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Most people feel anger, sadness, or fear at some point during the day. It's normal to feel these emotions. The question is, what will you do when they show up: Will you let them sabotage you? Or will you turn them into your allies?In today's episode, I teach you the skills you need to turn these feelings into your allies so that you can experience more joy and healthier boundaries.
Here's what we cover:
1. The #1 question to ask yourself (6:38)
2. How anger is trying to help (6:53)
3. What to do when you feel sadness (11:03)
4. An illustration from one of my favorite movies (15:11)
5. Why we need fear (19:41)
6. A powerful exercise to use at any time (29:00)
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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.
Resources
- Fill out the The Best of You Podcast Survey
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- The scene in Good Will Hunting
Transcript
Alison Cook: Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. This is our last episode of 2023. We hit the ground running again the first week of January.
So we want to hear from you before we move into 2024. We want to know what content you've appreciated, what content you want more of, what you're dying for me to talk about that we haven't talked about yet, what guests to interview, so we've created a survey. I'd be so grateful if you would just take two to three minutes to click on the survey link–it's in the episode show notes, or you can go to the episode page on my website, DrAlisonCook.com/podcast, you'll find the link there.
When you fill that out, we are going to give five randomly selected participants a free copy of The Best of You as well as Boundaries for Your Soul. So five of you will get a copy of each book, The Best of You and Boundaries for Your Soul, as our way of saying thank you for taking just a couple of minutes to fill out the survey.
Again, you can find that survey in the episode notes of this episode, wherever you listen to it, whether it's on Apple or Spotify, or you can go to my website, DrAlisonCook.com/podcast, and you'll find the link under the episode show notes there.
We would be so grateful to hear from you as we seek to serve you through this podcast with the best resources available, bringing together spiritual wisdom with practical tools from psychology.
Today's episode is the last episode in our series on Five Steps to Navigating Overwhelming Emotions. You've learned how to focus on an unpleasant emotion. You've learned how to befriend those emotions. You've learned how to invite God to be with you in the experience of an emotion. You've learned how to unburden painful emotions in last week's episode.
Today I want to talk about how we bring it all together. How do we integrate those emotions into the rest of our lives? Because here's the thing–those emotions are trying to help. Each emotion that you experience is a clue; it has information for you about how to make a change or make a decision or something.
You need these emotions, once you focus on them, befriend them, invite God to be with them, and unburden them, so they can become your allies on your journey toward wholeness. They help you become a more effective decision maker. They help you set healthier boundaries. They help you care for yourself. They help you to forge healthier connections with other people.
So today we're going to walk through THREE of the most common emotions, and how each one might be a cue that you need to make a subtle shift in your life, especially here at the holidays. I want you to pay attention. If you've been experiencing any of these emotions, you can make just a subtle change that will help you find just a little more peace, a little more joy, a little more groundedness this holiday season.
So I want to start today with the emotion of anger. The reason I want to start with anger is that it's often one of the first emotions that we notice. Anger has a lot of cousins. It doesn't always show up as just red hot rage, although sometimes it does. There's a lot of different permutations to how anger shows up.
For example, anger can show up as just irritability, maybe a sense of annoyance with others, where you just feel negative toward yourself or others. It can show up as judgmental or overly critical feelings toward yourself or others, where there's just a little bit of an edge.
Another way it might show up is as resentment; you start to resent the very people that you're actually trying to serve this holiday season, you start to resent the very people you're trying to please.
So anger as a broad emotion has a lot of ways that it shows up. From one extreme of lashing out, yelling, being verbally abusive to other people, all the way to more internalized anger that can show up as frustration, irritability, or hypercriticism.
If you are noticing any of those manifestations of anger, that's your cue to work the five steps to focus on it. Isn't it interesting that I feel so critical of that other person? I'm going to focus on that for a second. I'm going to pay attention to that. Or I'm just so bitter about my work. I just noticed a lot of bitterness. I need to look at that bitterness to focus on it and see what's going on there.
Then you have to befriend it. Right away. It's there for a reason. I don't have to beat myself up for feeling this way. What's going on? What's that about? Invite God into that experience. Ask God to be with you. As you begin to unpack that emotion, unburden any messages that might be there all the way back from the past.
Things like, everyone always lets me down. No one ever gives me a break. Notice those messages, pay attention to those messages. As you do this work of engaging with that emotion of anger, of journaling on behalf of it, maybe talking to a friend on behalf of it, I want you to ask yourself this clarifying question.
How is my anger trying to help? Just begin to think about that. How is this emotion trying to help? And notice what comes to mind.
Here are some examples of the ways that anger might actually be trying to get your attention to help you. It might be trying to protect you from danger. It may be that you're feeling all of that negative energy because you're in a situation that's not safe, and you actually need to do something to protect yourself.
It may be that you're letting people walk all over you. The fact that you're feeling angry inside is actually a cue that you need to set some healthier boundaries. You might need to speak up for yourself. You might need to get more assertive with a friend, with your family, with work.
You might need to say, guys, I'm overwhelmed. I need to get some things off my plate. Could you help me? You might need to have a hard conversation. Maybe somebody has hurt you, so you're just noticing that cynicism or that bitterness fester. Instead of beating yourself up for that, you might need to let that be a cue that you're going to have to brave that hard conversation. Maybe it's an opportunity to say to your family, let's set some boundaries around gift giving this year, or I'm going to focus on giving the gift of quality time this year. So you take command of something that you can actually do to bring a little bit of change into the situation.
Anger, when we focus, befriend, invite, unburden, then integrate, is mobilizing. It helps us take action and create change that is good for us. If it's good for you, I promise you, it is also going to be good for the people around you. When you say yes to God, yes to your own health–even when that means saying no to some of the things around you, you are honoring God. You are also honoring the people around you.
Even when they're disappointed.
Okay. So look at anger as an opportunity to set some healthy boundaries, to assert yourself, to use your voice, to speak up for something that will help you take command of your own health this holiday season. It could be around food. It could be around gifts. It could be around conversation topics.
There's so many ways you can speak up on behalf of yourself to give yourself the gift of agency at the holidays where you have some choice. You are not only at the mercy of the people around you, of all the expectations around you. So anger, when befriended, can become an emotion that helps you establish healthier boundaries.
Next, I want to look at sadness or hurt. This is often the other side of anger. Often our anger surfaces when another more vulnerable part of us is really hurt. Maybe you're hurt that no one is actually noticing your needs this holiday season. No one's coming alongside you saying, hey, how can I help you?
Maybe you're hurt that a friend seems to be ignoring you or disregarding you this holiday. Maybe you've been hurt by a family member. You're angry on one hand, but on the other hand, you're really hurt, and you don't know what to do with that feeling.
Maybe you're sad because of a loss. We talked about this in Episode 80. You've experienced loss and the holidays are pushing on that bruise where you're feeling that loss very keenly this holiday season. Sadness and the hurt that you feel is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of your deep capacity to love and to connect with other people. It's an emotion we want to honor.
Oftentimes we want to bring in that emotion a little bit closer so that we can get curious about what we really need. So if you're noticing sadness or hurt, work on those steps of focusing on it, befriending it, inviting God into your experience of that sadness of that hurt, and then unburdening any pain that feels like it's from the past, that feels like it's interwoven with messages that aren't helpful to you.
And then let's find a way to integrate that sadness into your experience of the holiday season. I want to give you some examples of this because it's really powerful.
Sadness reminds you of your need for others and for God. It helps you become aware of needs that you have, of places where you're tender, that you need to receive care. It helps you develop empathy. It helps you come alongside others in beautiful ways, and it also helps you speak the truth about your story and about some of the hardships you're facing. Which helps you create more authenticity in your relationships.
Here's the thing though, if you don't honor sadness, if you try to exile it, it can get really big and it can lead to feelings of being invisible or worthless, or it can lead to feelings of fatigue or insecurity.
So you want to notice that sadness and let it inform you. Again, I want you to ask yourself a question. If you're noticing any of the manifestations of sadness this holiday season, I want you to ask yourself, how is sadness trying to help? What does it need you to know? Look at sadness as a wise advisor. How is it trying to inform you this holiday season?
Maybe it needs a safe place for you to grieve a loss. It needs you to carve out time with a trusted friend or with a counselor, with a small group where you can let them know what you're dealing with. Maybe it needs validation that it's okay for you to feel sad that what you're dealing with is hard and that it's okay that you don't have a quick fix.
Maybe it needs a gentle boundary to be reminded that yes, while some things are hard, there are also some things that are good and you can hold both side by side.
***Music Break***
To give you an example, we just watched the movie Good Will Hunting again. I hadn't watched it in years. and there's a couple of powerful scenes in that movie, but one in particular where the main character, Matt Damon's character, unburdens a hurt from the past with Robin Williams' character, who plays the role of his therapist in the movie.
If you've seen that movie, there's a powerful moment where Matt Damon is talking about the abuse from his past and the pain of it.He's very rational and Robin Williams keeps saying to him, it wasn't your fault. and Matt Damon's character keeps replying, I know it wasn't my fault.
Robin Williams keeps pushing in because what he senses is that a part of him is still carrying the weight of that pain. And sure enough, as he pushes in and pushes in, pretty soon, Matt Damon's character is just sobbing and letting Robin Williams love him and honor the pain with him in that moment.
He has a release and unburdening where he's no longer carrying the weight of all that pain alone in that moment. He's brought the force of all that emotion to the surface with someone who loves him and who cares about him, and he's unburdening the excess baggage, the excess weight of that pain.
There's a moment of release. And that moment of release frees him to then make changes in his life. So pretty soon we get to the end of the movie, spoiler alert, and he's finally able to make a decision where he leaves his old neighborhood. He leaves his past behind and he takes a brave step to claim a different future.
The ending of that movie is so profound because it embodies the both-and of sadness and joy. He unburdens that hurt, he unburdens that pain. There's a departure at the ending of the movie where he says, “I got to go find a fuller, more whole expression of my life and my talents and of the gifts God has given me”.
That means I have to leave my childhood neighborhood. And that's both sad and also incredibly joyful. What I love about that ending is, it is a happy ending in a way, but it's a true ending because so often when you're dealing with hurt or you're dealing with pain, joy is right around the corner. There's something there for you.
Maybe there's a hurt that you experienced long ago that makes the holidays hard for you. Maybe it's hard for you to gather with your family this holiday season. But as you unburden that hurt and you share what's hard with someone who loves you, something amazing happens. That thing that was hard becomes an avenue for deeper connection and that deeper connection with someone who loves you and cares for you in your present life leads to an experience of joy.
Sadness and joy are intimately linked in that way when you look at sadness and you face it and you honor it and you unburden it with someone who loves you and you share that heartache with them, it's amazing what happens. You find connection. Sometimes you end up laughing together.
Sometimes creativity sparks and you decide to do something to honor that loss together. Maybe you decide to do something completely different on Christmas day, because you can't figure out how to do the thing that everybody wants you to do. Maybe you end up getting creative to find new ways to celebrate the holidays as you honor what's also sad.
For example, maybe you spend some time volunteering or spending time with folks who are hurting. There's sometimes solidarity in reaching out to be with others who are hurting at the holidays where you don't feel alone, or maybe you get creative and create a game or a scavenger hunt or eat different foods or make plans to see different people that you don't usually see on the holiday, just to shake things up a little bit and open up new pathways.
Once you honor sadness and share it with someone who loves you, you'll be surprised at the way that creativity starts to pop and you start to see ways to create moments of joy, even as you honor the sadness.
Finally, let's talk about fear. Fear is a pervasive emotion. It's arguably the most primal, most pervasive of all emotions. It's that racing heart when you're about to give a big presentation. It's that pit in your stomach when you have to have a hard conversation. It can turn into anxiety if it gets really big.
Here's the thing about fear. It's also trying to help. Fear can alert you to real threats that you need to get strategic about facing. Sometimes fear is telling you something that you need to know. Hey, you need to have a plan because when you spend time with this family member, things don't always go well. They're inevitably going to hurt you. How are you going to respond? What are you going to do? So fear can be really helpful in alerting you to slow down and create a plan for an unsafe situation.
Fear can also just be a reminder of your vulnerability. You might fear someone's rejection. You might fear that if you disappoint someone, they'll reject you. You might fear that if you don't get things perfectly, people are going to laugh at you or shame you. Fear is so pervasive. It drives so much of what we do. and so it's so important.
Again, if you notice fear, if you notice that pit in your stomach, or you notice that feeling of holding back or wanting to play small or wanting to play it safe, or maybe you just notice the ways that fear manifests as incessant people pleasing, or perfectionism, or constant internal chatter, overthinking, not being able to get things done.
Because you're just analyzing and analyzing, trying to figure out the perfect way so that no one will ever be mad at you. That's another way fear shows up. It is so important if you're noticing that to focus on that feeling, name it. Oh my gosh, that's fear. I'm afraid. I'm terrified of making that person mad. I'm afraid of getting it wrong and making a fool of myself. I'm afraid to make a change because what if I don't have what it takes?
Befriend that feeling. It's okay that it's there. It's there for a reason. We don't have to fix it. We don't have to make it go away. Just notice it and befriend it. Invite God into your experience of fear. God, I'm frightened. I want to be wise. I'm also scared. Help me in that fear.
Unburden the fear. Remind yourself that you are beloved and that no one can take that away from you. Even if you do disappoint someone, even if someone does get mad at you, even if you don't get it perfectly, you are going to be okay because you're a beloved child of God and no one can take that away, even if the worst thing happens, you are going to be okay,
So you unburden that fear, and then you allow that fear to inform your decision-making, but you don't let it drive, you don't let it lead you. Again, you ask yourself this powerful question, how is fear trying to help? It's not maybe using the best strategies, but it's there for a reason. It's trying to help.
So often, what fear needs from you is your validation, number one, just your non-shaming presence. It's hard. Yes, that, I get it. Yes, that is scary. You're right. It is hard. And it also needs you to lovingly remind it of the truth of God's power. Oftentimes, we have to negotiate with our fear a little bit.
Maybe you want to set a really extreme boundary. You wish you could just go to a different place for Christmas and avoid everybody. Your fears, they're going, you can't do that. Everyone will be mad at you.
Fear in that case is actually helping you be reasonable. Let's negotiate internally. Let's think about a way that we can honor other people and simultaneously honor ourselves. So maybe you end up coming up with a hybrid solution where you spend half of Christmas day with your family, but you carve out an hour or two hours to just do something that you want to do for yourself.
Or maybe you're worried about all the people you might disappoint this holiday and you're fearful of just losing love. That is such a big fear for so many of us. We are hardwired for connection. So many of us have those attachment wounds, where we just can't bear the thought of hurting someone and losing that feeling of connection, even when we're doing harm to ourselves by not establishing a healthier boundary.
So if you notice that you're pleasing others or working overtime to make sure no one else is disappointed, maybe you're avoiding conflict out of worry or fear. You've got to extend compassion to your fear. Of course, I don't want to hurt anybody. Of course, I don't want to let anybody down. Of course, I wish I could make everybody happy.
And also, I'm not God. I am not omniscient. I am not all powerful. I have human limitations and I have to operate from within those human limitations and that's normal and it's okay to operate within my own limitations.
If other people don't like that, it's not my responsibility. I have to release that. I have to release them over to God, even as I claim the limits of my God given capacity and you gently work with your fear to soothe your fear. It's okay. Yes, it is scary.
I don't want anyone to be disappointed. And also, it's okay. I am beloved by God. I am going to be okay. And you walk yourself through that experience of fear. Fear, when integrated into your internal family, becomes such a beautiful channel of humility. Or better yet, what I like to call brave humility, where you humbly acknowledge your own human limitations and you do the best that you can and you release what is not your responsibility.
Anger, sadness, and fear become your allies on this journey toward wholeness. Anger helps you speak up for yourself and establish those healthy boundaries. Sadness reminds you to care for yourself and connect with others authentically so that you can be surprised. It's the joy that comes through the power of authentic connection and fear can help you stay kind and humble even as you release expectations of yourself that you were never meant to meet.
These emotions, when befriended and invited into your internal family, help you create a wise tapestry of your life that involves caring for others, even as you honor yourself; that involves setting healthy boundaries, even as you sometimes make sacrifices; hat involve honoring the good things in your life, even as you also honor what's hard.
***Exercise***
I want to close this episode today as well as this entire series by giving you some powerful questions you can ask yourself under each of these five steps. When you encounter a big emotion, you can engage these questions in real time right now as you're listening by hitting pause. on the podcast and journaling about the questions or just quietly noticing inside your soul how you would respond to the different questions.
You can also go to my website www.dralisoncook.com/podcast and find the full transcription for this episode in the episode show notes. And you can use the written version of these questions to help guide you in your journaling. This is a tool for you to use whenever you're noticing a big emotion. So here are the questions.
The first step, Focus.
\Where do you sense the emotion physically?
Is there a thought or image that comes to mind when you focus on it?
What situation evoked the emotion? What's an early memory of when you've experienced this emotion in the past?
Step number two, Befriend.
How do you feel toward this emotion?
If you notice any other emotion like criticism, shame, or frustration, ask that other emotion to step back and see if you can engage this original emotion from a place of compassion or curiosity.
Can you befriend this emotion and welcome it?
Number three, the step of Invite.
What happens when you invite God into your experience of this emotion?
What fears do you have about inviting God to come closer?
Is there anything you sense God has for you in your experience of this emotion?
Number four, the step of Unburden.
What burden does this emotion carry?
Are there any messages that go hand in hand with your experience of this emotion? There might be messages from the past about your worth. About not being good enough, about being rejectable, unlovable, invisible. Notice those heavy weights and see if this part of you would be open to reframing or releasing those messages.
What is a new message you want to tell yourself as it relates to this emotion?
Finally, Step five, Integrate.
How is this emotion trying to help?
What needs is this emotion trying to alert you to in your real life?
How can you work with this emotion to identify a change that you can make? A way to assert yourself, care for yourself, or set a healthy boundary.
And as we close, thank God for your experience of these emotions. They're trying to help you become a fuller, more beautiful version of your God made self.
***
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you'd take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts and click the plus or follow button. That will ensure you don't miss an episode and it helps get the word out to others.
While you're there, I'd love it if you leave your five star review. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday. And remember, as you become the best. of who you are. You honor God, you heal others and you stay true to your God given self.
We all over-react at times. I know I do! Maybe someone is late, and you get really angry instead of a little annoyed. Or your colleague gives you constructive feedback, and you feel decimated inside. You don't know why you had such a big reaction. What if your "overreactions" are actually clues to unpack?
In today's episode I walk you through an incredibly practical way to use the power of big emotional reactions in the present to help you heal from events in the past. When you decode the information in your overreactions, you can finally unburden yourself.
Here's what we cover:
1. The main reasons we overreact (8:27)
2. Why we pick up burdens from the past (16:36)
3. The effects of parentification (18:55)
4. How to become a cycle-breaker (23:27)
5. A real-time exercise in unburdening (29:20)
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- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order todayIf you've been searching for a better alternative to traditional healthcare and want to take your health to new heights, visit www.WildHealth.com/Premium to apply for membership.
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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.
Resources
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- 2 Corinthians 10:5
Transcript
Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you're joining me for this whole series, Five Steps to Navigating Overwhelming Emotions.
We have two steps left and today's is so important. We're going to touch on so many things that so many of you ask me about regularly. I love today's topic. We're going to get into this question of how do I break cycles and what does that have to do with my current day emotion?
Now, listen, if you are not already subscribed to The Best of You Podcast, please take a moment and subscribe to it right now. You can click the plus sign or the follow sign wherever you listen to the podcast. When you subscribe to it, you'll get reminders every time there's a new episode so that you don't miss one. Now, if you're on my email list, I also send out email reminders, but the best way to never miss one of these episodes is to click that subscribe button.
So what we've talked about so far is the very first step is to focus on an emotion, especially an emotion you don't like, we want to make them go away. But the first step is to actually stop yourself long enough to focus on it, which is immediately then followed by the second step of befriending. You focus on the emotion and you befriend it. You welcome it. It's there for a reason.
We're not saying that you welcome it to let it take you over, but you welcome it so that you can figure out why it's there and what you need to do on behalf of that emotion.
The third step, you invite God into your experience of that emotion. So now you're aware of the emotion, you're extending compassion toward the emotion, and you've invited God into your experience of that emotion. If you think about it, all of this is leading toward a wiser way through it.
These emotions are there for a reason. They’re cues that, when harnessed, can help guide you into healthier decision making, healthier actions in your day to day life.
Today's step is the step of unburden. Sometimes these emotions get complicated. Sometimes they're deep. They're rooted in pain. All the way from the past. In this case, the emotions are bigger than the immediate set of circumstances.
You might notice that you're more angry or more sad or more anxious than the actual situation in front of you warrants. If that's the case, that's just a cue that you need to do some work of unburdening. You've picked up a burden or two, and I'm going to get into what I mean by that.
We need to take a little more time to go deeper and unburden that part of you that's picked up this pain from the past so that you can free that part of you from the unnecessary weight of the emotion. There's a quote from my book with Kimberly Miller called Boundaries For Your Soul. There's a quote where we say, suffer what you have to suffer, but don't suffer what you don't have to suffer.
What that means is you might feel a little sad. Or a little anxious, or a little frustrated. That might make sense. That's suffering a little bit, but sometimes when these emotions get bigger than the situation warrants, it's because we're suffering something that's unhealed from the past. We're bringing past pain into present pain, which makes it twice the pain, and we don't need to experience that extra weight of pain, so we can unburden that emotion.
We're just experiencing a normal range of emotions without that excess baggage from the past. So with that being said, let's dive into this fourth step of unburdening a painful emotion.
The first question that I usually get asked when we're talking about unburdening an emotion is how do I know that I need to do this work? How do I know that one of my emotional responses has gotten extreme? The answer is, it's when you have an overreaction emotionally.
I want to be clear, there's no shame in this. We all overreact. When someone is overreacting, it's just the reality that you're getting more emotionally charged than the situation warrants. Let me give you some examples of what I mean by that.
A classic example is you lose your temper or yell over a minor mistake. Maybe one of your kids spills their milk, or maybe a spouse forgets about an appointment and you just lose it and you yell or you get really angry at them. That's a classic example of an overreaction. The situation warrants frustration. It might even warrant anger, but it doesn't warrant that extreme anger response.
Here’s another example that has to do with anxiety. Maybe a work meeting that you've been really nervous about gets changed. The schedule gets changed on you. While that change might evoke anxiety, an overreaction might be if it evokes extreme anxiety or even panic. Same thing if someone's late, maybe a friend is late to meet you for coffee.
While you feel a little bit stressed, you're a little bit worried. Where are they? An overreaction would be that you start to catastrophize and you start to imagine that they've been in a car accident and they're at the hospital when really they're just 10 minutes late. So that would be an example of an extreme emotion where you're having an emotional response that doesn't exactly match the situation in front of you.
A third example is that you get extremely sad over a minor disappointment. So for example, maybe you don't get invited to a neighbor's get together and it's disappointing and you're bummed out. But an overreaction might mean that you get really depressed and you start feeling like you're just never gonna be included anywhere.
It really was just one gathering. Or maybe someone at work or someone in your family gives you some constructive feedback and you just break down crying. You just get so sad. You have an extreme emotional response to a situation that really warranted a mild feeling of disappointment or a little bit of hurt, but not a major reaction.
That's what we mean by an overreaction. It just means that we have an emotional reaction that's not proportionate to the situation at hand. Again, there's no shame in this. This is a cue that we might need to unburden some part of us that's experiencing the big emotion.
The first thing we have to do is look at the underlying reasons for why the emotion might be so big. So, here are some of the reasons you might be having these big reactions:
It might just be stress or emotional strain. This is really common during the holidays, and we use that phrase, sometimes it's the straw that breaks the camel's back. The thing that happened hit you at a moment where you just didn't have anything left and you exploded in a big emotional reaction. Now, if that's the case, you will know, because pretty quickly you'll realize, oh my gosh, I completely overreacted.
I'm so sorry. I'm just stressed out. ‘Cause there's a lot going on. Here's why. You'll move on. That in and of itself is an unburdening. You recognize, oh, I'm carrying a lot of weight and this one, and this one thing was just too much.
So you unburden the weight of that shame. You name it, you honor it, and you let your loved one know, hey, this is what happened, and you're good. You repair. So that could be one of the reasons you have a big reaction, but today, what I want to get into is the reality that sometimes there's a deeper reason that you had a big reaction.
Something happened in the past that is just similar enough to this situation in the present, that those emotions from the past are sneaking in and ambushing you in the present situation. So I'm going to unpack this a little bit for you, but this is really common. You have an overreaction in the present because there's something in the past that still hasn't been unburdened, that you still haven't fully healed from, and that part of you wants to get healed, so it sneaks into the present, hijacks you in the moment.
You have this big reaction. You can't figure out why. Well, in this case, it's what we call a trail head. It's a cue that you need to look back and follow the trail to what is the actual event that happened in the past that is actually related to the big emotion that you didn't get to have back then, and you needed to have back then so that you could heal and repair.
Okay, so here's an example of what I mean by this. Let's go to the situation where your anxiety gets really big when someone changes the schedule. Let's say in this case you and a few friends were planning a get together, you've been looking forward to it, you've been so excited about it, and suddenly your friend backs out. They have to change the schedule, and it's for a very understandable reason, and you're disappointed by it, but you have a huge reaction to it.
You're angry, you're upset, you feel abandoned, you feel betrayed, you feel almost inconsolable. In that situation, the real thing that happened is that you've had a history of people canceling on you, of people ghosting you.
In fact, the history with this particular emotion of feeling abandoned might go all the way back to childhood where around Christmas time, there was a family gathering and you were so excited about it.
Maybe your parents had a history of being erratic or inconsistent in their behavior and they just canceled the event, didn't explain it to you, and you were just left in the dark.
Suddenly it's just gone and you're alone and nobody ever explained to you what happened. Nobody ever talked you through it and you were just left alone with all that disappointment and all those feelings of sadness. No one ever talked you through it and helped you heal that wound.
In fact, maybe that was a pattern. Maybe that happened time and time again, where there was just this inconsistency, where your parents were coming and going and no one stuck to this schedule, and you never knew what was happening, and you look forward to something, and then it'd be canceled, or one parent wouldn't show up, and for whatever reason you just constantly felt alone and abandoned and disappointed.
You've never really dealt with that. You never really had a chance to process that trauma and the memory of that feeling of abandonment still lives in your body. So when something happens in your present life that is just similar enough to that past experience, it triggers that backlog of emotions from deep inside of you.
Instead of just getting a little bit of disappointment, you get that whole geyser of emotions that's been buried inside of you for decades in some cases. You have this huge reaction to what really in the present tense was just a minor disappointment. So that's just an example of how painful events from the past can create these burdened emotions that are just buried deep inside.
