Science-backed tools.
Spiritually-based wisdom.

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.

Pre-order Healing What’s Within: Coming Home to Yourself--and to God--When You're Wounded, Weary, and Wandering

‍

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:

• Boundaries For Your Soul Series

‍

‍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.

‍

Today, Cindy and I are tackling your questions about therapy, shedding light on research, common challenges, and insights to help you on your own healing journey! Here's what we cover:

‍

Here’s what we cover:‍

1. Which modality should I use (DBT / CBT / IFS / EMDR)?

2. What is the most important factor in getting results?

3. What is trauma-informed therapy?

4. How do therapists deal with getting triggered by a client?

5. What if I feel like I'm “too much” for my therapist?

6. Do we take the role of sin too lightly?

‍

Resources:

• Episode 67: The Link Between Faith & Emotional Healing—Gen Z, College Life, & A Hidden Search for Meaning with Cindy Gao
• Find Dr. Alison on Facebook and Instagram
• Sign up for my weekly email at dralisoncook.com
• Episode 70: Mastering the Art of Emotional Intelligence—How to Harness the Power of Your Emotions to Improve Your Relationships
• Episode 23: Am I wounded or am I sinful?

‍

If you liked this, you’ll love:

• Episode 113: A New Vision of Human Flourishing—A Christian Approach to Mental Health with Duke University Psychiatrist & Theologian Warren Kinghorn

‍

‍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!
• 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 today. We're closing out this current series, “Therapists on Therapy” with something special, a Q&A session featuring your questions about this very series. Joining me today is someone you might recognize–my incredible media coordinator, Cindy Gao Higgs.

‍

We absolutely love hearing from you. And today, Cindy and I will dive into some of the questions you've sent our way. Now, for those of you who might be new or who have missed Cindy's appearances before, let me reintroduce Cindy. She's not only a vital part of my team, but she's also a Masters student in counseling at Denver Seminary, where she is in training to become a counselor.

‍

She also has a powerful story of coming to faith in Jesus during the pandemic while she was a student studying remotely at Harvard University. It's an incredible story. And if you haven't heard it yet, I highly recommend you go back and check out my interview with Cindy on Episode 67, where we discuss Gen Z and a hidden search for meaning. It's one of my favorite episodes, and it really highlights the intersection of faith and emotional wellbeing.

‍

Be sure to stick around until the end of today's episode where Cindy and I get pretty fiery talking about the relationship between sin, compassion and boundary setting. I always enjoy these conversations. Before we jump in, a quick note. Several of you have been asking about specific diagnoses or diagnostic categories like neurodivergence, autism, addictions, and other topics.

‍

I'm excited to share that we're planning a future series with specialists to dive deep into some of these areas. So please keep an eye out for that. And to make sure we're covering what matters most to you, I will be running some polls in both my weekly email and on social media.

‍

So if you're not already connected with me, please make sure to follow me on social media. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram. It's @DrAlisonCook. And you can sign up for my weekly email at dralisoncook.com. It's free. It goes out every Friday and I send out additional resources in that email–books that I'm reading, conferences I'm aware of that you might be interested in. 

‍

I'm always trying to include that in my weekly email, bonus resources that I think might be helpful for you. And that's where I'll also sometimes do some polls and surveys to find out what you want me to cover on the podcast. All right. So without further ado, please enjoy today's episode where Cindy and I are answering your questions all about therapy.

‍

***

Cindy: So the first question we have from Bernadette is, how do I know which therapy modality will best suit me? There seem to be so many different approaches like CBT, DBT, IFS, EMDR. How do you choose one?

‍

Alison Cook: Oh, that's a great question. All the acronyms can make your head spin , it's a great question. I would love to hear a little bit from you, Cindy, from the perspective of how you're being trained in some of the modalities and how they're talking to you guys about it as up and coming therapists.

‍

I would say, first and foremost, that each modality has some real strengths, and some fit with different people more than others. So I don't tend to be someone who prescribes only one modality. I think there are real strengths in each one, and I think we can all benefit from different emphases and each approach to therapy.

‍

So number one is to do a little trial and error, maybe do a little bit of reading on some of these different approaches. And then see what kind of speaks to you. So for example, if we're talking about IFS, internal family systems, that's the one I talk about the most is the one I'm trained in the most.

‍

It's more experiential. It's more where you're really connecting to a part of yourself from inside of yourself. You're experiencing what it feels like to be present to a wounded or hurting part of your soul and what it is like to differentiate from that part. And for some people, that is really powerful and it brings healing in a way that others don't, but some people don't really like it.

‍

They want something a little more pragmatic. Something maybe a little bit more like CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is more, here's what I'm thinking. Here are the thoughts, and a therapist helps you disentangle facts from fiction, things you're telling yourself that aren't very helpful, helping you replace those thoughts with reality, more constructive thinking, which leads to different behaviors and different habits. 

‍

It's a little bit more pragmatic. Some people really benefit from that. So a lot of it really depends on your own personality, your own disposition, a little bit of trial and error, and understanding what each one emphasizes.

‍

Now in this day and age where you can get a lot online, you can even sometimes find videos where folks are showing what each modality looks like and notice what kind of draws you in.

‍

Cindy: Yeah. I think it's a really good question, and I'm wondering if listeners would be interested in a potential series where we can go more in depth a little bit into all the different approaches. So if you're a listener and you're interested, you can email info@dralisoncook.com and let us know if that's something that you'd want to know more about.

‍

Alison Cook: That's a really good idea. We'll do a little survey and see how much interest there is in going through more systematically, what each of those modalities is about.

‍

Cindy: I would say, before I started my master's program, training to become a therapist, I was so confused about all these different acronyms. It felt overwhelming to be like, oh my gosh, how do I pick the right or the best modality for me? And through my training now, as I've been learning about all the theories and the different techniques, I totally agree with you that different modalities can work better for different types of people. 

‍

But at the end of the day, it really struck me that in all these modalities, there are common elements that therapists use that kind of make up the therapeutic “magic sauce”. You can use different techniques, but who you are as a therapist, what your relationship is between therapist and client, that really is arguably more important. 

‍

It’s the concept of the person of the therapist. You can have all this knowledge and use all these techniques, but if you don't really care about your client, that's not really going to help. So I hope that's encouraging to people who maybe feel anxious about figuring out the best approach. I think regardless of the approach, you can find healing in a therapeutic relationship.

‍

Alison Cook: It's actually interesting that you say that, Cindy, because that's what the research shows. The research shows that it's the therapeutic alliance, the relationship that you build with the therapist, that brings about the most effective results. And it's interesting, you think about that even biblically.

‍

We are created to heal in the context of relationships. What I'll find oftentimes is folks will come to me because we have a great relationship. They want to keep seeing me, but maybe we reach a point in our relationship where they really should try EMDR and I'm not trained in EMDR.

‍

At times in the past, for example, I'll be working with a client and they'll go seek EMDR from a therapist for a specific period of time, and then maybe they'll come back and see me after that. We incorporate that into our relationship.

‍

So there are a lot of ways to do this, but I agree with your point that you find someone that you really respect. Again, they're not perfect, but it's a relationship that feels restorative to you. And that's really the most important ingredient.

‍

Cindy: Yeah. So the second part of this question from Bernadette is, how is a trauma-informed therapist different from any therapist?

‍

Alison Cook: Yeah that's a really great distinction because I was thinking that some therapeutic interventions/approaches are more suited for trauma work than others. 

‍

So a trauma-informed therapist is somebody who's going to understand the unique impacts of trauma. And what that means is that they understand that, first of all, there's a really important emphasis on pacing, that when you come in to therapy, often your baseline concern is, oh, I'm experiencing anxiety in this relationship, or I'm experiencing friction in this relationship, and it might seem like it's about the here and now, but there's really a long tail to the past, and there's a lot underneath that that's really painful and that's going to be hard to unpack. 

‍

And if a therapist moves too quickly into, let's dig in to all that deep stuff, it can almost re-traumatize someone because they're not ready. Their system is not ready. They've learned to cope through some of these survival strategies.

‍

You've learned to cope through pleasing other people. So all of a sudden, if your therapist is really attacking that and trying to use behavioral interventions to get you to stop certain things,  you don't know how to cope because that's the only way you've learned to cope.

‍

So a trauma informed therapist understands the connection between our current behaviors and our past wounds and understands that pacing is a big part of that. So for example, in IFS, we always talk about getting permission from the protectors, which means we don't go for the big, deep, overwhelming, exiled emotions, all the pain before those protector parts of us understand that the system can tolerate it.

‍

And what that means in practical terms, for example, I'll even use myself as an example. There were years where I had deep anxieties rooted in the past that to open up the lid on that all at once would have flooded me. I would have become more anxious. I wasn't ready. I didn't have the coping in place for that.

‍

I had to chip away a little bit at a time over different years and different junctures until finally, I can go into those deeper areas of my life without feeling so anxious. We have to be really sensitive, and that's what primarily a trauma informed therapist does.

‍

EMDR does a lot of work around containment, building safety, building trust, before you go into those deeper areas of wounding, those really painful memories. It's really important if man, in my history, I've got some really tough stuff that I've never really looked at.

‍

When we say they're trauma informed, they understand that they're going to work with you to build up your reserves, build up your tolerance, build up safety, build up trust, so that when you do dig into some of that, you're ready. You're ready, and you're not going to have a worse reaction than you would before.

‍

I think about it sometimes in the medical model. Maybe you need surgery, but your overall body isn't yet healthy enough to tolerate what it will take to go through that surgery. You first have to build up the overall health of the system before you can have that procedure.

‍

Cindy: That's super helpful. Yeah. There's been a lot of research that has come out on how trauma affects the body, the brain, the way we relate to others. And I would say that for all therapists, it's a necessary part of our professional role to understand that research because that will inform the way that we see our clients and help us be more effective.

‍

I think it's really a way of understanding the human condition and understanding why we think, feel, and act the way we do. And it's not its own modality, it's something that you bring with you regardless of what acronym you practice with.

‍

Alison Cook: Yeah. A behavioral therapist, and when you talk about behavioral, this is someone who's going to really focus on modifying behaviors or modifying thoughts. They're not going to dig into past memories, and can still be trauma-informed in the sense of, maybe in the initial inquiry, making sure, okay, let's look at some of these thoughts. It's like a trauma informed CBT therapist. Someone who specializes in CBT might say, man, I think it might behoove you to go do some trauma work.

‍

To go look at the past, because we're not making any progress making behavioral changes. So to be trauma informed might not mean you go out and get certified or you get an expertise in trauma work, but it means you understand there are different reasons why folks might not be able to make the changes in their life they want to make.

