposal. That's what these parts of you do. They're survival parts. They're protective.
They're protecting you from too much pain. So if you've got a long history of numbing, that's something you want to work through with a trained therapist. This IFS model can be really helpful in working with these firefighter parts because they're there for a reason. They're trying to protect you from feeling too much pain.
Here's the thing about numbing on a more day to day level. If you notice, man, I'm just, I'm not wanting to face myself. I'm not wanting to journal. And this is usually what happens with most people–they notice the numbing behaviors first, they don't notice the painful emotions. Because the numbing behaviors are doing their job.
This happens to me. I was talking about it on last week's episode with Chuck DeGroat, Episode 123. We were talking about how we'll go days checked out. I will notice those behaviors before I notice what's underneath them. Because the job of those numbing behaviors is to keep us from painful emotions.
Almost always what I will do when I begin to notice myself checking out, is scrolling more than usual, binge watching, avoiding myself, essentially not journaling, not wanting to pray. Because I don't want to deal with it. When I notice that, I have to take a deep breath and show myself, I'm checking out because this is hard.
I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to wade through the complicated mix of emotions that I'm feeling. I don't want to wade through the fear, the heartache, the sadness, the anger. I don't want to wade through these feelings that this situation has stirred up inside of me.
I start there. That is the lowest hanging fruit of dealing with numbing. It's befriending those numbing parts of us. Isn't that interesting? I watched Netflix for four hours without thinking about it. I wonder what that's about. It starts that simply. Isn't that interesting? I'm eating a lot of sugar right now. I wonder what's going on.
That simple act of getting curious, of noticing, brings a little bit of your prefrontal cortex online. It brings another part of your brain online. It's a healthy differentiation. I'm aware that I'm doing this thing.
It puts even a paper's width distance between you and the numbing behavior. Oh, this is what's happening. That's naming. And naming is the opposite of numbing. Naming is the opposite of numbing. You don't have to get right into the deep heart emotions initially, especially when you're noticing the numbing behaviors.
Name that you're numbing. This is what's happening. That's what I'm doing. God, help me. Help me take a deep breath and bravely face whatever it is that's going on. And then maybe take the next step. I need to start to journal. I don't want to face what I'm feeling. God, I wonder what that's about.
Start with the lowest hanging fruit. When you start to name numbing behaviors, you give yourself a fighting chance of actually facing the emotions that are underneath them. Now listen, I go through numbing in depth in chapter six of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. But please hear me say right now in the context of boundaries, either setting them or receiving them in the context of deep pain–numbing parts of us are not your enemies.
They are parts of you that are trying to help, and shaming yourself for the numbing never helps. Get curious about it, naming it gently but honestly–this is what's happening. This is what I'm doing. That is a brave step in itself. So start with naming, noticing without shame, without criticism.
And slowly you'll start attuning gently to the beautiful intricacies of your mind, of your heart, of your body. And you'll start to learn as you start to name the numbing and you begin to notice the uncomfortable emotions. You will start to learn what actually brings you comfort or relief, what brings you actual peace or delight.
Here's the thing for those of you who have these very skilled numbing parts of you. It's not that we want to rip the bandaid off. It's that we want to gently learn how to face the hard emotions, while trusting ourselves that we can keep ourselves safe, that we can give ourselves the actual good things that our souls need in partnership with God's spirit.
When you name your numbing behaviors and the painful emotions that lie underneath them, you come alive to yourself and to God and to the wonder all around you. You start to feel again. And it's such a beautiful process. You become empowered to set the healthy boundaries that you need and to honor the disappointment that we all feel at the hands of others,
You start to nourish a beautiful symphony of feelings inside yourself. You start to learn what brings you joy, what brings relief, what brings play and how to soothe yourself in healthy ways.
What do you do after someone hurts you?
How do you heal the pain that lingers inside of you?
This is such an incredibly helpful, honest, and vulnerable conversation with my friend and fellow therapist Chuck DeGroat, author of the brand new book Healing What's Within. Chuck taught us so much about the harmful realities of narcissism in his book, When Narcissism Comes to Church, and now he's helping us heal the lingering wounds.
Here’s what we cover:
1. The moment that launched 5 years of inner chaos for Chuck
2. 3 surprising questions God asks to each of us
3. How Adam & Eve were manipulated
4. The first step when dealing with narcissism
5. How take feedback from others
6. How to ask for what you need from others
Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here.
Resources:
- Pre-order Healing What’s Within: Coming Home to Yourself--and to God--When You're Wounded, Weary, and Wandering by Chuck DeGroat
- When Narcissism Comes to Church by Chuck DeGroat
- Other books by Chuck DeGroat
- Genesis 3
- The Sickness Unto Death by Soren Kierkegaard
- Our Many Selves by Elizabeth O’Connor
- ChuckDeGroat.net
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 97: I Shouldn't Feel This Anxious—Insights on Trauma & Healing with Monique Koven
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.
- Pre-order Healing What’s Within: Coming Home to Yourself--and to God--When You're Wounded, Weary, and Wandering by Chuck DeGroat!
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. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I was so looking forward to this conversation today with my dear friend and fellow therapist, Chuck DeGroat. Chuck has a new book coming out called Healing What’s Within: Coming Home to Yourself--and to God--When You're Wounded, Weary, and Wandering.
It is such a beautiful book on healing. You'll hear some of the framework for the book in our conversation today, and toward the end of the episode, he gets pretty vulnerable about some of the feedback he got early on as a young therapist in training,
Chuck DeGroat is a licensed therapist, a spiritual director, and the author of five books, including the best selling book, When Narcissism Comes to Church. He also serves as Professor of Counseling and Christian Spirituality and the Executive Director of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan.
Chuck is such an incredible human and a gifted thinker at the intersection of emotional and spiritual health. His new book, Healing What's Within, is out this week everywhere books are sold and I cannot recommend it more to you. I actually was honored to write the foreword for the book. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation today with Chuck DeGroat.
***
Alison Cook: I am so thrilled to talk with you. You've become a friend. You're someone whose work I so admire. It was such an honor to read this book and write the foreword for it. It's such a beautiful book. So thank you for writing it. Thanks for being here.
Chuck: Yeah. Thank you for writing the forward.
Alison Cook: What I loved about this book, Chuck, and I'd love to start here, you open the book talking about a season of time 20 years ago when you were working as a pastor and you were fired from your job. You don't give us the details. You're very clear that's not the point of that illustration–the point of that illustration was that it launched five years of inner chaos.
Chuck: Yeah, that's right. I wondered if I should write that in the previous book, the narcissism book. I didn't want to center my own story, but I was encouraged to write more of my own story and I do in this book. That's a early pivot point, to say that there are these things that happen to us, these ways in which we're harmed and wronged and abused.
And we can talk about those kinds of things. If you spend any time on Twitter, we talk about those things all the time, but we have to shift the conversation inward. At some point, we've got to begin to do the work that you've been teaching us to do, frankly, for a number of years now. We've got to shift the conversation inward. The trauma is not what happens to us, but what happens within us.
Alison Cook: That's really powerful right there, Chuck. So essentially, this is what I love about you. We'll dive right in. Essentially, that incident, you could frame as spiritual abuse. You could frame it as something wrong that happened to you. That's true. That's valid. We could talk about it from that place, but what you're trying to encourage us to do in this book is, no matter what's happened to us, I'm responsible for what happens inside of me as a result of that.
Chuck: Yeah, that's right. It doesn't absolve external institutions and churches and organizations from responsibility at some level. But the healing work is the work that happens when you turn within. You probably know stories like this. I know stories where people have received the justice that they longed for.
Maybe a wrong was righted externally. But a year later, they're still dealing with some pain, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, panic, whatever it is. Now they need to turn their attention inward. We have to take responsibility for what happens within and heal what happens within.
Alison Cook: I was thinking about this interview this morning and I noticed this in myself; I'm curious what you think about this. Because I teach about this, you teach about this, and the whole book, Healing What’s Within, it's right there. I am going through something externally with family dynamics, and I noticed I've been avoiding myself for a few days.
And what I mean by that is, I don't want to journal. I don't want to pray about it. I don't want to turn my attention inward. I've been spending tons of time analyzing, how should I act? What should I do? How should I talk about it with other people? I couldn't believe it. This morning, I was preparing for this interview and I was refreshing my memory because I read your book a while ago.
I was refreshing myself on the notes, and I thought, oh my gosh. I turned inward. I started to cry.
Right now the tears come up. I hadn't even considered the grief that's underneath. Yes, I have to make decisions. Yes, I have to do some things. I've been doing this work 20 years, as you have, and what is it that makes it hard to look inward?
It's so intuitive, it's so logical on one level; of course we need to look inside, but you talk about how It took you five years to really begin to look inward. Why do we resist that?
Chuck: Yeah. It really helped me to begin to understand that at the heart of trauma is disconnection. You hear this from all the folks that you and I revere. Gabor Maté, Peter Levine, Stephen Porges, others like that. At the heart of trauma is profound disconnection, profound alienation.
That's in part why I started with Genesis 3 this time. It’s the primal story of disconnection, of alienation. The question God asks is “Where are you?”. Because God meets us in the midst of our disconnection. But the wild thing, what you're talking about, is that we can go for days, weeks, months, years–for me, it was at least five years before I got into therapy.
Then I'd say a few years later, when I ended up in a hospital in Mexico in severe pain, I won't go into the details here, it was pretty nasty, but where my body had kept the score. So it took about five years to get into therapy and then three more years for me to hit this point where I am continuing to live in this disconnection and I've got to do something about it.
Alison Cook: Let's go into that. In the book, you go through those three questions. Where are you? Who told you? Where have you taken your hunger and thirst? It was fascinating to me to think about those questions in a non-shaming way.
Chuck: That's it. Because I think you and I may have grown up with pastors and in churches where we learned that Genesis 3 story was a story of this great tragedy. This cosmic tragedy that we're all implicated in, and God was raging mad. So I've always thought, well, of course, we've got to hide because God's angry.
And we could talk about that a lot longer, but to me it's really thrilling to see what's happening in the text. God is walking in the cool of the day, when God would normally be walking with Adam and Eve when the sun has gone down. That's when they go for their afternoon walk. But God's looking around like, where are you? It's time for our walk.
That first word, “where”, is the first word of the book of Lamentations. It's a word of longing. It's a word of heartbreak. There is this sense of “I miss you. Where are you?” For me, that was a game changer, because I'd grown up in a tradition where God's angry and God's looking for you and God will find you. The reality is, God comes with kindness and curiosity and compassion to meet us in our place of greatest pain.
Alison Cook: Yeah. That is a profound shift. It's not an angry “Where are you?” I wonder if when we've internalized that, that's a little bit why we're reluctant to face ourselves. Because when I'm turning my attention inward, what am I really feeling? What's really going on inside of me?
That's where we're meeting God in truth. If there's shame there, if there's any condemnation, I don't want to do that. I don't want to go there, but if it's a, oh, where are you? I miss you. When you say that, I just, I feel that.
Chuck: Yeah, it's an invitation to slow way down. I've called this the Genesis Examen for years. In the Christian tradition, there are these ways of self examination, the Ignatian Examen. But these three questions, this Examen, is a way for us to slow down. I was driving this morning, and I do these five day intensives and they can be very intense.
I was driving this morning, and I heard that question, where are you? I would have liked to have been anywhere but where I was, and I was thinking about later today and a nice meal that we're going to have with some friends. I was thinking back to some other things, and I was like, where are you?
I'm not here right now. I need to be right here right now. I need to be grounded in my body to do this work for the next three hours. So it was an invitation back to my body, back to my breath, back to presence.
Alison Cook: That's it. Sometimes I don't want to feel grief. I don't want to go into this hard broken place. But when we surrender to that in response to the loving question from God, we are so much more able to move through it with integrity, with that Holy Spirit led self presence.
Chuck: Yeah, that's it. It's all about attention. It's all about noticing. It's all about presence. I don't know about you, but I can live hours of my day and hours of my week disconnected. My family knows and sees it. Some of my colleagues and friends see it as well. it's always an invitation back to presence.
Alison Cook: I want to pause there for a second. Because even when you say that, I'm imagining the listener saying, wait, isn't that normal? To be driving in my car, thinking about dinner, thinking about this, thinking about that, how is that disconnected?
I can go for days, like you're saying, and I haven't actually checked in. You're in your car and there's some part of you that's been trained to hear that voice from God. How do we start that work? Or how did you begin to learn that practice? I think it's a practice is what I'm trying to say. There's a little bit of a discipline to it. I hate to use that word.
Chuck: Yeah. I think it's the practice of attention. It does take time. If we've lived inattentively or in an externalized way, where we're constantly thinking about these things that we need to do, or perhaps because of the trauma of life in a hypervigilant state, we're going to live functionally disconnected from ourselves, and we might not even know it.
That's the thing. That's the reality of the work that we do. A lot of the folks that we work with and probably our stories as well, what we discover is that I didn't know that I was disconnected. I thought this was life. I stayed busy. That busyness has kept me from some of that pain that I really don't want to look at, and so this is a brand new invitation to folks.
That's why I love it through the lens of “where are you” in Scripture? I'm sure you get accused of this sometimes: “You're a therapist, you're a psychologist, that's what you are supposed to do”. I want to say, no, actually, that's where God begins when we've experienced alienation, where we've experienced disconnection. God invites us back to ourselves, back to God, back to one another.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's really the essence. You can't bifurcate what's going on spiritually with what's going on emotionally and mentally. To geek out here for a second, one of my favorite books of all time was Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death. Wonderful title. He talks about how we're going to be nailed to ourselves, essentially.
I always remember reading that going, whoa, then I better get really at home with myself. There's something powerful about that, that at the end of the day, whatever we mean by the afterlife, but also right now, the eternal now, we're going to have to make peace with ourselves.
That's the person we're going to be with. And the more I can do that in the light of God's compassionate invitation, “where are you?”, we're aligning with the truth. In thinking about trauma, even if the truth is, I can't go there, there's too much, that's a starting place. That's a starting place.
Chuck: That's a starting place. I've heard you talk about it on the podcast–we've both been informed by internal family systems. This is a contemporary way of doing counseling, if listeners are not familiar with it, where we talk about these parts of ourselves. Years ago, I may have told you this before, but years ago, I was introduced to the work of a woman named Elizabeth O'Connor.
She was a pastor in Washington, D. C. alongside Gordon Cosby and she would lead spiritual retreats. So back in the late 60s, there's a book called Our Many Selves that came out of a retreat that she would lead where she'd simply greet people.
She had no idea about this sort of contemporary therapeutic modality. All she was doing was leading a spiritual retreat and she was asking people to identify the many selves that are caught up in the many things out there that lead them into fragmentation and to come back to the ground of their being.
This is old news, good news; this is not contemporary psychology. This is the ancient Christian tradition as well.
Alison Cook: That's exactly right. When you go back to the older ideas, what they're talking about is alienation from the self, and we actually have to be reunited. This isn't a modern psychology thing.
The second question also really blew my mind. “Who told you?”, which again, can have the connotation in my mind of shaming. “Who are you listening to? Why aren't you listening?” as opposed to how you recast it as from this place of curiosity. I think about it as, where did you get that message? Who told you? Where did you pick that up?
Tell me a little bit about how you've wrestled with that in your own life and with clients.
Chuck: Yeah, there again, it feels like another question that comes out of heartache. Who's telling you this counterfeit story? I created you for Eden, for goodness, for all these things. Who told you that you weren't enough? Who told you that I couldn't be trusted? It's an invitation to curiosity.
The other thing that I wasn't told about Genesis chapter three is that Adam and Eve were victimized. They were deceived. There was so much emphasis placed on Adam and Eve's responsibility–and I don't want to minimize responsibility. You go down those rabbit holes and you've got people who want to catch you in some heresy.
Okay. We're responsible. I get it, but we were deceived. I think what God is asking is, what are the voices that you're listening to? What stories are you telling yourself that don't reflect the goodness of my story? My whisper of worth and belonging and purpose over you?
Alison Cook: That's really powerful to think about it in those terms. She was manipulated in that story, totally manipulated. How often are we unwittingly manipulated, controlled, whatever it is? Like you're saying, there's responsibility, especially once we become aware, but I love that. I found that so powerful, that recasting of “Who told you? What lie did you believe?”.
Chuck: Yeah, so we can look at our stories with some curiosity again. I did this work today. I was sitting with a man where we gently walked back through his story and learned that early on in his life, the message that he got, it wasn't a message that he heard, it's a message that he intuited because his parents weren't around, was that you've got to go it on your own.
I was like, that's the story. That's the primal story. That's the story that all of us at some level end up believing. “I'm on my own. I'm not enough. God isn't enough. God's goodness can't be trusted. My own instincts, my own intuitions can't be trusted”. The invitation is to gently walk back into your story and into the stories you tell yourself.
Even right now, you can go back into your past, but the reality is, you're probably telling yourself some version of that story right now.
Alison Cook: Yeah. To become curious, as you say. So that invitation, even driving in the car, taking a walk, “Where am I, where are my thoughts? What am I thinking? Who told you? Let's check where the messages are coming from ". Then this last one, “Have you eaten from the tree?”, that gets at, “Where have you taken your desires?”. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Chuck: This was the one that stumped me years ago when I was doing some of this work on retreats that I was leading. I served out in the Bay area in San Francisco, and so I would take Silicon Valley executives for 48 hour silent retreats, no phones. Can you imagine what that would be like?
I'd invite them into these questions and that third one, have you eaten from the tree? I was like, God, you asked two really beautiful open ended questions. And now this. And so as I listen carefully, what I started to hear is, “Where have you taken your hunger? Where have you taken your thirst? Where have you taken your desires?”
In other words, I long to fill you up. I long to satisfy you. But where do you go to cope? Let's get curious about where you go to cope, because I think that what we know about what happens within us, what we know about trauma, is that we seek to medicate it in one way or another.
If we begin to pay attention to the things that we go to, the things that we chase after, the ways in which we chase worth or belonging or purpose in a variety of different ways, we'll begin to understand a bit more about how we're coping and self-medicating in light of that wound within.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I thought that was brilliant. It makes sense. Where have you gone to feed this? Again, in a non shaming way, in a naming way, let's talk about it. Let's be honest about it.
Chuck: It's really that simple in a sense. As therapists, people come to us with so much shame in the midst of addiction. I want to stop doing this. I don't approach it with yeah, we've got to get you to stop doing this right away. It's instead an invitation to get curious about what that's about. How are you medicating the wound?
It's a strategy that's protecting you from the story underneath, and so let's get curious about the story underneath. I bet the strategy will go away as you get more curious about the story underneath.