When something happens in your present life that even loosely resembles one of those painful events from the past, those burdened emotions take the opportunity to just show up in a big way.
The good news is that when that happens, it's an opportunity to give yourself the care that you actually need. To unburden those painful emotions from the past so you can separate what happened in the past out from these very normal, very real, more manageable disappointments in the present.
This is the heart of the work that is so often done in therapy. It's noticing these big reactions and helping you identify what is rooted in your present circumstances and what is residual, unhealed pain from the past so that you can disconnect the two and have a normal reaction in your present. Oh, that's disappointing. Or, oh, I'm kind of bummed or, oh, that worries me a little bit, but those emotions match the situation in front of you.
You're not carrying all the weight of those burdens from those past memories. This is an example of a cue that you might need to do some unburdening: it's when your emotions in the present tense are bigger than the situation in front of you warrants.
If you're noticing that, if you're like, man, that is me, I do that. I have these big reactions that I can't figure out why they're so big. I can't figure out why I can't just be a little bit disappointed or a little bit angry or a little bit anxious. You know, because that feels like the normal way to respond to these events.
Please do not beat yourself up or shame yourself. This is just your body, the way that God designed you to give you a cue. Oh, I need to do some unburdening work. I need to do some healing. There's something in my past that maybe needs my attention.
So what do we mean by burdens? Well, the burdens that we pick up are these extreme beliefs or feelings. Sometimes they're physical sensations. Where we'll feel a disproportionate amount of tension or tightness in our stomach. Parts of you have taken on as a result of painful experiences from the past.
You can develop these burdens at any time, but often they develop in childhood. When you're a child, your mind can't process complex emotions or complex situations. So when something hard happens, even in the best of parenting situations, you make sense of those events, you often interpret those events in ways that aren't helpful.
That's when you pick up a burden, a belief burden, or an emotional burden that you were never meant to carry, but it never gets healed at the actual place where the injury occurred. Parts of your soul are still hanging on to these burdens from the past. So I want to give you some examples of these burdens. if you want more examples, there's two pages devoted to these examples and how to resolve these examples in Boundaries for Your Soul in the chapter on unburdening.
So here are some examples. My parents are fighting. It must be my fault. As a kid, your parents are fighting all the time. You hate it. No one's really naming it. No one's really helping you understand what's happening.
So you tell yourself, and this is so common, it must be my fault. If I could behave better, if I could be more perfect, my parents wouldn't behave in this way. So you take in that burden and it helps you explain a really hard situation, even though it's not true.
There is no correlation between your behavior and your parents fighting. But you tell yourself that because it helps you make sense of a painful situation, you carry that burden with you all the way into adulthood. So whenever anybody's fighting around you, you feel like it's your fault. It must be my fault that there's conflict. Even though it has nothing to do with you.
Anytime you're with people who are fighting or there's conflict, even normal conflict or healthy conflict, you start getting so anxious inside because in your mind, this is catastrophic. I can't let this happen. Because you're still back as that young child where it really was catastrophic to be a child witnessing two adults argue and fight and be angry with each other without anybody caring for you through that.
Another common burden that you pick up as a child and bring into adulthood is, I am responsible for everyone around me. Now, I bet a lot of you have that one. I am responsible for everyone around me. Now, listen, in a small dose, we are responsible to some degree to be good to the people around us in a normal way.
But let me walk you through how that oftentimes is rooted in a belief burden. You're a young child. The caregivers in your life aren't taking care of themselves.
Maybe one of your parents has an undiagnosed mental illness and you watch them not really be able to get out of bed or not really be able to care for themselves or be really erratic emotionally and you take on the responsibility for that. You start parenting your parent as a young child.
There's a term for this in psychology. It's called parentification. You become the parent for your parent, and it's never a child's responsibility to parent their parent. A child has a basic need of being cared for and loved and nurtured by an adult caregiver.
When that role gets inverted and the child is asked to care for their caregiver, that burden gets formed. It's my responsibility to be responsible for everybody else. That burden can sometimes get translated as, I'm not worthy to receive care from others because as a child, nobody ever cared for you.
You never had a lived experience inside your body of what it feels like to be cared for by an adult, by a parent, and so you tell yourself, oh, I'm not worthy of care. So not only am I responsible for everybody else, I'm also simultaneously not worthy of receiving care.
That's a double whammy of a belief burden. Either one of those is hard enough. But they're both rooted in a situation where as a child, you didn't get the care you needed from a caregiver and you picked up a burden. Listen, this is not conscious. You don't know that you're doing this when you're a young child.
You don't consciously say, wow, it's my job as a five year old to be the most responsible person in the room, to be the most mature person in the room. It's not conscious. It's just what happens. You start to notice that no one else in your household is taking any responsibility for their health or well being and so you do.
You just step up and do it and you tell yourself at some deep level, you internalize the message of, this is what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to be responsible for everyone. You take that with you into adulthood, and you don't know how to let go. You don't know how to let other people take responsibility for what is actually their responsibility.
So these are belief burdens we pick up as young children. We internalize them and they're operating silently under the surface, but they're influencing the ways we show up with others.
Again, let's say you're an adult and you're just overworking to the point of almost harming yourself to do things for other people that are not your responsibility to do for them. Maybe someone comes to you and gives you some constructive feedback and says, hey, I don't want you to do this. I don't want you to micromanage me in this or stop asking me about this or stop trying to do what's mine to do.
You feel incredibly hurt by that when in reality they're actually trying to be helpful. They're trying to say, listen, you don't have to do this for me, but you carry that burden of, that's the only thing I know. I only know how to take responsibility for everybody around me.
So if you try to pry that responsibility away from me, I feel decimated. I don't know what to do with that. I don't know how to let people come alongside and share the weight with me, so you have a big reaction that's rooted in a burden from the past.
Now, here's the thing. Rationally, you may well understand that you shouldn't be thinking or feeling in the way that you do. You may be able to tell me, I get that that thing that happened in the past wasn't my fault. You have some cognitive awareness about it, but the reality is some part of you deep inside may still carry a residual experience of that burden.
When a similar situation happens, that part of you tends to come to the surface. So that's where these steps are iterative. When that happens, you focus on it. Oh, I just had a big reaction. You befriend it. This is a cue. My body's trying to tell me something. Something happened that needs my attention. You invite God into that experience. God, help me understand. Then you can go through this process of unburdening.
So I want to end this episode with a little exercise in unburdening because the best way to do it is to experience it. But before we do that, I want to touch on this idea of cycle-breaking. You may have heard this. It kind of floats around social media from time to time, this idea of being a cycle breaker.
A cycle breaker is someone who works to disrupt and change a negative familial pattern. If you think about it, these patterns get handed down generationally. So, for example, the burdens you picked up as a result of the way you were parented, your parents probably picked up the way they parented from their parents.
So when you break cycles, you work to identify an unhealthy pattern in your family of origin, something that happened that caused you harm. So you work to identify it, heal it in yourself, and then as a result of that, you then no longer pass that same unhealthy pattern down to your own offspring.
So you become a cycle breaker. You stop the pattern. This work of unburdening is really important. As you unburden your own painful emotions and your own painful memories, you're breaking the cycle of a pattern of behaviors.
You're consciously choosing a different path. You're choosing to heal and in doing so you create ripple effects of healing into the people around you, including your own family and the next generations ahead of you.
Here are some examples of what I mean by that. Oftentimes, addiction or misuse, what causes some of these injuries, is in your childhood. When you break a cycle of addiction and you heal and you obtain your sobriety and you no longer use, you're breaking a cycle and you're no longer handing down the damage that comes from substance abuse.
You're healing what happened to you and you're stopping that pattern of injury that occurs in families where their substance misuse from being passed down to the next generation. If there's a pattern of untreated mental illness, such as untreated anxiety or depression in your family, maybe that's the reason that your parent, when you were young, wasn't available to you, or why you don't have a secure attachment.
What you've decided to do is prioritize your own mental health so that you are healing those wounds and as a result, no longer passing down the damages of untreated mental health issues in your family.
It can happen. You can break the cycle of unhealthy conflict where maybe you were really harmed by the way the adults in your life handled conflict. so you, as a result of that, have decided I'm going to become someone who's really good at navigating conflict.
I'm going to unburden and heal the damage that that did to me. Then I'm going to work to create places of healthy conflict in my family going forward. There's so many ways we can become cycle breakers and cycle breaking comes out of this work of unburdening.
It's a byproduct. It's a fruit of this work. As you unburden and heal from the pain of your past, you create a ripple effect of change. You start to show up as a healthier version of yourself and your own family and your healing creates a ripple effect.
When the Bible talks about generational sin, I often think of it as generational trauma. We're passing down the generational trauma of our ancestors. You have an opportunity as you engage in your own healing work to unburden these painful emotions from the past, stopping that generational pattern and ushering in a generation of healing. This is amazing work.
We are part of that together. That's really what this whole podcast is about. It's unleashing a movement of healing because as you heal, you heal everybody around you.
Sometimes parts of us are fearful of unburdening. It's scary. Change is hard. Sometimes we like to keep the status quo. Again, the chapter on unburdening and Boundaries For Your Soul is an invaluable resource, walking you through some of the different fears that you may have about doing this work.
I mentioned this here because I want to say, if you have a deep reservoir of pain from your past, you don't want to do this work alone. This is work you want to do with a therapist or with safe people where you begin to unpack some of the pain from your past.
But it's so important for all of us to do the work of noticing where is there a big reaction, or a big pattern of emotional reactions in my life that I'm just not able to get on top of, and maybe that's a cue that there's some unburdening work I need to do. There's some painful experiences from my past that need to be healed and where I need to do some of the work of unburdening.
So I want to end with an exercise where you can begin to get a glimpse of this work of unburdening. As we walk through this exercise, if you want to pause the podcast, wherever you're listening, to give yourself more time to reflect, just feel free to do that.
Take this at your own pace. I'm going to walk you through some questions so you can just listen and learn, or you can actually try to engage the questions in real time by hitting pause and maybe doing some journaling work as I ask you each of the questions.
Think of a recent situation that evoked a strong reaction in you. Maybe it was at work, maybe it was at home, maybe it was with a friend, but you had maybe an overreaction. Just think about that situation and see if you can work through those first three steps as it relates to the emotion.
What was the emotion? Just focus on the emotion for a moment apart from the situation. Were you angry, were you anxious, were you sad? Were you scared? And then see if you can befriend that emotion. See if you can get curious about it or become compassionate toward it and just kind of notice what that emotion is.
If it feels overwhelming or too extreme, that's a cue that you might need to process this with another person, that you don't want to do this alone, because sometimes that can happen if you're new to this work. But if it feels comfortable to you, just notice the emotion and from a place of compassion and notice what it feels like in your body. You might even notice what it feels like as an image in your mind.
Then as you're connecting to the experience of that emotion, whatever it is, just letting yourself be present to it, you might invite God to be with you in that experience as well, to gain deeper understanding through the power of God's presence. What was that about? That sadness, that anger, that big reaction.
I'm aware of it. I'm connected to it. I'm not shaming myself for it. What was that about God? You're kind of becoming a detective or a student of your own soul. You're becoming aware of the emotion from a healthy distance.
Just notice what that feels like. Let the situation fade away as you tap into the emotion you experienced in that moment. As you're present to that experience of the emotion, whatever it is, begin to ask yourself some unburdening questions.
What is an extreme belief or a message? That goes hand in hand with this feeling. So here's some examples of what I mean by that.
As you're present to the emotion, you might become aware of some messages you tell yourself about the experience that evoked that emotion. For example:
No one ever helps me. I'm always on my own.
It's my fault. I should have tried harder.
No one will ever understand me.
If people are angry, I'm not safe.
If someone is mad at me, it must be my fault.
If someone is disappointed with me, it must be my fault.
If someone ignores me, it's because I'm not worthy.
If things don't go perfectly, I am a complete failure and no one will ever love me.
These are all examples of belief burdens, and notice if any of those types of messages resonate with your experience of that emotion. If so, I want you to make a note of that burden. What is it and what might that part of you that's been carrying the weight of that burden need from you or from God to create what I call a holy reframe? What's a holy, healed, healthy message that that part of you needs to hear?
When you create a holy reframe, I want you to imagine that part of you feeling the emotion as a child. What would a child need to hear in that moment of feeling the weight of that burden? Here are some examples:
Sometimes you feel alone, but there are people willing to help. Let's stay persistent.
It may take time, but someone will understand and love and appreciate you for who you are.
It's uncomfortable when someone is upset with you, but it doesn't mean everything will fall apart. You're safe.
Disappointment is a part of life. It doesn't mean that you did something wrong.
There might be many reasons someone ignored you, but you are always worthy of honor and care.
Criticism can be hard to hear, but it doesn't have to define you.
Take what's helpful to grow and release the rest.
It doesn't have to be perfect to be a success. Let's celebrate the good that we were able to accomplish.
As you reframe those painful burdens, it's really important that you're connecting with the part of you that experienced the big emotion. In that moment, you're reparenting yourself in a way.
You're helping a young part of you release an old burden and recognize that there might be a different way to see this situation. This hurting part of your soul can learn to release some of the weight of that pain that it's been carrying from long ago. You begin to care for yourself in that moment, in the way that maybe no one ever cared for you back then.
This work of unburdening is a process of releasing old messages you may have carried around for decades and replacing them with truer, more beautiful messages infused by God's Spirit. Messages rooted in the truth, that you are enough, you are worthy, you are beloved.
No matter how hard this situation is, you have what it takes in partnership with God's Spirit to face it. It's a process of tenderly attuning to every part of your soul in need of your care from this place of compassionate presence.
Remember, suffer what you have to suffer. There are hard situations that you have to work your way through with your family, with your friends, with the holiday season. But don't suffer what you don't need to suffer.
Take captive every thought, Paul said. It applies to these messages. You tell yourselves in these moments of big emotions, notice what messages you're telling yourself, release those messages and replace them with the truth of your belovedness as a soul created to bear the image of God.
If you're struggling to feel connected spiritually or stuck in negative emotions, you're in good company. Research shows that 9 out of 10 people struggle with stress during the holidays. In today's episode, I walk you through my simple but life-changing strategy for unlocking spiritual connection and experiencing more of God's loving presence.
Here's what we cover:
1. 3 reasons painful emotions get heightened at the holidays (2:32)
2. A simple hack for experiencing more spiritual vitality (8:22)
3. The neurobiology of what happens when you connect with God (9:43)
4. How to transform mundane moments into spiritual encounters (12:18)
5. How to harness your external environment to change your mental habits (23:03)
Thanks to our sponsors:
- 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.
- Listen to Girls Night with Stephanie May Wilson wherever you get your podcasts!
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Get 35% off your first order of Sundays. Go to SundaysForDogs.com/BESTOFYOU or use code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
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.
Resources
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence
- Galatians 5:25
- The Garden Within by Dr. Anita Phillips
Transcript
Alison Cook: Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you keep coming back each week.
The response to this new series on five steps to navigating overwhelming emotions has been amazing. So many of you have written to me, letting me know that yes, this holiday season, you are dealing with so many tough emotions.
The holidays amplify our emotional states, this is a well researched fact in psychology. The holidays put a magnifying glass on family gatherings, on times that are supposed to be joyful and celebratory.
And so they evoke memories from the past. It's normal and natural that you feel heightened emotions as you anticipate these gatherings. If you've had a loss in your family, or if you've got acrimony or discord in a family, or if you have painful memories from past holidays, it makes sense that the coming of December will trigger some of those emotions.
Our emotions often have roots in memories from the past. Which means they're often influenced by previous experiences. So when you encounter a situation that's similar to a situation you've encountered before, maybe numerous times, if you go back through the course of your whole life, your brain can trigger emotions based on those past experiences.
So what I mean by that is as we move toward Christmas, there could be a young part of you, a part of you that is still stuck in a five year old memory of a traumatic Christmas. This is really common, these holidays have a lot of buildup around them.
And so if you've got some unresolved pain from your past, it makes sense that the coming of the Christmas holiday will start to tap on areas where you might have some lingering wounds from things that occurred a long time ago.
So that's one reason why emotions get intensified at the holidays–this idea of stored memory where a holiday triggers these memories from the past. A second reason is that there's a lot of pressure on the holidays.
There's a lot of stress on trying to make everything just right, make everything perfect, make everybody happy. Keep your kids happy. Keep your extended family happy, navigate different expectations that other people around you have for the holidays, navigate invitations or the lack of invitations. There's a lot of pressure to please, perform, produce, compare, all of those P words we went through last year at this time.
These over-working parts of us tend to come out this time of year under all the pressure of the holiday season. It can amplify those feelings of being less than, or shame for not having things perfect. Or those feelings that surface when you feel like you can't please everybody.
Or the feeling of self defeat when you feel like you can't produce at the level that everybody expects you to produce. Or the feelings of inferiority if you feel like you're not measuring up to what you see everyone around you doing. There's so many ways that some of these go-to parts of us can surface.
So if you're noticing yourself feeling more of those feelings than you normally do, don't be surprised. The holidays tend to activate some of these feelings. And then finally, the third reason that our emotional overwhelm can get amplified during the holidays is that the holidays can serve as a milestone or a marker for grief and loss.
The holidays tend to evoke those memories of the people we love who are no longer with us, or the people we love who are far away or who we can't be with during this season. And so you may feel the tension of the holiday season, wanting to experience the joy of the holiday season while simultaneously being even more aware of the grief or the loss.
This is normal, and throughout this series, I really want you to honor these different emotions that surface during the holidays. If there's one thing you take from this entire series, it's this: all of those emotions are welcome.
All of those emotions have a seat at your table, this holiday season. I can feel both joy and sadness this holiday.
I'm actually going to focus on that feeling and befriend it and incorporate that emotion into my experience of the holidays this year. Those are the first two steps to dealing with overwhelming emotions. We're going to get to the third step in today's episode, which is to invite God into your experience of that emotion.
***
The third step of the five steps to navigating your overwhelming emotions is based on my book with Kimberly Miller, Boundaries For Your Soul. This third step of “invite” is so important. This is the step where deep healing and transformation occurs.
You've got to first focus on that emotion. You've got to stop trying to banish it or make it go away. You've got to befriend that emotion, make peace with it. Then, where the real transformation occurs is when you're present to that emotion, whatever it is, you invite God to be with you in your experience of that emotion.
This is holy ground. This is where transformation occurs, where you not only become present to your own experience of an emotion, but you invite the one who made you and who loves you to be present with you in your experience of that emotion.
And I want to simplify this process because it's a really deep transformational process, but there's a really simple way into it. It's what I like to call “comma, God”. It's a really simple hack that I've found to be transformational in my own life.
What you do is no matter where you are, it could be right now, wherever you are listening to this podcast, it could be while you're journaling, it could be while you're grocery shopping, it could be while you're in the car pickup lane, waiting to pick up your child from school.
You become aware of the emotion. You focus on it. Oh. There it is. There's that emotion. There's that feeling I wish I didn't have. I do have it. I'm going to befriend it. And as you're naming that experience of that emotion, I want you to simply add a comma, God to your experience of naming that emotion.
Here are some examples of what I mean. I'm worried about all of these things. I'm worried about my kids. I'm worried about money. I'm worried about my health. Start to add a comma, God. I'm worried, God. I'm sad, God. I don't have time to pray, God. I'm angry, God.
And suddenly you just start to name these different experiences, and you're inviting God into the experience with you. I'm so mad right now, God. I don't have enough help. I'm all on my own. No one is helping me with anything.
“I feel so alone” becomes “I feel so alone, God, help me find support”. And you see the difference when you're in the emotion and you're ruminating in the emotion–I'm worried, I'm angry, I'm this, I'm that–you're blended with the emotion.
As you begin to bring that emotion out in front of you, you focus on it. You befriend it. I'm worried. And then you invite God into it. I'm worried, God. Help me untangle the knots. And suddenly you're engaged in a lived embodied form of prayer. Instead of walking through the grocery store lines, mindlessly ruminating, you're mindfully aware of the things on your mind in partnership with God's spirit.
It's a simple way into an ancient practice that Brother Lawrence talked about in his beautiful book, Practicing the Presence of God. Every single moment you become aware of an emotion, wherever you are, you name it, you befriend it, and you invite God into your experience with it.
You just add a comma, God. Comma, God is a simple way into a deeply transformational practice, literally wherever you are, whatever you're thinking about, add a comma, God.
What's happening in that moment is a deeply profound act of becoming consciously aware of the contents of your own soul, getting them out of your mind, getting out of your amygdala, out of your left brain where you're ruminating.
You're becoming consciously aware of whatever it is that's on your mind, whatever emotions, whatever thoughts–you're bringing them out in front of you, with those first two steps and then adding that comma, God. Suddenly you're not alone. You're aware of your feelings in partnership with God.
This is a transformational way to go through your day.
As you invite God into whatever it is that you're experiencing at any given moment of the day, you transform your spiritual practices. No longer is prayer this sort of 20 minute quiet time that you guilt trip yourself for not having every single morning–all of a sudden prayer becomes an embodied way of being in the world.
And you begin to bring every part of who you are into relationship with both yourself and with God. And here's the thing: even if you notice that you don't want to invite God into that moment, I'm mad at you, God, I don't really want to talk to you about it. Right there, you're still engaging a form of prayer.
Your comma God is: I'm mad and I don't want to talk with you about it, God. I'm hurting and I don't want to pray, God. Suddenly you're telling God about how you feel about talking to God, which is a form of prayer in and of itself.
It's amazing when you start to add a comma God to the end of every single feeling and every single sentence that you notice in your heart, mind, and soul. So I want to end today's episode with some other ways that you can practice this embodied version of prayer.
Many of us measure the success of our prayer life by maybe the intensity of connection that we feel with God or the minutes on the clock or how much we're able to focus with our eyes closed on God or meditating on scripture. Now, listen, those are all really fantastic practices, and we need to do those things, but I'm pretty sure that practicing the presence of God and inviting God into everything you're experiencing is equally as important, if not more.
It's what we see in the life of Jesus. It's walking in step with God's Spirit, which is what Paul talked about in Galatians 5. Let us keep in step with God's spirit all the time, everywhere we go. This is not shaming nor judging, this is a reorienting of your mind, heart, and soul to the presence of God.
In order to do that, you first have to be aware of the contents of your own soul, of what you're really thinking and feeling. And you have to believe that the God you're inviting into the contents of your soul loves you and is not judging or fearful of anything that God will find there. A lot of times we're having to get rid of old messages that we've inherited somehow.
It's a practice. Here are some really practical ways to train yourself toward this practice of paying attention to your feelings, even as you're inviting God into them. So the first step is to think about a time of day when your mind drifts, whether you're gardening or walking or driving to work or cooking or in traffic. These sort of dead periods where you're doing something, but your mind is free to wander.
These are the best moments to begin to capture this step of invite, in this step of using the comma, God hack where you become consciously aware of whatever it is that you're thinking and feeling and adding that comma God to the experience.
So the very first thing to do once you've identified those places where your mind tends to drift or where the emotions could potentially stir up, because you've got some dead time where you don't have to be focused on work or on somebody else. And just begin to notice, what are you actually thinking about?
What are you actually feeling? And then add that comma God, invite God into that experience. Isn't that interesting? I'm worried about my bills. I'm worried about my health. And then just take that next step. God, here's what's happening. I'm worried about my bills.
I'm worried about my health, God. Help me think clearly about what's really going on. Be with me as I work to get to the root of these fears or, I can't shake this idea that someone is mad at me, that I'm letting someone down, that I'm disappointing someone, God. Isn't that interesting?
Could you be with the part of me that's ruminating on this? They can't stop thinking about this. Could you help me consider the facts of the situation, God? Could you help me discern, God? If I actually hurt another person, if I actually did let someone down or if I didn't, God, could you help me think through this situation?
Suddenly you've got a partner as you become mindful of this fear. Or I'm wrestling with grief. God, I don't want to feel grief. I want to numb out. I want to make it go away, but I can't. It's here, God. Could you be with me in the grief? Could you help me honor the grief without letting the grief take me over?
Could you help me, God?
Carve out times to grieve, and to simultaneously still honor the good gifts that are available to me right now. God, could you help me honor both? I'm worried, God, about the conflict that I know is going to ensue on Christmas Day between my parents who are divorced or between my siblings who don't talk to each other anymore, between my kids who don't really get along.
I'm worried, God, could you join me in that worry? Could you help that part of me to calm down a little bit, because when I calm that worry a little bit, that's when creativity starts to show up. Could you help me, God, to calm that worried part of my soul? I'm tired, God. I don't have the energy to do all this.
Could you come be with that part of me, Lord? That's exhausting. Could we just tend to that weary part of my soul and could we stop forcing her to get it together for just this one moment? Suddenly you're tending to these different parts of you in partnership with God. You're taking otherwise ordinary moments of the day and turning them into healing moments where you become aware of what your soul actually needs.
Creativity shows up in those moments of holy, God-driven, compassionate self-awareness.
So the first way to invite God into this process is to identify those times throughout your day where you have that dead time, where you're doing something, some sort of task, but your mind tends to drift. Your mind tends to wander. Capture those moments to do this work to focus on the emotion that you're feeling, whatever it is in that moment.
Befriend it and to invite God into it through using this comma God exercise. So that's the first thing you want to do. I want you to harness the power of those moments that we all have throughout the day. There's no excuse not to do this work. We all have moments of time where we're participating in a somewhat mindless activity. Turn those mindless activities into mindful moments with God, where you do this work again of focusing on an emotion that you're feeling, befriending it and inviting God into it.
The second thing that you can do in order to invite God into more of what you're experiencing each and every day is to harness the power of your external environment. Notice the things around you, particularly in nature. Nature is filled with reminders about the power of God. And that's why Jesus used so many metaphors related to the mountains, the hills, the trees.
He was always looking to nature as a reminder to point us toward God. Nature serves as this very practical, concrete, reminder. Whether you're in a house looking out the window, whether you live in an apartment in a city or whether you live out in the country, you can always look out your window and see what is going on outside and use that as a cue to remind you about God.
So you start to add a comma God to whatever it is that you notice when you're looking at what's around you in your external environment. So here are some examples of how you can use those external cues, especially from nature to practice inviting in the presence of God. So the first thing is just to look at your window and notice, do you see trees?
Do you see mountains? Do you see grass? Is the sun out or is the sun setting? Is it night or is it day? Each one of those things that are always going to be around you becomes a cue. Let's say you're taking a walk and you start to notice the trees around you. I see those trees, God, those trees remind me that all seasons pass.
Maybe you notice that it's winter, that there's snow on the ground. I see the snow on the ground. The trees don't have leaves, God, this is a reminder that everything has its season. It's okay for me not to feel the glory of all the fruitfulness right now. This season matters. And this season will also pass.
