Science-backed tools.
Spiritually-based wisdom.

Have you wondered how a single negative comment can shape your beliefs about yourself?

In this episode, we dive into the crucial distinction between critical thinking and limiting beliefs, exploring how they shape our decisions. My guest, Dr. Josh Axe, author of the New York Times bestselling book, Think This, Not That, shares his personal story of overcoming a powerful limiting belief and helping his mom navigate through cancer. He offers some powerful critiques of our current medical model, and some practical tips to navigate a more holistic way towards health. Do not miss this thought-provoking episode!

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Here’s what we cover:

1. The difference between critical thinking and limiting beliefs
2. How one person’s negative comment created a limiting belief
3. The negative effect of limiting beliefs
4. Josh’s journey with his mom through cancer
5. An incisive critique of pharmaceutical ads in the U.S.
6. How to balance natural & medical interventions
7. The power of reverse-engineering your life based on your vision for the future

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‍Thanks to our sponsors:

• Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
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• Go to thrivemarket.com/bestofyou for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift!

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Additional Resources:

• I Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
• Think This, Not That: 12 Mindshifts to Break Through Limiting Beliefs and Become Who You Were Born to Be by Dr. Josh Axe
• DrAxe.com
• ‍Proverbs 23:7
• ‍Proverbs 9:10
• ‍Matthew 22:37
• ‍Genesis 15:5
• ‍joshaxe.com
• The Dr. Josh Axe Show

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‍Related Episodes:

• Episode 105: 4 Lies We Tell, the Mental Health Benefits of Honesty, & How to Stop Lying In Your Relationships
• Episode 103: Name, Frame, and Brave Gossip
• Episode 104: Overcoming the Fear of Vulnerability—Strategies to Stop Feeling Alone and Build Meaningful Connections
• Episode 105: 4 Lies We Tell, the Mental Health Benefits of Honesty, & How to Stop Lying In Your Relationships
• Episode 10: What are Limiting Beliefs and How Do I Overcome Them with Mary Marantz

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Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author.

While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.

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Transcript:

Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here this week for another episode where we're talking about how to Name, Frame, and Brave our way through areas in our lives that bring up dissonance inside of us, a feeling of inner tension, these areas that have potential for good on some level and also some potential for harm.

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In today's episode, we're talking about the dissonance of our limiting beliefs, and as I write about in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, our minds can be used brilliantly to help us solve the problems that we face. Our minds can also be used to dupe us into self sabotage, into thinking traps, and into staying stuck in negative thought patterns. So our minds are a crucial component to our overall health.

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They're not the only component–I want to be clear; we are minds and emotions and a nervous system and a body. All of these parts of us have to work together to create the kind of melody of our lives. In today's episode, we're going to focus on our mindset and to cue up this conversation that I had with our guest today, I want to differentiate between what it means to be a critical thinker versus what it means to hold limiting beliefs. 

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So what's the difference? Thinking critically involves trying to assess and analyze information, consider multiple perspectives, and evaluate evidence to make informed decisions or judgments. You're questioning assumptions, you're examining biases, you're assessing the validity of what you're hearing. It could not be more important in this world today to become a critical thinker. 

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A limiting belief is a belief that constrains you or holds you back; these are beliefs that are typically negative and self defeating, and they can stem from our past experiences, from the ways we were conditioned. Maybe our teachers told us we weren't good enough, or maybe in our peer groups we felt like we were less than, or we have a fear of failure. 

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These limiting beliefs come out as, I'm not good enough, or I'll never be successful and they prevent us from pursuing opportunities or taking risks that could lead to growth and fulfillment. So you want to be someone who thinks critically, who evaluates what's coming your way, whether it's what other people are telling you, whether it's what you're hearing in the news or on social media, you want to evaluate the truth of what you're hearing in any given situation.

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Someone who's a critical thinker approaches information with an open mind, with curiosity, who asks questions, who seeks to understand and who gets underneath the assumptions and maybe even the motivations of the person who's presenting information. Someone who holds limiting beliefs, on the other hand, would accept information or viewpoints without questioning them. I'm not smart enough, so I have to accept whatever these other people are telling me.

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A critical thinker makes decisions based on careful analysis, weighs the pros and cons, considers potential consequences, seeks outside opinions and relevant information. You strive to make an informed decision based on multiple perspectives. Somebody who resorts to limiting beliefs makes decisions based out of fear, self doubt, or negative assumptions about themselves or their abilities. They create self imposed barriers. I can't do this for myself, so I have to blindly trust other people. It hinders your ability to pursue opportunities or find real meaningful solutions. 

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Finally, critical thinkers actively engage in self reflection and continue to learn, to expand knowledge, to expand skills, to expand perspectives. They are open to feedback and constructive criticism, and they use that as an opportunity to grow and improve. 

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Whereas if you are trapped by limiting beliefs, instead of looking for opportunities to grow and develop, limiting beliefs can create a self perpetuating cycle of missed opportunities and even self sabotage. I'll never get it right. We give up or let go, or resort to letting other people dictate our opinions of our own selves. 

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I want you to become critical thinkers. People who think critically about the information you take in, who get second opinions, who get third opinions, who analyze the data, who consider underlying assumptions and motivations.

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I want you to move away from becoming people who are limited by negative self talk. I'm not smart enough. I have to assume that those people know better, that other people are wiser. Those limiting beliefs don't lead you to the best that God has for you.

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Our guest today talks about these limiting beliefs in his brand new book called Think This, Not That: 12 Mindshifts to Break Through Limiting Beliefs and Become Who You Were Born to Be. Dr. Josh Axe is a doctor of natural medicine and a clinical nutritionist. He founded one of the largest functional medicine clinics in the U. S. and runs the popular health website, DrAxe.com, where you can find recipes, natural remedies, videos, nutrition advice, and fitness tips. 

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Dr. Axe is a board certified doctor of natural medicine he earned his doctorate from Palmer College and his master of science in organizational leadership from Johns Hopkins University.

His brand new book, Think This, Not That, was a New York Times bestselling book. He is here today to talk to us about limiting beliefs and about how we can embark on a more holistic journey to health. Please enjoy today's conversation with Dr. Josh Axe.

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I'm so thrilled to have you here today to get to know you. I know we have mutual folks in common through your work in Nashville. I love the emphasis that you put on holistic healing. I really want to get into that today, but I also love that you have this new book out all about limiting beliefs. Could we start there, Dr. Axe? I'm curious. 

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It's about this journey as you've been a healer, as you've taken a deep dive into all these holistic ways of healing. When did you realize the power of mindset, the power of our minds as a part of that?

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Josh: I think there've been a couple instances that really opened my eyes to it. I would say that one was when I was back in high school. Another was my mom battling cancer. Another was when I was diagnosed with a spinal infection not that long ago and was told I may never walk again. It was so bad. 

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But going back to the actual, I would say, the inception of it, was when I was in high school. I remember going into freshman year of high school, I was in English class and I had a teacher who asked me to stay after class. She said, Josh, what do you want to do after high school? I said I want to be a doctor. 

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I said that because the year before my mom had gone through chemotherapy and I remember she had lost her hair and thinking I want to help people like my mom not have to fight cancer in this way and heal. 

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She laughed out loud when I told her I wanted to be a doctor. She said, with your grades, you'll never get into med school. She said, my daughter barely got into Ohio State med school with a 3.8. She said, you've got a D minus in this class and you got an F on this paper. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. You need to try harder.

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For me, looking back as a 13, 14 year old, I didn't really know a whole lot better. So I thought what? Basically, the thing I walked away with was, I'm not smart. Then a couple weeks later, my mom brought me to see another doctor and I got diagnosed with ADHD. They're talking about me like I'm not in the room.

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I remember thinking to myself, gosh, not only am I not smart, I'm like, I'm medically not smart. There's something wrong with me. In high school, I really stopped. I didn't really try much. I always had trouble paying attention, but I really didn't try. The only reason I graduated was I knew if I didn't graduate, my dad would be irate.

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So that was my motivation: not getting my dad too upset. I graduated with a C minus and barely graduated. Then I applied to a bunch of colleges, got denied by most, but one college, actually it was the University of Kentucky. They said you're not accepted, but If you come and do summer classes and you perform well and you get an average above a 3.0, we'll let you in. 

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I had a lot of other things so I think that's probably why they even gave me any shot at all. I said, you know what? I really don't want to be the kid that stays home and goes to community college or doesn't graduate. So I said, I'm going to try. I had English 101 again for college. That was the first class I took. 

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I said, I'm really going to try on this paper. I tried. And, yeah. It was like deja vu. Her name was Miss Williams. She said, Josh, can you stay after class? I thought, oh no, not this again. She said, what's your major? I said I haven't picked a major yet. She said, I want to let you know that I think you're a really talented writer. I think you should consider being an English major, a journalism major. She said, you actually got the highest grade in the class on this paper. Great job. 

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It was like having a memory transplant or a mindset transplant. I went from believing for four years, “I'm not smart and I can't do it” to thinking, “Wow, somebody told me that I'm talented and I could be great at something”. It literally, radically changed my life in a major way. I think about this, if I wouldn't have heard her say that, or somebody along the way say that. 

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Then eventually I went to become a doctor. I went to Johns Hopkins, I graduated there with a 3.9 GPA and wrote some books. I did some things. And I wouldn't have done any of those things if I would have held on to this limiting belief. For me, I started realizing my beliefs and my mindset are so incredibly important. 

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We know that this is true. Everything from the scientific literature, we see, like the Rosenthal effect and psychology literature makes me think about that. Or the Bible, of course, talks about how as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.

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But I really took these things that I learned and actually, from there, it really helped me in helping patients because I realized that if I had a teacher tell me something that I can, a lot of these patients that I took care of, their doctors would tell them things like, for instance, they would give them limiting beliefs. 

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“Hey, it's genetics. There's nothing you can do about this, or you have to be on this pill the rest of your life”. It really limits the patient. So when I started working with patients, I realized I'm going to do the exact opposite. I'm going to let them know, listen, your body has an amazing capacity to heal. 

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Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that you're bringing that in. For too long in our culture, there's been this kind of dichotomy between the hard science of medicine and then the “softer” science of what I do in the field of psychology. You and I both know that there is no divide like that.

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They all come together. The mind, the heart, the soul, the body, they're all integrated. God made us with a nervous system. It links it all together and we need all the different tools, but it's really hard to find someone when you're hurting, whether you're sick physically, whether you're struggling with limiting beliefs to find someone to bring it all together.

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So tell me a little bit about how that evolved for you. You started out in functional medicine, and I've heard you talk about the story with your mom's cancer. You had some sort of red flags but I'm not sure the pharmaceutical industry is really giving us everything that we really need. Tell me about that evolution for you. How did you land where you are today, where you're really integrating all of these different things, including what we believe?

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Josh: Yeah, for me it happened pretty early on and I'll give you an example why. When my mom was diagnosed with cancer as a kid, I thought, and I'm going with her to these treatments, she's going and getting chemotherapy, she's throwing up in a bucket, all of her hair is falling out and then for the next 10 years after those treatments, like my entire high school and college, I remember my mom would be exhausted all the time. 

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My mom was one of those moms. She worked and she was a mom and she was a wife. She did all these things and she was worn out. I remember seeing the devastating effects of conventional medical treatments early on and thinking, there has to be a better way. I think I was aware of that very early on. Then eventually, when I went on and started studying more of these practices of natural medicine in school for that, by the way, when I was about to open my clinic that same year, my mom was diagnosed with cancer again.

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This time we decided to go through a whole natural protocol. I'd been really blessed to be able to study under a doctor who was practicing functional medicine at the time. I had learned a lot about nutrition. In fact, I started working as a nutritionist before I graduated to become a doctor.

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I ran all this blood work. We would do new micronutrient tests and fatty acid profiles and microbiome tests and heavy metal proof, all the stuff. We would look at all those things when my mom got that diagnosis, and we decided to take care of her all naturally. We started juicing vegetables and doing bone broth and a lot of herbs like turmeric and astragalus and a lot of these mushrooms.

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Her body healed. It was amazing. We went back after four to six months and redid a CT scan. I remember the doctor's exact words, because he called my mom and he said, what have you been doing? She shared it. He goes, this is highly unusual. We don't typically see this, but your tumors have shrunk by more than half.

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We want to see you again here next year. She went back then, and was in complete remission. So my mom now is in her seventies, the best shape of her life. I think when you are able to experience it, that's big. I’ll also say, I grew up in a household of faith like we prayed. So I would say it integrated very early for me because of my family and having my faith growing up and being able to see my mom's miraculous recovery. Now that I've had time and you're going to be much in line with this, now that I've looked at the research on neuroplasticity and what happens when we think about healing versus not, and the mind-body connection, there are so many of these examples of this, but if you even study the placebo effect, it's the amount of times the placebo outperforms or equally performs the medication or the supplement or whatever you're taking, it's tremendous. 

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We know that the mind is powerful. And then you read the Bible, and it's a similar thing. If you read the Bible, life and death is in the power of your tongue. So I think the combination of my faith and this experience with my mom were two big things.

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Alison Cook: A couple of things that are coming to mind, because I want to share with you a personal case study to talk through from my own life, but a couple of things come into mind. One is the literature, the research on prayer, the efficacy of prayer. Secular research that shows its benefits.

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And it doesn't mean you don't still need scientific interventions and medical interventions. But when you were talking about limiting beliefs, there's such solid research in social psychology about self fulfilling prophecies. If we have a negative mindset toward relationships, when you feel like people aren't going to like you, or you feel like you're going to be rejected, you tend to create environments in which those things happen. 

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To use the biblical metaphor, we tend to reap the kinds of seeds that we sow, and so the way that we think really does influence what happens, our outcomes. Dr. Axe, this is the quintessential, especially here in New England, I had a long journey with Lyme disease.

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Josh: Yeah.

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Alison Cook: It was so interesting, and I still deal with the after effects, but what happened is the treatment, the onslaught of antibiotics, created a whole separate set of issues right now that are harder in many ways for me to overcome. I've had to shift my mind and I want to ask you about this. Is it advertising? I think of myself as a critical thinker, but why do so many of us buy into this idea that the pharmaceutical industry is really the only way to go, because even me, it's like, antibiotics will knock it all out.

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Now, I did need antibiotics. I did. We do need these medical interventions. I want to be clear about that. Also, there was a point at which they started to do more harm than good. The only way now for me to heal those residual effects is good old techniques; it's like exercise interventions, all the things you're describing.

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I also think there's something where, at least to myself, I can only speak for myself, that I want the magic pill. I want the thing that makes it all go away and it's harder in many ways to do the integrative approach of, yes, you need to eradicate the thing that's hurting you, but you also need to be about those natural supports, those natural things that God has given you through exercise, through food, so I wanted to share that with you two questions.

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One is, why do we buy in so much to this idea that the pharmaceutical industry is the only way, whether it's depression, whether it's a complicated diagnosis, and then what's the balance? What's the balance where we do need the prescription, and also, we need so many of these other tools at our disposal?

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Josh: Yeah. So what I would say is, I think it comes down to two big things. One is exposure. We are exposed to pharmaceuticals on a constant basis. The U. S. and New Zealand are the only two countries, literally the only two countries, that are allowed to run pharmaceutical advertisements.

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Now, because most other countries believe it's really a conflict of interest to try and sell a drug and run advertisements for those because you don't want health care to be primarily a money-making industry. You want it to be more of an altruistic industry based on physicians helping and having a heart for a patient.

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The pharmaceutical industry and the advertising and the billions of dollars poured into that creates a real issue, with a real conflict of interest. One of the big issues is that it's on TV. It's on advertisements. Most people are on them. In fact, 89 percent of people over the age of 65 are on at least one medication. 

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The average woman starts their first medication, which of course is birth control, at 15 years old. So all that being said, it's in our social groups, it's on social media, it's all over the place. Number one, is there a greater exposure to that or other things? The exposure is incredibly high. The second thing, and I don't think I've ever heard anybody bring this up, but I think some of it has to do with certainty. I think a lot of medical professionals are absolutely certain and they're trained for four years, 12 years, in a lot of cases.

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They may think, this is the thing. This is the only cure. This is the only way. This is the only thing you can do. So I think when you're talking to somebody and they have this level of certainty and they've been elevated as this is the highest way, I would say, if somebody were to ask what is the highest position you can hold of any in terms of an authority of any profession? Name something higher than a medical doctor. 

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Maybe a rocket scientist, but still not even then. So I think there's a level of certainty that's there as well. So I think those are the big reasons. I think we've actually created this sort of appearance that medicine is superior to nutrition and things that are holistic. Like somehow they've cracked a scientific code that we could never reach with. 

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What's crazy is when you look back at medicine, now, this is still true today, 1/3rd of all medications today, those compounds originally came from plants and now they're synthetic. So for instance, metformin comes from lilacs and aspirin comes from birchwood. And, so medicine itself actually came from nature, but now they've been able to synthesize it so now it's stronger and cheaper essentially.

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I think those are some of the biggest issues now in terms of what the balance should be. My opinion is going to be stronger than some and it's going to be maybe lesser than some, but my opinion is that probably 90 percent of medications are unnecessary today.

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The reason I throw that number out there is that if we were actually going, and that number could be higher, it could be a little lower, but I do think that certain conditions, let's say ADHD, let me give an example. When I was a kid and I had bad ADHD, they would have diagnosed with a severe ADHD and I got prescribed Ritalin and Adderall and so I know this, but if my mom would have put me in a soccer game or a video game or gave me a book I liked, I was sucked in.

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Nobody could focus better than me when my diet changed; my hyperactivity went 100 percent away. 100%. So all that being said, I really believe the way the medical profession should work is if you have somebody come in with high cholesterol or diabetes, I've helped hundreds of people reverse type two diabetes. 

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Patients would come in and I would say, okay, we're going to put you on a diet, and it's not really a diet. We're going to have you eat a lot of meat and vegetables, okay? That's the diet, meat and vegetables. We're going to get some good fiber. That's the diet. I'm going to have you start walking. If you can lift weights, great. But if not, let's walk three times a day for 20 minutes. 

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I'm going to give you some supplements. I'm going to give you chromium picolinate. I'm going to give you bayberry, which now the extract is called Berberine. I'm going to give you cinnamon and maybe some fenugreek. Okay. Let's do that and let's see what happens. 90 percent of the time, and this isn't an exaggeration, if you bring me a diabetic and I do that with them, versus you bring somebody that's practicing conventional medicine, 90 percent is going to have a better outcome 10 years from now.

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Almost every time those patients reverse their type two diabetes. This isn't an exaggeration. It's the reality of what happened. I really think that's the sort of thing that should happen when patients come in. I think the other big side of things, I believe that probably close to 80 percent of diseases should also be treated with emotional, spiritual, and mental support, because this is well known in Chinese medicine.

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Every condition has an emotional, mental component. For instance, if somebody has high blood pressure, that's so much stress related. It's almost always anxiety or anger. Those emotions cause blood sugar to spike, or blood pressure to spike. If somebody has worry, they'll get an upset stomach that affects the upper GI.

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Grief–if you are holding onto something from the past and haven't let it go, that affects the immune system. A lot of anger and bitterness, resentment and unforgiveness–that affects the liver. Now I'm quoting Chinese medicine here. We know, and here's another prime example, fear affects the adrenal glands.

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Everybody knows that. Your body puts out more cortisol and adrenaline and these stress hormones. We know that based on different types of emotions you experience, they affect different organ systems. To me, if somebody comes in and they've got a condition, you name it. If we treat it the right way with diet and lifestyle and then bring in that emotional mental component of addressing that issue, people heal.

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My point here is that I don't think we should do away with medications. I think that should be the first line of defense for as long as possible. If somebody is not experiencing a breakthrough, then, hey, let's get them on medication for the shortest time as possible but let's use it then.

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Of course there's emergency medicine, which I think we're actually doing a pretty good job of. You fracture your femur in half and you're in the E. R., do what you're typically doing there for the most part. But that's, I guess that's my opinion on that.

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Alison Cook: Yes. Why do we so quickly jump to synthetic medicine versus looking at the lifestyle, the whole picture? When we bring this back to this idea of mindset, of limiting beliefs, I have a lot of medical folks in my family. One of the things they all talk about is that so much of it is trying to get the patient, and I'll put myself in this category, to understand this is more holistic.  

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To understand and to believe, because you can tell me all day long that I need to change my diet or I need to do this exercise. But I have to do it. I have to go do it. It's this relationship between you and your patient. That is discerning. There are all these biblical qualities: discernment, wisdom, being a healer. You're walking with your clients, and your patients, and so like me as a therapist, I have to try to work with the mind.

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I can tell you this all day long, but you have to leave my office and go and implement some of these micro changes. How do you, as you've worked with patients over the years, how do you work with them on these mindset issues? Do you have tools? I know that's where this book came from in many ways, is to walk us through them.

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But how have you learned, how we can be our own worst enemies and how we can actually harness the power of our minds? What are some of the tricks and tools to help us buy into this more holistic, empowered way of managing our health?

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Josh: Yeah, I'd say it's two things. I think this is very biblical in its foundations, and it's really leveraging pain and pleasure. This is something many of the top psychologists do today. It's something that I've done when I worked with patients or helped people with other areas of their life.

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I'll give you an example of this. If we go back in the Bible and look at what God says, how we should look at him, one of the quotes that comes to mind is, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. There, the word fear is actually used constantly in the Old Testament, especially in terms of how we should view God.

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Now, the word fear there is not necessarily the sort of fear that where we’re huddling in the corner, where we're fearful of being burned up. It is partly that, but in addition, it's this reverent awe and wonder of wow, God, you are so big and so great. I think one is though, it's fear and it's pain. 

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You want to use that for your good. The other is pleasure. This is really tied to, love the Lord your God with all your heart. Like it's this idea of love. It's more of the positive, but you want to leverage both the negative and the positive to help yourself change.

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The way that I like to do this with patients or even myself, is show them two paths. Here's what's at stake. If you want to continue, if you decide to stay on your same diet with type two diabetes, and you're not going to make any changes whatsoever, I want you to know the likely consequences.

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We could use data to show this. It's likely going to cause nerve degeneration where you could lose your foot or you're gonna have trouble walking. You're going to feel very poor in this way. It also leads to heart disease. It also leads to a decreased lifespan. You could go and show it and I want you to go a step further and think about how that's going to affect your family. Think about how that's going to affect your kids. 

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So you actually want to create pain for them because this is true with everything in life. Our awareness is tied very closely to our ability to grow in an area. You look at the people that are very spiritually strong, when you get around a lot of pastors or priests or rabbis, and they have this serenity to them. It's hard to upset them or get them off because they have spiritual awareness.

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It's a very high emotional IQ. There’s emotional intelligence, but it's the very same thing with the body and your life. The people that I see have the best health have a very high physiological IQ. They know what's going on in their body. They can start to tell and they become more aware.

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If somebody isn't aware, like most people have not thought about what the outcome is if I don't reverse my diabetes or if I don't do the right treatment. People don't become aware of that. Like people do with cancer, they're told that you could die. But with diabetes, they don't say, you're going to die tomorrow.

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So my point is I say, hey, here's the likely outcome. Now here's the other outcome. If you make these changes, write down what are the things that you most want in this world. Is it to be at your daughter's wedding or your granddaughter's wedding? Bring your kid somewhere?

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We did this with my mom, by the way, I did this exact same thing. I'm sharing with you. She said, I want to bring my grandkids to Disney World in my seventies. You know what my mom's doing today? She's actually, I talked to her. She's picking up my niece and nephews, three of them, and they're going to Disney world this week.

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So I think that really being able to help people gain a greater level of awareness of the outcomes and tie pain and pleasure to those things based on what they really want, their desires in life gives us at least a better shot.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. It's seeing the big picture. This is more than taking a pill and it'll go away. It's really understanding there are choices. There's some things we don't have control over, but there's a lot that we do. What do we have control over?

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I love what you're saying. There are two paths, Here's one and here's the other, and why wouldn't we do what we can within our control to choose the path that we want? I imagine you walk people through this in the book because there's a sort of future self exercise I hear in that.  Imagine, visualize, see what you want to be doing. We don't do that enough. What do you actually want 20 years from now? Then let's work. Yeah. That's powerful.

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Josh: Yeah. One of the exercises I have people do in the book Dr. Alison, is a process I call visualization to realization. I've had so many people who have started reading the book and they say there are a few exercises in the book they quit and things that radically changed their life. One of those is this process, what I have people do, actually, there's one step before visualization and that is prioritization.

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Thinking about what is exactly what my life should look like? Some people might say, I want this second home or I want this financial goal. But we haven't really thought about, okay, I want to make sure I'm in my 70s, bringing my kids to Disney World. I want to set it up to where my kids want to come back for the holidays and whatever it is. 

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So people haven't really often thought about what are my biggest priorities in life? What matters most? Because all the time we sacrifice our time with our family for other things, or time or our faith. I'd start with that. The next is visualizing it very clearly. My wife and I actually were able to do this. It was amazing. So we got married down in a little place in Florida. It was called 30A.

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It's where the Truman Show is filmed. It's around Panama City Beach and Destin, Florida. The day after we got married, we did a mini honeymoon there and we rode around in bikes. It's this big neighborhood. I said, it'd be so cool to have a home here one day, and so we went back and I said, you want to do a vision board?

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So we made this vision board and I went online and did a search for the neighborhood. It was called watercolor. I looked up watercolor homes and I found one. I liked it. Never seen it before. Put it up there. Five years. So step one is, we want to prioritize. So we talked about having family time here and all kinds of stuff.

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So then we visualized and then we wanted to strategize. How would we make this a reality? So we said, okay, let's start setting aside for us. We were able to do 1000 a month and then more over time. We started saving towards getting a house there. Then we created it as a system.

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It automatically came out of the bank account. What is in this fund? Five years later, we weren't in the position yet. We're still a few years off. But we were in the same neighborhood with my in-laws on these little bikes going around, and I had this idea and I looked over to my father in law, Joel, and I said, hey, what if we go in together and we get a house or we get this lot because we found this perfect lot, our dream lot down there. 

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They said, hey, we're in. We decided and we bought this lot and I was at my house. This was the next week and I was recording a podcast and I remember right before I was looking up and I was looking at my vision board and I thought. There's something so familiar about that house on my vision board. By the way, there are thousands of houses in this neighborhood, thousands.

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I realized that the lot we bought was next door to the house on my vision board. In fact, part of the picture was that lot and it's crazy. We've been praying about this for years. And listen, visualization isn't about getting a lot in your favorite vacation neighborhood, but really, iit was such a powerful reminder that when you go through the right process and the Bible talks so much about visualization, God says, listen, look at the stars of your sky, Abraham, so numerous shall your descendants be.

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For me, I think that this is a really powerful exercise people can go through. I go through in detail in the book of how to do that. Some other people have been able to do that and birth their dream business or write their dream book or create their dream family environment or heal from a condition.

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Alison Cook: It's really powerful and we're not taught that. I'm glad you tied that to scripture because there is the again, that sort of woowoo version of that, that we can see out in the culture.

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Josh: The manifesting word.

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Alison Cook: But there's also science behind it. To me, the biblical component of it that we're not often taught, because here's the thing when you do that, my husband and I have been doing a lot about this, we're hitting an empty nest. What do we want our lives to look like when we're 80? You align your dreams and your hopes with reality. 

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Here's the other thing, even in your story, there is some cost on the front end. You have to put some savings away or for health, I started to realize I want to be healthier. I want to do this work for a really long time. And there's a cognitive distortion, a thinking trap in my mind, that I don't have time to exercise because I've got so much work to do. 

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But the truth is, if I don't make time to care for my body and exercise and do these things that I need to do to heal, I'm not going to have those 20 years, like your mom, like you're saying, you're not going to be taking the kids.

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When you start to really think practically and wisely and align what you long for with the truth, we have to delay gratification. We have to do these things. We start to work with the grain though, of how God designed us. That's what I hear in that. You still have to take some steps there to achieve that goal. 

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You went to your father and also, if you hadn't taken some time to really prayerfully consider the life that you want. you can't create it. It's so powerful.

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Josh: One of the things I always do, Dr. Alison, is I will picture and visualize those things based on the priorities that I have, but then I always recheck with God and say, God, make sure I have my priorities straight. If you have a better vision, I'm going to sit here, but what's maybe something more clearly you can show me. I always invite God in that process.

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Alison Cook: I love that. I love that. It's a partnership with God. Yeah. I love that. Tell us, Dr. X, you do so much. You've got this book, you've got a practice. Tell us how my listeners can find you and all the different things you have to offer.

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Josh: Yeah. I'll say one of the things that I know we started the show with is overcoming these limiting beliefs. This is something that radically changed my life, when I say that I believe that changing one single limiting belief can absolutely change someone's life. A lot of people listening to this might be one limiting belief away from that dream relationship.

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One limiting belief that's keeping them from great health. One limiting belief that's keeping them from that thing that they've been dreaming about. That's why I wrote this book. By the way, we didn't get into this, but a year and a half ago, I had a spinal injury. Because of a medical mistake, I went in to get something really natural done and then my disc and my bone got infected while doing it.

‍

I didn't walk for a year. In fact, this time last year, I wasn't walking, and I was told by a doctor that I might never walk again. I wrote this book while I was in bed. When I was having all of these limiting thoughts. I was in this place where I was told, I went from having great health, to I'm gonna never walk again. I said, I want to write something that will help people experience a breakthrough. 

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Using mindset medicine is what I called it. I really did that in this book. I think if anybody's looking for a breakthrough this is such an amazing book to check out. If people go to joshaxe.com and get the book there, or you can go to Amazon, buy it, and then go to joshaxe.com, I have hundreds of dollars worth of free bonuses. People will get the workbook. 

‍

They'll also get a mindset masterclass, a whole masterclass. It's worth hundreds of dollars there and loads of other bonuses attached to audio interviews from some amazing people like Irwin McManus and lots of people that people would recognize.

‍

If people want to take advantage of that for the next couple of weeks, they can go to joshaxe.com, get the book and you'll get it on Amazon, plug in the code and you'll get hundreds of dollars worth of free bonuses. The book is called Think This, Not That, because there are all these things that we think all the time that are leading us down a destructive path versus I teach people hey, think this, and if you do, you're going to have that outcome that you've dreamed of. 

‍

People can check out the book. Ialso have a podcast, which I know you're likely going to be on here in the future. That's the Dr. Josh Axe Show. I cover a combination of health content, but also a lot of mindset content as well there. So they can check out the podcast, the Dr. Josh Axe show, and then I'm on the social channels @Dr. Josh Axe, but I want to say, Dr. Alison, thanks so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of what you do, because again, as we've talked about, I'm such a big believer in mindset and biblical psychology and for healing. Again, it's been a real honor to be on today. 

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Alison Cook: There's so much overlap I'm so grateful for what you're doing. All the people that you're helping. I'm so grateful that you're so healthy. I can see you right now in front of me, you're up and moving around. You did it. You overcame. Yeah, that's amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Check out Think This, Not That.

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Josh: That's right. Think This, Not That. Yeah. Amazon.com, bookstores nationwide, but you can also get at joshaxe.com.

Are you ever tempted to lie to spare someone’s feelings or avoid conflict?

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You're not alone. Research shows that most people tell at least one lie every day, even though honesty significantly benefits our relationships and mental health. In today’s episode, we explore the science and Biblical wisdom behind lying, and I'll share practical strategies to foster more honesty (spoiler alert: it involves setting boundaries!) in your relationships.