Alison Cook: Of attentiveness, of that awareness, of consciously, again, in the terms of IFS, differentiating when I go for that apple, when I go for that food, when I go for that booze, whatever it is, oh, there's a wound and it's powerful. That is what makes the work. The integration of the spiritual and the mental and the emotional work all works together because we create that space for healing for the way that God designed us to heal. It's like we give the oxygen that our systems need to shift.
Chuck: Yeah, that's it. I love the oxygen metaphor, like maybe that's what these questions offer. An opportunity to simply breathe and attend, and the act of doing that the healing is already beginning. We can do a lot of work. We can do a lot of talking. We can do a lot of looking at your life, your story, your trauma, but it begins as we breathe. As we notice. I love the idea of introducing some oxygen to the system.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's a little bit of a paradox. Even my experience this morning of, oh, I actually need to tend to the grief inside of me. It is actually now going to unlock and bring more oxygen in, which is going to allow me to brave a better solution or a better way through. Like your experience in the car, it's so life changing and earth shattering. It sounds so simple and yet it really is the path to healing and wholeness.
Chuck: Yesterday–you're going to appreciate this, I hope–I was feeling some of the pressure of hard, challenging client situations. I was actually sitting with my intensive client. It's been about two and a half hours and I felt in my body that sense of pressure.
We've got one day left and I put my hand on my chest and I breathe and sometimes I'll do that. That's become a practice of even now when I do that, I can feel it in my body like, oh, okay. there's a blessing that God can offer in that space. It’s relaxing and calming.
That's really beautiful. We've got to find our way to those resources and practices, of course, that work for us. But for me, in a moment where I was feeling some pressure, a hand on the chest, the deep breath, and I was back in my body. It didn't fix everything. It didn't make me a brilliant therapist for the next half hour. It allowed me to be more present.
Alison Cook: It brought you back to yourself, which brings you back to God, which opens up more. You're operating then with the grain of the universe. It's so good. It's such a good, powerful, powerful work, Healing What’s Within.
I am curious, Chuck, you've written a number of books. A lot of people know you by your work with narcissism. You wrote the book When Narcissism Comes to Church. Why was this the next book for you?
Chuck: Yeah, I feel like this brings it all together and that's a really incredible feeling in some ways. Back in the late nineties is when I began seeing women who were emotionally abused by their partners in a church where I was serving. That began the work for me.
I began trying to figure out this emotional abuse thing and find books. I remember finding one that was translated from Dutch. It was one of the only resources back in the day on emotional abuse, and I ended up going to court for some of the women that I was working with, but a lot of reading, a lot of learning, some supervision, some new modalities like IFS and other things.
For a number of years, I felt like I was piecing things together. The narcissism work felt like an important and timely work to name what I and others have been seeing in the church for many years. This isn't new. This isn't a new phenomenon. Christians have been abusing power for centuries.
There are stories in scripture that show that. This to me was the culmination of over 25 years of pastoring and practicing as a counselor. It's really fun to be able to anchor it in a biblical story and to re-narrate that story and show people in concrete ways how they can go within and do this inner work in a way that is transformative.
Every once in a while, I think your last book did a really beautiful job, it's simply naming the process, and every once in a while you land on something as a writer, as a teacher, that helps you articulate it simply and invites people in. For me, that's what these three questions do. I can use this in counseling or as a pastor leading retreats.
It really brings together a lot of the divergent threads of a 25 year vocation of counseling and pastoring and retreat leading and more.
Alison Cook: It makes sense. You're naming. On one hand, we have to name what's going on systemically; we have to name what's going on outside of us. Also, we have to name what's going on inside of us. They're both important. In fact, Healing What’s Within is actually then the brave path that one has to take.
Chuck: Everyone that I've worked with will know this and I'm sure you'll do the same thing–when people come to me and say, I've got this narcissistic pastor in this traumatizing system. My first counsel is to do your own work. They're like, what do I do? What do I say to the pastor? I think I should confront him. Maybe I should write a letter. I feel the anxiety in the email, in their voice.
Okay, let's slow down and let's make sure that you get care so that whatever you do is coming from our true selves, from our core, and not from a reactive or anxious place. That's the work.
In a sense, people are asking, is this a follow up to When Narcissism Comes to Church? The answer is, in a very real way, yes. This is the work that you need to do so that you can be healthy and whole as you engage the complexities of our church and our world.
Alison Cook: Because the one thing that you can take responsibility for, it's a cliche, but it's true. You're never going to be able to change the other person. The only way through is to get really deep within yourself and find your own way through whatever the case may be. You have to do that work from within.
Chuck: Again, that's going to sound cliche or it's going to sound therapeutic to some. I want to say, even this morning, sitting with a pastor, he said that very thing. I said, do you know St. Augustine from church history? Oh yeah. I know St. Augustine. Have you read the confessions, where he says God, you were within, but I was on the outside looking for the answers out there?
Augustine says, return to yourself, go within. We get scattered, we get pulled and the movement for the sake of wholeness is always a movement within that allows us then to move out and to be healers. That's the work that you and I do because in part we've done the work within.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It can feel like a paradox, but it's absolutely the way through. I wanted to ask you, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I'm curious because I don't know this about you personally. How did you end up counseling women? How did you end up counseling emotional abuse survivors? Did you stumble into it? Did you set out? How did that evolve for you?
Chuck: I was a seminary student in the mid 1990s and I was about to start a PhD program in New Testament studies with a well known and regarded New Testament scholar. I had gotten the blessing of this particular scholar, but I was a nervous wreck. I was so anxious about it.
I sat down with a counseling professor at my seminary, and this is going to sound really funny because I'm a counseling professor at a seminary now. He said to me really honestly and kindly, but it was hard, he said, if you don't do your work, you're going to be dangerous to the church. You're probably already dangerous to your wife.
That sounds hard. It was probably harsh, but I was invited into this incredibly relationally-oriented counseling program where I was invited to listen to the experiences of my fellow students, and to ask them about their experiences of me. The program at the time was by and large women.
I put that question out there, and what I started hearing is, you're arrogant, you're off putting, we don't feel safe with you. We wish you wouldn't have started in the counseling program. This was devastating. At the same time, it was a truth serum. I needed to hear this and it set me on my own journey. We could talk about this a lot longer Alison, but they were naming misogyny. They were connecting it to my mother. This is what we therapists do.
Alison Cook: You were all training and there was this invitation. You'd asked and they were willing to fill in.
Chuck: Yeah, and I had supervisors. When you go through programs like this, you've got your fellow students and you've got supervisors and you're jumping in the deep end. It was a revelation of the ways in which I was hiding, a revelation of the ways in which I needed to heal.
What happened is it really opened my eyes to how women were experiencing not only me, but the seminary setting I was in, the complexity of male female relationships, and the late misogyny. Again, this is back in the late 90s. We weren't tweeting about this. We weren't holding up signs of “down with the patriarchy”.
Alison Cook: It was before it was trendy.
Chuck: It was before it was trendy. It gave me an opportunity as an on the ground pastor to do the work, to really listen to the stories of women. That's where it began.
Alison Cook: Okay. So as your friend, I find it hard to believe with the way I've experienced you these last few years. Do you think that there was truth in it? Do you think that you were a bit of a lightning rod for a lot of what was going on around you? Do you think a little bit of both?
Chuck: What they were seeing in me? Yeah, I think I was a part of a group of men at the seminary who were clicky. We were tribal, we had all the answers to the questions, and the experience was, they're in and we're out. There was a sense of arrogance that they were rightly perceiving.
Now what they didn't know was that I was the most insecure guy in the pack, and I was clinging to a sense of security. I wasn't the pack leader. But I was certainly participating in something that to them felt very arrogant. I remember sitting in one conversation where I fought them for about 20 minutes and then I was in tears for about the next 40 minutes as I started recognizing some of the connections.
I heard the whisper of, “Who told you?”, and I started making connections to my own story and my own insecurities and the ways in which I was grasping for my own sense of worth and purpose and status and other things like that, and so it was a pretty radically transformative two years, but the fruit of it was now I could hear and see in ways that I couldn't hear and see before some of the stories of women in this largely complementarian context that I was in, where they were experiencing harm in their marriages. Yeah, that was it.
Alison Cook: Are you okay with sharing that Chuck?
Chuck: Yeah. I am okay sharing it. I don't share it very often and I notice discomfort in my body as I share. I actually think it's probably good that people experience my discomfort with this.
Alison Cook: I don't know about you, but I know for me as a therapist, I can much more easily elucidate concepts sometimes than talk through some of my own stuff. I remember listening to you and thinking, that's part of the training. It's a good part of the training of becoming a therapist; you expose and open yourself up to the feedback of others.
I remember moments like that in my own seminary training, in a different context of people putting their finger on things. I'm curious because honestly, a couple people put fingers on things in my life that I was like, nope, and I knew how to smile and nod, but inside I was like nope, I won't be going there. And then a few years later going, oh my gosh, they were exactly right.
Chuck: It could be one of the lines from the narcissism book that is most quoted–it's the question, “how do you experience me?” That came out of that early training. In my work, because I've started a couple of counseling centers at different churches and started a couple of training programs, in every place of leadership, that's been a core question that I've asked people who I've led.
How do you experience me? That's, I think, a really important question for us to always have at hand, particularly for leaders. But if we're friends, spouses whatever, how do you experience me?
Alison Cook: I think we often lead out of what we've had to learn. I know for me in various junctures, when I was writing a lot about boundaries, my kids and my husband are like, this is not one of your strong areas. I'm like, exactly. I have to think about it so hard. It is so hard for me.
At my core, I'm such a pleaser. It would be my joy to make every person feel totally happy. So I'm constantly having to push against it. I only say that to say, often, what becomes so powerful to us is what we're learning about. Oh, this is how people experience me. How do I grow and change? I think it's really powerful about you that it has become your strength.
Chuck: Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't end. I had a student march up to my second floor office a couple of years ago when I was up there and say, that question that you ask us to ask in class, can I answer that for you? Can I tell you how I experienced you? I was sitting there like oh, of course. Sure.
He said, "You talk a lot about presence, but you walk really fast through the atrium in the seminary from one thing to another. It always feels like you have a lot going on and you don't have enough time for us”. It was like, oh thank you. Let me sit with that and process that, metabolize that and understand what's going on.
He was exactly right. I was in a season where I was traveling a lot. When I was down in the atrium, I was avoiding people because I didn't want to get caught in a conversation because I had too much to do. He gave me the gift of that reflection and I needed it.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that's a hard one listening to you, because I'm even imagining the listener and I'm thinking of myself in those seasons, and that ability to be present and open to the feedback of others. It comes all the way back to not shaming. Yeah. I haven't been present in these moments with my kids, or I wasn't present here. I wasn't a great friend in these situations.
That's true. Part of me is like, I gotta go fix that now. It comes right back to, where are you? Oh God, that is where I am. I might not even do anything about it, but I can honor that. There's truth in that.
Chuck: Yeah. I can listen in a way that acknowledges the impact on the other and I think that's a really important piece that came out of the narcissism work. Can we acknowledge our impact? What's tricky for me as a counseling professor and someone who talks about these things, is that I have students or clients or family members, by the way, who can perhaps gaslight themselves into thinking, it's probably not dad or it's probably not my professor or my counselor because he talks a lot about presence.
He's good at that. It must be me. The reality is, and yeah, in a non-shaming way, I could say, Chuck, that is a propensity of yours. You got really good at hiding and disconnecting. It's another invitation, but it's a kind invitation.
Alison Cook: That's a really good point about the gaslighting. Because it's not that we have to be perfect. It's not that we have to fix it. It's that we can honor that other person's experience. What you're sensing there is accurate. We're honoring the reality of their experience of me without shaming ourselves–that takes a lot of internal fortitude. It's the fruit of the work of healing that you've been doing for 20 years.
Chuck: This is why it's not selfish. I always tell people it's not selfish, because this allows you to love your neighbor. This allows you to listen well and honor your neighbor, honor the pain, the harm that you might've caused or created. None of us are immune to that. And then we get to live.
I'll often say to my clients, now you get to live the rest of your life in this. There's no arrival point. You continue to do the work with curiosity and you listen for those questions and you assume that you're going to be disconnected again.
But you come back and you begin again. That's a phrase, by the way, from the Christian tradition that you see in all the great contemplatives and mystics. Begin again. It's simple and it's non-shaming. If you fail, begin again. If you get stuck, begin again. If you're disconnected, begin again. It's okay.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. That's a beautiful summary. That's how then we continue to live. It's a virtuous cycle of more and more goodness. It's not that we don't continue to have to begin again, but it gets a little easier. There's more compassion.
I have a couple more questions. Are you then also able to find pockets in your life where you can more honestly speak about what's hurting you or what you need from someone else? Do you feel like that's also a fruit of doing the work internally, of being able to then voice, oh man, that hurt? Does it flow both ways?
Chuck: That's been an area of growth, and I think I'm getting better at saying I'm hurting or this is what I need, because I think for a long time a part of my own self-medication cycle was to be quite externalized and to help others in the midst of their needs. It's a classic sort of helper syndrome.
So in another moment this week, in a similar way to what I described earlier, in the midst of a pressure packed, challenging situation with a pastor that I've been doing some work with, I put my hand on my chest again. My clients all discover this after a while.
They're like, what are you doing? Are you saying the Pledge of Allegiance? What's happening right now? But, I whispered to myself, Chuck, you do hard things. It's okay. I think that in the work that we do, there needs to be an acknowledgement at times that this is hard.
I know one of the messages that I had growing up was that I had to always look and dress the part. I couldn't have needs. I couldn't be weak, fragile, or needy. There's that sense of, yeah, this is hard. This hurts. Or you're tired. Or you need a break. Things like that are growing practices. I think even today, having done this for such a long time, I'm still a work in progress when it comes to that. Yeah.
Alison Cook: Yeah. That's also vulnerable. I've noticed that in myself and sometimes I don't verbalize it, but shifting into myself and what I need in the moment can be a subtle cue to someone I love or someone around me. That subtle, like you're saying, deep breath, putting your hand on your heart, as a way of being known and of showing up in your own needs.
Chuck: Yeah.
Alison Cook: I want to end by asking you a couple of questions I like to ask my guests. What would you say to that younger 20, 25 year old you now, if you could sit with him for a few moments?
Chuck: Wow. That's such a good question. I’d look him in the eye and co-regulate, as we say, and say breathe. Breathe. Because I think I lived my early years holding my breath a lot, pushing through and yeah, I say breathe. It's okay. That might be it because I think younger me would be in tears at that point.
Alison Cook: It's beautiful because that's what you're doing now when you give yourself that. Yeah, that's beautiful. Chuck, what's bringing out the best of you right now?
Chuck: Oh yeah, that's another good question. It's a sweet time in our family right now, Alison. There have been some ups and downs over the years, but my oldest is living with us for the first time in a number of years. She's 23 and she's getting married, and two weeks from Saturday, she'll be married. Sarah and I, my wife, Sarah, we've got two daughters, 23 and 21.
We're getting to really invest in our oldest in a way that we haven't in a while. She reminded us the last time that she was the only one that lived with us. It was from zero to 16 months. We are loving time with her and time with her fiance.
I live in Michigan in the summer and it's gorgeous. We sit on the back deck and have these unhurried conversations. That's been really beautiful.
Alison Cook: I love that. Where can people find you and find the book? We'll link to it in the show notes, but this is going to come out probably the week it releases. I don't know if you have any kind of bonus order items or anything like that.
Chuck: I'm on Myspace and the book, if you're listening to this days before the book comes out, there's a little bonus if you pre-order. You can get a two plus hour workshop on spiritual abuse, religious trauma and systems thinking, and how we transform ourselves and systems.
It's a two plus hour lesson that I'll send you a code for. You can go to my website for the pre-order link. The website is ChuckDeGroat.net, and then I'm on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, but not TikTok. I can't do it. I have not been able to do it.
Alison Cook: The book is Healing What's Within: Coming Home to Yourself When You're Wounded, Weary, and Wandering.
Chuck: Forward by Alison.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that's right. It's a fantastic, beautiful resource that everybody needs. I'm thrilled. Thank you for sharing with us your expertise, but also your personhood.
Chuck: Yeah. Thanks friend. Good to be with you.
Has anxiety ever made it hard for you to connect with God? Do you love God but sometimes struggle with church?
Today's episode is such a breath of fresh air. I had the pleasure of diving into a deep, insightful conversation with New York Times bestselling author John Mark Comer. We explore the powerful intersection of mental, emotional, and spiritual health, uncovering how these aspects work together to create a whole, integrated person.
Here’s what we cover:
1. Misconceptions in the church about true discipleship
2. The benefits and limits of therapy for personal growth
3. What to do when anxiety or past trauma make it hard to engage spiritual practices
4. John Mark’s candid experiences with therapy and what he’s learned
5. The two essential spiritual practices for holistic well-being
6. Our thoughts on the overlapping circles of emotional & spiritual maturity
Resources:
- Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did. by John Mark Comer
- Other books by John Mark Comer
- The Practicing the Way nonprofit
- Dr. Alison Cook with John Mark Comer on the Rule of Life Podcast
- The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud by Philip Rieff
- Freya India’s substack
- Wayfaring by Dr. Warren Kinghorn
- Episode 113: A New Vision of Human Flourishing—A Christian Approach to Mental Health with Duke University Psychiatrist & Theologian Warren Kinghorn
- I Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 67: The Link Between Faith & Emotional Healing—Gen Z, College Life, & A Hidden Search for Meaning with Cindy Gao
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Head over to WildHealth.com/BESTOFYOU and use code BESTOFYOU at checkout for 20% off!
- 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.
- 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!
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 thrilled you're here today as we round out this series on “Culture and Mental Health” with a guest who is likely familiar to you. My conversation today is with John Mark Comer, the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Practicing the Way, and today's conversation is a fascinating deep dive into these overlapping circles of spiritual formation and mental health.
John Mark has such an interest in the realm of psychology and really sees it as integral to our overall goal of spiritual formation and being made into the likeness of Christ. What he lays out in Practicing the Way is such a nuanced, robust, rich vision of what it means to be formed into the likeness of Jesus.
I loved this conversation. Toward the end, he asked me about a theory he's working on that gets at the overlapping circles of emotional health and spiritual health. It's a fascinating riff there, right at the end of the conversation. We could have kept going for hours. We had to stop because of time, but it was such a fun back and forth, a deep dive into this work of what it means to become a whole person, being formed by a God who loves us and who longs to be invited into deeper and deeper facets of our lives and truly transform us from the inside out.