Maybe you put a plant in front of you that you tend each day. And every day you see that plant becomes a cue to invite God into whatever it is that you're experiencing. Every time I water this plant, God, I'm reminded that I need to water my own body, literally, that I need to tend to the garden of my own soul. Every time I notice that this plant needs me to remove some weeds or some dead leaves, it reminds me, God, to check in on the soil of my own soul. What does my own soul need?
A powerful resource that I want to, that I can't recommend and a powerful resource that I can't recommend enough is Dr. Anita Phillips’ new book called The Garden Within. It's a beautiful book that uses this metaphor of the soil of your soul and how you need to tend to it. And so maybe you read that book and you buy a plant, and every day that you have to care for that plant becomes a reminder to you to add that comma God.
Here's this plant that needs my care, God. How can I apply that same wisdom to my own soul? Maybe every morning or every evening, as you watch the sun set, you notice that sunset and add that, comma, God. The sun is setting, God, you do that.
I have no control over that. I can't make that happen. And yet, every evening, the sun sets, God, and every morning, that same sun rises. Those two things happen and they remind me that you are ultimately in control, God, and I am not. What are the things in my own life that I need to send off with the sun as the sun sets and let it go for the rest of this evening?
Because guess what? Those things will come back tomorrow when I wake up with the sun and the sun rises. Those things I'm worried about will still be here tomorrow, God. But I can let those things go with the sun as it sets right now.
Okay, so that’s the second practical thing you can do. The first one is just to identify those places during the day where you've got some mindless time, where your mind tends to wander. Turn those mindless times into mindful times where you invite God into whatever it is that your mind goes to during those times, because there's really no such thing as a mindless time. Your mind is dwelling on something during those moments. So use those dead times to focus, befriend, and invite God into whatever it is that you're experiencing.
Number two, use those external reminders, especially from nature. And again, the reason I love using those cues from nature, whether it's plants, trees, hills, the seasons, the sun rising or setting, whatever it is that's around you is that they are just beautiful reminders of how God shows up in every detail of every day.
Every time you notice one of those objects in nature, remind yourself to add that comma, God. What does that tree have to teach me, God? What does the fact that the sun is setting right now have to remind me of you? Use those external cues. And then number three, the last practical thing you can do to invite more of the presence of God into your day to day life, is your breath.
Your breath is such a powerful tool. It's literally what keeps you alive. You do it all the time. And so often we are not mindful or conscious of the fact that we're breathing. But when you notice those moments, again, going back to those typically mindless moments, when you're in traffic or you're picking up your kids or you're running errands.
Start to notice your breath. Notice what it feels like to take a deep breath in and take a deep breath out, and then add a comma God. I'm worried, God. Inhale. I trust you, God. Exhale. This is called breath prayer.
And it's really powerful. And you can do it wherever you are at any moment of the day. Begin to notice your breath. “God, I'm struggling”, as you breathe in. “I need you”, as you breathe out,
“God, I'm scared”, as you breathe in. “Be with me”, as you breathe out. “God, I'm overwhelmed”, as you breathe in. “Be with me”, as you breathe out.
And as you do that you're practicing an embodied version of prayer. You're incorporating your whole nervous system because taking those breaths calms your nervous system. You're also opening up those connection pathways in your brain. You're connecting with the God who loves you, which brings endorphins in.
It brings good chemicals into your body. Suddenly, you're not alone. You're working in partnership with God. It's not that your problems magically go away, but you're incorporating the power of your God-given design as you invite God into whatever it is that you're experiencing. As you do that, your nervous system calms, good chemicals come in, you feel more grounded.
And from that place, we know from all the psychology research and all the neurobiology that when you're a little bit more grounded, when you're a little bit calmer, when you're experiencing that sense of connectedness, creativity starts to spark, and it's from this place, this calmer place inside this connected place inside where you're present to what you really feel.
In partnership with God's Spirit, you will begin to discern your next brave steps. You'll start to find a way forward. I want you to practice noticing, “What am feeling right now?”, befriending it, and inviting God into whatever it is that you're experiencing right now.
This is the path to transforming overwhelming emotions into your greatest allies in partnership with God's Spirit.
What if your emotions aren't your enemies afterall? What if they actually help? This holiday season, I'm taking you on a deep dive into my proven 5-step method for finding joy and peace by bringing harmony and wholeness to your inner world. Today, we'll walk through the first 2 steps that are crucial to developing a healthy relationship with your emotions.
Here's what we cover:
1. 3 truths about emotions
2. A counterintuitive first step
3. How to speak on behalf of an emotion vs. from it
4. The surprising solution to negative emotions
5. How to finally move from self-condemnation to self-compassion and why this is Biblical
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 AquaTru.com and enter code BESTOFYOU at checkout to get 20% OFF any AquaTru purifier!
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.
Resources
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- Matthew 5:43-45 (The Message)
Transcript
Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you are here. We are starting a brand new series this week. It's going to be the next four weeks leading into Christmas. We are in the midst of the holidays, and so I'm gonna walk you through five steps to navigating overwhelming emotions.
This is based on my book, Boundaries For Your Soul: How To Turn Your Overwhelming Thoughts and Feelings Into Your Greatest Allies. These five steps come directly out of that book and they're pretty deep steps. Each one warrants almost a whole episode.
This takes some work to really look inside of yourself and begin to establish a healthy relationship with the different emotions or the different parts of you that inevitably get triggered or activated, especially during the holiday seasons, but really at any time in our lives. What I want to do in this series is really dig deep into each of these steps, because each one is sort of a whole world in and of itself, as a way to equip you with tools this holiday.
So every single episode, you'll have a new tool to begin to manage the feelings that stir up inside of you, especially the hard ones. Especially when there's anger or irritation or annoyance or anxiety or frustration. Or even sadness or grief or fear. These are normal emotions to experience anytime, especially at the holidays, because the holidays tend to evoke a lot of these different emotions inside of us.
This series is designed to help you look at this as an opportunity. An opportunity to grow in extending compassion toward yourself, to grow in regulating your emotions, which is a skill we all need. If you go back to episode 70, I did a deep dive into mastering the art of emotional intelligence, one of the skills required to be an emotionally intelligent person.
It doesn't mean stuffing your emotions. It doesn't mean criticizing yourself for having emotions. It means learning to regulate emotions. It means learning how to tolerate the experience of emotions, even the negative ones in a healthy way, and allow them to inform your decision making so that you can set healthy boundaries on behalf of yourself, so you can speak up on behalf of yourself, so that you can take charge of the plans you're making.
This month of December is an opportunity to pay attention to your own internal landscape, to the cues your emotions are sending you so that you can lead yourself wisely. Because as you lead yourself wisely, as you show yourself compassion, as you pay attention to the cues your emotions are sending you and give yourself the care and attention that you need, you will create that same kind of oasis of emotional and spiritual health for everyone around you.
It spills out, when you nurture the inside of your soul from a place of curiosity and compassion, the oasis that you create spills out to everyone around you. Okay. So we're going to start with some quick, basic truths about the role of emotions.
Number one, emotions in and of themselves are not bad or good. They're not bad emotions or good emotions. Emotions just are. They're cues that your body sends you, and they're important cues. They're cues that help you understand how you are responding to the environment around you. As you notice an emotional cue inside of you, there's a signal.
Something is happening here. Something is happening that is activating my nervous system that I need to pay attention to in order to respond in an appropriate, healthy way to the environment around me. When you notice something like anxiety or overwhelm or stress or negativity, what most of us try to do is we try to brush it aside. Or we try to numb it.
One of those two things. We try to talk ourselves out of it. Logic our way out of the emotion. I shouldn't feel that way. It's stupid to feel that way. I'm a bad person for feeling that way. We try to guilt trip ourselves out of feeling that way, or we just try to distract ourselves or numb ourselves from feeling the way we feel.
But what we really need to do is simply notice, pay attention. Oh, that is so interesting. I'm not feeling excited about the holiday coming up. I'm not feeling excited about this family gathering. I'm feeling stressed out. I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling really frustrated. I wonder what that's about. We need to pay attention to those emotional cues.
As we pay attention to those emotional cues, we get healthier. We learn to make wiser decisions on behalf of ourselves and on behalf of the people who are in our lives, because when our boundaries are healthy, we're going to show up in a healthier way with the people that we love.
The goal of this work of paying attention to our emotional cues is not to silence our emotions or to make them go away. We want to experience a full range of emotions. That's what makes us human. Jesus experienced a full range of emotions. We see this throughout the scriptures. We see Jesus experiencing the full range of human emotions.
As we attune to ourselves, the goal is to experience that full range of emotions without being taken over by those emotions. Because it's a paradox. When we try to stuff or silence our emotions, they actually get bigger and hijack us in the moment. So if you're feeling anxious, you don't want to be at a family gathering, you wish you didn't have to go.
Instead of paying attention to that, you just try to ignore it or bypass it. You end up spending five hours at this family gathering because you didn't say, hey, I'm going to put a limit on the amount of time I can be there because I know it's not going to bring out my best self.
Then you're sitting there and you've silenced those emotions. Guess what? Someone looks at you sideways or someone says something that lands on you a little wrong and all of those emotions explode. They erupt in that moment. If we don't do the work on the front end of paying attention to the emotions of building trust with our own emotions, those emotions will come out.
They're going to hijack us in the moment and they're going to come out way bigger than if we had simply attuned to them and cared for them all along the way. So this is incredibly important. This emotional maintenance, paying attention each day. What am I experiencing today? What am I noticing? What am I feeling?
If I don't pay attention to that, it is going to come out somehow. This is a daily practice of noticing, of becoming more aware of your emotional states. You can make these emotions allies on your journey toward health. Your emotions will help you establish healthier relationships with yourself, with God, and with other people.
Today we're going to take on the first two steps, because they go hand in hand. The first step is to focus on an emotion. Now that can sound counterintuitive at first. You're like, why would I want to focus on my emotion? Especially if it's an emotion I don't like.
But the reason that it's important to focus on an emotion is this: think about if you were to look at an object under a microscope. You take the object and you put it under the microscope so that you can see it better. When you do that, the minute you take that emotion out in front of you and look at it, you've created distance from it.
This is a process that psychologists call differentiation. You differentiate from that emotion. So suddenly, instead of just feeling so angry, when you focus on the anger, you say, oh, there's anger. Oh, I'm angry. What is that anger about? You get a little distance from that anger.
You take that anger out and you put it in front of you. You're looking at it from a healthy distance so that you can see it more clearly. So often what happens is the emotion takes us over. I'm just so angry. I'm just so angry, anxious, or sad.
You're already triggered or activated. You're aware that there's negativity inside your soul. You can even do this as I'm talking with you right now–notice, where do you feel that emotion? Where do you feel that activation in your body? How do you know that there's negativity inside of you?
Whatever it is, just notice that feeling of activation that feels unpleasant. In that very act of noticing it. In that very act of going, man, I just don't feel good right now, I'm angry, or I'm frustrated, or I am just so exhausted, you are noticing something really important.
You're noticing that cue. Focusing is simply taking that one step further, like that microscope going, wait a minute. I'm going to examine that for a second. I'm anxious. Isn't that interesting? Where do I notice that anxiety? Oh my gosh, I'm so tense. You start to ask yourself questions.
Where do I feel it physically? My body is just so tense. Or, man, I just feel it in the pit of my stomach. Or I can just feel this charge of energy, you know, coursing through my veins. Like I just feel so adrenalized.
You begin to notice–what is that feeling and how does it show up in my body? Then you might take it one step further as you focus on that feeling. Is there a thought or an image that comes to mind when I focus on it? You might even close your eyes and just imagine, do a body scan and kind of notice in your body, man, I feel like I'm revved up like an engine.
Or I just feel so angry, I want to crawl out of my skin. I want to lash out at somebody, but I'm trying to hold myself back or I feel so scared. I want to disappear and go away. Or I just feel so worried. My thoughts are like a spinning wheel. Begin to notice or focus on what it is that you're feeling.
Again, the goal here, as you focus on this feeling, you're getting a little distance from it. You're moving from being inside the feeling to having a tiny little bit of healthy distance from it. Okay. That's where that anger is. I feel it. It's not comfortable. I don't love feeling that way, but there it is. I'm naming it.
I'm calling it into being. It's true. It's what's happening. I'm not going to gaslight myself out of feeling this way. This is how I'm feeling. I might as well get curious about it. Curiosity is a huge part of this step of focus.
It's getting curious about what you're really feeling. How familiar is it to you? I've been feeling this way a lot lately. Isn't that interesting? I wonder what that's about. When did it start? Have I been feeling this way for months or did I just notice it today? And if I just noticed it today, what was it that triggered this emotion?
You're engaging in a process of curiosity as you notice this feeling that's been activated inside of you. As you get curious about this experience of activation, this powerful act of differentiating from it gives you just a little bit more control over it. You start to control your emotions versus the other way around.
You're the wise parent in the room. This is all based on the internal family systems model of therapy. I've talked about it a lot here. I did a whole six part series on this model, starting with episode 39 back in February called Boundaries for Your Soul. It's a whole series.
You can go back and listen to that series for a more in depth overview of the different components of this model, but the key thing that you need to know is as you put your focus on this negative emotion, this negative experience of activation inside your soul, you're creating healthy distance from it, which empowers you to manage and lead yourself through the experience of that emotion instead of that emotion leading you.
I want you to hear the difference when you differentiate from emotion and you gain a little bit more control over it. It allows you to speak on behalf of that emotion in a constructive way, as opposed to speaking from the emotion. We talk about this in Boundaries For Your Soul. I want to give you some examples of that. It's super powerful when you are aware that you're getting angry and you feel it in your body and you focus on it and you're like, I am angry right now.
Let's say you're with a spouse or you're with a family member and you're starting to feel heated inside and you start to become aware of your anger. If you're speaking from anger, you might get really loud. You might yell. You might get sort of passive aggressive. Here's an example of speaking from anger.
“Fine. Just have it your way. It's always your way anyway.”. Door slam. Right? That's what it sounds like when you speak from anger. Now, here's what it would sound like to speak on behalf of anger. You're getting a little heated. Tensions are starting to run high.
“Listen, I'm noticing I'm starting to feel angry and I don't think I'm going to be able to participate constructively in this conversation right now. I'm going to excuse myself until I can calm down and we can have a more constructive conversation.”
Then you leave. You exit the room. So you're taking command. You're saying, I'm going to lose it right now. I'm noticing that I'm angry, but you're saying that from a calm place inside.
Here's an example. If you're feeling sad, sometimes we kind of sink into the sadness and when we speak from it, the other people around us don't know exactly how to help us. So it might sound something like this: “I don't really care what we do. I don't know. It doesn't really matter.”
Now, imagine you spoke on behalf of that sadness and you said something like this: “Listen, I'm noticing I'm feeling really sad. I'm just kind of down and discouraged. So I don't really know how to make plans tonight. Could you help me figure out a good plan that honors the fact that I'm actually feeling really discouraged.”
Suddenly you've invited that other person into helping support you in that feeling versus speaking from it. When you focus on an emotion and differentiate from it, you remind yourself that this is just one part of who you are. It's not the whole story. You are not only your anger. You are not only your depression. You are not only your anxiety.
It's a way of reminding yourself–there's a part of me that's angry. There's a part of me that's really sad. There's a part of me that's really anxious. It might even feel like a really big part of me. Sometimes you can only get a paper's width of distance from that emotion.
But even just a little bit of distance reminds you it is not all of who you are. That emotion is not all of who you are. That little bit of differentiation gives you the ability to speak on behalf of it. Oh man, there's that sadness. There's that anger. There's that anxiety. There's that grief. There's that fear. There it is.
I see it out here in front of me now. It's not just coursing through me, and I can invite you in to see it with me too. This is what's happening right now inside of me. I have a name for this feeling. This feeling is present in this conversation. That becomes a healthier way of communicating with other people, which increases the likelihood that you'll be heard and understood.
It's really different when you say, listen, I'm feeling sad today and it's informing how I make decisions. Someone else is probably going to respond to that with some empathy. Or when you say, listen, I'm starting to get angry, I need you to know this, that other person has been cued that if they continue with that behavior, you're going to be angry.
Now they may continue with that behavior because they don't care. But then that's on them. You've alerted them to your emotional state. Finally, it enhances trust. You are able to trust yourself because you're able to articulate the emotion that you're experiencing. You build trust with that emotion. You honor it. You create a space for it without being taken over.
So learning to focus on an emotion and speak on the half of it is critical to emotional health. The process of focusing on an emotion leads us right into this second step. These two steps really go hand in hand, and that is the step of befriending.
When you focus on an emotion, you name the emotion without shame and when you name without shame, you are able to take it one more step and befriend that emotion. You're welcoming in that emotion, you're extending hospitality to it, and this is radical. I'm convinced that this process of learning to befriend your emotions and extending hospitality toward them is the essence of transformation.
It unleashes a radical act of healing and transformation when we surrender to that moment and say, oh my goodness, I don't want to be angry, but I am here. What we're doing is we're honoring our God-given design. This is the way God designed us. He designed us to have these emotions as cues to help us navigate through life.
When we notice those emotions without shame and befriend them, we are honoring our God given design and we are surrendering to the truth of that moment. I am anxious. I wish I wasn't, but I am. I am anxious. I can name that. I can take a look at it without shame. I can even extend compassion to that anxious part of myself. This is radical stuff. This is gospel love.
This is the way Christ enters in and loves every part of who we are. When we get to that point where we can notice that we're anxious and we can be present to that anxiety inside our own souls with radical self compassion. That part of me is anxious right now. I don't hate that part of me. In fact, I welcome that part of me.
It's there for a reason. It's part of my God-made self. I'm going to extend the compassion of Christ to that part of me. That anger that is present to me right now. That is a part of who I am. I am aware of that anger. I can extend the compassion of Christ to that part of me that's feeling that way. This is beautiful, deep, transformative love.
This is not saying it's okay for me to go act out and be a jerk. I am not saying that. I am saying that when you begin to name these different feelings without shame and extend the compassion of Christ to these different parts of yourself, you will transform.
You will experience the love of Christ so deep within your soul that you have no choice but to be transformed. I don't know any other way to put it but gospel transformation. When you begin to extend the compassion of Christ even to the parts of yourself that you don't like.
I want you to imagine those parts of you that have given you so much trouble. Maybe it's the part of you that just so desperately wants to numb or shut down or. Maybe it's the part of you that just cannot let go of a grudge or resentment. Maybe it's the part of you that just compares all the time. Maybe it's your inner critic that just beats you up. I want you to imagine that part of you as another human.
Someone in the world that has just been so beaten down and beaten up and criticized by others that it is just barely hanging on by a thread. This is a part of you that has just received no love, no care, no loving kindness, no compassion. Can you imagine extending the love of God and the compassion of Christ to this part of you that the world has despised and that frankly, you have often despised?
You feel like this part of you causes all of your problems. What if this part of you is in need of your care? What if this part of you is in need of the compassion of Christ? As you begin to extend that kind of radical hospitality to the parts of yourself that you don't like, you will experience deep transformation inside.
You move from a state of self-condemnation where you are just constantly beating yourself up and judging yourself and condemning yourself, which is a state that so many of us live in. You move from that state of self-condemnation to a place of warm, welcoming hospitality.
I see you there, anger. It's okay. You can have a seat at this table. I'm not going to let you take over because there's more to me than you, but you are welcome to have a seat at this table. I see you there, fear. I get it that you're here. You are welcome. You get to have a seat at this table too. I am not going to let you take me over, but you can be here.
You serve a function for me, and I'm glad that you're here. I see you there. That part of me that just wants to indulge in all the food and all the drink and just wants to have lots and lots of fun and not think about the hard stuff. I get it. I see you there.
You get to have a seat at this table too. We want you there, fun part of me. You get to have a seat. I'm not going to let you take over either because we also have these other parts of us, but you get to have a seat at this table. you know what? I see you there, sadness. I see you there, grief, you are precious parts of who I am and you get to be here too.
I'm going to care for you and I'm going to welcome you. You are each cherished, valuable members of my internal family, and you each get to be here at the seat of this table of my life. I'm going to care for you in partnership with God's Spirit. You are welcome. I extend to each of you the compassion of Christ.
As you begin to relate to these different parts of your soul from this place of compassion, notice what happens inside these different emotions. They start to soften. They don't feel so extreme. These parts of you feel seen and heard. You notice, I'm feeling a little sad, or you notice, I'm feeling a little anxious. Okay. That's all I really wanted. I just wanted that validation.
I don't have to get so big to get your attention. These different parts of you, they start to soften just a little bit. instead of these extreme polarizations inside where you just feel the extremes of the emotions, you start to notice a beautiful vitality. A textured complexity of, I have a lot of different parts of me.
One moment I'm sad, one moment I'm joyful, one moment I'm so mad, and then the next moment I'm... kind of laughing about it. Because this is what it means to be alive.
This is what it means to be a multifaceted human made in God's image. We are meant to experience the whole range of emotions. We're complex beings. We can experience a couple of different emotions at the same time.
As we tend to those emotions, each one being granted a beautiful place at the table, we become more whole. Sometimes one of those emotions needs more care than another. Sometimes we're really hurting and then those other emotions come in and help out. Maybe we need to give our anger a little shot at setting a healthier boundary on our behalf.
Because a part of us has been really hurt. So let's talk about how to deploy some healthy anger to set a healthy boundary with someone who hurt us. Or maybe we're feeling really fearful and the rest of our family needs to get on board and be like, man, she's scared. What can we do to help bring her some encouragement?
Maybe that fun filled part of me needs to help that fearful part of me remember that she's not alone, that there's more to us than just fear. You start to tell the story of all of who you are, not just any one single one of these parts. This is what it means to extend hospitality to all the parts of your soul.
We do not change and become more whole in the context of criticism and self-condemnation. That is not the gospel message. We change and we become more whole in the context of Christ's compassion, and it starts with learning to extend that radical transformational compassion to the parts of your own soul that you don't like.
I'm telling you, this is powerful transformation. What is a part of you that you've hated, that you've tried to will away, that you have criticized and judged and condemned? I want you to consider inviting that part of you to have a seat at the table of your soul and to extend the love of Christ even to that part of you.
When Jesus said, I'm telling you to love your enemies, let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer for then you are working out your true selves, your God created selves. That's from Matthew 5:43-45, the message version.
What if Jesus meant to extend that radical compassion, to the parts of you that feel like your enemies? Now, listen, remember Jesus is no fool. We talked about this back in the episode on turning the other cheek. We don't extend love to our enemies out of a position of being doormats, we extend love to our enemies because love is transformational and powerful.
It's our most powerful weapon. Always remember that when we extend love and compassion to these parts of ourselves that are giving us a hard time, we are saying, I see you. I see what you're doing. I'm not stupid. I'm not naive. I see what's going on here. I love you so much that I'm going to sit here with you until you start to soften and until you trust me and until you see that I have nothing but good for you.
You have to do it in relationship to the one who made you and the one who knows you and the one who wants what's best for you–that's the power of love. Now, listen, our external enemies, sometimes they do not want to sit with us and be transformed by the power of God. Then we got to send them on their way.
But those internal parts of us, we have a lot of power to say, I see you, I see what's going on here. I am not blind. I am not naive. I see what's going on here and I am willing to do what it takes to be with you and to hear you out and to hear all about how much pain you've experienced until you are ready to be transformed all the way from the inside out.
Imagine what it's like to sit with a child who's acting out and what do they need the most from you? Any child who's acting out needs your love before they need your correction. They need to feel connected to you before they will receive your correction. It is the exact same with the parts of our soul.
Those parts need to experience connection to you and to the God who made you before they will receive correction. It's a process of saying to the part of your own soul, I see you, I see what's going on with you. I am not going to leave you. You cannot push me away. You cannot scare me away.
I will sit here with you long enough until you experience enough of my compassion that you trust me to help you go about this in another way. You see, these parts need our compassion to change. We change in the context of compassion and connection, not in the context of criticism and condemnation.
I was thrilled to have this conversation about a book that's easily one of my favorites this year. The brilliant author, professor, and public theologian, Esau McCaulley is here to share his personal experience with the many faces of trauma and how he stayed connected to the goodness of God through all of it.
Esau's new book, How Far to the Promised Land, is a gripping, powerful story of one man's journey of survival and hope. This conversation is packed with so much incredible insight all the way through to the end.
Here's what we cover:
1. Esau's early experiences with trauma (6:59)
2. How being a dad has been part of Esau's healing (11:48)
3. Racial trauma (18:08)
4. How to integrate different parts of yourself (28:53)
5. Why we have to tell our stories (31:18)
6. Esau's thoughts on forgiveness (40:35)
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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.
Resources
- Books by Esau McCaulley:
- Genesis 33: Esau forgives Jacob
- John 18:23
- Surprised By Joy by C. S. Lewis
- More about Dan Allender's theory
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here for this final episode in this series on Faith Talks.
Today's guest, Esau McCaulley, is the author of a brand new memoir, How Far to the Promised Land. I've been listening to this memoir, and I love the genre because I feel like memoirs give us insight into people's lived experience. It's the story of their lives. Esau is a New Testament theologian and scholar, but listening to the story of his life really helps connect the dots to some of the Bible teaching that he's also known for.
It's such a powerful book. It's a beautiful story. It's well written. It just draws you in. But as I was listening to the book, I thought, this is really a story of forgiveness. Esau acknowledges in our interview today that it really is, although he doesn't necessarily say that up front.
If you missed last week's episode, go back to the beginning of that episode where I talk about different types of forgiveness and when I'm talking about forgiving others. I talk about how sometimes we have to forgive others who hurt us and they apologize and change. Sometimes we have to forgive others who maybe acknowledge the hurt, but they don't ever really change.
Sometimes we have to work through a process of forgiveness when people never acknowledge the harm that they've done. then sometimes we have to work through a process of forgiveness when a group of people or a culture or a community harms us without ever acknowledging the wrong. There are all these different ways that we have to wrestle with forgiveness in our own lives.
Remember, forgiving doesn't mean continuing to put yourself in harm's way. It means working to release resentment and anger in our own hearts for our own good, spiritually and emotionally. As I was listening to this memoir, I thought, I need to have Esau on the podcast to talk about his experiences because there's just such a beautiful tone throughout this book.
He does not shy away from naming what's hard, and the traumatic abuses that he encountered in his own home, at the hands of his own family, his father, and some really hard things that happened to him at the hands of the culture at large growing up.
He talks about those things, even as he talks about the goodness of God. You can just tell that he is someone who has wrestled deeply with this idea of forgiveness. He is not shying away from what's hard, even as he's wrestling with his own healing and doing his own work.
Esau McCaulley is a professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His articles have appeared in Christianity Today, Religious News Source, and the Washington Post, and his book publications include Sharing in the Son's Inheritance, Reading While Black, and his brand new memoir, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South.
I hope you will check it out. You will not be disappointed. It's such a great read. I am delighted to bring you my conversation with Esau McCaulley.