‍

Here’s what we cover:‍

• How often do we lie?
• 4 mental health benefits of honesty
• 4 types of lies we tell
• The link between lying and boundaries
• 3 reasons why we lie
• The most important question to ask yourself about the lies you tell

‍‍‍

‍Thanks to our sponsors:

• Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
• Go to https://hensonshaving.com and enter BESTOFYOU at checkout to get 100 free blades with your purchase. (Note: you must add both the 100-blade pack and the razor for the discount to apply.)
• Sign up for AromaTru's Insider Club today and you'll receive a FREE Waterless Oil Diffuser and a FREE lemon eucalyptus oil - that's over $200 in savings. Head to aromatruorganics.com/bestofyou to take advantage of this exclusive offer.
• 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.
• Go to thrivemarket.com/bestofyou for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift!

‍

Resources:

• I Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
• ‍Exodus 20:16
• ‍Proverbs 12:22
• ‍Ephesians 4:25
• ‍Colossians 3:9-10
• ‍John 8:44
• People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck
• The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
• Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller

‍

‍Related Episodes:

• Episode 103: Name, Frame, and Brave Gossip
• Episode 104: Overcoming the Fear of Vulnerability—Strategies to Stop Feeling Alone and Build Meaningful Connections
• Episode 20: Making Peace with Yourself (& Facing Your Fear of Disappointing Other People)
• Episode 72: Overcoming Failure, Handling Adversity, and Telling Yourself the Truth

‍

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.‍

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Transcript:

Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here. I'm so excited for this episode today. There is so much to unpack as it relates to lying, but before we dive in, I want to remind you to please pick up your copy of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way if you haven't already,

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I lay out the three step framework, name, frame, and brave, in detail in the first few chapters of the book and this framework is designed to help you find your way through some of these more complicated sort of thorny challenges that we all face that don't have a quick fix solution. 

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In today's episode, we're going to apply this three step framework to this very prevalent phenomena of lying.

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I did a lot of research on the topic. It was fascinating. It was convicting to me personally, and it was really illuminating. And my goal for this episode today is really to not only inspire and encourage you to name, frame, and brave more honesty in your relationships, but also to give you really practical tools and scripts and strategies for how to do that in especially tricky or tough situations.

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In the research, I discovered two competing facts that I think are really profound. Number one, there are tremendous psychological benefits to honesty. Studies have found that people who are more honest tend to experience less stress and anxiety. They have improved mental health overall. They enjoy healthier, more intimate relationships. They experience higher degrees of personal integrity. 

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This idea of who you are on the inside matches how you show up with other people. And lastly, people who practice honesty tend to make better decisions. Their decisions tend to reflect their true needs, their true desires. And as a result, they tend to enjoy greater satisfaction in their lives.

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I'm calling honesty a practice for a reason. It doesn't always come naturally. But here's the thing: as we practice honesty, starting by getting really honest with ourselves and with God, and then moving into our relationships with other people, we come into that alignment with the truth, which is so critical for a healthy, whole, meaningful, purpose-filled life on this earth.

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No matter what our circumstances are, it's one thing we have some control over. We can live with a lot of integrity, no matter what is going on around us.And I really believe this is what we need most right now is to dig in and lean into being people of honestyI truly believe that creating a culture of honesty is so vital to the health of our world today. And it starts with you and me making a commitment to it in our own immediate spheres of influence.

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Here's the thing. Honesty is so good for our mental health, and yet the statistics on the prevalence of lying reveal that most of us are lying at least daily. Here's some basic statistics about the prevalence of lying, and this doesn't even get at the culture of lying and gaslighting in the larger systems around us. This is getting at our own individual selves.

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An average person lies one to two times a day. 60 percent of people lie at least once in a 10 minute conversation. This is from research done by social psychologist, Bella DiPaolo and her colleagues. Men tend to tell more self-serving lies, lies that aggrandize or sort of puff up their accomplishments, whereas women are more likely to tell those lies that try to save other people's feelings or smooth over social interactions. 

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90 percent of people lie on their online dating profiles, 40 percent of people lie on their resumes. And I thought this one was really interesting. People are more likely to lie over the phone than they are face to face. And if you think about this, I don't have a stat on it, but if it's that much easier to lie over the phone, imagine how much easier it is to lie on the internet. 

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As we move away from these human to human interactions in our real lives, in our neighborhoods, in our communities, in our church groups, and move into more digital or more virtual relationships where it's easier, frankly, to be deceptive.

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Even the research reveals this dissonance where on one hand, it is so healthy and freeing to be people who practice honesty, and yet we're in a culture where lying is incredibly prevalent and there's no way that prevalence of lying doesn't affect us as individuals. 

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So in today's episode, that's what we're going to focus on. We're going to unpack what exactly is lying? What are different types of lying? Why do we lie? Is there ever a benefit to lying? And then we're going to get into some really practical strategies and tips, and even some scripts for how to bring more honesty into your interactions with other people.

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Because naming, framing, and braving a path out of lying is a truly counter cultural move. If we can become people who practice honesty, that is an incredible way of following Jesus in the work of becoming namers of what's true.

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So number one, what is lying? The basic definition of a lie, according to the dictionary, is to simply make an untrue statement with intent to deceive. The American Psychological Association defines a lie as “a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth or falsehood”.

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If we break that down, there are three key elements of a lie. Number one, there's a falsehood. There's information conveyed that is not true. Number two, there's intention. The person making the statement knows it's false and intends to deceive the listener. And number three, there's that element of deception, which means it includes another person. 

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The goal is to make the listener believe the fault statement is true. We actually want the other person to believe what we're telling them. So there's a falsehood, there's intention, and there's deception of another person.

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Before we dive deeper into lying, I want to pause and give the definition for honesty, because I think it's really important to hold in the background as we go through this conversation about lying. Being honest in relationships means consistently expressing your true thoughts, feelings, and intentions with kindness and respect.

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And every part of that definition is important. We are not talking about being harsh or being cruel. We're talking about a practice. This is a skill we develop it takes some commitment to be someone who consistently practices honesty,

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If we think about the three key elements of honesty against those three key elements of lying, they're the exact opposite. Instead of falsehood, honesty involves truthfulness. The information that is conveyed is accurate and factual. It doesn't mean we tell all the details, but what we do share is accurate. 

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Number two, the intention of someone who's making an honest statement. It's simply to communicate without hidden motives. We're trying to convey the facts about what we think or feel. And then lastly, instead of deception, honesty is characterized by transparency. The goal of honesty is to be open and clear, allowing the listener to understand the true intent and content of the communication. 

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Now, I want you to imagine for a minute, if all of our relationships were really built on honesty. Can you imagine if we lived in a world where we can actually trust what the person in front of us is saying, where our leaders were honest and we trusted that what they were speaking about from behind a podium was actually, in fact, the truth of what they believed without intent to manipulate us or to deceive us? 

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Where marketing gurus in advertisements that we see on TV are actually presenting us with facts that we could trust in order to help us make informed decisions? Where our friends, where our spouses, where our parents, where our pastors, where our leaders were, to the best of their ability, conveying information in a way that actually matched what they think and feel and believe in any given moment? What a world would that be where we could trust the words that are being communicated all around us.

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I honestly think that kind of honesty in the workplace, in the town square, in our government, in our media, in our social media feeds, in the news that we watch, is somewhat inappropriate. It is really hard to find factual, authentic communication in the broader world around us, and while we cannot solve all the problems in the world around us, we can start in our own lives, in our own friend groups, in our own families, inside ourselves, to be as honest as is humanly possible for us to be.

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Here's the thing. Honesty doesn't mean we are experts. It doesn't mean that we have all the answers. It also doesn't mean we stop thinking or caring about other people's feelings. There's a lot of nuance to this. And so I want to distinguish what I mean by honesty and some counterfeit versions of it that are out there.

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Honesty is not oversharing. In fact, honesty might be showing some restraint in our responses. You can be honest without revealing a lot about yourself. Honesty shows discretion. It's not oversharing. 

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Honesty is not bluntness. Bluntness means speaking harshly or in an insensitive manner, without regard for the feelings of others. Honesty involves sharing the truth as best we can understand it in a way that is respectful of the listener.

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Honesty is not being an expert. In fact, often the most honest response we can give, especially about more complicated topics, is “I don't know”. I think about this a lot when I try to vet a new healthcare provider or a new mental health provider or a new expert that I'm seeking wisdom from–can they say, I don't know, I'll look into that further? To me, that's an indicator of somebody who's being honest with me. And I far prefer that than someone who pretends to know everything or to be an expert about something they actually don't know.

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Lastly, honesty is not the same thing as vulnerability, which we discussed in last week's episode. Honesty doesn't have to involve emotional risks. It can be surface level. And this is really important. I want you to hear me say this. When I'm talking about being honest, it doesn't mean divulging personal or sensitive information. That's vulnerability and vulnerability is something you really want to safeguard with entrusted, safe relationships. 

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We're going to have different degrees of vulnerability with different people, but that doesn't mean we can't be honest. Honesty is a practice we really can strive to adopt universally in most of our lives.

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So what does the Bible say about lying? Most of us have this idea that lying is wrong. It's built into our moral code, which is why a lot of us experience dissonance when we're tempted to tell a lie, but also in our culture, when we're aware that there's lying going on around us, we have this sense that it's not good, that there's something wrong with it, even though we don't always know how to name it or identify it.

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Here's some context from the Bible to undergird our conversation. It's one of the 10 commandments. Exodus 20:16, you shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. And if we look at the context of that time period, false testimony was really important because justice was really dependent on people's words, people's narratives, about what happened. There was no such thing as video evidence or a paper trail or an email trail like we have today. 

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If you needed to go to someone and say, hey, this person has done this thing to harm me, it was your word against theirs very literally. And so in ancient Israel, legal systems relied heavily on the verbal testimony, on the honesty of witnesses to make fair judgment. 

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We also see admonitions for honesty in Proverbs. Proverbs 12:22 says, the Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy. And then we get to the New Testament, Ephesians 4:25, therefore, each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor. For we are all members of one body, and then Colossians 3:9-10, do not lie to each other since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed and knowledge in the image of its creator.

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We see Paul encouraging believers to become people of integrity with one another, to let their honesty characterize this new Christian community that was forming, that was to be different from the culture at large, that was wracked with lying and deception and manipulating other people. We are to put that off. We are to become people who are honest with each other. 

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And then we see in John 8:44, Jesus referring to the enemy of our souls as the father of lies. He says there is no truth in lies, and he's referring to the devil. When he lies, he speaks his native language for he is a liar and the father of lies. There's such a stark contrast between the father of lies and the truth that sets us free that we find in the person of Jesus. 

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And so this idea of becoming people who are truthful, people who are honest, people with deep integrity, people whose yes means yes, and whose no means no. People who present themselves on the outside as who they really are on the inside is incredibly important to those of us who are seeking to follow in the ways of Jesus and differentiate ourselves from the ways of the culture all around us.

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It reminds me of a book that's a little bit older. It came out a few decades ago by M. Scott Peck. It's called People of the Lie. And the book is a really profound, incisive exposition of the way deception is at the root of so much evil, so much toxicity, so much abuse, so much of the interpersonal trauma that infects relationships and neighborhoods and communities and cultures.

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Lying is so insidious and it can start really small. And that's where we're going to focus most of our intention today. But if we're not careful, small, tiny, even little white lies grow and erode our integrity, our honesty, and keep us from bringing the goodness, the beauty, the freedom that we are meant to have in our own lives and we are meant to bring into the world around us.

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I want to touch on what the research in psychology says about lying. It underscores what we know to be true from the Bible. There's some very recent research published in the British journal of social psychology that reveals that lying is not only unhealthy for our relationships, but it's not healthy for us.

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Number one, it tends to lower our self esteem. It's a little bit of a self-perpetuating cycle. At its most basic, we often lie because we're not confident in ourselves. We might feel shame about ourselves. We don't trust that people will still love us if we were to show up honestly as who we really are. So lying often stems from feeling bad about ourselves, but it actually then decreases our self-esteem.

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Instead of healing that root, when we lie, we stay stuck in that loop. I don't feel good about myself, so I lie. But then when I lie, I feel even worse about myself. And so then we stay trapped and stuck in this cycle of self defeat.

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Number two, lying actually increases negative emotion. There can be a hit of relief immediately after a lie, especially if it gets you out of a tricky situation. But what the study found was that no matter whether you're telling lies to get out of something or to puff up your own ego, or if you're telling lies to please someone else or to protect someone else's feelings, regardless of the type of lie, it tends to increase negative emotions over time.

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It increases dissonance inside, it increases anxiety; we don't actually solve things with the people to whom we're lying. Over time, those negative feelings continue to fester inside of us because we're not actually bringing what we really feel out into the open where we can work through it with someone else. 

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In fact, there was one study I thought was so fascinating, where the people in the study were given an honesty challenge to not tell one lie for 10 weeks. And I remember the Jim Carrey movie, Liar, that is similar to this study. But what they found is that the folks in the study who were challenged to not tell a lie for 10 weeks experienced significant improvements in their physical and mental health. 

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Lying isn't good for us. It's not good for our relationships. And in contrast, honesty is so good for us. And it's so good for our relationships. 

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I do want to touch on the question, are there ever any benefits to lying? This is an important caveat because if you're in a dangerous situation with someone who is threatening you psychologically or physically, or they're going to emotionally blackmail you, or for any reason you need to get out of that situation, or you have to keep up a lie until you can get out of that situation, that's a very different thing. 

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In that situation, you are using a lie and deception strategically and systematically to keep yourself safe or someone you love safe. And that's a very different thing. I hope that goes without saying, but I do want to say that if you're someone who's in an abusive situation or a toxic situation, and the only way to keep yourself safe is to lie in that setting until you can get yourself to safety, that's a very different thing.

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Please know that there's been a lot of studies done on the ethics of that, that it can be a very strategic way to create enough safety until you can find your way to safety. Also when it comes to lying, there are situations where telling the truth might cause unnecessary pain. A lie can be used again, strategically, to protect someone's feelings. And I'm using that word strategically because there's a conscious awareness of it. I'm going to lie in this situation. And so in those situations where you're protecting yourself or protecting someone else, you're not deceiving yourself. You're not deceiving God. And hopefully there's at least one or two other people in your life that knows what you're doing and why you're doing it in this case.

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Okay, what are some different types of lies? So I thought this was interesting to touch on. These are the four most common types of lies that people tell. Number one, the little white lie. This is the one that is the most common. 72 percent of all people admit to telling little white lies. I'm pretty sure it's possible that the other 28 percent who say they don't tell little white lies are potentially telling a little white lie. 

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Here's the thing about white lies. They're the least harmful of the different types of lies. They're usually told in order to avoid hurting someone else's feelings, to be polite, to smooth over social situations, common little white lies. Someone asks you how you're doing. Maybe you're having a terrible day and you say, I'm fine with a smile. 

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Or maybe your friend or your spouse or your child is wearing a new outfit and you don't think it looks that great, but in the moment you don't want to hurt their feelings. And so you tell them, oh my gosh, I love it. You actually are trying to get them to believe you like the thing you don't really like.

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Another common example of when we tell little white lies, someone asks you to do something that you don't want to do, or for whatever reason, you don't want to tell them the real reason you can't do it. And so you make up a lie. You feign an illness.

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You suddenly magically have guests coming in out of town, out of nowhere. Whatever the thing is that you make up, it's because you don't want to hurt their feelings. Little white lies are more common in some cultures, more than others. They're more common in some parts of the US than other parts of the US. Regardless, a little white lie does still meet the criteria for what a lie is. 

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You're saying something that's not true. There's an intention to deceive the listener. You're not saying something neutral. You're not saying, wow, what an interesting outfit. The lie is, I love it. And you're actually trying to make the listener believe that faulty statement is true, that you actually love it. Even in these cases with little white lies, we still want to practice honesty with ourselves. Somewhere you've got to tell the truth. I call it a practice because we have to practice this skill, this muscle inside of ourselves. It's a very counter cultural practice for most of us.

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Okay, number two, another big category of lies are lies we tell about our personal accomplishments. 64 percent of people admit to lying in this way. These are the lies where we exaggerate our achievements, our skills, maybe lie about our weight or our height. Maybe we take credit for something we didn't really do. Maybe we exaggerate something in a job interview.  Again, you might have a good reason to do this in a given situation, but in general, why not try to be as honest as possible? 

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Number three. The third most common type of lie that we tell are lies about our emotions. And I think this one is so interesting because the practice of honesty requires us to be honest about how we're actually feeling inside of ourselves first, and a lot of the work that I do in The Best of You and I Shouldn’t Feel This Way and Boundaries For Your Soul is trying to teach you how to get to the root of what you are actually thinking and feeling in any given moment.

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Not necessarily so that you go tell everybody that, but so that actually, here's how I feel about this thing. I'm going to figure out how to share that in a way that is constructive, not destructive. But if we're in a habit of lying or covering over, or even deceiving ourselves about our emotions, that bleeds out where we don't have emotional truth in our relationships. 

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We tend to do this, especially in social situations or intimate relationships to avoid conflict. We don't want to deal with the actual hard conversation that we need to have. And if we make a habit of this, we lose sight of what we actually feel or think inside of ourselves. So for example, we pretend that we're happy when we're really upset or frustrated or angry. We bury those negative emotions instead of naming them honestly. 

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Maybe somebody hurts you, and instead of saying, yeah, that really hurt, we shove it under the carpet. It's really a lie. It's not emotionally honest when we say, no, it was fine. It was okay. It didn't bother me at all. When in fact, the thing that happened did hurt me or did bother me. Another example: let's say there's some friction with a family member or a friend. And we deny it. We say, I'm not mad. I'm not frustrated. I'm not bothered. But in reality, we are. When we do that, we dig a hole for ourselves, because what if down the road, we actually want to have a conversation about this thing that's been bothering us, but we've spent weeks, months, maybe years denying that the thing bothers us.

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It makes it really hard to earn the trust of that person that you want to have an honest conversation with, if for years, you've been denying the very thing you actually finally realize you need to name and discuss.And so again, we can find our way out of these things. It's never too late to start being honest. It's never too late to say, you know what, I haven't been honest with you. I actually have been bothered by this for a lot of years, and I'm sorry that I wasn't honest with you sooner, but I do need to have this conversation.There are ways that you can approach that, but I will say that's why a practice of emotional honesty is so important early on in your relationships. That baseline practice of, at the very least saying, I'm not sure how this makes me feel. I need to think about it for a little while and then get back to you.

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Finally, another big thing we lie about, and this is a tricky one because we might even have a really good motivation–maybe you don't want a friend to know what you did over the weekend because you don't want to hurt her feelings that you did some things with people without including her. 

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So you might be tempted to lie, or you might want to have some privacy at a social gathering. Someone asked you a question and you don't really want to answer it. And so you might be tempted to lie. Again, there's an understandable motivation for all of these different types of lies. Lying doesn't actually get us the real thing we want, which is honesty and transparency, even when honesty and transparency means saying, I'd rather not answer that question. I'd rather not share that information with you. I'm not comfortable divulging that. It gets into boundaries. The more honest we become, the healthier our boundaries are going to become with other people. 

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Because typically in all of these cases, if we're lying to protect someone else or to protect ourselves, we're not doing the harder, deeper, holier work of getting to the root of how can I show up authentically? How can I show up honestly, authentically, because that's ultimately what's going to be good, not only for me, but for the health of this relationship, even if this is a relationship that needs to have more healthy distance, because I don't want to answer these questions this person keeps asking me.

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That brings us to, what are the different motivations for lying? 

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Number one is self protection, self preservation. We might want to avoid a consequence that we actually need to face. Sometimes we are trying to protect ourselves from hurt. We don't want to feel rejected by the other person. We don't want to feel judged by the other person. We don't want to feel criticized. 

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These are all really valid reasons to want to do something to put a barrier in that conversation with that other person. The intention there makes sense, but the strategy of lying is not the healthiest strategy, typically at that moment.

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Number two, we want social acceptance or approval. We want people to like us. We want to fit in. We want to make a smooth social environment. We're at a party, we're at church, we're in the neighborhood, and we don't want to be weird. We don't want to be odd. We want to play along, play the social game, answer the questions, but we don't actually really want to share what's really going on. So we make up lies to keep the social norms of civility going. Again. Understandable, right? You don't want to  feel socially awkward.  I get that. And also we have to really think about a healthier way of being honest.

Lastly, the last motivation, this is the least common, but very real, is we're trying to be controlling and manipulative where there's actually a malicious component for the lie. This might be where there's a gaslighting component or a narcissistic component where someone is lying to get power over you, to try to manipulate you, to try to control you, to try to create a narrative that's untrue, to keep you feeling small or to sustain their own narcissism. 

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This is the most toxic kind of lying. This is where we get into abusive lying, and it's important to name and this is very real. We do see this from time to time where there is a really malicious motivation behind the lying.

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So I want to close today by giving you some practical tips and strategies to name, frame, and brave lying in your own life. As you listened, you probably were resonating with some of those examples, some of those motivations more than others. So how do we become people who are honest?

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First of all, name it. And this is a quote from chapter two of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, name what's hard, start with yourself. Notice, when am I lying? You might even think about as you're listening today–was there a moment that you told a lie?

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Maybe it was at a store, at the grocery store checkout line. Maybe it was with a boss. Maybe it was with your own child. These are all common places that we lie. There's no shame in this, but to notice and become aware. Yeah, that's a place I am tempted to lie. When I talked about that neighborhood barbecue, if that's a place for you where you're like, man, that is a place where I, those social gatherings where I'm really tempted to lie because I can't stand social awkwardness, but I also don't want to answer the questions. Notice that. Naming without shame is the first step to braving a better way forward. 

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And then number two, do some framing work. Ask yourself, why did I lie? In that situation, what is the motivation behind it for me? Whatever the situation is, you might ask yourself a really powerful question. I think this is one of the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves when we're framing something like this: what am I afraid would happen if I were to tell the truth?

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You might even ask yourself, what's the worst thing that could happen in this situation, if I told the truth? In contrast, what's the best thing that could happen if you were honest in that situation? That question can reveal a lot. You might notice that there's actually nothing you really fear. It's a habit. You've gotten into the habit of lying as a coping mechanism for social anxiety or you've gotten into the habit of lying when you feel embarrassed, or when you feel fearful of conflict, even as you recognize that's not necessary, that the person is someone you could actually have a really healthy conversation with. 

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Sometimes we fall into the habit of lying as a conditioned survival response that lingers all the way from childhood where maybe we learned to lie as a way to survive as children because we were fearful of judgment or shame or repercussions. And this can happen if you're someone who's high on empathy or highly sensitive, and maybe you had parents or caregivers who were shaming or who were critical. And so you learned to lie really quickly to keep yourself protected from that.

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And that conditioned response has followed you into some of your adult relationships. You might notice that. And then you've got to ask yourself, wait a minute, how do I heal that in the context of my current relationships? Because the people around me now aren't actually unsafe. They're not actually shaming or judging or criticizing me.

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So I actually want to work on being honest with them. As you frame it, that might be something that surfaces for you. Or maybe as you ask yourself what you're afraid of, you realize, oh my gosh, I'm actually afraid that this person's going to get really angry with me. And they actually are unsafe. The reason I lie in this setting is because they're not safe. That's actually a very real threat. 

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And that's a very different way. of framing it, because if that's the case, then you might need to think about talking with a therapist or a trusted advisor or a friend about this relationship that's unsafe and how you either get help creating more safety in the relationship or put more boundaries around your relationship with this person so that you're not being exposed to their toxicity.

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In that case, the framing is very different. It may be that lying is helping you to survive. And so we've got to get you to safety. Framing is so important to understand what's going on behind lying behaviors.

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Another framing question is asking yourself, who do I find myself really being honest with where it's so easy to be honest? See if you can identify, what are the ingredients in that relationship that bring out that honesty inside of you. What's that about? And notice that and move toward that.

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And then finally, once you've named the lie, framed it and understood a little bit more the function that lying behavior is serving in your life, you can then take brave steps toward more honesty. You might brave healthier boundaries. As we've said, if there are certain situations or certain people who evoke that lying part of you as a survival strategy, you might need to implement some healthier boundaries. 

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In those situations or with those people, if you've identified there's a habit component, you might need to brave more mindfulness. And this will feel awkward at first, but maybe you brave a pause when someone asks you a question and you get really aware of that feeling inside of, oh, a lie is about to come out of my mouth. I'm going to take a deep breath. Pause.

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And see if I can say something honest, it might be as simple as saying, I don't know how to answer that question, or I'm not sure what happened. Or I'm not sure how to respond in this situation. 

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That pause and that breath can really help you connect to that Holy Spirit led self inside of you that is yearning to bring forth more truthfulness, even if what's truest in that moment is, I don't know, I need more time. Can I get back to you? I'm not sure how to answer this right now. I'll need more time. 

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You're showing up more authentically when you give yourself the gift of that pause. Practice finding one thing you can say that is true.

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And then lastly, along the lines of that pause. Practice being really honest, especially in those situations where there's an opportunity to give a written reply. Take your time. Don't text right back. If you need to turn down an invitation, think about it. What's really true here? What am I trying to convey? 

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Because I can't go to this event. And the truth is I don't really want to do more things like this with this other person. So I don't also want to make up an excuse or pretend I'm sick or pretend I have company. What I actually want to say in this moment is something like, I so appreciate your thinking of me. I'm not a big fan of X, but I love to find other things that we could do together. 

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That's an honest reply that honors the invitation, but also honors the truth about how you really feel. Or if someone asks you for help and you really care about that person, but you don't have the bandwidth to provide the help they need, instead of telling one of those little white lies, honoring them with the truth where you say, man, I am so sorry for what you're going through. 

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I need to be honest. I am also going through a lot right now, so I don't have a lot of margin. I want you to know I'm with you in spirit. I am rooting for you, but I don't have a lot to give during this time or season. These are hard things to say, but in those relationships where you really want to develop more authenticity, more truthfulness, I promise you if you give yourself the spaciousness, the pause, the time to really look inside yourself and notice what is actually true and formulate a response that is both honest and kind, you will start to experience the joy, the freedom, the confidence of knowing that you are aligning with what's true. 

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You will start to bring more goodness, more beauty, more authenticity into your relationships and into the world around you.

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Have you ever felt isolated because you couldn’t open up to others? Do you worry that showing vulnerability might lead to more hurt?

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You are in for such an incredibly special treat today. This is such an honest, incredibly real conversation about the risks of vulnerability, the hurts that come from letting others in AND the incredible opportunities for intimacy, connection, and healing when we do.

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My dear friends, Kathy Tuan-MacLean and Tara Edelschick, authors of the incredible new Bible study experience, "Moms at the Well," surveyed over seven hundred moms and discovered most women struggle with worry, anger, comparison, escapism, a desire for control, and heartbreak. Yet most women feel alone in these struggles. If you've ever felt lonely or skeptical about finding community with other women, this episode is for you.

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Here’s what we cover:

1. The risks and rewards of vulnerability
2. How 1 marriage crisis launched a 20 year small group of friends
3. 2 essential ingredients to safeguard trust in a friend group
4. How they dealt with gossip
5. Strategies for dealing with hurt feelings, ruptures & repair
6. One shocking result from their survey
7. How I found friends as a single woman
8. The one thing that kills group trust

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Additional Resources:

• For 20% off + free shipping when you order Moms at the Well, use code IVPPOD20 at https://ivpress.com/moms-at-the-well
• Moms at the Well: Meeting God Through the Mothers of Scripture―A 7-Week Bible Study Experience by Tara Edelschick and Kathy Tuan-MacLean‍
• welcomejesuswelcome.com
• Hagar’s story in the Bible
• Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
• John 7

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‍Related Episodes:

• Episode 103: Name, Frame, and Brave Gossip
• Episode 85: The Goal of a Healthy Family & 6 Roles We Take On In Dysfunction
• Episode 66: The Truth About Anxiety & How to Become a Worry Free Parent with Sissy Goff
• Episode 65: Vulnerability, Parenting, and Letting Go of Control—Inside A Guy’s Perspective With Our Friends From Dadville

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‍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.
• 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.

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Transcript:

Alison Cook: Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here for this series where we are here to name, frame and brave some of these areas in our lives that bring up dissonance inside of us, a feeling of inner tension or even ambivalence about how to move forward.

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Today's topic is about the dissonance we feel about risking vulnerability, especially as it relates to how we show up with our friends. Vulnerability is risky. It includes exposing our inner selves, including our fears, our weaknesses, even our insecurities to other people. 

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This openness can lead to deeper, more meaningful connections where we're really seen and understood at such a deep level. But it also leaves us susceptible to judgment, to rejection, and even to betrayal at the hands of other people. When we open up some of these areas of vulnerability deep inside of us to other people, we can open ourselves up to being hurt.

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The fear of being misunderstood or hurt can stir up that dissonance inside of us. I do want to have close relationships and be intimate with other people on one hand, but on the other hand, it's too hard. I've already been hurt too much. I don't want to take that risk. We can wind up kind of stuck between two competing parts of ourselves. I want greater intimacy on one hand, but I'm fearful of being hurt on the other.

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If we're not careful to name, frame, and brave that dissonance, we can wind up with relationships that aren't deeply satisfying, that only keep things at a surface level. Learning to name, frame, and brave vulnerability is essential for personal growth and for building the kinds of authentic relationships that we all crave. 

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As you listen to this conversation in today's episode, I want you to think about naming some of that dissonance in your own life. What are the different feelings that come up when you think about taking a risk of being vulnerable? What conflicting feelings do you notice inside of you and then frame those feelings?

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Have you been hurt in the past? Is there a good reason you're a little bit nervous about being vulnerable going forward? Because if you've been hurt in the past, it's really important to honor that and to brave some healthy boundaries to help keep you safe going forward. Is part of what's hard for you about risking vulnerability your schedule?

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You just don't have time. You're so buried in all the things that you're already committed to that creating the time to develop those kinds of deeper bonds just feels overwhelming to you. So that's a different way to frame it.

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Then lastly, as you frame your own internal reactions and responses to this idea of braving vulnerability, you might ask yourself, what is the worst case scenario that might come from working to bring a little bit more authenticity, a little bit more vulnerability into your friend groups?

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What is the best case scenario that might come from that? And really honor both your fears about the worst case scenario and your hopes for the best case scenario. Remember, the work of framing is really to take the time you need to reflect on both of those possibilities so that you can anchor yourself and prepare yourself as you take brave steps to move forward.

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Finally, as you listen to today's episode, consider some braving steps you might take. For you, braving might mean introducing some boundaries into your relationships so that you can feel more safe to be vulnerable. It might mean being more assertive to ask some friends, hey, what would you think about moving our relationships into a deeper place?

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Let's structure some time together where we can be intentional about talking about some of the hard things in our lives, or it might be that you're not even sure where to start. You just don't even have the kinds of friendships where you can begin to brave more vulnerability. So for you, it might be considering the environment around you. 

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Where are some places, some clubs, some local communities, some church groups you might consider joining just to take a step toward putting yourself in the path of other people you'd like to get to know? And maybe consider if they're the kind of people you might want to go deeper with. 

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As you listen to this episode, I want you to notice what stirs up inside of you as you consider what it's like to be vulnerable in your friend groups. What do you notice? How do you frame it? What are some brave steps you might want to take in your own life? 

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My guests today, Kathy Tuan-MacLean and Tara Edelschick have written an incredible new seven week Bible study experience.

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It's called Moms at the Well and it's a beautiful guide that offers a modern day well for moms, a gathering place to encourage one another, to take an honest look at the challenges we face and to experience the God who invites us into a process of spiritual transformation through this work of gathering together.