‍

Cindy: So we'll move on to the next question. This is from Julie. What do you do as a therapist if you yourself get triggered during a session?

‍

Alison Cook: Oh, that's a good question. Therapists are humans like everybody else. So that's the first thing that I would say. Like anybody else, when you're in a conversation with another human, we notice reactivity within ourselves. So that first step of noticing, oh I'm triggered by what this person is saying.

‍

There's some reactivity inside of me. That self-awareness is the baseline. We all have to have that, whether you're a therapist or in two-way relationships, you're learning how to, first of all, recognize, I'm feeling a little frustrated. Oh, that's making me want to check out. I'm wanting to detach. 

‍

That can happen in any relationship and emotional intelligence–we did a whole episode on emotional intelligence–is learning how to even be aware of that. So that's number one. Therapists really have to have that good self awareness.

‍

I'm sure you're doing a lot in your training, Cindy, about growing that self-awareness. Noticing is number one. Oh, I'm anxious about this. Isn't that interesting? Okay. So then part two for the therapist is, how do I regulate that while staying present to my client?

‍

Because it's not the nature of this relationship for me to bring that in. And one of the things I really like about IFS, I don't mean to always go back to that, but I think one of the things IFS gives us as clinicians is that framework of thinking about it as a part of me. 

‍

Isn't that interesting. I can be curious inside of myself. A part of me feels a little anxious about that. Or part of me feels a little annoyed right now. Can I honor that while staying present to the client? And it can really reduce stress inside. Because it's okay. Two things can be true.

‍

I can feel really compassionate toward you and want to be present with you while simultaneously being aware that gosh, later on, after this appointment, I'm going to need to take a look at that. I'm noticing I feel a little scared.

‍

I've noticed, years ago, I would notice if clients had angry parts and they'd come in with anger, a part of me would get really triggered because I was really uncomfortable with anger. I noticed that, okay, isn't that interesting? And then I do my work outside of that session. And that's why as therapists, we grow through the work of providing care, because then I have to go, isn't that interesting? What is that bringing up in me from the past where that kind of reminds me of someone in my life who used to get mad at me and now I'm afraid?

‍

And how do I work through that with my supervisor and in consultation with other therapists in my own therapy so that I'm not bringing it into this relationship? We get to do our own work as a part of showing up for others, which is really powerful.

‍

Cindy: Yeah, for sure. In my program, so much of the training is this continuous facing of our own stuff and processing it through essays, in our class discussions, with supervisors, in group supervision, individual supervision. There's so much of it because that's part of what will enable us to be good therapists.

‍

We have to be self-aware, because our own stuff cannot get in the way of helping our clients. So that's something I think therapists should take pretty seriously in their development. And I also think about the concept of the wounded healer from Henry Nouwen, which I think is so beautiful. Because, as you said, all of us are human.

‍

All therapists are human. We all have our own wounds. But it's not something that has to get in the way. And it can even empower us, as we've faced our own stuff and really been aware of the ways that we struggle and our own pain points, we can harness those experiences and it can help us be more effective.

‍

We can empathize more. We can connect better with our clients. We can see the world differently and really honor the sacred space that we have with our clients because we've done that work to really see how raw and vulnerable and truthful and special the work is.

‍

Alison Cook: To your point, Cindy, the other thing I love about the work of therapy is sometimes you repair with a client. Sometimes a client has to repair. There's rupture and repair within a therapeutic relationship. I've had that happen where I'll say something or we'll have a session and the client will come back and be like, hey, that didn't land very well with me. I didn't like that. 

‍

And we talk through it, which can become a restorative experience because that's a part of a normal human relationship. We don't always get it right. I would encourage the listener, if you have a therapist where there's been a disappointment, sometimes it's not a good fit, but sometimes it might be worth trying to raise that and say, hey, this isn't landing right with me or this isn't helpful to me.

‍

Or when you said, this was hard for me, see what you get back. Because therapists are also human. Sometimes they'll defend themselves. Sometimes they won't make it better. And if that happens, then that might be a cue to switch therapists. But in a lot of cases, you bring that up and you actually have a really helpful understanding of what it looks like to work through a repair with a therapist.

‍

We are very much wounded healers and I think all of us, every single one of us is a wounded healer as well. These skills that we're learning within the context of a therapeutic relationship are the same life skills, essentially, that we're learning to go out and enact with other people too. 

‍

We're trying to discern, is this something I need to try to repair with this person? And where is this person not a good fit for me?

‍

Cindy: Yeah. Something else I'm also hearing in this question is a potential fear of, what if what I'm experiencing or feeling is too much for a therapist even? Because it feels so overwhelming for me internally. What if my therapist can't handle it?

‍

Alison Cook: Wow. Yeah.

‍

Cindy: What would you say to address that fear?

‍

Alison Cook: It's a great question. I think what I would say is to test it out, because we don't know. So this is where I love the “name, frame, brave” work. You've done a great job of naming it. I notice I'm a little bit nervous. I think my emotions might be too much for this person. We've named it, but we don't know how to frame it yet. 

‍

The framing might be, I'm afraid of my big emotions. My therapist actually is dying for me to get a little more raw. But the frame sometimes might be, actually they're not tracking with me for whatever reason, they're not able to keep up with me. And I have had both experiences in my own personal therapy where I notice I'm holding back cause I don't think they're gonna get it. And sometimes I've been right. I've been holding back out of holy discernment.

‍

And sometimes I've been holding back and parts of me were afraid. What I would say is, test it a little bit, maybe name that very experience with the therapist. Hey, I'm noticing this. What do you think? You are always trying to, especially at the beginning of a therapeutic relationship, you're trying to discern if this person is trustworthy and safe for you. You do not want to assume that because they're an expert, they are safe for you.

‍

Cindy: Yes, that is such a good point. Just because they're a therapist and they have all these letters after their name doesn't mean that they're gonna be a good fit for you and that you're gonna feel comfortable with them.

‍

Alison Cook: That's right. So test the system a little bit, test it out and notice and see how they respond and see how they respond. If you feel like, ooooh, they really got it. Or see if they bypass or sideline or make you feel worse. And notice those cues like any relationship. We talk about the red flags and the green flags and the yellow flags.

‍

The same applies as you're discerning about whether or not to work with a therapist and whether or not to reveal certain things to a therapist.

‍

Cindy: Great. So we're gonna move on to our final question for this episode. This one's from Carrie. In this series, Therapists on Therapy, as we've talked about the wounds that might bring people into therapy, Carrie is wondering, are we taking the role of sin too lightly in our understanding of woundedness? And what are your thoughts on balancing self-compassion versus taking responsibility for our actions without making excuses?

‍

Alison Cook: Great question. We have a podcast episode, I think from about a year back called, Am I wounded or am I sinning? 

‍

Cindy: Yes. That's Episode 23. We can link it in the show notes.

‍

Alison Cook: There is a definite theme with most of what we talk about on the podcast, that we change in the context of compassion, baseline. We change in the context of compassion. We get compassionate about whatever emotions we're feeling. We get compassionate about whatever the reason is behind a behavior, that we're going to change in the context of compassion versus the context of beating ourselves up or shaming ourselves.

‍

When we're shaming ourselves, when we're criticizing ourselves, when we're berating ourselves, we're actually ratcheting up the nervous system. We're actually moving ourselves out of that calm, clear homeostasis, that place inside that makes us more equipped to make wise and constructive decisions.

‍

So when we shame and beat ourselves up, it rarely helps us toward the end of healthier, more constructive choices. I think that is definitely a theme. Does that mean, I guess the question is, does that mean we're being easy on sin?

‍

Cindy: Yeah, I totally agree with the importance of that compassion. In my own life, I don't think it's a “compassion” versus “taking responsibility for sin” dichotomy. I think in my life it was very much, I had to become a Christian, and that meant receiving compassion and love from God, and that's what empowered me to actually look at the behaviors I'd done, and some things that I realized I wasn't proud of, but I was too ashamed to ever face, so I pushed it aside.

‍

I never admitted it and could never apologize because I would become so overwhelmed with shame that I would deny it. I probably have gaslit people in that period of time because it was too much for me to handle. And it was actually learning, okay, there's a God who actually loves me, who accepts me even though I've done all these things I'm not proud of. 

‍

And once I was able to receive that compassion and extend that compassion towards myself, that empowered me to start taking responsibility and owning the decisions I'd made in my life.

‍

So I think they actually feed really well together. I can see the perspective of, we don't want to stop at, oh, I'm compassionate towards myself and everything that I've done is okay and I can keep acting in this way that might be hurting others.

‍

But it starts with self-compassion, and I think taking responsibility for the way that we act and our actions and how we treat others is really important. But that flows out of an acceptance and a compassion that we have for ourselves.

‍

Alison Cook: Yeah, I love that, Cindy. Thank you for being so honest about that because I think there's a lot of truth in what you're saying. I could say the same thing. There's times when I've acted out and I was doubling down on it and I didn't want to be called out for it. And you do the things, the gaslighting and the justifying and the rationalizing and the defending that is hurtful.

‍

It's an interesting question and I think that question tends to come from two different places. The first place is in ourselves, am I justifying sin in my own life? But the second place I noticed that question can come from is folks who've been really hurt by abusive people, by narcissistic people.

‍

By people who are really doing harmful, cruel activities, which also happens. That question can come from, hey, are we being easy on that? Are we being easy on some of those folks that are really being cruel out there? And there's some justification for that. I get that. And then there's also the angle of, am I being too soft or too easy on myself from that first angle?

‍

I couldn't agree with you more in my life. The more there's that sense of my own belovedness, the more there's that sense of that healthy, and I don't even want to call it shame, but that healthy oh, that's so hard to admit, I hate that I do that, but I do, and I need to take a look at it. 

‍

The more I lean into my belovedness, the more that that little tinge of shame becomes constructive and moves me toward change versus destructive doubling down on more toxic strategies. So I 100% agree with that. 

‍

To those of you listening where you've been really harmed by somebody, and there's this, why are we being so compassionate towards folks who are doing terrible things, which can also be at the root of that question. In my years, some of my work was with addicts who had, through the course of their addiction or to support their addiction, really done some pretty harmful things to family members, to other people, to their kids, even, to spouses.

‍

And what I've noticed is that number one, for those folks to even ponder that when they're in sobriety, when they're trying to change, that there is a God who actually is compassionate for them, it's so radical that to actually maybe even taste that would lead them on the path of, how would I not change for this guy who would love me even after I've done these horrible things?

‍

So it doesn't lead to oh, let's be soft on this. It actually leads to this paradoxical, dramatic, how could I? This almost paradoxical, I have to completely change. And I noticed that the enemy doubles down on the shame, the “you are rotten”, which doubles down on the toxic behaviors. It's fascinating. So I've seen it from that side. 