*Music*
Alison: Esau, you're a New Testament theologian and scholar. Then you write this memoir that's your lived experience, and they're both powerful. They both matter. You talk about that in the first part of the book, the introduction, you're like, when people ask you these questions about racism or whatever, you're like, you need to know the whole context. I love that.
Esau: I think that sometimes when we arrive at adulthood, and maybe people see us, we go and speak places, we have nice outfits on, and at least for me I'm shaved and all of the things–I’m put together. They think, oh, you're a Christian because Christianity worked for you. That things went a certain way in your life and that Jesus makes everything go.
They may sometimes extrapolate from the present picture that they see and suggest that we're only Christians because God is helping us in a way that's visible and material and I want to say no, you met me at this point in my life, but God met me a lot earlier.
In order to understand what I say now about God, you need to understand how God was there from the beginning of my story and through the generations of people in my family.
So you're right, it's a much different kind of writing process, but I think it's more along the lines of saying, these accounts that I give about God and the Bible and Scripture and these things aren't simply intellectual. They're also deeply personal.
Alison: That's right. They're lived, they're experienced. The book is not explicitly about forgiveness, but I saw that thread all the way through it. I also wanted to tell you Esau, my husband and I were just talking last week about how we'd never heard a sermon about Esau, the character in the Bible.
I'm getting to the end of your memoir and I'm like, oh my gosh, you connected those dots to the Esau who forgave. To take us back, take my listeners back–Esau, you tell many stories in such a beautiful way. It's a beautiful book. It's insightful. Like you said, it's not heavy handed. You tell your story as it is. But there are these moments that you described.
The first one that stood out to me was a moment when you were a little boy. I thought about trauma. I think about how we talk about trauma on the podcast as unwitnessed pain, as something that happens, especially as children, that goes deep inside where there's not an adult there to help us make sense of it.
You talk about these moments of being hurt that you internalized without necessarily having an adult there or a father there to help you process those. So tell me a little bit about that younger you.
Esau: It might be helpful for the reader, I'm assuming, and the listener, if they haven't read it, I'm going to put the book into a bit of context, and I'll try not to ramble too long. In 2017, my father passed away in a single car accident. He was a truck driver heading back from California back to our family.
We don't actually know what caused the accident, he just dies. It quickly becomes clear that my family wants me to do the eulogy for my father. That was tricky because my father was, he struggled with addiction throughout our entire, most of his life. So he was in and out of our family, in and out of jail, in and out of our lives.
That kind of absence created its own sense of trauma and brokenness. So now I'm tasked with this idea of telling his story because the eulogy is an attempt to tell someone's story and tie that story to the wider purposes of God. So I was really struck with this idea, but how can I tell the story of someone who I don't know?
It generally leads to me sitting down with friends and family who knew him, relatives who were alive when he was a child to get an idea of who he was. That process though, of returning to his past, caused me to return to my past. Because his story and my story aren't easily separated.
When I began to write, the book has two versions of my father. The perception of my father that I had as a child, and then the perception of my father that I developed later, after I learned his story. One of the stories that I tell early on in the book is in a chapter called, The Making of a Villain.
When my father came home and he struggled when he was high on drugs, he would also become violent and abusive. I talk about what it's like to be in that room, afraid and praying to God that God might be there to rescue us. In one of the stories, the police are called and he comes in and he's sent off to jail. But the next morning I have to go to school and I misbehave in the school and I get in trouble.
So the teacher is asking, why is this person misbehaving? Why is this child doing these things he or she shouldn't do when they know that they should be listening to what I say? It's because I was so hyped up on adrenaline. I couldn't focus. But I also didn't have the tools to explain to the teacher, my family life is chaotic, so I don't care about anything you're trying to teach me in this class.
That idea of the person who you want to love you the most is the person who causes you the most pain. When you're a kid and something bad happens, who do you run to? You run to your parents. What happens when one of your parents is the person who's doing the bad thing?
Or what happens when your mom is also dealing with the trauma from having an abusive husband? I can't go to my mom and talk to her, so a lot of this stays inside for a long period of time.
Alison: You're saying that so well, and I so appreciate what you're describing. Those moments where you don't know how to give language to, and so you internalize, I would think, some shame. You're getting in trouble.
Throughout the story, there's this sense you're a pretty good kid. You're trying to do the right thing, but you don't know how to make sense of these things.
Esau: Yeah, I think you're really afraid because you don't want anybody to know. Like you go to school and you walk around and you think, can people see it on my face? So it's not just the difficulties of what's happening to you. That's it’s own trauma. But the trauma that there's no one you can share it with is a double pain.
I talk about this in the book, that as far back as I can remember, it's actually been a tricky part of me becoming an adult. As far back as I can remember, I didn't have any career goals. I never had career goals. Like, I didn't want to be a doctor. I didn't really care. I just want it to be a husband and a father because as a kid, I had this, I had an awareness that what was happening to me wasn't good and that it was damaging me in a certain way.
I wondered what would happen to a kid if from the moment they were a child all the way through their adult life, if they had a parent who loved them. I wonder what would happen to a woman if she had a husband who thought she hung the moon.
Before I thought girls were gross in middle school/elementary school, I had this idea almost like a lab experiment. What would it be like, to be in a house that was different than the one that I was in? So in some sense, the trauma turned me inward because like I said, I couldn't share with anybody, but it also shrunk down my goals. My entire life, I only wanted to be a husband and a father.
It was funny–yesterday I was playing basketball with my son. We had just bought him some new shoes. They're like 40 or 50 bucks, but they were the Giannis Antetokounmpo shoes and they came in the mail and he's got the Giannis’. It doesn't matter. There was the last season. He doesn't know. He's eight years old, nine years old, doesn't get mad at what I give him his right age.
He went outside and you could tell–we have a little goal in the backyard–you could tell that he was trying to do moves that he couldn't normally do but he thought, I got new shoes on. And so he just wanted to play. He wanted to play with his dad.
That moment, it was such a joyous, untroubled moment. He's just a kid thinking he can play basketball like the guy he saw on TV. In a lot of ways, those moments that I have with my son are very poignant. He doesn't understand why dad is so emotional when he's just playing basketball.
But for me, I really thought to myself, this is all I ever wanted. I just want to see a kid be happy. So I think that in the first part of the book, the writing is even trying to reflect that reality. I'm trying to describe what it is like to see the world through the lens of a kid who's undergoing particular traumas.
So even the writing and the way that the language, like it's, the book is written, I tried to simplify the prose.
Alison: Yeah.
Esau: As I try to think about how it felt as a kid, obviously complex memories have developed, but there's a certain sense in which I know what it feels like to be that young kid in that place.
Alison: You feel that when you're reading it. It's so well written. Like you said, you put us in those shoes. I want to touch on what you just said. You're describing so beautifully almost what we talk about in the therapeutic world–reparenting, where there's a sense of you're reparenting your own younger self as you're allowing yourself the taking in that moment with your own son.
That's beautiful.
Esau: One of the things that I tried to do was like, it's funny, I'm trying to do my best to avoid reparenting because when one of the other things that I've noticed is that with my daughters is a totally different experience because with my daughters, I don't know what it's like to be a young girl who's looking for a dad.
It just feels like the memories don't stack in the same way. So I feel freer in my parenting with my daughters. With my sons, I've tried very hard to allow them to be them and not to undo my past. In other words, like I'm a big sports person. I was playing sports growing up. My oldest son runs track, but athletics isn’t his entire life.
He actually is in the scholastic bowl. That's what he does. He's really good, like varsity, and he's amazing. So I go to his scholar bowl like things and I can't cheer it on because you got to be quiet. But I try to embrace him as him instead of saying he needs to be what I want him to be because when I was a kid, I wanted my dad to go to my football games.
My son's school doesn't even have a football team. So I've tried to do my best to unburden my children from the responsibility of undoing the things that I did, to embrace them as unique George, which isn't always easy. Because the feelings always come. They always come and you can't completely avoid it, but being intentional about saying he's not me and I'm not my dad.
Alison: That's right. Two things can be true simultaneously in that you can be fully present to your boy in his experience, which is so different from yours, and present to your own emotional experience and awareness of,oOh my gosh, I'm doing it. I love that.
Esau: Yeah. It's healing. It's healing to see untroubled joy. It just is.
I cannot articulate how much I enjoyed watching my son try to do a crossover in new shoes that he couldn't do because his dad bought him some shoes and he said, thank you dad. Even when we go on car rides, my oldest is 15 and turning 16–pray for us ‘cause he's driving now, but driving around just in the car with him and being able to have conversations.
In some sense, I don't know how to do this because my father was long gone by the time I was 15. I don't know what you ask a 15 year old. No one asked me anything. So those complex feelings are both new experiences, but like you said, the past is always with you as you live. I can't escape it, but I try not to pressure them with the responsibilities of undoing all my childhood trauma.
Alison: It's really beautiful. I want to ask you, Esau, there's so many things I want to ask you. In the interest of not using up your whole afternoon, I started to make a list as I was listening to your book, and it's really cool to listen to it in your voice.
The different injustices you've talked about–a few that were in your household with your dad, but then you also describe being handcuffed and detailed numerous instances of crazy injustices and as I'm listening, I'm like, I would be filled with resentment.
You're clearly a deep feeler. You're a big thinker. You're engaged. You're in tune. You don't minimize some of these things that happened, but you also don't strike me as someone who is filled with resentments.
Esau: Yeah. I think it was really hard because I'm trying to strike a particular balance that I think is important for people to learn how to function with–people as believers. I didn't want to say that things that happened to me weren't bad.
Because if you move towards forgiveness or grace too soon, then you can have the impact of minimizing these things. There's this point in the Bible where Jesus goes, if I didn't do anything wrong, why did you strike me? He's being questioned. He's no, like I need you to know that, and I know that what you did for me in this moment was an injustice.
So part of what I wanted to do was to write about those things. That those injustices were real and they happened. One of the tricky things when you start talking about things like this, I think about the different parts of the book. So when people talk about family trauma, it's a little bit less controversial. We can understand that. We at least empathize.
When people talk about racial trauma, they get defensive because they feel like they're convicted somehow. Then the idea of talking about racial trauma and family trauma in the book about finding God feels like that's a distraction.
But I want people to understand that it’s a part of my testimony. It's making sense of the goodness of God in the context of family trauma and anti-black racism. If I eliminate that portion of the story, then I'm cutting out a significant point of healing that God did in my life. What happens to a lot of listeners or readers is that they struggle to accept that as a true experience.
So what I wanted to do in the story is to say, these are the things that happened to me, so that you understand when I'm wrestling with the idea of God and how God can be good and kind and forgiving and just, I'm wrestling through these particular issues. One of my favorite books, by C.S. Lewis, I love C. S. Lewis, I've talked about him a lot, is Surprised by Joy.
He's converted in Oxford and he's dealing with these existential questions and like literally the greatest literary minds in human history are evangelizing him. So he's like arguing while talking about God.
That's not my testimony. I didn't come to God in the context of walking around Oxford, having these kinds of questions intellectually. I'm trying to figure out God in the midst of trauma. Anti-black trauma. So what I want to say to people is how do you make sense of that?
This may seem to be overly superficial–only God was there to help.
When I talk about that, how sometimes you can go to college, get an education, you learn and read all of these books, you learn about all of these critiques of Christianity and all of the ways in which God can be good, you start relitigating your past. But I can say the people who were encouraging me to set aside my spiritual values weren't actually there when I was suffering.
They were there to convince me that God wasn’t there in my suffering later on. So what I want to say is that in the midst of those things, who was the person who was my comfort?
Who was there? Who was helping me? I didn't have my dad, but I had a bunch of people who were men in my life from my church who cared about me, who prayed for me, who listened to me complain. So part of it was simply the presence of God is the reason that I survived. Another reason is to say that it was the people around me who loved and cared about me.
As to why I might not be as bitter, I'll put it this way. I don't think that we're always immediately ready to tell our stories. Sometimes we go through things and we just survive them. The only testimony we have is that God helped us survive them. So there's stuff in the book that I didn't talk about publicly ever, because for a long time in my life, all I could say is I survived it.
Alison: Yeah.
Esau: I think sometimes you get to a place where the stories no longer control you, but you control them. Once you have control of those stories, you can then redeploy them for the sake of healing and for God's glory. I talk about this and I thought about this a lot. I don't know if she ever listened to these podcasts, but I mentioned her a couple of times.
One of my heroes is Rachel Denhollander. Rachel went through a trauma that she now talks about for the sake of helping other people. It doesn't mean that every trauma survivor can do that or they're required to do it. For some people, that's too difficult. For every person there’s a cost.
Every interview costs a trauma survivor something to tell their story. But for those of us who feel comfortable, that they are in a place spiritually where they can tell that story, we can begin to use those stories for God's glory. So I'm at the point now in my life that I can tell those stories without bitterness and I can see the ways which I can use this story to help people live healthy and fuller lives.
But that wasn't where I always was. I like to give people time to say maybe in the grace of God, you might get to a point one day where your story is not something simply that you survive, but there's something that you can actually use for the glory of God. Not that God caused it or anything like that, but you can use it.
There's things that aren't in the book. There's stories that are not in the book because I'm not ready to tell those stories. People think, why'd you do a memoir? I said hold on. It's 60,000 words. These are like, like 10 or 15 stories. These are the ones that I felt comfortable sharing with people.
There's other stories that I'm still trying to make sense of as a believer. Maybe in the future I'll be able to tell those stories, but I'm not there yet.
Alison: Yeah. I love that. I love what you're saying. It's complex. There's different moments that I work through resentments in my life. We were talking with Curt Thompson a couple weeks ago, and he was talking about some resentments he was working through, and I was like, oh, isn't that interesting that I wouldn't talk about them at this point because they're very real. I could certainly tell you something about 20 years ago. So I love what you're saying.
Esau: There are two or three things that I'm just like, I can't talk about them. This happened like in the last three to five years. I think that the pandemic was hard on everybody. But the last five to 10 years of my life, a lot of things have happened that I haven't processed yet.
When I speak about them, I still feel the emotion, so I don't talk about them. There's a reason why basically the events of the book all end in 2017, effectively.
Alison: That's where you were ready to go.
Esau: That's where I'm ready. So that was one portion. We'll see if I'm ever able to write about what happened after that.
Alison: Tell me those moments when you were a kid, when you were a teenager, maybe as a young man, those moments of breakthrough. I love how you said “God was there with me”. There were a few people that broke through, I think you used the word uncomplicated joy to describe your son.
So for you, it was complicated. There was a lot of complicated, but there were moments as glimmers we talk about in psychology, where something broke through, whether it was through the Holy Spirit, whether through a human, where you were like, oh, I want more of that.
Esau: Yeah, I think a part of it was my mom who played a tremendous role in my childhood and she was one of them. I think it can be really difficult to talk about my mom because once again, there are other people who had great moms who ended up under different circumstances.
I talk about that in the book, but for this sake, I can say this: she could imagine a future for her children. It was not rooted in our circumstances. That was a deep conviction that she had from God, that God had better plans for us. Even when we didn't believe it, we believed that she believed it.
So that was one of those things that carried us up. The language of the book is like, how far to the promised land? One of the things that I realized is that in some sense, my mom's home was the promised land. It's this place of safety. Even before we arrived, it was like this kind of promise within the context of poverty and suffering and anti-black racism.
My mom said, you're not gonna let these people tell you who you are. I tell you, this one time where she said we can't, she came home, she worked for the school board, so she'll go across town and then she'd come back from across town because we lived in the black part of town and the school board is always in the white part of town.
She had friends over there and so she would say, man, they said that you all couldn't learn, that you couldn't think, that you guys are nothing but a bunch of animals. Is that true? Is that true? Is what they're saying about you true? Because if that's true, then I've failed as a parent. For me, that was it.
One of the other things, I don't know if I talked about this in the book, but it was our church. It was our church. Week in and week out the pastor would preach with such an urgency because I think he knew that life and death was actually the decision that we had to make each week.
I had this running joke where I was like, okay. We were in church every Sunday. The door was open. We was there. So I would say I'm coming to church and if the pastor preaches a good sermon, I'll be a Christian for another week and I won't sin. If he preaches a bad sermon, I'm in the streets.
So it was like a week to week thing and it's actually influenced how I think about preaching because I know what it's like to walk in a church on a Sunday with every desire not to have hope, and to have someone who will help me to hope for a little bit longer. I wanted to say that they did that more often than not.
Even when I thought it wasn't doing its work, I'm pushing these things off, they were somewhere inside of me doing their work and in the fullness of time, it bore fruit.
Alison: I love that. Esau, one of the things that I'm really interested in–the topic of my first book is this idea that we have an internal family of parts. It's a model of therapy that acknowledges we're complex. We have different parts of us and it helped me a lot being someone who has lived in a lot of different parts of the country, like I said, grew up in rural Wyoming, ended up at an Ivy League school in New England where I felt like a complete misfit.
I think about you, reading your memoir, you even talk about the different parts of you. You find your way to St. Andrews where you're studying with N. T. Wright, yet you carry with you all of these former selves.
I'm very interested in that. I think, especially as trauma survivors, those things don't go away, these parts of us, and we don't want them to. What's that like for you? Talk to me a little bit about how you bring all of these parts of you so that you feel like your whole self, wherever you are.
Esau: That's a good question because for a long time, I don't think that I did that very well. I think that there was this idea that in order to get to college, I have to be someone else.
Alison: Yeah.
Esau: Then they teach you who they want you to be at university. So then you become that person. Then I leave the South and I go to graduate school in New England. Then we eventually go to Japan because my wife is in the military. Then we go from Japan eventually over to Scotland.
I'm running. When you're in the rat race, when you're running towards something, it's almost like your bags were checked before the departure and you're flying without the bags, but eventually you land wherever you're going and all the bags come back.
Alison: That's good.
Esau: So at a certain point I arrived and this is what 2017 is, I arrived in the place where I was supposed to be and then all the bags showed up. I realized that I wasn't happy being the version of the person who they wanted me to be. That it actually felt stifling. That I was going to lose my mind unless I let everybody come back.
So part of my writing is my journey to reintegrate myself. I have to be someone who grew up in the black church. That's just a part of who I am. I'm someone who fell in love with the liturgy and I love the sacraments. That's just a part of who I am. I'm someone who loves the Bible. I'm a Bible professor. That's a part of who I am. I'm also a writer.
I'm like, I'm a mess of stuff. Like I have five books in five different genres that I've yet to read because I'm just interested in different things. So I am always trying to say now only in the last three to five years, how can I be who God made me to be instead of the person people wanted me to be? You want to say, how did you do it? I said, I think I had to do it to keep my sanity.
Reading While Black was for me. My first book that you all know about was my Declaration of Independence.
It was saying, I have to be a Christian this way or I can't do it at all. I'm going to be a Christian this way or not at all. So I can't be anything other than who God called me to be. How Far to the Promised Land is the story in a sense, of journeying towards becoming that person.
So I guess I want to say, I think there's a lot of people who get to a place in life where they have the things they want, but the cost is too high.
Alison: Yeah.
Esau: I felt like the cost of not being myself was so high, I had to integrate them back so that I wouldn't lose myself. So I try now to be utterly myself for the sake of my own spiritual, emotional, and mental health, which means that the people who liked the version I knew how to perform for them may not like me as much anymore. That's okay.
Alison: Preach it. I love it. That's so much of what we talk about here on the podcast is this internal integration, this integrity. It's not just emotional, it's a spiritual process. I'm curious, because you talk a little bit in the book about what you're saying, how I knew the person I needed to be to fit into whatever setting.
So was writing the book helpful to you, writing the story? I would imagine, helpful to you in pulling in the different threads.
Esau: I think that everybody should write a memoir. I don't know if everybody should publish one, but everybody should write one. Because what I realized is there are stories that happen to you. They just exist in your head that you return to over and over again, but aren't actually integrated in your life.
They’re just regrets. They visit you like the ghost of Christmas past. They're just unresolved. Because when they occurred, you didn't say what you wanted to say. There were things that were happening and what I figured out in writing this book was, and this was glorious, I wasn't expecting it, is that I can't undo the past.
I can’t undo what happened, but I can actually end the past. I could write a conclusion, not to redo it. I can say, okay, I didn't say this. I didn't do this. I regret it and I wish that I had, and had I had the wisdom, I would have done this. So what I've discovered in writing this book is it actually helped me in the process of integrating different parts of myself.
It helped me, the final chapters when I dealt with the story of my father and our final interactions with one another. That was, I think, some of the best writing that I've ever written in my life. Because it was honest. I realized that the things that I said at the time that I believed, that I actually believed...oh, that's actually true.
It's one thing to say you forgive someone and to feel it at the moment. But there is something in the sense of, in the context of writing the book, processing all of the forgiveness that I had articulated. So for me it was tremendously healing.
One of the other interesting things about it is like, there's been no other sermon in my life that I wrote and then I revisited six years later. The book is framed around the eulogy and the last chapter contains actual words that I wrote. Seven years ago. To return to that text again and to say, yeah, I actually believe this stuff.
Alison: Yeah.
Esau: A real account of what happened. It's true. One of the weird things is I've had people who reached out to me since I wrote the book to say, oh, I knew your dad. One person reached out to me cause the book concludes, I'm going to give it too much away, he ends up at Oak Cliff Bible Church with Tony Evans as the pastor.
It was a big church, influential with me as well. I ran into someone online who said that my dad was in the Bible study that he talked about in the book. He said, oh, I led that Bible study with your dad. He used to talk about you after church all the time. I was like, I didn't even know that. So maybe you put a book out into the world and you find out stuff that you didn't know.
Alison: Yeah, Dan Allender talks about narrative being so important to healing from trauma, and it's what you're saying. It's telling the story over and over. It's why we need stories. We're telling the story of our lives, trying to piece together the threads, and as we grow, as we mature, we pull in new threads and we start to see it a little bit differently.
We see a few more contours. I think you're onto something when you say, and even just the research on journaling, for those of you listening, telling your story, retelling your story and if it's painful, as I'm sure there are painful spots where whoa, I'm not sure I'm ready to tell that story.
Just notice. That's okay. You don't have to, again, you don't have to publicize it. You don't have to, there might be a time when you're ready to do that, such as you said, but I think you're really saying something profound about telling our stories, revisiting the stories, adding chapters to the stories.
Esau: I'm glad you talked about this. Sometimes you don't know that you're still angry about stuff until you start trying to talk about it. You realize, oh man, this really still bothers me.
Alison: Did you find some of that when you were writing?
Esau: Yeah. So there's a chapter called fleeing the South where I talk about the police encounters that I had, and it's the final police encounter that I had when I'm driving from my hometown back to my university and the police officer pulls us over. We're in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee, and he says, I'm pulling you over for a sudden change in speed.
We had gone from a speed of 55 to 35 because of the speed trap. That's how we changed speed suddenly. It was like the sheer ridiculousness of it. See I'm, you can feel it now. It's coming outta my voice, like the sheer ridiculousness of this thing.
But we're in the middle of nowhere, so I can't say to him, oh, you shouldn't pull me over 'cause what am I gonna do? Then he asked, there's two of us in the car, he asked for my license and the license of the person next to me because we told 'em we're going to college. We're going back to campus.
He asked for our student IDs, and there's no law in America that says you have to prove that you go to college. But once again, we are at the mercy of law enforcement in the middle of nowhere. So we have to do whatever he says.
Alison: You talk about how your mom had taught you.
Esau: You told me to do it. But I think, and I talk about this, like the idea of the fear, the confluence of bad days.
One of the ways that God was gracious to me is that every time the police officer was having a bad day and he was taking it out upon me, I was not having a bad day. I was emotionally in control. So when he's calling us, even though we're 22 years old, he's calling us boy, or 21 years old.
He's calling us boys. You boys go back to campus. The person in me who wants respect wants to say who are you calling a boy? That's what I wanted to say. But if I say that it escalates the situation. I had this fear, this real genuine fear of what happens when my bad day and their bad day occur on the same day.
And so that was one of those things that took me out of the South. One of the things that's been really interesting about the last five years for me, I've written so much about the South. This book is set entirely in the South. Reading While Black deals with a lot of the South.
I felt a little bit of sadness that I had to leave a place that I loved because it had broken my heart. So in the context of me writing that section of the book, I was like, man, I love this out. I'm so mad that they made me leave, and I felt that there was still a little bit of me that's a little bit still processing that particular trauma.
Alison: Yeah, I love that. Again, the power of going back, it's like pressing on an old bruise a little bit and maybe it's no longer a gaping wound, but there's still some emotion there. Thank you for the work that you put into that. It's amazing.
Esau: Thank you. I really felt and this is what I was trying to get at earlier. Really quickly the world is in some sense moved in a way from my discipline to your discipline. This might seem like a strange way of putting it, and I'm not saying we don't care about the Bible, I know you do Bible and theology and psychology, I know you do them both.
What I'm saying is, I was abroad, and when I came back to the states in 2016, 2017, there was the question–what does the Bible say about these topics? I feel like now the question is, given my trauma, can I trust God?
Alison: Yeah.
Esau: What I was trying to do was to say, I'm not giving you a prescription of what to do, but maybe seeing the life of someone who went through difficult things and who came out on the other side as someone who still has a robust trust in the goodness of God gives you as the reader, a chance to have that same confidence.
I feel like both of those things are necessary. In other words, I think that we need practical tools to help us process the complexities of life.
Forgive me for rambling on about this, but I remember thinking Christianity ought to be easy by now. When I was a kid, I thought, oh, you get married, you have kids, you got to rent to repeat until you die. It's hard and you live long enough and people who you really put your trust in break your heart. So how do you follow God after that?
Alison: Yeah.
Esau: I feel like the work that you and others are doing helps us process these things, and to think about how we might function as Christians. This is beyond my competence to be prescriptive. How Far to the Promised Land is descriptive and I hope that people can find that useful.
Alison: Gosh, that's beautiful. I really think about what you and I do, and this is why I was starting to be a psychologist, but I was like–it's Augustine–I can't study the soul without studying God. You can't study God without studying the soul. So what you and I do is, two sides of the same coin.
I lead with psychology, and a lot of what I lead with is, okay, so Jesus says, forgive. How do I forgive somebody who has never asked for forgiveness, who has never even owned it, which you have plenty of in your life? How do I forgive somebody who has asked for forgiveness, but has really hurt me?
How do I build trust again? You touch on that. You go down every single one of those in your story. I want to hear your theology about that, too, but I want to hear more about it after I've heard your story, because I'm like, oh, dang. It's just part of human nature.
Esau: I'm glad that you learned the secret because there's a bunch of ways into the book. But the way into the book that you capture the most of what's going on is a long meditation on forgiveness
Alison: That's how I took it.
Esau: It's like the secret sauce of understanding what's going on. The first thing that you actually read is the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Oh man, we love this story, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.
The Pharisee thinks he's perfect and he says, God, I'm glad I'm not like this other guy. Then the Tax Collector goes, God have mercy upon me, a sinner. We love that story. Oh, we love it. Because we can say no matter what you did, God can forgive you and blah, blah, blah.