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The book is born out of Kathy and Tara's own experience being part of a small group of women for over 20 years. I was part of this small group for two of those years, and I experienced firsthand the power of what they've created, where there's such transparency, where there's such vulnerability, where there's such honesty, even as they've journeyed through some of life's toughest challenges.

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As you'll hear from them today, it's not that everything magically resolved in all of their lives, but somehow through the power of gathering together, of continually coming back to each other and gathering around the well, they encountered God in incredibly powerful ways. Moms at the Well not only gives you seven weeks of content, but it gives you ideas about how to safeguard the trust of such a group so that it's safe for you to show up as you really are with this group of people you're forming. 

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I cannot recommend this book more to you as a way to begin to show up more vulnerably and more authentically with the other women in your life. This is an amazing resource for you. Tara Edelschick has her EdD from Harvard and has worked as an educator, teaching public high school students, graduate students, and homeschoolers throughout Massachusetts.

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Kathy Tuan-MacLean has her PhD from Northwestern and is the National Faculty Ministry Director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Kathy and Tara are so real and so honest about the challenges they've faced in their own lives, especially their challenges as moms. I am so thrilled to bring you this conversation today with my dear friends, Kathy and Tara.

***

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Oh my gosh, it's so good to be with you, Kathy and Tara. It's been too long. I was part of this group that we're going to talk about today with you for a couple of years. I was there for some of the first seeds of this beautiful book that you're putting into the world. I remember sitting in your living room, Kathy, you guys were starting to form the survey questions. So welcome. Thank you so much for being here with me today to talk about this beautiful book.

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Kathy: It's great to be here. I think you helped me with some of the survey questions, Alison.

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Tara: Yeah, around your dining room table. Kathy, I remember the three of us.

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Alison Cook: I remember and I miss it. I want to dive into this today because one of the things you talk about as a result of your survey is loneliness. What's so interesting about that time period is, you were gathering a lot and Kathy, we would just gather there and we'd all be parallel working in your home.

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I remember feeling as a writer, so much of the time, I'm working by myself. I remember during that time, just feeling like, the way I would describe it was, it took the edge off the loneliness. We weren't even talking half the time. I was sitting at the dining room table writing, someone was over on the couch, someone else was coming and going.

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Kathy, you're an amazing cook. There was always amazing food around, but I remember feeling, it just takes the edge off the loneliness to be doing this together. I think you're both so gifted at that. I'd love to start there because for the listener, you've been part of a small group of about maybe six women for over 20 years, 25 years?

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Kathy: I think 2004, so 20 years.

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Alison Cook: In the Boston area, this was the group I got the opportunity to be a part of for a couple of years while I was there. I remember my mind being blown by the depth of this group. The way that you really did life together., I'd love to just start by you sharing a little bit–tell me a little bit about how that group formed, why it formed, and then I want to dig into what you think the secret is to the longevity and depth of this group of women that you established?

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Kathy: Sure. In some ways, maybe the way we started is atypical, especially for what we're wanting moms to do. We actually started out of a crisis that was happening in a friend's marriage, because this friend came to a place of realizing that her marriage had some deep fissures in it that she had enabled.

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She came to the end of herself and was having a really hard time. I realized that because there were people connected to this friend, but who weren't as connected to each other, I suggested, why don't we just pray for you? So we started as a group of four who were all connected to this friend in different ways, praying for her and her marriage, and we started meeting every other week just to pray.

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For the first bunch of months, I think it was very focused around her and the crisis that she was in. But over time, the more we would share and challenge her and pray, we realized, okay, we know that her marriage is in crisis, but it isn't like the rest of us don't have to hear almost everything we're saying to her.

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It all applied. I think it was a year in, we're like, okay, and she even was like, okay, I appreciate how much care you've given us, but can we have this be a little more mutual and equal? We're all like, yeah, because we were all receiving as much. It really became a prayer group for all of us.

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Over time, we invited various people. Alison, we had the joy of having you for a while, and people have come and people have gone. We've walked one friend to death and into Jesus’ arms. So we've really dealt with every single crisis there is that you could have. Kid crisis, marriage crisis, life and death crisis, health crisis. We've been a group who've walked and walked with each other.

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Tara: I love that. The four who started are still in it. So others have come but the four who started, we're all still together. I can't imagine, we were much younger and recently we've been saying, oh, we're getting old together. It chokes me up. Like we're getting old together. 

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Then Kathy and I, when the pandemic happened and everything got shut down, I sent out an email to a ton of people and over the years, that has morphed and it became a group. We meet every weekday, Monday through Friday, from 7:30 to 8 am. Then there's usually a contingent who stays on until 8:30. We read a book and talk about a book Monday through Wednesday. Thursday, we pray for our kids. Friday, we do Bible study. 

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For more than four years now. Like Kathy said, there are people who might look like they're in crisis, but all of us have stuff going on. All of us are lonely. The pandemic maybe brought out a little more than others. But having walked through it all with each other has been transformative for both of us. I couldn't be more grateful.

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Alison Cook: Yeah it's amazing. The book is called Moms at the Well, and as I was reading it and thinking about the two of you, I was thinking, this book truly flows out of these wells that you've established over two decades. I think it's hard to do. There's a reason that women feel lonely, that moms feel lonely.

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I wanna ask you a little bit about that. What were some early mistakes that you were able to overcome that allowed you to stay intact? As someone who came in for a period of time and then migrated out, I can speak to the fact that it's not an in-group out-group type of well that you've created. There's a sense of stability with fluidity that allows for folks to come in, nourish, refresh, and then as life circumstances have it, maybe move on to the next stage. 

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But there is that core stability. So tell me a little bit about what. What do you think helped you to stay intact, to keep this well intact for so many years? What worked for you?

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Tara: I think that the biggest thing that worked is that everyone in these groups is committed to being honest. People are taking risks about pain, longing, suffering, and of course lots of cheering–yay, you did it! We are people who are for each other. 

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It's actually sometimes hard to find cheerleaders. It's hard to find people where it's safe to be honest. I think Kathy is very open and honest and vulnerable. I've learned a lot from her to just say, yeah, this isn't working. If the core group has that, then when people come in, it's oh, you mean my kids don't have to be perfect. I can be a mean wife sometimes, and then everybody goes, ooooooh.

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Alison Cook: That was my experience. I agree that there's a level of safety that you two and a couple of the core members have established that just breathes life. It just breathes life to those who come. What were some mistakes or disappointments that you had early on with each other that you were able to overcome?

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Kathy: I would say that the irony is, that if you're going to walk with people for as long, you get to know each other's flat sides or sin nature really well, as well as people's strengths. Part of the challenge, I think, the important thing, is to speak the truth in love. I personally am a person who really likes to be challenged, but I don't like to have people give me advice.

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So there's a difference that when people are giving you advice, often I feel really patronized or I feel like they think I'm an idiot. I don't know what the word is there, but I'm always like, I can figure out advice for myself. What I really appreciate is where I have blind spots and people can point out where I'm not seeing God, or where I'm not seeing my husband, or where I'm not seeing my God, my kids the way that I should.

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So I think that the commitment to challenge and the commitment to to try to not judge. We talk a lot about comparison in one of our chapters and how we can't help but compare, but envy and judgment, when those come out, it can kill a friendship and it can kill a group. We are really trying to be a group where we are for each other, going on with something Tara said too, I think actually making the commitment is huge.

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So we could have at any point quit, but I think because it was really life giving, because our group was really a well, I personally was just super-hyper-committed. I needed the group. I needed it, and I show up every morning for this book club because I need it. I need to have that sort of community.

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It is sipping from the well of living water when you get to be with these women. They pray for you. You literally do receive the Holy Spirit as people pray for you.

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Tara: When we keep talking about the well, I want to make sure, and I know that you know this, the well is not us. The well is Jesus. What this group of women does is not just pray for each other, but we believe that God is with us. We go back to the Bible. We remember each other's miracles.

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When somebody's faith is waning, we say, but remember, God did this for you. Along with that, I think maybe an early mistake, because we came out of crisis, was that we were going to pray really hard, and then their marriage was going to get healed and the man's addiction was going to get healed.

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Didn't happen. His addiction lives on, they ended up divorced. From the beginning, that's been the reality. God loves us, God's for us, God can do miracles, and a lot of the struggles and some of the judgment came from like, how come you're not getting better? How can you still do this 20 years in? Oh, cause I'm broken. 

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But Jesus isn't. The well really is finding those people who are honest about what's broken, who keep offering you that sip of living water, that Jesus, that the Holy Spirit is.

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Alison Cook: I love that. What you guys have lived, and this is what I want the listener to know– the book is amazing and it really flows from this experience. I love what you're saying. You're not, the people involved aren't the magic, it's the commitment to gathering around the well, no matter what.

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You’re going to still show up Thursday night, even though, nope, we prayed and my marriage is actually falling apart more. It's getting worse. Or we prayed and I'm still doing this thing. We're just going to keep showing up. There's such a vivid picture of grace, community and companionship, which I really think is at the heart of Jesus's message.

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Of course, there's a part of me that's like, we all need this. So how do we take what you guys did, and bottle it up so that everybody can experience this? Because again, according to the research that you did, according to what I see all the time, moms are lonely. People are lonely. 

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This isn't happening everywhere. So one of the things I'm pulling from this already is honesty and commitment. We're not committed to outcomes. We're not doing this so that we can all have healed, happy marriages and home lives and perfect kids. It's because this is the way of Jesus. 

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We gather together, whether in good times, whether in bad, yes, we're praying for each other, and regardless of the outcomes, we're going to continue to gather with Jesus and with each other. That's kind of it. That's really what you guys were able to do over these two decades. 

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Tara: Like Kathy said, one of our core members died. We prayed for her really to not die, obviously. It's a heartbreak. She's gone. But the longer you live, our hope is built not here. Our hope is built on Jesus. We may not see what we want, and all will be well. So you don't have to be perfect right now.

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Kathy: Maybe one more thing I'll say is that in the 20 years, it isn't that we haven't had conflict. When we've walked with people through hard stuff, there has been conflict, there's been hurt feelings, there's been confrontation, there's been working things out. It's funny because one of my friends in the group who happened to live across the street from me, her daughter heard us processing what was going on and she's like, I don't get why what you're doing isn't gossip. 

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She looked and my friend looked at me and I was like, it is processing, we are processing. It became our joke that we're processing, but we actually came to realize that if any of us is in crisis, on one hand, gossip is a horrible thing among women in particular–it's a way to judge usually, and think you're better than others.

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But because so often if someone's in crisis, you actually need the community to problem solve, to figure out, how do we approach someone over a very difficult issue? Or how do we support this person, or what can we do to help? We realized that any one of us, at any point that we're in crisis or need, having our friends process together without us there, is actually super great.

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At this point, I'm like, yeah, please go process and I'm never going to think it's gossip because I know that you're for me and you want me to have life and to choose life.

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Alison Cook: That's a really good distinction. There's a group norm. There's enough safety. There's established safety and trust within the group that you know if two people are trying to analyze or process the situation, they're doing it for your good. There's a spirit of the heart. There's a good motivation there, versus if someone's going and betraying your trust or betraying your confidence by gossiping at the playground at school about your stuff. That's a very different thing. There's that norm within the group.

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I love that you brought up conflict. I love that you mentioned conflict within the group. Is there an instance you'd be willing to share with us about a time you had to work through that? Because I think it's really real. There's no way that you don't go through seasons of hurting each other's feelings. Is there any time that you can think of where you really made a mistake or had to work through something that you'd be willing to share?

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Tara: In general, I think Kathy's exactly right. That we processed more than gossiped. But, some are a little more judgmental than some of the others. I'm one of the judgmental ones and sometimes when we talked, it veered into judgment. Somebody had some very difficult parenting issues. None of which I actually think I could have done any better at, but I was behaving, sounding, feeling judgmental about it.

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She was really hurt and really upset at me and my judgefulness and Kathy had to have a mediation between us. Then Kathy had to mediate between the hurt woman and the other woman who tends to also struggle with some judgment sometimes. There were still sore feelings at the end of it, but we worked through it.

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We were committed. We loved each other for each other. But yeah, I didn't want anyone to think oh, this is the perfect group. I could never emulate it.  It's messy. Whatever our besetting sins are, we bring them into group.

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Alison Cook: So I want to name something here that I think is important. I talk a lot on the podcast about triangulation, where we dump on a third party. We go to a third party and say, oh man, Tara really hurt my feelings. I'm so mad at her. We just dump that on the third party. We never really have an intention to go directly to you.

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You're naming something I think that's really important because I'm guessing what happened is the person with their hurt feelings went to Kathy and said, I was so hurt by how Tara responded to me last night. 

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That becomes triangulation if Kathy and the person who's hurt just gossip about it and bag on Tara and then never bring it back up, but in a community, the power of community, is in that situation, the person who's hurt can say, I don't know how to talk to Tara about this, but I'm so hurt.

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Then the third person can say, okay, how do we bring this back into the community? So there's a constructive purpose there. It's not dumping or venting. It's, we're going to let the community, the group hold the hurt in a way that the two of us can't at this moment.

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When you're that third person, where you're holding the pain of another member of the group. How do you handle that? How do you ensure that this becomes constructive versus destructive?

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Kathy: That's a great question, and I'm not sure I've always done it well. However, I do keep on thinking, as a Chinese person where in our culture, there's no such thing as direct communication, when it comes to conflict, having grown up in Hawaii, where it's primarily Asian American, I was very sick of all the passive aggression, the silent treatment. 

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I did not enjoy how my whole culture dealt with conflict. It strikes me that if you're the third person, the temptation is to hold the information and fan the flames because you're the person who's in and the other person's out. If you're all about trying to consolidate your own position in the friendships, your own safety, your own power, your own affection, whatever then it is, that would be the temptation. 

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It would be very destructive. But because we're Jesus followers, we know that everything about God is about reconciling God to one another. In all our relationships. I do think that the goal, therefore, that's implicit in committed relationships, is that we're always going to be trying to work towards reconciliation.

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Someone can vent, but then the next question is, so what do you sense God inviting you to do? Which is the classic spiritual direction question. I've received spiritual direction for 20 years, oh, 30 some years now and I'm a spiritual director. As you invite folks to consider, what is God inviting you in light of that? Then you can begin to include God in problem solving and knowing that God's heart will always be for reconciliation.

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Alison Cook: That's really good. We're always in the position of trying to point each other back to the well. So there's this: I want to validate that you're hurt. I'm not gonna say, “well, you just need to forgive. You just need to blow past that, she didn't mean to hurt you.” It's not that, but it's also not, I love what you're saying because that's that insidious, “oh, I'm the good guy here I didn't hurt you. You're telling me about how she hurt you. I'm better.” 

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That can creep in. There's a middle ground of, thank you for telling me. I know that's hard. I wonder what God is inviting out of this situation. Not rushing to advice or a solution, but holding together the information. I grew up with a lot of triangulation and having been hurt by it, having often been the third person that people dump on and just feeling the helplessness that comes from that. 

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That was often my role. I don't want all this information, but I don't know what to do because I was the safe person. I hated it. So I never wanted to do it to anybody else. But one of the things I learned through my time with you guys is that constructive component. 

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I think we have to look at the fruit there. There's a couple of key things there that involve a lot of trust, that ultimately we're all drawing, pointing people toward Jesus. Even when sometimes we're going to each other saying, I'm not sure how to make sense of this. This hurt me, or this is bothering me, or help me understand because I always have blind spots. 

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We need that group. I think that's a really nuanced thing that's hard to do well. I love that you brought that up, Tara. I love that you owned that in that case. Maybe there was a way in which you were being a little judgmental. You didn't see her blind spot and you guys were able to talk through that. That's really hard to do. That's why you've been doing this for 20 years.

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Tara: It wasn't maybe I was doing it and it wasn't a little, I was definitely doing it a lot. It was really hurtful, but I can grow from that. Because when she told me she was hurt, it allowed me to apologize and ask for forgiveness. I can grow from that. That's the beauty of the well,

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Alison Cook: And it wasn't quick.

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Tara: That's the thing. Even after that one conversation, everything's not all better now because I broke her trust. I hurt her. So you have to wait long enough to rebuild the trust. To say, okay, I'll put my toe back in, but you really hurt me, so I'm not jumping full-body in.

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She was really great. I'll say the brave part for me was, I wanted to run away, but I didn't. I had to sit in the shame. She had to sit in the mistrust, we had to work our way back. I think Kathy alluded to this, the judgment, the solution to both of those is Kathy's question. She was so good at this in the group. Now we can all do it because she taught us one:  What is Jesus inviting us to? Even for a while, the only kind of prayer we did was listening prayer. We'll just listen and see, we'll just pray for you to hear from God, because we were doing so much without giving advice.You can hear what God's invitation is here, you can hear what God has for you. The second you say those words out loud, the judgment melts away. 

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Alison Cook: Thank you for naming that because again, I want the listener to hear, the well holds space for pain between two friends and it makes sense to me. So someone shows up, they're sharing vulnerably, they feel judged in the group, even after they've said, hey, that hurt, even after there's been repair, man, I'm not sure I want to share that vulnerably next Thursday night about my stuff.

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It really takes some resilience. I love that the well creates space for that, creates space for the rebuilding of trust. It's okay. That you Tara, again, you had the resilience and the fortitude to sit even in the bit of shame. Where it'd be so tempting to just try to overperform to say no, I'll never do it again, as opposed to, the well has space to sit with that feeling of, oh, I'm sorry that I did that. 

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It isn't just a one time thing. That's an ongoing repair that happens internally between two people. It's really quite profound when you really begin to unpack what happens when we just commit to continuing to show up together and not sideline our emotions, not sideline what's hard, bring it with us around the well of Jesus.

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It's really amazing. I think this is the body of Christ. I think this is what we are supposed to be doing, but it's hard. It forces us to deal with our own stuff and not in a quick fix kind of way to sit with it with each other.

***

Throughout Moms at the Well, you're bringing In this beautiful weaving of the real things that women are dealing with these spiritual practices and biblical wisdom. So it's just this beautiful dance of real emotions and spiritual wisdom. Some of the key things that women are dealing with are worry, comparison, anger–we get hurt by each other–and a desire for control. We want to control our kids, our families, our marriages, heartbreak, the devastation of realizing that a marriage is failing or that maybe a marriage isn't failing, but not what we thought it would be, or our kids are failing, or maybe they're not failing and they're not what we wanted them to be.

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All the things that we deal with in life. I guess I want to know, as you got those survey results back, were there any surprises or were most of them down the list like yeah, this is what we've seen too.

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Tara: I'll tell you what was surprising–not the anger and the worry and the control, because we have, and everyone we know has all of that. That was not as surprising. What was surprising was the number of women who wrote in at the end, “This survey made me cry. No one ever asks about foster mothers. No one ever asks about adoption. No one ever talks about kids with disabilities. 

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“I'm not allowed to talk about losing it at church because then I'm a bad Christian mom. I'm not allowed to talk about this. I feel so alone. If other mothers knew what I was dealing with, they would judge me. I couldn't tell anybody at church what's actually happening in my family.” All of those responses, of how unseen and lonely maybe we could guess that but the depth of it, Alison, was so profound and sad.

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Alison Cook: Gosh, just the fact that you asked the questions evoked those kinds of responses. Just being asked what's hard. 

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Kathy: I actually remember that, because the first survey we did was when I was doing it for Intervarsity staff moms, and it was at the beginning. We actually have done two different surveys for moms and so I remember both of you helping me with that survey. I think it was both of your feedback that you said, I need to include widowed, grieving, single, divorced, step, foster, adoptive.

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We kept on brainstorming, what other mom is there? and making sure it got on my list and again, being able to tick off what kind of mom you were and seeing your kind of mom on the list, people were crying. People were writing me emails saying, I'm crying right now because I'm a grieving mom. I've had three miscarriages. There's no place to be seen as that sort of mom.

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Alison Cook: That is amazing. I remember that and it makes sense to me. When I think of moms, immediately, my brain goes to being a stepmom and bearing all of the challenges of motherhood and yet feeling like, does this apply to me?

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Thinking about women who don't have children or don't have biological children, but who are nurturing humans through life, through a lot of different ways that as women, we share this. We do share this commonality. It manifests in so many different ways, but this drive to be connected to and nurturing and bringing life into other humans, we all have that. 

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I love that. I love that even the survey teased out the nuances of loneliness in that experience. As you've written the book and put the book into the world, what words of wisdom would you have for the women listening who might be feeling some of what your survey respondents felt being asked those questions?

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Kathy: Our first chapter looks at Hagar, and the theme is on when you feel unseen. The good news is that Hagar, when you think about Hagar as the first person an angel of the Lord ever shows up to in all of scripture, she's at a well. It's the first time God ever shows up at a well, and we see God showing up at wells all the time from then on.

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She was outside of the family. She was an enslaved servant of Sarai, probably given to her when they were in Egypt, forced to bear Abram's child and then so mistreated that she flees. This is not the sort of person who got seen. You don't ever see Abram or Sarai calling her by name.

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The first person who calls her by name is God, is the angel of the Lord. I would say that her experience at this well is that she dares to name God, the only person in all of scripture who dares name God, and names him El Roi. The God who sees me. And then God tells her, go back and you'll have a son and you will name him Ishmael, which means God hears.

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So Hagar is the one who receives the message that this God of Abraham is the God who sees and the God who hears. They didn't know that before that. For anyone who is feeling alone or unseen, God does see you. The story of Hagar gives us such great hope. We are just as precious as Hagar. God sees you, God hears you.

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Alison Cook: That's beautiful. That is beautiful. I love that. That's the root of all of this, is that deep yearning to be seen and known just as we are. That's the yearning. We know that in God, but we also need places like the one you guys have created–wells where we get just a glimpse even of someone else seeing behind the mask that we feel like we have to put on, at school, at church, whatever, even in our families sometimes. And another woman saying, I see you, I get it, I see it all, and I'm here, I'm going to keep showing up. I'll be here next Thursday, whatever, I'll be here tomorrow morning, no matter what, whether it's gotten better, whether it hasn't, that's the desire, that's the longing.

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Tara: No matter what. That's the deepest longing in all of our hearts is to be seen and valued and obviously the person who gives us that most is God. When we find it in other humans, they are reflecting God. "I see you and I delight in you." We got an email this morning from someone and she said, "I got through the introduction and I'm crying." The only thing that's in the introduction is, there's lots of other mamas just like you. One of our chapters in Women at the Well, we call her Sam because we don't like being unnamed, so we call the Samaritan woman Sam. As far as we know, she likely never had children. But we include her in the book because she births the Gentile church after her encounter with Jesus and him seeing her in all her mess, and loving on her and offering her living water. 

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She runs back to town and tells everyone else about this guy who has living water, who saw everything I've ever done. That's her testimony. You don't have to mother in the way that the church celebrates on Mother's Day. Women are mothering and giving birth to lots of loving communities. We want to celebrate all of those ways of mothering.

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Alison Cook: I love that. Man, that is just powerful. Just naming that longing. What would you say to the listener who is aware of that longing to be seen? Who is aware of that yearning and feels incredibly lonely. What would you say? How would you encourage her as far as taking a step toward community? I think that taking this book to your church and saying, hey, let's do a group around it because it gives you a structure and a scaffolding for this that maybe you could put your toe in the water. You can study the stories of other women in the Bible as an entryway, but how might you encourage that woman who's listening?

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Kathy: I would say that, first of all, the gift of someone who will see you and value you and not judge you, not envy you, is a real gift of God. I think that when you yearn for that, the first thing is to ask God for that gift. God gives good gifts. I do believe, given our survey, that there are many women out there who are hungry to go deeper.

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in both their relationship with God and in their relationship with one another. So I do think asking God, please give me this gift, and then open my eyes, put on my heart, who might be a person I might ask, who might be someone I want to do this group with and then take some risks.

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Tara: Risking vulnerability is the way you can lead. Knowing that even if no one else is talking about it, they're feeling it. Not one of 700 women that we surveyed said, I'm rocking it. Not one. You can share vulnerably and somebody's eyes will open up. Somebody's shoulders will drop and go, oh, me too,

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Alison Cook: This is making me remember a story that involves you, Tara, and your husband, Jeff. When I first moved to Cambridge, I was single. I didn't know a soul. I was so lonely. I was so in need of friends. A friend of mine, a random friend of mine who'd been part of Jeff's community at Harvard, said, oh, you should reach out to Jeff. Jeff Barneson. I had coffee with him because he was at the head of the graduate Christian fellowship at Harvard. 

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So I thought, he probably knows people who maybe could be my friend. I'm pretty sure this is how it happened. I think Kim remembers it a little bit differently, but I said, do you know anyone who could be my friend? I told him about my life and myself and he said, oh, you should get to know Kimberly Miller. Kimberly Miller ended up being my coauthor on the book, Boundaries for Your Soul.

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We had coffee. She was studying IFS. She was also a therapist. He set us up essentially on a friend date. I thought of that as you were talking, I love what you said, Kathy, it's asking God. I was just praying all the time, I was like, man, I need friends. I was writing my dissertation, so everything I was doing was in isolation. 

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I didn't have kids. So there was no avenue for connecting with women in that way. Church can be hard as a single woman. So I started asking people, I need a friend. Do you know anyone who could be my friend? I want to share that because that's another way of being vulnerable and saying, this is a need that I have.

***

Kathy: I was thinking about the metaphors that we use and I'm struck that the well is where you go to get the water you need for life. So if we're actually talking about the metaphors, the water is the living water of God. To give something away, in our chapter on Sam, we realize, what is the living water?

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Jesus promises living water. What is the living water? Then you have to go to John 7, three chapters later, to find out that Jesus says the living water is the Holy Spirit. The water that Jesus promises is God's presence living within us, the Holy Spirit, being filled with the Holy Spirit, which is what we believe happened to Sam.

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It’s why she went from being someone who seemed isolated and alone and in shame to being someone who could name everything and talk about Jesus with freedom and invite people into her experience of Jesus. So I'm just struck that the water is always good, and yet a well can fall into disrepair.

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A town well, you want to make sure people don't pollute it. Someone can ruin a well; that's what enemies do. They ransack a well so that people can't access the water anymore. So I was just thinking how when we wrote the book, we started out thinking, oh, we're writing this book on spiritual formation for moms, partly because that's a book I've been trying to write for 21 years now.

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We went through many iterations. We had a couple of rejections. We had friends read really horrible drafts that we actually even submitted for publication that got rejected, thank the Lord. Part of what we realized is that for us, the key has been this idea of a community of women coming to this well to try to get the water they need for themselves and their families. 

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This Holy Spirit living water, the water of God that helps us live our whole lives, that being careful around and stewarding well. The structure of the group, which we've actually talked quite a bit about, is important, and that's one reason we actually hit group commitment.

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It's pretty hard in the book because what will kill a group is if someone doesn't keep confidence, if someone takes up too much space, if someone betrays the vulnerability that others show. With our group commitments, we're hoping that people will create a safe and healthy and wonderful well where the Holy Spirit, the living water, can flow out freely and everyone can come and drink.

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Alison Cook: I love that. It's so interesting. Anger doesn't kill a group, comparison doesn't kill a group, envy doesn't kill a group, hurt feelings don't kill a group. What kills a group is what we do with those feelings, when we let those feelings come in between us and disrupt us from gathering, or we let the enemy start to let those feelings fester versus bringing those feelings into the well. I love that you laid out guidelines for folks in the book so that they can do this work together. I want the listener to be so encouraged, just as Kathy just said, there are norms that you can use.

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You can work through this, these feelings, some of this stuff will come up. Conflict will come up, but there are some ways in which God will begin to use those things toward the end of forming you, not letting those things divide you from each other. I think our fear of those feelings keeps us from each other versus God wanting to take those feelings and use them to bring us toward each other.

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I want every woman to experience this, to taste this. You guys have lived it just so beautifully. I'm so grateful for what you've created, for what it brought to me during that season of my life that I could come. It brings tears to my eyes that I could come in and sit with you guys around the well for a short season and taste the goodness and taste just a little bit of being known.

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I had some major life epiphanies and growth spurts just by coming in for a couple of years to being a part of this community with you guys. I take that with me. The fruit goes with me wherever I go. It's just beautiful. Now you're going to change the lives of tons of other women through this book. 

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I have two last questions for you before we wrap up. If you could go back in time, what would you say to the younger version of you with all the wisdom that you have now? What would you say to the younger version of you who was struggling with some of these things as a young mom?

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Kathy: I went into motherhood thinking I was not going to commit all the sins of my mother and my grandmother. We like to joke that rage comes down the female line in my Chinese family. I couldn't get over it. I couldn't get over it. We write about it somewhat in the book and talk about it in some of our videos. I think that the process of parenting has not been a process of getting over any of my issues. Instead, it's been a process of meeting Jesus in the midst of them.

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That's what we say about this book, that if you want to read a book about how to be a good mom, this is not it, because we never necessarily achieved that. But we did meet the God of the universe who loves us and walks with us and fills us with the Holy Spirit and loves our kids more, too. So I would say to my younger self, you're going to fail. You're going to disappoint yourself beyond what you ever thought you could do. And the God of grace and goodness will come and meet you in ways you never ever thought you would expect.

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Alison Cook: I love that. I love that. That's a good word. That's a good word.

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Tara: It's a good word. It's almost identical to what I would say, Alison. I remember going to bed, waking up in the morning and praying, God, please help me not be angry and controlling today. Then I would go to bed and say, God, please forgive me for being so angry and controlling. I say in the book, my kids say, oh, mom has dictator syndrome.

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Anne Lamott has this great line, I'm not sure it totally fits, but she says, oh, don't tell me worrying doesn't work. Of course worrying works. Nothing I worry about ever happens. I used to love that line, and I laughed so hard, and I was like, guys, quit worrying. Nothing you worry about ever happens.

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But actually, almost everything I've worried about has happened. Nobody has hurt my children more than I have. I could never have known that I was going to be the one who hurt them more than anyone else. Now, I think I've loved them more deeply than anyone else, too. That's who I was going to be as a mom.

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But what I also couldn't have imagined was that God's going to keep saying, you are my beloved daughter. He's saying, I love you and I love your kids. More than you can know. More than you can know. It's okay that you lose it on your kids. I know, I see it, and I still think you're awesome. Your kids are gonna be okay.

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Alison Cook: It's powerful. Even listening to you, I think about the graciousness of God. It's not that God doesn't see it all. The big thing I learned from the group was that I was in Enneagram 3, not in Enneagram 2. I remember the moment I figured that out, and it was being totally transparent about things that I have a lot of shame about, and so for me, even now today, that task manager part of me will just hit the ground running.

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I'm so sorry, God, I got too much to do to stop and talk to you. It just brings tears to my eyes because God is just like, I know. I know, and it's not okay. Also I know you, I know you, I'm still here with you. I'm still here. It's still a battle. I'm aware of it.

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God's aware of it. I'm more aware of God's presence with me through it. It's a really nuanced thing. I think for all of us as moms, as just all these things we struggle with, it's just that being known, being seen in the struggle takes the edge off. It reminds me exactly of what I used to feel with you guys. It just takes the edge off where I remember palpably leaving times with you guys and just feeling a little bit softer and lighter and more filled. 

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Problems weren't magically solved.

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Tara: It's living water.

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Alison Cook: This is just so rich. I could keep talking to you guys for the next two hours. I think what you guys have put your finger on with this book is so powerful. Tell everyone how they can find you and how they can find this book and how they can maybe use the book to get started with a group of other women on their own.

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Kathy: One of the great things is, because the whole vision of the book was that we wanted moms to do this together, which is why each chapter starts with a group Bible study. You can buy the book straight from InterVarsity Press and use a coupon code. If you buy more than five books, that's 40 percent off and free shipping.