John Mark Comer is the New York Times bestselling author of Practicing the Way, Live No Lies, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, and four previous books. He's also the founder and teacher of Practicing the Way, which is a nonprofit dedicated to integrating spiritual formation into your church or small group.
Prior to starting Practicing the Way, he spent almost 20 years pastoring Bridgetown church in Portland, Oregon, and working out discipleship to Jesus in the post-Christian West. Please enjoy my conversation with John Mark Comer. I can't recommend this book, Practicing the Way, enough to you and to your church communities if you're longing for a richer, more holistic, deeper understanding of what it means to be apprenticed to the person of Jesus.
***
Alison Cook: I really want to go on record saying how much I immersed myself in Practicing the Way. I mentioned to you before we started recording that I can sometimes go into books specifically about spiritual formation with a part of me that wonders, “Are they going to spiritualize everything?”
I could sink into this book. There was something about it that I trusted because you're bringing the whole body into it. And that allowed me to really ping off of these overlaps between what a Christian psychologist does and what spiritual formation is.
And it's not because John Mark, you're necessarily veering into the realm of psychology specifically, but more because I can tell in the way you're so well read in these ways, there's a real integrated quality to this book all the way through. It was really fun for me to read this beautiful book. It’s so loving and so needed and I appreciated it so much. I want to thank you for that.
John Mark Comer: Oh, that is my honor, and that means a lot coming from someone like you. I hold you in great regard.
Alison Cook: We're so thrilled to have you on the podcast today. I want to anchor our conversation. I thought it was fascinating how you describe what it means to apprentice to Jesus in such a robust way. A little bit into the book, you described three of the bad strategies, or the three myths of modern day discipleship that really rang true. It’s part of why my antenna goes up with this idea.
You talk about willpower, you talk about more Bible study being the cure for all things. You talk about the magical zap of the wand, the spiritual bypassing that we talk about all the time on the podcast as being part of the problem. So I want to set that aside for a second for the listener to recognize, that's not where you're going with this.
How do you think about what it means to apprentice to Jesus and how is it different from what a lot of us are getting taught or seeing modeled in the church?
John Mark Comer: Yeah, pretty much all words change meaning over time. Often, we're using the same word in a conversation with another person, but we mean something totally different. Discipleship is one of those words that means different things to different people. And there's a few reasons that I prefer an alternate translation of the Greek word, which is mathetes, or the Hebrew word talmid.
One is because I think it's a better translation of the original language. So a number of Greek scholars, who are much more intelligent than I am, would all argue that, this Hebrew talmid, or Greek mathetes, which is the word that is translated “disciple” in most English translations of the Bible, can be translated as disciple, or as follower, or as student.
The word most literally means disciple, learner, but we don't translate it that way because the ancient near Eastern model of education was so vastly different from the modern Western model of education. A number of scholars think that our English word “apprentice” is the best kind of analog we have to the original language because it taps into a model of learning that is relational.
You can't apprentice under a book, you can't apprentice through an online course; you have to apprentice under a master. He has to or she has to accept you, and you have to be with them. I'm sure you did that after you completed your degree–you have your advisor or whatever. The language used in psychology is a relational process. It's holistic.
In the ancient world, apprenticeship isn't about head knowledge, it's about skill. It's about what we would call character–who you are as a person. It's a long process. It's not necessarily linear. You may follow some kind of curriculum, but it's not like working through the chapters in a textbook. It's this kind of iterative process. It's very unique to the learner, beginning where they began and leading them forward.
So one reason I call it apprenticeship is, I think that along with a lot of other people, that's the best English word we have for what Jesus means by if anyone would be my mathetes–my disciple, my apprentice.
The other reason I use it is because I think a lot of people grossly misunderstand what discipleship to Jesus is. We take this ancient concept, we tear it out of its historical context, and we import into it modern day meanings. They may be really good things, and I name in the book a few of what I think are common misconceptions. Maybe that's too strong of a language.
A lot of people, by “discipleship”, mean one-on-one mentorship, where a younger Christian would meet with an older Christian on a weekly basis. Beautiful thing. But I don't call that discipleship, I would call that mentorship, which is a good and necessary thing.
Some people mean in-depth, inductive Bible study, where you get together with that mentor or group of people and you do in-depth biblical research. Somebody criticized the vicar of our church recently saying, why is our church so weak on discipleship? And when he began to press them saying, what do you want more of? What is it you feel that we're not doing? And they basically said we don't have small group Bible studies. There aren't in-depth, small group studies. So in their mind, small group Bible studies and discipleship were synonyms.
And then for other people, discipleship is like leadership development. So Jesus had the 12, he's raising up 12, who are you raising up? And you get the Amway model of discipleship. Those are all good things that all have a good and necessary place in spiritual life. But I don't think that's what Jesus means when he says, “come and be my disciple”.
Discipleship was a part of Jesus' world. It was the pinnacle of the first century Jewish educational system, which began with our equivalent of elementary school, where you would study the Torah off the side of the synagogue, and then most people would finish their education by about 12 or 13.
Then they would apprentice in the family business or help run the family farm. A small number of people would go on to a second level of education called the house of learning, where they would study the entirety of the Hebrew Bible, or what we call the Old Testament, under a scholar or a scribe or a rabbi. And that was very prestigious.
It was sadly for men only in that patriarchal culture. And it would normally end by about 15 or 16 years old, but then only the best of the best. So this would be our equivalent of people that get into Harvard on a full ride scholarship. Only the best of the best would qualify to become a talmid or a disciple or an apprentice of a rabbi.
Rabbis were like the rock stars of first century Jewish culture. Very hard for us to imagine. We think of pastors as nerdy or whatever, but man, rabbis were all that back in the day. Rabbis would regularly take a small coterie of disciples of apprentices, maybe two or three, maybe six, maybe 12, maybe 70. They would have followers that would literally follow them around.
It was not like you would attend class Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and you would apprentice under them. Apprenticeship in that culture essentially meant you had three goals. If you made it into an apprenticeship program under a rabbi, your first goal was to be with him. You'd leave your family, you'd leave your friends, you'd leave your job, and you would literally follow. It wasn't a metaphor–you would literally follow your rabbi around.
Your second goal was to become like him. You wanted to be formed into the kind of person who was like your master. So this is 2000 years before radical individualism. That's not how people are thinking. That's not the highest value in that culture. You wanted to literally talk and adopt the mannerisms of not the theology and ethics, but the behavioral ways of being of your master, because you saw them as this great luminary, not of mind, but of life and heart. You wanted to embody something of what they embody.
And then third, your goal was to eventually do what they did. You don't call it apprenticeship in psychology, but if you're training under an advisor or whatever, I know there's a period there where you have somebody watching you and watching recordings of your sessions. What's the name for that?
Alison Cook: It's exactly like what you're saying. It's your trainer. It's your thesis advisor. There are all sorts of names for it, but they're exact. And it's terrifying. They're watching you to see if you are ready and then they're going to entrust you. I think about those early years after going through years of training when I saw my first clients, and they're watching your every move and it's terrifying. Oh my.
John Mark Comer: You're recording yourself. I've read about that. The end goal of that process is not for you to be able to read a psychology book off Amazon and know the definitions to terms. The end goal is for you to become a psychologist, for you to become a master, for you to be able to sit with someone and participate in the healing of their soul.
In the same way, an apprentice to a rabbi's goal was to become a rabbi, and rabbis were not necessarily full time vocational jobs in that day. Most rabbis were bi-vocational; most of them would farm or run a business, and then in the off season or in free time, they would travel around from synagogue to synagogue and teach.
If you take this, that's what discipleship is. Period. Full stop. And then if you translate that, if you flip that around and translate that into what does it mean to apprentice under or disciple after Jesus in our world today? It's to essentially organize your life around those three same driving goals.
Whatever your job is, whatever your daily responsibilities are, your three organizing principles are to be with Jesus, to become like him, to be formed into a person who is on the inside, not in your behavior, but on your literal inner woman or man, has taken on the shape to mirror the properties of the inner life of Christ. And then to do as he did, to begin to live as he did, even vocationally in the way that we go about our business to live as Jesus would live if he were us. So that's my basic take.
Alison Cook: It's so good. It begs the question for me as I was reading, I'm going to launch into some of these overlaps. In the book, and again, it's not a critical book, you do a really good job of naming, you're a namer of things, you're not criticizing, you're not trying to shame, you're saying, hey, here’s reality as I see it. I think you do a really good job of that.
But you talk about how some of these “one and done” models of, “I'm saved, and I'm good to go” are in many ways, part of the problem of folks leaving. Because first of all, it's not realistic. It's not how we actually change or grow. You're casting this vision of this model, of a process. It takes a long time. It requires skills.
You talk about the intersection between, it’s not willpower, but we do have some responsibility, and putting ourselves in the position to work synergistically with God's grace, through becoming an apprentice. I thought a lot about my process of becoming a psychologist. It was years, and then again, once you graduate and you're launched…
John Mark Comer: You're still beginning, and you never stop learning. You never want to stop growing.
Alison Cook: You're constantly learning. So I loved that. We have this whole culture of therapy that has developed, this whole world of psychology that has trickled down and become so mainstream, where you can, and I'm not saying this is right or wrong of an apprenticeship model, you can go weekly to meet with your therapist.
You're getting someone attuning to you. You're attuning to those processes of, how do I regulate my emotions? How do I learn to recognize when my nervous system is moving into fight or flight? And it actually makes sense. You're actually getting some of these skills that allow you to do some of these things. There's this practicing of becoming healthier, and that person is attuning it to your uniqueness.
Maybe you've had some trauma. That's why this is hard for me. You're getting all this attunement over here and all this equipping. This is me armchair experting here, but I wonder if a little bit of what happens is church becomes I don't know. I'm not getting that kind of depth of formation there.
I'm getting told to read the Bible more. I'm getting told to pray more, but I can't really do those things because when I go to pray, my mind is racing. Or when I go to read the Bible, my nervous system is still jacked up. But over here, I'm actually learning some of these skills. And I think it's subconscious. I don't think it's happening consciously, but it got me to think, there's this therapized world, and you talk about it in the book, that I think about being part of that world. This is not the end. I think therapy should be in the service of spiritual formation.
I want to hear your thoughts on that, but I do wonder if, because we're getting some of that deep tissue formation in that world, it is setting up a little bit of disillusionment with some of these less robust, less holistic spiritual practices that you're speaking about in your book. I guess that was a whole lot I threw out there. I'm curious how you might respond to that.
John Mark Comer: Yeah. I think you're wrestling with great questions. A vantage point I have come to with a gentle but very firm conviction is that we need to adopt a holistic or whole person approach toward discipleship/spiritual formation/sanctification. There's lots of overlap between those three terms.
This is an oversimplification, but the tragic split between discipleship, or what older generations called sanctification, and the therapeutic world, is devastating for both sides. So there's great disillusionment that we're really in touch with as people that grew up in the church from people that grew up in the evangelical model of discipleship and found it did not produce deep healing and significant levels of spiritual maturity.
But what is fascinating, and I'm sure you see this more than me, but man I am seeing it start to explode, as therapy has gone mainstream over let's call it 10 years. Philip Reif writes about the shift from religious man to psychological man, forgive his male-centric language.
He's writing that in the sixties. His famous line, “Religious man was born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased” is in his book, Triumph of the Therapeutic, about the impact of Freud on Western culture. So obviously this is, at some level, 100 plus years old, this development into a therapeutic culture. But now the TikTok-ification of therapy is actually producing radical disillusionment from Gen Z over the limitations of therapy without God to actually heal the soul.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
John Mark Comer: A female thinker I'm following very closely right now is Freya India. She has a phenomenal Substack. She had an article recently, “Our new religion isn't enough”, that is basically this scathing indictment, not so much of therapy, but of therapy as a new secular quasi-religion without God.
It's interesting, if you separate these two things, if you separate, for example, therapy from Christian discipleship. As a Christian, if you participate in church, and that's one sphere of your life, then therapy is another more secular sphere of your life.
There's so much good about therapy. This comes with the assumption that I, and most of your listeners are fans of therapy. I’ve been in therapy for 14 years, I’m a big fan. But regarding secular therapy, many psychologists have told me, we're taught in school that therapy is to be objective. We're not to have a worldview. Yet that is totally unrealistic.
You cannot give therapy without some level of worldview, some transcendent sense of good and evil. So therapy apart from God is radically individualistic. It's not communal. At some level, it's the professionalization of community. People often confess things to their therapist they would never in a million years say to their family or friends or community.
So it enables this projection, often, of the false self to those people, because we don't actually have to come out of hiding with people where we have accountability and people who see us outside of this context, people who want to attune to us, but also call us on our crap because we're doing life together.
Secondly, it can be ultimately narcissistic. I'm not talking about good Christian therapy, I'm talking about TikTok kind of therapy–some of the new slogans like, “Is this serving you?”. In a secular, pluralistic culture, often happiness or subjective emotional well-being becomes the litmus test of ethical decision making. Do you stay in a marriage or not? Is this serving me? Do I continue to ______? I don't know. Is this serving me? Is it helping me or hindering me?
And then third, it has no transcendent source of moral authority. So I read, I won't name it, but I read a very interesting recent secular book that has some really good things. I was very happy to incorporate some of their therapeutic thoughts, but man, never in a million years would I still be married to my wife if I were to follow that worldview.
There's all this disillusionment, and at some level, naming your wound is different than healing your wound. I still think modern therapy does a way better job at identifying what's wrong than it does at healing the deep parts of the soul. And the good versions of it do a really good job.
But on the Christian discipleship side, we all have a model of discipleship, and the Jesus model is holistic. I think you get all of what you get in therapy and more, but the evangelical model of discipleship that I grew up with is so wildly deficient. It's enlightenment based, it's so Cartesian, it's so head-based, in science language, it's explicit knowledge based, not implicit knowledge.
It doesn't attend to wounding, it has no concepts for trauma and attachment, it's not a super relational process necessarily, unless you get a one on one mentor, it's often one to many, not one on one, it's this very linear process, and it is head up, and it does some aspects really good, so it's not all bad.
It tends to produce, it tends to be most impactful early in the spiritual journey, when your mental maps to reality are so screwed up by the world that remapping through learning Scripture, hearing good sermons, hearing biblical truth, remapping your mental imagination to what's good and true and beautiful produces a significant effect on you, which is why new Christians tend to just, I think by the intuition of the Spirit, consume Scripture and podcasts and books and sermons. It's like they're eating it up.
I think that's the Spirit of God saying, “Your mental maps to reality, your explicit knowledge is so wildly off base that as you refill your mind with truth, your body is going to begin to naturally realign to Jesus' vision of human flourishing”. The problem is, the moment we reach a stage in our discipleship where the problem is no longer that we don't know what Scripture teaches, or we don't want what Scripture teaches.
It's that we cannot get our body, our heart, our will, or our desire to fall in step, the automatic responses of my body. The problems in my marriage are not most likely not going to be solved by a really good sermon on Ephesians chapter five. I know it, I've taught it, I know the Greek. The problem is not that I don’t know what the Greek means by “love your wives as you love your own flesh”.
It's my self-preservation instincts, whether you want to go through evolutionary psychology or the flesh or the narcissistic traits that run so deep in me that when I'm tired, in particular, when I've had a stressful day, the automatic responses that come out of my body toward my wife have yet to take on the inner life of Christ.
So I need something more than yet another good sermon through Ephesians five. I need a way to get this explicit knowledge, this truth, into the implicit knowledge of my body, which goes into all the work and the domain that you work in. Spiritual formation, and I'll end with this, is a newer phrase that started on the Catholic side of the aisle and spread into Protestantism several decades ago.
It has been gaining steam for a few decades. One way to think about what spiritual formation is, is the evangelical model of discipleship, updated with the best learnings of psychology from a Christian worldview. And that's how I think about it. Or you could say it's a whole-person model of discipleship.
You look at spiritual formation, it was mostly introduced to us, not by pastors and biblical scholars, but by psychologists, psychiatrists, spiritual directors, professors, and philosophers. Almost all the luminary voices come from that tradition. And I think they're absolutely updating what's missing in the evangelical world.
Alison Cook: It sounds like you're almost saying spiritual formation is that integrated space where psychology meets the spiritual. It's mental, emotional, spiritual, it's the whole being. It's the nervous system. It's not that one dimensional, pray your anxiety away thing.
There's a bunch of stuff you're saying. First of all, you're so aptly naming disillusionment everywhere. There's disillusionment with the limitations of what my church has offered me. I'm thinking of the listener. There's disillusionment with therapy. To your point, it's so isolated. It's so individualized. It is not an end in and of itself.
John Mark Comer: My therapist said to me recently, people come to me and they think that I will be able to stop their pain. They think I will offer solutions and an end to their pain. And then what you learn is there is no escaping pain. That's actually what growth is.
Alison Cook: Yeah. These are all spokes on the wheel. It's another tool to help you toward the end of what you lay in the book, which is abiding with Jesus, who is the true lover of our soul, who is the true one with whom there is no disappointment or disillusionment. I get what you're saying.
There's lots of room for disillusionment on all sides with all of these fixes. I want to get to practicing the presence. You quote brother Lawrence, and when you're describing this, there's this integrated, don't be fooled into thinking, oh, I'm going to have to go pray my anxiety away.
It's not simplistic. It's an integrated, holistic, whole being, bringing everything into the presence of God. It occurred to me, John Mark, as I was reading, it's so beautifully written, so graceful, so loving, you want to melt into it. I started thinking about the mechanisms by which we can practice the presence of God.
You lay out the practices that we need to do. They're not legalistic, but these are the things we need to do. We need to be alone with God. We need to be in prayer. We need to be in Sabbath. There are some of these really ancient practices that are going to facilitate this. I started thinking, let's take prayer for an example, or when you talk about being with Jesus, I started thinking about where a psychologist comes in, or a therapist comes in.
You talk about every morning going into your room and sitting in silence. As an introvert, you love that. You talk about how your friend likes to go out and walk in the park because they’re an extrovert. I need some external stimuli. There's not a one size fits all. But let's say I'm doing that, and my mind is racing and I can't stop.
There's so much pain that I can't be alone because what's happening actually is I've got some trauma that I've never dealt with. And what's happening when I'm sitting alone is, and this is the kind of thing my listeners will come to me with, that doesn't work for me. It's horrible. I have to leave and then I feel bad.
And then I feel shame because I'm not able to do this and I can't sit with God. And I'm a bad Christian and all this shame fills me. What I'll say is, that sounds to me like your body is doing its job. There's a cue there. This is painful and it's not God. There's shame there. It's that, gosh, maybe I need to, in order to abide with Christ, my nervous system isn't letting me sit in silence.