‍

That being said, if you are someone who's been hurt by somebody who's really toxic or really abusive, I have no problem saying to clients, that is toxic. That is abusive. That is evil. I'm not necessarily saying that about the person, but I am naming that pattern of behaviors for what it is. 

‍

And we will set a boundary with that. We will not let those behaviors harm you. We will not let those behaviors near you. We're going to do what we have to do to set boundaries around that so those behaviors are not hurting you. They're not coming anywhere near you. You may have to take extreme measures to shut those behaviors down. 

‍

But that doesn't necessarily mean, even with those strong boundaries, even that strong naming of this is toxic, this is wrong, you do that so that you get to safety, at the end of the day, you are still releasing judgment of that individual to God. 

‍

Your goal is to do that to free yourself from the ongoing damage of harboring anger and resentment against that person. Even when we set really strong boundaries with sin, whether in somebody else or in ourselves, sometimes in ourselves, if we've got patterns of sin and we have to be like, listen, this is wrong. I cannot step across this line. 

‍

That's very different from hating ourselves, from beating ourselves up, from shaming ourselves. That's saying, this is a clear line I cannot cross. That's a boundary and boundaries are not inherently condemning. They're based on practical realities and facts. This behavior cannot stand.

‍

I like to distinguish between really strong boundaries, either with the behaviors of someone else or with ourselves, and this sort of self-condemning or other-condemning emotional posture that doesn't really bring health to anyone. In ourselves or in other people, we can be compassionate. 

‍

Compassion says, man, I've had a really hard day. I am so tempted to go do something really stupid right now because I'm mad at my loved one and I've had a really bad day. Compassion says, I've had a really bad day. It doesn't say, I can go do that thing. It saysm I've had a really bad day. How can I care for myself in a healthy way through it?

‍

How can I get more support for myself? It doesn't say I've had a really bad day. It's okay. I can justify, I can rationalize doing this thing I know I'm not supposed to do. It can feel like a fine line, but it's an important one.

‍

Cindy: Compassion does not justify harmful behaviors. And to your point at the beginning of your answer, compassion is what helps us calm that nervous system. If we've had a bad day and we're way overwhelmed, compassion can bring us down, to actually have the resources to make better decisions. Whereas if you feel completely overwhelmed, you will be more vulnerable to making an impulsive decision that might hurt yourself or others.

‍

Alison Cook: Exactly. Yeah. So well stated. Compassion is really powerful. It's not soft in that sense. It can really transform that moment, that pause between an impulse and a choice.

‍

Have you ever felt like you’ve grown and healed, but the people around you haven’t?

‍

In today’s episode, I’m joined by my friend and therapist, Dr. Monique Gadson, for a powerful  conversation about how to ignite change not only within ourselves but also within the systems we're deeply connected to—whether that's our families, churches, or work environments. Here’s what we cover:

‍

Here’s what we cover:‍

1. Dr. Monique’s insights from her work as a therapist within a church setting

2. How to be "in" but not "of" a system

3. The difference between toxic cultures and imperfect human gatherings

4. How kindness can sometimes hinder growth

5. The effects of culture-wide PTSD

6. Practical ways to find and nurture hope

‍

Resources:

• And The Church Said podcast with Dr. Monique Gadson
• ‍Episode 33 and Episode 60 with Dr. Monique Gadson
• Instagram: @drmoniquesmithgadson
• ‍drmoniquesmithgadson.com

‍

If you liked this, you’ll love:

• Episode 33: People Pleasing & Developing Your Own Inner Compass—Thoughts on Depression, Mental Health & the Church, and Finding Hope in Dark Places w/ Dr. Monique Gadson
• Episode 60: How to Make New Friends, Identify Red & Green Flags, & Extract Yourself From an Unhealthy Situation w/ Aundi Kolber & Dr. Monique Gadson
• Episode 73: True Belonging vs. Groupthink, Cliques, & Trying to Fit In—How to Belong to Others While Staying True To Yourself

‍

‍Thanks to our sponsors:

• Register for the Broken to Beloved Conference here
• 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!
• Head to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code BESTOFYOU to receive UP TO 39%!
• 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: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here this week. This is our very last episode in this series, “Therapists on Therapy”. I've really enjoyed the conversations in this series, getting to know different therapists, different resources, different areas of expertise. We'll have many more series like this because I love having other therapists on the podcast. 

‍

But for today's episode, I wanted to introduce you to a dear friend of mine who has a really unique background working as a therapist in church-based settings. So when we think about therapy, we often think about it as an individual endeavor. You're struggling. Something's not working in your life. You don't like the way you feel, or you're struggling in a relationship, so you decide to seek the support of a therapist.

‍

Now, a typical therapy session, as most of us know, you go to an office or you log on virtually, and you meet one on one with your therapist. You have a dedicated space each week devoted to focusing on how to heal a wound or how to effectively cope with a tough situation or how to communicate better, how to treat anxiety or depression. 

‍

You do all of this in the privacy of that individual relationship. But here's the thing–as a therapist, we're working with somebody individually. We're equipping them. We're helping them get healthier. We're helping them think differently. We're helping them discover new strategies, new ways to protect themselves, new ways to set boundaries, new ways to understand a situation. 

‍

But then you go back into the systems around you. You go back into a family system. You go back into a church system. You go back into a work system. You go back into systems of other people and you're expected to apply these new skills, but other people don't always respond to the changes within you in ways that are helpful.

‍

Sometimes they do, a lot of times they don't. I often think, how do we also change the system? How do we also tackle the problems that exist in systems around us? My guest today, Dr. Monique Gadson, has worked for decades within systems. She started her work within a church community and now works within an academic institution, where she works to bring healing, not only to individuals, but to entire systems. 

‍

As a consulting therapist, Dr. Monique has worked for decades with churches and organizations in leadership development, risk management, and establishing emotionally and mentally healthy environments. She holds a PhD in marriage and family therapy and two master's degrees in Christian psychological studies and clinician mental health counseling. 

‍

She hosts the podcast called And the Church Said, where she discusses church and culture from a Christian counseling perspective, and she is an assistant professor of counseling psychology at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology.

‍

Monique has been on the podcast two times before, back in Episode 33, where she talked about overcoming people pleasing and some of her thoughts on depression, and with Aundi Kolber in Episode 60 on how to make new friends and identify red and green flags. She has such a wealth of wisdom. I loved this conversation. We talk so candidly about what it means to heal systems, because the truth is, God designed us to exist in communities with other people. 

‍

It's so important to think about not only how we heal ourselves, but how we also bring healing to the communities that we're a part of. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Monique Smith Gadson.

‍

***

Monique, I am so thrilled to get to have this conversation with you. I get to have lots of conversations with you, so it's really fun for me to record this conversation so that other people can hear it as well. Thank you so much for being here with me today.

‍

Monique: You know I love being with you. You're wonderful. Your podcast is one of my favorites anyway, so it's really fun to be able to record for one of my favorite podcasts and one of my favorite people, so thank you.

‍

Alison: One of the things that is so interesting about your background, Monique, is you are a therapist, but your work, almost from the get go, was within a church context. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that looked like? You are really pioneering on the front end; you set up shop as a therapist within a church. How did that happen? 

‍

Monique: Yeah. Not only did I set up shop in a church, but let's be very specific–in the black church when it was not necessarily the trending thing that it somewhat is now. Truly a God thing. I always felt called to the black church specifically.

‍

Growing up as a PK, the black church has been central in my life, from then until now, and I had come to understand it felt like there was this void in the church, in terms of us talking about mental and emotional struggles that people were experiencing. So I went to graduate school, trained as a professional clinician, and was talking with my pastor one day about what I had done in graduate school. 

‍

And, before I know it, they are asking me to come and be a part of the staff at the church. Yeah, I had the opportunity to really cultivate what a counseling ministry/having a professional clinician on staff looks like in this particular context.

‍

Alison: Your experience and your expertise is so interesting–having the “both and” of the individual training, the clinical training, the background, but being within a church context. What do you see as the pros and cons of being situated as a counselor within a church community?

‍

Monique: My social location from the years gone by, was having to help people understand that these two do marry well together, counseling and faith. Historically, when I started out, there was a lot of skepticism, a lot of suspicion. It felt as though there was this attempt to brainwash.  

‍

Being housed within a church gave people the opportunity, especially over the context of the numbers of years that I found myself situated there, it would give people the opportunity to understand that it does not have to be in direct opposition, one to the other. It is very much biblical for us to attune to our mental and our emotional needs. 

‍

Not to cast shade, if you will, on however pastors choose to present their sermons, but sometimes when the context is just, here is the biblical passage and I'm preaching it and perhaps not hone in on the emotional state of this individual, or not look at how this person's mental health suffered. It may be the tendency to not see that, if it's not focused on more specifically. 

‍

So that was a pro of being able to be in that context. One of the cons would be having to understand that when we're thinking more systemically, you can have an individual that is situated within a community where sometimes the work that the individual is attempting to do for their own betterment of their emotional and mental health might not be supported in the overall community.

‍

Let's see. That was a con at times in spaces, not overall, but there are things that we would try to promote in terms of emotional and mental health that some people would question from a spiritual perspective. You talk about spiritual bypassing. You know how some things are misinterpreted. “If you had faith, then this would not be”. 

‍

So there are some places where those were problematic. Then you'll get the person to come back that would repeat the cliche that they've heard–if I'm too blessed to be stressed, then why am I feeling this way? I’m having to think about the environment that we are going to send people back into.

‍

Alison: Okay. So let's talk about this for a second, because this is a dichotomy that really happens on every level. We have therapy, you go in, you're getting healing resources for your individual healing, but then you have these systems and a system could be a church, it could be a family, it could be an institution, it could be a place of work, it could be any group of people. We need to be parts of systems; we don't exist in isolation.

‍

So inevitably, you go back into a system and especially when we think about the context of the church where there's so much overlap, if the messages within the system are not supporting or reinforcing what you're learning in therapy, it creates dissonance for the person and also for the therapist at times.

‍

So let's talk about it on two levels. Number one, for the individual, you're experiencing this dissonance. I'm hearing one thing over here from my therapist, but then I'm at church and they're saying something else. I see what you're saying. That could be really magnified if your counselor is literally within your church setting and they're not totally aligned. I guess I'm curious, as a therapist, it seems to me that when you're within that context, you're both thinking of your individual clients, but you're also thinking about how to help this system be a safer place for folks who are hurting. Did you have the power to affect some of those changes?