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So I'm assuming that you can have that in your show notes. Obviously, you can buy it on Amazon or you can ask your independent bookseller. We have a website called welcomejesuswelcome.com, where we have a leader's guide, where we have playlists. It's where we have hopefully more material that will be helpful for that.

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So we want to support you all in the journey of walking together, following Jesus with your children and in your families. So yeah, lots of ways. We're on Instagram. We're on Facebook. You can follow us.

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Alison Cook: Grab the book. I'll put the coupon in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. I'm just so grateful for you both.

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We don't want to gossip, but most of us do it. What if gossip actually plays a deeper role in our lives and relationships?

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So often in life we bump into "grey areas," areas that can stir up dissonance inside of us. We hold certain beliefs or values, yet we find ourselves acting in ways that are contrary to those values.

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In this series, we're exploring some of these areas that can bring up dissonance inside. Our focus today is gossip. I explore the problems with gossip, as well as some of the surprising research on how it can be constructive. By examining both the positive and negative aspects of gossip, you'll feel empowered to name, frame, and brave a healthier understanding of gossip in your life and relationships.

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Here's what we cover:

1. Why gossip is a gray area (3:09)
2. What the Bible says about gossip (6:42)
3. What psychology research says about gossip (12:46)
4. 6 motivations behind gossip (13:43)
5. Constructive vs. destructive forms of gossip (21:40)
6. How to Name, Frame, and Brave gossip in your own life (29:17)

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‍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!
• Go to AquaTru.com and enter code BESTOFYOU at checkout to get 20% OFF any AquaTru purifier!
• 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.

‍‍

Resources:

• I Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
• ‍Proverbs 11:13
• ‍Proverbs 16:28
• ‍Proverbs 26:20
• ‍James 1:26
• ‍Ephesians 4:29
• ‍Anne of Green Gables books

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‍Related Episodes:

• Episode 102: I Shouldn’t Feel Conflicted About God—How to Name, Frame, and Brave Complicated Emotions About Faith & God
• Episode 96: Signs of Emotional Immaturity & How to Bring Emotional Health Into Your Relationships
• Episode 89: When A Relationship Has to Change—How to Tolerate Discomfort, Face an Attachment Void, & Resource Yourself

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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author.

While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.‍

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Transcript:

Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here. I'm so glad you keep coming back each week to join me for these conversations. I am thrilled about this brand new series that is based on the framework I laid out in my brand new book, I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. 

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Many of you have it in your hands already. Many of you have already read it. In this series, I'm going to apply the framework, the three step process in I Shouldn't Feel This Way, to complicated real life challenges that I don't address in the book.

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So we're going to cover a wide range of topics in this series, topics that are sometimes the source of debate or differing opinions, and they might lead to some internal dissonance. Dissonance is this feeling of discord inside of you when you have two competing priorities that are at odds with each other, or maybe you're behaving in a way outwardly that doesn't match up to a belief you hold inwardly.

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As I teach you in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, that experience of dissonance is a gift. It's a cue to get curious. I wonder what that's about. For example, I noticed that I'm really tempted to tell a little white lie in this situation, even though I don't want to be someone who lies. When you notice that experience of dissonance inside of you, it's a cue to do some naming work, some framing work, so that you can brave a healthier way through it.

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My goal is not to give you formulaic or pat answers or quick fixes, but instead to empower you to name, frame, and brave a wise discerning path through some of these areas in your own life.

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Today's topic is the topic of gossip. Now listen, most of us tend to think of gossip as negative or bad. We don't want to be a gossip. We don't want to gossip with our friends. The Bible warns us against gossip. I personally have seen the damaging effects of gossip in so many ways. We're going to talk about some of that in today's episode. 

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At the same time, what's really interesting about gossip is number one, its prevalence. Social psychology research has shown that over two thirds of our conversations as adults contain some form of gossip. So whatever we think about it, most of us are doing it. Then number two, social psychology research has also unearthed some of the positive aspects of gossip that may explain a little bit why some of us are doing it.

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In today's episode, I want to untangle some of those knots through naming, framing, and braving this gray area of gossip. Why do we do it? What does the Bible say about it? What's negative about it? What is the positive component, if there is one, that we actually want to preserve? And how can we preserve that component in a healthy way? 

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There's so much in this episode for every single one of us. I had so much fun learning about gossip, both from the Bible and from social psychology research. I think there's some really interesting questions we can ask ourselves about the role of gossip in our lives to be a healthier human, a healthier friend, a healthier family member, and to help us in partnership with God's spirit to bring more goodness, more kindness, more compassion, and more wisdom into our relationships and into this world, which is in such desperate need for that. We're bringing it into the world through doing this work of naming, framing, and braving healthier paths together.

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At its simplest form, gossip is the exchange of information about the personality traits, the character, or the behaviors of someone who is not present in the conversation. So when we use the phrase “talking behind somebody's back”, that's a very clear picture of what gossip is. 

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It's simply talking about another person when they're not present. They're not there to engage in the conversation with you. Now, when I give you that very simple definition of gossip, talking about someone else when they're not present, I bet every single one of you listening, whether you're driving or at home or at work is saying, yeah, I've done that.

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I've done that. I've talked about someone with another person when that third person wasn't present. It's so common. I think that two-thirds estimate is probably fairly low. We do this all the time. Parents talk about their children when their children aren't present. Siblings talk about their parents when their parents aren't present. Friends talk about another friend when their friend isn't present. Friends talk about their family members with their friends when that family member isn't present. 

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We can get very literal about that description and see it everywhere. You begin to see why I'm labeling this as a gray area, because immediately we begin to recognize in ourselves those instances when we are talking about another person in the absence of that person. We're trying to do that in a constructive way.

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I want to mention what the Bible has to say about gossip, because it's an important backdrop for so many of us as we try to develop our moral compass around the topic. The Bible addresses the topic of gossip in numerous locations. We see it in the Proverbs, for example, Proverbs 11:13, “a gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a secret”. So we get at this component of how important it is to be people who are trustworthy, who do not betray the secrets that our loved ones share with us.

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We see another example in Proverbs 16:28, “a perverse person stirs up conflict and a gossip separates close friends”. So again, we get this idea that someone who is gossiping is trying to separate people, is trying to stir up conflict and chaos.

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On the other hand, we get another picture of what happens when we're not gossiping in Proverbs 26:20– “Without wood, a fire goes out; without gossip, a quarrel dies down”. So there's this image of gossip being the kindling that fuels and stokes the fire of quarrels and conflict that keeps it going, as opposed to being the opposite, which is someone who works to reduce the flames of chaos, reduce the flames of conflict. 

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We want to remove the wood from that fire. But, you can already tell as I'm saying this, that it gets tricky. Because I can already feel the questions forming in my own mind. Okay. Let's say I'm in a conflict with Bob over there. I don't want to stoke the fires of that conflict. That's not my goal. I do want to reach a resolution of that conflict. 

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But on the other hand, if I simply refuse to talk about what I'm feeling about that person, I'm also at risk of never solving the problem–of stuffing or sidelining or numbing those emotions that I'm feeling because I'm struggling. I'm struggling with this person. Yes, I do not want to stoke the fires of that conflict, but I also, in order to solve or resolve or arrive at a better solution, I do need to figure out and get to the root of the struggle that I'm having. 

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Again, this is why there's a gray area. When is it appropriate to go outside of this relationship that I have with this person or to divulge the secret information that I'm carrying about this person that is really troubling me? I don't want to hurt them. I don't want to do something damaging but I need help. I need wisdom. I need to be discerning. I need advice. 

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How do I go about that constructively? So we already see some of that inner tension building up as we read through these scriptures. Then we go to James 1:26 where we have this really almost harsh admonition about our tongues and the way that the words that come out of our mouths can be used to hurt others. They're really powerful. James 1:26 says, “those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless”. 

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James says the religion that God our father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. Now, I love this passage because it's really saying, here's what we don't want to be doing. Here's what we do want to be doing.

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We want to be people who are not slandering others and using our tongue to harm others and cause destruction and cause chaos and increase conflict. We want to be people of peace. We want to be people who are lifting up the poor, lifting up those who are hurting, caring for the most vulnerable among us, including the vulnerable parts of ourselves.

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So again, here's that inner tension. We want to be people who are using our words, using our mouths in conversations with our friends, in our families, with other people for good, to encourage, to empower, to improve the lives of others. Also, what do we do when we're struggling, when we're hurting, when someone has hurt us, when we're in a situation that's complicated and we need help untangling the knots of that situation?

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Again, to underscore the James passage, we see in Ephesians 4:29, another admonition that is such a beautiful aspirational admonition. “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen”.

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Okay. So there's some very clear guidelines there of the kind of people we want to be. We want to be people who are really careful about what we talk about and what the impact is of those words that we use. So this is the backdrop that I'm going to drop into this conversation about gossip.

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We want to be people who are using our words to uplift, to empower, to create more goodness, to create more wholeness in ourselves and in the lives of other people. That's the backdrop. We do not want to be people who are stoking the flames of conflict, of hatred, of malice, of controversy, of slander. We do not want to be people who are sowing the seeds of division and destruction through our words. 

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This is a really important value for so many of us. It's why I love this podcast every week, because I know those of you who are listening, who are people wanting to live as fruit-bearing, goodness-bearing people in this world, we're trying to do that. Also, we find ourselves in complicated situations where we need to confer with other people in our lives about how to best navigate challenging relational situations.

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I want to turn now to some of the research in social psychology that has exposed the more constructive side to gossip. I think it's important in the interest of framing this conversation about gossip because most people do it. Why are we doing it? What is the motivation behind it? 

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According to research and social psychology, there are about six distinct motives that underlie gossip behavior. I want to walk through these with you. As you listen to them, I want you to think about them, honestly, inside your own soul. Which ones resonate with you? Yeah, I think that's why I do it. Or I think that might be underneath it for me. 

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Notice that again, without shame, as part of naming and framing your own relationship with gossip. What is the underlying motivation for you? So number one, the first motivation that was found to be the most common is information exchange. 

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We gossip about other people to validate our own perceptions about other people, and to gather information. So at its most basic form, gossip can be a form of information gathering. For example, I am starting to make a new friend, I'm going to make up names here, so these are not real people, but let's say for example, I'm starting to make friends with a woman named Joan, who I don't know very well.

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I don't know if I can trust her. I'm not sure how intimate to get with her. so I go to another friend who knows her very well. Maybe we're part of the same community, maybe we're part of the same neighborhood, maybe we're part of the same church group. I say, hey, what do you think about Joan? Do you trust her? Do you think she's a good person? What's your impression of her? 

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Suddenly I'm in a conversation with a mutual friend about Joan, and Joan is not present. My primary motivation is to gather information. I'm trying to understand my own perceptions and I'm trying to get more information. So this is one motivation for why we might talk about somebody else when they're not present. 

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It might happen in a family. Maybe you and your siblings are talking about a parent or another sibling. What's going on with dad this week? He's been so grouchy. Has he been mad at you too? You're trying to gather information. Is it me? Is he on my case? Is he in a bad mood? Is something else going on? What's happening? So you're trying to gather information. That's the number one most common motivation that we gossip about other people when they're not there.

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Number two is social bonding. It's a way to strengthen bonds within a group. If I share information with you about someone else, I might feel like I'm providing added value. I know things that you don't know. I have information that you might want. It's a way to establish my importance in a group.

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So for example, I might say, did you hear the news about so and so? Can you believe that this person did this thing? I'm bonding with you by letting you know, I know information that you might want to know. If I give you this information, I will be valuable.

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A third motivation is emotional catharsis. We need a place to vent sometimes. For example, if you're struggling, maybe you care for somebody in your family or maybe you have a friend or a family member that you really love and that's really important to you, and sometimes there are really hard things about loving this person.

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Most of us have been in a situation like that. Every once in a while you need to vent. You need to tell someone you trust about what's hard about being in a relationship with this third person when they're not there. Now, there's a really important distinction between venting and dumping.

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Venting is when you're sharing frustrations with someone you trust with the goal of reducing your own stress. It's like one of those Instant Pot pressure cookers. Sometimes the pressure is building and building inside of you and you need to release the valve and let some of that steam off so that you can re-enter the relationship from a healthier place.

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This is a really fine line. Talk about nuanced, because venting, if not done appropriately and in a healthy context, can actually become toxic and it can keep us from working through conflicts that actually need us to work through them directly with the other person.

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On the other hand, there are situations where sometimes we need to vent. For example, when you're parenting, or in marriage, or sometimes taking care of an elderly parent, it can be helpful to release some of that excess frustration to someone else so that again, you can be empowered to go back into that relationship from a healthier place.

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So again, when you're venting, you're really intentional about what you share. You're not trying to throw that person under the bus. You're primarily venting about your own experience, your own emotions about that person, and you're very mindful that's what you're doing.

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It's really wise to ask for permission. Hey, I am dealing with some frustration. This is really hard. Can I share with you some of what I'm dealing with in the context of this other relationship? You're asking for permission from the person. You've got an express purpose and there's a boundary.

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I'm going to do this for this amount of time, and then my goal is to be able to reenter that relationship and work through it directly. So this isn't going to be chronic. This isn't going to be habitual. I'm not going to constantly complain about this person without boundaries around that. That's venting. 

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Dumping is unloading emotional baggage on another person without any regard for the other person or for the person about whom you're dumping. You're maybe complaining incessantly without really ever doing the work to fix it or figure out how to navigate a better solution. 

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You're maybe oversharing about intimate personal information that doesn't need to be shared to effectively communicate about the frustration you're experiencing. You're probably not even aware of it when you're dumping. To be honest, it's become a habit or a chronic pattern of behavior where instead of dealing with a behavior directly in an effective way, you pull in an outside person. This is what often gets into triangulation. You triangulate a third person and complain to them constantly, while never really addressing it in your own relationship directly.

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So again, there's a big difference between venting and dumping, but when we're venting strategically, consciously, with boundaries around it, that can be a form of gossip that allows us some emotional relief.

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Number four, another motivation, and we're progressively moving toward the ones that are more damaging, this one is simply for entertainment and distraction. Gossip can sometimes serve as a pastime, a form of entertainment, where we discuss the lives of others as a form of amusement and a way to pass the time.

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I remember the Anne of Green Gables books. I loved those. There were some characters in the book that you got the sense that it was their hobby. That was their pastime. They sat on the front porch and gossiped about people who walked by.

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So this can be semi-benign, where we all know people who seem to know everything about everybody. That's what they do as a pastime. Maybe they're not even malicious. We see a lot of this in celebrity gossip. People want to know what's going on with what celebrity, who's dating who.

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So there's an entertainment value to it. It might be a hobby, and while this may not dramatically have a negative impact on the person about whom we're gossiping, at the same time, I would think about it like any passive pastime, such as television or scrolling social media or reading, gossip magazines–what function is that serving in your life?

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Is that time being taken away from other things? I put this category as a numbing category. When you think about numbing, we're trying to numb or distract ourselves and sometimes disappearing into the lives of others through gossip, celebrity gossip, or even gossiping about friends can be a distraction. It can take us out of our own problems. 

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The question I would have for you is, to what extent is that dominating, to quote Mary Oliver, your “one wild and precious life”? Do you really want to fritter a lot of time away down the gossip black hole? You might want to name for yourself, wow, I do spend a lot of time gossiping about friends. I wonder what that's about. 

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What am I distracting myself from? Is there another part of me that needs my attention? Maybe I'm more focused on other people's lives because I don't know how to engage with my own thoughts, goals, dreams, and hopes. Is that distracting me from real needs in my own life that need my attention? 

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Again, so as with any habit or recreational activity, it may not be super harmful in small doses, and it may not be harming other people, but is it really helping you or is it keeping you from other more important things that you could be doing with that time? 

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Then we move into number five, where it gets a little bit more overtly insidious, and this is the dynamic of influence and power. Engaging in gossip can be a way to manipulate. Maybe if you have information about someone else, you share that information and contaminate their own standing within a group.

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You might use that information to gain power for yourself. That gets pretty toxic where someone's reputation can be ruined. We can harm somebody else's life by sharing information about their lives that is not our information to share. Another form of that is sharing information about someone else in order to make ourselves feel better. 

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Maybe we share something bad that someone else did because it makes us feel better about the bad things we've done. At least it wasn't as bad as that person. This gets a little bit into social comparison. It can provide a means for us to puff ourselves up in comparison to someone else. At least I'm not like that person, at least I'm not as bad as they are. 

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Did you hear how they yelled at their kids? Did you hear about how terrible their marriage is? Did you hear about how they got fired from that job? With the subtle implication and the internal motivation that at least I'm doing better than that person is. Gossip functions as a way to puff myself up and make myself feel better at the expense of someone else. 

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Lastly, number six, it can really get negative and toxic if we are specifically using gossip to harm another person. At this point, yes, it's to puff myself up, but really I want to harm that other person. I want to take that other person down. My motivation is really to harm that other person. 

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Now, research shows this is the least common type of motivation. Most often when we're gossiping, it's not to try to directly harm somebody, but still it's a spectrum. We don't want to go anywhere near this side of the spectrum. This is what slander is, when you start to twist the truth about someone, maybe take a story that has a grain of truth and magnify it or distort it and spread it around about someone behind their back as a way to malign their reputation.

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Sometimes the word we use for this is backbiting or stabbing somebody in the back. We go behind their backs and say something mean about them with this specific purpose of undermining them, trying to get their job, trying to get their friends, maybe trying to erode attention that this other person is getting that we're jealous of.

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This is where we might start to spread rumors about somebody or really malign somebody's character in a really malicious way. Again, this is an extreme form of gossip, but it does happen. If you've had this happen to you, it is incredibly painful. It's incredibly damaging. It's incredibly toxic, and it's really destructive and something we don't want to be anywhere near in our lives. Nor do we want to be engaging with folks who are using the strategy to harm somebody else.

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So again, these are six motivations for gossip. So it's really important to search your own soul. Ask yourself, why do I do this? What do I get from it? What purpose is it serving? Where is there some constructive and beneficial value? Where is this getting toxic? 

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Not only maybe for the other person, but also for me, because if it's not good for someone else, it's also not good for my own soul. So really to do that personal soul searching, number one, but then number two, to think about the effect of that on the other person. There's a reason why we want to be really careful about talking about someone when they're not present. 

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Imagine a world with me, for a moment, where your friend group, your church group, your neighborhood, your community, where everybody really had everybody else's best interests at heart, genuinely. The bottom line is, I know that if people are talking about me, it is out of love. It is out of a place of love. They love me. They're for me and any conversation that has had when I'm not there is in the service of that love.

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To close today, I want to talk about how to name, frame, and brave gossip in your own life. So the very first step is always to name it without shame. I noticed that I'm so tempted to gossip about that other person. Or I notice that in my friend group or in my small group or even in my family, we tend to talk a lot about other people.

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I've noticed it. It makes me a little uncomfortable. I'm not sure what to do about it. I try to pretend like it's okay, but really it's bothering me. All right. So the very first step is to name it without shame. Notice: what do I feel like when it's happening around me? What do I feel like when I'm doing it? 

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Pay attention to those cues. What are the situations that trigger it? When am I most inclined to indulge in it? Is it after being on social media? Is it within a certain friend group? Again, naming without shame. We're not jumping to try to fix something. We're trying to notice and name without shame. 

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Number two, frame it. Think about those different motivations that we talked about and reflect on it in yourself honestly, in partnership with God's spirit. You might ask yourself, do I do it because I'm trying to get information? I'm trying to assess somebody's character. I'm trying to understand how to interpret this other person's behavior. That's valuable to me. I want to be able to exchange information. I want to do that in a healthy way, or do I do it for social bonding?

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Do I do it because it makes me feel closer to certain people? it's not all bad, but I want to watch it to make sure that it doesn't get unhealthy, or am I doing it as a way of venting? I have a couple of really hard relationships that are hard for me to navigate. Yes, I noticed that I tend to vent about these relationships, and if that's the case, how often am I doing it? 

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Am I aware that I'm doing it? Is it a habit that isn't really yielding fruit or am I trying to rely on other people constructively to help me carry a heavy burden? If I'm doing that, is the other person okay with that? Maybe I need to check in with that other person?

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Moving into those latter three, am I doing it as a form of entertainment and distraction? It's easier, frankly, to have conversations about other people than it is to get real about my own life, or to ask real questions about my friends or my family members. If that's the case, then maybe there's going to be a different braving step to take to pivot away from gossip as a distraction or even as a form of idle entertainment and move toward other shared activities that actually help me develop the intimacy and the sense of connection that I crave. 

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Number five, am I doing it to gain power or control or to manipulate other people? Or am I in groups where I notice that my friends or the other people around me trade in gossip to exert their power, to try to show their superiority, to try to maybe malign people behind their backs?

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I noticed that I don't like how those friends or how those work colleagues talk about other people behind their back, but I don't know what to do about it.  I haven't known how to get myself out of those situations. 

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Again, name and frame without shame. You're getting honest with yourself about how gossip shows up in your life. Then lastly, am I around people who are maligning other people in an effort to harm them? I don't like it and it makes me uncomfortable, but I don't know what to do about it. 

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Or am I ever tempted to do that? Someone's really hurt me and I don't like this person and I'm going to start spreading stories about them. If that's your motivation and you can name that honestly, good for you. That's the first step toward change. 

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I'm going to be honest with you. When I name and frame gossip in my own life, it almost always falls into those first three categories. I'm trying to bond with someone, I need to vent, or I'm genuinely trying to get information so that I can be more discerning. It's been so freeing to me to recognize if I can put it in one of those three buckets, I can figure out how to have conversations with the third party in a constructive way, and then I've worked through some of that dissonance in my own life.

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Here are some braving steps you can take based on how you framed the role of gossip in your life and in your friendship groups.

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Number one, according to the BRAVE acronym that I set out in chapter four of I Shouldn't Feel This Way, boundaries. What are your boundaries around gossip? Here are some examples of realistic boundaries you might consider setting.

Think about the boundaries within your family. What norms have you cultivated in your immediate nuclear family? For example, maybe in your family there is a norm and you even state it transparently in a family meeting. Listen, Sometimes your dad and I talk about you kids when you're not around because we're trying to understand you better. When we talk about you and what's going on in your life and with school and we don't keep secrets from each other, it helps us be better parents for you. It's for your good and for the good of the family. Likewise, sometimes you and your siblings might talk about us. We might do things that annoy you and when you're together, you might talk about us.

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What we would ask for you to do as siblings to support each other is, if you're sharing things with each other, to encourage each other, to come to us directly, to help us have more transparent conversation because we have blind spots. Sometimes we don't get it right. Sometimes when you go to your siblings and you guys talk about what happened, they might be able to help you come to us more transparently so that we can approach something we're not doing right. You begin to have conversations about what it looks like to rely on other people to help improve the relational conflict that we're actually having with another family member. 

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You might have norms within a friend group. We've got an upcoming interview coming up where a group of women who are in a small group talk about the norms they set with each other about talking about other members of the small group behind their backs. It has to do with consent and norms, and it's for the constructive benefit of the other group members. 

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So for example, if we're talking about another friend, because we're trying to understand that friend, we're trying to figure out how to help that friend, or I've got a blind spot about that friend. The goal of going to that third party who's not in the immediate situation is, I need to understand this better. So would you help me so that I can grow wiser? What do you think is going on? 

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It's from a place of love. We're trying to arrive together deeper layers of truth. If that friend were to catch you in the act of having that conversation, would she be surprised? Would she be hurt? Or would she say, I get it. I know that you're trying to love me better.

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You also want to set boundaries with your own self. Sometimes our motivations slip and we're like, I really want to pray for that person, but really, I want to tell you everything that happened. We know our motivations. We have to check that. If you need to vent, if you need to gather information about somebody you're trying to understand, is this someone I can trust? Do you see this the way I'm seeing it?

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Be clear to name that when you go to the third party. Listen, I'd like to have a conversation with you about this. Number one, do I have your consent? Are you on board with having this conversation with me? Because I don't want to pull you into it if you don't want to be a part of it. 

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Number two, state your goal. I'm looking for wisdom. I'm looking for action steps I can take and I need some help either through venting to you some of the emotions that I'm feeling so that I can get greater clarity, or through getting some information or some perspective from you to help me approach the situation better.

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You're always bringing the accountability back to yourself. Would you be willing to help me? I will be the one who will then take action based on this conversation. This conversation will be over after that. Meaning there's a beginning and an ending to it. This is not idle gossip or idle chatter that we'll keep coming back to. So you put boundaries around that conversation.

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The other thing you can do when it comes to braving steps around reducing gossip is to expand your range and learn about how to have direct conversations with people. Sometimes I think we don't know how to go to somebody and say, listen, I'm struggling in this relationship right now. So the easier thing to do is to talk about it behind their back with someone else. You might want to work on: how do I communicate more directly with people? 

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You might work on a norm of transparent communication, especially in families, especially in friend groups. Some of us who are more inclined to be people pleasers, we tend to tailor how we show up based on who's in the room. But the more you work on being your true self, the more you work on being authentic, the more you work on being transparent and you expand that range of authenticity, the more you can show up the same, no matter who's in the room.

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Number three, you might need to brave assertiveness skills to speak up when folks are gossiping in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable. Now, listen, sometimes folks are toxic. As we know from past podcast episodes, if someone is toxic, maybe the bravest, most assertive thing you can do is simply excuse yourself and get up and leave. Excuse yourself from the conversation.

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Please excuse me. That's a full sentence. Please excuse me. I have to go now. You don't have to tell them why, especially if you sense that there's a toxic situation that could have some backlash for you. You can simply excuse yourself. That's quite assertive. Sometimes, you might need to speak up. 

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Here's some examples of things you could say to a friend or a family member. They're really practical. You might say, listen, I want to be here for you, but I'm not comfortable hearing all of the details about that other person. Could you share with me broadly what you're struggling with so I understand enough to help you, but I don't feel like I'm getting information from you that's not mine to have? 

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Another norm you can set either for yourself or with someone else is say, Can you share with me the situation you're struggling with, without telling me who the person is? That's a great thing to challenge yourself on. I want to share with you something that happened to me without identifying the specific person involved, or I want to share with you some emotions I'm struggling with in a relationship without identifying the specific person involved, because then I'm getting the help I need without gossiping about someone else. 

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So those are examples of assertiveness skills that you might need to learn. If you're in friend groups where there's a lot of gossiping, again, sometimes it's excusing yourself, letting your behavior do the work for you. Sometimes it's speaking up and saying, hey, could we work on some different norms here? 

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If you're someone who resorts to gossip or resorts to reading about or talking about other people as a pastime, or it's become a part of the way that you bond with your friend group or within your family, what are some other things you could do?

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What are some other hobbies you could pick up? Are there games you could play? Could you go on a hike? Are there fun activities that would bring you joy and meaning and purpose together, not talking about other people? Sometimes I think it's a habit we get into and we need to gently remind ourselves, Oh, let's brave something more life-giving that we can do together.

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Finally, sometimes you have to change your environment. You might have to shift away from people who cannot stop bringing up other people when those people aren't around for no good reason. You might have to shift away from people who try to pull information out of you. You might have to shift away from family gatherings. 

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Maybe you go for an abbreviated amount of time. Maybe you excuse yourself early because it's so focused on criticizing or demeaning or talking about other people. Maybe it's a church group or a small group. Now, listen, here's the thing about shifting away from a certain environment.

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Is it possible that they'll potentially talk behind your back once you take that brave step to leave? Absolutely. They probably already are. People who are in the habit of constantly talking about other people aren't going to make an exception for you.

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But again, you're moving forward on your path toward wholeness. You're moving forward to different kinds of people where you're going to have shared activities, where you're going to have shared vitality, where you're going to only talk about other people insofar as it's ethical, edifying, and helping you be a better, healthier, more whole person. So who cares if there's some idle chatter behind your back? You've left that behind. You're on your path to a better, braver future.

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Do you ever feel distant from God? Do you struggle with conflicting emotions or unanswered questions that make it hard to feel God's presence in your life?

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Today's episode brings the 🔥🔥🔥. I'm passionate about naming the false guilt and counterfeit messages that keep us from a vibrant relationship with God.

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So often we try to shove complicated feelings aside or manipulate ourselves into feeling what we think we “should” feel in our faith. It doesn't work. The good news is that as with any relationship, when you name and frame what you're feeling honestly, you invest in a deeper, more authentic relationship with God. Here’s what we cover…

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Here’s what we cover:

1. The problem with spiritual bypassing

2. 6 counterfeit messages we internalize about God

3. 5 framing questions to help you transform those messages

4. Specific examples of braving steps you can take in your spiritual life.

5. My personal experience with spiritual dissonance

Today's episode is an excerpt from Chapter 11 of I Shouldn't Feel This Way, available everywhere books are sold.

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Resources:

• I Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
• ‍Matthew 26:36-46
• Research on religion as a buffer for stressful experiences
• James 1:2
• ‍Matthew 5
• ‍Romans 5:3-5
• ‍The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
• ‍Philippians 2:12
• ‍The Soul of Desire by Curt Thompson

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‍Related Episode:

• ‍Bonus Episode: Aundi Kolber & Dr. Alison on Writing & Launching Books

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‍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!
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• 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.‍

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Transcript

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Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. What a week this has been. I Shouldn’t Feel This Way is out in the world. It's in your hands. I'm seeing so many of you post about it and review it on Amazon and write to me about it and DM me about it. And I'm so thrilled that you've got in your hands the very best I have to give, this framework, this naming. framing and braving framework that I believe will help you tackle the challenges that you face.

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I'm so thrilled it's finally out. ​Talk about emotions. I've had so many emotions all week. It's a lot of work to write a book, but it's even harder in many ways to launch a book into the world, especially in this age where everything is done full-throttle, fast speed, you know, “more, more, more, more” type of energy.

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You can listen to the bonus episode I dropped on Tuesday with my friend, Aundi Kolber. We talk a little bit about the process of writing and the process of publishing in this day and age. I really enjoyed that conversation with her. It's just two friends really talking about writing, and it was a really fun way for me to celebrate launch day on Tuesday.

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This week also marks the second anniversary of The Best of You Podcast. So there's been a lot of emotions this week, a lot of feelings around this work that I've been doing these last several years of writing books and creating content and sharing resources with so many of you. I am so grateful. So grateful for you. 

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I am so grateful that you want to engage in this work of healing. It makes me feel less alone in the world to know that so many of you are interested not only in the work of healing mentally and emotionally, but also in the work of bringing your faith into that. Not only of inviting God into the work of healing, but also healing at times our own relationship with God.

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And so in today's episode, I wanted to specifically apply the framework that I lay out in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. It's a three step framework that applies to any challenge that you face, anything that kicks up a whole lot of emotions in you.

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This “Name, Frame, Brave” framework can help you find your way through that. And I apply that framework to a lot of different topics in the book. I apply it to the thinking traps that keep us stuck. We need to name, frame, and brave the negative thinking and the thinking traps in our own minds.

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I apply it to the numbing behaviors that so many of us struggle with. We have to name, frame, and brave those numbing behaviors in order to come out the other side in a healthier place. I apply it to feelings of comparison, to feelings of “less than”. Those are feelings that we also need to name, frame, and brave.

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I apply the framework to toxicity in relationships. How do we name toxicity, frame it, and then brave a way out of toxic dynamics into a healthier place in our relationships. I apply it to communication and conflict in our healthy relationships.

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We have to name hard emotions, even in our healthiest relationships, so that we can frame them and then brave a better path. And then in the very last chapter of the book, I apply the framework to the feelings that we have about God. It's one of the chapters that is closest to my heart.