This is where a good Christian therapist can come in and facilitate that process and help get to the root, like a surgeon, get to the root of what's going on here. In psychology, we talk about bottom up approaches to healing versus top down.
John Mark Comer: Explain that to me.
Alison Cook: Top down–this is also true in psychology, it's true in the church–top down is, we're going to look at cognition. We're going to look at insight. We're going to examine thoughts for someone who has trauma living in their body. It's not helpful. Bottom up approach is, we're going to start with the body.
How do we learn to breathe? And I'll tell you in my own life, learning to attune to my body, my emotional state, was a portal to God's presence. Because I lived in my mind. I can evaporate into my mind and completely disassociate from my body and live there for days and years. And I learned to come into my body and those nervous system interventions that I learned as a psychologist. Suddenly, even now to this day, my best portal to connection with God is my posture.
John Mark Comer: Interesting.
Alison Cook: I'll start bottom up, instead of starting, and this might sound heretical, but instead of starting with going to God, because then I go to my mind and I start thinking about God. I go to my body.
I take that breath, and suddenly, there's God–because God's meeting me right there where I need to be met. It's actually out of my mind, in my body. And that's where I began to be able to practice the present. So what I'm saying is, I think there are different ways. The nuances of the human soul are so different and so intricate.
A good Christian therapist can come in and go, maybe let's start with the body. Maybe let's start with some grounding so you can feel what it is to be in your body, in a calm nervous system. And that might be the path to that experience of God's presence that has been so elusive to you.
And that's how I was thinking as I was reading about this. I was like, this is where some of these therapeutic interventions that we’re trained in dovetail so nicely into this overall goal, but it's still not the end. It’s, oh my gosh, as I begin to attune to my nervous system, to these emotional states, suddenly there, I find God.
I'm sad right now, and I'm with God. Oh, I'm tense. What's that about? And that becomes that prayerful practicing the present. So I'm curious how that lands on you, but that's where I started to see where my work dovetails with this goal that you're laying out, which is practicing that constant presence of Jesus.
It's not giving up on it because man, I can't do it. It's wrestling for how it works for my unique design and my unique history. And again, this is where that individualistic side of me, I was so trained to think about individuals, where if I'm thinking of someone, I'm always going through that lens of, okay, you've got this trauma history. You're disappearing into your mind as an escape hatch. Let's bring you into your body. And that might be where you find God.
John Mark Comer: Yeah. I could not agree more. We're saying the same thing from different angles. The modern mind likes to categorize the human person. So you have your spiritual life and then you have your mental life and then your emotional life and your relational life and your physical life, but nowhere do we experience life in categories like that other than in chapters in a book or points in a sermon.
I'm not right now experiencing my mental life or my physical life or my relational life. I'm experiencing life. Now, I think if you define mind as directed attention, which I find is a compelling understanding of what the mind is, then I think we can bring our direct attention to different aspects of our whole self.
So we can think about the tightness in our chest, or we can think about anxieties that are coming up for us about tomorrow. We can think about another person that we're present to and we can focus our attention on these different aspects of our whole person, but it's all us.
Many people don't even realize that in Hebrew there is no word for spiritual. If you get out a concordance or go to Bible Gateway or Bible Hub and look up the word spiritual, first off, you won't even read it, really, until the writings of Paul. It's not anywhere in the first three quarters of the Bible.
And then in the New Testament, it doesn't mean what most people think it means. It doesn't mean immaterial. It's a relational word. It means in relationship with or in attunement with the spirit of God or with other spirits. You can be spiritual with other spirits besides the Holy Spirit.
And Jesus barely uses the word at all. The quip is, if you were to ask Jesus how his spiritual life was, he would probably look at you really confused and be like, my spiritual life…you mean my life?
Alison Cook: It’s not bifurcated.
John Mark Comer: Yeah, I think part of the problem is that we separate all these things. So we think of beginning and breathing and letting pain come up versus mental prayer versus church. There are different aspects for sure, but we think of them as different categories and that's wildly unhelpful.
This is where a good therapist or pastor or spiritual director is so helpful for knowing what your next step is, or what your doorway into God is. We don't all start from the same place. And what's easy for one is impossible for another. I write a bunch about the practices for a number of different reasons. There's no official list of the practices in the New Testament.
Some people say there's seven, some talk about nine, some people talk about 70 of them. You could argue that there are really two practices. Going into the quiet to be alone with God, and deep relational connection and community. Everything else–prayer, Scripture, worship, Eucharist, gratitude, all of it happens in these two buckets of what you could call the quiet or the deep relational connection.
This is where I think you and I would be on the very same page. The goal of both of those is attunement in modern language. At some level, it's the healing of our attachment filters and our emotional memory that blocks us from trusting love. And I think, the goal of all the practices is attunement to God and to one another and how you get to that attunement.
And you would understand better than I, the many things that often block our capacity to attune, not to God and prayer, but to one another. I'll watch that with certain people. You begin to connect with the person, and then something is said. It happened to me a few days ago, and I could see this person's brain went offline.
They went straight into anxiety mode, and they were no longer emotionally connecting with me. They were marshaling an intellectual defense to try to tamp down their anxiety. It was visible. It was all over the person's face. And I'm sure that's because I mishandled the conversation. But you saw that relational connector; it's almost like there was a switch that turned off, and they went into a different thing.
I think both of those are really tricky for people, and that's where the healing of the soul is incredibly important. And both of those spaces of solitude and community are often more diagnostic than therapeutic. Often they reveal what's wounded or broken more than they heal it, and again, they do both.
Sometimes, if you go into solitude or you get into a deep relationship and all this crap comes up, wounding comes up and fear comes up and shame comes up, that's a gift in its own right. All of that's in you. It's sabotaging your life, your formation into a person of love. Let it come up. And the hope is to get to contemplative spaces where we're experiencing the love of God in prayer and safe, deep, trusting relationships where we're experiencing the love of God through another person's love.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I love that. I think that is where hyperindividualism leads us nowhere good. We do have individual differences. So toward this end of being formed, I love how you talk about in the book, we are all being formed. We are all being formed by something or someone into someone. We are all being formed.
So let's be real clear. We want to be formed by Jesus. And there are a lot of individual differences about how that might happen. One of the things I really appreciated, John Mark, is that you lay out nine practices in the book. Where you and I first met is, you had me on your podcast because you were doing a series on fasting.
You talk about that as a practice. Jesus fasted. And you said, I want a mental health professional to talk about the nuances of fasting for particular groups of people, especially people who have dealt with eating disorders, especially people who have dealt with disembodiment. What you're doing there is so beautiful.
You're saying, and I want people to know, as you read this book, it's not all or nothing. Bring your individual story to the table. If sitting in silence stirs up your anxiety, that's a cue. Don't beat yourself up for that. Don't throw the baby out with the bath. Oh, what is that about? Get some help, seek support, talk to somebody about it.
If your church is fasting and for you, that's dangerous ground, that's a cue. That's another invitation for healing. So I like how you're saying that these practices aren't necessarily prescriptive. They're going to reveal, in a non shaming way, different areas of our souls that might need more attention, more healing.
And a Christian therapist could be helpful in that, a spiritual director, speaking honestly about that. I don't think we have to throw out this emphasis that psychology has brought to us, of the individual nuances of our souls and our stories that matter to God, and also these universal practices that are so important.
We don't have to throw out one for the other. And that's where I really enjoyed reading your book and thinking about how we all are doing our jobs. You're helping remind us of these practices that are so crucial to becoming like Jesus.
My work might be coming in and helping the individual figure out how to tune up or how to heal a specific area in a specific way that this practice is revealing. It brings some heartache or brings some pain or brings some specific issues in a non shaming way.
John Mark Comer: Yes. Which is why for many people, I'm going to hesitate to say this, because they're not mutually exclusive, but the practices are not the place to start, with spiritual formation or discipleship. Relationships are; healing is. This is a clumsy analogy, but if you were to shrink your view of the person down a bit more to the body, I had a great chat with my son last night who's 15 years old, a sophomore in high school, who's an artist.
He's a brilliant artist, and wildly out of shape. Doesn't play sports at all, has not done any working out, and he draws for hours a day and it's actually beginning to deform his body a little bit. He's maturing, he's growing, so he's on this new kick. He wants to start exercising.
He started martial arts. And he was chatting about joining the cross country team at school, running and getting cardio. And it was all a delight to my heart to hear that he's beginning to realize, I have to take my body seriously. I can't sit around and draw.
I'm a whole person. Let's say you are my son, Moses, or you're whoever, and you decide you want to start running cross country or you want to run a half marathon. There is one aspect of that which is discipline, skills, training, effort, hard work, building muscle, building capacities that you don't have through repetitive training in community.
But if Moses has a broken leg, or stage four cancer, thankfully he doesn't have either, or a sprained ankle, then you don't start with running sprints. You don't start with, “drop down and give me 400 pushups”. You start with surgery, or healing, or chemotherapy. Now, these things are not mutually exclusive.
You can do chemo and you're probably not going to be running five miles a day, but you should go for a walk every day at the same time, take a micro step forward toward moving your body. And I think in a similar way, this is an oversimplification, but there are these practices that are, at some level, disciplines and skills by which we open our inner life to grow into people of love.
But often those practices are wildly ineffective if we're living with wounds beyond the normal cuts and scrapes of living through the world. The body self-heals minor wounds, but deep wounds need extra care. So if I nick my hand this afternoon and I bleed a little bit, I can wash it off and leave it alone and it'll heal by itself.
If I get in a car wreck, I'm not going to go home and take some ibuprofen. I'm gonna go to the hospital and have surgery because my body's not gonna heal by itself. It will die without help. And I think our whole person is that way. There are certain emotional wounds that we can heal from. Just give them some time and some healthy movement, and you'll be okay.
And then other wounds where, no, you need some relational attunement to help heal from this in order to not die, but to flourish and thrive. We all have our own starting point. And that's why for some people, the step isn't to go on a seven day solitude retreat and memorize half the book of Psalms. It's to start therapy. We can only do so much at a time,
Alison Cook: To look at those attachment wounds or look at the shame that keeps coming up that keeps you from experiencing God's love because you've never experienced love in your body. So how would you even know what that felt like? Yeah, that's so good. John Mark. I love that. I love that.
Start where there's a wound. Start there. That's a part of that formation. You're taking a brave step toward healing which will move you forward.
John Mark Comer: We don't heal ourselves. We do not, so that's where the therapeutic thing falls down and often people become wildly aware of their wounding and how they got messed up and how their current behavior is tied to their parents or whatever, but then they're not really that different five years later.
They're more self-aware. We cannot self-heal. And again, I have a holistic view of salvation, like I have a holistic view of discipleship. I think salvation is in part about the healing of the whole person, including the body and resurrection eventually. In solitude or in scripture, the real goal is not to control or mechanize or self-engineer our character formation.
It's to set our self before God and let him do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. And therapy often works that way. You can't fix yourself. The insight is wildly helpful, but it is not sufficient for deep healing and change. Woody Allen is a wildly self-aware person who's been in therapy twice a week for longer than I've been alive.
And if you know some of his marital, sexual history, it is shocking that he can walk around in public and be accepted. Self-awareness alone, insight, that's one of the myths of the therapeutic generation. We think that insight alone is enough to change. It's the myth of evangelical preaching and Gen Z TikTok therapy. If I know this thing, then I'll be okay.
But as you're saying, you can know how you're messed up. You can know how you got messed up. And still, what's the Thomas Keating line who was doing work in this vein long before my time? The issues are in the tissues. There is this deep sin in all of us, if you want to call it that. Brokenness, wounding, if that's more palatable language, is in all of us. All of us need to be healed and saved and formed.
Alison Cook: Are you familiar with the Warren Kinghorn out of Duke?
John Mark Comer: No, I'm not.
Alison Cook: You'd love his book, Wayfaring. It's a brilliant book. We had him on the podcast a few weeks ago, but he talks about the seven pillars of mental health flourishing in the mental health community: resilience, emotional regulation, self awareness, all these things. They're great. These are good things.
And they're not ends in and of themselves. He uses Aristotle to talk about actual human flourishing. Even if you are very self-aware, you can regulate your emotions, all of these things, you're still not in the realm of transformation.
John Mark Comer: Can I try an idea on you, Alison? And I want you to genuinely disagree with me if you don’t agree. I'm working a lot of this stuff out. I've been essentially trying to read my way into a Master's degree in psychology. And I think I might know enough only to cause damage at this point. But I've been thinking about Pete Scazzaro, who has done so much good work on this over the years about the link between emotional health and spiritual maturity.
I have been defining emotional maturity and spiritual maturity with the huge caveat that these are not separate categories. We're whole people. The emotional category, emotional health or emotional maturity, I think of as two essential skills. One, it's the capacity to be aware of what you're feeling, of your internal state, to name and notice what's coming up in your body and your heart and ideally even notice maybe where it comes from.
You know what parts of your past, your story, your family of origin, your experience is tied to and how that's mapping onto your present experience.
And then secondly, to not be run by those feelings, to receive them hospitably, to welcome them, to learn from them. But to know they're not inerrant truth. They’re messages, they’re messengers, and they have their own bias. In psychology that would be called emotional regulation, and I think in the New Testament that's called self-control, and I think it's the same.
I think it's the same idea. The ability to have these feelings, to be in touch with them, to notice them, and name them, and listen to them, and even welcome them without letting them necessarily dictate your behavior. Spiritual maturity I would define as the ability to know, and the ability and willingness to know and do the will of God. So it's the ability and the willingness. So you want to do the will of God, and you actually have the ability to know and do the will of God.
Some people don't know what God's will is for sexuality or money or whatever. They're still learning, hence the role of Bible study and sermons. And then the will of God often gets more complex as you age. And then there's the ability. Often I know what God's will is for me as a husband, but then I often don't have the ability, at least not consistently, to follow through on God's will. And that's where I think these two things rise together.
You can only become so spiritually mature if you are emotionally immature. If you lack the capacity to be with your feelings, to know where they come from, to not let them run you, then no matter how well you know the commands of Jesus in the New Testament, you're not going to be able to consistently obey them because you don't have the emotional capacity.
Or on the flip side, I know some people that are quite emotionally sophisticated and have good interpersonal relationships, but frankly, they are living by their own source of moral authority. They're doing their own thing. They're not interested in obeying the teachings of Jesus about marriage or money or you fill in the blank.
For me, I'm wanting to bring these two things together, believing that they're not actually separate categories. They're actually two aspects of becoming people of love in Christ. So how does that hit you? Would you push back on that or interact with that?
Alison Cook: You're speaking right to my playbook. In I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, which is my latest book. I lay out this framework of “name, frame, brave”. Naming emotions, to your point, is that emotional self-awareness, emotional framing. The second step is the least glamorous. It’s that process where those two things come together.
If you are angry, for example, and you're aware of it, “I'm angry, mad at my partner, I'm mad at my kids. That framing step is the liminal place, it's the place in between, where you've named something, but you don't know yet the third thing, which is braving–what am I going to do with it?
Framing is that area for spiritual discernment, knowing the will of God, discerning the emotion and its role. It could be a pause. That pause of discernment, of deeper reflection,might lead you to “You know what? I'm angry for a reason”. And part of emotional intelligence isn't just knowing the emotion, it's actually speaking constructively when necessary. So the anger might be, I need to have a hard conversation with this person because I don't like what's happening here. I'm not going to lash out at them, but this anger is here for a reason.
Part of that framing might be, I'm angry because I'm being a jerk and I'm being selfish. And I actually need to surrender that anger to God. This person isn't doing anything wrong and I'm being petty. So that framing, that discernment, is where I went when you said that it's where those two connect.
We're looking at the emotions while also discerning with God's spirit what to do on behalf of that emotion. The same emotion or the same set of circumstances could lead to a very different framing. What is the will of God, to your point? Is God inviting me to be brave here and actually speak up on behalf in a healthy way?
John Mark Comer: What do I do with this anger? What is it moving my body to do? And is that in line? Yeah, you used a word earlier that I really love. You used the word integrated. I like to say I take an integrated approach to discipleship. And what I mean by that is, for me, my primary sense of self is as an apprentice of Jesus.
My primary sense of the meaning and purpose of life is that I am following Jesus and apprenticing under Him into becoming a person, ultimately, of love over a lifetime and beyond. And for me, Jesus’, commands and teachings that come to us through the four Gospels, and the collection of writings that have grown up around them that we call the New Testament, for me, frames my worldview, my telos, my sense of what's good and beautiful and true, and what's bad and ugly and untrue.
I'm not questioning what marriage is, or what gender is–I'm getting all of that from Jesus. But then, how do I obey the commands of Jesus–be anxious for nothing, do not worry about tomorrow, honor others above yourselves, do not be afraid–these are the commands of Jesus. I am more than happy, because I am a whole person, to take a whole person integrated approach toward becoming the kind of person who can consistently obey the commands of Jesus.
So, do not worry. Great command. I cannot consistently obey that command based on insight and willpower. I'm very happy to go to church every Sunday to listen to sermons, to read scripture every day, to pray. I also do a cold plunge every single day. We have an infrared sauna. I'm on a number of supplements. I take L theanine. I've done the almond clinics, brain scans.
I'm on medication to lower my heart rate because I have a traumatized nervous system from a sudden infant death syndrome when I was three months old where I either died and resuscitated or was almost killed. Working with several clinical psychologists, they basically said that it permanently damaged my nervous system and put me into a kind of fight or flight, all the time.
So my whole body is in need of healing. I'm more than happy to take a whole body approach to discipleship, which is why I'm very happy reading the wisdom of therapists who are totally far from Jesus in their worldview. I'm adapting in attachment filters, sure. Because what I'm trying to say yes to is Jesus calling my life to become a person of love in him.
So that's where I think we have such an opportune moment here with the disillusionment in both the church and in the secular world, to bring back together two things that never should have been separated: discipleship to Jesus and the therapeutic healing and growth and development of the soul through relational connection.
All of it for me is ultimately about apprenticing under Jesus with my whole person.
Alison Cook: I love it. I need to let you go. Thank you for being here, and Practicing the Way is a fantastic, beautiful, holistic read. I can't recommend it more.
John Mark Comer: That's incredibly kind. So grateful for you, Alison, for the work you're doing. I know it must be hard to live inside the contours of the Western Protestant Church with the passions and insight and expertise that you have as a psychologist. And I want to say thank you for staying faithful.
We need pastors to learn about the therapeutic, and we need therapists to learn and stay rooted in biblical orthodoxy. Tragically, the people that are biblically orthodox are very far from this conversation, and the people that are psychologically sophisticated drift theologically. Thank you for holding that together.