Then I said hold on for a second. Did the Tax Collector come to your house? He had taken the last bit of money that you had to pay for your kids' food. Now the tax collector has robbed you and your kids are starving. What has the tax collector done over 20 years? Basically, he was a terror to his community, destroying lives wherever he went.
That's what the tax collector was. I want to promise you that the Jewish people who were around that tax collector were not rooting for his forgiveness. When the tax collector converted, came back home, I'm pretty sure people are like, I'm not sure I want to kick with this guy, which is why people didn't want to mess with Paul in the Bible. It took Barnabas.
So the question I wanted to ask is what happens then if I'm trying to process in effect what a tax collector like character did for me? Because my father does have a turning at the end. But the turning of the end doesn't undo the 25 to 30 years of trauma that he caused.
That process of saying, I am glad the tax collector converted or repented. It's not as simple as we hear it in the story when we're actually a part of it. One way to read How Far to the Promised Land is to say, what happens to the child of the tax collector whose life is forever changed by the decision of his father?
I don't go too deep in the Bible, but I'll say a little bit more. One of the things about tax collectors is they were shunned by their community and oftentimes that shunning extended to their family. So you can imagine if the tax collector was the one who was robbing all of the families, do you think people want to play with the kid or the tax collector?
No. So the kid finds himself isolated. So you know what that means? He's often stuck in that same life of his father. It creates generational trauma. It's passed down. Tthe tax collector's son, his entire life, even the opulence that he has, is probably rooted in what he knows is the suffering of the people around him.
Now it's not a direct analogy because my father doesn't enrich our family by his actions. He makes us poor. But in the same way that everything that happens to me in the book is set in motion by my father's failure is similar to what the tax collector did in the communities around him. So you get to the end and you say, yes, I'm glad that he repented.
That's a journey the book chronicles, it chronicles both that journey and the chaos that was caused in my life by his departure.
Alison: Yeah, I think it's Bonhoeffer who talks about cheap grace. This is costly grace. Costly forgiveness. There's a cost to it. Also there's redemption in it. As you're made whole through your own journey as well.
Esau: Because I think you have to actually, and this is where things get really tricky. Because I don't want to, this is descriptive, not prescriptive because I have to own my own actual need for grace. If you're going to know how to forgive, you actually have to believe that you need the doctrines of grace.
What I mean by that is the difference between saying I like grace. Grace is a good comfort that helps me even though I think I'm 90 percent Christian and only need God to do 10 percent of the work. ‘Cause I'm pretty good.
But we say no. I actually need the grace of God to function as a Christian and that I'm not just someone who has victimized, who's a victim, which I am, but that in other ways I've also hurt and wounded other people.
The forgiveness that I want to be available to me in theory, I have to extend to other people. So it's only when you own in a deep way, God's grace, his ability to forgive you, that you can actually hope that God forgives someone else, even if you don't benefit from it.
So in other words, I got to the point where I couldn't have the father that I wanted as a child because I was an adult now. So I wasn't wishing for that. What I could say is I genuinely hope for a better ending for his story than someone who abandoned his family and then died alone.
Forgiveness wasn't reconciliation. It was actually hope–hope that even if I never get anything out of it, I hope that this person finds him or herself before the end.
Alison: Yeah, that's so powerful. It's so nuanced.
Esau: Yeah, people say what's this book about? It's just about life and life is complicated. Don't ask me to say it in a sentence.
Alison: It's a beautiful memoir. It is complex. That thread of forgiveness, you just move through it and not easily, but you walk us through it. It's so worth the read. One of the questions we ask, and you touched on this, is what's bringing out the best of you right now? How would you answer that?
Esau: I think that right now, two things. One of them is my family. I realized yesterday, I was on a walk with my dog. I said to my wife, people don't actually pay me to come and speak. I would do that part for free. People pay me to leave my family.
That's what you actually like. If you invite me to come somewhere, you're actually paying me to not be with these people whom I love and whom I care about. Because I just enjoy being with my wife. It sounds lame. I enjoy being with my wife and kids and they bring me real joy. I'm like, I think that you're amazing. And I like my wife and kids better.
So it's always so what's bringing the best out of me is seeing that it is a privilege to watch a life unfold before you. That's what you have in the family. It's an intense community watching a life unfold. So I would say right now my children and my wife are bringing me real and great and lasting joy.
I also say that I'm really enjoying the writing process. Writing is an act of creation. I don't know how other people write. But half the time I don't know what I'm going to say when I have a vague idea, and the thrill of putting together sentences and paragraphs and those kinds of things.
It's the joy of an anticipated door for someone else. Sometimes I write stuff and I say, I think this is really going to help someone. They're going to like this line. They're going to like the way these words function and it gives me joy.
Don't tell anybody, this between me and you, like for fun at night, I've been working on a fiction book and that's been like the thing that I've been doing for the last few months, about a month or so is thinking about what kind of fiction book might I write?
Alison: Cool. Do you mean literally I shouldn't record that?
Esau: I was just joking. You can put it in. Yes. I'm working. I'm doing more biblical scholarship. Don't yell at me, people who say when you're going to do the Bible, but I'm working on my next book, biblical theology, and I'm also working on a fiction book. It's actually a trilogy. We'll put that to the side. If I say it in a podcast, then it has to be real.
Alison: It's public accountability. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for all you poured into this beautiful book. Your books are amazing. I'd say read both and whichever. If you're someone who wants the biblical theological version, read Reading While Black first, if you need the lived story to go, I need to know this person's going to relate to my suffering and what I've been through before I trust his theology, read the memoir first.
Esau: I'm not saying I'm like C. S. Lewis. Remember when they talked about the order of the chronicles of Narnia? If I were the reader, I would read How Far to the Promised Land first, and then Reading While Black, even though they were published differently. But How Far to the Promised Land is the introduction to everything.
Alison: Yeah, it is. It's the prequel. It's amazing. Thank you so much, Esau,
Esau: Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Today's episode is packed! First, I walk you through some practical, research-backed thoughts on forgiveness and grace. Then I invite you into a conversation I had with none other than Max Lucado about how God's forgiveness and grace played out in his own life.
Here's what we cover:
1. The difference between grace & forgiveness (2:20)
2. Personality type & forgiveness (7:11)
3. 3 types of forgiveness (11:03)
4. How to forgive (15:15)
5. Max's personal story (23:28)
6. Clear words of wisdom about toxicity (37:38)
Thanks to our sponsors:
- 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 www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
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.
Resources
- God Never Gives Up On You: What Jacob's Story Teaches Us about Grace, Mercy, and God's Relentless Love by Max Lucado
- Research on forgiveness
- "[Forgiveness] is an active process in which you make a conscious decision to let go of negative feelings whether the person deserves it or not." -Dr. Karen Swartz"
- Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods." -Dieterich Bonhoeffer
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I am so thrilled for these next two episodes, the final two episodes in this series on Faith Talks. We're going to talk about grace and forgiveness, and the two concepts are fairly intertwined.
They're different, but they're intimately linked. So in the first part of today's episode, I'm going to talk about what grace is, what forgiveness is, how they're different. I'm going to talk about forgiveness and what's so tricky about it, what's so hard about it. Then we're going to jump into a couple of interviews with people who are talking about these concepts, who are illustrating these concepts, who are showing us how these concepts play out in their day to day lives.
So first let's talk about what grace is. We throw this word around–we want to be people who are gracious. We want to be people who demonstrate grace. We want to receive grace. We want others to be gracious toward us. So what do we mean by that?
Grace more broadly defined is a posture of kindness. It's a posture of what I like to call goodwill. Which might mean you tend to give others the benefit of the doubt. You tend to give grace. The reason that person cut me off in traffic or was rude to me in the checkout line is because they were having a hard day.
I want to have a gracious, generous outlook. We want others to have a gracious outlook toward us. We think about God's grace. We think about the reality that God is constantly showing grace to us, which means God constantly has a posture of goodwill toward us. It doesn't mean that God isn't aware of where we're getting it wrong, where we're missing the mark, where we're a little bit far from God.
I don't think God is naive. I think God sees those things, but God gives us grace constantly. God is the master of grace giving. As we receive more and more of God's grace toward us, it allows us to have a reservoir of grace inside our souls that spills out to the people all around us.
So grace is a general posture.
When we get into forgiveness, we're talking about a subcategory–a specific form of grace. Forgiveness is given out in the context of a specific offense. It's initiated by a wrongdoing or a series of wrongdoings, a lot of wrongdoings. It doesn't have to be just one wrongdoing. So forgiveness is a posture of the heart, the soul, the mind toward someone who has wronged. Something that violated us in some way.
It involves letting go of the resentment, the anger, or the desire to get even. Again, there's some assumption in this definition of forgiveness, that there is cause to be angry. There is cause to feel resentful. There is cause to want to get even. There is a desire at its best for justice–something wrong happened.
Forgiveness requires us to be very honest about the wrong that occurred. Forgiveness isn't glossing over things. Forgiveness requires us to be very in tune with, “This was wrong. I was wronged in this situation”. It means facing those unpleasant emotions, the resentment, the anger that pops up.
It doesn't mean denying those emotions. We're going to get into this. This is a little bit of a spoiler alert, but I've got a whole new series coming up on emotions that I'm so excited about. So I'm going to touch on it today. There's more to come in the coming weeks, but forgiveness means acknowledging those negative emotions that understandably surface when someone is hurting you, someone is mistreating you, someone isn't. honoring you, someone isn't respecting you, someone isn't giving you the kindness that you are giving to them.
It evokes negative feelings in us. That's normal. What we do with those negative feelings is on us. Forgiveness is one of the tools, one of the strategies that's available to us.
There are a couple of things I want you to hear today before we dive into these episodes:
Number one, a posture of grace and a posture of forgiveness in psychology research, these attributes are correlated with improved mental health in general. If we are people who tend to give others the benefit of the doubt, if we are people who tend to release resentment and anger and hold a forgiving posture toward others, we see improved mental health benefits.
This is secular research. These attributes are correlated with increased levels of happiness, decreased symptoms of depression and anxiety, and a generally more positive outlook on life.
In general, it's not healthy for us to harbor a lot of ill will. It's not healthy for us to harbor resentment and anger. It doesn't do good for our bodies, our souls, or our minds. We see this time and time again in the research. So we do want to be people of grace. We do want to be people of forgiveness.
But there are a couple of nuances to that. Number one, research in psychology has also established a strong correlation between the ability to forgive others and certain personality traits. You probably know this anecdotally. You probably right now as you're listening, can think about yourself and recognize, I'm someone who forgives pretty easily, even when I've been wronged.
Or you might be aware that it's really hard for me to forgive. I don't like it. I don't like seeing wrongs. It's really hard for me. There's probably a good reason for that.
Back in episode 49, we talked about the big five personality traits that are the most researched personality traits in psychology that tend to be how we're wired.They tend to be pretty stable over time. One of those traits is agreeableness.
Some people tend to have a more agreeable approach. For those folks, indeed, what we find is that forgiveness and grace come a little bit more easily than folks who have lower levels of agreeableness. Now, if you go back to those episodes, you remember there's not a good or bad here.
The people who score lower on agreeableness tend to be more invested in justice. They tend to be more invested in calling out wrongs. So there's a need for all types. If you're somebody who struggles with forgiveness, my guess is you are somebody who really hates injustice, and that's a good quality.
Doesn't mean you don't have to work on forgiveness or grace. But it does mean we don't want you to lose that quality of calling a spade and naming what you see and calling out wrongs. There's a real need for you in our world.
For those of you for whom forgiveness and grace come a little bit more easily, there's a need for you to not jump to a naive glossing over. That isn't actually forgiveness. I put myself in this category.
For those of us who have a highly developed fawn response, who are a little bit more of a people pleaser, we can call ourselves gracious and forgiving, but what's really happening is we're not looking at the hard facts.
We're not looking at the reality that there was a wrong. The invitation to us is to get a little bit more in touch with what I believe matters to God also, which is that justice piece, that truth telling piece. This wasn't right. The way this other person treated me, it wasn't right.
I'm willing to forgive that person. Yes, that may come a little bit easily to me, but I'm also working on naming when something isn't right. That's also a part of my growth spiritually, emotionally, mentally, physically.
So the first thing as you're listening to these conversations I'm going to have today and next week, I want you to hold that in mind. Is there a personality disposition that makes some of these things a little bit easier? Where are you on that spectrum? If it's harder for you, what's your invitation in terms of forgiveness? If it's easier for you, what's your invitation in terms of forgiveness?
If it's harder for you, your invitation might be to go through the mental rigor of working to release resentments and anger. If you're someone for whom forgiveness comes pretty easily, your invitation might be to work on naming and honoring wrongs that have been committed at least before God and with a couple of other people being really honest about areas where you've been hurt.
There is hurt there and you need to also face the hurt before you jump into forgiveness because it's also not wise to let other people take advantage of us. We need all of these tools in our tool belt.
Finally, I want to talk a little bit about different types of forgiveness: number one, there's forgiving yourself. Sometimes we wrong ourselves. We do something we know we shouldn't do, or we do something that at the time is the best we can do, that years later we're beating ourselves up or we're mad at ourselves that we did that thing that we're now suffering the consequences of.
This is real self forgiveness, and this is where I love that parts work where we look at a part of us that did the best we could at a given moment in time. We bring that part out in front of us. We stop beating ourselves up. We invite God into that experience because God doesn't beat us up. God names without shame. We walk through a process of forgiving that part of ourselves in partnership with God's spirit. It's so powerful. We'll get into more of that in these upcoming episodes.
There's also forgiving others. This is the most commonly known form of forgiveness, and there's a couple of forms of forgiving others.
Number one, there's forgiving others when they ask for forgiveness, when they acknowledge a wrong. Maybe somebody has hurt you. A parent has hurt you. A friend has hurt you. A spouse has hurt you and they've come to you and said, I'm really sorry. I messed up. I'm going to do better next time. In those instances, forgiveness can be hard, but it's sometimes a little bit easier.
Then there’s when someone owns what they have done, sometimes somebody asks for forgiveness, but they don't really change. That's a little bit harder.
Then sometimes we have those situations where someone has wronged us in deep ways. Maybe they've wronged us systematically time and time again and they've never owned it. They don't even think they've done anything wrong. They might not even know the extent of the damage they've caused. Those are really hard situations to forgive, especially if you're still in a relationship with that person.
I'm going to come back to that in one second, but I want to name the third type of forgiveness, and that's collective forgiveness. It’s where a group of people or a community of people or a culture of people has harmed you. If you've been part of a church community that harmed you, the whole culture was toxic and that community harmed you, that can be really hard, especially if you cannot get away from the group that has hurt you.
So I want to touch on this category of forgiveness that so many of us, all of us at some point in our lives have experienced a hurt from someone else where that person doesn't know or doesn't care that they've heard us. This is really hard, especially if you're in an ongoing relationship with this person, and I want to say up front that I believe very clearly that boundaries and forgiveness go hand in hand.
I do not think forgiveness means continuing to allow yourself to be put into harm's way. If you've received any of those messages that you should forgive and forget and let this person keep harming you, that is wrong. You will hear our guest say this today, and I'm so grateful that he did.
Here's the tricky thing about forgiveness in those cases. We don't do ourselves any favors by holding on to anger and resentment. It doesn't do good in our own souls to hang on to those feelings longer than we should know.
We need to honor them. We need to notice them. We need to let those feelings run their course. But the minute we start to grab on and feed on anger and feed on resentment over time, that's not healthy for us. There's a lot of research that supports that. So we want to honor those feelings, but we want to release those feelings.
I believe that one of the best ways we can do that is to set healthy boundaries with those who are harming us. Once you trust yourself and God long enough that you've established that healthy distance from that person in whatever way that you can, then you can begin to do the work in your heart of releasing anger and resentment.
I want to be clear about that. Boundaries go hand in hand with forgiveness. Getting enough healthy distance from a person who has hurt you, especially if they're unrepentant, especially if they're not saying they're sorry, especially if there's no bid for restoration and where reconciliation is not possible.
Forgiveness is about getting healthy distance, whether that distance is physical and you never let that person into your space again, or whether there's emotional distance, maybe with someone that you have to have an ongoing relationship with, but you recognize that person will never be able to give me what I actually need.
You can then begin to do the work internally to release resentment and anger, and you release that to God, and you are able to release that to God because God is a God of justice. So you're not gaslighting yourself. You're not saying what they're doing is okay. You're saying that is wrong. Simultaneously, I can release that to you, God, because you are the God of all justice.
I can't do anything about this. All I can do is protect myself from further harm, while simultaneously releasing to you the anger and resentment I feel. You are the God of justice, and I can release that to you. That's powerful. That's a powerful form of forgiveness. It doesn't mean you let that person continue to hurt you.
How do you do that? Again, if you're in that category of someone who's been hurt, and maybe you've got some boundaries in place. You're learning how to get some healthy distance from this other person, from this situation. But you're aware of that resentment and negativity inside.
Dr. Karen Swartz, she's a researcher out of Johns Hopkins, she says it this way. She says, forgiveness is an active process in which you make a conscious decision to let go of negative feelings, whether the person deserves it or not.
That's tricky. That's hard. I like this definition though, because she's saying a couple of things. It's an active process. It's ongoing. It's not a one time event, especially if it's a really deep hurt. If it's an ex, if it's a parent, if it's a child, an adult child who's really hurt you.
It's a conscious, active process where you're having to do what I call “mind your mind”. There's some mental rigor of noticing, oh man, there's that negativity. Especially if you have to see that person, there's that negativity. It's a process of noticing that, naming that, and not shaming yourself for having that feeling.
There's a justification for it. That person hurt me. Also God, will you help me release that negative feeling? Will you help me release that resentment that I feel in my soul? Will you be the God of justice? Because I've done everything I can do to protect myself. This person isn't changing. They're never going to change.
It's not good for me to harbor resentment in this situation. I can name it. I can honor it. I can do what I can, what's my part to protect myself, and then I need to release it. God, I got to release it because it's not healthy for me to hang on to. Will you help me release it?
It's a mental muscle you're developing as you learn to forgive. It is an active process, and I believe it happens in the context of healthy boundary setting. You set the healthy boundaries. You do what you can to protect yourself from ongoing harm. That's part of wisdom. You notice the negativity when it comes up. You honor it. You go to God and you release it. God, you are the God of justice. I release that negativity. I release that other person into your care.
You are the God who knows all. You are the God who knows more than I do. You release it and God takes it from there. We can trust God because God is a good God. God is a God of justice. He sees everything. He understands everything. He's big enough to take these heavy burdens that we bear.
Alright, so I wanna move into today's interview. Most of you are familiar with Max Lucado. He is a pastor, a speaker, and a prolific best selling author. He is known for his deep understanding of grace.
I got a chance to meet Max recently and noticed that he is someone who embodies grace and it's not cheap grace. Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about the difference between cheap grace and costly grace. Costly grace recognizes when there's wrongs. There's a cost to grace and Max is somebody who understands that.
Today we talk about Max's brand new book called God Never Gives Up On You: What Jacob's Story Teaches Us about Grace, Mercy, and God's Relentless Love. I love this conversation and it's a beautiful book. If you're in need of some grace of your own, some encouragement, this is a great book and you'll hear in today's episode that Max doesn't beat around the bush about toxicity.
He names it and he owns it and he calls it out where it is in the Bible. It's all over the Bible. Yet God is still a God of grace. I'm so pleased to bring you my conversation with Max Lucado.
Alison: Can you tell us a little bit, I know from your story that before you were a pastor, you worked to pay your way through college. It sounds like you initially wanted to become a lawyer before you discovered Bible courses and discovered the calling to be a pastor.
This is a while back. Can you tell us a little bit about that younger version of you and what his understanding of grace was at that time in your life?
Max: You've done your homework, Alison.
Alison: A little.
Max: Yeah, that's pre NOAA, pre ARC, I'm so old…
Alison: I love that stuff. That's the hard earned wisdom that you've earned.
Max: Yeah I don't know if you have kids, but you would not have wanted your kids to hang out with or date the teenage/early 20 year old, 20 something version of me. I was pretty much a scoundrel. I was a six pack a night guy, I was a brawler, I was all about me, and part of that was due to the fact that I had reacted to an understanding of faith that we would call legalism.
Where your relationship with God depends upon performance. I tried my best for a few years and I couldn't. A combination of peer pressure and raging testosterone and societal issues later, I cashed in that chip and said that's never going to work for me.
By the influence of a good friend, a guy who's still a friend to this day, I decided to try attending church again and I heard a pastor describe what we call grace and don't know how I missed it.
I don't fault anybody in my youth–I probably wasn't listening–but I became convinced that God could forgive a jerk like me. It was truly life changing, Alison. We hear people all the time say, my life was heading off the rails. My life was heading off the rails.
Alcoholism is a major issue in my family of origin. My brother died as a result of alcohol. I have several aunts and so I was headed off the rails and grace is what caught my attention.
Alison: Yeah. I love the focus on this in the book–God never gives up on you. Max, one of the things we focus on in this podcast is that healing is a process. It's not one and done. Grace comes in. Jesus comes in. We're changed. We're changing over the whole course of our lives, which is what I love about what you did with the story of Jacob.
In the book you talk about how Jacob had to reckon with his past at a key inflection point, and I write about this as well. I love this moment. I love how you describe this moment. What are some moments in your own life where you've had to reckon with the past and wrestle with God a little bit as you considered moving into your future?
Max: Boy, you get right to the core, don't you, Alison?
Alison: That's what we're all about.
Max: Yeah, that old saying is true. You can't move into the future until you've dealt with your past. And dealing with your past is challenging. Apart from the grace of God, I would think it's impossible. I had and have messed up some really good relationships through the years due to my inability to exercise self control. I also have an addiction to the approval of people, which is interesting because I have a real curiosity about theology, and sometimes what I begin to discover in Scripture is not what I was taught or what others taught me.
I'll have to part ways a bit with people and chart my own course. I find that very hard because I like people to like me so much. I'm not a disrupter. I'm a pleaser. I see that now. But I have found that I did not manage that well.
As you ask about my past, the two things that I've had to trust is that God's grace is adequate for forgiveness for my life in my early years, the inappropriate behavior, and in uncontrolled passions. Even as a pastor, sometimes I cut people off rather than talk it through with them. I would avoid them and that's not healthy. I've had to go back and mend a few of those bridges over the years.
Alison: Isn't that something? The benefit of growth as we grow in our own healing, we become more mature and we receive more and more of God's grace. It's paradoxical. It's not that we become more and more like what you call, I love what you call the super-saint. It's not that we become more aware of our super-sainthood.
It's almost that we become more aware of, oh my gosh, every step of the way, the more aware I become of God's goodness and God's love. Simultaneously, we become a little bit more aware of our failings. It is such a paradox is what I hear you saying. We have to constantly reckon with that.
Max: As God gets bigger we appropriately get smaller, and that's the way it should be. Trusting in the great grace of God, how strong He is, I was reflecting earlier, maybe three or four days ago, with my family, how we used to put our girls to bed at night.
We have three daughters, of course they're all grown now, and they have kids now. We were talking back when they were little, and we had a bedtime routine. Part of that bedtime routine is that I would allow each of my daughters to feel my biceps.
Now, once upon a time, I actually had biceps. I don't anymore. There's more sag than strength there. But we'd make a big deal out of it. They would say, daddy, you're so strong. Of course, they're already getting ready for bed. They've had their bath. This is the last thing I would do before we'd tuck them in.
My thinking was, I want them to go to sleep knowing that they have a strong father and that they will rest better having felt their father's muscles. I didn't know I was actually practicing theology by doing that but I do think that we're stronger as we let God get bigger and we allow ourselves to be small.
To be that child that feels the muscles of God. These stories in the Bible, like the story of Jacob, really celebrate not Jacob, but God, and give us an opportunity to really place our hand on his biceps and see that he's the one in control.
He's got a great plan for us. He's not going to deviate from it. He's not going to abandon us, and we can trust him to get us home safely. Because in the end, it's his strength that matters, not ours. It's his grip on us that matters, not our grip on Him.
Alison: Yeah. Thank goodness. I love what you said. You said apart from God's grace, I think it would be impossible to face ourselves honestly, to reconcile with our pasts. It's that cushion of grace and the bigness of it that makes it possible for us to tell the truth about our own inadequacies and the areas in our own lives. You call it the tilted halo, right?
Max: Anxiety is running unbridled through our society and I think one of the things that we don't talk about as a cause for anxiety is an unresolved past. If I've got secrets in my past, if I've got mistakes in my past that I've never dealt with in a healthy fashion, the unhealthy approach to dealing with my past, it creates stress.
I'm either suppressing it, I'm hiding from it, I'm working my way, shopping my way, eating my way, drinking my way to get around it…
Alison: …pleasing our way…
Max: lazing my way, and it becomes a hectic race to outrun my past. Christians, we can say, you know, what I did was terrible. It's horrible what I did. I will not pretend. I do not pretend it was good. Nope, no more. Not gonna justify it. Not gonna deny it. I'm gonna own it.
But I'm gonna present it to God and allow him to speak words of forgiveness over it. That I think, I really think, is an unaddressed issue or unaddressed approach in our dealing with anxiety. Because if we can let that pass, be presented, healed, prayed for, forgiven, then we've got a load we can release and move on with life.
Alison: Yeah. Again, that grace, I love how you're describing the bigness of God's grace is paradoxically what allows us to change and heal and grow. We don't heal in the context of criticism. We heal in the context of that compassion, that kindness from God.
You've met with, no doubt, thousands of people over the years as a pastor and through your books and through your ministry. What are some things you see that make it hard for people to really receive deep in their bones, this grace that you're describing?
Max: That's a great question. I think it's the fact that nobody else has given us that grace. If I have let people down, and I know I have, and they continually remind me of it, or shame me about it, for me to hear a pastor say, yeah, but God forgives you, in the back of my mind, I say, yeah yeah. You mean my ex-wife won't forgive me, but the God of the universe will? That doesn't add up.
Because others fall short, because forgiving others is hard, because others have a hard time forgiving you. Please, let God be God. He can. He's already seen your life from beginning to end. From start to finish. He's chosen you. He's decided you're worth having in His eternal kingdom.
Even if no one else can, even if you can’t forgive yourself, take step one–trust that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us and that the God who knows us, loves us, and he can forgive us. I think that's a challenge.
Alison: Boy, I think you're taking a peek into my playbook here. We did an episode recently with a young woman she works for me, who met Christ through her peers at Harvard. She was in a search for meaning and she said exactly what you said. She said, I'd lived a whole life of nobody really showing me love, showing me grace.
So when people tell me, God loves you, that doesn't mean anything to me. I don't have a lived experience of that. What she said changed were those people on her campus showing her that love, showing her that embodied glimpse of grace. That's where we also become that embodiment of grace for those around us.