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And so in today's episode, I wanted to share an excerpt from this chapter with you. It's one of the things you guys ask me about the most. What do I do with the painful emotions I feel about God? Whether I feel distant from God, or maybe I feel disappointed with God, or maybe I feel mad at God, or maybe I'm even questioning if he's even there, or if he is there, if he even cares.

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Our relationship with God is like any relationship that we have. We love God with all our being. And also sometimes we feel so frustrated that God isn't showing up in the ways we wish he would. Sometimes we feel disappointed in our lives and gosh, wouldn't it have been nice if God had just made that a little bit easier. 

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Sometimes we feel distant from God. We want to have faith in God and yet sometimes our faith wavers. What is this really all about? These are such normal emotions that we all experience, and it doesn't help to guilt trip ourselves for having these emotions. It doesn't help to gaslight ourselves about these emotions. It doesn't help to try to numb and avoid these emotions.

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What does help, is to name these emotions with God. And so today I'm going to share with you some of this chapter and some bonus content that didn't make it into the chapter, so that together, we can name, frame, and brave a more wholehearted relationship with God.

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The first problem I want to name when it comes to our conflicting feelings about God is a problem called spiritual bypassing. I write about this a lot on social media. Whenever I do, it gets a lot of traction. I think a lot of us have had this done to us and a lot of us do this to ourselves. Here's what I write in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way:

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If you grew up in a faith community, you may have been taught to spiritually bypass the complex feelings you experience. Spiritual bypassing is essentially a thinking trap. It ignores the richness and complexity of your God given design. Maybe you feel confused, scared, or uncertain. You don't know what to think or do. 

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Instead of carefully working through the different layers of a complicated problem, you try to force fit a spiritual pseudo-solution. For example, you might try to tell yourself things like the following: I should just pray more. Just forgive and forget. That's the best way to approach this situation. Just let go and let God. 

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Sometimes you spiritually bypass yourself. Oftentimes other people encourage you to spiritually bypass. They assume that all your problems can be solved with a spiritual solution. A friend might encourage you to jump to forgiveness when what's really needed is to grieve a betrayal and establish healthy boundaries. Or a faith community might encourage you to spiritualize a problem that is not primarily spiritual. 

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For example, a spiritual leader might encourage you to pray harder for God to take away your depression or medical condition, instead of helping you find a professional who is trained to help you. Or they might encourage you to love the person harming you instead of helping you to protect yourself.

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Spiritual bypassing keeps you from adequately addressing the problem you are facing. It also creates dissonance inside, which is internal discomfort. There's a whole chapter on dissonance, in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. You want to trust in God, but the problem is only getting worse.

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So you start to blame yourself. If only my faith were stronger. As a result of that inner tension, you resort to any of the following unhealthy coping strategies: 

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Self gaslighting. You tell yourself you don't feel what you really feel. 

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Numbing. You suppress your emotions instead of working to cope with them.

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Magical thinking. You disregard reality and deny yourself the opportunity to discover practical solutions. You miss out on opportunities to develop skills, gain knowledge, or receive care and comfort from others. 

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Here's what is true. God created you with an ensemble of interconnected parts, including thoughts, emotions, and a nervous system, each one designed to work harmoniously like an orchestra. Your job, in partnership with God's Spirit, is to be the conductor of that orchestra, working patiently with all the pieces, including your thoughts and even your painful emotions and the cues your nervous system is sending you and bring that noise out of dissonance and into a cohesive melody.

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It starts with naming the different truth pieces of what you feel. The truth is, you don't have to bypass your mixed up feelings. Instead, you can name them, frame them, and then brave a deeper understanding of yourself and your relationship with God. God doesn't ask you to bypass the conflicting emotions that you face. Not even the conflicting emotions you feel about him.

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So often, those feelings are an opportunity to brave even deeper growth and healing. It's normal to experience confusion, doubt, anger, fear, or disappointment when it comes to God. You could even argue that Jesus experienced complicated feelings about God as he anguished in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

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You can almost sense the desperation in his prayer. Really, God? Really, I have to go through this? A relationship with God is like any relationship. It involves complicated feelings. I want to pray, but I'm so angry. I want to believe God is good, but I see so much suffering. I want to trust God with this decision, but I'm not certain. You might also experience complicated feelings about yourself in relationship to God.

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I can't turn to God right now, I'm too far gone. I've done such terrible things. How could God love me? I should trust God, but frankly, I've done such terrible things. How could God love me? And this is my favorite: I should trust God, but frankly, I can't. I'd rather trust myself today. 

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Walking by faith is a delicate tightrope. It's the ultimate both-and. It involves trusting God and honoring the way you really feel. You can have faith and feel scared, confused, or uncertain. You can trust God and trust yourself, experience anger, disappointment, or doubt. You can follow Jesus and be uncertain about how to apply his teachings to the real problems in your life. 

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I would argue that true faith is the work of constantly reconciling what's impossibly hard with a hope in what's unfathomably good and beautiful. If you overweight either one, you miss out on the fullness of an active dynamic relationship with God.  If you are someone who chafes against naive spiritual platitudes, or who wrestles with complicated feelings about God or faith, you're in good company. This wrestling is the work of faith. 

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The good news is that as with any relationship, when you name your complicated feelings, you invest in a deeper, more authentic bond instead of bypassing them. We often try to shove these feelings aside and manipulate ourselves into feeling what we should feel, or we process these feelings with friends or loved ones without ever processing them with God.

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But what if spiritual maturity is bringing all of what you feel, including your anger, doubt, and confusion into your relationship with God? No matter where you are, whether you're journaling, waiting in the car pickup lane, or grocery shopping, simply start to name the different truth pieces you feel, and then address each one to God.

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It’s a practice I like to call comma God. “I'm worried” becomes “I'm worried, God. I don't understand what's happening”. “I need help” becomes, “I need help, God. I don't know what to do”. “I'm sad”, becomes, “I'm sad, God. I feel so alone”. “I don't want to pray”, becomes, “I don't want to pray, God. I'm kind of mad at you right now”. And just like that, you're engaged in a prayer.

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You become aware of yourself in the present moment and you become aware of God. Research shows that when you dwell on God and not only on yourself, you reduce stress and anxiety and increase your ability to tolerate painful experiences. To be clear, what you believe about this God with whom you're connecting matters.

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Is this a God who loves you? Is this a God who's for you? Is this a God who takes you by the hand and walks with you through the trials that you face? It's wise to reconsider the messages you've internalized about God. Imagine if a child were to come running to you, angry or scared. Would you rebuke her or offer her a platitude?

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Of course not. You would pull her close to you and give her the gift of your presence. “It's hard to feel angry. I'm here with you. I want to understand”. You'd give her compassion, tenderness, a sense that she's not alone. 

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Similarly, when we're mad, scared, uncertain, or heartbroken, we rarely need a reprimand or a pat answer from someone else or from God. We need presence. We need attunement. That doesn't mean we don't also want answers. We do, but just like a hurting child, we first always need connection. That's how God made us. 

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And if we know how to soothe a child who is hurting, how much more does the one who made us know how to attune to us in our sadness, hurt, or despair? Like a tender, loving parent, God meets us with compassionate kindness and presence in all of our complexity. God doesn't always fix things right away, but he does not ask us to bypass what we feel. He does not gaslight us. He does not ask us to pretend when we're hurting. Even when we're hurting about God, God gives us the gift of honoring the truth of what we feel.

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Sometimes I think about that perfect person, that perfect relationship, where we just need to vent all of the pain, all of the emotion, all that we're feeling, and we just need them to hold space for us. Even though some of the things we feel aren't fair, even though some of the things we feel aren't really their fault, even though we know they're doing their best, we just need to let it out.

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That's the kind of presence God gives us.

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The paradox is that when you name what's hard, what's true in this very moment, you open yourself up to God. You stop trying to analyze your motives or earn God's approval. You stop trying to fix yourself or figure out God. You move into the present moment. You attune to what you really feel and God's Spirit attunes right there with you.

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You're never closer to God than when you're naming what's hard. You're telling the truth and the truth is God's sweet spot. 

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When you name what's hard, you tend to bump into old messages. You've outgrown messages that keep you from growing deeper in genuine faith. You might be surprised at some of the messages you've picked up that interfere with an honest, authentic relationship with God. 

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Counterfeits–simplistic versions of otherwise beautifully rich spiritual concepts–such as what it means to love others, show faithfulness, experience joy, confess sin, or forgive are rampant. These false versions of these messages linger in your mind, often outside your conscious awareness, creating dissonance inside. 

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Naming those messages helps you tame them. You can then determine where you picked them up and why you believe them so that you can develop a truer viewpoint instead. Here are some of the most common counterfeit messages I observe in my work with clients and some ways to reframe them. 

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Number one, I should feel happy in my suffering. Passages like James 1:2 can be taken out of context and misinterpreted as suggesting that you should always feel happy. This counterfeit message encourages a false version of joy. The truth is that joy is a complicated emotion, intimately linked with experiences of sadness, grief and pain. 

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When I posted a video on Instagram on Tuesday about the book launch day, there was a lot of joy in that message, but that joy included some of the other emotions like sadness, like fear. My ability to experience joy, the fruit of joy, included my ability to honor some of those other feelings simultaneously.

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Number two, if I had more faith, I wouldn't be struggling. Some religious circles equate faith in God with health, financial success, or happiness. This counterfeit message pressures you to project an image of being “blessed” or successful as evidence of your faith. 

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This is me interjecting: I really dislike those memes when I see them on social media that somehow a vision of outward success, material success, a perfect family, a perfect life, is an indicator of being blessed. That flies in the face of Matthew 5 and what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. The truth is that a strong faith is no guarantee against suffering. Instead, God promises that as you persevere through suffering, you'll develop character and hope. That's Romans 5:3-5.

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Number three, I should just die to myself–which is the impetus for my second book, The Best of You. Jesus teaching about self-denial can be misconstrued to suggest that you should never consider your own needs. 

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This is a misapplication contrary to how Jesus lived his own life. This counterfeit message promotes a false version of sacrifice, encouraging you to disregard toxicity or boundary violations, instead of working in partnership with God's spirit to protect and care for yourself. The truth is that sacrifice is a delicate balance of selflessness and self-respect.

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Number four, I should always feel content. While contentment is a virtue, it's a cultivated skill, not a quick fix. This counterfeit message promotes a false version of peace encouraging you to bypass negative feelings. The truth is that acknowledging frustrations or areas of discontent in your life can help you grow and change aspects of your life, yielding more contentment.

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Number five, I should forgive and forget. Forgiveness is a central tenet of Jesus’ teaching, and it's an incredibly nuanced concept. The counterfeit version of forgiveness encourages you to minimize or overlook legitimate wrongs. That's not what Jesus taught. The truth is that acknowledging hurt and injustice is critical to ensuring that resentment and bitterness don't fester in your soul.

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And that's the primary goal of forgiveness–to release the resentment and bitterness. It's a process, a practice that does not happen in an instant. It takes time and effort to engage in the work of forgiveness.

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And number six, I'm a terrible sinner. This term, sin, reflects a complicated theological belief about the imperfect nature of humans and the need for redemption through Christ. The counterfeit version of confessing sin induces shame, false guilt, or control.

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You try to shame yourself, beat yourself up, or others try to control you by exploiting the imperfect nature of your humanity. That's not what God intends. On the other hand, when you name the imperfections you see in yourself in a loving environment without shame, you find freedom, acceptance, and belonging, the opposite of shame.

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You don't have to dupe yourself into these counterfeit versions of faith, hope, love, forgiveness, peace, or joy. Our God is so much deeper and richer and more intricate than the simplistic formulas we're so often given. Be honest about what you feel and create a place in between to reflect on the different truth pieces in partnership with God's spirit.

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Here are some framing questions you can ask yourself if you're struggling with feeling conflicted about God. Facts. What counterfeit messages have I believed? Roots. Where did I pick up those messages? When did I start to believe them? Audit. Are these messages true? Do they yield spiritual fruit? Are they helping me discover more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, or self control toward the parts of myself that are struggling, not only toward other people? 

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Mental messages. What messages do I tell myself about how God views me? What messages do I tell myself about how I'm feeling toward God? And finally, expansion. What do different passages from the Bible say about these messages I'm telling myself? What would someone who loves me and is for me say about these messages I'm telling myself? 

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Those framing questions are based on the FRAME Acronym. You'll find that full acronym in chapter three of I Shouldn't Feel This Way. I want to close today by talking through some holistic spiritual practices. This falls under the category of the step of braving. Sometimes we have to brave a different path. Or maybe brave a different way of doing things even while we stay on the same path we're on.

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The antidote to spiritual bypassing is to brave a holistic relationship with God. One that includes all of your being, including the complexity of your thoughts, your nervous system, and your emotions. You're fighting for a more vital relationship with God. And in doing so, you're working out your salvation, which can also be translated as healing. This is from Philippians 2:12. You're working out your healing all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

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One practice I've enjoyed, I call whole body prayer. Many of us have this idea that praying means sitting quietly with your heads bowed and eyes closed. We measure the success of our prayers by the intensity of emotion or the minutes on the clock. But what if you incorporated your whole being into your prayer, including your thoughts, feelings, and even your body?

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For example, in chapter five, you learned how to mind your mind throughout your day to pay attention to your thoughts. As you mind your mind while cooking or gardening or walking or driving to work, consider inviting God into the process of attuning to your thoughts. I'm worried about my child, my health, and my bills. Help me to think clearly about what's really going on, God. Be with me as I get to the root of what's happening.

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Or I can't shake this idea that someone is mad at me. I hate the way that feels. Help me to consider the facts of the situation. God, help me discern if I did something wrong or if this is false guilt. Or I'm wrestling with anger. I'm feeling angry. I'm frustrated that this person is getting away with harmful behaviors. God, I'm not willing to be harmed anymore. Lead my thoughts as I consider how to best protect myself.

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In chapter six, you identified different activities to help you process negative emotions instead of numbing. You might incorporate conversations with God into the activities you identified. For example, when you become aware of painful emotions, consider walking outside, eyes wide open, and naming what you notice as an act of praise. 

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I see that mountain, God, it reminds me of your strength. That tree is beautiful, God, it reminds me that all seasons pass. I'm grateful for the sun that always rises, God, it reminds me of your constancy. When you can't find words to pray or to connect you to God, give God thanks for the tangible reminders that you see in nature all around you.

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Finally, in chapter seven, you learned how to ground yourself when your nervous system is activated, when you're experiencing an intense emotional reaction in your body. Remember that when a child is scared or upset, you'd first gently soothe her by pulling her close and taking deep breaths. As she soothes, she's more able to communicate with you about what happened. 

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Similarly, when you're activated, it can be hard to pray in the way most of us have been taught. It's helpful to calm your nervous system as you articulate what you feel or what you need. Consider the difference between the following prayers. 

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God, I'm desperate. Please make this go away. I can't take this anymore. As you pray, your heart is racing. Your body is tense. You're begging God to intervene in your situation. Now listen, there's nothing wrong with this type of prayer, but imagine a different way of turning to God in prayer. 

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God, I'm struggling. Take a deep breath. I know you're with me. Another deep breath. I'm scared. Take another deep breath. I need you. 

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God designed your body to release endorphins and good chemicals. When you breathe, sing, experience nature or move, incorporating any of these activities as you name what's hard with God will help you soothe your nervous system in partnership with the way God designed you.

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And finally, you might need to brave new forms of healing communities. The first time I experienced the pain and dissonance that comes as a result of church-sanctioned spiritual bypassing was while I was working at a Christian summer camp as a college student. During an early Bible study, a leader of the camp taught us that if we didn't hear the voice of Jesus whispering in our ear telling us what to do each day, there was something wrong with our faith.

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I didn't hear the voice of Jesus that summer, At least not in the way that the Bible teacher thought that I should, as proof of my faith. Instead, I watched as my peers sought to showcase the superiority of their spirituality through quoting Bible passages and public displays of morality. All the while, not one word was said about the cliques, overt racism, and cruel jokes about the very people we were there to serve that permeated staff culture.

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That's not the Jesus that I serve. The dissonance inside me that summer was almost intolerable. I felt heartsick and confused. Not about Jesus–I knew that the hypocrisy I witnessed was not the fruit of listening to his voice. Still, I was confused about how people who claim to follow Jesus could be so horrible to other people. 

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Somehow, even at that young age, I knew it was okay to feel what I felt. I named it and framed it constantly with God. How could people who claim to love you, God, and hear your voice, behave in these ways to other people? I didn't force myself to pretend it was okay. Over time, this relentless naming and framing paid off. I began to see how I could brave a healing path. I couldn't change that experience, but I could do my part to help others who are hurt by toxic spiritual cultures.

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Over time, my family and I also braved a whole different kind of church community, one where the focus was on caring for those who were hurting the most, those suffering tremendous pain, addictions, homelessness, and debilitating mental illnesses. In that community, we felt connected and accepted in ways we'd never felt before.

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This is me interjecting here, but the words that we use constantly to describe that community was holy ground. It's where we sensed God's holy presence the most. When people were being the most honest and real about their brokenness.

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One of the practices we came to cherish was a time each Sunday during the service to give testimony. I was always amazed by the honest naming that ensued. 

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I'm Bob, and I didn't use last night, even though I really wanted to. 

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We love you, Bob. 

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I'm Peggy. I found a wallet, and I really wanted to steal the money in it, but I didn't.

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We love you, Peggy.

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I'm Stan. I'm depressed, but I got out of bed this morning, praise be to God. 

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We love you, Stan. 

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I began to brave a new vision of what it means to be in community. What if we learned to name together, honestly? What if we lovingly attuned to each other's struggles instead of trying to fix them? What if we could chase away old messages of shame and counterfeit virtues? 

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I'm Matt and my heart is broken today. 

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We love you, Matt. We're glad you're here. 

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I'm Anne and I cannot stop people-pleasing. 

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Welcome, Anne. We receive you. 

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I'm Joni and I'm so mad at my friend. 

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It's good to see you, Joni.

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I'm Chad and I relapsed last night. 

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Welcome, Chad. Thanks for coming. 

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I'm Sue and I yelled at my kids this morning. 

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We did too. We're so glad you're here with us today. 

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As we name together, without shame, we become a truer, more beautiful oasis and embodied experience of Christ for each other. Psychiatrist and fellow therapist, Curt Thompson, wrote in his beautiful book, The Soul of Desire, about small groups of people he leads called confessional communities.

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In these communities, individuals gather to name their longings, their heartbreaks, and their traumas. What Curt said is that all are “acts of prayer, creating spaces for connection and transformation…it is in communities like these that we encounter the possibility of being deeply known and where we practice for heaven. It is in a body of like minded people who are working hard to tell their stories as truly as they can, that Jesus shows up right in the middle of their narratives and utters in the voices of others to hear in the room, peace be with you”. 

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And I would add, “you're not alone”. I experienced what Curt described, not only within my church community, but also with my sister and two childhood friends. We gather regularly with the purpose to name, frame, and brave what's hard in our lives as one person shares the truth pieces of a fragmented story.

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The others listen attentively not to solve the problem, but to bear witness to all the pieces. As a result of being attuned to in this way, we each catch a glimpse of a truer, more beautiful picture of our lives. As a result of being seen and known by a loving community, we grow stronger and steadier, sure of ourselves, our convictions, and our purpose. We develop a deeper sense of integrity within ourselves, with others, and with the one who made us.

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If you've been taught that working out your faith should be simple, unthinking, or one size fits all, I would argue that you've been taught wrong. The Bible is not a simple book. Following Jesus is not always straightforward. Learning how to forgive, walk by faith, love others, and live joyfully takes skill. It takes perseverance. 

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It requires you to attend to various truth pieces in partnership with God's Spirit. Name, frame, and brave your way through complexity in your emotions. Shallow, simplistic formulas won't cut it. Not in this world. 

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The good news is that like your maker, you are beautifully vast and rich and wonderfully deep and intricate. You were made with the capacity to attune to your inner being, to shape the content and direction of your own thoughts and emotions, and even the responses of your nervous system. Learning to access and harness the power of your God given design to shape your life is one of the most joyful and lasting sources of satisfaction.

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As a tree grows tall and strong over time, its root system spreads out, providing more stability to the tree and tapping into a broader range of nutrients. The complexity of the root system contributes to the overall strength and resilience of the tree.

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The same is true with your spiritual growth. When you do the work to navigate uncertainty, process disappointments, and grieve painful experiences, you become stronger, wiser, and more resilient in your life. Even as you expand to tap into a broader range of spiritual practices, you don't have to choose between honoring yourself and your experience and honoring the God who made you. 

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That choice is a false dichotomy. Instead, you can connect and attune to yourself and with God. You can name what's hard and claim your hope. You can honor all the things that you feel and honor the faith you have in God.

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Here's the paradox of hope: to experience hope, you have to face what's hard. You have to practice the awkward motions of naming what's wrong, examining the truth pieces and reflecting on what's not working. Sometimes you tumble to the ground. You ask for help. You get back up. 

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Hope emerges as you find your way through the suffering. It's a paradox. There's no comfort if you don't face the truth of exactly where you are. Counterfeit hope bypasses reality. It ignores landmines and obstacles. It pretends everything is just fine. Even though you're floundering, it's like offering someone a shiny red plastic apple when they're starved for real nourishment. 

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True hope, on the other hand, enters into your reality. It helps you name what's hard. It helps you unearth deeper understanding. And as a result, it catalyzes you into brave action. Shame is eradicated. You experience the thrill of working your way through a tangled-up mess and discovering a beautiful clearing on the other side. 

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Best of all, you start to find hope within the journey. You start to activate glimmers of hope every step along the way. You activate hope when you catch yourself in a thinking trap and redirect your thoughts with patient tender care. You activate hope when you gently nourish yourself through pain instead of numbing. You activate hope when you patiently soothe your nervous system. You activate hope when you name toxicity for what it is and set a boundary with it.

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You no longer fear suffering or hardship because you've learned how to brave it to create harmony out of dissonance, calm out of chaos, peace out of pieces. The entire process, naming, framing, and braving, becomes a virtuous cycle of hope. You're taking charge of this beautiful life you've been given.

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You're shattering the divide between where you are now and where you want to go. You're shattering the divide between what's hard and the goodness you long to see. You're shattering the divide between the pain of this earth and the glorious hope of heaven.

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Happy Book Launch Day!

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Today I Shouldn't Feel This Way is out in the world AND it's the two-year anniversary of The Best of You podcast. To celebrate, I asked my friend, fellow therapist, and author, Aundi Kolber to join me for a special bonus episode! Join us as we share insights into why we started writing, what we keep private vs. what we share publicly, and how to navigate the publishing industry.

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Additional Resources:

• Connect with Aundi Kolber at www.aundikolber.com or on Instagram or Twitter
• Purchase Strong Like Water or The Strong Like Water Guided Journey by Aundi Kolber
• Purchase Try Softer or The Try Softer Guided Journey Aundi Kolber
• Purchase I Shouldn't Feel This Way out today!
• Get free study aids for Boundaries For Your Soul and The Best of You on my website.

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‍Related Episodes:

• ‍Episode 45: Strong like Water—Finding the Freedom, Safety, & Compassion to Move through Hard Things & Experience True Flourishing with Aundi Kolber‍
• Episode 46: People Pleasing as Survival, How Jesus Regulated Emotions & the Problem With Toxic Positivity and Spiritual Bypassing with Aundi Kolber

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Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author.

While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.

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How do you navigate anger in your family?

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What do you do when a parent who was supposed to  love you and keep you safe actually caused you harm?

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Families evoke such complicated emotions. You might feel angry and then guilty about that anger. You might feel a mixture of love and resentment. Today, we tackle family anger and generational trauma. My guest, Lisa-Jo Baker was a teenager when her mother died, leaving her alone her father and his fierce temper. When she found herself exhibiting that same temper with her own son, she knew it was time to dig deeper.

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Her new memoir, It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping, is a beautifully-written, incredibly powerful story of the legacy of anger, violence, and generational trauma—and how one family healed. You do not want to miss this conversation.

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Here’s what we cover:

1. When a parent is both hero & villain

2. The moment Lisa-Jo realized her father’s anger had become hers

3. How she began to investigate her past

4. A powerful metaphor for the scars of our families

5. The risk of discussing your pain with your parents

6. Self-righteous anger vs. wise anger

7. What Lisa-Jo confronted about racism as a South African and an American

8. Biblical wisdom for healing

Order It Wasn't Roaring It Was Weeping

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Additional Resources:

• Other books by Lisa-Jo Baker:
  • Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships
  • Surprised by Motherhood: Everything I Never Expected About Being a Mom
  • The Middle Matters: Why That (Extra)Ordinary Life Looks Really Good on You‍
• ‍Pre-order I Shouldn’t Feel This Way on Amazon‍
• Go to Ishouldntfeelthisway.com to claim pre-order bonus items‍
• The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook‍
• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay Gibson
• Weeping re-recorded by Josh Groban‍
• Mark 5:24-34

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‍Related Episodes:

• ‍Episode 97: I Shouldn't Feel This Anxious—Insights on Trauma & Healing with Monique Koven‍
• Episode 98: I Shouldn’t Feel Alone in My Grief—Why Your Grief Matters & the #1 Most Important Support For Those Who Are Grieving‍
• Episode 99: I Shouldn’t Feel Like My Spirit is Broken—Exploring a Broken Spirit & the Dark Night of the Soul with Christopher Cook‍
• Episode 100: I Shouldn’t Feel Betrayed By Someone I Trust—How to Grieve, Breathe, & Receive in the Wake of Broken Trust with Steve Carter

‍

‍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!
• Go to thrivemarket.com/bestofyou for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift!
• 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.
• 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.

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Transcript:

Alison Cook: Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. One of my favorite times of the week is sitting down with you and having real conversations about hard things in our lives, where we don't shy away from naming what's hard, but we also are always looking to brave a better path ahead.

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Toward that end, I was thrilled with how many of you joined me live for the bonus Masterclass, “I Shouldn't Feel Anxious”. It was overwhelming to me, the power in that live Masterclass. It's a great class. I'm so proud of it. We are walking head-on into anxiety, which is a feeling so many of us feel on a regular basis. 

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It doesn't have to be a scary feeling. It doesn't have to be an unsettling feeling. It can be a feeling that becomes a cue that helps you frame and brave a better path through. If you've been waiting, if you've been interested in this new book I've been talking about for the last six weeks, I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, now is the time to order it. 

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You have until Tuesday, May 7th to pre-order I Shouldn’t Feel This Way and get access to this latest masterclass, “I Shouldn't Feel Anxious”. It's a one hour video. We'll send you the link. In addition to that, you will get the guided journal, which is a really cool tool I worked really hard to design. You'll get my favorite tool from the book called “the looking tool”, and you will also get access to last month's masterclass, “I shouldn't feel stuck in my head”. 

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So all of those bonus items are free for you when you pre-order a copy of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way anywhere books are sold. Go to Ishouldntfeelthisway.com to claim those bonus items. You've got, let's see, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, five days left to pre-order. IIt'll be in your hands May 7th, and you'll have those bonus items today.

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As I've said before, I absolutely love creating this content for you. I'm a teacher at heart, and it has been my joy to get this content into your hands. I cannot wait for you to have I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. I cannot wait to hear what you think about it. 

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Today's episode is the last episode of the “I shouldn't feel this way” series, where I've been interviewing guests about hard topics that they've faced. Today's episode is about a topic that I hear about so often from you. It's about the feeling of anger toward our own parents. 

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What do you do when the very person who was supposed to honor you and love you and keep you safe actually caused you harm? It's such a complicated set of emotions that we feel about our own parents. You might feel angry at a parent and then guilty about that anger. You might feel a mixture of love and closeness with the parent, even as you're aware that there are things they did that caused you pain.

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The relationship you have to your mom, to your dad, are some of the most important and formative relationships that we have, and they bring up a lot of complicated emotions for us. I devote a large portion of my book, The Best of You, to unpacking some of the ways our parents can cause harm to us. Now there's a spectrum of toxicity, as I lay out in that book; a lot of us are parents ourselves, and we're so aware that we are not getting everything right.

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There's a spectrum of toxicity. None of us is completely healthy, and none of our parents were completely healthy, and that's okay. On the other side of that spectrum, most people are not entirely toxic. It's so important to be able to tease out those complicated emotions of love and of anger and of hurt and of gratitude that we feel about our parents. My guest today, Lisa-Jo Baker, has written an absolutely beautiful memoir about her relationship with her dad.

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This book is so beautifully written. It's so poignant. It's so nuanced as she teases out the complicated mixture of emotions, the complicated relationship of really good things and really painful traumas that she experienced as a result of her relationship with her father.

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The book is called, It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping: Interpreting the Language of Our Fathers Without Repeating Their Stories. It's out on May 7th, and I cannot recommend it more to you. Lisa-Jo does not shy away from naming really hard things in this book about her father, about some of the generational trauma that resulted in some real pain in her family. 

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That as a young mom herself, as she relays so honestly in today's episode, she realized, oh my gosh, I have to figure this out. I have to heal myself so that I don't carry on these patterns to my own children. I know that so many of you listening are asking that question. How do I heal so that I don't pass down some of these heartaches, some of these wounds to my own children? 

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I love that Lisa-Jo so bravely told her own story as a way to help all of us enter into our own. Lisa-Jo Baker is the bestselling author of Never Unfriended, Surprised by Motherhood, and The Middle Matters. She has a law degree from the University of Notre Dame and has lived and worked on three continents in the human rights field. She's a sought after national speaker and the author of the brand new memoir, It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping. She and her family live outside Washington DC. 

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I've gotten to know Lisa-Jo, not only as a writer, but as a human behind the scenes, and she is one of the most real and authentic and wise and deeply brimming over with goodness humans that I have had the pleasure to meet in the Christian publishing industry. I'm so thrilled to bring you today this conversation with my friend, Lisa-Jo Baker.

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***

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Alison: Lisa-Jo, I am so thrilled to have this conversation with you about this magnificent book that you have written. I think one of the questions I get asked the most by folks who listen to this podcast who follow my work, who read my books, is along the lines of, “I'm doing my own healing work. How do I not pass it on to my own kids?” 

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These things that I've inherited from my own parents are from the ways that I'm parented. So we're going to get into that. I'm not going to start there, but I want to frame our conversation for those listening. There's so much going on here that I want to talk about, but we're talking about when we have complicated feelings about our parents. What do we do with those complicated feelings? Which is so much of what your story is about. And then also, what do we do when we are the parents, and we start to realize, oh man, now I've got to parent my own kids. 

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This is the legacy I was given, whether we're conscious of that or not. Some of us become conscious of that as we start to do the work of excavating our own childhood. You start off the book right away talking about your dad as both the hero and the villain of your story. Tell me a little bit about that, Lisa-Jo. When did you first know that both-and experientially/consciously? When did you first kind of name that reality that there's this hero and villain thing going on with your own father?

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Lisa-Jo: Definitely not as a child or a teenager or even in my 20s, because he's your dad. So anybody who has a parent who's complicated, and I guess what parent isn't, now that I am one to teenagers, I don't know that I would have been able to verbalize the problem. I actually think I would have described my father for most of my life as my biggest fan. My biggest champion. 

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He was so for me. I grew up in South Africa. He made a path to launch me to go to college in America. It was very exciting. He was my biggest believer and champion in what I wanted to do, and I wanted to go to law school and do human rights. He believed it and not only did he believe it, he made it possible for me to do it.