I want to honor you and bless you and say, may your tribe increase, may your life be long, and may your podcast be well listened to. May the books be many and may the grace of God continue to be upon your life.
Alison Cook: Thanks. Thanks so much. It means a lot. Appreciate it.
We all face doubt, disappointment, and even disillusionment at times.
In today’s episode, I’m sharing with you my framework for cultivating a vibrant inner spirituality—one that doesn’t bypass or exile the hard parts of this faith journey.
Here’s what I cover:
1. The surprising secret to emotionally resilient faith
2. What is an inner family of parts?
3. Research on different faith orientations
4. The 5 languages (e.g. parts!) of faith
5. How to honor (& lead) each of these parts
Resources:
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- The Best of You Podcast question formI Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
- Episode 39: Boundaries for Your Soul—How to Navigate Your Overwhelming Thoughts & Feelings
- Psalm 86:11
- John 14
- Mark 9:24
- Episode 76: When Self-Help Isn’t Enough—Finding the Faith & Strength to Move Forward after Loss & Heartache With Granger Smith
- Episode 119 with Dr. Jemar Tisby
If you liked this, you’ll love:
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Go to AquaTru.com and enter code BESTOFYOU at checkout to get 20% OFF any AquaTru purifier!
- Get 40% off your first order of Sundays. Go to SundaysForDogs.com/BESTOFYOU or use code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
- 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!
- 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 thrilled you're here today. I'm going to share with you a framework I've been working on for what I think it means to have an authentic, psychologically mature, emotionally resilient faith. A faith that honors what's hard about this journey of trusting God while also remaining deeply human.
One of the things I've noticed over the past two years of podcasting is that there's always a strong response to episodes that touch on the harder aspects of faith, maybe those times when it feels like you're in a dark night of the soul, or when you feel like your spirit is broken, or whenever I talk about spiritual bypassing, you all really respond to that.
It really resonates with you. Most of us are looking for ways to speak about our faith more authentically, to honor what's hard about faith, even as we want to wrestle for our faith. We want to be authentic and we want to be honest about this faith journey that we're on. So in today's episode, I want to lay out for you this framework that I've been working on for years.
It's a combination of the work I've done in internal family systems, IFS therapy, which is the topic of my book with Kimberly Miller, Boundaries For Your Soul, combined with decades of research from the field of the psychology of religion that looks at different orientations to faith, different ways that people orient to their religious life.
This is the dissertation research I mentioned in Episode 119 with Dr. Jemar Tisby that has profoundly impacted the way that I view religion and this journey of faith that matters so much to so many of us. It really gets at the heart of what I do, which is to bring together the wisdom of psychology with the deep desire so many of us have to practice our faith in Jesus in every aspect of our lives.
In today's episode, I want to lay out for you some of the framework that I'm developing on that topic. As always, I would love to hear from you. Any comments that you have, questions that you have, insights, ideas about what resonated with you or where you would like to learn more.
If you have questions about today's episode or any episode in this series, please leave them on The Best of You Podcast question form. You can find the link to that doc in the show notes for this episode. I'll also link to it in this Friday's email. I send an email out every Friday morning, and you can sign up for that email at dralisoncook.com. I often provide bonus resources or announcements in that email.
That's where you can find a link to that question doc. We're also going to be sending out a survey related to upcoming episodes that you guys want me to have. So please be sure to subscribe to that email list again, at dralisoncook.com.Without further ado, let's dive into the five parts of faith, my framework for how to develop a psychologically mature, emotionally resilient faith.
In this journey of faith, where we're trying to find a really authentic spirituality, an authentic expression of our faith in God, I see two obstacles. On the one side, I see the over-spiritualizing, the spiritual bypassing, the reductive voices that want to keep faith small.
These voices don't want to honor the legitimate complexity of working out our faith with fear and trembling; these voices shame and blame those who are trying to hang onto their faith through identifying and naming hard challenges.
Maybe you're struggling with doubt or uncertainty or confusion, or maybe you know you love God, but you still feel angry or hurt or sad or scared. Maybe you're dealing with anxiety or depression, even as God is for you. You're wanting to face these hard challenges, yet these voices can sometimes try to shut you down with platitudes or quick fixes.
They sound a little bit like this. “Just have faith. Let go and let God. Don't think about the hard things. You just have to shut down the questions, the doubt, the hurts.”
It's almost like these voices want you to put your fingers in your ears and cover your eyes and plow through hard things without really looking at it or without really naming it. It might work for a little while, but over time you find yourself running out of gas and maybe even doubting more.
But there's another side, another chorus of voices I see on the other side that can also be problematic. Folks on this side may play into the doubt, play into the uncertainty, and want to move you towards cynicism, toward skepticism, and maybe even toward leaving your faith all together.
Folks on this side might be using that voice to tempt you to walk away from faith altogether. “They're all hypocrites. There's nothing good there. Burn the house down and leave while you can. There's no use fighting for your faith. Just walk away.”
That also leads us to nowhere good. We're trying to fight for a more authentic faith without bypassing our feelings, without shoving our questions and our uncertainties and our disappointments aside, while also not being lured away to leave it altogether.
I see so many of us trying to navigate that middle path, dare I call it the narrow way that Jesus spoke of, where we're trying to filter out those voices on one side that shame us for asking hard questions. They want us to put our head in the sand and not name what's hard that we see in the culture around us and the churches around us, even in our own souls.
It doesn't help us. We're also trying to filter out those voices on the other side that lure us to cynicism, to negativity, and to eventually leaving faith altogether. We're trying to find that middle path of what it means to follow Jesus. While Jesus tells us we'll recognize his voice, sometimes his voice can get lost in the din of voices all around us.
I want to offer you another way today, what I believe is a psychologically complex, emotionally resilient, authentic faith. One that honors the fact that we all have different parts of us when it comes to the path of following Jesus. I don't think that path looks like one right set of behaviors, one right set of feelings, one right way to think.
I think it means cultivating your own symphony of faith inside your own soul. That symphony contains many parts, each one no less important than the other. As you cultivate a relationship with each one of those parts, you discover the joy of harmony. As I talk about in the faith chapter of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, harmony doesn't mean we don't have different parts.
I want to take you through five common faith parts of that symphony, and how cultivating a relationship with each one of those parts can lead you to a more vibrant, more beautiful, more wholehearted, more emotionally resilient faith over the long haul.
First of all, I want to give you a very quick overview of what I mean by internal family. If you want to learn more, you want to go deeper into this model. You can check out my book, Boundaries For Your Soul. I wrote it with Kimberly Miller. Or you can go check out Episode 39. I did a a five part series on Boundaries For Your Soul: how to navigate your overwhelming thoughts and feelings, which gives you an overview of internal family systems.
For today's purpose, all I really want you to know is that this internal family systems model posits that we all have an internal family of parts that is our job to parent. We are not only one thing; there are different parts of us, and we are multifaceted. That there are different parts of who you are is not a new idea–this has been around for centuries.
We see evidence of it in the Bible, especially with King David and the way he talks in the Psalms. He prays for an undivided heart in Psalm 86:11, and he talks about how he has calmed and quieted his heart like a weaned child within him. There's a sense in which David is attuning to different facets of his soul and learning to calm the different parts of himself.
We see the apostle Paul talking about different parts of himself when he names the inner tension between the things he wants to do and the things he's actually doing. Bessel van der Kolk talks about how every major school of psychology has acknowledged the mosaic nature of the human soul. You're created with different parts of your soul; you are multifaceted.
You might notice that a part of you wants to stay home tonight, whereas another part of you wants to go out and meet up with your friends. These two parts of you are in conflict and part of your job, as you grow in psychological maturity and emotional health, is learning to honor the competing parts and not sideline either one, but make decisions based on the good of the whole.
This is what we do in families. Families are composed of different parts, different individuals, and each individual sometimes has competing ideas about what to eat for dinner, about what to do for the weekend. The goal in a family is to try to negotiate between different parts of the family for the good of the whole.
Sometimes, different family members have to compromise or sacrifice for the good of the whole. It's the same inside your own soul. Different parts of you have conflicting agendas at different times, and your job is to work through some of those inner tensions without shaming yourself, without exiling parts of yourself, but making decisions for the good of all of you.
This is what it means at its most simplest level to be comprised of different parts. It's your job to lead that inner family wisely in partnership with God's Spirit. When it comes to faith, what I want you to think about today is a cluster of parts inside your soul that relates specifically to spirituality and to God and to how you practice your faith.
I want to say up top, these different ways of orienting to faith, what I'm calling five parts of faith, can be applied to different types of religious belief, right? And so for the purpose of what I am trying to do here I want to focus on orthodox Christian belief and what I mean by Orthodox Christian belief — I go back to the creed, a belief in the triune God as revealed through the Bible: God, the father; God, the son made known through the person of Jesus Christ; and the Holy Spirit who lives inside of us, as Jesus spoke of in John 14.
Orthodox Christian faith also posits that Jesus not only walked on the earth as the visible representation of who God is, but that he was crucified on the cross and rose again. That's such an important part of our Christian faith, that resurrection of Jesus. Through the power of Jesus conquering sin and conquering death, we also have new life as we seek to follow him.
This is the basic tenet of what I'm calling orthodox Christian faith. This is the core of what it means for us to be Christian. There's a lot of things about which reasonable people can reasonably disagree. We might even find ourselves in very different types of churches, very different denominations, very different Christian camps, but in general, that's what so many of us are coming around.
Imagine that for a minute with me at the center of the seat of your soul, that core belief. But around that table are these different faith parts–different parts of you that orient to that faith in Jesus in different ways. That's what I want to focus on today. Not so much the core content of that belief, but those five parts of us that circle around that faith in different ways.
So again, if it's helpful to you to imagine that table of your soul, you've got that faith, you carry those beliefs and you hold them dear in your heart. But there's still different parts of you that relate to your faith in different ways. I developed these five parts out of decades of research in the psychology of religion, where psychologists studied different people and their different orientations to faith.
These five religious orientations are styles of faith and approaches to faith. What I am suggesting to you today is that we in fact contain all five of them, probably more, but for the sake of argument, we're going to reduce it to five–all five of these orientations inside our own souls. This is what I'm calling the five parts of faith.
As we learn to acknowledge these different parts and build relationships with these different parts and introduce each of these parts to God and to each other in, the more healthy and vibrant and mature and resilient our faith will be, the more we'll be able to relate in healthy ways with one another.
So here are the five faith parts. I'm going to give you the actual names that are used in the psychology of religion for the sake of academic rigor. That part of me wants to name them correctly. But I'm also gonna share with you my renaming of these parts in ways that I think is a little bit more honoring.
The first parts are called extrinsic parts, and these extrinsic parts of us really want to be socially acceptable. I like to think of them as the good upstanding Christian parts. These are the parts that are a little bit more concerned with how other people see us. They want to do the right thing, to fit in, more than they want to do the right thing to honor God.
Again, remember. From a parts perspective, from an IFS perspective, there's no shame in any of these. We're getting curious about the different parts, these extrinsic parts, these good upstanding Christian parts, the ones that want to be socially acceptable. We tend to see our faith as a means to achieve our goals or to obtain good standing or to look like a good person more than to really want it to honor God.
We see these parts scripturally when Jesus talks about the Pharisees. You're praying loudly in public, you're putting on a show publicly, but your soul is far from me. These are the parts of us that want to perform faith because that makes us feel like a good person. We feel like that makes us socially acceptable.
We feel like a good Christian, and they're not as connected to what it means to follow Jesus as we sometimes wish. Remember, I'm positing that we all have this part inside of us to some degree.
Back in Episode 76, I interviewed Granger Smith about his story of being what he called a cultural Christian. He wanted to appear like a good Christian man. He was a country music singer, and then he realized, oh my gosh, I'm doing all that and I don't actually have transformational knowledge of Jesus.
He was speaking to these extrinsic parts, the “I want to be a good upstanding person” part of us. Again, there's no shame. We want to honor and own and name these parts inside. I don't want those other people to think poorly of me. I want to look like a good Christian I can check a box. It makes me a good upstanding citizen. That's the voice of these parts, and at their best, these parts help us show up for church.
They help us show up for Bible studies. They help us show up for prayer meetings. They might even encourage us to do the right thing by our neighbor. Because I'm a good Christian, I should be kind to that person. So at their best, they can help us do the right thing in society, and that's not all bad, but at their worst, these parts are shallow, flat, and hollow, and at their very worst, they're self-righteous.
They lead us to do these things to make us feel superior to other people. They might judge other people who don't do these things, and they might be tallying up all the good Christian check marks and never pausing to spend time with God. These extrinsic parts of us, we all have to keep an eye on.
In the research, the balance to these extrinsic parts are what psychologists called intrinsic parts. These are the parts of us that genuinely want to connect to our faith deeply and sincerely. That relationship with Jesus really is the end, in and of itself. Those intrinsic parts of us are working every single day to try to integrate our beliefs into our lives.
We want to be moving toward these intrinsic parts of us, these parts of us that sincerely love God, that sincerely want to follow Jesus. These parts of us that are deeply connected to conscience, where we feel that prick of, oh, I did that overt religious action so that other people will think highly of me.
The truth is, I hated every minute of it. I was resenting those people that I was trying to serve. I only did it to try to get a check mark with that church community, or with that other person. This is the very deeply faithful part of us that longs to do right. This part of us doesn't always have all the answers, but it's deeply connected not only to the belief in Jesus, but a sincerity and a genuineness and an honesty.
These parts of us, we want to keep very close. They're closest to our true self. It's the part of us that is saying, oh, I think I did that because I felt guilty and not really because I was trying to honor God.
The truth is, if I was really trying to honor God, I might've set a healthy boundary there. These parts are the parts of us that say, you know what? I don't really want to go to church today. I'm checked out. I'm annoyed with what's going on at my church, but I'm going to go. But I'm also going to use that time to talk to God about what I'm really feeling right now while I'm sitting in church.
These are the truth-telling parts of us. They're the honest parts of us. They're the genuine parts of us. These are the parts of us we want to keep really close to us.
Closely related to the external parts are the fundamentalist or legalistic parts of us. Now, fundamentalism has been researched for decades in the psychology of religion. It's often thought of as a pejorative term. What I wanna posit is that we all have an inner fundamentalist. All that means is that these are parts of us that are strongly attached to binary thinking, right versus wrong, black versus white.
You're in or you're out. You're with God or you're against God. These parts of us want to reject nuance and complexity. They don't like uncertainty. They want to be certain. Here's the thing– at their best, these fundamentalist parts of us are leery of change. They're very loyal. They're very faithful. They want to do what's right.
At their worst, these parts of us get dogmatic. These parts of us think they have the corner on truth. They start to think that they're the arbitrators of truth instead of deferring in humility to Jesus. Sometimes, they can get myopic and don't see the whole truth. They can be cruel. They can prioritize dogma over love.
They can prioritize being right over relationship. It's really easy to point fingers at these parts out in the culture around us. But the truth is, the more you grow in understanding your own emotional landscape, the more you begin to realize, oh, I have those parts. I have those parts too. Again, these parts can be helpful.
I remember early on as a college student when I had a pretty radical experience of Jesus and on my college campus, there was a lot of excitement and there were a few of us that were really on fire and we were leading people to Jesus.
We had a little mini-revival on our campus during this time. My group of Christians was featured by one of the big publications at the time put out by R. C. Sproul about how there was a revival in the Ivy leagues. We were bringing people to Jesus. It was powerful. I loved that time and had a little inner fundamentalist that man, sometimes in private, with people I loved, with people I really cared about, I was taking that Bible out and I was beating some people over the head with that Bible.
If you're listening to this podcast and you knew me at that time, you know what I was talking about. There was not a lot of love in some of those behind the doors conversations. There was a, “I have the truth. You need the truth and I'm gonna beat you into it”. Now, listen, that part of me really cared a lot, but that part of me didn't understand that sometimes the best thing to do is sit on your wisdom.
The best thing you can do is show someone how your life has changed versus preach to them about how their life needs to change. That part of me didn't always understand that at that time in my life when it really comes down to it, I can tell you from personal experience, that little inner fundamentalist in me is usually scared of getting it wrong.
It wants to be certain. So when I can connect to that part of me honestly, and ask that part of me to give me a little space, it leads me to more courage. There are some things I don't know, and that's okay. We can hold some things loosely, and that brings more opportunity for faith in Jesus.
I might be wrong. You know what? If I am, that's okay. I can honor your humanity on this issue. Whatever the topic is, I can give them respect. I can honor them, and honor this part of me that really wants to be right. I can put some healthy distance between myself and that part of me that deeply longs to be right, that deeply longs to know the truth for eternity, for now and all time, that deeply longs to have a corner on that truth.
I can relax my nervous system, and as I honor that part of me that is finite, because that part of me is not God and does not see the truth at all times for all people in all places, that allows me to give the benefit of the doubt to people, even people with whom I disagree.
And so that inner fundamentalist is important for each one of us to pay attention to. We can notice when we're feeling a little dogmatic, we're feeling a little bit like “we're right, you're wrong”, coming from a superior place. It doesn't mean we have to abandon those beliefs. It does mean we defer our need to be right in the moment for a higher calling, which is to fix our eyes on Jesus.
Jesus may be calling us to lay down our swords, to lay down our right to be right, and love and respect and honor other people.
Next, the third part that researchers have indicated is almost the opposite. This part researchers call “quest orientation”. I think of it as our spiritual but not religious parts. They are spiritually-seeking parts. These are the parts of us that are open, that are curious, that sometimes experience God and spiritual highs out in nature, far from the walls of a church.
These parts of us might seek the highs of an encounter with God. They might seek miracles or spiritual experiences or mountaintop experiences. At their best, these parts of us can really lead us to curiosity, to openness and to rich emotional experiences. They're more tolerant. They're interested in what other people think and other people's spiritual experiences.
They can teach us that God isn't contained in any one setting. That God reveals himself all the time, in all places. These parts of us, in contrast to the fundamentalist parts of us, are more curious. They're wanting to feel God's love, wanting to experience God's miracles.
At their worst, these spiritually curious parts of us can lead us to pursue the spiritual experience above and beyond the Creator. Let me be clear, that doesn't mean following the spiritual experience right out of a Christian faith. This is where I also see spiritual bypassing come in. Folks who have strong Christian viewpoints, but they want to bypass the reality that sometimes following Jesus means doing hard things. Sometimes it means persevering through incredibly challenging circumstances where there isn't that mountaintop high, or that really good, instant quick fix feeling.
It's slogging it out every day in a hard relationship, but you don't feel like you can leave. Or slogging it out through going to church, where you're struggling to find a church community that you really like. Or slogging it out through a recovery program where you really do have to take it one step at a time.