Sometimes our showing that to other people is even more powerful than those words. We have to back that up. I'm in no doubt that you're showing that to so many people through your written words.
Max: I hope so. Being kind to people, being a genuine listening ear, and expressing acceptance. I know of a fella where I play golf who was involved in a horrible accident and a person died as a result of that accident. He is so broken, and this might sound like I'm self promoting, I'm not.
Every time I see him, we talk, I check on him and he tears up. He tears up. He said, people don't know what to say to me. So I think that's what you're talking about, that kindness. When others find it difficult, if we can at least extend a hand, put an arm around the shoulder, ask how they're doing…we likely underestimate how powerful that is in people's worlds.
Alison: More is caught than taught. You're showing him the love of God in that moment. I love that. One of the things, Max, I really appreciated and we talk a lot about on this podcast because in my world of trauma and therapy, the reality is we are bumping up against toxicity. It's real.
Sometimes folks find themselves in toxic relationships, in toxic systems. We have to be wise. We have to be shrewd. We can't be naive. You talk about unflinchingly the toxic cultures present both in Jacob's time and in our time today, and I appreciate that you named that. That you don't try to skirt around that.
I think people need to be equipped. We need to not be naive. I think sometimes as Christians we hear the message we need to love people and that doesn't always work. Tell me a little bit about why you included that, how you've navigated that as a pastor and in your own life.
Max: Yeah, the reason that conversation got included in this book about Jacob is that one of the saddest stories in the story of Jacob involved, toward the end of his life, he's returning to Bethel with his family. He had a large family, two wives, two handmaidens, a dozen kids, who knows how many servants.
They camp near a place called Shechem. Shechem has been unearthed by archaeologists. It was a city. Of course, they were Bedouins, and so they were probably attracted to this stone walled city with streets and shops and maybe an opportunity to drink something other than desert water, have a good meal. They started living and put their roots down near Shechem.
They weren't supposed to. They were supposed to keep going to Bethel. But while there Jacob had one daughter Dinah. While there, she was violated by one of the men. That man happened to be named Shechem, he was the son of the ruler, and then he not only violated her, but he wanted to bring her into the city of Shechem to be his either lover or wife or something.
He wanted her. It was pathetic. It's a horrible story of misogyny and brutality, nothing good, and it gets worse. Jacob was passive. He didn't respond. He didn't defend his daughter. When the blood brothers of Dinah learned about what happened, they went Rambo on the village and they convinced the men, (the story's brutal), they convinced all the men in the village to be circumcised. Then while the men were healing, they murdered all the men. People who've not read the Bible say that's in the Bible? Yeah, that's in the Bible. That's Jacob? Yep, that's Jacob.
It was horrible. What had happened is a toxic culture existed. A toxicity where the strong manipulate, control, brutalize the weak. Where those in power take advantage of those who have less power.
Toxic culture has a strict pecking order and those in control. Hurt those who have less control. It's not it's not a culture in which kindness is valued, but strength is valued in power. It's not a culture in which forgiveness is a virtue. Vengeance is a virtue.
We can find ourselves in these cultures. Jacob did. Jacob should have gotten his family out of there sooner. He eventually did, but not before the damage was done. Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation like that. It could be in a work situation, school situation, sadly a church situation.
It could even be in a family. In those situations, we need to number one, realize this can cause damage. Wives, if your husband is behaving like a shechem, get your kids and get out. Get out fast. Men, if you are turning a blind eye towards Shechemites, then you need to repent, take a stand for what's good and either get your family out or confront what the evil is.
This is something we can't mess with. Sometimes we can even see this in a nation. In a culture where we begin to elevate somebody who's full of braggadocio, is that the right word? Swagger. A lot of swagger. We need to watch out when that happens. We need to. It is a warning. I think this story in the Bible, it serves as a warning. A toxic culture can really hurt people, hurt a generation.
Alison: I appreciate your naming that so much as a pastor, as someone people look up to. I think that's so important, especially for women to hear, but for all of us to hear, to not be naive about the reality of toxicity around us.
Max, as we're closing today, I want to ask you a question I like to ask all of my guests, which is, if you think back to that younger young man, way back in the day, maybe before he had really encountered God's grace, what would you want him to know that you know now? If you could have a minute with him, a moment to meet with him, what would you want him to know?
Max: The honest conversation would have to do with treating women with respect, would have to do with acknowledging the danger of alcohol, and would have to do with choosing the right friends. I think he knew those things, but he wasn't listening. He needed somebody to sit down eyeball to eyeball with him and say them.
I'm making it sound like that period lasted a long time. Really, it was a two or three year period, 17 years of age. But I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful, Alison, that I didn't cause any damage during that time. I was bad enough to learn to acknowledge how bad I could be.
I am grateful my life was heading off the tracks. So I am forever grateful to the pastors, to the friends who taught me that God loves me and God gives a second chance, who introduced me to the Holy Spirit, who urged me to read the Bible. I'm forever grateful. But I would like to have a face to face with that kid.
Alison: I love that. I love that there's a loving firmness in the face to face. This is how God redeems all of our stories. The humility too. We all have that in our life. That's why I like to ask the question–every single one of us can look back and reconnect with that former part of us, both from a place of, wow, I've come so far and I’m so grateful because without that younger version, those needs, those raw edges, we wouldn't have stumbled into the fullness of what it means. We would be, oh yeah, I'm all set. I've been cool my whole life.
I love that. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been an honor to have you today.
Max: Thank you. All the very best. Thanks for letting me be a part of your podcast.
Have you felt far from God? Do you find yourself wondering what in the world God is doing amidst all that is hard? I would argue that a dark night of the soul is a healthy response to pain, brokenness, or suffering. We need to create space for these seasons of wrestling with God-not try to shove them aside or stigmatize them.
Here's what we cover:
1. What is a dark night of the soul?
2. How is it different from depression?
3. Why does God allow us to feel far from him at times?
4. How a dark night of the soul can bring us together
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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.
Resources
- Leave your questions about forgiveness and grace here!
- dralisoncook.com/podcast
- The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross
- Book of Psalms
- Matthew 27:45-47
- Book of Job
- James 4:8
- John 12:24
Transcript
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm glad you're here. I am loving this series on Faith Talks where we're looking at some theological concepts that primarily relate to our faith journeys through a psychological lens.
These things go hand in hand. As you know, everything we do on this podcast brings together faith and psychology, and in today's episode, I want to talk to you about a concept that is known as “the dark night of the soul”, and it's a concept I've thought about a lot and read about a lot over the years. It's one I've experienced. It's one I've learned to help others differentiate from an experience of depression.
In psychology, we are often quick to diagnose certain symptoms as depression, when sometimes in certain situations, you might be experiencing a cluster of symptoms, a cluster of things that are hard, that are more appropriately categorized as a spiritual dark night of the soul.
It's more spiritually rooted versus emotionally or psychologically rooted. It's a fine line. It's an important distinction. And I want to go into that. Today, I want to help you understand what some of those differences are.
Before we dive into today's topic, I would love to get your questions on two more topics that are coming up in the future. The first is the topic of forgiveness. I think this is a really hard topic for a lot of us. And I'd love to get your questions.
What questions do you have about forgiveness? The second is the topic of grace. What does it mean to receive grace? What does it mean to give grace? I'd love to find out from you, what are your questions on those two topics? There are a couple of ways that you can leave me your questions.
The easiest way is to go to The Best of You question doc link in the episode show notes. You can find that right here where you're listening to the podcast. You can find it on my website, dralisoncook.com/podcast.
You can leave questions in your comments on my website, on social media, anywhere that you find me. As we look ahead to talking about forgiveness and grace, I'd love to know what questions you have. And also, if you have questions after today's episode about the dark night of the soul, leave those questions there as well.
What is a dark night of the soul? Well, the term “Dark Night of the Soul”, originates from a book. It was actually a poem that was written by St. John of the Cross. St. John of the Cross was a Spanish mystic. He was a monk. He lived in the 16th century. He was a contemporary of St. Teresa of Avila. If you're familiar with her work, they would write letters to each other.
He was in a Carmelite monastery. She was in a nunnery. They were friends. They wrote letters. They were deep lovers of Jesus, deep thinkers, prolific writers. And St. John of the Cross wrote this whole book called The Dark Night of the Soul. It's a wonderful book, about this experience of not feeling close to God, essentially feeling distant from God, feeling desolate, empty, even as he wasn't questioning his faith.
St. John of the cross loved Jesus. He was a believer. He was a devout Christian, a devout believer in God. What's interesting about the dark night of the soul is that he wrote it while he was in prison. He had been part of some reform efforts that were not welcome in the society as a whole. He was put in prison and during that time suffered really pretty intense, I would say, psychological abuse and mistreatment.
He was by himself. This lasted for about nine months. And after he got out of prison is when he wrote about the dark night of the soul. Often a dark night of the soul correlates with an experience of suffering. You go through something hard. Something really terrible happens. Perhaps you're not imprisoned literally as St. John of the Cross was, but maybe you've gone through a prolonged season of suffering.
Maybe a health crisis or the loss of someone you love, or a season of prolonged loneliness of being alone and yearning and not seeing answered prayers, not seeing those things you've hoped for come to pass. Prolonged periods of suffering.
It doesn't matter how big your faith is. This happens. Really hard things happen in our lives. Often, this leads to what we call a dark night of the soul. Now, how is a dark night of the soul different from what we would talk about as depression?
And I really want to make this distinction today because I think it's important. It's really important to name depression accurately. It's really important if you're going through a bout with depression or if you struggle with depression to understand what it is to have it diagnosed properly and to get treated properly.
It's important to name a spiritual dark night of the soul accurately, because it's a different type of suffering and it requires a different type of intervention. How are they different?
Well, number one, a dark night of the soul is primarily a spiritual journey. It's primarily characterized by feeling far from God by feeling maybe even a little bit disillusioned with God, wondering where God is, wondering why God isn't showing up, wondering why some of the things you had hoped for and, and even planned on or put your faith in haven't come to fruition.
And there's a wandering, not necessarily a loss of. It's a questioning of where are you, God? We see it all throughout the Psalms–where are you, God? Why have you forsaken me? Why have you abandoned me? We see it in the life of Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane, when he asks God, where are you, God? Why have you forsaken me? We see these moments where it feels like there's the absence of God. This is a dark night of the soul.
Depression, on the other hand, is a primarily psychological condition. It might arise out of events, similarly to a dark night of the soul. It might come out of trauma, might come out of loss. It might come out of stress. It might come because you have a biological disposition, but instead of questioning God, you might feel lethargic all the time.
You might notice sleep disturbances. You might have trouble concentrating. You might have a hard time eating. You might not want to get out of bed. You might have lost interest in some of the things you normally love to do, in a sort of a dark mood that doesn't feel constructive in any way.
And there's a persistent sadness, sometimes an anxiety, a loss of interest in activities that you found pleasurable. Again, it's hard to sleep. You might notice that it's hard to eat. You have a hard time engaging in things that you normally like to do. You might have persistent negative self talk, a feeling of hopelessness.
And this goes on. A lot of these symptoms we all feel from time to time, but you feel a sort of persistent heaviness and a lot of these symptoms over the course of several weeks without any alleviation and without any sense of meaning or purpose.
If you're feeling really significantly sad, you can't stop crying, things that you normally like to do no longer bring you joy, you're struggling to get out of bed in the morning. maybe you are persistently racked with negative self talk, you feel hopeless, you might even be contemplating thoughts of death or suicide–this is really important to pay attention to, and you want to reach out for professional help.
You want to get help because when we move into seasons of depression, we need interventions. You might even have spiritual faith while you're experiencing depression but you can't get yourself out of a rut, out of negative thinking. You can't get yourself into your rhythms that you know would be healthy for you. They're not working. That's when you want to consider therapy.
You might consider medication to help you. You might see a psychiatrist. You want to get support. You don't want to be alone in that. You want to move through depression, lift your mood so that you can function in a normal way. You want to bring the floor up. You don't want to stay there.
There's nothing good that comes out of that. You want to get help. And it's nuanced, a spiritual dark night of the soul. You might not feel a lot of joy. You might not necessarily feel a lot of pleasure, but you are connected with a sort of spiritual seeking.
There's a sense of questioning. There's a sense of crying out to God. There's a sense of purpose, even if you don't understand what the purpose is. You're trying to arrive at a deeper truth, at a deeper awareness, at a deeper understanding of God and God feels distant and it's uncomfortable. It's often very disorienting, but it's very clearly a spiritual journey.
For example, if you're going through a dark night of the soul, you're probably going through your normal day to day rhythms. You're not struggling to get out of bed, you're not struggling to sleep, your appetite isn't gone, you're not experiencing some of those biological and physical symptoms of depression.
Instead, as you're going about your normal rhythms, as you're living your life, which you're not struggling to do, you're keenly aware of spiritual questioning. You might be aware that you don't feel that God is close to you. When you go to pray, you might not have that sense of connection or intimacy of, oh, this is what it feels like when God is near me.
That might be gone and it can be very disorienting. You might be going through the motions of prayer, but not really feeling connected with God. You might be asking hard questions of God. I don't understand, God. It doesn't feel like you're here. I don't understand this thing that happened. And the old ways that I used to make sense of things aren't really working anymore.
Maybe I'm even questioning that specific scripture that used to make sense to me. That particular passage of scripture isn't making sense to me anymore. Again, unlike depression, you are going about your day to day processes. Your biological functions are not interrupted.
In a dark night of the soul, but you're really questioning, you're really struggling, but you're struggling spiritually. You're asking questions of God. You might be wrestling with God. You might not be clear about God. You might be frustrated with God. You might be angry with God. You might be wondering, where are you, God? Why aren't you showing up?
I want to be clear. All of those things, wrestling with God, being frustrated with God, asking God why he's not showing up–all of those things are suggestive of a faith that is quite robust. When we're going to God with those questions, with those frustrations, when we're working out those feelings of where are you God, we are paradoxically turning toward God.
We're wrestling with God, but we don't feel the answers. We don't feel the relief that at other times and at other seasons of our life we felt. I'll tell you about my life. I've had moments of both.
I've had those moments where God was close. No matter what I was going through, I could connect to God. No matter how much I was struggling, I had a sense of Christ's presence with me, of God's presence with me. There was a deep feeling of hope, even amidst painful circumstances.
And it means the world when you have that, you're like, it's going to be okay. You feel it. And you know it. And God is right there with me. And it's amazing. There are also seasons that we go through where we're struggling, where we're suffering, where something happens that doesn't make sense. And we don't feel God's presence.
We don't feel God's closeness. In fact, we might feel abandoned. We might feel alone. We might feel like God's not there. We might feel like we don't get that emotional sense of “it's going to be okay, God is right here”. We don't get that emotional sense of “God's with me, even in my pain”. We might even feel quite abandoned.
This is a dark night of the soul and it's normal. This is what I want you to hear me say today. It's normal. If you're feeling like, man, I'm praying, I'm struggling, and I don't feel God's presence. I don't feel his assurance. I don't feel his nearness. I don't feel his comfort. I don't even feel his guidance. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do. I'm praying. I'm trying, I'm going about doing the things I'm supposed to do. You may well be experiencing one of these dark nights of the soul.
A season of spiritual darkness. It doesn't mean you're losing your faith. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It doesn't mean you're not doing things right. These are well validated spiritual seasons that some of the greatest spiritual leaders of history talk about.
And to give you a few names of people who have written about this idea of the Dark Night of the Soul, Mother Theresa talks a lot about her Dark Night of the Soul. CS Lewis is another one. Martin Luther King, Jr. Talked about his dark nights of the soul, and many more great thinkers in the faith describe going through these seasons of feeling far from God.
In the Bible, we see it in the story of Job. We see a story of a man who feels it. God doesn't step in right away as Job is interacting with his friends and questioning his circumstances. God doesn't enter in right away with quick fix platitudes or assurances. Job works it out for a while.
We see it in Jesus. We see these moments with Jesus, where he wrestles with God for those moments, and he doesn't feel God's closeness. The question might be, why? Why does God do this? Why, sometimes, does God not?
I think about the scripture that says, if we draw near to God, God draws near to us. And I believe that that is true. I also believe that we don't always feel God's nearness. Things can happen where it's hard to experience God's nearness. So, why does God allow those seasons where we don't experience his nearness?
Well, a lot of really smart people have written on this topic. I'm going to try to summarize a few of those reasons based on my own research and my own work. The great mystics of the faith, including St. John of the Cross, talk about these dark nights of the soul as these seasons of cleansing the soul where we have to give up some of our attachments.
And if you think about your faith, we have faith in God. We love God. We believe in God, but if you're human, inevitably these attachments creep in where our faith is really in this idea of, well, if I love God, my life will work out okay. Or if I do the right thing, I'll get the right result. Or if I love God enough, my life will look a certain way. I'll be blessed. Everything will look good on the surface.
And gosh, it's not the way life works. It's not the way life works. And when we go through these dark nights of the soul, something happens that is hard and, and it forces us to reckon with some of those attachments.
But wait a minute, God, I thought you promised me good things. I thought if I put my trust in you, these bad things wouldn't happen. And God allows a little bit of that wrestling. Is that really what I promised you? I didn't promise you that you wouldn't go through hard times. That's not what God actually promised.
I promised I would be with you. I promised you wouldn't be alone. I promised you would grow. I promised you purpose and hope. I didn't promise you that these relationships wouldn't fall apart. I didn't promise you that other people won't ever hurt you. I didn't promise you that there wouldn't be sickness, that there wouldn't be suffering.
We live in a broken world. Hard things happen as a result of our own behaviors, as a result of other people's behaviors. God doesn't promise that those things won't happen. It's not a formula. This Christian life of if I do all the right things, I'll get all the right results. It's not always the way it works. It's not, but we can subtly begin to believe that.
And when we go through these dark nights of the soul, I believe sometimes it's a complicated nuanced thing, but a lot of it is yes, this hard thing happened. It's true. I can have compassion for what's hard. And as I am honoring and bearing witness to the truth of something hard that is happening in my life, it's forcing me to ask deeper questions of God.
Why God? Why would you allow this to happen? I don't understand. And I think somewhere In that intersection of facing what's hard really honestly, of really honestly taking a look at what's hard in our lives, of what's not going right, whether it's our own fault or whether someone else has hurt us, and taking what's hard and really going to God with it and saying, God, I don't like this. This doesn't feel fair. What's going on here? Did I bring this on myself? Why would you allow this? God allows a refining process.
He allows a process for us to grow deeper in our relationship with Him that demands we go through a season of darkness. It's not to hurt us. It's to help us grow stronger. It's to help us deepen. It's to help us understand God better.
Sometimes we have to shed old beliefs, old ways, old ruts of thinking we've gotten in. And it can feel like a death. It can feel like a loss. It can feel like we're losing everything we knew. I don't understand, God, why everything is upside down. This isn't how it was supposed to happen. How can you do this?
But in that wrestling, as we let go and we turn to God with those questions, and again, it can feel like you are free falling. This doesn't make sense and it feels like a dark night of the soul. I don't understand, but somewhere in that freefall, we are allowing God to take us more deeply into an understanding of who He really is.
It's in the absence of pat answers. It's in the absence of platitudes. A positive way of viewing something where we really let go. And we say, God, I don't understand. And yet here I am, that something profound happens in our spiritual lives.
We let go of any childlike attachments we've held. We let go of any faulty beliefs, maybe that have crept in and we step into radical faith. I don't get it, God, and yet here I am. And I believe God shows up in a profound way in those moments. And the word that I like to think of in these moments is this word surrender.
Surrender. And surrender isn't a one time event. It's an ongoing event of coming to the end of yourself and even of your own knowledge and even of your own ability to talk yourself through something really, really hard and saying, God, I've tried everything. I cannot figure this out. And yet here I am.
And in those moments, I believe God shows up in powerful, profound ways. Now, I'm not saying you will always feel it in that moment, but I am saying something happens in those moments where your soul gets formed in a deeper, truer, more beautiful way. And you come out the other side of a dark night of the soul, transformed with a deeper faith, a deeper sense of God, a deeper sense of transformation, of really understanding what it means to walk with God.
One of the best ways to distinguish a dark night of the soul from an experience with depression or hopelessness is that a dark night of the soul ultimately leads to transformation. It leads to growth. It leads to health. It leads to deeper layers of maturity, spiritually and emotionally.
It leads to more goodness, more kindness, more love, more gentleness, more compassion for others. It's more compassion for yourself. It leads to beautiful fruit. That's how you know you're going through a dark night of the soul. It's not to say it's not painful. It's not to say it's not challenging and hard, but it yields beautiful fruit.
There's a couple of metaphors that I think are helpful again in distinguishing a dark night of the soul from depression. A dark night of the soul: you're walking down the path in the forest and it's dark and you cannot see very far and there are trees, big tall trees on both sides. You have enough to see the next step ahead of you. You can keep walking. You're not lost in the fog. You're not spiraling down a cliff. That's depression.
You're on the path, you're on it, and you're inching your way forward. And you can see enough to get to that next step. But it's dark and it's not really fun. It's not pleasant, but you've got enough. But you're going through that dark passageway to get to a better place. You've got to go through that to get to that better place.
And I think of Jesus's words in John 12, where he talks about that kernel of wheat. That grain that has to be buried in the ground, dead to the world, because when it gets buried, it comes out and it sprouts new life, but it has to go under the surface, deep into the soil to do its work to lay down roots, that when it finally pops up again on the surface of the earth and shows its beauty, it's ready. Those roots are deeper. It's done its work in the dark night of the soul, and it comes out even more beautiful. That's the beauty of a dark night of the soul.
I want to end by talking about something that I've thought about for a while. I think there are seasons in which we go through cultural dark nights of the soul. And I think to be honest, we are in many ways in one of those right now in this country, in this world, and there's a lot of reasons that I think that, but I think that a lot of people are struggling with these types of feelings right now, feeling scared, feeling worried, feeling more anxiety, feeling like we believe we have faith, but God, what are you doing? This is hard. We don't get it.
People are wondering about meaning, about purpose. What is this all about? We have more access to information than we've ever had before. We can't stick our heads in the sand. We know what's going on in different parts of the world. We know the suffering that exists all throughout this country, all throughout this world. We can't hide from it, And there's sort of this collective dark night of the soul.
I'm wondering if some of you have felt that as you've talked with your friends, with your loved ones, with your family members. Like, yeah, we're all kind of struggling right now. Are we all depressed? Well, I don't know. Maybe, but in many ways, I think a more apt term is more of a dark night of the soul.
More of a spiritual questioning. What's happening, God? Yeah, we believe we trust you. We love you. We also are scared. This is hard. This is complicated. Hard things are happening. Life is hard. Our kids are struggling. Our family members are struggling. Our friends are struggling.
I hear often from many people, “I'm struggling, but I don't want to talk about it with my friends because my friends are struggling”. You know, we're all struggling. I want to name that today, if you've noticed that, name that with your friends. I think we're all struggling a little bit and let's name that because when we name that, it takes away the shame.
We're in this together. This is kind of a rough season. It's been hard coming out of the pandemic. It's been hard. A lot of this stuff going on in our country, in this world right now, and it doesn't feel like we can say, oh, it's going to get better. We don't see that ray of hope on the horizon collectively.
The problems feel really complicated. And there's a part of me that while that's hard, and while I don't rejoice in that, it makes me turn toward these ideas about the dark night of the soul and says, God, what are you doing? Are you refining us? Are you calling us to go deeper? Not into more pat answers and superficial band aids and quick fixes.
Are you calling us to go deeper, to have deeper conversations with one another, to be more honest with one another about what's hard to move closer toward one another? To move beneath the surface with one another?
I need to name this. I need to talk about this. I want to hear what's going on with you. What's really going on? How are you feeling about this? We don't have to have all the answers, but we do need to come together. I wonder if naming that in your small groups, in your friend groups, in your family, I don't have all the answers. I can't fix it for you. I can't fix it for myself, but together, this is a hard season. This might even be a collective dark night of the soul that we're in. And that's not a bad thing. That means it's a little dark. We're walking slowly.
We're walking a little more cautiously down the path. We're looking around to make sure our people are okay. We're looking around to make sure we're together. We're not alone. We're looking around and checking in on other people because we're aware that folks could get lost during this season because it's a little disorienting.
There's potential for despair more than normal, more than we're used to. We're checking in on each other. And I want to name that. That's okay. I think that's what we're supposed to do during these seasons. I think that's part of what God is doing.
It's not to help us dig deeper into our own selves. I think God wants us to move more toward each other. Not to fix each other, but to say, hey, are you okay? I'm here. I'm with you. Because here's the thing, a dark night of the soul, ultimately is a feeling of absence.
It's not sensing God's presence. Even when we believe, even when we have faith, we don't feel that sense of God's presence.
And I wonder if part of the work God is doing in this collective dark night of the soul that I think we're going through is an invitation for us to remember and reimagine what it's like to be God's presence for each other, to be God's embodied presence for each other.
I'm here with you in this dark night of the soul. And you're here with me. And together we begin to embody God's presence on this earth. And we embody hope for a world in desperate need of it. We don't have to conjure up those good feelings of hope.
I think sometimes we feel like we do. We've got to be salt and light. I've got to be happy. I've got to be joyful. I've got to make sure other people are aware that I've got the hope. I don't know if that's the way it is in this collective dark night of the soul.
I wonder if as we draw near to each other and we embody the presence of Christ to each other in our own questioning, in our own dark nights of the soul, even in some of our own spiritual desolation, if you're feeling that, we begin to embody hope. We embody hope for each other and collectively and we embody hope for a world in desperate need of it.
Do not be dismayed, my dear brothers and sisters. If you are sensing this dark night of the soul, you are not alone. I believe God is calling us inward, deeper, closer to him and to each other.
He's refining some of those faults. He's refining us. It's hard to let go of some of those false hopes and shiny objects, but he's replacing that with something much deeper and it starts with us showing up more honestly, more authentically, more genuinely to say, I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. I'm with you. We are in this as God's people together.
I read country music singer Granger Smith's new book in one sitting and cried my way through it. It's a powerful story of the unspeakable loss of his 3-year old son and what happened in the aftermath as he attempted to cope.Granger tried everything to cope with the trauma, including numbing and every self-help hack. It didn't work. This is an incredible story of what happens when self-help fails and God shows up.
Here's what we cover:
1. The traumatic "slide show" that ran through Granger's mind for months
2. Why we numb
3. Granger's rock bottom moment and what happened after
4. What grief looks like when transformed
5. How self-help messages gaslight us
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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.
Resources
- This episode contains discussions about suicide which may be distressing for some listeners. Please prioritize your well-being and proceed with caution. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 for free, confidential support.