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So that was one narrative I lived in for a long time. At the same time, at the back of my mind was a box that I shoved all these other thoughts and feelings to do with my father into. It was a box I didn't look in very often. I pretended it wasn't there, but every now and again, that box would explode in my mind and I would have to reconcile it with what was happening again with a parent who was weirdly, the most stable, trustworthy force in my life and the most destabilizing force in my life.

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I lived in that weird tension, and I think the way I navigated it is, I wouldn't have described it this way at the time, but I ran away from home in the most respectable way you can. I went to college, but I went to college in another country. So I put an ocean between my father and I, and in doing so, I was able to live comfortably with the box in the back of my mind that I rarely had to open.

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Alison Cook: I think it's so helpful that you're naming this for us because I think that box is how we survive. You needed that narrative of your dad as the hero; we need our parents to be our heroes and, even the best of parents, there's complexity there. But so often this is the reality, where there's this box and in your case, it was significant.

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I remember as I was reading an early copy of your book and I was like, this is abuse. There's abuse here. There's trauma here. You said to me those words are very new for you. Is that right, Lisa-Jo?

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Lisa-Jo: They're very new in my vocabulary. I would never have described it that way. I actually remember talking to a therapist, maybe four or five years ago, and she described my childhood that way. I said to her, no, my dad's a passionate guy. Everybody has parents who have awkward moments or family explosions.

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She stopped me and said, no, that isn't a normal baseline. That isn't a normal way for parents to manage their anger. We have a word for that. We call it abuse. You have experienced trauma. It was so shocking for me. It was like trying to learn a new language. In the book, I talk a lot about language and it was a language that I had never verbalized. 

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I will say the first time in my journey when somebody else questioned my childhood narrative was when I met the guy who would become my husband, this really hot Michigander with cowboy green eyes. We were sitting up late one night talking, the way you do, sharing your stories. When I told mine to him, when I was done, he looked at me and he said, “I guess what I don't understand is how you didn't get into drugs or drinking”.

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I laughed. I was so surprised. I said to him, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? Like, why would I do that? He said, “dude, because your story is messed up. Like, how did you not get into hard drugs?” I never really reckoned with that. I thought it was a funny thing he said and moved on.

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But that combined with what that therapist said to me was the beginning of me saying, I think I need to go back and look at this box again.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. There's so much here that I want to unpack a couple of things. One, the remarkable ability of our psyche to compartmentalize like that. There's something beautiful about that when you think about trauma. For those listening, we talk about how a part of you needs to have this narrative about your childhood. It helped you survive. But then someone else comes in and says, “That's not normal”. 

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You tell a story in the book about an instance where your dad's really pretty verbally abusive with you. You show us versus preaching a sermon to us. You show us the nuances of your dad's complexity, the majestic-ness of him and some pretty vicious abusive language that is so painful for a young child.

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One of the things I say all the time is we want to name behaviors, not people. I can imagine for you, once people are coming in, poking a little bit at your narrative, there's protective components of your dad. No, I love this man. Don't call my dad this thing, which can keep you from doing the healing work you need to do to reconcile.

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This man I love also did these things that we are going to label accurately as toxic. It doesn't mean he is a toxic person per se, in this case. Tell me a little bit about that, how you untangled that for yourself.

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Lisa-Jo: The truth is, in all stories, there are characters that are both. They have the potential to be the hero and the villain. It's because in human nature, there are no caricatures; in the real world, we are both-and. So he was both this very destructive force in my life and this amazingly powerful force in my life for good.

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I didn't start to tease it out though, and here's what's interesting. There has to be impetus. There has to be a force in our story that makes us want to look at the places we don't want to look. Interestingly enough, it wasn't enough to do it for myself. It wasn't enough to do it when I got married.

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The impetus for me is when I had children and found myself screaming, like in a frenzy, like a psychopath at my middle son. It was such an out of control rage that I actually had the thought in my mind–oh my gosh, you are your dad. You are doing what dad did to you, Alison, and I write this in the book, I chose to continue to keep screaming in that moment.

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That for me, that was the moment when I knew–there's something here I have to figure out.

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Alison Cook: When you told that part of your story, I thought, oh my gosh, this is it. Because we become the thing that hurt us if we don't do our own work, and it brings humility. Oh, I'm the one in this case, and also I have a choice now. So tell me a little bit about that. That was your moment, and then something in that unlocked something in you. Was it conscious that, oh, I need to go now take this box out and look at it? Or was it, I'm assuming it was way more meandering than that.

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Lisa-Jo: Yeah, I wish things were that direct and straight and simple. I think mostly it was this horror of what I had done. I couldn't believe I did this to a kid I love that I was this furious with. The connection back to my father is, I felt a righteous degree of rage toward this child. He's a challenging kid. He had pushed all my buttons and I realized, oh, I'm justifying in my mind this outrageous behavior that I'm displaying exactly how my dad used to me.

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My dad is like a fire and brimstone preacher who believed he had righteousness on his side when he was so angry with us. At that moment I realized, whoa. This isn't a story I want to be in. I'm already deep in it. How do I get out of it? It was the beginning of what I would describe as like a five or six year process of pulling on that knot, that thread. 

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And, we're in the middle of our lives, there's carpool and laundry and school drop off. You don't have time to step outside of your life for that. So for me, it was fits and starts of trying to understand what was going on and how I needed to rewrite the story, but I didn't have any framework. I had nobody who could model for me what that looked like.

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Here's an interesting thing that happened for years. I had been invited by mops, they are now called MomCo, to speak at their annual conference. I would come and talk on temper. I was aware that I had a temper I needed to control. I remember my very first workshop, I was so nervous because they put me in this giant ballroom with a jumbotron.

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I thought, this is going to be mortifying when 10 people show up in the front row of this anger workshop. Instead, it was so massively packed that the fire marshal had to come to try to ask people to leave. So that was my clue that, oh I'm not the only one. That went on for three or four years until in 2019, they asked me if I would come and give a talk from the main stage, like a keynote on anger as a parent.

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I thought at the time, man, I don't know how much more there is to say about this. And Alison, I was standing in my bathroom, brushing my teeth, and this thought dropped into my mind: You should talk about what it's like to be the child of an angry parent. I took my toothbrush out of my mouth, looked into the mirror, and was like, I will never talk about this.

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Never ever talk about that. Because what I knew is if I wanted to talk about that, I would actually have to do business with my dad. Like, I would have to talk to him. He and I would have to unpack stuff and I thought it was going to vomit. I was like, no, nope. We don't talk about that. I would never even have identified myself as the child of an angry parent.

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So that was the beginning. I blame God for that. To me, as much as you can sense God speaking to you is what I sensed, but it was the beginning of him trying to help me get free.

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Alison Cook: Take out the box and look at it, which means you'd have to deal with your own anger with your dad, whom you adored and loved. That's one of the hardest things for us to do, is give ourselves permission to feel betrayed and disappointed by the people we love the most. It's wired in our little childlike DNA to adore these big people.

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I want to say, Lisa-Jo, at the end of the book, and I told you this, I ended up loving your dad. I think we talk a lot on this podcast about emotional immaturity. There's a wonderful book by Lindsay Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. I think it's touching a nerve in our generation because our parents didn't have access to understanding about emotions that you have.

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You and I have barely gotten this much of, and our kids have a way lot more of. So there's this huge deficit. I want to name that there is empathy for a generation of parents that had all these wild emotions. You get into the book, when you unpack that box, you begin to see all the things that shaped your dad, the pain and the trauma he went through that shaped his rage.

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I want to get into that, but I want to say upfront, even when we have empathy for our parents and we get it, we still have to do the work of honoring the complicated mix of feelings that we have about them. We can do that in healthier ways, in ways that don't necessarily rip up the relationship.

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Sometimes we do have to allow the old relationship to die, to see if a new one can be born. That's why, again, this book that you've written is so powerful because it's such a delicate thing to talk about, Lisa-Jo. You begin to open up this box slowly and you find some pretty tough things that you bravely bring into your story. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like for you?

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Lisa-Jo: So the context is, I'm from South Africa. Born and bred. We're not a missionary family or pastor's kids. We're South African the way you're American. It’s where we grew up. But I grew up under the apartheid era. I was born in 1974 and apartheid was becoming codified into law in South Africa. The unique twist on the story though, is that at the time, my father had graduated medical school and he was serving as a missionary doctor in Zululand. 

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So I was this white kid born in Zululand at the height of apartheid. So you've got a lot of pressure in this cauldron already. My dad was a man of faith, a believer. Yet, he had been formed by the story that came before him. I remember when I started teasing out the idea of writing this book, my dad said to me, he was worried that I was going to put him in a box.

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He was worried that the book would put him in a box. I was able to say to him, actually, dad, writing the book, writing over years of conversations, we unpacked a lot of his childhood and I learned things about him I had no idea about. I didn't know how he had been formed. Honestly, when I look back at my parenting now, I actually feel like it could have been a lot worse. It could have been much more violent, like his own childhood had been. 

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So it was a weird dance to begin to have conversations with one another. But the impetus was this invitation to come and speak. So if there wasn't something that had happened, between the invitation to speak and what had happened with my own son, that I think sometimes what the Lord needs is an entry point in, because otherwise, why are we motivated to take the step?

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In being invited, I looked down and suddenly realized, oh, there's this part of me that is wounded. I didn't realize it. I've been living and there's the steady stream of bleeding happening out my side that I haven't really paid attention to before. The thing about Christ is, he doesn't want to make it worse.

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He wants to make it better. He gently drew my attention to this part of my life that I had been ignoring for several decades. It felt like this winsome invitation to step into it. I will say for anyone listening, the grace is that those things don't happen overnight. I was like “no” for a long time. Then I was like, I'll do this little tiny talk. Then I was like, I'm never writing a book on it. 

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I don't know if I told you this, Alison, but I was under a book contract, and for a year and a half, I wrote a completely different book. I was writing this non-fiction self-help book about social media and how to live a healthy life in a social media world. But at the same time, on the side, I was working on a fiction book about a father and a daughter. 

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I realized, I think my brain is trying to write about my dad, but I won't let myself. I remember I was talking to a really good friend one day as I was driving home about this book I had been writing, this other book. I was saying to her, oh, writing is so hard. I hate this book. She said to me, oh yeah, writing is so hard because at the end, you get this book you love. To which I responded, no, I don't feel that way. This book is dumb and boring and I don't know why anyone would want to read it. She said, I think that's a problem.

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I talked to my agent and described this fiction book I was writing on the side. She said, I think you're writing the wrong book. I think you're supposed to be writing about South Africa and your dad. The brain is strange–how it isn't ready to look directly at the thing that needs to be fixed. But I came like a crab sideways into this every step of the way.

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Alison Cook: That's amazing, Lisa-Jo, it's amazing to me as a student of the psyche. I think about those parts, the part of you sneakily came in that really wanted to tell the story, but other parts of you were afraid, understandably. Yeah. You told me that the process of really opening up that box, it was indeed really hard and really painful.

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I think that is sometimes the truth about healing. It can, when you go to that part of you, that's bleeding out the side, it can feel a little bit worse before it feels better and you need to be ready for that, You need to be prepared for that. I'm curious, as you began to write into some of those most painful parts, did you second guess yourself along the way? I would imagine it wasn't all roses and butterflies. I would imagine it takes a lot of courage. 

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Lisa-Jo: Yes. Every single step of the way. I will say that I didn't know how my dad would feel about this book. I didn't know if he would give me permission. I didn't know if he would enter into it with me. It's important for the reader to know we've had years, my father and I, to try to navigate our relationship.

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Having distance has helped. He's such a huge and powerful force in my life that sometimes, what's been really helpful for us are the conversations we have over Voxer or WhatsApp or text message because there's delay. There's opportunity for reflection and for feelings to calm down before you respond.

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We've had years. He's changed a lot. A lot of his life has changed in incredibly powerful and healthy ways. He is already in a healthier place. So I would like to clarify for people who have a parent who isn't in that place, it's a more complicated story. In the book, I do talk about how forgiveness is possible, whether the other person participates or not.

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I really believe that. But in my case, I did have this unique experience of my dad, and it was like we were doing a two step back and forth over the years, having snatches of conversation that would be really painful, and then backing off and taking time and then talking again in little bits and pieces.

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And my mom, I'll say this, my mom was a professional translator in South Africa. We have 12 national languages, and she used to talk a lot about the difference between translation and interpretation. How translation is a one-to-one matching of words, but interpretation is actually reading cultural context, the person you're talking to, their story.

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It's trying to give a more nuanced definition. In writing the book, that was the experience I had with my dad. I realized I need to interpret him and not try to translate him one-for-one. Being willing to enter into that place of tension together to hear him and see, am I understanding? But him then being willing to hear and interpret and understand me was the weird two-step we did over years.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that. I love that. I want to say for the listener, you show the story of your life, it's a memoir. This is a memoir. It's beautifully written, the way that you show the messiness of that, the complexity of that two step. There are moments you describe in the book of sitting in a car in silence, and you show us the awkwardness of that dance, of staying in a relationship with someone where there's a lot of complexity. 

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And then every once in a while, there's a breakthrough. I think it's really powerful because we can break these things down into “five steps to forgiveness” or “five steps to healing”, that can be helpful to have that scaffolding, but the reality is when you go into life, it's snapshots and moments over time, that kind of assemble this larger picture of, oh my gosh, we're in a better place. We're in a better place. We understand each other more. And you show us that.

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Lisa-Jo: I hope so. I hope the book reads like a movie. I hope it's something you want to binge. I come from a family of movie-makers and story-writers. I wrote it like a fiction book. It's exciting. It sweeps from South Africa's Outback. So I hope the book feels bingeable because I tried to write it and put you into the story with me as we are experiencing this unique dynamic of me as a child who grew up in this unique South Africa and then moved to America. 

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There's a moment I share in the book that's one of my favorites, that I think is this perfect picture of what our parents do to us. So my father is a gifted doctor. He's done surgery. He studied under Dr. Christian Barnard, who did the first open heart transplant in the world. It happened in South Africa. But when I was a teenage girl, like a preteen, 12, I was at a birthday party and we were playing a game of tag and I slipped and fell and cut my leg really badly, right on my shin.

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My dad is the one who stitched it up. But when he stitched it up, he hadn't properly first excised enough of the dead skin. So when he stitched it, he stitched together dead skin, so the stitches didn't hold properly, and as the leg healed, the stitches slowly slipped out of each other's grasp and left this shiny shimmery patch of skin that's different from the rest of my leg.

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It's a lake that is on my leg because of my father. For me, it is a metaphor for our relationship, because in order to have a healthy healed relationship, you must excise the dead skin, the pain and the trauma. If you don't, there will always be a scar that will reflect back to you the things you haven't healed yet.

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Often growing up, I would look at my leg and as a girl, you're annoyed you have this. So I have this literal scar on my body because of my father's failure to do the work of a doctor that he knows. So when he sees the scar, he still comments on it. Ah, I didn't do that right. And so that's one of the pictures that the book offers the reader.

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I'm not a teacher. I always say I'm a storyteller. There are stories like this, about what it looks like to be formed by our parents in ways that leave actual marks on our lives and bodies.

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Alison Cook: Yeah, it's a beautiful image. It really is. I love what you said, Lisa-Jo, that regardless, in your case, your dad made a choice to also grow, to also express regret, to grow, to apologize for things late in life. There's been growth, there's so much in that metaphor, but even in light of that, there still are those scars. We don't completely make them go away.

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Lisa-Jo: He had the best intentions. He wasn't trying to leave a scar. That's why it's such a powerful metaphor. He loved me. He was trying to love me. In our conversations over the years, he has said to me, your mom and I loved you guys the way you love your kids. We weren't trying to scar you. We were trying to love you. 

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I think it's been helpful to read him through that lens because there've been times when I've read him in my mind as the bad guy. He is the bad villain of the story. It's been difficult to try to arrive at a central place where he isn't the villain or the hero. He's a human. He's a human father. 

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So he's 76. I'm going to be 50 this year. Guys, it's not too late is what I'm saying. I look at my own kids who are getting ready to leave the house, and I panic about it and think, oh my gosh, how have I messed them up? I tell myself, if it's not too late for dad and I, and we are literally still rewriting stories from my childhood every time he is willing to sit with me and bear witness to something painful and recognize his role in it. 

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A scar is healed, but I will say, for years he wasn't willing. And what's terrifying is to bring those tender stories to our parents, afraid that they will deny them or say it was your fault or say it didn't happen or that they don't remember. That is a very painful risk. It took me a long time to be ready to even risk those conversations,

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Alison Cook: I love how you put that and sometimes they gaslight, they do all the things, and then you have those precious pearls. In your case, he did rise to meet you there, but I love what you're saying because the truth is, to circle back to what I was saying at the beginning about how do we incorporate some of what we've learned about the complexity of our own parents into our parenting, I caught a glimpse of it as you were talking. 

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We have to learn how to let our kids see us as both the hero and the villain. We don't want to be our kids' heroes. We don't want to be our kids' villains. I'm curious, as you parented your own kids, it's so different than how we were parented in many ways, but it's really showing up as, oh my gosh, I completely blew it. That's actually the key to being that healthy parent in a way is owning it when you are the villain in the story for your kids.

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Lisa-Jo: Right. As you say, naming it has been really powerful. So because temper is something I've struggled with and no one will push your buttons quite like a toddler, as my kids got older, I learned to recognize when I was starting to feel angry and then to actually name it out loud to my kids. I felt when I named it to them, it was like a flashing warning sign to me and to them.

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I would be able to say, guys, mom is starting to freak out. I would say very calmly, this is a lot. I feel overwhelmed right now. I would literally do what you say–I would name how I was feeling. I named how I needed to take a break or step away or why. It was such an interesting thing.

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I started to recognize my temper as when your gas light flashes and it tells you, you need to be refueling. Those feelings of anger, I didn't used to see them as righteous, like, time to really let those kids know!! Now I see them as, oh dear, warning sign. Mom is about to lose her mind.

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Then there are options for me: step away, tell your kid how you feel, sit in another room. Even when they were little, they could manage for a while without me. So naming my actual feelings has been really powerful. I think it's helped them be able to recognize their feelings at the same time, to say, you can feel those feelings, but your feelings are not allowed to be the boss of you.

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That is not permissible in our house. So we get to be the boss of our own feelings. You can feel them. You can be mad, you can be sad, but we don't let our feelings hold other people hostage. Your feelings don't get to be terrorists in this house.

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Alison Cook: That's so good. That's so good, Lisa-Jo. The other big character in the book, besides anger and all these big emotions, is racism. It’s a prevalent theme throughout the book. It is in many ways the underlying villain in some ways of the story. There are moments in the book that show the reality of what it's like to grapple with aspects as white women of our own participatory, whether directly or indirectly, through our being part of a dominant culture in really horrible things and how we wrestle with that.

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You go there with us. You tell us the stories. There's one where you arrive in America, in DC, you and I were there, we discovered at the very same time, really, which was so crazy to read in the book. But it was your introduction to racism in America. So there was that spin on it. Then you have to circle back and wrestle with your own relationship to it as a South African. Tell me a little bit about what that was like for you to wrestle with as you wrote the book.

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Lisa-Jo: The book is called, It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping, and it's actually a lyric taken from a very famous anti-apartheid political protest song. So when you talk about racism, if you're South African and you hear the title, immediately South Africans will start singing the song to me. They're so familiar with it. 

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So it's been re-recorded by Josh Groban and many others. Of course it has lots of nuances. It applies to my story with my dad and South Africa, but that is the context. I was a white child born in apartheid under institutional racism. Then I moved to America in a context I wasn't familiar with.

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A large part of the book is connecting those two stories, because what happens is we tend to tell ourselves, apartheid's over now. We have a new president and a new constitution and a new flag and a new national anthem. Yay us! We're better. It was an interesting experience for me in 1994 to have lived through South Africa's first free election and voted in it.

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I lived through South Africa's racial reckoning. And then as a student and now adult in America, to have lived through America's racial story and reckoning over the last four years, that's still ongoing. It's been a very unique position to occupy in both countries. I think the tendency we have is to say, racism is something that you do and you have to not do.

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So I either do it or I don't do it. Obviously, I don't want to think of myself as a racist, so I don't do it. We're good. Part of what I wanted to share in telling the story is whether or not you think of yourself as participating in any kind of racism, you are related to it simply by being human. Like you're in God's family, you are descended.

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If you trace your family lines back, I promise you, you are going to find stories. I was shocked to discover that there are some really hard stories I share, that I learned for the very first time when talking to my dad. He said to me, I've never told anyone the story before, and then shared a story. I call it “the monster that I talk about in the middle of the night”. I remember saying to my husband, as soon as I heard my dad tell that story, I knew in my spirit, it had to be in the book. 

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I asked my husband, man, is this crazy? Is it going to be a disaster if I share the story? He said this to me, it's one thing to study about racism to read about it, to march, to watch the news, to follow the social media commentary, to opt in or out, depending on what side of it you are on. It is a very different thing to read a story and enter into it with somebody you trust and view the effects of racism from the inside.

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As white people, we don't often have access to that. But if I can invite the reader to stand in a story and then maybe ask themselves, huh, maybe it's not as simple as choosing not to be racist, but recognizing that we are for better or worse, all related as the human family.

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Our family trees hold stories that have consequences for people of color. We have to face them. We have to be willing to tell the stories. So that's what the book tries to do. It's not here to lecture you. It's here to tell you, look at your own story and then maybe look differently at the people of color in your life because your story is connected to theirs. Whether you want it to be or not, you have got monsters in your family tree too.

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Alison Cook: It's so nuanced but you're teasing out that line between victim and perpetrator and I want to say that carefully, because if you are an oppressed or marginalized group, you have been the victim of racism and that is a very different thing. If you've been abused as a child, that is a very different thing. So there's that category that's real and full stop. You are the victim in this situation. 

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Then there's this other category that's so hard to talk about, where in your story, for example, my dad was verbally abusive with me and then I find myself screaming at my child–how do I make sense of that? Same with racism, here I am. I'm somebody who was anti-apartheid. I come to him, and then I find out, oh my gosh, people in my own family did these things. I have to face it in myself.

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Lisa-Jo: I think the metaphor I use in the book actually is this idea of, there was an equation I was trying to solve my whole life. I somehow wanted injustice to equal justice. Like, how do you balance this equation? How do you cancel out the injustice to get to justice? In my life, those things were intertwined.

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My father was part of the injustice I experienced in my life. Then South Africa had this ongoing injustice narrative. I wanted to be a human rights lawyer. I came to America to study law. I went to law school. I wanted to figure out how to cancel out injustice. It's what drove me. It drove my dad. 

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Yet here we are on the other side of the equation, also part of the injustice story. That was the tension, recognizing I used to think there's us and them, like good guys and bad guys, that I want to be on the good guy's side of the equation. Then it was very unsettling to discover–of course, we live on both sides because we are humans who have sin natures and have to constantly be willing to do the very difficult work of looking at ourselves, our own motivations, our own stories.

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And it's very uncomfortable to be challenged to do that. Yet that is what it requires if we actually want justice. Shalom talks about wholeness; it's not peace, it means a right relationship with others, with ourselves, with God. To do that, we have to be willing to do a kind of heart surgery on ourselves, where we ask ourselves, are we doing that? 

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So you can have my dad who moves to Zululand, who serves as a missionary doctor there, who raises his daughter speaking Zulu. At the same time, he owns a farm where people live as indentured servants and don't even have access to running water or toilets and it never occurs to him to update that. Both of those things at the same time. You are on both sides of the equation.

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Alison Cook: I have to say again, the stories that you told in the book were so much more compelling to me to do the work of wrestling than all the education that I've received. I noticed as I was grappling with some of those stories, all the complicated emotions that came up. One of the things I felt was, you know, I want to present myself as the good guy–

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Lisa-Jo: We all do!

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Alison Cook: Yeah, I've actually been, whether indirectly or directly, I benefit in ways I may know or don't know, it doesn't matter. That's the work. We know that, through all the education, many of us who paid attention and are trying to do this work, but there's nothing like wrestling with it inside your own soul. That's what your book did for me. I want to say for the listener, you will be wrestling. I said this when I interviewed JS Park, who I know you worked with on his book. I said the same thing to him. 

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I said, reader, beware, you will be asked to wrestle with some of your own uncomfortable emotions. But it is my belief that is where the work actually gets done. That's where you actually get into that transformational piece.

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Lisa-Jo: Yeah, my hope, especially because my story starts in South Africa, so for an American reader, it feels maybe like an easier entry point. Because it's easier to look at somebody else's country and say, whoa, you guys are messed up over there. We so were, and we still are struggling. But what's interesting about South Africa, I had a good friend who read an early copy of the book.

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I live now in Maryland here on the East coast, outside of DC and Baltimore. The first half of the book takes place in South Africa. But my friend said to me when I moved to the States and I started unpacking what I discovered about the history of the Chesapeake and the slave trade here in Maryland, she said, as she was reading, she said out loud, wait, what?

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No. I love Maryland. What? I love Maryland. I described the trees. We live on this beautiful road where the trees change colors in the Chesapeake Bay. It's so beautiful. Also, I worked in Africa and visited Ghana and spent time at the slave fort, the former slave fort there that was the depot for millions of Africans who were sold into slavery here.

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Guess where they arrived? The boats arrived here in the Chesapeake, right where I currently live. It was this moment of recognizing the intertwining of our country's stories, how we forget that our countries are so intertwined. So it is impossible to say, not me! I'm not a bad guy.

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You're right. You're complicated, but your story, your history, absolutely, is part of the story of what happened coming out of Africa. No matter if you live in your Maryland home and the only thing you've ever thought about the Chesapeake is the school trips my kids take to taste oysters for the first time, it was like this shocking moment.

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I say in the book, listen, I'm a tired mom. I don't want to be parsing through history in this way. it would be so much easier to be like, huh, interesting, and keep driving. But there's a story I tell in the book that you're familiar with, where I was challenged by a great black human rights lawyer in South Africa.

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We were literally driving through a black South African township and he rolled down his window and told me, look out the window, look. Look what has happened to my people. That's a metaphor all through the book. Are you willing to roll down your window and look? Can you look at the stories?

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Alison Cook: It's so powerful because when we look, we can't fix all the problems in the world that's, but we can look and we can name. We can choose not to gaslight it or minimize it or spiritually bypass it. We can name it for what it is. There's something so powerful about that. When we do that, it's such a paradox. 

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The book is beautiful, Lisa-Jo. As we close, I wanted to ask you, we've touched on two different themes here, but for the listener who is wrestling with really complicated feelings about their own parent, about their own childhood, what wisdom would you want to impart to them as a result of your own deep dive into your own past?

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Lisa-Jo: I'm not sure I have wisdom, but I maybe have some courage to say, the great and amazing thing about God is that I have learned, as someone who loves stories, and my brothers make movies for a living in South Africa, my whole family still lives there. What I have discovered about God, is that he too loves stories. He's the great storyteller. 

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In my experience, there are no threads, no plot twists in our story that he drops and doesn't circle back to. So if you have a place in your story that's painful, a thread that you don't even want to touch, in my experience, simply being willing to look in the direction of that thread is enough for God to be willing to enter into, the beginning of the repair. 

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You don't have to know how to repair it. It's actually not on you, but if you are willing to bring it to him, a story that has really stuck with me recently that I've looked at in a new way is the Bible story we've often heard. It's one of those weird ones of the woman who had the issue of blood. She's bleeding, and all she does is come to Jesus and touch him. That's it. She doesn't expound on it. She doesn't say how terrible it is, or how painful or how humiliating. It's this part of her she doesn't want anyone to know about.

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It's so embarrassing. I've thought a lot about our painful stories that way. This part of you that you're aware of that you don't want anyone else to know about. It feels like you're bleeding all the time, and you don't know how to fix it. There's something about taking it to Jesus and saying, here it is. Just touch him and tell him, here it is.

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And then see what he does. Because in my experience, over the last five years of this book and the decade before that, he has been very gentle and very slow.

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Alison Cook: Yes.

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Lisa-Jo: He has gone back to that bleeding area, that thread that I thought would never get stitched back into the story. He has actually cut away the dead skin and he has slowly stitched it in a way where it isn't painful to touch anymore and it's not bleeding. So my encouragement is to be willing to look in the direction of the thing you've been ignoring.

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Alison Cook: That is beautiful, Lisa-Jo, I love that. I love this book, this beautiful offering. I know it cost you a lot to write it. I'm grateful that people have a chance to get their hands on it and that you've been willing to share. That's what I meant by brave when I circled back and I said, I think it's brave, as someone who helps people go into those really hard places. Not everybody chooses to do that. 

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I think it's so brave and it is what brings true transformation. One last question. I ask all my guests, what is bringing out the best of you right now?

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Lisa-Jo: Maybe it feels cheesy to say, but it's the fact that we are savoring these last few months of my oldest before he leaves to go to college. There's something about knowing that I don't want to be tied down by the weightiness of lasts, but instead lean into the savoring of it with him. 

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I'm trying to savor the story we're in where there's still five of us. It is bringing out the best, I would say, of all of us. I think we're all very aware that we're eating the last moments of this feast of being a family of five, and it has really brought out something pretty special I didn't even know to expect.

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Alison Cook: That's beautiful. I love that. Thank you so much for your time and your effort to bring your own story into the world and to incubate so many stories of others as well. It's beautiful. I'm so grateful to have had this chance to get to know you through this book.

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Lisa-Jo: I feel honored. It's not often you get a therapist that you get to process a book like this with, back and forth, as a friend. So thank you for giving us the gift of naming and a framework that helps make sense of some of our really complicated stories.

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Have you ever felt betrayed by someone you thought you could trust?

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It's a deeply painful experience that can leave you questioning not only the betrayer but also your own judgment. Trust, once broken, seems almost impossible to rebuild.

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My guest today, Steve Carter, experienced a series of profound betrayals at a pivotal moment in his life. In 2018, amidst misconduct allegations against Bill Hybels, founder of Willow Creek Community Church, Steve made the difficult decision to step down from his role as a newly minted lead pastor—a position he once considered his dream job. Shortly thereafter, he faced yet another personal betrayal by his own parents.

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Reeling from the loss of his job, his dream, and his trust in those closest to him, Steve entered a desert season guided by three words he sensed God gave to him: Grieve. Breathe. Receive. Steve's journey through loss is so powerful, so honest, and so deeply healing. Please do not miss this conversation!

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Here’s what we cover:

1. 2 essential ingredients for trust

2. Why grief is the antidote to cynicism

3. Confronting our attraction to patterns of narcissism

4. The anger high vs. the peace of forgiveness

5. How he hangs on to his love for the church

Preorder Grieve, Breathe, Receive: Finding a Faith Strong Enough to Hold Us by Steve Carter

Get a copy of Evening Psalms by Steve Carter

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Additional Resources:

• The Thing Beneath the Thing: What's Hidden Inside (and What God Helps Us Do About It) by Steve Carter‍
• The Craft & Character podcast with Steve Carter‍
• Stevecarter.org‍
• @SteveRyanCarter on Instagram and X
• The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. -Frederick Buechner‍
• Pre-order I Shouldn’t Feel This Way on Amazon / Claim your bonus items at ishouldntfeelthisway.com
• More on Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief‍
• The feelings wheel
• ‍Genesis 3:11
• ‍Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller‍
• Jesus Christ by Brand New‍

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‍Related Episodes:

• ‍Episode 97: I Shouldn't Feel This Anxious—Insights on Trauma & Healing with Monique Koven‍
• Episode 98: I Shouldn’t Feel Alone in My Grief—Why Your Grief Matters & the #1 Most Important Support For Those Who Are Grieving with J.S. Park‍
• Episode 99: I Shouldn’t Feel Like My Spirit is Broken—Exploring a Broken Spirit & the Dark Night of the Soul with Christopher Cook‍
• Episode 79: Surviving Trauma & A Path to Forgiveness—Finding God In the Hardest Parts of Your Story With Esau McCaulley

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‍Thanks to our sponsors:

• Go to ⁠www.organifi.com/bestofyou⁠ today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
• Head to factormeals.com/bestofyou50 and use code bestofyou50 to get 50% off!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!
• Make the switch and build a starter kit. 15% off AND free shipping when you buy a Notes starter kit at notescandle.com/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.