‍

Monique: That's my hope and my prayer. A lot of the work included, how do I impact the system? And it would look simple. For example, in our grief support group, people are coming and they find themselves on this grief journey. I would talk to the participants quite often about how we often find ourselves in the middle of a grief journey, not only as a participant, but also as an educator.  

‍

We're having to say to people sometimes, that's not helpful when you say whatever it is that you say. So especially in the case of a person who experienced miscarriage, I noticed (more so even personally, as well as professionally) people would say, “something might have been wrong with the baby.  That was God's way of protecting”. 

‍

And you're thinking, what in the world does this even mean? So you would hear those types of comments, and we would actually talk about that sometimes in the support groups, where we are saying, these things land in ways that are so not helpful.

‍

We need to think about how it is impacting us, and to empower ourselves to say to other people why that is not helpful. Perhaps even what would be a better thing to say or not to say in those moments. So that's one example of ways that we are thinking, if you can impact the system, and we know from thinking about systems in nature, that if one person enters, one person exits, the system changes.

‍

So if we can get a person to enter that system who is better educated, better informed, then we are looking to impact change even in that way.

‍

Alison: It’s so interesting to think about a support group within a larger church context. The overall system, the church system, isn't going to be perfect. People are going to say things. It's like a giant family. People are going to say things that rub you the wrong way. The pastor's going to say things that you don't even agree with, or that hurt. 

‍

We don't expect a family to be perfect. We don't expect a church family to be perfect. There's toxicity, there's toxic cultures, and that's one thing. But then there's imperfect human gatherings of people, which is every single church on this planet.  We're talking about that category in this group. But what's interesting about what you're saying is when you have a support group or a counselor within that context, there's a way in which I could see where it'd be harder, but there's also a way in which suddenly, you've gone through something really hard. You've lost a family member. 

‍

People are saying things that aren't helpful to you within the church family, but you've got this other subgroup within the family where you can process that, where you can get support, where people do get you, where you might even feel buoyed up to go back out into their larger family and say, hey, that's not helpful, because you're not alone.

‍

There's a way in which that subsystem creates more health within the larger system. It's like a large extended family where there's different pockets within the family of varying degrees of safety. 

‍

Monique: That's a beautiful way that you describe it, and the hope is, even as you were talking, I was thinking about allergy shots. Yes. Probably because I soon have to take them. But anyway, when you think about even the concept of the allergy shot, you are being injected with these things that you are allergic to that are supposed to build your system up over time to calm it. It's oh, okay, I don't have to blow up every time this particular foreign substance, if you will, enters into my system.

‍

Like you're saying, it is not necessarily the toxic system. But if it's okay, helping people to understand how to better support a person, to really understand that everything does not necessarily have a spiritual response to it or needs even a spiritual response to it, it doesn't have to be spiritualized away, when we can get a few individuals who understand that and who can demonstrate that with another individual, that is a way that we can begin that process of trying to create the environment, the larger system, to become, more healthy.

‍

Alison: Monique, it feels to me like the trajectory of your body of work, even what you're doing now at a graduate school setting, from the inside of an organization, you're trying to introduce or expose some of these micro-toxins, these micro things that hurt little by little. Through that, you’re creating a healthier system. That's hard work.

When you're embedded within that system as a therapist, where you're really trying to go in and help that individual, you're simultaneously aware of how the system is creating harm, even at the best of circumstances. That's a lot. It's a lot. It's a two-front battle. How do you sustain your own spiritual and emotional health through that?

‍

Monique: You know, I talk to people like you, haha. You're grateful for people who get it, who understand that. I have that opportunity to go and say that this is hard. I don't know that people necessarily get it. It is exhausting and it is hard when you enter into a system, and you understand the need to differentiate who you are, even within that system.

‍

Many years ago, of course, then I was a whole lot younger as a clinician. So over the years, I've thankfully gathered more experience, more wisdom, but you do understand that you have to have a sense of who you are as it relates to this particular system. As much as you can, how is it that you think about impacting the change without being lured into that homeostasis that the system is going to want to maintain?

‍

So back when I said a minute ago, anytime someone new enters or exits, the system changes.

Remembering that it's okay that things are a little bonkers right now. All pieces of the system usually are going to operate in such a way to bring that balance and that calm, if you will, back. Whatever that norm is for that particular system. That is what they're wanting to bring back into existence.

‍

When you enter into a system and when you are trying to bring about change and when you are having to name things, when you are having to call out and identify the factors that create anxiety within the system, of course that is going to cause the system to become anxious. 

‍

When that happens, then the system says, hey, you are the foreign particle. How is it that we can deal with you so that our anxiety can ease? Because that's going to be the nature of the system. The person, such as myself, who has to embed in the system while also trying to bring about a level of change within that system, we have to be so very mindful that things that come to us are about us and also are not about us.

‍

We have to understand that it's survival anxiety that is being stirred within a system, meaning this system treats that particular entity as something or someone that needs to be annihilated, if you will, to be able to bring the system back to a level of calm. So I have to be mindful. This is why we have to enter into the system knowing what the assignment is. 

‍

I've said this several times over the years in the various systems that I have found myself: a lot of prayer, a lot of journaling. Journaling is my thing. I prescribe it anytime and everywhere I can. But for me, those are the tools that I definitely have to rely on. Praying and journaling and being in community with people who understand how I am being adversely impacted working within those systems. 

‍

To be able to be reminded, this is my assignment, go in, do your assignment, step out when you need to, take a break, take a rest, dust off your equipment, put it back on and get back at it. That for me is how I usually have to approach it. I think about David in Scripture and I remember reading this not too long ago and actually journaled quite a bit about it. 

‍

When he was going to battle Goliath, Saul tried to put on David his armor.David was like, this isn't working for me.  And so he took it off. He goes and he chooses his slingshot and the stones. So he's like, this is me. This is what I need to be able to do this assignment that I feel like the Lord has sent me to do. We have to be very mindful, again, of who we are, especially in the Lord, and what is it that He has called us to do, to be able to get in there and do our work.

‍

You're not going to go in and not be unscathed whatsoever. No way, but we do have to have an understanding of our assignment so that we are able to stay focused on the task at hand.

‍

Alison: This is why I wanted to have you on the podcast. This is what I love about you, this work that you're doing so faithfully to disrupt, distress, and introduce anxiety into a system in order to change the system, so the system will be healthier for the individuals that it tries to serve, which is the goal!

‍

We're not even talking about completely toxic systems. We're really talking about, for the most part, healthy, but broken human systems.This is what is so nuanced about change. To the listener who's at a church where they're like, I love this church, it’s not toxic. And by toxic, when you're someone like you who's going in and you're disrupting and you're naming things and you're calling out things and you're saying, hey, I don't think this is quite right.

‍

You're getting pushback. It's hard. It's not fun, but you're also not getting gaslit, you're not getting shut down, you're not getting exiled. That would be toxic. That would be abusive and it would be untenable. Sometimes it's a fine line. But for the most part, it's like the system has invited my voice and they want to hear from me. They're listening. There is enough of a relational trust. 

‍

This is why I wanted to try to have this conversation. It's a hard conversation to have because we're talking about that messy middle, where it's not this, you gotta get out because this is toxic.

It's also not, I love everything about this community. It's meeting all of my needs. It's that murky middle where there's some good, but there's some things that are hard, which is so much of our experience.

This is really what you do. You go into that kind of place and try to introduce change, one brave step at a time, like David with his slingshot. It's so profound, Monique, what you do, and for the listener, whether you're a therapist or not, when you show up in a system and you name things and you call out things, it's not always instantly gratifying, but it is that good, hard work of bringing change.

‍

There is a cost to it.

‍

Monique: There is a high cost for sure. Even back to what you were saying, it's not always necessarily toxic/abusive, but it can be, like you say, such a fine line, that I am saying, oooh, do you even understand how close you are tethering to it potentially being toxic and abusive?

‍

Because of this messy middle, I think one of the hardest concepts for me to get people to understand is about being kind. Okay, being kind, yes, versus what could be the other side of that coin, maybe rude. Of course, I would prefer you to be kind. And also, I am saying when it comes to sometimes having to enact change or a change, kindness doesn't cut it.

‍

Kindness can be a scapegoat, if you will, preventing transformation from taking place. Transformation is going to call upon us to be uncomfortable. It's going to call for us to have to look at self in the mirror in ways that more than likely, will uptick the anxiety. But if we don't have the threshold to deal with that, then we might resort back to, let's be kind and be nice to people, and we'll be hospitable.

‍

We'll open up a space for you to come in, which, hear me say, I'm not minimizing that. But if we're talking about what might be needed, which will include a transformation to take place, which is going to require, as you're saying that messy middle, we don't get to do that without being touched in some ways and touched in ways that again, probably will increase our anxiety.

‍

Alison: Yeah, it's not always comfortable, and kindness, to your point, can mask this false peace. As opposed to, ooh, I don't like that. I don't really like what she's saying. Which again, the more honest and sincere might be, I don't know if there's anything I can do about it. I don't like it. It's hard to sit with. It's uncomfortable. 

‍

Just sitting with that, which as clinicians, we're trained to sit with, but a lot of folks aren't, and that's how change occurs in any kind of system, in a family, in a church is sitting with, ooh, I don't like what you're saying. I like you. I don't like what you're saying. This might not have even been what I really wanted when I asked for your input. You're actually giving me real input. Let me sit with that discomfort.

‍

Monique: Whether it's a family, if it's the parent having to say the hard thing to the kid, or yes, in this day and time, yes, young adults are reflecting back and maybe parents were not perfect. Again, not necessarily saying toxic, abusive, that's a totally different context and yes, it requires, a different kind of approach, but yeah, there are some times as parents, we need to hear from children like, okay, oh wow, I didn't realize the way I said it or the way I was, was that problematic.

‍

Whatever the case, it causes discomfort. The mirror has been held into your face and you're like, whoo, okay, don't like what I see there. But it is apparent that something needs to change. So in that family system, yes, that can happen in the church setting having to even be mindful when we think in Revelation, the letter to the churches. 

‍

I'm thinking about the church of Laodicea. And, the word says that, if you're not hot, if you're not cold, if you're lukewarm, I'm going to spew you out.

‍

So there is something about saying either you're for the word of God or you're not. That's really the way it is. But to hear things being proclaimed in a church setting, whether we personally might agree or not, but it's lining up with what the Word of God says, it may make us uncomfortable.

‍

Alison: Yeah.

‍

Monique: But that's how this transformation is going to take place. If we're saying we're trying to be a thing or we're wanting to be more welcoming or more diverse or more whatever the case may be, okay, the reality of how that might have to happen versus the ideal. You're going to have to spend some time in that messy middle. We're in this time in our culture where we are so conditioned to quick fixes.