There's no miraculous healing, and spiritualizing parts can lead us into really beautiful experiences of hope, of joy, those emotional highs, but that quest can also lead us to bypass the day to day work of showing up and persevering.
Lastly, this is a part that I think a lot of us might not want to face, but I think it's important. These are the agnostic parts of us. The parts of us that have doubts, the parts of us that aren't sure. Here's the thing about agnostic parts–when they're honored and named and given a seat at the table, they become our humility.
These are the parts of us that might feel confused or even skeptical, that might have questions we can't quite answer, and they acknowledge the limits of what our finite humanity can know. At their worst, these parts of us become cynical and skeptical and throw out the good things when it's messy, confusing, and hard.
But at their best, these parts of us keep us humble. They keep us connected to God with a spirit of, sometimes God, I don't know. Perhaps one of the best representations of how these different parts work in the Bible comes in Mark 9:24, where a man has brought a son to Jesus for healing.
He's desperate for a son to get healing, and when Jesus asks him if he believes, the father replies, “I believe. Help my disbelief”. I think about that juxtaposition of those two parts right there, the intrinsic part, the believing part of the man, I do believe. And then “help my disbelief”, help this agnostic doubting part of me that isn't sure and doesn't really believe.
In the freedom of being able to speak on behalf of both parts in that moment with Jesus, these doubting parts don't have to get the best of us. We all have them. When we're honest with these parts, we can bring all of them to Jesus. This is what it means to embrace this internal faith family. You show compassion toward the doubting parts of you. It's okay. I'm not going to let you lead this family, but you don't have to go away. You can be here.
I can bring you to Jesus and you can show compassion toward that good Christian part of you that wants other people to know what a good Christian you are. It's okay. I get it. I get that you want others to accept you, that you want others to see your value. You don't get to lead this family, but it's okay that you're here.
You can show compassion toward that fundamentalist part of you, that inner legalist that beats you up for having doubts and for being hypocritical, the part of you that wants to beat other people over the head who don't agree with everything you think is paramount. You can show compassion for that part of you and ask it to take a step back. It gets to be a part of your family, but it does not get to lead you. That part of you does not get to play God.
You can show compassion toward that spiritually curious part of you, that part of you desperate for that mountaintop experience, that healing touch, that part of you that longs for the magic. That maybe you had at one time, but man, does it seem distant to you right now? You can honor that part of you. It's a beautiful part of who you are.
It's a part of you that helps you imagine what things could look like, even as sometimes you have to help that part of you acclimate to the reality that sometimes life is hard, sometimes things don't feel great and sometimes we still have to do the hard things.
Lastly, you can nurture that inner believer. Here's the paradox–the way to nurture that inner believer is to honor each of those other parts. You don't nurture that inner believer by shutting down or exiling or shaming those other parts of you. You nurture that inner believer by honoring those different parts that show up.
When you honor each of the different parts of that faith symphony, without trying to sideline or exile any one part, you actually begin to cultivate a vibrant inner spirituality. No matter what's going on outside of you, you're learning to cultivate that inner vitality, that inner release, as you sit at the feet of the God who loves every single one of these parts of you.
Today’s conversation is a fascinating deep-dive into celebrity culture with Katelyn Beaty, editor and author of “Celebrities For Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, & Profits are Hurting the Church.” We explore the dynamics of celebrity culture and its profound effects on both the church and our personal sense of worth and mission.
Here’s what we cover:
1. The importance of developing an inner locus of control
2. How celebrity culture impacts the church
3. Parasocial relationships & influencers as attachment figures
4. Reevaluating what true success looks like
5. How to discern trustworthiness in people you follow
Resources:
- Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church by Katelyn Beaty
- Podcast conversation about the connection between Christian celebrity and narcissism with Chuck DeGroat
- The Beaty Beat Substack
- Saved by the City podcast
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 119: Drawing Strength from the Past —The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance with Dr. Jemar Tisby
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Right now get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription - but only for our listeners - at Babbel.com/BESTOFYOU.
- 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: Thank you so much for being here, Katelyn. I devoured your book, Celebrities for Jesus, this summer. It came out a little bit ago. When did it come out?
Katelyn: It came out two years ago.
Alison Cook: Yeah, it's been a while and I've seen it and I've had it. It was really timely in my own life as I was processing some of the things I was bumping up against in the publishing industry. So a little bit of my background–I started out in the academic world. My PhDs in psychology and religion and I did a bunch of academic research.
Then I ended up publishing a book. My coauthor and I published a book on a model of therapy. It's called Internal Family Systems, IFS. It's the impetus for the movie Inside Out. That's how everybody knows it. We published a Christian adaptation of the IFS model. So we took the IFS model and integrated it with Christian theology.
I didn't understand platforms. We were writing this book and we had no clue. I don't even think I had a social media account when it came out in 2018. The book ended up doing pretty well, and there I was, in a world that has been very confusing to me to sort out. So that's a little bit about the backdrop. I share that with you to say, I think it was timely this year. I've been wrestling with some of these pressures that I feel or frustrations that I feel. Then I read your book and I thought, oh my goodness, this explains so much. Before we dive into the topic, Katelyn, I'd love to know what led you personally to be interested in this topic.
Katelyn: Yeah. It's a great question. I work in book publishing now, where celebrity dynamics are very much in play. But before that, I worked at a journalistic publication covering events and trends in the American church, and starting in 2015/2016. there seemed to be this slew of stories related to pastoral moral failure scandals.
Katelyn: It's often very hard for institutions to recover after a scandal and seeing so many of those stories and seeing a pattern and feeling very sad about, like, why does this keep happening? The answer to that is very complex and multilayered, but I'm convinced that one of the undeniable dynamics at play in those stories is celebrity power.
The ability to influence people using the tools of social mass media, but without a lot of embodied proximity or accountability. I’m asking not why these particular people are pursuing that kind of celebrity power, but also what it is about us, as either churchgoers or consumers or readers or social media users, that really props people up and kind of fuels this celebrity power dynamic.
So it's really meant as a kind of personal reflection, a way of asking, where have we gone wrong?, even more so than what went wrong with those other people. There's something in the water, and my book is an attempt to try to understand what's in the water.
Alison Cook: That’s so good. That thread runs throughout the book–here's the problem and how have we participated in creating it? It’s in a very non shaming way, but rather a curiosity about what is this? That's what I pulled out of the book.
We talk a lot about curiosity on the podcast. A lot of listeners, Katelyn, are coming out of church hurt, a lot of church abuse, they've experienced some of the pain and the fallout of some of these, maybe not even the public moral failings, but some of the culture that we've created.
I want to touch on a little bit, even when there's no celebrity in the sense of millions of followers, there is still something that trickles down into a church culture, where a figure at the front of the church can become this local celebrity figure. And when something goes awry there, it leads to tremendous hurt. So this affects us on numerous levels.
Katelyn: You're right that it's not just the mega church pastors that can be put on pedestals. You can be in a church of 150 people,but if you still have a relationship between leader and body of people that gives a leader undue authority or power, I'm sure you've come across this in stories from your clients, where there can be a spiritual power attributed to someone with celebrity.
This idea that God wouldn't have given them a platform if God didn't want them to use it. And then you start relating to this person as not necessarily a God-like figure, but they have a lot of power over your spiritual life and imagination. And when there is some kind of, failure, fallout, or disappointment, because this person is human, they are flawed like the rest of us, there can be incredible amounts of cognitive dissonance.
Like, I had put some measure of trust in this person, and I had, in some ways, taken their words and actions to be divinely ordained, and now the mask is off. Something's been exposed. They're actually human like the rest of us. They're flawed. They may have deep, serious kinds of pathological or mental health issues to address that have gone unaddressed. It ends up affecting my view of God because I conflated the person and God in my imagination.
Alison Cook: Exactly. That's so well put. I see the two different pieces of this. The first is, how did this sort of culture of celebrity get created? The second piece is, how can we better equip ourselves to not get sucked into it?
As you're describing, whether towards celebrities in the news or on social media, or whether in our local communities, how can we be equipped? One of the things I talk about a lot in my book, The Best of You, is the idea of an internal locus of control. Many of us as Christians, depending on our faith background, were raised to not trust ourselves, and to only trust external authority figures.
That actually backfires against us in situations, as you're describing, where we actually need to have that inner discernment, that inner locus of control, not only with our pastors, but with any human with whom we interact. Because we're all fallen on some level.
We have to, at times, be able to trust our feeling that something doesn't feel right. This doesn't line up. This isn't working for me. It might even be with someone you love, a good friend or a spouse, where you're like, I don't think this is right. We have to develop that muscle.
So I want to get there. We have a responsibility in this. I also think, culturally, there are so many layers to why we don't have that muscle. One involves some of those toxic messages. “Don't trust yourself. Your emotions are bad”. I talk about these all the time on the podcast, but another layer to this is what you're describing, which is this systemic promotion of celebrity culture among our Christian leaders.
In the book, you describe this culture of celebrity; you describe three features of it and you describe this idea of how folks are given social power without proximity. You look at it from a lot of different angles about how different industries, the publishing industry in particular, but others are actually fostering it. So talk to me a little bit about that.
Katelyn: Yeah. Obviously, celebrity power is not relegated to religious communities. We are in a time of celebrity, for reasons that are more complicated than I can get into or articulate. We have, I would say, in the last 100, 150 years, in large part because of mass media and the tools of mass media, the ability to communicate with many more people than you could physically in person connect with.
Starting with newspapers, but also radio, television, and of course, social media, has added jet fuel to this dynamic. But culturally speaking, we have moved away from institutional authority where authority comes from someone's credentialing or formal authority administered by a body of other people saying, yes, you have this authority because of your training, because of your experience, because of your intelligence, etc.
Now it’s about individual authority or charismatic authority, which is more about a person's ability to woo crowds. Oftentimes, celebrity is very much connected to oratory power–you want to sit around and listen to them–or charisma–they are the kind of person you want to be around. They're magnetic. Maybe they're traditionally physically very attractive.
So all of these non-institutional ways that people gain social power, we see that across all industries, and by and large, especially in the evangelical world, where there's a bit less emphasis on institutions and more emphasis on entrepreneurship. Evangelicals have historically been very pro media and use whatever tools that are at their disposal to reach as many people as possible with the gospel.
We're going to embrace these tools. The evangelical world has by and large mimicked what works in the broader mainstream world when it comes to celebrity. Why not? Why shouldn't we have Christian celebrities? Because those celebrities can reach many more people than any kind of local church or local leader could. Celebrity also works because it makes people a lot of money. There are market financial incentives to keep the celebrity machine going.
I think what we are recognizing is that there are costs both for the celebrity figure who has the celebrity attached to them, as well as for the people who are following the celebrities. We talk about parasocial relationships–I feel like I have this friendship with this person, even though I have never met them. I don't know what they're like in an actual relationship, but I have this heart connection to them.
Part of the antidote for all of this is the profound importance of embodied relationships in which you can be known for the good and the bad. We all need those communities. We all need places where we can show up as our full selves. That is true for the celebrity too, maybe especially so for people who find themselves with celebrity power, because the kind of loneliness and isolation and pressure to keep up the celebrity persona can be really intense.
Those dynamics actually are contributing to problems of bad choices, mental health problems, mental health challenges. You hear people say, I would never want to be that famous. I think there’s a good reason for that. Now, some of us do want to be famous, but we’re seeing the cost of celebrity for the person who has it.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that non-shaming thread throughout the book. You're trying to name something that you're seeing without shaming. Those of us who are a part of participating in it, and those who are pursuing it or find themselves with a platform–there's a cost to a lot of it. As I was listening to you I was thinking about this sort of charisma-focused platform that's removed from expertise.
I think about Hollywood, where that kind of charisma, that very specific ability to emotionally connect, and you become a famous actor and we love watching them on film. There's that draw to that Julia Roberts or whomever it might be. But we're not expecting that person to be our moral leader. We're not expecting that person to be our spiritual leader.
When you parlay that into the Christian field where they are literally using those same tactics that maybe the Hollywood actor would use to win over an audience. And a part of me cringes a little bit, not in judgment, but in, oh, I don't want that from my spiritual leader. Not that it's wrong to be a charismatic person. You can use those gifts well.
But we talk a lot on the podcast about spiritual bypassing, which is attributing spiritual reasons, attributing God to things that are not in fact, necessarily spiritual. When I hear someone with a large platform saying, “God gave me this platform”, I think to myself, did God give you that platform?
Katelyn: I mean, Alison, you're reading my journal. Yes. I think that's a reasonable question.
Alison Cook: Not to be cynical and not to even judge the person's gifts or the sincerity of their heart, but did God give you that platform or did that platform come from all these other ways? You're in this industry, you're in publishing. So yeah, what do we do with that?
Katelyn: There is some wisdom in that little internal cringe when you hear someone with a big platform saying, God gave me this. I think you're right that something in us recognizes there's some kind of dissonance between celebrity power and spiritual leadership in the way of Jesus, in the core Christian understanding of what it means to be a shepherd of souls, which is a different model from a CEO leader.
We have imported understandings or models of leadership from the business world often to great effect. This has worked for a lot of Christian communities. Is there something about that model or understanding of leadership that misses the fundamental core of what it means to try to lead others in the name of Jesus?
Obviously it goes without saying that a core aspect of that is humility. A leader is not there to puff up themselves, but to truly serve. Like you, this is not me saying all platforms are bad, don't use the gifts of charisma you've been given. It's not that if a church is bigger than a hundred people it's bad.
It's not that. It's a kind of spirit or posture of leadership. A lot of Christian leaders or influencers, writers, there's a sense of starting with such good motives. I'm not in this for myself. I really do want to help others, I want to serve others, I want to encourage. But if you get more celebrity power over time, it starts to become self-justifying. It starts to feel really good.
It starts to maybe have an addictive element to it. So the things that you would have said no, that's too self promotional or too self involved three years ago, now maybe you would do things that you wouldn't do before because the celebrity is working for you.
Alison Cook: And that Christian narrative of, “God brought me here” can magnify that. It's so subtle, and you do such a beautiful job of exploring that in the book. Those last few chapters take us into what is actually the way of Jesus, and you use the metaphor of the ring from the Lord of the Rings, which I loved.
You come down pretty hard, again, in a non-shaming way. You also say in the book that there's clear ironies, like you and I are on a podcast speaking to tens of thousands of people. We're all dealing with this on some level, in our local communities, whatever tiny amount of celebrity we may have.
So we all have to reckon with this, but man, I thought it was powerful that you really liken it to the ring. Talk a little bit about that.
Katelyn: I'm happy to talk about the Lord of the Rings any time, any place, and I will try not to get into all the narrative details, although I could. The ring is JRR Tolkien's image of power and the temptation of power. Obviously he's not talking specifically about celebrity power, but various characters in this great trilogy are grappling with the lure of the ring, what I could do if I had the ring, how much power it would be. Gandalf in particular, he's a very good figure because he will not even entertain the possibility of trying on the ring.
He knows that the first place where you go wrong is thinking, I would never be tempted by that. My heart's in the right place. I only want to do good. I only want to serve God. My motives are pure. What could be the problem? Being honest with ourselves, maybe to borrow from the world of therapy and spirituality, and our shadow sides.
Alison Cook: Exactly.
Katelyn: The parts of us that oftentimes we can't even see or we don't want to see, but the parts of us that do hunger for power, that do hunger to feed the ego or the false self. I don't have tried and true practical tips for how we can all avoid celebrity, because as you alluded to, you and I are swimming in the waters by the fact that we have these platforms as writers, teachers, and communicators.
I do think that there are ways to mitigate the temptation of celebrity, but at the very least, it's something we have to be very aware of in ourselves. We need a level of self-awareness, self scrutiny, and inviting others who we trust and who love us to be an honest mirror back. Is there something about how I'm going about this that feels off to you? Because I might not be able to see it, but maybe you can.
Alison Cook: I will tell you, reading your book, you describe some things in the publishing industry and it was helpful to me. It was a little bit of a mirror. It was like, oh, those are some good points. If I'm doing those couple of things, that's a yellow flag. That's why I appreciated the book so much because you're talking about it.
If we don't talk about it, how can we do the work of holding up the mirror to ourselves? I love that health starts first of all, with a humble self-awareness of the parts of us that look at the ring and want it. The other question I think is interesting is, what about me wants to attach, and I use that word intentionally, to this persona?
What about me needs or wants to attach to this authority figure or this influencer? What about me wants and needs that person to be perfect, or to be a savior or a rescuer or something that is not possible? I think there are some attachment needs there and it reminds me of the Israelites. God was like okay, I'll give you a king, but the king's going to disappoint you.
There's something in us that almost wants to bypass the work of being in messy human relationships where there is no perfection. Those are some thoughts I have. I'm curious how that lands on you.
Katelyn: It's fascinating to hear you frame our relationship to certain celebrity figures as a kind of attachment. They're serving or feeding some kind of need for us. Otherwise, we wouldn't develop that attachment. I wonder if it's, as you said, “could someone just tell us what to do and how to be in the world?”
If I can locate that kind of authority externally into an idealized leader, then it relieves some pain. It may be internal anxiety about, how do I know how to be a good person of faith in the world?
Alison Cook: I think that's part of it. In my own life, if I look at those folks, because I have them, I want to attach to them. It's not all bad, but I'm curious about that. What is it? There's a reason. There's a reason that person is someone I want to idolize. What is that telling me about me?
Katelyn: I'm thinking about the set of writers whose books were very powerfully formative in my faith earlier on in life as I was entering into adulthood. I still think about those writers or theologians or pastors and I feel so grateful for their work.
I might say, God used them in my life to spiritually mature me. There's a difference though, between appreciating someone's work in the world and attaching to them in a more emotional, parasocial way. I'm under no delusion that any of those writers are any less or more human than I am.
Alison Cook: Yes. Or that God is specifically using them any more or less than he is you or me.
Katelyn: Yeah, that's a really good point. Especially as Americans, we really want external proof or fruit of serving God. We want something measurable. So thinking about how many churches have really focused on numerical growth, and numerical growth can be great.
But we're so quick to see something growing and saying, oh, it's working. God is blessing it. Bad things grow too. Or things can grow and have both healthy and unhealthy elements mixed in. I think we can be tempted to be quick to associate something growing with something being blessed and the person who seems to be growing it being uniquely blessed. We can't live under that illusion anymore.
Alison Cook: Yes, it's such an important distinction for us all to really look inside our spirit. I love what you're saying. It doesn't mean we can't be like, oh man, this writer, this person has changed my life. Their writings are a powerful use of their gifts. But we should be wary of equating those gifts with a special kind of blessedness.