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Transcript:

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Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to the 100th episode of The Best of You Podcast. It's hard to believe this is our one hundredth episode since the podcast aired almost two years ago, and gosh, what a journey this has been. I have loved this work of bringing different topics to you each week. It feeds the teacher in me, the part of me that really enjoys breaking down concepts and making them understandable.

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I used to teach high school and I've taught some graduate level courses in psychology. And so this work of podcasting has just been such a treasure for me. And the fact that you've responded to this podcast in the ways that you have through sharing it, through messaging me, through listening and reviewing all of your kind reviews has really validated this work that I do. And I'm just so grateful for that. 

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Frederick Buechner has a beautiful quote that says, the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. And this podcast has been one of those places for me where I felt like and here I go. I'm going to start tearing up, which is par for the course for me on this podcast. But this podcast, sitting in my little back room closet, speaking words over the microphone to your listening ears has been a place where I can tease out ideas and, and learn with you, even as I'm trying to describe and explain and unpack and untangle the knots of complicated topics related to psychology, related to emotional health, and related to our spiritual lives and our faith in God.

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And so on this release of our 100th podcast episode, I just want to say, thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for caring about this work of bringing together good psychology, good science, with deep, rich, abiding faith in the God who made us and made himself known through the person of Jesus.

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I'm so grateful that you're here with me each week. It gives me so much hope in the world, as I know you are putting so much goodness, so much healing, and so much light into the world around you, even as we gather on these Thursdays to talk through hard topics.

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Today we are continuing the “I shouldn't feel this way” series. We're talking about betrayal, and Steve Carter, my guest today, is an incredible example of naming what's hard, framing your reality and then braving a healing path. And those are the three practices that I lay out in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. Name what's hard. Frame your reality. And then brave a new path. Those three practices are essential to living a wholehearted life in partnership with God's spirit.

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So this book, I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, is the most forward facing of all my books. It's teaching you how to do these daily practices, again, of naming, framing, and braving so that you can stay on that path toward the life that God has for you. The book comes out May 7th, and when you preorder it, you will get the first three chapters now. 

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So you'll get the naming step and the framing step, which is actually my favorite step, which I shouldn't say, but it is because I think it's the least talked about and I think it's important, but you're going to get those first three chapters, a guided journal, as well as access to the video masterclass stuck in your head that I did a few weeks ago. You can get I Shouldn’t Feel This Way anywhere books are sold. It's going to be in your hands in just a couple of weeks, but you'll get started on those first few chapters now. Head over to ishouldntfeelthisway.com to claim those bonus items.

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So in today's episode, we get into betrayal. Betrayal is the act of betraying a trust that has been placed in someone. Maybe you placed trust in a partner, in a friend, in a pastor, in a parent, in a person. work colleague, and maybe they were unfaithful to you. Maybe they lied to your face or spread lies behind your back. Maybe they broke promises time and time again. Maybe they shared secrets that you had told them in confidence, maliciously with other people. Betrayal isn't making a one-time mistake. 

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We talk about this a lot on this podcast, And I want to drill down on it one more time here–we all make mistakes. We all make mistakes. The difference between making a mistake and a pattern, is whether you own it, whether you can go back to the person and say, I made a mistake. I'm so sorry. Here's what I'm doing to change so that this never happens again. 

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You'll hear my guest talk about this today. Betrayal is a consistent pattern of unfaithfulness, of deception, of manipulation, of broken promises, of breaching confidentiality, of toxic behaviors. Without taking ownership, without repairing, without any effort to make a change.

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And it's incredibly painful when you realize that someone you trusted has betrayed you. And not only have they betrayed you, but they're not trying to make it right. They're trying to cover over what they did by adding more lies, and more secrecy.

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My guest today, Steve Carter, has experienced every kind of betrayal and he's writing about it in his new book called Grieve, Breathe, Receive. And one of those betrayals in particular was extremely public. Many of you may have read the story about what happened at the Willow Creek church. This book is just a profound offering about the journey of grief that we have to go on in the wake of a major betrayal.

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I love that Steve framed this healing journey as one of grief because in doing so, he honors the truth of his experience even as he honors the process of grieving that loss that he's been on. Steve Carter is the bestselling author of The Thing Beneath the Thing and the host of The Craft and Character podcast. He's a coach and he currently serves as a teaching pastor at Forest City Church and teaches regularly at churches, conferences, and businesses worldwide. He lives outside Chicago, Illinois, with his wife and two kids, 

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You can get his brand new book, Grieve, Breathe, Receive: Finding a Faith Strong Enough to Hold Us anywhere books are sold. I cannot recommend it enough if you're someone who's experienced betrayal by anyone or just experienced any sort of complicated loss that has left you feeling confused and anxious, angry and frustrated. This book has real help and real hope for you. I'm so thrilled to bring you my conversation today with Steve Carter.

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Alison Cook: Steve, this is just such a powerful book. Grieve, breathe, receive–it's such a powerful title. But I was really struck by the betrayal after betrayal that launched this process of grief. Throughout the book, you write about these betrayals, the betrayal being on staff at Willow Creek, not just on staff, but being, correct me if I'm wrong, but being tapped to essentially succeed Bill Hybels as the lead teaching pastor. Is that right?

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Steve: It was going to be the two of us, but I was, over content and with the congregation, in many ways going to be the face of the primary preacher. Yep.

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Alison Cook: I remember you telling me, when you interviewed me about The Best of You, that you had a book queued up about that, and it was even called The Best of You. 

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Steve: Yes. Yes. It was so wild because when we talked and I saw your title, I was like, I always loved that title. What was crazy is, when I submitted that book, my publisher knew about the Bill Hyvel story coming out and they told me and I was like, what? So that's how I woke up to it. 

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I was preparing and had written a book, like a young Timothy taking and stepping in after Paul, and then to see it all come crashing down and the betrayal of it…yeah. Yeah.

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Alison Cook: It's stunning because that book went by the wayside. You write about another book that went by the wayside, but it brings tears to my eyes because I know how hard it is to write a book by your own decision, because you realized I'm not writing this book out of the right place. So you pulled that book. 

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You've discovered that the story you'd been told about your biological father wasn't true. So a betrayal by your own parents. There is just a stunning list of betrayals that you experienced within a fairly short period of time.

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I think about these “I shouldn't feel this way” moments. And as I was reading this with tears in my eyes, thinking this is more than any one human should have to encounter, I'm thinking to myself, and you do such a good job of describing, you were the one in the wake of all of these betrayals that's left without a job. That's left with people mad at you because you pulled out of Willow Creek on the early end, before a lot of other people did. 

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While the church was still in the midst of covering it up, correct me if I'm wrong. So you're the one without a job. You're the one people are mad at. You're the one reeling. You're the one feeling horrible, and yet you hadn't done anything wrong.

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Talk about an “I shouldn't feel this way” moment. And Steve, put us back in that moment in time when you have so many emotions, when you hadn't done anything wrong. 

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Steve: It's a little bit overwhelming to hear you retell all of those sequences. And I don't know if three years ago, I would have even used the word betrayal, and I never would have even connected the idea that betrayal could be trauma. And the effects of that are: they mess you up.

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You start to just wonder, how can I trust myself? And so I think back to when it all came out, as it started to unfold, I thought I could save it and I thought I could get everyone to the table and I thought I could, I thought we could do this.

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I never actually believed that an institution would betray victims. I never thought that the people that I knew would choose to preserve something. whether it's a story, whether it's a secret, whether it's hiding, and as I started to be awakened to that, whether it's in my family, whether it's in my church family, I was like, is any place safe? 

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And I say this pretty much every weekend I preach now–safe plus consistent again and again, over and over, on repeat, makes someone worthy of trust. If someone is unsafe and consistent, they're not worthy of trust. Or if they're safe, but inconsistent, it's really hard to trust them.

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What's so tricky is when you start to play out the areas and the spaces where you're getting blamed as the one that betrayed them by leaving. And I'm like, friends, I fought to do the right thing. I didn't do it perfectly. There's some stuff I really wish I would have done differently, like the book that we talked about a moment ago.

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There's things I wish I did differently, but for the most part, what I really longed for was for the church to be what I know the church to be. To walk alongside and hold space with the victims and the marginalized and the hurting, and to proclaim goodness. But I also realized that I was accessible. The former lead pastor was gone but I was online and people could get to me and I would engage.

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And I began to have to really translate their pain. Because what they said, some of it was just not personal, but it felt very personal. It was about someone else, but they were directing all of that energy towards me. And it was hard. It's hard to navigate through all that stuff.

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Alison Cook: I'm just thinking of the listener who, maybe not at the same public level of betrayal where everybody knows and it was just such an enormous international scandal, but there was a process of wanting to believe in the institution.

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There was a journey of wanting to believe, even as information was coming out until you got to that point of, I've got to leave. I've got to post my resignation. That's important for people to hear, because we do feel so much guilt.

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It takes so much time. How can I not believe in this institution? How can I not believe that what these people are telling me isn't true? I think that's such a normal process. And I guess I'm curious about that. That was maybe a few months of a period of time, where you just came to the point of recognizing, I can no longer trust this institution, this behemoth. Yeah.

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Steve: I got subpoenaed to meet with one of the victims and two two other staff people and one elder and Willow's lawyer and this woman's lawyer. And I knew this woman, like she lived in my neighborhood back in the day. Like I knew her. And when she walked in the room, I just knew right then something happened because that wasn't my friend. And she sat across and shared her story. And up until that moment. I was like, hey is there truth here? 

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My wife, she was a lot quicker to the truth than I was. I was hopeful. I was hopeful we could figure this out. But when I sat across the table with this woman and she shared, and at the end of it, the end of the conversation, I was like, hey, I'm in Bible college, they never taught me how to have conversations with lawyers. I don't know how to do this. We were friends. Can I call her? 

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And the lawyer talks to her and she says, I would like that. And so the next day I call her because I'm imagining the vulnerability hangover that she's feeling. And at the end of the conversation, I ask her this question, the dumbest question, but the greatest question I ask her is, what would you like me to do? And she said, get to the truth. And I said, okay. 

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From that moment, I felt like I had permission from a victim to get to the truth. It jolted me out of the gravitational, institutional preservation protection-mode to, oh my goodness. And I just started going one by one to each of the women victims and hearing their stories. I totally went rogue and I don't know if it was the right thing to do, going totally rogue. But I didn't know who I could trust. As I started to hear these stories, I realized this stuff happened.

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Alison Cook: Yeah.

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Steve: If we can't name what we did, if we can't name what we did, how can we fully claim what God did?

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And there was this massive cognitive dissonance. That was the tricky part. I think that moment opened my eyes, and then the next few months. every single day, some other news or information is being revealed to me that I'm going, oh my goodness, I got totally played. I got played. So it's just, it was tricky and all of that.

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Alison Cook: This is the thing about complicated emotions–and I see this with so many people walking through what you're talking about. I think people who are really loyal, people who are really empathetic, almost don't want to feel those things that you feel–the distrust. There’s something we're not getting at–what is the truth? 

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Sometimes really going after the truth forces you to do things like going rogue, talking to people, asking things, and it can feel uncomfortable to people. It can feel like you're being disloyal, it can feel like you're going behind people's backs, but you're trying to get at the truth, and so the fact that you're naming that is so helpful to people because it can feel really uncomfortable. We might rather avoid the complexity of those feelings.

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Steve: And that's when I first heard the title of your next book, I was like, that's exactly how I felt. I shouldn't feel this way–I'm much more in homeostasis by being loyal, believing the best, really leaning forward with hope, giving someone the benefit of the doubt. That's how I am. And to realize as I start to untangle, oh my goodness, I'm having these thoughts. 

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And then all of a sudden you shouldn't feel this way. Behold, it felt so unfamiliar for me to actually see the whole of a person, the beauty and the brokenness and hold both. I was so scared; it felt so unfamiliar. I think some people are way better at that. I felt like I had to grow up really quickly in that regard.

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Alison Cook: This is the trauma of toxicity and of gaslighting and of these tactics that people use. It's beautiful, your God given design to be loyal, to be empathetic; it is beautiful that you want to have hope, that you want to believe in people. That's a beautiful aspect of our God-given design.

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When people manipulate, exploit, prey upon that, and you came to find out, actually, that had been happening to you since you were a young child. You didn't even know. It distorts that otherwise good quality. And so you're trying to figure out, how do I be wise? And also that innocence that isn't all bad.

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And so I want to pivot here, because that's where you end up. How do I get back? I don't want to become somebody who's just completely untrusting, who's cynical, who's skeptical, which would be an understandable path after what you went through. Completely understandable, Steve. This is why I want everyone to read your book.

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Because you have experienced the depths of betrayal, and also there's a lot of hope in this book, a lot of goodness. You haven't lost that innocence. And one of the things that is so powerful is that you frame what happened in this book as grief. You frame it as a process of grief.

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And I thought that was such a fascinating way to frame the complicated mix of emotions that you went through. How did you begin to conceptualize the aftermath, the incredible emotional aftermath, as grief? I think there are a couple of ways you could have really framed it, but that framing of grief was really interesting to me.

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Steve: Yeah. The day after I resigned on August 5th, 2018, my wife and kids and I went to Madison, Wisconsin. I got up super early and I had turned my phone off, and so I turned my phone on that morning and it's just littered with comments. Some say good things. Majority of them are really painful things and I go on a walk in downtown Madison, and I'm just asking the Lord, and I haven't had this kind of thing happen very often in my life, but I just was like, I need a word, I need something. 

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I don't know what I'm doing next…I knew what the next 25 years of my life was, I don't know what it is now. I sat down at a bench, I didn't hear anything and I literally just kept crying out to God, and three words came. Grieve, breathe, receive. And I just, I wrote them down. I went to a donut shop in downtown Madison. I sat down and I wrote, it was almost like a marching order for me.

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Grieve what is. Grieve what I thought it was going to be, grieve how key people let me down, breathe in new mercies, and exhale anything that's getting in the way, and receive what I need to learn, receive what I need to own, and receive who God wants me to become. That became a mantra, but to be honest, I had no idea what the word grief meant.

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I had spent my life bypassing the desert, running from the wilderness, not leaning into grief at all. And I think as I started to lean in, I realized oh, I got to feel this. And I think in my own home growing up, I learned I shouldn't feel grief. I think even on Sunday mornings, when everything's just always happy and up and to the right, we're just subconsciously taught, you shouldn't feel this, you shouldn't feel this.

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And I think I had to learn my definition for grief and it's–there's way better ones–but for me it was helpful: I'm going to honor what comes up. When change shows up, and there's good change and there's hard change and there's just change. And how do I honor all of those complex emotions that are happening within me?

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Not try to bypass them, but hold space for them. And it became something that just slowly, but surely, God began to reshape and reform me to be a healthier person than I was previously.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. You and that, and you walk us through in the book, those three words, that mantra, it shaped the next few years. Tell us a little bit about the different emotions, the different complex emotions that came up for you.

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Steve: Yeah. One of the greatest gifts in the desert season, because my family, we lived close to Willow, then we moved to Arizona, and I just started reading the desert mothers and fathers. I just tried to hike and really walk through the deserted lands and see what started to show up.

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And one of the great gifts of that time was a bunch of mentors who had been in my life from years prior just made themselves available. I couldn't have gotten through this as quickly without them. But one of them, he knows I love Hebrew and Greek and words. And so he just called me and he just said, how's the SPADURA?

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And I'm like, what are you talking about? Is that a Greek word? I don't know that word. He's like the SPADURA, and I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. There's this acronym that he was he saw grief and it was really based off of Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief, but it was really talking about the shock and the sadness that comes and being able to honor it. 

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Oftentimes, as Kubler-Ross writes, we start to kind of bargain. ButI had a lot of anger. It just wasn't fair. Wasn't right. And I have mastered the art of bright-siding; I never wanted to be angry, so I could always turn it to be good. And this was a chance where I just had to sit in it. And then oftentimes when I sat in it, because I didn't have any muscles for grief, that anger turned to such profound sadness that it was like a downturn. There was a depression. I never had been on medication before that, and I needed help. My body could not get me through this like it normally had. And then there's this almost surprise, I don't know if it's hope, if it's a little bit of an upside, it's maybe where the waves aren't crashing as much and you just start to begin to see this. 

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And so as I started to walk through this, I realized it's not like you go from S to P to A to D to U to R to A. It's really like, I can be at a U and then go on Twitter and see what someone's posted. And it sends me to A, and it's almost like ping pong all over. And it felt more spiral, dynamic, and circular than it did actually moving from stage to stage. And so those words became almost like a feelings wheel for me to teach me how to name where I was at, because again, I was brought up with “You shouldn't feel this way. You shouldn't feel angry”. And to be able to honor that was a real gift for me.

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Alison Cook: You talk about in the book how crucial it was for you to be defining your reality by naming, to be naming and defining your reality, and that was a lifeline for you. And I can imagine with the level of gaslighting and the level of having to unpack all of the manipulations, it's almost like you had to replay the tape of the story of those years at Willow, even the story of your childhood with the other betrayal against this new understanding of the truth. And so tell me a little bit about that process of really spending that time in the desert, redefining your whole reality.

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Steve: This was the hardest part for me of the grief process. Because I had to be able to look at something and realize, oh, I was told that was true, but it's actually not true. I was told that was not true, but that was actually true. And I remember I actually spent some time with someone who does complex trauma therapy.

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And I walked through my story and I'll never forget what she said. She said, Steve, I just need to reflect something back to you. Number one, you were a victim in this, your goodness, your innocence, it got played on. But number two, this is what I'm more fascinated by. Why are you drawn to narcissists? And I was like, whoa. 

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And I think some of the stuff I had to realize was, why am I drawn to certain places and certain people and certain systems and certain structures? And I think part of it is that it was a familiar position growing up. It became familiar. I knew how to navigate through that world, number one. But then I think too, as you start to untangle, you have to look at stuff in the most honest and true way. And if I did get played, which I feel like I did, I have to also honor the truth that someone thought that they could play me. That the perks would overshadow doing the harder right.

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And that my way of living and operating and people pleasing and fawning and living made me very susceptible to bet on, that I would stay complicit and silent. As I had to start to do that level of work, I realized, oh my goodness. That untangling, but then as you start to untangle that, there's stuff that's really beautiful there, but there's also work to be done. And so I think it was not just the untangling of all that’s bad. 

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It was really the untangling of, man, I let that person say that. And I believe that to be true about me and that it wasn't. And there's a great verse in Genesis: who told you that? God's saying that. And I remember Christine Cain saying that: Who told you that? And did God really say…? Who told you that? 

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And I just realized, I took some other people's words as gospel, and I had to untangle that. And just coming back to, oh, this is who I am. Broken and beautiful. This is who I am. And that was work. That was a lot of work.

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Alison Cook: And doing that work without shaming yourself, because you were the victim. And it's such a delicate nuance, tension, of, I was taken advantage of. I was wronged here, let's name what's true. Let's name what's true. And also that receive–how do I grow so that I don't lose that innocence and also don't let this happen again?

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To the best of your ability. What do I have to learn so that I can, and it's such a delicate balance from not shaming or blaming yourself, but also just looking deep within. That's brave work. I loved that reframing of the “who told you?” not from a shaming place, but from a loving place, Steve. “Who told you this?”

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Steve: Yeah, I think that's really good. Yeah. Alison I just realized, sometimes the speed of our life, we don't get to slow down to actually stop and reflect. And sometimes when we do, we often feel that shame. And I think part of that process was just realizing–one of my mantras was like, no shame, no shade, like just consent to reality and just hold it.

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And let's just turn it around, almost like it's a diamond, to see what reflects. To see different colors and get curious. And there were days that it was harder. I felt like, man, did I mess up? Wow. There were days and I had to catch myself and be like, all right, that was enough. That was seven seconds of shame. This is not helpful to the conversation. 

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What can we learn? What can we be curious about? What's the deeper work that can be done? So that was a helpful piece, but it is so easy for that shame to creep in and take over.

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Alison Cook: You talk about a quote that's about that liminality. I talk about “places in between” in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way to do that work of, I do feel this way. I have to have places to metabolize it. He said it so beautifully. He said, hope is the liminal vulnerability that invites us into a place where we show up as our whole selves, and admit we are limited. 

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We can't undo the past. We can't make people change their minds. You're holding the tension of your whole self, what you have control over, what you don't, what you can't change, what you can. There was so much wisdom in that. 

Steve, it seems as if there was a precision to the naming, because what is so beautiful about the book is that you are pretty honest. You're not, to use your word, bright-siding things about what happened to you. It's also not a book of hopelessness or cynicism.

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And I think that's a really hard balance to strike. You said something really profound. You said, Willow didn't hurt me; five people did. And that reframe seemed really important to you in figuring out how to contextualize what happened. Can you talk to me a little bit more about that?

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Steve: Yeah. I found myself just getting asked all the time. How can you still love the church after what happened? And people talking about Willow really badly. 

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Alison Cook: Yeah.

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Steve: I struggled with it and I had to really wrestle. Am I bright-siding here? Am I just trying to preserve and protect? But honestly I started to realize, I'm not mad at the sophomore in high school who went to the youth group. I'm not frustrated with many of the staff. I'm not. I loved my job. I loved my life. I loved what I got.

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I felt a connection with those people and those people, I believe, felt a connection with me. God was working. I knew it. And as I started to really sit with it, I'm like, it's not Willow. It's these five people. And that reframed it for me to realize, oh, my work is to ensure that I'm doing the reparative work to not allow the seeds of unforgiveness to take root in my heart, in my soul, where bitterness and resentment can take over. 

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And that's hard, because every day, there are oftentimes reminders of the faces of these five people. And I have to remember the process of forgiveness. And it's always at work trying to make sure that my heart is ready. That if that day comes where I can break bread, that potentially a miracle can happen. I don't know if that will ever happen, but my work isn't to control whether they show up.

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My work is to say, will I be ready and not violate my soul, but from an integrated and healthy and beloved place by Jesus and the kingdom of God, I can engage that. I didn't want to, because you get energy from being angry, you get energy from being bitter, you get energy from anger-fantasizing, like “If I saw one of them, this is what I would say!”. There is a high that you get from that.

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You don't get the same thing with forgiveness. You get to be a little bit lighter and freer, but it doesn't have that same energy if that makes sense.

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Alison Cook: Oh yeah. Yeah. You get the daily, you get more of the peace, you get more of the hope. It's so interesting as you describe that process of compartmentalizing, and I see this with folks who've been through traumas. Compartmentalizing those five people that are the real root of the anger, of the bitterness, of the resentment, which paradoxically allows you to be restored with all the folks where there isn't that hurt.

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It's such a paradox that by really drilling down on what was hurtful and the people that really are like, no, that wasn't okay, and maybe I'll work out through a process of forgiveness, but I will also bracket them in my brain as folks who are untrustworthy.

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Steve: Yep.

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Alison Cook: It also paradoxically freed you to have more peace with the larger story of your time at Willow.

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Steve: Yes. 100%. And I did an intensive with my therapist and I realized that, and I know that you're familiar and IFS, I feel like I learned about it from your first book and I started to really begin to engage with it. But I realized the feeling of powerlessness would come, the firefighter would come out and just get that fire out. Don't ever feel that, go buy something, go eat something, go experience something, go preach, go work, do something, don't feel that. Or protect yourself at all costs.

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Alison Cook: Yeah.

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Steve: But oftentimes I didn't know how to sit with the powerlessness, and then choose a more integrated, embodied path forward.  And that is what the gift of almost Sunday brings. The gift of Easter and resurrection is that There is something on the other side of the betrayal; there is something on the other side of the grief.

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There is something on the other side and I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. And yet the forming work that came continues to surprise me.

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Alison Cook: It's just, oh man, the part of me that just grieves with you, I think also being a writer and knowing the labor that at the very least of all of that, those two losses of two books you had to let go of. I'm so grateful for this book because it shows the fruit of the journey for you these last three years. And it's so rare, Steve, for us to see examples of people who are naming what's hard, who are being relentlessly honest about the truth and also simultaneously the process of staying hopeful for lack of a better word. 

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Hopeful that it's not a binary and actually, the more you name what's hard and the more you quarantine it out, the more you actually can find hope. What would you say, Steve, to that younger 38 year old you now, if you could sit with him for a moment, who's about to go into this.

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Steve: It's gonna be okay. It’s gonna be okay. The whole first half of life energy and second half of life energy, there's something that's so real about it. But there's a band called Brand New and they have this song. They're not a Christian band, but they have this song called Jesus Christ. And they say this line, Jesus Christ, Jesus, what did you do those three days that you were dead? Because this problem is going to last more than the weekend. 

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And I think that kind of sense of, for some of us, Friday is going to be a lot of days, just the grief. And the Saturday of Breathe, that might be a lot of days and a lot of seasons. But Sunday does come. And it doesn't come the way that we thought it would come, or that we hoped it would come. It usually surprisingly comes in different ways. And I think I just realized it's not gonna be what I thought it was gonna be. But it's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay.

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Alison Cook: It's a powerful example. I love that. Going into that place in between, that Easter Saturday, for a prolonged period of time and letting it do its work so that now, in good time, you're able to tell your story. You're able to tell it in a way that will bless people, will honor folks who've been through betrayals, who've been through hard times, who need to grieve and who also don't want to get swallowed up by it, but want to come out the other side.

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The last question I would ask is, what would you say to those listening who've been through betrayal? Or who are in the midst of processing through betrayal? Maybe it's the same thing.

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Steve: Yeah I think that the grief journey, I think that Friday, Saturday, Sunday, just became a, grief is Friday, breathe is Saturday, receive is Sunday. It became a healthy mantra, but I had to honor what comes up when Friday shows up, and your Friday is when you are in grief.

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You're like, how could this happen? And then Saturday is you actually trying to trick your brain to go, I can get through this. I can get through this. I'll figure this out. I know what to do. And then Sunday's just the reality that, oh, you can't get through it. But you will walk with grief. And it will be a part of your story, but it won't have the same amount of energy that it once had. 

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I'm not saying it's going to be easy. You're going to hold it. It's going to be a companion that you will carry with you. And it will shape you and form you and it will also surprise you. That's the reality that, for anyone who's walking through it, it's okay to name if it's Friday, or if it's Saturday, but just hold on to the reality that in a way that doesn't make sense, God will surprise you because Sunday's coming.

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Alison Cook: Thank you for pastoring us through this with this book. I think it's going to help so many people. How can people find you? How can they find the book?

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Steve: Yeah. Thank you. Stevecarter.org, @SteveRyanCarter on Instagram and Twitter or X or whatever we call it. And then the book is everywhere books are sold. Feel free to reach out. I always love to connect with people. 

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And Alison, I just have to say, your voice is so refreshing when I read your words. I listen to the podcast and I hear you, and then I get the chance to read, and I hear you and it's your ability to take such thoughtful concepts and make them accessible. There were moments where your first book, it was with me in the desert. And so I just thank you. I think for so many of us who would listen to you on the regular, thank you for consistently being that truth teller, that guide and a reminder that it's going to be alright. It's going to be alright.

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Alison Cook: I appreciate that. I'm so grateful that, I guess it's it's cliche, it's Mr. Rogers who said, in the midst of so much dismay, look for the helpers. Look for the people. And you're one of those people. Reading this book, I was honestly, Steve, going into this book grieving, not in my own personal life, but some of the tragic fallout of our culture that we're seeing in the church culture.

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And I read this book and I thought, what a gift in the middle of it. What a gift. I am so sorry that you had to go through it and I'm so grateful for the fruit that you allow God to bring in your life through it. Just so grateful for you. Just so grateful for your work, for these words, for your life, for the goodness that you've allowed to continue to come through your story.

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Steve: you. That means the world, coming from you.

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Alison Cook: Yeah, so Steve, are there any pre-order items for folks if they want to go ahead and get the book now?

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Steve: Yeah, our books actually come out on the same day, which I'm so excited about. It's such an honor. If people pre-order and they go to SteveCarter.org, I wrote something called the evening Psalms, which is like a devotional of 150 Psalms, so they can get that for free.

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And then we'll have small group curriculum that we've created for conversations for people to have. So they're on my website. There's a bunch of little freebies if people choose to pre-order and submit the receipt number.

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Alison Cook: I'm so glad because I guarantee you, whatever you've put out will be helpful to folks. So go get that, and read Grieve, Breathe, Receive.

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Do you ever feel like your spirit is broken? Do you feel like you can't put yourself back together despite your best efforts? Please do not miss this episode. My guest, Christopher Cook, has such powerful words about a broken spirit and how it’s different from (but related) to depression and burnout. We also dig into a real time discussion of the dark night of the soul. This conversation connected so many dots for me, and I cannot wait for you to hear it.

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Here’s what we cover:

1. The painful circumstances that nearly broke Christopher's spirit

2. Recovering from survival mode

3. What is a broken spirit?

4. Chris’s experience of a dark night of the soul

5. The true meaning of surrender

6. How to support someone going through a dark night of the soul

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Additional Resources:

• Win Today with Christopher Cook‍
• Healing What You Can't Erase: Transform Your Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Health from the Inside Out by Christopher Cook‍‍‍
• @wintodayChris on Instagram‍
• healingwhatyoucanterase.com‍
• DrAlisonCook.com/resources‍
• Proverbs 18:14‍
• US Depression rates from Gallup‍
• Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross‍
• The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith by Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich‍
• Psalm 51:17
• ‍Psalm 51:6
• ‍John 8:31-32‍
• John 11; The Death of Lazarus‍
• 2 Corinthians 10:3-6

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‍Related Episodes:

• Episode 97: I Shouldn't Feel This Anxious—Insights on Trauma & Healing with Monique Koven
• Episode 98: I Shouldn’t Feel Alone in My Grief—Why Your Grief Matters & the #1 Most Important Support For Those Who Are Grieving

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‍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.
• Head to factormeals.com/bestofyou50 and use code bestofyou50 to get 50% off!
• Go to AquaTru.com and enter code BESTOFYOU at checkout to get 20% OFF any AquaTru purifier!
• Go to thrivemarket.com/bestofyou for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift!
• Make the switch and build a starter kit. 15% off AND free shipping when you buy a Notes starter kit at notescandle.com/bestofyou.‍

Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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.

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Transcript:

Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you are here today for this episode.

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It's the third episode in the “I Shouldn't Feel This Way” series. We have two more to go. So this is the middle one and it is good. The whole conversation took a left turn about halfway through and got really real. It’s real time about a topic that I know so many of you have resonated with, related to the dark night of the soul. 

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We talked about it in episode 77. It makes an appearance here, and my guest talks very candidly about his very current experience in it. And because he shared so openly and so vulnerably, we went into this real time conversation where we were teasing out some terms in a really nuanced way.

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I'm so grateful for this conversation. I had a huge aha moment as I connected the dots of some of the work I'm trying to do related to this idea of surrender. About halfway through, we talk about that. There's so much in this episode and I came away with so much. I can't wait for you to hear about it. 