‍

So much so that we don't have, again, this threshold to say, you're right, and it might require more than some bandaging to make it appear to be what it needs to be. So whatever that system is, it can play out in different ways.

‍

Alison: Yeah. We want the quick fix. We did it. Look, we checked all the boxes. We're now a healthy culture, we're healthy, or folks are tearing the whole thing down. I'm out. Sometimes that's needed, but so much of change, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I actually heard Trevor Noah say this on a podcast recently. I thought it was really interesting. 

‍

He was talking to Adam Grant and they were talking about groupthink. In religious cultures. Trevor Noah was saying when he grew up, his mom, a faithful believer, very religious, they went to church all the time, what Trevor Noah was saying was that the paradox of his mom was that she was very loyal, very devout, deeply held beliefs, and she constantly disagreed with the sermon and said, I didn't agree with him on that.

‍

I didn't agree with him on that. I don't think that's right. As a kid, he learned what we call cognitive complexity. You can hold a couple of different things, which to me, I was listening to it thinking, that's a tiny little thing where someone from within is still retaining some individuality, some differentiation. I'm a differentiated person within this setting. That's again, very nuanced. So many of us think, if I'm part of this institution, I have to be sold to everything that they say, or I have to be out. 

‍

You and I've had this conversation. What does it mean to be within? It's funny, Monique, we talk about this biblically. You said this to me recently: be in the world, but not of the world. We think about that primarily in the context of secular cultures. Be in it, but not of it. But the truth is, it also can apply to our faith communities.

‍

Be in it, but not completely subsumed by it. Keep your own presence of mind. Keep your own discernment. Keep your own cognitive complexity. Disagree. Agree to disagree on some topics. That's what you're trying to do in this very subversive, subtle way within contexts, is encourage that kind of mentality of, we're all in with Jesus.

‍

We're all in with Jesus. We're not all in with a gathering of imperfect humans, necessarily. We don't leave our individuality at the door.

‍

Monique: We don't. When you talked about the tearing down, I do believe that there is a season. Scripture even speaks of there being a time to tear down and there is also a time to build up. What we failed to move to or toward, let's tear it down. But what is it supposed to build back up into? 

‍

Now, if we're trying to build it back into where, as you're saying, I can be of it and in it and it's all like me and I am all like it, then that's problematic, because the diversity in how we're created. God did not intend for us to be the same.

‍

The hard work that we are facing today is yes, how do we learn to differentiate? How do I look at you and say, you're going to have a different opinion than I have? It does not mean that your difference of opinion is going to equate to my annihilation. Because that's where we jump to kind of automatically.

‍

And then hear me say this. A lot of stuff has happened in the last, I don't even want to know what number to put on the years, but in the last couple of years, it's a lot. We are in very polarized times. I would say that we are all, as a collective, dealing with a post-traumatic something.

‍

I would say it's beyond the pandemic. The pandemic is scapegoated into it. It was large enough of an event in our lives. So I'm definitely not minimizing it, but I would also probably make an argument that there was a lot that existed prior to this pandemic that would now factor into some of this post traumatic whatever it is that we are experiencing.

‍

So when we are hearing rhetoric that will give us the idea that if not for this group of people or this thing, then this would be the outcome, we're going to be pitted against one another. Things have been flattened to the point that it's an either-or in our minds.

‍

No messy middle! It's an either- or. That in and of itself is going to, I would argue, create a survival anxiety because nothing can really be watered down to that. But we're trying to make it fit. And it's not fitting. So then we are beset with this survival anxiety.

‍

I observe it in families. I observe it in classrooms. I observe it in church. I observe it in institutions. When we think about what we do from a clinical perspective, we understand that the bodies are activated and triggered, and now in survival mode. When we're there, we already know that all of our rationalizing has gone offline. We're in fight, flight, survival, freeze, fawning, all of those collectively.

‍

Alison: How do you find your way, navigating differences, navigating healthy differentiation, within a community context? It requires that groundedness, that calm nervous system, that ability to hold nuance, that individual work that we've been doing, but we now have to bring into these community spaces.

‍

Because we need them. I really agree with you. Culturally, we're seeing this on so many levels. You would think it's easy–I'll go to therapy and not go to church cause I'll get my needs met. I'll experience love and attunement but I don't have to deal with all the stuff you and I are talking about, and yet we need to figure out how to find our place within a group of people. 

‍

We do, that's part of our design. You're right, we are in need of a new way of thinking about how to be together. What we're really getting at here is this: how do we be a collective of individuals, which includes differing beliefs and different cultural experiences.

‍

You and I talk about this. We've had very different experiences. You've had different experiences in a black church and yet sometimes when you and I talk, there's more overlap than differences in doctrinal issues. And, there are differences where we come down in how we view scripture, how we view this, how we view that, there's differences in personalities and styles, and all of those things matter. 

‍

But the reality is, it's messy to figure out how to come together in a group, honoring these differences on different levels, honoring our individuality, our individual personhood, our individual beliefs, while simultaneously creating a group, creating a whole where we come together. 

‍

I'm not sure we've scratched the surface of how to do that. And so with that sort of backdrop, I'm curious, what brings you hope? 

‍

Monique: What brings me hope. So even as you were talking, maybe I can connect those two because as you talk about us as individuals living in this diversified world where, more than likely, there are going to be more people that do not look like us, think like us, vote like us, talk like us, or dress like us, or whatever the case may be, eat like us, fill in the blank.

‍

But when we understand that we can create a microcosm, that can eventually impact the macrocosm. That is what gives me hope. We have these conversations. We have conversations, the two of us, and we have conversations with other people. And to be able to experience that, as a microcosm, gives me hope that when we are done talking and these individuals go and live their lives according to how we did in that group, that gives me hope.

‍

I say this to students–if we don't see or if we ourselves are not injecting into society what we need to see, not what we want to see, because sometimes we can be skewed by our own wants. But what we need to see, even when we think more scripturally, in terms of loving neighbor, in terms of understanding that every individual that has breath is an image bearer of God himself, if we're not injecting that into society, then I would truly be hopeless. 

‍

But to be able to experience it and to know that there are individuals who are going out into other systems, I'm praying and believing that they are impacting those systems in ways that the system may not like, you're shaking things up and we don't want to be shaken up. We want to be as we are. Then I have hope. That gives me hope.

‍

Alison: I love that. That could be the whole theme of this episode for the listener. Go out and be that image bearer and bring goodness and honesty and authenticity into whatever space you're going into. That is how you will begin to change that system. Tell me, Monique, as we wind down here, these are two questions I like to ask all my guests.

‍

What would you say to that 20 something year old you that was starting a counseling practice in the midst of a church? What would you say to her now?

‍

Monique: I would say to her now, you were on assignment. You were on task. When you don't have a blueprint, if you will, to follow, when you really are having to follow what you pray is the leading of the Holy Spirit, when you have very few who are in agreement or who are pushing against or pushing back, you can doubt what you're doing.

‍

But when you have many years behind you and are able to reflect back, you know that you were on assignment and you were on task. That's what I would tell her.

‍

Alison: That's beautiful. What's bringing out the best of you right now?

‍

Monique: Whew. What is bringing out the best in me right now? I think, to be honest, the hard stuff, the things that it would be easier again to just bypass. In this stage of life, stage of spiritual growth. The complexity of the diversity of the world is bringing out the best in me including having to go deeper into that messy middle.

‍

Alison: That messy middle. I love that. You are an absolute gem. I honor the decades of work you have put into changing cultures, changing systems, whether in the black church, whether now in a more predominantly white institution.

‍

You go in, you take the assignment, and you live it. I could not be more grateful for who you are and for how you have honored that assignment that God has given you. You are beloved. You are welcome here. Anytime we want to learn from your wisdom, where can my listeners find your work who want to connect with you and learn more?

‍

Monique: Yeah, so I play around on Instagram at times. Dr. Monique Smith Gadson, so that's the Instagram handle there. The website would be the same, drmoniquesmithgadson.com.

‍

Alison: All right, you've got a podcast, called “And the Church Says”, and there's some great episodes on it for folks who want to listen to you. You've got some great conversations in there. Go back and hear that. Thank you so much for giving us your time and your wisdom today. I'm so grateful for you.

‍

Monique: Thanks for having me, Alison.

‍

Did you grow up in a blended family? Are you navigating the complexities of creating one?

‍

Blended families face unique challenges, and it can be overwhelming to sift through the stigmas and bad advice that often surround step-parenting. In today’s very personal episode, I’m joined by blended family expert Ron Deal. Together, we explore how step-families can become a powerful part of God’s redemptive story, offering healing and hope in the midst of grief, loss, and complicated circumstances.

‍

Today’s episode is filled with powerful tips for ANY family about how to become healthier.

‍

Here’s what we cover:‍

1. The two key ingredients to building and sustaining a healthy family

2. Common sources of dysfunction in families and how to address them

3. What the church often misunderstands about blended families and how we can shift the narrative

4. The redemptive power of step-families in transforming pain into purpose

5. Empowering children to navigate change and loss with resilience6. Practical ways to honor grief within families and create a supportive environment

‍

Additional Resources:

• Ron Deal’s books
• Pre-order The Mindful Marriage by Ron Deal and Nan Deal
• Phillipians 2:3-4
• Restoration Therapy by Dr. Terry Hargrave
• familylife.com/blended
• rondeal.org

‍

‍Related Episodes:

• Episode 85: The Goal of a Healthy Family & 6 Roles We Take On In Dysfunction
• Episode 12: Overcoming the Pain of Divorce with Eryn Eddy

‍

‍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.
• Head to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code BESTOFYOU to receive UP TO 39%!
• Head over to WildHealth.com/BESTOFYOU and use code BESTOFYOU at checkout for 20% off!
• 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.
• Register for the Broken to Beloved conference here

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 am so glad you're here today for this very special episode.

My guest today has decades of experience working with families. Ron Deal is a bestselling author, licensed marriage and family therapist, podcaster, and popular conference speaker. He specializes in both marriage enrichment and stepfamily education.

‍

Ron is the author and consulting editor of the Smart Stepfamily series. So just listen to some of the titles of his books: Building Love Together in Blended Families. The Five Love Languages. The Smart Stepfamily: Seven Steps to a Healthy Family. The Smart Stepdad, Dating and the Single Parent, The Smart Stepmom: Practical Steps to Help You Thrive. The Smart Stepfamily  Marriage. He's just got so many resources for anyone who's trying to develop a sense of family. He also has a brand new book coming out in January called The Mindful Marriage. There is so much wisdom for everyone  in this episode about the ingredients that make for a healthy family, no matter what your family looks like. Please enjoy my conversation with Ron Deal.