I interviewed Jemar Tisby on his new book, The Spirit of Justice, and that book, oh my gosh, it is filled with stories of Christians who never got fame or notoriety for the brave steps they took as a result of their faith in Jesus in impossible circumstances.
In fact, many of them received horrible consequences for taking brave steps. I was reading this book going, how do you make sense of the gospel of, “I'm blessed because I have a big platform”, when this to me is the fruit of a life in Christ, and it sometimes looks really tough on the surface.
It sometimes means folks won't like you. I think there's a misnomer there that size, that fame, that celebrity, that public notoriety is equated with a special kind of God's blessing, that flies against the face of the gospel.
Katelyn: Yeah, what you're getting at and what it sounds like Jemar's book is illustrating, is that there's a distinction between success and faithfulness. And faithfulness is the goal.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
Katelyn: Success is measured by external output of numerical growth or sales, or these external markers of what the world would call success. Most people are not called to be faithful in that realm. I really wanted to emphasize in my book how important it's been to me to hold my parents and people I grew up with in the local church as models of faithfulness, over and against the temptation to equate faithfulness and success.
My parents are the most “salt of the earth” people. They show up for each other. They show up for our family, for their local church, for their neighborhood, over the long haul, in really ordinary, unglamorous ways. That is so beautiful to me. The reality is that for the vast majority of us, that is what we are called to be and do. That is going to be the locus of our faithfulness. And that can be enough for all of us.
Alison Cook: Returning to that time and time again. I think in this culture, really returning to this is the good work. This is the good work, the good fruit of being in my daily life. I think it's very revolutionary in our culture to lean into that deeply. In those last couple of chapters of the book, it's that call back to the beautiful, good work of faithfulness.
Katelyn, since the book came out a couple of years ago, and I know you're still writing, how do you in your own life hold that tension of faithfulness and success?
Katelyn: I will say, it was an interesting experience trying to launch a book critiquing celebrity, when most book publishers want authors to use their platforms to promote their work and play into some of these celebrity dynamics. I wrote this book critiquing a numbers focus and yet I was checking the sales numbers for this book on a regular basis.
Alison Cook: Yeah. That's honest. Yeah.
Katelyn: So obviously I did not write this book because I figured all of this out. The actual launch of the book was a real stretching exercise of ultimately giving the results to God, and believing ultimately that the fruit of our good work is going to be grown because of God's work in the world.
It doesn't all depend on us, and that can be a real relief. I really try in my writing, to focus on the content of the writing itself rather than the Katelyn Beaty show. That performer element is very much also a part of my personality. But, there's something about trying to focus on the value of the work rather than offering myself as a persona.
What I want to offer and what I think is actually most beneficial to others is the writing and thinking and research rather than the Katelyn Beaty show. I'm so glad to not be in book promotion mode anymore. You always feel like you could be doing more and that can be really depleting.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
Katelyn: I'm also an introvert, so I like being at my desk and writing most days. So I don't know if I'm answering your question very articulately, but I feel like I've experienced the very tensions that we're talking about.
Alison Cook: What I hear is that you wrestle with those tensions, and you honor them. I think that's the path to health. As you said, it's not a binary. It's not, I never struggle with that. I'm good. That would be a cue that you do. When we talk about, for example, I know you've done some presentations with our friend Chuck DeGroat who talks about narcissism.
Katelyn: Yeah, we've done a podcast conversation about the connection between Christian celebrity and narcissistic personality traits in leaders, and I'm happy to share the link for that.
Alison Cook: For those of you who want to dig deeper into the link between narcissism and this kind of celebrity we're talking about, we'll link to that in the show notes. But one thing is, when people say, how do I know I'm not a narcissist? The fact that you're asking the question with genuine curiosity is a good sign.
Anytime we're able to look inside and go, oh I'm showing some of this–that's the beginning of humility. There's a wrestling in that, which is so important no matter what we're doing in the world, naming and being honest about some of those different tensions in ourselves.
So I love that you're saying that. I think that's really honest, and paradoxically, that ability to know ourselves is actually what makes us more trustworthy and brings that around to folks who are given a platform of authority.
One of the things I look for is some of that ability to wrestle with. I remember reading Eugene Peterson's biography, and one of the things that stood out to me was how much he wrestled with inner tensions around these topics. I'm really struck by the connection you're making between self-knowledge and self-trust.
We need tools and places where we can interrogate ourselves in a gentle and loving, safe way and be honest with ourselves. I think you're right that it's either the people who say oh, I'm not tempted by numbers–
Katelyn: “It's not about numbers for me”. I'm like, is it a little bit though? Sometimes that's actually a greater warning sign than someone who says I'm wrestling with this.
Alison Cook: I agree. Or someone who says I'm only doing this for you, or I'm only doing this for God. We're more complicated than that. To me, that cues, oh, you're not aware of that shadow side. Again, that doesn't mean I have to completely tune that person out and turn them off.
But it is a cue where I go, huh. How much has that person really reflected on, which might be a cue that at some point, because if people haven't done their own work of really looking at that shadow side, they're setting themselves up potentially for that ring, for that success to get the best of them.
It gives me a cue over time, so I'm not as disappointed or I don't put as much stock in the person. I can hold it a little bit loosely, that idea of who they seem to be putting themselves out to be. You talk about the issues with power without proximity, and that really stood out to me.
I've thought about it a lot, since reading your book, about really prioritizing the proximate in my life. Really prioritizing the proximate. If at any point I'm looking too much to folks I don't know or don't see on a day to day basis, that's a problem. Who are the people in my immediate life? What are those relationships like?
Katelyn: Yes. Are those relationships places where I'm ultimately loved and valued because of my output or because I'm keeping up this really impressive celebrity persona? Speaking personally, my friends and family value the work that I do and have cheered me on when the book came out, and also, that's not the kind of thing that establishes the care in our relationship.
It's, “I like you for you. I care about you for you”. Yes, this public facing work is a part of you, but it's only a part of you. It's not the main thing, and if we're in feedback loops where we're only ever getting positive reinforcement for the celebrity persona, we're in fewer and fewer spaces where we're free to show up as our full selves and rest in that belovedness, apart from what we're producing or doing for other people.
Alison Cook: I love that. That's so well stated. I'm curious what projects you're working on now. Where are you headed next?
Katelyn: Yeah. I work in book publishing in my day to day job–I'm the editorial director for Brazos Books, which is an imprint of Baker Publishing Group. I really enjoy being able to curate a collection of books that our team thinks will benefit readers, and it's really fun to work with authors and see their books come to fruition.
I really enjoy my work at Brazos. I try to write pretty regularly at a substack called The Beaty Beat, and that's really to keep my writing and journalistic juices going. Occasionally, I will write for a media outlet, and I also have a podcast with my friend Roxy about navigating life and faith in New York City, where we both live, and that's called Saved by the City.
So those are the things that I'm working on. I'm not currently working on a new book idea. I strongly feel that no one should write a book until they absolutely have to. I don't want to write a book to write a book. I don't think most people should. That might change, but for now I feel very content writing on the side.
Alison Cook: I am so grateful for the work that you did. For the listener who resonates, as I know many of you will, this book, Celebrities for Jesus, has a rhythm that is very objective. You name things, you're honest, but you're not cynical or shaming. That felt really important to me because we see enough of that that's also not helpful.
In many ways, because I can have a cynical part of myself, I want to be able to name things without indulging that part of me. You go into some of the things that happen behind the scenes in the publishing industry that I had no idea about. But these things, it's very real and I think it's helpful to know, because it'll help you be more discerning about people you follow, when you know a little bit more about what goes on.
I thought it was a really beautiful, helpful book for all of us living in this culture. So thank you for doing that work. I know it probably wasn't always easy. I'm sure you got some pushback on it. But it sure ministered to me and I know it will minister to a lot of people. So thank you for doing that. To close, I like to ask all my guests, what's bringing out the best of you right now?
Katelyn: I'm not saying this because I'm talking to you, a licensed therapist, but I'm about to turn 40–I think by the time this episode airs, I will already be 40. As I'm sure a lot of people who are about to turn 40 feel, I feel like I'm entering into a slightly different life phase that has prompted all sorts of big questions of discernment: What do I want my life to look like in 10 years? How do I know? Can I trust my own desires? Is that something I should follow?
I've been meeting with a spiritual director here in New York for the last year or so, and having a space to ask some of those questions and discern what the next phase of my life could look like with God. It's a new framework, not how do I discern the one thing God wants me to do that’s inscrutable and mysterious and I need to make sure I'm on the right path, but rather, what if you and God dream together about what this next stage of life could look like?
It's been healing and freeing and grounding in a stage of a lot of change for me, a lot of internal change. That's bringing me life.
Alison Cook: I love that. That leads right into the next question, which is what needs and desires are you working to protect?
Katelyn: Oh, wow. I feel like I've talked to a lot of peers recently who are in a similar life stage, and all of us have said something to the effect of, I'm learning to say no more.
I'm learning to be more discerning about what I give my time and energy to. I don't feel as obligated to say yes to everybody just because they ask me for something. I think at a previous stage in my life, I felt a lot of duty, maybe especially like a Christian duty to, if you're a good Christian, you give whatever people ask of you.
The need I'm protecting is recognizing that the resources of time and energy are finite for all of us. You are free to say yes to the things that really align with your true self and what brings you to life or makes you come alive, rather than simply the things that you feel like you have to do because someone asked you nicely to do it.
Alison Cook: That’s awesome. You're preaching to the choir with that. This is a big topic on the Best of You Podcast: how do we disentangle and differentiate from those parts of us that are so conditioned to the needs of other people. So I love that. I'm so grateful to you for the work that you do and the way that you're doing the work.
The way that you are trying to embody the very things you speak about means a lot. I think that's what we need. I'm so grateful. Thank you for giving us your time today.
Katelyn: Yeah, it was a lovely conversation. So thanks so much for having me on, Alison. I loved it.
It was an absolute honor to sit down with New York Times bestselling author & public historian Dr. Jemar Tisby, for an incredibly rich conversation about his brand new book, The Spirit of Justice. We discuss his own story of coming to faith and what led him to explore stories of Black Christians who tirelessly pursued healing, goodness, and justice against impossible odds.
Here’s what we cover:
1. The impact of culture on mental & emotional health
2. The double-edged sword of religion
3. The dissonance Jemar felt as a Black Christian in predominantly white settings
4. The lifelines who helped him shore up his faith
5. What is the spirit of justice?
6. Jemar’s thoughts on therapy
7. What stories of resistance teach us about following Jesus
Resources:
- The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance by Dr. Jemar Tisby
- The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Dr. Jemar Tisby
- On Being Black and Reformed by Anthony Carter
- How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice by Dr. Jemar Tisby
- @JemarTisby on social media
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 79: Surviving Trauma & A Path to Forgiveness—Finding God In the Hardest Parts of Your Story With Esau McCaulley
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Get 40% off your first order of Sundays. Go to SundaysForDogs.com/BESTOFYOU or use code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
- 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! 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 thrilled you're here with me today. I love creating these episodes that provoke thought and inspire our healing journeys. Today I'm especially excited as we launch a brand new series all about the intersection of culture and mental health.
This series is a little bit different from what we've done in the past. Over the summer, I was deeply moved by several books I read that explored how our cultural realities impact our emotional, mental, and spiritual health. In this new series, I'm excited to feature some incredible experts to talk with us about some of these topics.
In fact, after reading some of these books, I reached out directly to the authors and said, hey, would you come talk to me on the podcast? And I'm so thrilled to say that so many of them are going to join us this fall. We're going to tackle some of the hot topics in the culture around us, including systemic inequalities, celebrity culture and the role of social media, as well as church cultures and what it means to practice the way of Jesus in our modern day.
While the experts for this series may not be from the field of mental health, I believe their insights have profound implications for all of us. The cultural context we live in profoundly shapes our mental and emotional well-being, whether it's discrimination that certain groups face, whether it's the narratives we're told about our worth, whether it's our church cultures or the societal pressures to conform to certain standards.
In considering mental health through the lens of culture, we start to see how our personal struggles are often linked with broader social realities. In my own life, I'm keenly aware that what's going on in the news or what's going on in the political climate around me can affect the way I'm thinking and feeling even about myself or about my environment.
When we talk about these realities and name some of these realities with open minds and curious hearts, we can help lead each of us to deeper, more holistic healing. This communal aspect of healing is something deeply rooted in the teachings of Jesus, as we seek to be curious and compassionate and connect with the world around us, even as we seek to bring some of those same qualities into the parts of our own souls that need care.
Today I am honored to welcome a guest whose work has profoundly impacted me. Dr. Jemar Tisby is a New York Times bestselling author, historian, and a leading voice on issues of racial justice. His brand new book, The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance, is out this week. The Spirit of Justice dives into powerful stories from America's history of individuals who fought against racism and agitated for justice. People who suffered at times in their quest to bring more healing and more goodness to those around them. Reading their stories reminded me of how much we can learn from their perseverance, their suffering, their methods, and even their hope and their resilience.
I loved this conversation with Dr. Tisby. Toward the end of it, we both experienced a Holy Spirit led moment, a moment of clarity of what it really means to follow in the way of Jesus and how so often that takes us into deep learning from those who have suffered and persevered and shown courage through impossible circumstances.
Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. JemarTisby.
***
Alison Cook: I'm so thrilled to get to meet you. I've followed your work for a while. So by way of background, to give you a little bit of how I came to you, my doctoral degree is actually in the psychology of religion. I'm a therapist, but that's my background. I was actually a history major. So I really resonated with this book.
Jemar: I knew there was something I liked about you!
Alison Cook: Oh my gosh. The history part of me was like, wow. It was so rich, this new book of yours, The Spirit of Justice. My doctoral dissertation was on the relationship between religion and prejudice, because in psychology, especially social psychology, research is fraught and there's all sorts of bias and everything in it.
But there is a very clearly established link: the more religious someone is, the more prejudiced they tend to be in the field. As a Christian, this was driving me crazy. I was like, how can this come out time and time again? So my dissertation was my effort to try to create a nuanced variable for how we could tease that out.
And one of the things I was trying to argue is that religion can be used for great harm, to oppress, for violence, for racism, to rip us apart, and it can be used for great good. That power of Christianity can be harnessed. Talking about Christianity specifically, it can be harnessed for great good.
Your book, The Color of Compromise, really dives into how American Christianity in particular has been part of the problem when it comes to racism and many of the problems in our country. Then this next book, The Spirit of Justice, when I saw you start to talk about it, I was like, oh, you're going to go through and trace the history.
I finished reading it last night, and the history of black Christians in particular, it brought tears to my eyes time and time again. You trace the history, the whole history in this country of how black Christians, empowered by their faith, fortified by their deep faith, have been moving these rocks toward freedom and justice for all, consistently against impossible odds.
It popped that part of my brain that's always looking for this double edged sword, of where is it doing harm? I see it in my work with clients–where is it doing harm? And where's our faith coming alongside and bringing more healing, more goodness, more justice? So that's the backdrop of why I wanted to invite you on.
Jemar: I'm so excited. First, I got to say, I am going to take everything you said and rip the audio and play that everywhere I go, because you did a perfect encapsulation of my work, of my views, even on Christianity as it relates to race and racism and prejudice. It can be used for ill, as we've seen so often, but it is also a force for liberation and uplift and equity.
And the way you explained that, I was like, let me take notes on my own work coming from you because it's so beautifully encapsulated. Thank you for that.
Alison Cook: That was my big question all throughout my doctoral work. I'm such a big fan of your work. Tell me a little bit, Dr. Tisby, you have a really unique story of faith. I've listened to a couple of your other interviews. I read your bio on your website. You come at this experience of Christianity through various strands.
And I'm curious, looking back to your younger self, when you first encountered Christianity, were you as aware of this sort of double-edged sword as you are now? And how did that play itself out for you in your own life and your own relationship with faith?
Jemar: I've talked many times about not growing up Christian and then coming to faith in high school through the ministry of a white evangelical youth group. What I'm beginning to understand decades later is that my passion for reducing racism as a barrier to authentic community and belonging comes not from having negative experiences in church–it comes from having some very positive ones.
So if we go back to high school, that youth group…it's high school, you're learning what it means to be your own person, and the high school cafeteria is a perfect microcosm. You've got the tables separated by activity and identity.
The football players are over here. The skaters are over there. The drama kids are over there. If you can picture that, and I think all of us have had this experience of kind of standing at the doorway with our tray and saying, where do I belong. Where do I fit? And that is what this youth group did for me.
It finally gave me a place to belong. It gave me a friend group. It embraced me in so many ways. That is the positive part. The negative part was that to the extent I ever felt separated, distant, excluded, it always had to do with race. So whether that was the dating scene, whether that was going to church on Sunday and hearing not the style of preaching, but what they were talking about, and what they weren't talking about was often louder than what they were talking about, what they left out.
Never addressing issues of race, never addressing issues of justice, all personal holiness, almost self-help kind of stuff. So all of that was there. I didn't have categories for it. I didn't have language for it, but I felt it. I knew it was there, and race and religion have always been part of the way I've thought and developed in terms of my faith.
Alison Cook: The word that comes to mind as I'm listening to you is there, I imagine there was some dissonance inside of you. Is that right? And probably at that young age, you don't know how to make sense of that. You know, I like this, but I also don't feel quite like I belong here.
Jemar: Exactly. Yeah, there were some cultural touch points there. Some of it from not being a Christian. Like they would reference books of the Bible or Bible verses, and I'm a baby Christian. I don't know any of this stuff. But there were also cultural differences. So many of them went to a different high school that was in a wealthier area and had cars or swimming pools.
It was like, okay, this is a different world. And then also, relationally speaking, number one being feeling at both times hypervisible and almost invisible. So hypervisible, being one of the only people of color ever in the room. Feeling like oh, I got to speak for all black people, or I got to do stereotypical black things, whether that's play basketball or rap or whatever.
And at the same time, feeling invisible, because my concerns of me and my community were not part of the conversation there. To this day, I say this because when people hear me talk about racism in the church, often our minds go to the most extreme examples. Somebody calling you the n-word, shutting the doors of the church, saying you can't be a man.
That's not what was happening. To this day, the person who led me to Christ and first brought me to that youth group, we are very good friends. To this day, that youth pastor that led the group, we are friends. So it was much more of a kind of soft racism, if you will. That is what is most pernicious because it's harder to see and it's harder to do stuff about.
Alison Cook: Can you talk to us a little bit about how you began to more intentionally address some of that dissonance? What were some key moments where you began to go, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I’m imagining there's this deep spiritual connection that developed out of a deep faith in Jesus. There's also this, where do I fit here in this group?