- Like A River: Finding the Faith and Strength to Move Forward After Loss and Heartache by Granger Smith
- The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
- Billy Graham videos on Youtube
- Matthew 1
- John 14:23
- Matthew 16:24
- John 16:33
- Matthew 11:28-30
- Matthew 13:44
- Grangersmith.com
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so excited about this series on Faith Talks where we're highlighting the spiritual dimension of MEPS that I like to talk about–the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health that we're all responsible for.
Before God, we're all responsible for our mental health, our emotional health, our physical health, and our spiritual health. In today's episode, we're going to talk about faith and how faith is different from self-help.
I dabble between the two–I love to give you guys practical tools that are often categorized as self help tools, but all of that happens against the backdrop of a living faith in Jesus. I had a profound experience of transformation through meeting Jesus personally in college, and my experience was not unlike what our guest will share with us today.
I'd grown up as a Christian. I knew all the right things. I read the Bible, but I didn't really know Jesus until that moment in college. It was about a three month period of time where it all became real to me. It changed everything.
When I read our guest's book, it reminded me right of how empty all of our tools are, all of our self help strategies, all of the things we do that are important, but how empty those things are if they're not infused with the power of the living God. If we're not infused by that daily moment-by-moment connection to Jesus, to the one who loves us, to the one who brings us forward into this beautiful life, who helps us bring purpose out of pain, who helps us find hope when we are hurting the most.
For this episode, I've invited on a new friend of mine. His name is Granger Smith. You may know Granger from his country music. He's an award winning, platinum selling country music singer songwriter.
But I was introduced to Granger through his New York Times bestselling book, Like A River: Finding the Faith and Strength to Move Forward After Loss and Heartache. It's an incredibly raw, candid look at the aftermath of an unspeakable loss that Granger and his wife Amber experienced several years ago.
It was the loss of their three year old son to a tragic accident. It really led Granger into an experience of post traumatic stress. It talks about how Granger found hope again. It's a powerful book, it's a moving book and Granger shares very openly in our conversation about the aftermath of that trauma.
I want to give you a heads up that today's episode includes some graphic imagery of the loss. It touches on drug use and it touches on a moment where Granger considered suicide. So I want you to listen with care today. If those topics are triggering to you or activating to you, please listen with care and seek out support.
If these subjects are particularly distressing or sensitive for you, I want to remind you there's 24/7 free confidential help available for anyone who's in distress–you can text or call 988 if you're experiencing distress.
This is a powerful episode about how Jesus met Granger in his moment of deepest need. Now the way it happened for Granger is not the way it happens for everyone necessarily. There are a lot of ways that Jesus meets us in our time of need. It doesn't necessarily happen this way for everyone, but it's a powerful story about how we need connection with the living God, the God who can actually change us, the God who can actually redeem us, the God who can actually give us hope.
I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with Granger Smith, the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Like A River: Finding the Faith and Strength to Move Forward After Loss and Heartache.
I am so glad to have this conversation with you today, Granger. We met very briefly in Dallas–we were both there recording an interview. I didn't know about your story but I knew your country music when I went and looked it up. I thought, oh, I know those songs. I love your music. But I didn't know your story and read your book in one sitting on my way home on the plane–cried my way through it.
I'll get into this later when we talk, but it was a really profound way that God used it in my life because my story in many ways, at least my story of faith, is almost the opposite of yours in the sense of being a Christian. It was all-in spiritually and I almost didn't have the practical life tools that I needed.
It was really profound to me to enter into your journey and be reminded of what it's like to be living a successful life, trying to cope with really hard things without that transforming rebirth, that transforming experience with Jesus.
We'll get into that, but I want to just start for my listeners who aren't aware of your story or who maybe haven't read the book. You found your son face down in a pool and you were not able to save him. That was the end of his life. He was how old, Granger?
Granger: Three. He was three.
Alison: Three years old. You and your wife went through an unthinkable loss in that moment. You describe with such honesty and in such detail what it was like for you in the aftermath of that loss, the guilt that you felt even though by no estimation was it remotely your nor your wife's fault. It was a horrible accident, but just the horrible guilt that you felt, the PTSD that you experienced, you talk about a slide show that consistently went through your mind.
Would you just tell us a little bit, if it's okay, I hate to push on a wound, although I know you've written the book and you're talking about this, just a little bit, about what those first few months were like after this loss.
Granger: Yeah, certainly. I am willing. I think that a lot of people thought when I wrote the book, they thought oh wow, Granger wrote a book about the loss of his son. But interestingly enough, that's just the first chapter. Because the book is what you're talking about. The book is the aftermath of it.
What happened to me spiritually, physically, emotionally, after that loss, after that tragedy and running parallel with what was happening to my wife and my kids and everyone else around us simultaneously walking through life as a public figure, as a country music singer that needed to get back out and tour and fulfill contractual dates and make money to pay for the rest of the crew that was on salary…that was a journey. And I tried hard to control that journey.
I tried to control the way that I reacted to the tragedy. I tried to control the way that people saw me. I tried to control my family and navigate the depths of that grief as this kind of authoritative figure, as if I had the power to emotionally and spiritually control anything.
That was my first mistake. I always like to say that I am really a kind of a control freak, and that has worked out for me sometimes and it has not other times. So I was really into the self-help movement. I considered myself mentally tough, and a lot of things that I've done, and I don't say that in a way to brag.
I say it in a way to qualify me for when we get into the conversation, that wasn't enough. I ended up completely hitting rock bottom after trying everything to physically control the environment around me.
Alison: Yeah, you describe that in such precise detail, that all of those, in some ways, what the world would applaud, and even as Christians, the discipline that it took you to get the level of success that you had in your life. The morning rituals, you excelled at these daily rituals, these daily rhythms of keeping a well-ordered life.
Not all of it is bad, but it could not sustain you in the grief that followed this loss. You described that you would get little footholds of, okay, maybe it's going to be okay, but it just wasn't. You talk about this slideshow–tell me a little bit about that. The slideshow that you couldn't get out of your mind.
Granger: Yeah the best way I could describe it, especially in hindsight because I've thought so much about it, is that my brain saw something so abnormal and out of the norm of anything that I could possibly comprehend that when I saw that, it damaged it in a way. Maybe in a way that a computer overloads with too much RAM and it starts spinning that little spinning wheel of death on the screen.
I believe that something akin to that happened in my brain when I saw something so out of the ordinary, so devastating that it overloaded on RAM. That's the poorest way I could possibly give an analogy. But in order to try to fix itself, my brain was replaying the events over and over looking for a solution to it.
Looking for some kind of finality to it, like something that it missed. Oh, there's an explanation to why River was in the pool. There is, because I ran it so many times, subconsciously, that it finally found the solution, and it closed the loop, and it fixed itself. Those images were of River face down in the pool.
I'm crashing into the water, I pick him up, he's... he's limp like a ragdoll. His eyes are loose and rolling around and his head and his body is purple and Amber, my wife is running out to meet us and she's horrified and the emergency services are arriving and they are working on him. After we did CPR, we’re driving to the hospital.
The doctors are coming in saying there is no more hope. He is gone. We've lost him. The funeral flashes in. My son Lincoln has his hand on his little brother's casket and as he releases the hand I remember that the moisture from his hand leaves the print on top of the casket itself and those images just play and play and they could pop up at any time.
I could be in a conversation with someone, could be in the middle of the night, and I could wake up and think I'm okay, and then the slideshow starts and I'm not okay. It was horrifying. It was addicting. I was addicted to the slideshow, and it absolutely controlled me. All in, I think, all in a way that my brain was just trying to fix itself.
Alison: Yeah, the word in psychology oftentimes for what you're describing are flashbulb memories. You're exactly right what you're describing. Your brain, the circuitry of your brain, takes a photographic picture of these moments that are so extreme and so out of its norm and it just keeps going. Anybody who's been through that kind of traumatic moment of seeing something as you said that we should not be seeing, the brain captures it and it becomes a nightmare.
But it's interesting because it's almost like your power–the tremendous ability of your mind to solve problems–became your worst enemy because this was unsolvable. There was no explanation. There was nothing that could take this away. So then it just becomes an intrusive loop that you couldn't get away from. You talk about connecting with Navy SEALs who had similar experiences with PTSD and those flashback experiences. It was very similar to your experience, and it makes sense.
Granger: Yeah, you said that all so beautifully and so much more technical than me, and I love that. I would speak to these special forces guys because they're known for, when you think of PTSD, that's what you think of. You think of these men and women that have seen things and they can't get that out of their head.
So I thought, what do they do to combat this, because that became the biggest problem. I was having my own mind overcome, and once again, I have to go back to what I said earlier about qualifying myself as a mentally tough person so that someone couldn't just write me off as well, you know, I could overcome something like that.
I couldn't. It became the main enemy of what I was dealing with and so I thought just like other injuries in my life, physical injuries, and I would think what does a NFL quarterback do to recover from this certain injury? I thought, what does a, some kind of war vet special forces guy, how does he or she recover from PTSD?
I come to find out that they don't do it very well. There are different techniques. There were different ways in therapy. One of them was called brain spotting that I went through. That was trying to identify the places in your mind that are recalling that information from and trying to soften those memories where they're a happy place.
For the most part these veterans were not doing very well at it because it's still not widely understood how to combat it at all. That's your field, not mine or any veteran’s, so without a lot of knowledge of even how this is happening, people were coping in other ways. Like alcoholism. That's why alcoholism is so huge with veterans. Drug use is so huge with veterans. Because that's a quick fix. That's a way to numb it quickly,
Alison: I wanted to thank you for the way that you so candidly describe your own foray when you couldn't beat it. You're a logical guy. You're smart, you're strategic, you're logical, you're a problem solver. You tackled it like one would tackle any problem. You couldn't beat it, understandably.
The therapist in me was like, of course. You turn to numbing, you turn to marijuana, and you're so honest about it in the book–I was so grateful for that Granger because that's what people do and you didn't sanction it. But you also didn't shame it. You were like, this is the only way out and it doesn't fix it, but it sure did give me a night's sleep when I needed it.
I worked with so many trauma survivors who have had that same experience, who've been in prison or who've seen atrocities or have been the victim of such horrible abuses. That is the only way to shut that slideshow down. For a moment, it does it. We're taking all the morality out of it. We're not talking about whether it's right, wrong or indifferent. It's survival.
Granger: Yeah, I think I said when a drowning man is drowning, he'll do anything he can to find the air. That was air at the time.
Alison: Yes. It got you through. You also say so candidly and so beautifully, that it didn't get to the root of the problem. It just numbed it. It just got you through to the next day. I want to pause there because for those who are listening, I know so many of you in private, in secret, have turned to things that you wish you hadn't turned to when the pain was too great.
It's part of the horror of some of these things we've experienced and there's no shame in it. We want to name these things without shame.
Granger: I would say that if anyone is in that category, you just qualified someone that was going through something so devastating that then they tried something to get over it and now they're shameful of that thing. I would say you can't be. You can't be, because it's not a matter of comfort. It's a matter of survival.
Alison: That's right.
Granger: You'll do anything you can. That doesn't mean that it's right or wrong, like you said. But it was a matter of survival and what really matters is what happens after that.
Alison: So tell us a little bit about that. You had a dark night of the soul that kind of took you into the depths of, I've tried everything, including numbing. It was so fascinating to me, Granger, from a psychological perspective, it's exactly what we see.
I don't know if folks have named this for you, but the minute you start to get a ray of hope, if there's been any sense of “I might be able to make it”, that is when we are the most vulnerable.
When you look at suicide or depression, when we look at the trajectory, the minute you start to feel like, oh, maybe I'm going to make it, that's when we're the most vulnerable to falling back down into the pit. I saw a little bit of that in your story. There was a moment of hope where you, for the first time in a long time, enjoyed being with your buddies on the road.
It'd been torture. You'd hated it. You'd been going through the motions. You were doing it because of all the reasons you said you thought you had to. There was one night where there was maybe just a moment of, maybe I can enjoy this.
In that moment, it took you right into actually right back to the pit and then in the worst possible way. Can you tell us about that a little?
Granger: Yeah, I love the way you put these things. This is great. It's a great conversation and yeah, I did feel that. I had been through sessions of therapy and I felt like I at least understood that I had some tools in my toolbox to tackle the root of the problem. I knew that I couldn't completely fix it, but I knew that if I could just kick the can down the road a little further each day, that eventually time would heal me.
So I thought, I've got this, I've got the brain spotting techniques that I learned in therapy. I've got a pretty good grasp on it, I've got a good community around me. People that are supporting me, praying for me, loving on me. I've got a good job. I was wrong, but I thought that these things that I just named would eventually heal me.
Then as a backup to all of this, I had the weed pen, the marijuana pen that you charge up and you could inhale this vapor. I thought, I've got all this, plus I've got my goalie in the last goal, making sure that ball doesn't get into the net. I've got everything pretty much worked out, and it had been about probably seven months since we lost River.
That was the night in Boise, Idaho that we had a show and we had a distraction in the concert because my guitar player, we went snow skiing that day and he broke his collarbone and that put a huge distraction in the whole day for me because then he had to get surgery and he missed the show.
He was totally fine, but he missed the show and we were forced to play one man down and so we had to put a lot of brainpower into performing without all these guitar parts and finding a way to supplement that. I'm not thinking about the normal pain that I go through. I'm thinking about new things and using my brain in other ways.
We accomplished a great show. The crowd was awesome. The band was great. We felt so good. I remember thinking, wow, I feel pretty normal. I feel like a normal human. I don't feel like this guilt ridden, shameful father that lost his son that's trying to find ways to just breathe oxygen. I'm not that guy. I feel pretty accomplished today.
So after the show, the guys said, hey, we'd love to just go have a drink, like the old times, just to have a few drinks. I was like, yes. I would love that. That sounded amazing.
There was this little obscure bar by the buses and we went over there, just us and we had a few drinks and sat at the bar and talked about old times and had another drink and talked about more old times. I remember one of my audio guys said, hey boss, it's really nice to see you looking normal again.
I said, thanks man. I felt it. I felt that in my soul. I was like, wow, what a great feeling to feel normal again. I walked out to my bus and it was a cold December day in Idaho. That's the first time I noticed, oh wow, I'm really tipsy. I went into my bus and I tried to dial in the code to the lock on my door and it was not working. I thought, man, I don't think I have been actually drunk since we lost River.
Then I thought, oh, I haven't been drunk since we lost River. Then it started, and I started getting clarity to what was happening. I thought, oh no, I hope I have the ability to fend off the slideshow. I went to the back of my bus and I quickly pulled out my pen, my weed pen, and I took a large hit of it, just as a precaution, and I remember taking that in and I thought, Okay, this is a precaution for the slideshow.
As soon as I started thinking that, the slideshow came in. Full, vivid, bright, there's River, he's in the pool, he's face down, the whole thing repeating itself. It was vivid, and it was real, and I had all the tools with me–I had the weed pen, I had inhaled, I had everything, and everything was failing.
All my little weapons were broken. I had nothing to defend myself, and I lost it at that point. I lost it. I started crying uncontrollably, crying, standing in the back of my bus, just tears rolling down my face, and it seemed like a long time I sat there in self-pity and depression and guilt and shame. The slideshow is rolling and I cannot escape from it.
I reached for the drawer that I knew had a nine millimeter pistol in it. The one that was to protect our bus from anybody that would come on there and in the middle of the desert and want to take something from us. I was going to take my own life with it.
I thought, here it is. This is the way.
I've tried everything else, this is the way to finally end all of this. I remember in that moment feeling a comforting voice, and I don't want to over spiritualize this in a strange way, because it wasn't, I didn't hear a voice, I thought a voice. I thought of a voice that was comforting that said this is the way, this is how you'll end it.
Squeeze, and you'll finally have peace. Then I thought, with another thought, outside of that thought, I thought, this is not me. How is this thought in me? Because that's not me, I didn't just think that.
I was suddenly aware of another presence. Another conscience within me. I’m doing my best to describe something that's very hard to describe and I've heard C. S. Lewis walk through the different consciousnesses that we could have. But I realized there was an intruder thinking for me. That was the first time I realized I was in a spiritual war.
That I was outnumbered and outflanked and cornered. I had no weapons to defend myself. I was fighting a battle that was impossible to win on my own.
I cried out, right then I cried out, Jesus, save me. The slideshow ended. All of those feelings stopped. That second consciousness stopped. I dropped that pistol onto the bed, and the tears stopped, and I fell to the floor, and fell asleep in all of my clothes on that floor, repeating, Jesus saved me.
I was new, and the crazy thing about it was I always considered myself a Christian, I always did. So that name wasn't new, but there was a new authority to that name that I wanted to know and that started a new journey for me. On that night, on the floor of that bus, my new journey became, Who is this Jesus with the authority to end the slideshow?
Alison: Yeah. You tell this, you're doing such a great job now, Granger, and you tell it so beautifully in the book. I love Lewis, I love how he talks, The Screwtape Letters, I mean he's just such a genius at articulating this spiritual warfare. It's clever, it's sinister, it's tricky, it's so much worse than the ways in which it gets over-spiritualized and hyped in this sort of flashy way.
You do such a beautiful job of painting that picture of realizing, all of my tricks are useless in the face of this enemy. Suddenly you understood the enemy and then somehow in there you understood the actual cure in that moment, and it's so sincere how you describe it.
I just want to thank you for doing the work of trying to put words on that. I can't imagine it's pleasant. So I want to talk about that now, because as you said, this is a book that really is about your journey in the aftermath of unspeakable loss.
As I was reading along, the first half of it is really what you're saying. There's not a lot about your Christianity, but you do get a sense you're a man of faith. But then suddenly it takes a 180 , and there's a page in the book, I posted it on social media, it's page 93, and you go through all of the things you tried and you don't necessarily disparage them.
You don't necessarily say they're bad, a lot of this self-help regimen, but you're saying it didn't have the cure without Jesus, without the power of the living God. It fell flat. And it's such this stark picture that you paint of what I think so many people are living that it's not that these tools are bad and I thought about it and I want to say this to you as a therapist, as someone who equips people with tools, often practical tools–it was that stark reminder of in the absence of the living God, those tools are pretty impotent.
Granger: Yes.
Alison: So you went all in now–you shifted gears completely. Tell us a little bit about what that was like. Specifically, there's so many ways we could go with it. I imagine you were still grieving. I imagine there was still pain. I imagine there was still moments in the middle of the night, but what was different, what became different after that turning point for you?
Granger: Sure. You're right. There were moments of grief and pain and that didn't end. My grief didn't end that night. I could track that through my journaling, as I was still journaling through this process. I could track that I had bad days.
But amidst those bad days, I had a new mission. Who is this Jesus with the authority to eradicate the slideshow? It's like going through a war, but I know that if I can get to the end of this field, then there is light there. So I had a direction to move. Before that I didn't have a direction to go. I thought the direction was me. I was looking inside. I was looking internally for the direction.
The direction all along was outside of me. Those next several months, I was all in, like you said, and trying to find who he is. That started with the thought of, I need a preacher. The first thought I had was Billy Graham, that's a very common preacher name. Let's go for Billy Graham.
I found him on YouTube and I saw that there were hundreds of Billy Graham sermons. So I thought, okay, this is a good way to learn who he is. Through Billy Graham sermons. Here we go. I started watching and listening and I was attracted to them. I was drawn to them. I was drawn to that teaching.
I could look back now in hindsight and see that the gospel was just being poured over me every day. But I still didn't quite know what was happening. I was just on a journey of learning who he is. Would he have this kind of power?
Alison: I want to pause you here for a second because you use this term, dog-tag Christian, that I think is interesting in the sense that you had a cultural background of Christianity. It's not that you weren't a man of faith, but this was different. This was a heart-mind-whole-body-reset of really understanding who this person Jesus was that stopped the slideshow.
Granger: That's right. That's become a major ministry for me is speaking out towards people that could be, and I believe a lot of them are, stuck in that cultural Christianity. Because this is for the people listening in America. This is how a lot of us are raised.
This is what we say, one nation under God. This is the culture that we speak of when we talk about Jesus. I don't think there's anyone that doesn't know the name Jesus living in the United States of America today in 2023.
That's not a good thing though–it's actually harder to evangelize towards someone that already knows the name of Jesus and can articulate what he did on the cross than it might be to go to a tribe of someone that's never heard of him at all.
Alison: Yeah, that's what's so interesting about this leg of your journey. It's like you were starting over as if you didn't know anything even though you actually knew a lot.
Granger: Yeah, I could quote scripture. I could defend the faith to some extent. I definitely would have told you that I was a Christian. There's no doubt but in hindsight I look back and go, well, there was a moment–on March 1st, 2020.
That's when I knew, in every fiber of my being, that I was redeemed and restored and healed and forgiven. Ransomed. That was me. I knew that through teaching and that came through hearing a certain sermon of another pastor on YouTube and everything became clear to me on that day and that was the full 180 when I fully embraced who He was, as revealed in the Bible.
That's a concept that I, through my search through Billy Graham and everything else, still hadn't arrived at the idea, the very basic idea, that God has revealed himself in his Scriptures. Upon that revelation, I went home and I told Amber and my wife, I said, hey, we're gonna read the Bible.
We're not gonna read any more devotionals. We were stuck on devotionals for years. We're gonna throw those away. Not that they don't matter, but they are not a sole source of nourishment. We went to the Bible and I thought, where should I start? I thought, I remember thinking Matthew is the birth of Christ.
Let's start there. The beginning of the New Testament. Let's start there. We started at Matthew 1. Without commentary. Without anyone telling us where to go. We started Matthew 1 and just started reading like children. Like you said, starting over, let's read like children.
Because in John 14, Jesus says, if anyone loves me, he will keep my word. My father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. I thought, how do I keep his word if I don't even know what it is? I don't know what it is.
Out of gratitude, for him saving me on that dark night in Boise, my expression of that gratitude was supposed to be, hey, just keep my word. I'm going, what is it? Okay, so now I'm on a new mission now. Read his word. Absorb his word. Find him in his word as he's revealed. The living Savior revealed in the living Scriptures and that started a new journey, or maybe an extension of the other journey of finding him.
I was just, every day, I was blown away by those black and red words throughout the New Testament. I was blown away. I was telling Amber, look at this. Did you see this? Are we underestimating what Jesus said? Are we underestimating when he says things like, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself. Take up his cross and follow me. Are we underestimating what he meant here? I don't think we are.
I think he means what he says here. I was so excited and so motivated that when I finished, I started again because Jesus said the prophets were talking about me. I started in Revelation and started reading through Malachi. Once I finished that, I started again in Matthew. It's a pattern I'm still on today.
Every morning before the sun comes up, I'm reading where I left off from yesterday. That's what I'm going to read today in my plan. I'm feasting on it. It is real food. It's real nourishment. Everything else wasn't. All the devotionals and the visualizations that I was doing were not nourishing me like that living, breathing spirit was.
Alison: Yeah. It's so interesting, Granger, because your whole face just lights up. That movement from death to life, from dark to light, suddenly you had a new mission. You had a new purpose. You had a new person outside of you to pursue. Again, it wasn't that there's no grief.
It's not that you don't miss your son every single day. It's not that you don't, I know that all to be true, but it somehow provided you with something else outside of you to not take the pain away necessarily, but reshape the pain?
Granger: There is a new concept that was introduced to me, and it was hope.
Alison: Yes, there you go.
Granger: I could still grieve, but I grieve as those with hope.
Alison: There you go.
Granger: As the Scriptures were revealed to me, and as I read them, and I learned who He is, as revealed in the Scriptures, I learned that He, just like the old Sunday School song, has the whole world in His hands.
When Jesus says things like this, when he says, in this world, you will have tribulation. But, take heart, I have overcome the world. We just take that for one second, and we just think about what that really might mean, the implications of what that means. You'll have trouble. In this world, but don't worry. I've overcome it.
It's oh, wow. That means the one that I put my trust in, He's got the whole world in his hands. He's got everything providentially sovereignly in control for a plan of good because he's a good God. He has good planned in the end. So then I could just rest in that. I go, yeah, of course there's pain.
I'm not surprised at grief. I'm not surprised at physical pain, emotional pain, spiritual. I'm not surprised. I go, yeah, that's what he said, but take heart. I could trust him. I could rest in him. Suddenly a whole weight is lifted off of me. Then the new thought is. I want to tell more people about this.
Alison: Yeah. It changed everything. It almost, as I'm listening to you, it's like the way your mind was so fixated on solving a problem that you couldn't solve, that wasn't yours to solve, that your mind couldn't solve. It's not that God came in and just created a neat, tiny, tidy bow on what happened. It's that suddenly it was no longer your problem to solve.
God had it somehow. It's hard to put words to it without sounding cliche. I just think of people who are suffering, Nobody wants to hear a cliche where they're going God let it happen for a reason.
You're like, no, it was awful. But the way that you paint the picture of trying to be your own God in a way, in the sense of, make sense of it, fix it, solve it, make it go away, whatever it is, that the freedom you felt when suddenly it was like, no, this is God's, it's way too big for me. That there is a peace in that only because of who God is.
Granger: What I found in the gospel was solving my biggest problem, and that was when the world says, you need to forgive yourself, you're not guilty, let it go, and in my mind I'm going, yeah, but I am guilty. I was there, I was the one in charge of my son that night.
The Bible says, come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, you're sinners. You are guilty. You are sinners. Come to me. I will cover your sin. I will remember your sins no more. I will rejuvenate you. I will clean your guilt. Come to me. I'll clean you. Yes, you're a sinner. Yes, you're guilty.
Alison: Yes, you make mistakes, yes, you mess up.
Granger: I will cover you.
Alison: Yeah, it's funny because when I read that, I was like, it's like this cultural gaslighting because it's actually not a kind message to tell someone you can remove your own pain, you can forgive yourself, you can take away your shame. It's almost like the ultimate form of gaslighting. We actually can't.
Granger: It is. It's making people try to do something that they can't actually do, and then they think they're failing at yet another thing.
Alison: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. There's more shame then there's more shame. Okay, but I can't even do that. I can't even do these things I'm supposed to be able to do. It's so powerful, Granger.
It's led you now to actually you've left country music altogether. Is that right?
Granger: Right. That's right, I have. I'm continuing this thought of, wow, I want more people to know. I want more people to know. In Matthew 13, the parable of the hidden treasure, it says that the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, that a man finds and covers up. in his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
It's like there's this treasure that we have in Jesus. I want everyone to know about that treasure. There's not really any time for country music to get in the way of that. There's also an idea that exalting myself on the country music stage and needing attention and needing my name to be great in order to sell tickets it's just not reconciling with what I was needing and feeling under the cover of the gospel.
Alison: I'm moved by your story. I want to honor the way that you're stewarding it and the way that you are using this experience to help not only people who have experienced extreme suffering but as you say, people who maybe can check the box of faith, but maybe haven't come alive to all that it means to follow Jesus.
Granger: Yes.
Alison: When I was in college, I had an experience with Jesus, not unlike yours. It was very similar to a death to life experience. Suddenly the sky is blue, the grass is green, it's like I've been living in black and white and now I can see right. Like the song of amazing grace.