‍

***

Alison: Ron, I am so thrilled to have you with us today. Your work has meant so much to me personally, which we'll get into later on in the episode. But even coming into this conversation today, I'm aware of how formative and powerful family dynamics in general are. 

‍

We're going through some things as my parents age, family transitions and family dynamics can resurface. Even in my own life as an adult child, as an adult member of a family, let alone my own family...families are such rich soil for healing, is how I like to look at it. But they can also be the places where we get hurt and get wounded. I'm curious, in your years of expertise, in families in general, what do you see as some of the key ingredients of health and wholeness and what we might call successful families, whatever that means?

‍

Ron: First of all, thank you for having me on the program. It's an honor to be talking with you, and I appreciate the work that you do for people and families. I'm in total 100 percent agreement with you. I've often said to pastors, list for me the spiritual disciplines. And they'll say, oh, the classic definitions are silence and solitude and fasting and Bible meditation and prayer and memorization.

‍

I'm like, yeah. Where's “relationships” on the list? If there's one thing that shapes us more into the image of Christ, moves us toward our God and understanding who He is and how great His love for us, and there's also one thing that moves us away from all of that, it's relationships.

‍

Relationships are discipleship. Walking out love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in an everyday intimate relationship is no easy task. We're all imperfect, and we have imperfect families, and so we need God to help us to move in that direction.

‍

But at the same time, He's inviting us to grow up into Christ, even as we're living out our relationships. To your question, what are those things? There was a point in my career, I've been in marriage and family ministry for roughly 35 years. Earlier, I would probably come up with a list of things. I would say you've got to know how to communicate really well, and it helps if your family structure is the way God intended it to be.

‍

I probably would have given a list of things that are external to who we are. But Jesus made it clear that things come from the inside. That's what makes us clean or otherwise. I rattled off the fruit of the Spirit. What I'm always reminding myself of lately is that every one of those things are attitudes or qualities about our character that come from the inside.

‍

Those are the things that make us who we are, make us more like Christ. To become more patient, to become more Spirit filled, to have more self control. Those are things that anybody can do. Whether you've had a traumatic childhood, whether you've grown up in a complex family, whether you grew up in the foster care system, no matter what the backstory is, none of those things on the outside, those external factors, are going to dictate who you become and who you are on the inside.

‍

I think there is so much hope in that. That's what I want to move toward. That's who I want to become. Of course, in the process, I'm becoming more like my Lord.

‍

Alison: Yeah, I love that emphasis on the inside out. In your work, you're focusing on external families. My work focuses on this internal family systems, IFS idea, which is exactly to your point. I think Richard Schwartz originally was a family systems therapist, the founder of the model. And what he found is that we actually have an inner family that we have to parent. 

‍

I love what you're saying, because that's what I often talk about–as you learn to be patient with yourself, as you learn to express kindness toward yourself, that's what spills over. That internal work is what spills over into our families. When I think about families, Ron, and we think about healthier versus maybe dysfunctional families, I know it's a spectrum. There is no such thing as the perfect family. 

‍

I think that's so important for people to hear, but there are families that are more functional than others. If we think about the fruit of the spirit as the benchmark where there's patience, where there's kindness, where there's self control, where there's joy, where there's delight in each other, as the sort of the benchmark for health, what do you see as the ingredients that get at that dysfunctional side of the spectrum where a family is starting to fall apart and not really be what God wanted it to be?

‍

Ron: There are two foundational pillars to healthy relationships: love, which by the way, the Beatles said, all you need is love. They were half right. They're half wrong because the other pillar is trustworthiness. You can't be healthy in any given relationship, or even as an individual, if you don't have within yourself a sense of, am I loved?

‍

Can I give love? It's not just, do I love you? But it's, am I lovable? It's that sense of worthiness that comes from being loved. We get this in our most foundational relationships from the moment we're born. We're either taught, you're lovable and you're somebody worthy of being loved, or unfortunately, I don't have time for you.

‍

That adds up to a story about myself that I'm not very lovable. Trustworthiness has got to be right there as well. Trustworthiness is that sense of, can I rely on you? Am I reliable for you? Are we responsible to one another? Is there this emotional safety? That's what you get out of trustworthiness.

‍

I can trust my climate, my relationship, you can trust me. We're both emotionally safe in this relationship. With love and a climate of emotional safety, then you feel really good about who you are as a person. By the way, this is how God loves us. In the most important love relationship in our entire world, we know that He loves us with a never-ending love.

‍

That's the trustworthiness part. We can rely on Him for His promises. In the process, He is making us worthy because of how he loves us. So this gives me God-esteem. I like to call it that. Not because Ron's such a wonderful dude, but because my Savior is an amazing person. What he's done for me makes me a person of worth and value.

‍

Now, when I turn around and know that and then offer that to another human being, now I'm getting at being able to love them in a way that is reliable and trustworthy. They receive the benefit of that when you have a human relationship, family, parent, child, husband, wife that are trying to live out love and trustworthiness day in and day out.

‍

We all fail, but we're trying to move in those directions. You're going to have healthier relationships. The absence of one or both of love and trustworthiness is where you get the unhealthy and the dysfunctional dynamics. Again, notice this isn't necessarily tied to family structure. Structure brings advantages. I always want to point that out. 

‍

A man and a woman who meet, fall in love, and then begin to have children after they're married with one another provides a family structure that brings advantages to children. You can't replace that any other way. But they can still live in faithfulness to one another. They can still love deeply. Those are the things that, at the end of the day, really build us from the inside out.

‍

Alison: I love what you're saying. A couple of things. One, the love and the trustworthiness. It's not just love. Because that's where we get into trouble. A parent can love their kids and not be emotionally safe and do a lot of toxic behaviors, and it can really mess up a family dynamic. You can be really trustworthy, but kind of cold or distant, or maybe you show up all the time, but you don't create that emotional connection.

‍

I see that a lot with clients. Where they had all their physical needs met, their parents showed up for dinner every night, but there wasn't that loving warmth and kindness. If we think about marriage, we talked about on last week's episode, those four horsemen in marriage that Gottman identifies: contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. 

‍

It's almost like you could put that into a family. If there's not that loving environment, that warmth, if there's contempt and criticism and defensiveness, that's going to lead to unhealth as well. There's something else you're saying that I really appreciate, Ron. I like how you said it, that there are advantages to certain family structures, but that doesn't mean that the single mom who has love and trustworthiness can't provide a nurturing family environment.

‍

That also doesn't mean that the traditional family structure can. That was something that was really interesting to me, to realize that the superficial structure does not guarantee that you have those key ingredients.

‍

Ron: It does not. It does not at all. There are a whole lot of still-married Christian couples sitting in church every Sunday, judging the single parent who has gone through a divorce, and those still married Christian couples are miserable. Because they don't love well at all. They're not living to love, honor, and cherish.

‍

They're in it to manipulate, lie, and deceive, and yet they're still married and somehow they think that structure is better than a different structure. Like they've somehow got more up on somebody else. In God's economy, that's not the way it works. It is when we are living out those inner qualities that we've been talking about, that's what really matters.

‍

By the way, I got to add this little addendum–I love your comment about John Gottman and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. A lot of people don't realize that 15 years after he wrote that book about predicting divorce, he came back and wrote another book and said, in the four horsemen, we missed something.

‍

A lot of people are not aware of this. The book is on the science of trust. To the point I was making earlier, he came back and he said, we figured out that when something is missing, then the four horsemen show up. What's the something that's missing? It's trustworthiness. 

‍

When you're in a climate where I cannot trust you to be looking after the best interests of me, and when I don't feel in my heart that I want to be trustworthy to you, then the four horsemen start showing up in great excess. Isn’t that fascinating? By the way, his language was, how do you define trust? He has this whole chapter, and he's a secular scientist, he doesn't have any theological positioning about all this, but I got to tell you in the book, he does a whole chapter on defining trust so we could measure what trust looks like.

‍

Long story short, he ends up saying, it's when you consider the other person's interests as much as your own. Now that's Philippians. It's the exact wording that Paul uses of what humility does. Humility doesn't look after itself. It looks after the interests of others. So it's taking their best interests at heart and acting accordingly.

‍

That is being trustworthy. This is what our God does for us. That's why we can rely on His promises. When we emulate that, no matter the family structure, it moves the relationships in healthy directions.

‍

Alison: So for the listener, it's fascinating, whether it's marriage or family, that trustworthiness-- it's not perfection, it's not finding the right formula to never have family conflict, it's that combination of I love you and I'm trustworthy, which means I'm thinking of your needs as much as I'm thinking about my own.

When we have those two ingredients, we're setting our families up for success. We're setting our families up for health that comes from that inside work that we do to cultivate those fruit of the spirit. That's beautiful.

‍

Ron: If we've been missing that, as all of us have, my wife and I, we're doing lots of family of origin work these days. I'm 57, almost 58, and I think I'm doing more family of origin work at this point in my life than I ever have. I'm looking at that and I'm seeing the connections to who I am today.

‍

I'm thinking, yeah, that has an influence on me. But I get to move toward love and trustworthiness. I get to be somebody my wife can rely on. I get to be somebody who's dependable in how I carry myself and how I act and build my character. I'm going to mess up again today. And then I'm going to turn around and go, Lord, help me put on those qualities and the fruit of the spirit, and that's where growth and change and hopefulness comes from.

‍

Alison: That's right. It's never too late to develop those qualities in ourselves. Yeah, that's where we start. That's beautiful.  you've specialized for many years in your practice and your writings and your books with blended families. Tell me a little bit about how you got interested specifically with writing to blended families.

‍

Ron: You know, it's a funny story. A lot of people end up doing their professional careers, taking them in a direction that's very personal for them. That's not my story. This is professional for me and always has been. It started because of my first job; I was a youth minister. Here I was, working with teenagers that I didn't understand, trying to figure out how to help them and encourage them and deepen their walk with Jesus.

‍

I realized, boy, I don't understand enough about the family. I actually had an undergraduate degree, one in Bible and one in family studies, but I knew I didn't know enough. I went back to graduate school, specifically for the purpose of studying marriage and family therapy and so I could go back into ministry and help people.

‍

I wanted to prevent problems as much as try to fix them. When I was in graduate school, I got introduced, this is in 1992, it's been a minute, okay, since that class. I was introduced to single parent therapy and stepfamily therapy. Little did I know how rare that course was, especially at that time. It is still a rare thing today, and it opened my eyes to those kids that I had been working with, and now I understood them better and deeper. 