I think there might be a time at which you might walk away altogether. Oh, this isn't for me. In your story, what strikes me is that you wrestled with, I want to keep the essence of what I received here, which is this faith, but I've got to disentangle myself from some of the cultural overlays of it. Am I understanding that right?
Jemar: Right. So as I recall, my struggle wasn't whether God was real, whether this religion thing would work out. It wasn't that kind of crisis of faith for me. I was a teenager when I became a Christian, but there was something real in that commitment to Jesus. And that's always been true.
So my wrestling was more along the lines of, as you say, finding your place within this thing. My trajectory was, one, not really being aware when I first became a Christian, but sensing that dissonance even if I couldn't name it. Two, becoming much more aware that, oh, there are these different streams and strands and traditions of Christianity.
That was college, where I'm at a Catholic University at the University of Notre Dame. I'm a Protestant, non-denominational evangelical by background from that high school youth group, and I'm starting to discover this thing called Reformed Theology, which is a whole other branch of the church that's even whiter than the environments that I was in.
So now I'm becoming even more aware that the trajectory from there after college is, first, can we as black people have a seat at the table of reformed white evangelicalism as it stood then? From there, with Trayvon Martin, Black Lives Matter, the 2016 election, and more, how can we build our own tables?
Alison Cook: You speak to a lot of components. Because there are so many strands of American Christianity, let alone white/black church. I'm wondering in your own life, in your own kind of struggle and wrestle, who were some folks who stood out to you or what were some breakthrough moments?
I like to ask this question by way of background because we talk a lot about folks' stories and recognizing they've been experiencing trauma, and a lot of times they go ask for help or they go try to have conversations with people and they get varying kinds of response. Sometimes, especially folks in the church, the responses they get are not helpful. We talk a lot on the podcast about spiritual bypassing. They spiritually bypass it. Oh, trust the Lord. Don't enter into this.
Sometimes folks will have an encounter where someone will really name and validate you. Yes, what you're experiencing is real. Here's why you're experiencing it. I'm curious, were there moments like that for you where a pastor, a therapist, a friend, a loved one really came alongside you and said, I see you in this, I see you in what's happening.
Or did the inverse of that happen where you were really constantly fighting against the voices in your life?
Jemar: I love that question. There have been people who have been lifelines to me. They've been buoys when I was adrift out to sea that I could cling to. I thank God that along the way, there have been these people. So when I was in college, Chandra Johnson was the first black woman to be this basically advisor to the university president and was in the president's office, had a very high and influential position there.
And she took it as her ministry to take all of the black students, and there weren't a ton of us, under her wing and make sure that we had what we needed. She was one of the ones who was an early encourager of my writing and that was not a skill that I recognized as a gift or a contribution to the church at the time.
To this day, decades later, we're in touch every now and again. As I mentioned, going into reformed theology, there's different branches. This was about as conservative theologically as you can get. Like I said, there were even more white people. It was even less diverse, but there were a few: Thabiti Anyabwile, who's now a pastor in Washington, DC.
Tony Carter, who's a pastor in Georgia and wrote a book called On Being Black and Reformed. That was my first signal that there are other black people here. I'm not the only one. Anthony Bradley was in the same denomination as I was. So it was like, ok, one can exist in this universe, and there are others who do.
Another lifeline was, after college, I joined Teach for America, and I became a middle school teacher. They placed me in the Mississippi Delta, on the Arkansas side. That's where I got my first in-depth, ongoing experience of the Black Church. New Light Missionary Baptist Church, it was a historic church whose actual building had fallen into disrepair.
We were meeting in what was basically a warehouse with exposed concrete floors and folding metal chairs and an average age of about 65 in the congregation. But it was as authentic and historic of a Black church experience I could get. It was encouraging to me to see how Christianity is practiced among other groups.
So I could go on and on, but yes, I'm very thankful that there have been representatives. And then further along, as I got into historical studies, there have been people from history and from the past who stand out, many of whom are in this book, The Spirit of Justice.
Alison Cook: These figures that come into our lives mirror what you write about in your book–when we look back through history, we're looking for those light bearers, those folks who bring us touchstones of hope. And that's what you've done in this book.
In The Spirit of Justice, you're really tracing this incredible history. It's fascinating. It's hard. It's beautiful. It's compelling. It's empowering in the sense of, oh my gosh, these folks are fighting for the kinds of things they're fighting for without necessarily seeing a lot of fruit in so many cases for this fight for what's right and good and true and in the world.
I'm curious what prompted you to write The Spirit of Justice? I can think of a million reasons after reading it, but I wanted to ask you personally, what was your personal interest in bringing this to us?
Jemar: Thank you for asking that. I would say at least two major motivations. Number one, I've honestly gotten a bit weary of the assertion or even the question, is Christianity the white man's religion? Now I'm weary of it, but I totally understand it. I've asked it myself, because as we said at the top of the show, Christianity or religion in general can be used for very harmful purposes and to oppress others.
And in the US it has been the moral religious framework for racism, for US race-based slavery, for segregation, and all of that. So the question is totally legit. But what I have grown weary of is constantly responding, have you looked at the black church? To say nothing of the global church.
But this book is essentially a book length response to that question, is Christianity the white man's religion? And the resounding answer is no. Black people and oppressed people worldwide have understood the liberatory impulses of the gospel. They have understood it truly as good news to the poor. Good news for those who are in bondage.
I wanted to give examples of black people throughout our nation's history who did understand their force, their faith, not as the white man's religion, but as Jesus’ teaching that can lead to true equality. So that was one motivation. The other motivation was simply, I sensed in my spirit as I was contemplating a next book, that we were going to need some encouragement.
I didn't know the exact contours of what we would face, but I think 2024 has made a lot of that really clear. We're not simply polarized politically. We're looking at whether democracy as we know it will survive. We're looking at an extensive plan in Project 2025 to gum up the levers of democracy, enshrine the rule of a few over the the will of the people, and it's as serious as anyone has said, if not more, and in those situations when the odds look very stacked against you, it would be understandable to be deflated, demoralized, and even fall into cynicism and apathy.
So I want this book to be a cheerleader, the friend and the fan clapping on the side as you run this marathon and encouraging you, giving you that drink of water to refresh you and keep you going, because here we learn about people from throughout our history who faced even more daunting odds in the forms of slavery and lynching and segregation and degradation and beating and even murder, yet they still found a way to tap into something that I call the spirit of justice to resist and persist.
Alison Cook: The way you write about it is so compelling. It invites us to participate in that work of the spirit of justice. Tell me a little bit about how you conceptualize that spirit. You speak about it really beautifully in the book.
Jemar: So I opened the book with this. It's so powerful. This quote from Myrlie Evers Williams, the widow of Medgar Evers, at the grand opening of the Mississippi civil rights museum. It was shrouded in controversy. Could Mississippi tell the truth about civil rights and racism? Trump was president at the time and he was invited, and that totally flew against a lot of the truth-telling that this museum was supposed to be about.
There was all this controversy leading up to it, but Myrlie Evers still showed up. She still gave a talk, and then afterwards there was this press conference. I was in it, and somebody asked her how today in the 21st century compared to 50 years ago in the civil rights movement. She said, there's stuff that I'm seeing today that I hoped I'd never see again.
And she said she was weary, she was tired, but at the same time, she said, there's something about the spirit of justice that rises up within you and gets you ready to fight and resist all over again that stuck with me. I said, that's what we need. That's what we're going to need right now. So the book is a historical survey like The Color of Compromise.
It marches from the colonial era and really starts back in Africa up to the present day. What I do is highlight and spotlight certain figures who, because of their faith, resisted racism, resisted injustice, and fought for a better tomorrow.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's an incredible piece of history that you've done, really excavating and mining all of these stories with such integrity to the original. There's also a pastoral spirit being called up through the book for all of us to participate, to be inspired by. One of the things I wanted to ask you, I noticed throughout the book and several of the stories, Harriet Tubman is someone we know a little bit more about.
There's so many others where, especially in evangelical or Protestant theology, there is a very individualized, I need my personal freedom. Jesus came to save me. And throughout the story, you're not preaching this, you're not necessarily didacting this, but in every story, what was really compelling to me was the communal focus.
It really struck me as so close to the heart of the gospel of what Jesus is trying to do. There's something wrong here, and I have to do what I can both for my own sake and for the sake of these others that I love, which might mean putting my own life at risk. It flies in the face of that individualistic notion and brings us into the more of the justice notion.
A lot of times we talk on the podcast about how that word salvation, which has so often been thought of as an individual rescue, really in many ways is translated as healing. The Greek word sozo can be translated as healing. It's about bringing healing and I think about the relationship between justice and healing.
It's not individual, it's bringing it for those who have been the most harmed, those who have been the most vulnerable, and it's so compelling in the book, how we're seeing the folks who are part of being oppressed at the front lines. They are the ones most committed to bringing healing and justice for others. It's very striking throughout the stories.
That's what continued to surface for me. It's flying in the face of this modern American individualistic gospel. I know there's a lot of thought behind that, because you're a scholar and you've thought about that, but I'm curious about how you see that. That's what spoke to me.
Jemar: I'm so glad you pulled out that thread. Speaking about the construction of race, what it does with white people who have historically been the numerical majority too, that plays into it, but white people are generally treated as individuals, and that is a sort of privilege of whiteness.
So the analogy I always use is when I was in seminary, I was a phenomenal student, not to brag, but let's say, okay. I did poorly. Let's say I did poorly on a paper or a test. It wouldn't be “Jemar did poorly on that paper or test”. It would be, oh, black people, they can't quite cut it. They may not quite have what it takes.
So my whole group, my whole category, my whole race, would be implicated in my individual behavior. If that happened to a white person, John failed the test. John didn't do well on the paper. That's John. It's not all white people. So the way we're socialized, it teaches us to think individually or collectively because of how race is constructed.
That's part of it. What you pull out as part of the book is, so many black people recognize that their behavior reflects on more than them. So you mentioned Harriet Tubman before, she's a perfect example. She escapes to freedom and could have lived her life as a free person who escaped forever, but she said, if I'm free, other people deserve to be free too.
So she went back and forth 12 or 13 times on the underground at literal risk to her life. I don't even focus on that in the book–I focus on Harriet Tubman, the Civil War hero, which less people know about. So it started with the Port Royal experiment. Her reputation's huge and government and military officials call her down to help with the Port Royal experiment, which is essentially, all of these recently freed black people, what do we do with them?
Can they have their own communities? Because this was still a question in the mid 19th century. The white people are like, can black people handle freedom? And of course we can. She goes down to help with Port Royal. She trains people, she heals people, all that stuff.
And then she leads this incredible battle on the Combahee river and frees more enslaved people in a single night than she did on all of her underground railroad trips. That's a perfect microcosm of the communal understanding of liberation, healing, salvation, and how many black people undertook it for themselves to help uplift all.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It is a whole different mindset that is so convicting and so compelling, about how we can all take on more of that experience, that communal understanding of healing. Frankly, this is a little bit of a leap, but I think about it in our current model of therapy where I need to go see a therapist by myself and heal my individual self, and I'm always thinking about as a therapist, then this person is going to go back into a toxic family structure, a toxic church structure, a toxic community, a toxic culture.
There is no such thing as individual healing without it being connected to the rest of the community. And we see that portrayed through the history of how these individuals that you're highlighting in the book, every single one of them had that understanding of, it's not about my freedom. That made my brain think about how much individualism is embedded in white culture.
Jemar: That's critical. I've tweeted this a few times, but I said if I could get all the white people in the room and tell them one thing about racism, it would be that racism is not a matter of individual interpersonal attitudes. It's also a matter of systems and structures. So that's slightly different from the individual versus communal.
I'm emphasizing the individual feelings and attitudes versus structural solutions, but I think they're related. So it is great that you don't have a racist bone in your body or some of your best friends are black, like whatever the trope is. But fundamentally, even if you are as good and gracious and kind of a person as you can be, that's only going to affect your individual relationships and your network.
What can we do structurally to affect the community? On the policy level, on the practice level. That's what many black Christians, I think, bring to the table when we're talking about fighting racism, that many white Christians struggle to understand at least initially when they get into this work.
Alison Cook: What is your hope for who will read this book and how it will land on them? You've talked a little bit about wanting to inspire some hope and some encouragement, but what is your hope for some of the different types of folks who will read this book? Who did you write it for and what is your dream for how it will affect change?
Jemar: I always write books for myself. That is to say, I always write the book that I think I need. They always say, have your reader in mind, your audience in mind. Other people, of course, but also partially what I need to hear. So when I wrote The Color of Compromise, I needed to come to grips and contend with how Christianity has been used as a force of racial oppression and where that came from.
To name it and to put it down in words actually helped me to struggle against it better, but also be more at peace, not with evil but the tension and that dissonance that you named earlier.
And then How to Fight Racism was also my need to express myself and think out for myself, what do I think needs to be done about this? I emphasize both the individual and relational mindset shifts that need to take place as well as the structural and policy shifts that need to happen.
The Spirit of Justice fits into both of those books because once you understand the problem, The Color of Compromise, once you get a sense of what we can do about it, How to Fight Racism, then it really sets in that we got to be in this for the long haul. Often, it's going to be two steps forward, one step back, and it's going to be a lot of obstacles, a lot of setbacks.
So how do you keep going? And that's one of the fundamental questions that The Spirit of Justice answers. How do you keep going? You tap into the spirit of justice, and you learn from those who did in times before us and against odds and obstacles that were even more daunting than we face today.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that's powerful. Briefly, before we end our time, you're a pretty outspoken advocate for mental health and in particular for the need for more black mental health resources and therapists. Can you talk a little bit about where that comes from? What are some of the resources and what is some of the work you're involved in?
Jemar: Yeah, I'm so glad. I always get excited talking about mental health. It came to me in a typical God fashion, which is “totally unexpectedly”. I was at seminary, and there was literally a street dividing the campus. We had two sides of the campus: one side is where all of the MDiv classes took place, all the hardcore Bible and Biblical languages and theology classes.
On the other side of the street was the marriage and family therapy program. There was a literal divide between the intellectual and the emotional that was really unhealthy, but they did offer free services for students. You went in and your therapist was someone in training. So they weren't very experienced…
Alison Cook: I remember being one of those.
Jemar: …but what it did for me was say, A, this is okay, B, I don't need to be in a crisis to see a therapist, and C, it starts to break down the walls even internally between your thoughts and your feelings and helps you really begin to process all of that holistically.
So I've been in therapy on and off since 2013. I have a wonderful therapist now and we talk every week or every other week, and I'm a huge advocate for it because it's helped me so much. Obviously there's a testimony there as well. But also, as I do this work of justice for longer and longer, I realize so much of it is not what's happening externally, the changes that we affect in the world, but what's happening internally and the people we're becoming in the process, which is by the way, why I say pursuing justice is a goal worthy in and of itself.
Because whether you change the law, whether the person you want gets elected or not, who you become in terms of character and virtue, as you do the right thing for the right reasons, that counts too. And we fill the world with the kind of people that we hope to see: people who are gracious, people who are patient, people who are resilient, people who are courageous.
From a Christian perspective, I think God is at least as interested in those sort of qualities of your heart as, did you make the world a better place?
Alison Cook: That is a whole word. I love that. It changes us as well. It aligns us. It aligns us with God's spirit, with the person we're supposed to become. That's so interesting, to bring this full circle, because the deep satisfaction, the deep integration internally, is what empowers you and buoys you to keep doing the work, even though often the external work is difficult.
Jemar: I think it's a Holy Spirit moment because it came to my mind as you're speaking. We talked about Myrlie and there was this press conference after, maybe 25ish people in the room. She's in a wheelchair. She said at this point in her eighties, I think she's in her nineties at this point, and she's still alive as we speak. Thank God.
But people like her who lived through so much, there is a presence about them. Literally, she was regal when she spoke. The whole room hushed. We leaned in to hang on her every word. I think that is related to what we're talking about–who she has become over half a century of working and sacrificing and praying and struggling for justice is now a presence and an aura that fills and inspires an entire room, wherever she goes.
Alison Cook: That’s the Holy Spirit right there. Yeah. It changes us for the better. This is also for us. I think that's important. I think it's important for all of us to hear, but I think as White people with a fair amount of privilege. What you're saying is, man, this is also for me. This is for me. This is how I become a better person. It gets us out of that, “I'm trying to rescue other people”.
I'm more into the, “”I need this. I want to be this person. I want to be filled with the spirit that brings justice and mercy and goodness and healing for all”. There's a cost to that, but man, the other side is beautiful. And I thank you for that. That's really beautiful.
Jemar: You, like I said, have summarized and encapsulated and articulated so much of my heart behind this book and really my whole sort of ministry and work. I'm really grateful and appreciative. I do want to highlight and underscore what you said. This is for white people too. You asked about the audience.
I really am eager for black people to read this book because, for once, it's not a book primarily about our suffering, but about our resistance. We can get really weary focusing on blacks suffering quite understandably, even though it's true and we need to know about it.
We also need to see our own agency, and that's what this book does. In terms of the internal transformation, I reserve the entire last chapter to talk about the virtues that I think are in common. I talk about courage, faith, imagination, and resilience as the tie that binds all these folks together. And that's for everyone.
Alison Cook: That's right.
Jemar: It is in the process of pursuing justice and righteousness and following Jesus and being the kind of people that we're supposed to be, that I think humanizes us, builds empathy among each of us, and makes us into the kind of people that we can look back at in history and admire. And we become those folks ourselves. That's for everyone.
Alison Cook: I love that. That's beautiful. I love it. It's such a powerful book. It's called The Spirit of Justice by Jemar Tisby. Where can people find you and find your work and get the book and all the things?
Jemar: Easiest thing to do is go wherever you get your books. Please support local bookstores, but you can find all the relevant links @JemarTisby on social media, or I would love for folks to subscribe to jemartisby.substack.com where I write frequently and I am going to be posting about it all the time.
Alison Cook: I can't recommend it more. You learn so much historically. It's such a powerful, really well researched book, and these stories are about some people in all different spaces in all different ways throughout history, doing courageous things in the spirit of justice against all odds.
Thank you for writing it. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for continuing to be a voice of such wisdom. Bless you this week as the book comes out and all the people who will read it. I hope that the spirit of justice lives in this book and will infiltrate each person who reads it.
Jemar: Thank you for being an early reader and introducing me to your listeners. The spirit of justice is available to us all.
Stay connected all week long
The Best of You Every Day offers short, daily reflections on Scripture through the lens of emotional health—helping you stay steady, connected, and rooted in love.