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In this whole series, we are naming hard things because I believe when we name things, it sets us on a path toward getting the help and the healing and the clarity we need. If you're resonating with any of the things we've named in this series so far, whether it be a broken spirit, a dark night of the soul, we touch on depression in this episode, we talked about grief and trauma in the last two episodes in this series, if these namings are resonating with you, if you're like, I think that's similar to what I'm experiencing, be sure to seek support in that journey. 

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We talk a lot in each of these episodes about various paths to seeking support, whether it's a therapist, whether it's a spiritual director, a pastor, a small group, safe people in your life, whether you might need to consult with a psychiatrist or a medical professional, please reach out for support.

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Toward that end, I want to remind you of some resources available to you. Number one, you can go back to episode 71 called “Do I need a therapist?”, where I walk you through really practical tools to figure out if you need to see a therapist and how to go about finding one.

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You can also find a lot of resources on my website, DrAlisonCook.com/resources. There are links and resources there to help you get connected with therapists and support groups. So please check out those resources. 

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Naming what's hard and what's going on in your life is a huge step toward getting the help that you need. And once you have a name for something, you can take this information to that other person and say, hey, this is what I think is going on. Would you come alongside me as I journey through healing? 

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My guest says it several times in the episode today, and I want to highlight it up front: we heal through community. We need other people to come alongside us in our healing journey. So as you're listening, bear that in mind. I'm so grateful that you're here. And I'm so grateful for your commitment to this work of healing

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My guest today is Christopher Cook. We are not related, although we are often shelved together in the bookstores. And I so enjoy the opportunities that we get to connect on our work. Chris is a leadership coach and author and the host of the Win Today podcast. He focuses on transformation and wholeness. 

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His brand new book is called Healing What You Can't Erase: Transform Your Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Health from the Inside Out. And there's such good stuff in this book. Chris talks really openly about his own painful experiences and the toll it took on his own body, even as he was doing everything in his own power to try to survive.

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He gives such a powerful illustration about the broken spirit that can result from all the years of striving, of performing, of trying to survive really hard things and how naming that reality was the first step toward freedom.

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I'm so thrilled to bring you this rich episode with my friend, Christopher Cook.

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***

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Alison Cook: Chris, I loved the book. There's so much in it. There's so much good psychology. There's so much biblical wisdom. This whole podcast is all about integration. It's my goal, as we've talked, to bring good psychology to faith-based people because I believe the two go hand in hand, and you're doing that in this book. 

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I think it's so important for people to know how to differentiate from this sort of self-help gospel–my books are always in Christian self-help and I imagine yours are–what does that even mean, and how do we tease that out from true Holy Spirit-led transformation? But tell us, before we dive into that, set the stage, you do it so beautifully in the book, about your story, about what led you to going on this path so deeply. It came out of your own personal pain.

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Chris Cook: It really did, Alison, and what a great place to start. I reached an inflection point in my own journey of pain where I realized, I can't do this anymore. And that was in late October 2014, again, where I reached this place of saying, life is moving forward, and I am not. I think a lot of our friends with us today might be facing the same feeling, at least subconsciously. 

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I'm looking around me, and it feels like everyone's moving forward, but somehow my wheels are spinning in the mud so to speak, and we can dive into that, but let me rewind to get us to the place of October 2014. So in 1994 I was 11 and a half years old, and my mom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, which is a medically incurable diagnosis. It's a terminal diagnosis. And at the time in the early nineties, my mom being a 37 year old Caucasian woman, it was such an anomaly because the disease at the time typically showed up in elderly black men.

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Doctors were baffled. They didn't know what to do. So they said here, you could do a stem cell transplant, or do nothing. And to fast forward through the story, she ended up finding a classically trained immunologist, a medical doctor in New York City, who had pancreatic cancer patients living 25 years past diagnosis.

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He proposed a form of alternative therapy and insurance didn't cover it, so a lot of life changes were had at that point, where the family's bills tripled, the income was cut in half, and she was on that program I'd say for 11, 12 years. In 2006, after experiencing what she thought was severely strained discs in her back, it turned out myeloma was spreading throughout her body. It had metastasized. 

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She was given 30 days to live, and from 2006 to 2011, she was in and out of the hospital repeatedly. It was chaos around the clock. I want to back up real fast to say, amidst all of this, Alice, my sister, and I grew up in a very safe and stable, faith-filled environment. We had incredible parents. Both of our parents were professional counselors. The environment was very safe and stable for us while the trauma was unfolding. 

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So we almost lost her again in surgery in 2011. And then in 2012, in November, the day before Thanksgiving, November 21st, she took her last breath. I didn't get to say goodbye. It was really traumatic because the journey with her was 18 and a half years. Nine months after that, the state of complex post traumatic stress in my own body hit fever pitch and my body crashed. I was diagnosed with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis nine months after her death.

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I'm not sure I wanted to live by Christmas of 2013, Alison, and I never thought about acting on those thoughts. I was having 20 severe panic attacks every single day. Oh goodness. By October 2014, which is where I started my story, I had reached this inflection point where I said, I can't do this. I can't do this. And it was a short time of prayer. 

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I wouldn't consider it going into a time of prayer. I said, Lord, you got to help. I'm done. I'm exhausted. You gotta heal me. And he didn't respond with, “Great. I see. You're healed”. He responded with a question: “Chris, what do you want me to do for you”? And I knew at that moment, Alison, I had been set up.

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That cracked open the door to transformation, which we can dive into, but I'll hit pause there and throw it back to you.

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Alison Cook: Yeah, you write about the details of that leg of your journey so powerfully, bringing the complex into the complex trauma. Trying to care for your mom, trying to be present to your family, all the realities, the financial realities, and you were young. This was all the way into, I think, when you were about 30.

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Chris Cook: Yeah, exactly. My mom died 18 days after my 30th birthday.

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Alison Cook: You talk in the book, and I think this is so interesting, especially for people of faith, that you were in some ways. a master of healthy habits during that time. You talk about having a playbook.

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Chris Cook: Yes.

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Alison Cook: Tell me a little bit about that. It's not like you were completely not coping during that time, but tell me a little bit about what it looked like for you to cope in your twenties as you were leading up to this inflection point. What were you doing to cope during that time?

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Chris Cook: While my mom was still alive, I'd say the reflex was survival. I created a level of stability and routine in my life because everything else was out of control. And I'd say, in part due to my temperament, because I'm a type A, very driven high achiever, I like things in order. I don't like surprises. I don't love change. Routine is my favorite word. 

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In my twenties, it was creating systems for everyday life, and the systems created stability. But if I'm being honest, it was a very shaky foundation because I thought I could control life, but that is the biggest misnomer. We don't have control over the circumstances of life. And I thought I did. I think what caused more pain was the fact that when everything crashed, my whole paradigm about the fact that I thought I could control fell apart, in addition to the circumstances falling apart themselves.

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Alison Cook: Yeah.

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Chris Cook: Even to what you alluded to, through my journey of grieving, I still endeavored to create systems. As you said, the playbook for becoming healthy and even after my MS diagnosis, I had this playbook of how I would become healthy again.

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If I'm being honest, the motivation, Alison, for all of that was fear, not security in my identity in Christ. The motivation was, “I have to stay alive”. This is survival. It's fear. Fear was driving my maniacal drive to put the quote unquote playbook together. It wasn't wholeness. The fear was keeping my nervous system dysregulated, and I was in a state of chronic stress.

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Alison Cook: This is so interesting to me, Chris, because the system, as you call it, the playbook that you were doing, my guess is from the outside, didn't look that bad. Those things that you were doing, whether it's daily prayer or exercise or whatever these things are obviously good things. That's what gets so conflated. 

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The system itself you were doing great at, but you said it was the motivation under the system at the time the system was containing the fear, not creating a healing place for the fear.

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Chris Cook: You nailed it, Alison. That's it. The drive to fix my body, to fix my mind, to create stability again in my life was because of the trauma and the severity of the trauma. And I said, I can't do this. I cannot continue to wake up like this. And the fear-motivation kept my body in stress.

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Alison Cook: Yeah.

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Chris Cook: Every bit of effort that I exerted was from a fear-motivation, which immediately put me in a limited capacity.

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Alison Cook: Reading your book, it almost felt like recovery from a socially acceptable form of coping. When the bottom fell out in that moment of inflection and you said, I came to the end of myself, I couldn't do this. My support structures went away. 

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You think about someone that maybe has an addiction that's unhealthy, where they have to give up the thing, but the thing is actually bad. And yet in your case, that's where I want to tease this out with you, you had to give up the thing that wasn't actually a bad thing. Does that make sense?

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Chris Cook: Sure does.

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Alison Cook: But you first had to face something, Chris, and I love how you drilled down on this in the book, and it's a phrase we don't use enough. You call it a broken spirit.

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Tell me a little bit about that. There's grief. There's all these diagnostic labels. It was like, I'm crushed in spirit. Tell me a little bit about what that meant to you to realize that.

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Chris Cook: This is perhaps the linchpin, which excites me because my prayer is that we will awaken to the reality of the presence of a broken spirit. In a lot of cases, perhaps even from a self-help perspective, we approach life and recovery and therapy and trauma from a mind-body perspective only. 

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Unintentionally, we negate the fact that we are spirit, soul, and body, not body-mind. And scripture, as the anchor to my life, tells me that a crushed spirit, who can bear? Here's the picture I want to paint for folks which might help bring clarity to this. Because some are saying, Chris, what do you mean by spirit? Isn't that the same thing as the soul? 

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Some theologians even argue that the immaterial is one, but we won't go there. Here's the picture: if our bodies were a boat, the soul is our desire, our seat of emotions; the mind, the will; the emotions, the sail, because the sail sets the direction of the boat. The spirit is the wind and the driving force that gives life to the sail. 

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So if the boat is sitting at a port, but there's no wind in the sail, it's not going anywhere. The Hebrew word for spirit is “ruach”, which means inner drive, breath, wind, force. I'm not talking about the Holy Spirit, I'm talking about the human spirit–and the life of the spirit gives life to the sail, and sets the body in motion.

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The broken spirit, when it is collapsed, when our inner drive for life is collapsed, no amount of willpower, self-help, or good intentions can overcome the fact that the deepest part of our being is not soul, it's spirit, according to Scripture. So I want to address that first and recognize, oh, I've got to get that spirit healed by the power of the Holy Spirit and a bunch of other great modalities, so that my mind and my will, my emotions, my inner drive, the intentions of my life can be reset. So that my body can be in motion toward whatever I'm called to do.

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Alison Cook: Chris, I love the metaphor. Prior to this inflection point, prior to this moment of reckoning, it's almost like you were working on the boat. You had this really vibrant, huge functioning boat, but it literally could not sail because, it's heartbreaking when you put it that way, because your spirit was crushed. It didn't matter how hard you worked to get yourself together.

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Chris Cook: That's it, Alison.

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Alison Cook: And that's heartbreaking. Because how many people, with the self-help, and I hear that in your book, you're pretty blunt about the self-help movement not addressing the spirit. It's so demoralizing. How did you realize, oh my gosh, I have to take a different approach here/?

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Chris Cook: It was honestly the investment of time in the Scriptures and getting the clear blueprint for how we were created. So I'll set it up this way: we are the creation of a Creator; in order to understand how I function best, I gotta go to the Creator and study my design. For instance, I have an iPhone sitting right here and let's imagine for folks joined us, here's the metaphor. 

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If I didn't understand the full function of how this was designed and how it was made to function at an optimal state, I could say oh, this is a doorstop. It's heavy enough. It'll stop my door from closing automatically–and it will. But am I using this according to design?

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No, so therefore I go to the Scriptures and I say, okay Scripture is clear about the fact that we are created with spirit, soul, and body. We are spirit, we have a soul, we live in a body. And scripture is very clear also about the state of a broken spirit and what it will do to a human being when that experience is present in their lives. 

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For instance, Solomon said it in Proverbs 18:14, a paraphrase of it, basically that the strong spirit of a person, the strong inner drive, wind, breath, life force can sustain him or her in bodily pain and sickness. But then he asks this question: who can withstand a broken spirit, a broken mind, inner drive, a broken life force, courage, animation, vigor? Those are all words used to describe the ruach. 

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So what that tells me is that my best efforts, on my best day, in my best ideas, will never overcome the subconscious broken state of my human spirit, whose drive for life is gone. Let's put a, I don't know, perhaps a modern term on it. I think it's close to burnout, but it's way more extreme than burnout. I think it's like languishing, but it's more extreme. 

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This is not a difficult season. This is an utter state of defeat and hopelessness and lifelessness. I think I read a stat from Gallup the other day which was collected in 2023 and the state of depression amongst Americans is at fever pitch levels right now. So it could be part of that too, but it is the chronic unrelenting state of lifelessness. And it is so insidious that after we live with it for so long, we don't even recognize it for what it is. We think, ah, it's me.

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Alison Cook: Yeah.

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Chris Cook: It's me. And we learn to cope around that. And because we cope around it, we don't address it. And because we don't address it, we don't get healed from it.

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Alison Cook: It's a powerful naming. That's all we try to do on this podcast–name. My next book that we'll talk about next week is about the power of naming, and I hear that it was very important to you. It wasn't depression. It wasn't grief. There were components of those things. It was a broken spirit. How do you distinguish it from depression? I would assume there's overlap.

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Chris Cook: Sure. Because I'm not a medical professional nor a professional therapist, I don't want to put a ton of weight on my answer to your question. At the same time, I'm going to give it my best. I think it has notes of depression, notes of burnout, notes of hopelessness, notes of defeat, but it is all encompassing.

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I wake up and it's there. It's not, I wake up and then something happens and it shows up. No. I wake up and it's there. I go to sleep, it's there. My passion and drive for things that I once enjoyed is gone. I think that's synonymous with the experience of burnout. But as I said, I think it's more systemic than that because the broken spirit affects our body too.

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Alison Cook: The other term that's floating through my mind that we talk about on the podcast is dark night of the soul. Are you familiar with that? It's from St. John of Cross.

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Chris Cook: Alison, I'm walking through that right now. I have been since May of 2023. This is wild that you mentioned this, and you and I are going to talk about this at length, maybe on my show, because I am fascinated by this. I had Father Ronald Rollheiser on my show a few months ago, and Rollheiser and I talked about the dark night of the soul.

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So I'm reading right now, St. John of the Cross's book on the dark night. I am reading Janet Hagberg and Robert Gulick's book, The Critical Journey, synonymous with the dark night of the soul. Pete Scazzaro also talks about that. But, oh gosh, what's interesting is Father Rollheiser told me that in his experience, the dark night of the soul is not like psychological depression. He said, when a person is going through a dark night of the soul, it's not like psychological depression. When they walk into a room, they bring life to a room.

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Alison Cook: Yeah.

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Chris Cook: I'm not yet there. All I am saying, though, is that it is a very present experience for me, and it's really painful.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. I appreciate the honesty about that. I think again, these namings, broken spirit, dark night of the soul, they're scary. It can be hard. But also, I so appreciate you walking us through it because you can feel crazy if you go to a therapist and they give you an antidepressant.

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Chris Cook: You nailed it.

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Alison Cook: It doesn't mean you're losing your faith. That's the other thing people can assume. There is a spiritual despair, for lack of a better word, a spiritual hunger that we can go through with our trauma and all these other things, but it is distinctly spiritual. And I love that you're trying to tease this out. I'm with you in it. It's so important. 

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Chris Cook: This is a working theory for me. I'm still working this out and unpacking it and discovering. All I know is that a broken spirit for me has been different from the experience of the dark night of the soul. However, again, here we go with overlap. What are some things that might connote a dark night of the soul experience?

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The felt presence of the Lord is all of a sudden absent. My hunger for the Scriptures is absent. There could be the presence of lifelessness and purposelessness. The dark night of the soul in my experience here, I'm 10 and a half months into it right now, I'm learning how to hold both joy and grief in the same hand for stuff.

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It's been very purging, very cleansing, very hard, and it's nothing that I've done to bring this on. And maybe folks listening would resonate with this. Imagine you get hit in multiple domains of your life all at once. That's what I've been walking through. Again, it feels similar to the broken spirit. This is interesting. I'm actually thinking about this in real time as we're talking. Let me tease this out. 

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I think about Psalm 51:17 where David says to the Lord, the sacrifice acceptable to the Lord is a broken spirit. And this is after his confrontation with Nathan, regarding his adulterous behavior with Bathsheba and all of that. He says the sacrifice acceptable to the Lord is a broken spirit. 

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How many of us, Alison, unintentionally nurture that broken spirit like a little baby because it's the last thing we're holding on to. Because we're like, I can't let go of this. This is the last piece of my soul, and we're attached to it. And the Lord says, I won't reject it. I won't reject it. And we're like, yeah, but life has told me people are untrustworthy. And if we're really being honest, Lord, you are too. Both in the dark night experience and in the experience of the broken spirit, I think the next right move is surrender. 

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We could talk about that. I have a whole chapter about surrender in the book because that was the counterintuitive, anti-self-help move for me out of pain. It was not to try harder, but to give in. Which was surrender.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. And that, oh gosh. Okay. So this is very real time for both of us. There's so much of this in the book, but to have kind of the current understanding of what it's still like for you. I think that the term, surrender, is really powerful, what you said, and that's one of the distinguishing factors of whether there's a biochemical and medical thing going on. 

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There might be a component of surrender, but there's also a component of, I need to go get on antidepressant medication. We're delineating something pretty nuanced here in this case, where there is a spiritual root or a spiritual origin. It's that surrender, that I have to stop fighting.

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Tell me a little bit about what that was like for you. That gets back to the system that you had to let go of. How did that work for you?

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Chris Cook: Oh, you're such a good question asker. I love this. Okay surrender, because folks are saying, wait a minute, after all I've been through, now you're telling me to give up and surrender? That's actually not what I'm telling you to do. Surrender in my life was not giving up and saying whatever happens, happens.

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It was giving in. It was giving in to a process of confrontation of my own dysfunction, my own blind spots, the narratives that were keeping me stuck, the behavior patterns, etc. It was giving in to a process of confrontation that would, over time, in community and by the power of the Holy Spirit, lead to transformation. 

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I want to say that again because folks want to get a hold of this. Surrender is the next right thing to do; it is the anti-self-help thing to do, where self-help says, look down and try harder. We're saying, look up and out, and surrender. Surrender is giving in to community, because we heal in community, not alone. We heal in community. I'm going to give into a process of confrontation, looking in the mirror, so to speak, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

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Search me and know me, oh God, that would lead to a process of transformation. Now here's the key. Unlike self-help, transformation is not an overnight experience. Transformation happens daily and we will continue to experience transformation as long as we live. That's the big key for this. Surrender, confrontation, transformation. Surrender, confrontation, transformation. Change is hard. Transformation is painful. But, the pain of not changing is even worse.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. Yeah I'm listening to you and it reminds me, I had a friend in college who had a lot of stuff and I didn't understand it at the time, but I remember she said, sometimes you have to let the ceiling fall. We work so hard to try to hold the ceiling up and sometimes, you have to let the ceiling fall.

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Chris Cook: I agree.

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Alison Cook: I love what you're saying. It's a giving-in. And it doesn't mean that you don't get up the next day and maybe take a walk and maybe do some of the things we know are healthy to do, but there's something different in your spirit. The reason why you're doing it is different. 

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Chris Cook: I have to give him access. He says, the sacrifice acceptable to the Lord is a broken spirit. What does that mean? I have to give him access to the most broken vulnerable place of the core of my being, the place of woundedness. That is really risky business, especially after repeated adversity. Because adversity, Alison, is so loud. Adversity shouts louder than the still and small. Adversity shouts, where's your God now?

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Alison Cook: I know. And shame. You talk a lot about how the enemy goes after us with it. I hadn't made this connection until now, but as I'm listening to you, I'm realizing that's what I'm trying to do. We talked about this with The Best of You, that you and I have so much synergy in our work.

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There's so much in your book, Healing What You Can't Erase, so many valuable resources. But it's interesting that one thing that you said is what I'm trying to do with when we say, “I shouldn't feel this way. The surrender is: I do feel this way.

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Chris Cook: Bingo. Bingo.

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Alison Cook: That's what we're trying to do–to go, I do feel this way. I do. I can't fix it. And that is paradoxically what opens the door to what you're saying.

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Chris Cook: That's confession. That's true confession. It's saying, here's the truth. Here's the unfiltered truth because He won't deal with us in the false. Behold, you desire truth in the inner being, the psalmist wrote. Alison, this is going to mess with people's paradigm, and I hope it does a little bit because too often as believers, we approach the Lord with this sugary coating of religious dressing, and it's not true.

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He knows the thoughts and intentions of our hearts. He is a perfect holy God, and I believe we are not to approach him with pride or accusation. We have to come to him in honesty and in truth. Jesus said, if you abide in my word, you'll know the truth and the truth will set you free. Now this is another anti self-help move. There is a difference between truth and true.

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Alison Cook: I love that. I love that. Tell us a little bit more about that. That was good. 

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Chris Cook: So all of us experience circumstances in life that are true to us. Undoubtedly true. Fill in the blank with any one of your adversities. That's true. No one's denying that, but our perceptions and our ability to read our “true” is often so close-up, we miss the forest for the trees. And therefore, in the surrender, in the giving-in, not only do we allow the hand of the Holy Spirit to redeem, to reshape, to heal, but we gain perspective when we surrender our true to His truth.

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That changes narratives. That changes perspectives, because this is not about changing our minds. This is about changing our mindset. The whole default way by which we look at life and ourselves and circumstances–only he can do that. That's the change of heart. I can't change my heart. I need him to do that.

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This is why, Lord, have your way. Lord, here's my broken spirit. Lord, here is the very thing that I thought I could never let go of. Here it is,, and I'm really tentative to give this to you, but here we go.

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Alison Cook: Okay. So to go back to, there's so much, we're going to run out of time and I want to get into the healing, but you know what, people are gonna have to buy the book. I really want to understand this broken spirit because I think it's a profound offering. I think what you're saying, Chris, is in your twenties when you built this system, it was to keep you from having to face the broken spirit. Is that it?

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Chris Cook: Oh, I love this, Alison. You're so good at this. You're a therapist. This is why. I'm getting free therapy right now. Alison, here it is: because if I could build a quote unquote bulletproof system, guess what I did not have to do? I did not have to surrender. I did not have to lean on and trust in and rely upon someone else. Because life and adversity had said, trust only yourself, Chris.

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So if I crafted this little greenhouse or this echo chamber of beliefs inside myself and systems and strategies, which were all decent, like it was a good try. I didn't have to surrender my heart. Then, if I didn't have to surrender my heart, I couldn't be wounded again, and I was exhausted of being wounded, which means if I could self-protect and self-promote because of shame narratives, and could keep my heart at bay inside myself, I didn't have to get hurt again.

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But guess what? I was going to be a prisoner of my own life.

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Alison Cook: That reckoning of, oh my gosh, I have a broken spirit, as painful as that is, and it makes sense that it's evolved into this spiritual dark night of the soul, is actually the path to freedom.

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Chris Cook: Yes, ma'am.

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Alison Cook: It was what was true. It was what was true. And yes, it brings up all, By the way, all of the time you're doing the system, you're a Christian. We get trapped in even our own Christian systems.

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Chris Cook: 100%. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because I could compartmentalize the fact that again, I didn't have to lean on and trust in and rely upon Him with my whole heart, with my whole mind, with all of my strength. I'm going to put myself on the block here in a way, because of my temperament, my wiring, the strength of my wiring overextended and under stress became a liability.

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When I was provoked and adversity was so loud in my life, when I heard about leaning upon the Lord, trusting in Him with all my heart, with all my mind, I was really keeping the weight of one foot on the ground myself, so that if for some reason the rug got pulled, I could still maintain footing.

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Alison Cook: Yeah.

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Chris Cook: It's trusting in and relying upon my own strength, and Alison, I found out so quickly, while I might be able to change my behavior, I could never, ever change my heart, which is what I needed more than anything. The healing of a broken spirit and the healing of a broken heart.

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Alison Cook: I want to ask you before we close, because I did a podcast episode on the spiritual dark night of the soul last fall, and I think I got more questions. I'm really intrigued by this naming of the broken spirit. Chris, what is helpful to you as you're going through it, from other people who love you and what doesn't help? And I'm putting you on the spot.

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How can we support each other through this, so that we don't feel alone, so that we don't feel like there's something wrong with us? Because I think that's also where the enemy gets a foothold and where we don't want to face it or name it or feel like I have a broken spirit, because then how other people aren't going to know what to do with that.

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So how do we support each other? What have you found helpful? What have you found not helpful in your journey?

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Chris Cook: Yeah, what's not helpful are platitudes and pat answers. Let's go at this from the grief side of things, because any time we experience change in life, there's loss, and that loss has to be acknowledged, named, space has to be held, we have to give time to grieve it, whatever that is. I think about Jesus when Lazarus died; Jesus was the only one who could change that circumstance in an instant.

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And he didn't preach a sermon about how all things work together for the good. He showed up, he wept. And I think we need to take his cue. We need to show up, we need to shut up. It's presence over platitude. So that's what we can offer others.

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From our own end of things, we have to recognize that healing requires community. The enemy thrives in deception and in isolation. They go hand in hand together. When we're isolated, we're baited to believe lies. And when we believe a lie, we empower the lie, even if it's a lie, even if it's untruth. We got to heal in community. I'm a huge believer in mentor, spiritual director, pastor, counselor.

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In fact, I got a hoodie last week from Jackie Hill Perry and her husband, Preston Perry. And the hoodie says: Jesus and therapy. I'm like, yep, that's it. I'm a big believer in that. We need community to heal. That's where the ability to name our pain is given life, and in naming our pain, we almost offload it from our soul.

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Its strength is diminished in a way, when I can say to a mentor, to a counselor, to a pastor, I'm really struggling to believe this, whatever this is right now. This is how I'm feeling and we don't have to qualify it like, oh, forgive me for what I'm about to say. Or oh, I know this isn't going to sound rational. 

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I need to be able to have spaces where we can name our pain. We'll sort through it later, but that's what therapists and counselors and pastors and good mentors are for, because we heal in community. That, in a way, is similar to second Corinthians 10 where we're tearing down strongholds that are built in the mind.

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We're bringing again, true to truth. Community helps us see the truth for our true. Community is not there to invalidate what's true, but it is to say that truth is greater than true. 

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Alison Cook: Yes. It's true, and also I can help you see a bigger perspective.

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Chris Cook: I love that you said “and also” because I like to say “and also” more than but. Both fit. 

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Alison Cook: Also, it's so powerful. We need both. We need both. This is so good. It's so rich. I have two questions I want to ask you, Chris, what I ask all my guests, or at least most of them. I always say “all”, and then I realize that I sometimes forget, but I really want to ask you this one.

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What would you say to the younger you, that 20 something you, what would you want to say to him with all that you know now? If you could go back and spend time with him as who you are now, what would you want him to know?

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Chris Cook: You're so on point right now. I talked to Curt Thompson about this for an hour and in a puddle of tears, I apologized to that 20-year-old version of me because, back to where we started, because of fear and the reflex to avoid pain and get out of trauma, I made him rush through grief too quickly. I made the eight and 11-year-old me rush through grief too quickly. 

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I would say to him, please forgive me. I'm so sorry. I didn't know any better. I was hurting so badly and I had a gaping hole in my soul and I just, it was traumatic, and I wanted that thing healed. I moved too quickly, Alison. I would go back to the 20 year old, 22 year old, 30 year old and say, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I rushed those versions of me through the process of trying to get through pain, but I think that's reflexive to many of us because we hate pain. 

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Yeah, that's what I would say: “I'm so sorry. Forgive me for that”.

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Alison Cook: Wow. That's a powerful illustration of how we forgive. And also it's a younger part of you that stepped in to help you survive that didn't know better. So there's that self-forgiveness, that self-compassion. I did the best I could. And also it was too soon, too fast, too rushed.

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Chris Cook: Alison, it left me battle weary. I reached this place last summer, 2023, and I realized–I'm exhausted. Oh my, I'm exhausted. And I did a bunch of inner healing and therapy and we're unpacking all of that right now. I did some bilateral stimulation to help get stuff unstuck from my nervous system and, oh gosh.

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I have compassion for myself. So here's the thing, and maybe folks would want to hear this too. Let's say someone, one of our friends, is resonating with what I said about forgiving that earlier version of you. You don't heap on condemnation to the present version of you for that.

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And I'm figuring that out in real time because my type A personality, my Enneagram One inner critic says, you piece of crap, Chris. You suck. Why did you do that? And, ha, and then it heaps on shame all the more and I'm saying no. Holy Spirit, I need you to drive this ship. Because I need truth for my true. 

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Alison Cook: Man it's real. It's, I just, man, I honor you.

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Chris Cook: Thanks, my friend.

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Alison Cook: I honor you in this journey. I honor what you've been through. I honor what you're trying to heal. I want to say that I appreciate that you're giving others some language who are going through this too,

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Chris Cook: Yeah, I hope so.

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Alison Cook: This is the last question I usually ask and it feels apropos, Chris, as we're talking about the both-and–what is bringing out the best of you right now?

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Chris Cook: What a question. Realizing that I don't have to perform anymore. That's as real as I'll get. I don't have to perform anymore for belonging. I am okay to show up. I have mentors that I meet with every single Wednesday night locally here. And I tell them every week, his name is Dave, I talk about him in the book, I say to him nearly every week, your home is the safest place in my life because I can drive up and be. 

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And it's local, and it feels like home, and I don't have to perform, I don't have to write well, I don't have to host a podcast well, and it is in that same spirit. What's bringing out the best of me is recognizing that the best of me is found where I am honest with myself, honest with others, honest with the Lord, and I can enjoy it.

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The simple things of life, like grocery shopping, and going to get my car washed, and enjoying a good cup of tea and a book, and the best of me is creative. I'm a strategist at my core, but it is not from the motivation of fear and performance. It's from the motivation of, I'm resting as a son of God, beloved Abba's child, and I'm going to work not for identity but from it.

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The best of me shows up when I'm just me and I serve others best in that place too. I'm learning it. Oh goodness, Alison. That's such a fresh work in my life, a renewed work, but I'm committed to it.

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Alison Cook: That's beautiful. I thank you for giving us the best of you today. And again, in the book, there's so much; I see the talent and the giftedness and also in showing up so honestly, as you talk about the reality of the journey. It's going to help a lot of people, Chris. Tell people where they can find you and find your work and find the book.

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Chris Cook: Thank you so much. Healing What You Can't Erase: Transform Your Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Health from the Inside Out is my new book. You can get it anywhere books are sold. It's available right now. I'm on social media, all platforms, @wintodayChris. My podcast, my weekly podcast, you're about to be a guest for the second time, is all about mental health, emotional health, and spiritual growth. 

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It's called Win Today with Christopher Cook. It's a weekly show and the website is wintoday.tv. For the book, go to healingwhatyoucanterase.com.

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Alison Cook: It's great. It's great work. You're putting good stuff into the world. And I love that you're learning how to put wind in your sails a little bit. Isn't that what matters the most? Thank you so much for sharing so honestly and openly and for all your hard work.

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Chris Cook: Thank you, my friend. You're a gift and so good at what you do. And I wanted to say to folks who joined us today, that if you have found yourself on this podcast, Dr. Alison Cook is a legend. Keep listening. Alison, you're so good at what you do. I am not only a guest, but I'm a subscriber and listener and I'm very thankful for your work.

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I can't wait to read your new book and you and I are hanging out later this week and we're gonna talk all about your books. So thanks again for the opportunity and blessings to everyone.

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