‍

I was eager to start working in that direction when I came out of graduate school, and I went back into local ministry. I started trying to do marriage and enrichment and parent training and single parent ministry and stepfamily ministry. What I didn't know, Alison, is at the time, I looked around and said, who else is doing this in the Christian community?

‍

I found one guy, and he was about to retire, and he tagged me on the shoulder and said, you're it. You need to take over. I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. Are you kidding me? So I stumbled and fumbled my way into trying to do something in a way that was meaningful to couples.

‍

I found myself tiptoeing into some things that worked and we did them again. I started talking about it and teaching about it. I wrote my first book back in 2002. My first book came out, The Smart Stepfamily. Now we have nine books and eight video curricula. We're the largest blended family ministry in the world that we know of, and a regular podcast and live streams and all kinds of things that people can tap into. 

‍

It's because I felt like the Lord called me into helping kids. I still think I'm doing youth ministry because if I can help the parents, I am helping the next generation.

‍

Alison: That's right. That is so good and true. I want to tell you personally, I don't think you know this story, Ron, but your work has literally changed my life. I don't say that often. I really don't. It surprised me. When I met my husband, my listeners know, my husband was a widower with two young children. His wife had passed away tragically, and I met them after their mom had died. They were young, and we clicked instantly. My husband and I clicked, the kids and I clicked, and so that was all great at the beginning. Also, it's really hard to blend a family. I was unequipped and I didn't understand it.

‍

I thought being a loving person, I thought being a kind person, this will all magically happen. I also got some advice, especially from Christians, that wasn't helpful. They were applying Christian principles to a blended family. It was something like, “The marriage is always the primary relationship. The marriage has to come first”. 

‍

Folks were watching my husband and I, my then at the time, significant other,  fumble our way through. We took it really slow. We didn't rush things. We constantly worked to bring the kids in, but we actually got a little bit of criticism for that. I don't blame the folks. They were well intended. But the idea being, this should be about the two of you. 

‍

Intuitively, I'm a therapist, I knew that's not quite right. Finally, somebody told me, you've got to read Ron Deal's work. I read it and you put language and research and scripture onto what I was experiencing, which was essentially that this attachment between the biological parent and the children is primary.

‍

Ron: Huge.

‍

Alison:  It was so helpful to go no, we're doing something right here. It looks a little bit different than the way people think it should. The other thing you talk about in the book was that sometimes the honeymoon comes later on if you put in the work on the front end and you use the crockpot metaphor.

‍

I am here to tell you, 15 years in, we have the best family. I'm like, we've got a honeymoon family. We put in the work on the front end. Those attachments are so strong. We let that crockpot simmer and I couldn't love my family more. I wouldn't trade my family for any family. And I want to thank you. 

‍

The language that you put on some of those early dynamics in a blended family, I think they probably relate a little bit to folks who've adopted children in addition to stepfamilies. So with that long introduction, tell me a little bit about how you began to realize this, that this crock pot method works a little bit differently when you're bringing in different elements to the family.

‍

Ron: First of all, let me say, yay, and I'm glad the work has been helpful to you and your family. That warms my heart. The crockpot metaphor was born out of trying to understand the unrealistic expectations that a lot of people bring into their journey. It's really typical for even the church, like the advice you got is based on traditional family structure, instead of taking into consideration what's unique and different about a blended family structure. 

‍

You got “first family” answers to “second family” questions. Those almost always backfire. You add that to an unrealistic expectation– “Hey, honey, because you and I love each other, the kids are going to love the fact that we love each other. They're going to love you as a step-parent”. 

‍

All of that immediacy is not realistic; there's a journey here, liken it to the Israelites leaving Egypt to get to the promised land. How long did it take them? A lot longer than they thought. Not a few days, but 40 years. The same thing happens with blended families. On average, you need somewhere between five and seven years. This is what the best research says, for a family to create their sense of “familiness”, identity, their togetherness, their cohesiveness, that they've bonded and figured out how they're going to navigate life with one another. 

‍

That's not five to seven months. That's not five to seven weeks. That's not five to seven days. You honeymoon, you're back, and familiness is here. No, that's a journey that you have to be patient with. So I kept trying to figure out how to communicate that well to people, and the crockpot metaphor developed. 

‍

It is one of our cornerstone teachings, that when you embrace that and you get that, some ingredients cook faster than others. You understand that some ingredients came into your crock pot touching one another. They were family. They were connected. They had a bond and a last name and DNA and a history together. That didn't ever stop because now there's new people in the household. 

‍

How does the bonding happen and how long does it take ingredients to warm up, soften, and then share of themselves, which is what happens in a crock pot? Each ingredient has its own timing and has its own process, and when you embrace that and see it for what it is, and then add low heat, (there's the key, low heat, not high heat, which is what a blender has). 

‍

High heat is friction, and we're going to use a blade, and we're going to throw everybody together and make a smoothie. It's good in concept, but it doesn't actually work that way. Everybody's getting damaged by the blades. That doesn't work. We can throw this thing in the microwave and nuke it and be done in 30 seconds. It's a good idea, but it doesn't work that way. As a matter of fact, it tends to backfire.

‍

The more you press people for a relationship, the less likely they are to give it to you. So when you rest into the process, which is what the low heat attitude says, and you trust that time is going to take over, you're going to be very intentional, low heat. You're going to do what you can do, but you're going to trust God with everything else that you can't control, and that adds up, on the whole, more than likely, to a genuine, authentic connection that develops over time. it sounds like your journey is exemplary of what we try to recommend for families.

‍

Alison: Oh, intuitively I understood, my now husband understood, but we needed that language that you gave us and the biblical and scientific backing. Because sometimes it does mean short-term sacrifices. I remember, my husband had done such a good job of being that primary attachment figure for them through the loss of their mom, so you're not only dealing with children who are loyal to their parents, and that's a beautiful thing. They're not only loyal to their mom who passed away, making sure she's not being replaced, but they're also loyal to that parent. They don't want to lose that primary attachment to dad. 

‍

Even things like vacations, initially, here I am. I'd never been married, we were in love. Then it was like, we're going to take a vacation. I needed to not go initially. I needed to wait a little, until there was enough nurturing of all the different relationships, versus throwing everybody in a car. 

‍

I hear from people now all the time, when I talk about this, my peers who got thrown in that blender as kids, where it was suddenly like, here's your new mom. Here's your new dad. We're all hopping in the car for a family vacation. They're like, I don't want this.

‍

Ron: Right. This is weird, at a minimum. It's weird. And, at a maximum, it feels violating to be thrown into close proximity with somebody that you're expected to love and totally embrace, in the case of your stepchildren, as if mom never existed. No, that goes against everything inside a child and I don't care if that child is 5 or 15 or 35.

‍

They have to process this on an emotional level and it is a real challenge for them. When the adults understand, can I give you a compliment to say, I was willing not to go on vacation. Which means you have to set aside that eagerness in you, that loving heart that's bubbling over for a relationship, but you're saying, I got to consider what they need.

‍

I call that meeting/pacing with the child, and I need to give them some space to have that attachment reassurance with their father and spend some time together. But here's the thing that I want you to see. We were talking earlier about love and trustworthiness. That move on your part showed you to be emotionally safe.

‍

That means you're trustworthy. That means they can actually like you and it doesn't come with the cost of you invading every inch of their life, pushing into their relationship with their dad, acting like you're their mom, where you're replacing their mom, when you're certainly not able to do that.

‍

That shows you to be a safe person and that makes you more lovable. You see how those things work in concert with one another. Because the stepparent took a posture that said, I'm respecting your connections, your time, your grief. Good for you. That's exactly the kind of thing that we want to see happen in the early phases, especially because it gives the family a chance to like each other and then eventually to love each other.

‍

Alison: To trust each other, to your point. Yeah. Thank you. That means a lot, because I will say, it takes internal work. I understand why you want to take it personally. Why wouldn't you want me to come? Stepping into that role taught me more about love and trustworthiness.

‍

I wouldn't exchange it for what I learned about myself and what I learned about love. Paradoxically, through making those decisions, that was how I became a true parent figure. That's mother love.

‍

Ron: That's right.

‍

Alison: It's putting their needs above my own. 

‍

Ron: That is exactly right. Again, notice how the relationship for you was a discipling factor for you. It deepened your trust in God. Lord, I gotta trust you in these moments when I feel like I'm eager, but they're not. I've got to relax and trust that if we crockpot, we cook a little at a time, we'll actually get farther than if I try to force the blend in my time and demand it in my way.

‍

Alison: It is so helpful. I want to recommend to everybody listening, who's either in a position of trying to blend a family or when I tell my story, what's so fascinating to me, Ron, when I tell my story to other people who were raised in situations where they got just shoved in, there's trauma there.

‍

They immediately lock on to, you mean I wasn't bad because I didn't want that or I wasn't ready for that? I found it to actually be really healing for a lot of different kinds of people. This is a really delicate process of creating a family. Any family is a delicate process, but when you're bringing in, and I would imagine, I'm curious, that there's some similarities with bringing in an adopted child as well.

‍

Ron: There are. There are some distinctions between fostering, adopting a child, and becoming a stepparent and having a stepfamily. But the bonding process, the recognition that grief continues, that there has been some sort of significant loss in the child's life, especially in a blended family, everybody has gone through some sort of loss, or they wouldn't find themselves in that moment. 

‍

Loss doesn't end because you form new partnerships, new love, loving relationships, and try to form a new family. The past comes with that. Again, we want to educate everybody to say, how do we acknowledge the past, recognize the past, and not be afraid of those previous attachments that still continue on in a child's heart? 

‍

In the case of a child who has been adopted, for example, we've all heard of somebody who's been adopted at the age of two weeks and didn't ever know their parents into a loving Christian family. At the age of 25, they go on this kind of wild journey to find their biological parents. What is that? That is the attachment.

‍

That is something that is so hard to even describe, it has something to do with DNA, something to do with that God-given relationship between mother and child, and things that we cannot even fully comprehend in this life, I don't think. All of a sudden, I need to know who I am, I need to know where I'm from, I need to know my people.

‍

That carries into the adoptive family. Of course it does. To ignore that is to emotionally say to the child, hey, we don't want to have anything to do with that past, and we don't want you to have anything to do with your past. That's to show yourself unsafe as it relates to what matters deeply to this child.

‍

See, we can't do that and then expect them to trust us at the deepest levels. It is very much related to how much they love and trust us.

‍

Alison: Yeah.

‍

Ron: Even in the best of scenarios, we're going to have some moments where the child needs to know what happened. What was my past? What was that about? They need to fill in the story and figure out their identity, their story in life. It's all tied together. Same thing is happening with children in blended families. 

‍

If it's been post-divorce, unlike your situation where it's another home, we're back and forth and I love my mom and I love my dad and hey, stepmom's here. She's pretty cool. Stepdad's over there. He's pretty cool too. But I'm still trying to figure out where I put all of you in my heart. How do I make room for you? That's a lot for children to navigate.

‍

Alison: It's so much. Again, the inner work that you're describing, I think about it now, even as my kids are older, trying to make sure you’re not imposing your own thoughts on your kids and letting them find their own way. But when you are coming in as a stepparent or as an adoptive parent, all the more an opportunity to really honor your child's need to find their way through that kind of sometimes murky crockpot, that murky maze. 

‍

I love the work that you're doing to name those things for people in so many different settings. We will link to all of your resources.  I haven't found anybody else doing it as well as you're doing it in that space. Just helping people navigate and really honor the needs of the kids that are really legitimate and really valid. Even as we're trying to honor the goal of having that family-ness. I like that, how you say that. It's a different way to get there.

‍

Ron: This reminds me of something that we say a lot around here. Blended families done poorly, unfortunately, it adds chaos and pain and difficulty to the children's lives, but even more to the adults as well. It's difficult. But blended families done well, they're redemptive.

‍

Alison: Yeah.

‍

Ron: Because think of a person who's gone through a miserable relationship, you were faithful to your vows, but your spouse wasn't, and that was the end of the marriage. You've been beat up. Life taught you, marriage is not forever. Here you are now, risking again and investing yourself in a new love relationship. You go into it with this little fear and trepidation in the back of your mind going, I don't know, the last one didn't work out so well.

‍

How much of myself do I give? That level of trust that's being called into question because of the past. We call that the ghost of marriage past, by the way. You begin to love well and that's reciprocated in this blended family marriage, and you discover you can trust people to show up for you and you can show up for them and make sacrifices.

‍

All of a sudden, your heart is redeemed. Or think about a child who's gone through great difficulty, in and out of homes, various people moving in and out, dad's life, mom's life, whatever the case may be. I'm not even sure what's consistent in my world. All of a sudden, somebody shows up, a stepparent, and in the beginning you reject them.

‍

I did an interview for our podcast, Family Life Blended Podcast, not long ago, where a woman said that very thing. She said, I told this guy, I don't want you, I don't like you, don't be with my mom. You're out. That was her attitude at the age of 12, when her stepdad, third stepdad, shows up in her life.

‍

But then he won't go away. He's got the love and stubbornness of Jesus. He's basically gonna keep showing up, doing what he can. It took a long time. She finally was won over by that. Isn't this the way the Father pursues us?

‍

Alison: That's incredible.

‍

Ron: Parents get to emulate the passion of God for people who don't yet know Him. You get to win. He won her over. By the way, she's one of the biggest Christian music worship leaders in the country. She says, my step-dad showed me Jesus, taught me who he was. This is why I'm doing what I'm doing today. That is God's redemptive work through this stepfamily home.

‍

It's amazing. We love to watch that. We love to see those stories. That's what we're trying to do with our work.

‍

Alison: It's amazing.  It is redemptive. It is a glimpse of how God comes into even some of the hardest places and brings his love and it makes me filled with gratitude for the fact that you're helping so many people do that. I want to ask you one other question. You brought this up and I wanted to circle back to it about the role of grief, making space for grief.

‍

In all families, but in particular blended families, talk to me a little bit about how you encourage families to do that.

‍

Ron: I wrote a book called Preparing to Blend, which is a do-it-yourself guide for couples that are engaged, planning to get married that, by the way, that doubles for ministry leaders as a premarital counseling tool. We've got to radically update premarital counseling in the local church for people who are bringing children into that scenario to make it what it needs to be for them. 

‍

One of the chapters that we have is on the grief of the past and we've got another chapter on the grief of the future. In other words, how things are going to change as a result of this family coming together. But let's talk about the past for a second.

‍

So one of the things I'll coach a stepparent on is, imagine a stepparent who is learning how to gently step into the grief space, saying to a child, (this is real counterintuitive, so it's important), hey, look, all the kids in this house, including you are my kids. There's no his kids or my kids. There's our kids. 

‍

Okay. First of all, let me compliment the heart of that stepparent. In that scenario, they’re saying, I want you to know that I care about you and that you're mine and I see you as mine and I don't want you to think that I don't. Got it. Love it. Love that part of you.

‍

However, there's a child on the receiving end of that who's going, oh, so you're my mom now? I think you tried to push mom out of my heart. No, thank you. I don't want any of this or any of you. You made it harder for them to love you. Not easier. You had good intentions. But the strategy worked against you, okay?

‍

To step into that space is to say, what term for me are you comfortable with? What do you want me to call you? When I'm introducing you to my friends, and we're out at church, and, hey, this is my husband and my what? How do you want me to say that? You ask the child to find something that is in alignment with their grief journey, that they're comfortable with.

‍

That's one tiny example. Another one is to imagine a stepdad who's driving his stepkids to school one day and he goes, oh man, I figured out your dad's birthday is Friday and you're still on our time. You're going to be at my house instead of your dad's house on his birthday. 

‍

Imagine a stepdad saying, “Oh, that stinks for you. I am so sorry. Is there anything I can do? Do you need to run to the store? I'll take you to the store, get him a card, a gift. Can I help arrange a FaceTime so you can talk to him on his birthday? When do you want to do that?” 

‍

Listen to the eagerness of the stepdad to say to the child, your relationship with your biological father is not a problem for me. I'm not in competition with that relationship. In fact, I want to encourage your relationship with your dad. What that says to the child is you, stepdad, are safe. 

‍

You care about what matters to me, and you'll step into the hard, grieving, sorrowful places of my life, and you won't cry. You won't compete with it. You'll actually help me grieve and do what I need to do. That is a blessing and a gift to the child and a double blessing for the step parent because you become more respectable, more lovable.

‍

Alison: You paradoxically become more of a parent figure. It's right. You actually are showing that kind of fatherly love that you crave. You want to show it, but you show it in such a counter-intuitive way. It's to me, right out of the playbook of Jesus. It's just, it's so beautiful. I love how you describe that.

‍

Any other tidbits or wisdom that you've found to be really helpful for folks who are either healing their own wounds or who are in the midst of trying to do this?

‍

Ron: I think probably the most general comment I'll make, like I said, we have a dozen books in our series, we have many on children and stepparenting, being a stepmom, and all kinds of different things. The more you learn about your blended family, how it works, how the dynamics work on the inside and an understanding of what's going on with you on the inside, I love your work to that end, then the easier your decision making becomes. 

‍

You take your family forward at a pace that actually works for the rest of the family, the people involved in it. It's when you try to force the blend that you tend to get less of one. It's when you relax into the crockpot that you find more authenticity and connection being developed. So there's lots of little paradoxical moments. You gotta know. We call it getting stepfamily smart. 

‍

The smarter you get, the better decisions you make, the easier the family goes in general. There are still things you don't get to control. The family will never be like with a biological first family. There's never everything the way you want it to be. Life gets in the way, but that's okay. More often than not, it goes in the direction of where you would like to see it go. 

‍

It often gets there much more slowly to what you, and I'll close with this that you said earlier, there is a honeymoon for remarried couples. It comes at the end of the journey and not at the beginning.

‍

Alison: It's so true. We're aware, to your point at the very beginning of the episode, those qualities of love and joy and peace and patience independent of the family structure, we have those. I'd put them up against a traditional family any day.

‍

Before we wind down, you have a new book coming out. This one is about marriage.

‍

Ron: It is. I also want to say, I think it's probably the most important book I've written for blended families. Because the qualities and attributes that you will learn are not limited to marriage, because really, like your work, this book is about how we gain self control. That is the biblical term.

‍

The modern psychological term is self-regulation. How we self-regulate in the midst of dysregulation in such a way that we bring our best self to relationships. The book is primarily looking at the marital relationship. But later in the book, we actually have a whole chapter on how this applies to parenting, how it applies to stepparenting, how it applies to dealing with grief and loss and sadness and sexuality.

‍

The principles are everlasting. I'm going to brag about this until the day I die, and it's not because Nan and I had anything to do with it. Let me tell you what this book is. Dr. Terry Hargrave created Restoration Therapy that is now being used all over the world, thousands of people.

‍

It's the best integration that I know of modern therapy, neurology, and understanding of interpersonal neurobiology, as well as relationship systems and how they work, self-regulation, and New Testament theology, of changing and renewing our minds. It is a beautiful integration of that.

‍

He helped to transform Nan and I's relationship years ago, and we have partnered with him and his wife, Sharon, to write this book. Basically, Nan and I are the case study. We're the ones that you're going to read about–how we screwed a lot of things up and how these principles really helped pull us out of a lot of difficulty in our relationship. 

‍

So we're telling the story of us and teaching the principles of restoration therapy in the process. We're very excited about it because we know how useful and impactful it really is.

‍

Alison: I cannot wait to have you back on to talk about this book. It comes out in January.

‍

Ron: It does. January 7th,

‍

Alison: You live in this integration of the best of what we're learning in modern psychology with biblical wisdom. It's powerful. I see you doing that with this next book, and I'm really excited.

‍

I do have a couple of questions, Ron, as we wrap up, that I like to ask all of my guests . I'll start with, what would you say to that younger you back in the day who is making these decisions about your career and your own life? What would you say to that younger version of you now?

‍

Ron: Oh, you're going to read it in The Mindful Marriage because it's in there. I think in a nutshell, I would say Ron, look in the mirror. I was so busy looking up and beyond in ambition, and in pridefulness, not so much arrogance as in I'm a great person, but as in I was more of an insecure, prideful person.

‍

But I felt like I could work my way into all the right things, whether it be my marriage, my family, my career. Because of that, my pride blinded me. So I needed to look in the mirror and see what was really there. As soon as I started doing that, I recognized there's a lot of things that I needed to deal with and change, and that those were the very things that were driving my wife crazy. Yeah, I would say humble down, look in the mirror, and trust God more than you do.

‍

Alison: I love that. What's bringing out the best of you right now?

‍

Ron: Learning how to put on self-regulation, learning how to recognize that I have agency by the power of the Spirit to act in ways that are different from what my flesh wants to do. I am not a slave to my flesh. That's the old self. The new self is becoming, and it's pretty cool.

‍

Alison: I love it. That's awesome. Tell our listeners where they can find all the things that we've talked about. What's the best place to get in touch with your work?

‍

Ron: Two websites, familylife.com/blended. So familylife.com/blended will get you right to our section. My personal webpage is a collection of where everything can be found, new and old, blended and mindful marriage, that's rondeal.org.

‍

Alison: Thanks, Ron.

‍