From there I had to go on, as I alluded to, to fill in some of the practical life skills that we also do need to live a life in this world that we still live in. I didn't have a lot of those. That's why I say your story was almost the reverse. You had amazing, legit, practical life skills.
You had climbed your way to the top of an incredibly competitive industry. You had a wonderful marriage. You were a good dad. You had some skills. You had some skills that you will no doubt still use as you move forward. Those are gifts. A lot of what I do is equip people with those kinds of skills that they can use in partnership with their faith.
But I love that you're going to take all of these skills, the discipline, the keenness of the mind God has given you, even some of the creativity, even some of the ambition to use that to introduce others to this Jesus that actually changes our lives and frees us and removes the shame.
As you consider your future and as you consider this new journey, tell us just a little bit about what's bringing out the best of you. This is one of the things we like to talk about on this podcast. What are some current practices that are helping you live into this new vision for your life and how to steward the talents God has given you?
Granger: Sure. I feel that as much as I'm pouring out, as much as I'm speaking, or preaching, or doing interviews, or writing, I need to be doubly poured into, and so I feel like I'm in a season of equipping right now, and part of that season is that I'm in seminary, and so there's a lot of reading that I'm doing, a lot of studying that I'm doing, a lot of research papers and in fact, I did a position paper on C. S. Lewis recently, which is why that pops up.
I'm in a season of equipping and I don't think I could ever overestimate or oversell the importance, to everyone listening, of a local church. Of gathering, assembling on a Sunday morning with a local body. Under the leadership of elders or pastors that are properly shepherding and fencing their congregation from the wolves outside.
I think that is something, because of country music, that I just haven't been able to do consistently over any amount of time, is take my family to a church on Sunday morning and sit in chairs and sit under wise teaching and hear the word, hear some kind of expositional preaching, walking through different books of scripture and applying that to life.
That is probably number one out of everything that I do. It's really on top of the list.
Alison: I love that. You're really trying to absorb all of it through seminary, through church, through the Bible. I love that. Thank you. I appreciate being led into your story. I appreciate the way that you shared it so vulnerably so honestly with us. I appreciate just the way that you're leaning into being taught being shaped, allowing this leg of your journey to be transformative in a deep way.
I just look forward to seeing where God uses this story that you've been given to shepherd and help so many other people. Where can people find you? How can they get a hold of your work and learn more about you?
Granger: Yeah. Grangersmith.com or all the social media outlets. I'm just Granger Smith.
Alison: Thanks, Granger.
Granger: Hey, Alison. Thank you so much. I sure appreciate you sharing your platform with me.
Prayer is where self-awareness meets God-awareness. I've come to cherish it as an intimate, deeply grounding practice. But I haven't always felt that way. It used to evoke anxiety and activation inside of me as I worked to earn God's favor.
That's why I love this conversation with Kayla Craig, author of the new book Every Season Sacred. In this candid conversation, we talk about prayer in a fresh new way that will transform how you practice it.
Here's what we cover:
1. Scientific research into the effectiveness of prayer (3:57)
2. What prayer is (11:19)
3. How to pray when your emotions are chaotic (38:43)
4. Calming your nervous system (37:25) vs. hail mary prayers (10:44)
5. A simple way to pray throughout your day (33:02)
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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- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
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.
Resources
- Every Season Sacred: Reflections, Prayers, and Invitations to Nourish Your Soul and Nourish Your Family Throughout the Year by Kayla Craig
- To Light Their Way: A Collection of Prayers and Liturgies by Kayla Craig
- Liturgies for Parents on Instagram
- Kaylacraig.com
- Liturgies for Parents podcast
- www.liturgiesforparents.com
- The Science of Prayer from the Wall Street Journal
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Matthew 6:25-34, Luke 12:22-32
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. We are starting a new series this week that I'm so excited about. It flows perfectly out of the last series. It's called Faith Talks, and we're going to hit on some of the big topics that relate to our spiritual well being, because here's the thing–we know that there is no bifurcation between our spiritual health and our mental and emotional, and even our physical health.
They're all connected. There's a well-researched link between our mental, spiritual, and physical health and well-being. There's a pretty large and increasingly growing body of research that shows that involvement in spiritual practices, such as prayer, weekly gatherings, forgiveness, grace, et cetera, link to improved mental health, greater well being, more hope, and even greater sense of life satisfaction. They give us purpose and we need purpose to feel healthy in our lives.
These spiritual practices feed into a sense of community and belonging, a sense of resilience. They can help us face adversity. Those topics we talked about back in episodes 72 and 73.
So in this series, we're going to unpack some of these faith topics with a psychological lens. In today's episode, we're going to talk about prayer and I wanted to share with you some of the scientific evidence related to prayer and how it benefits us. Now, the data I'm going to share with you is from a Wall Street Journal article on the science of prayer.
This is not data that is necessarily coming out of religious institutions. I thought it was so interesting. The scientific research into prayer shows some of the following: number one, it can calm your nervous system. It can help you shut down that fight or flight response.
We talk about that a little bit in this episode, how you can shift to types of prayer that actually facilitate calming your nervous system instead of activating your nervous system. Prayer can help you work with your negative emotions and prayer fosters a sense of connection with God and with others.
I thought this was so interesting that there was a 2005 study in the journal of behavioral medicine that compared, quote unquote, secular meditation with spiritual meditation. Here's how they quantified the difference in secular meditation. You might meditate on a self affirmation such as I am love.
In a spiritual meditation, you would meditate on words that affirm a higher power, such as God is love. Notice the difference between meditating on the statement. I am love versus meditating on the statement. God is love. Now, this was a scientific research project where they compared these two different groups.
In this study, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, researchers found that the group that practiced spiritual meditation, meaning, the group that focused on the phrase, God is love, that focused their attention on a higher power, on a loving force outside of myself, a God who is separate from me, this group actually showed a more significant decrease in anxiety.
All of meditation actually is correlated with a decrease in anxiety and stress and an increase in more positive emotions. But in this particular study, the spiritual meditation that focused on the phrase “God is love” showed a greater decrease in anxiety and a greater improvement in mood.
They also showed a greater experience to tolerate pain. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal says, they tolerated pain almost twice as long as the group that used secular meditation. so I thought this was really interesting where science comes in and shows we need a connection to something outside of us, to a God who loves us.
It's not only within us. That's a little bit where our culture is going. God is inside of us. While I talk a lot as a psychologist about the importance of locating your internal locus of control, you need to have a sense of yourself, you cannot do that work apart from the God who made you, the God who is actually love.
The final thing that I thought was really interesting from this article, and I talk about this in The Best of You, is that when we approach God as a partner, as a collaborator in our lives, that's when we see these improved outcomes in our mental and emotional life. But when we see a God who's angry with us, a God who's punishing us or a God who abandons us or abuses us, we start to see worse outcomes.
It matters what you believe about the God to whom you're connecting. 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? A God who doesn't necessarily rescue you out of everything, but who comes to be with you in the mess.
It matters what you believe about God. In today's episode, we talk about this: how do you invite God into the hard stuff? For the episode, I wanted to invite Kayla Craig on to talk with me about prayer.
I love what Kayla's doing. She's the creator of a podcast and a popular Instagram page called Liturgies for Parents, where she shares nuanced and nurturing prayers for you to borrow for what she calls your fantastic, dirty, messy, holy life.
She's a parent to four kids, and she's the author of a brand new book called Every Season Sacred: Reflections, Prayers, and Invitations to Nourish Your Soul and Nourish Your Family Throughout the Year. It's a beautiful book that's organized through the four seasons–fall, winter, spring, and summer, with reflection and insight as well as prayers that you can pray both for yourself and with your family. It's a gorgeous book. I'm thrilled to bring you this conversation with Kayla Craig.
***
Alison: I'd love to go back in time for a moment. I'm sure this grew out of your own experience of faith and of prayer in particular, what was your relationship with prayer early on? Tell us a little bit about who you were spiritually, emotionally, as a young woman. Go back as far as feels right to you.
Kayla: What I'm so grateful for as I look to see who I was then, who I'm now, and who I'm becoming is that my faith has really been woven by so many different backgrounds and perspectives within the home of Christianity. I grew up in a more mainline tradition where there were some rhythms of liturgy but attended church off and on.
My husband grew up very strict, fundamentalist evangelical–his dad was a Baptist pastor, so we had very different experiences. When we got married, we really had to figure out, who are we? How do we make our faith our own? We have been part of so many different denominations.
While nobody's perfect, and there's pain involved in being human and being together, and there's very legitimate hurt within Christian circles and church communities, I do find that I'm also grateful. I'm grateful for the ways that my Catholic friends teach me to approach prayer in a different way and I'm grateful for the kind of impromptu boldness that my Pentecostal friends have.
Like all of these different expressions of faith, there's something that can be gleaned from that. I feel really grateful when I reflect on how that has affected my prayer life, because there isn't one way to pray. There's not one wrong way to pray or one right way to pray. I feel really grateful for all of the people and the ways of thinking and the approaches to prayer that have brought me to where I am and where I'm going.
Alison: Yeah, I am curious, and I'll go first, I'm curious how prayer functioned for you, if you can even think back early on. For me, for example, I wasn't raised Catholic, although my mom is actually Catholic now and was Catholic, but left the Catholic church when she married my dad.
So I was raised Protestant, but I remember a lot of Hail Mary prayers. I don't mean literally Hail Mary. God, please save me. God, please save me. I remember a feeling of activation. I wouldn't have described it as that back then, but it was from an activated nervous system state and not feeling a lot of relief in those prayers.
But it was prayer and God honors all prayer. So my relationship with prayer has changed. I'm curious for you, is there an early moment of really feeling like, because prayer right at its heart is conversation with God. It's not this weird, religious thing, it's simply a conversation with God.
So how did you begin to really experience that? Do you have a moment where you noticed, wait, this is me and God?
Kayla: I'll share one brief little story from my childhood and I write about it in Every Season Sacred, but we lived in this small house on a very busy road. My room had hardwood floors and I had this metal bed frame on the hardwood floors. if a car was driving by late at night with loud music, my bed would shake.
I remember being awake and feeling so scared in that moment. Just laying there in bed and feeling so scared and I, for whatever reason, I prayed right there. God, I'm scared. God be with me. I felt God was with me. It's a hard thing to even describe. I had never felt that way.
It's still very vivid in my mind now in my mid 30s, but it was this moment of, Jesus is with me right now. In a way that I had maybe thought Jesus is with me at Vacation Bible School, or maybe Jesus is with me when I go to church on Sunday sometimes. But really, it was this very intimate, first experience of God where my parents weren't around. Where the church leader wasn't around.
It was me, and it felt so intimate. Just this sense of peace, and I remember going to bed and falling asleep. it was like... a peace that cannot be explained. That was a really beautiful moment in my life and I think about that now. My own kids are experiencing God in their own ways and knowing that I cannot manufacture that for them.
They are going to experience the divine in their life in ways that I will not ever be a part of and so I find that really powerful and then you mentioned that I call myself a modern liturgist. I try to share my prayers as an offering for when people might not have their own, to put words to the beautiful moments in their lives or the deeply heartbreaking moments in their lives.
I have four children and my daughter, Eliza, joined us through adoption. She has Down Syndrome and a variety of disabilities and significant medical needs. She had a seizure disorder when she was younger and that has left her with a variety of physical and cognitive disabilities. When she was three, she got very sick and it was a cold that kept getting worse and worse.
I ended up having to take her to the emergency room. From there she was admitted to the intensive care unit and then she was put on a ventilator and on life support. It was a very difficult and thin space for us. Then we had three other kids at home. My husband and I were trading off and on about who is going to sleep at the hospital because every single day, we were reminded that we had no idea what was going to happen.
At that moment, people were saying, oh, I'm praying for you. it felt… empty, it felt like what's the point of prayer? We were doing the trade and my husband was in the hospital staying with my daughter and I went to be with our three sons and I checked the mail and there was a little book of prayer.
Just really short prayers, and that felt like a lifeline for me. It felt like something I could hold onto. Words that I could borrow when I didn't have my own, even if I didn't believe. It was like, I believe, help me in my unbelief, so I would sit by her hospital bed. I couldn't even hold her hand because everything, all the numbers and all the machines would go off. She was so sick.
I read the prayers, I read the prayers. she got better. But I also held that tension of knowing that not everybody gets better. Not everybody goes home. I really had to reckon with the new part of my own faith journey of figuring out like what is the purpose of prayer?
What is prayer? Is it meaningless? Is there something there for us? It's very deep and honest and real and uncomfortable questions of the mystery of faith.
From that experience, I started writing my own prayers, and talking with other friends and family. that kind of grew into talking with other parents across the country about things they've gone through in their lives and what do they wish they would have had?
What words do they wish they would have had when they didn't have any? They had those wordless groans. At the beginning of 2020, I created Liturgies for Parents on Instagram, where I would share short prayers. I had no idea that we had a global pandemic coming down the pipeline. I had no idea that we would have a deep, intense racial awakening in our country.
All of these things where it felt... heavy. we were all, what do we do? What is going on? Who am I in this? Who, what is my family doing? Are we going to be okay? Where is God? That is where my first book, To Light Their Way, which is a collection of prayers and liturgies for parents, came out of. Every Season Sacred is a growth out of that.
Alison: I love that idea of borrowing words when we don't have the words in those moments, like you described in that hospital room, needing somebody else's words. You want to communicate with God, but sometimes the words don't come in those moments. I love that you were able to rely on somebody else's words.
Then you wanted to do the same thing for other people. Help create words that we can turn to when we don't.
Kayla: Yeah, I need to borrow your words and we can share and we can hold each other up in that way.
Alison: Yeah, there's a comfort in that, and that's okay. I think sometimes we put pressure on ourselves in some strands of Christianity to come up with all the powerful, beautiful words, as opposed to the groans or borrowing the words. It made me think about when you were describing that moment in the hospital where you're desperate for God.
I had a stroke a couple of years ago, I talk about it in The Best of You, and I remember vividly my husband had found me on the floor. I couldn't move. He had put me in the car and we were racing and it was during the pandemic and he's racing me down main street and I am terrified.
In that moment, prayer wasn't a friend to me because my mind knew too much. My mind was like, God doesn't always heal. so that prayer of God, I know you're with me. I know this is going to be okay, wasn't there. My mind went to, God, I don't know that this is going to be okay. I'm terrified. That activated state of almost an anxiety prayer in that moment, almost evoked anxiety versus comfort.
In that moment was the embodied comfort. They put me through the CAT scan and I was so scared. the woman whom I didn't know, I said to her, I'm so scared. She put her hands on me and said, it is scary. She didn't try to make me not feel scared. That's what was calming to me in that moment. that to me, in hindsight was a form of prayer, was a form of two humans connecting saying, yeah, this is true. It's scary. also God is with us.
That is what was calming. I love that in the book, you're doing a lot of that, a lot of, yes, this is hard and also, as parents, that's so much of what we're doing with our kiddos. We're not trying to say, you shouldn't feel that way because we love God. It's, yeah, this is real and also tell me a little bit about that.
Kayla: In Every Season Sacred, I write about how my husband and I, when we were younger, were on an improv acting team together. One of the things you say in improv is “yes and”.
That you keep building, you keep building, you keep going. I keep that “yes and” in mind. When I'm parenting, my kids have such good questions, such big questions, such hard questions. It almost seems to me like they haven't yet unlearned that curiosity that so often we do as grownups.
I love talking with them, even though they give me more questions than I had when I first started talking to them. I think we often have this pressure not only to pray in a certain way, but we also have a pressure to have the right answers too. What even are right answers?
They're not really our answers to have, oftentimes. Being able to sit in that messy middle space with my kids, with my neighbor, with myself has been a growing opportunity for me because it isn't always easy, it feels so much more comforting sometimes to feel like you have this black and white answer.
Something is either good or it's bad. To enter into that “yes and” is like entering into this divine mystery where we have to give up our desire for control.
Alison: Yeah, can you tell me some examples of what your kids might have come to you with, whether early on or now, where you've had to pause?
Kayla: I tell a story about our son going to the library and walking through the main space and seeing a headline in a newspaper. Then that night all the kids were asleep and he came downstairs in tears and he told my husband and I about what he had seen.
It was about a school shooting. It was about children in his grade having to pretend to be dead. It took my breath away. I had no words in that moment because I couldn't tell him everything was okay. You know what I mean? It is this both-and of, we have a God who is peace.
And yet, we have a world that is full of violence. To navigate with him and to not have all the answers and to sit with him and let him know that what he was feeling was so real and so valid, and I felt that way too. Yet how do we create a sense of safety?
I promised him that I would do everything that I could do to make this world a more peaceful, more safer world for him, and talked about changeable ways that we can cultivate that peace. That's a heavier story, but a very real experience.
Alison: I love that. What a moment to maybe borrow somebody else's words. This prayer that you've written in that moment, this is such a fresh thing that so many parents are dealing with–the reality of danger in our world and in their schools. How do we pray in those moments for ourselves, let alone help our kids know how to access the peace that surpasses all understanding in those moments? Tell me a little bit about how you developed a prayer for that.
Kayla: In my first book, To Light Their Way, there's a section for prayers of lament, prayers for our weary world. When I submitted my manuscript, I included a prayer for gun violence in schools. My editor was like, this is really heavy, do you want to include this and I said, I really do because when my kids come home after doing an active shooter drill, I need the words and I know that other parents do too.
So we did include that prayer and It is heartbreaking, and it makes me sad and angry how often it's used, especially after a shooting. I knew that when I was writing Every Season Sacred, and this happened with my son, seeing that headline as I was working on this manuscript, I couldn't help but reflect on that.
To reflect on how we raise our kids, and rhythms of peace and non-violence as people who claim to follow the way of Jesus. The book is split up into Four Seasons, and then each season has a weekly chapter, so there's 13 weeks for each season of the year. They're not dated or anything.
Flip through them as they're a resource to you. But there's the reflection, this reflective essay, an invitation for the parents where I share about that story with my son. Then I share a breath prayer, some scripture that if it's a resource to you, you can go look up that's applicable to the theme that I'm writing about.
Then there are connection questions where I'm dipping into my journalism background. I share a bunch of open-ended questions that are along with those themes. It's for you and your family, so pick and choose what works for you, adapt them to the language that you would use, and grab a couple and try to intentionally, during the week, work in some of those questions to go a little deeper.
They're not Bible study questions, but they're questions to go deeper spiritually, to connect about your actual lives, about how you're feeling, your emotional state, your mental health, all of these things. Then, to close the chapter, there are two prayers. There's a prayer that is shorter with very accessible language, easier to pray with young children or developmental ages and stages where that's a little bit more accessible.
Then there's another version of the prayer that's a little more liturgical, has a little more poetic feel to it, deeper themes. I knew as I was writing this prayer, speaking about, or speaking into peace, speaking into nonviolence, speaking into this tension of living in a world that is so entrenched in violence and trying to navigate that alongside our families, it was a prayer in my heart.
I write a lot of these prayers with a notebook. I don't know if you do that too sometimes where it feels so intimate, all you can do is you have to have a pen in your hand. That's how I feel. So I remember sitting with my notebook crying and asking God to do something with these jumbled cries in my heart, and I hope that it brings a sense of peace and a sense of, if you don't have the words to pray, take mine.
Alison: What I love about this offering is that you didn't shy away from these really hard topics that meet parents where they are in today's world. I think you talk about technology a little bit, which is another, how are we praying for our kids through the world of navigating technology? It's seasonal but these liturgies are very current and these are the things that are on our hearts. How do we even pray through these things?
We barely understand them, yet we're not only trying to walk our kids through them in terms of guiding our kids to have healthy boundaries, guiding our kids to be safe, guiding our kids to be well equipped psychologically, mentally, emotionally, but guiding them spiritually. That's really where you're coming in and saying, we have to guide not only ourselves, but our kids through these very different landmines than many of us faced spiritually.
Kayla: I tried to create the resource that I need in my life right now, and not because I am an expert, but because I am working through this journey with you and with my kids alongside you. I'm really grateful for the authors, the theologians, the pastors, the artists, the poets, the activists, all of the people that I was able to reference and draw their work into.
I feel really grateful for that opportunity and in the back of the book, you might be going through a season of, like Catherine May says, wintering. It might be summer, so if you go to the back of the book, you can find those themes if you're really struggling, maybe with seasonal depression or grief. It's this isolation that sometimes happens in the winter. You can go find that and read that even if it's the 4th of July, so I want it to be this resource that serves you when you need it and how you need it.
Alison: That's so powerful. What are some rhythms that you rely on? Obviously writing and creating art is a rhythm for you. But how do you incorporate that in your day with four kids? Your life is busy. Life is messy. How do you keep those rhythms up?
Kayla: I think it changes all the time. It changes by the day, it changes by the season that we're in, now that we've gotten into the fall and looking to winter my days are a little different than in the summer when my four kids were home every day, so I have a little more margin in my life.
But sometimes the best I can do is–I talked about my daughter. She's in diapers. I have made it a spiritual practice that when I change a diaper, that is a prayer. Because that can be really hard, and my brain can immediately go to, what if, and what is this going to look like 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now?
For me, it's a diaper. Looking at her as a prayer and remembering that she is beloved and that I am beloved and that all we need is every day. We need God for right now. We need manna for the day and I love the verse about the lilies and the sparrows because it brings me a lot of hope.
If God cares so deeply for the sparrow, how much more does God care about me? Sometimes I have to remember that and let my breath become a prayer. Breath prayers are a great resource for me. I often fall back on simply breathing in, God, and breathing out, you are with me. Sometimes that's all I have the margin for and that's okay.
Alison: I love that. I love that every diaper that you change is a prayer. I love that. It reminds me of that moment in the ER when it felt like a prayer when the woman put her hands on me and said, it is scary, honey, I'm here. It's those moments that are sacred.
It's not always the eloquence of the words or the number of minutes on the clock that we spend quietly with our eyes closed and our hands folded in a quiet time, it's those moments. I love that. I love the very concrete, every time I change a diaper, this matters. There's great meaning in this moment. I'm honoring that with God.
Is there anything else you would want to share about your heart for prayer, your heart for folks whose lives are messy, who are struggling, maybe are feeling the disappointment of unanswered prayers?
Kayla: My book is called Every Season Sacred, and what that doesn't mean is every season is comfortable, easy explainable, what you wanted, happy, all of these things. That's not what I mean when I say sacred. When I say sacred, I mean that we can experience God even if, even when.
I hope, and I really pray, that if somebody cracks open the book, that they would feel an exhale, and not feel any sense of shame but if they're holding frustration or doubt, that they would feel not alone in it. Even though I cannot answer those questions, because I have my own questions, and I'm sitting there right alongside you in the unknown.
But I will be there with you. Above all of that, we have this divine presence who won't leave us, and won't forsake us, even when it really feels like that's not the case.
Alison: Yeah. It's the not-aloneness that is also a form of prayer. When we think about, again, this idea that prayer is closing your eyes, folding your hands, a certain number of minutes going through (and there's a place for that, there are times when that's really meaningful to me), but we think about group prayer as being with a bunch of people and closing our eyes, what I love about what you're getting at is this almost deeper, what's the thing beneath the thing, which is it's feeling not alone.
It's not so much about the way we're able to put things into words. It's the “I'm not alone in this'' that takes us a little bit closer to God. The goal of prayer is to take us a little bit closer to God. So reading someone else's words and saying, oh my gosh, she's articulating exactly what I feel in this moment–I'm not alone. Our nervous system relaxes and we're experiencing a little bit of a glimmer of God. I love that not-aloneness being a form of offering of collective prayer.
Kayla: Yeah, I wonder, do I need to draw nearer to God, or is God already so near to me, and all I need to do is be awake to it. All I need to do is notice, to pay attention. There is no prayer that is going to make God love us anymore, or give us extra blessings, or extra presents.
But we have that very intimate Immanuel, God with us, all the time. But it can be hard to notice that and to feel that sometimes.
Alison: Yeah. That moment of, oh my gosh, that's what I'm feeling. God, you are right here right now, in this moment. We need each other. We need each other to usher that in and again it's so much a part of my own experience.
I can almost get into a nervous system fight response to try to get to prayer, as opposed to the deep breath of, all right, God, you're already here. I don't have to fight so hard and I don't have to work so hard to get to the answers that I feel like I should have. Instead, I can breathe in your presence, the fact that you are right here.
That is a really powerful integration of spirit and body in that moment. Those are powerful moments throughout the day of noticing.
Kayla: In the back of the book, when I was writing Every Season Sacred, I kept thinking, this could be a resource or maybe this could be a resource. In the back of the book, there are these practical, very tangible resources that you can flip to.
One of them is a very gentle and brief introduction into praying the Examen. And, we won't get into all of that here, but it's this kind of at the end of your day. We all eventually, hopefully, go to sleep, and before going to sleep, reflecting on our day, and where God was with us, and making that a practice.
It doesn't have to be this big thing, and I'm really grateful for the people that have introduced that to me, because it helps me. Otherwise I'm moving on to the next thing, and it is so helpful to be able to reflect on that.
Alison: It's inviting God to be with me where I am, as opposed to getting myself into a state of telling God where I think I should be. It's inviting what I'm thinking about, which we're doing anyway, right before we go to sleep. We're replaying the tape of our days, it's becoming mindful of that.
Here's what I'm worried about. Here's what I'm thinking about. Here's what's on my mind, God. When we're ruminating or we're worried or we're in a big emotion, sometimes we do need to take that deep breath to become aware. Oh, I'm worried. Oh, I'm anxious. Oh, I'm sad. Oh, I'm scared. Then it's almost like that comma, God, I'm worried, that becomes a prayer.
That's what I love about that daily idea of the Examen. You do a great job in the book of describing it. I love that. In my own life, I've almost simplified it to, this is what I'm already thinking about. This is what I'm already worried about. Here we are.
That deep breath of inviting God in becomes the best sort of prayer. Suddenly when you start to do that, you're praying all day long. Even when you're in the car pickup lane and you're thinking about, how am I going to get to this? How am I, all the things that are going in our mind, it's that pause. A little bit of that differentiation.
We talk about where we are pausing to notice, Oh, I'm frantically rifling through my mental to do list right now. Oh God, that's what I'm doing. Can you come join me in that? Can you come join me as I take a deep breath? Could you join me in my to do list? As opposed to what's wrong with me? I should be praying vigilantly for all these children I'm seeing in front of me. The shoulds.
As opposed to actually, I'm really worried about all the things I have to get done. God, join me in that moment. So again, that's so much I love about what you're doing and recasting prayer as growing out of what we're already facing throughout our days.
Kayla: I pray that this would be you know an invitation into contemplation, but also a resource for you and your actual messy, complicated, busy, overwhelming, here and there and everywhere lives, like this is accessible to us right now. Yeah.
Alison: Amen. I feel like this whole conversation in a way has been a form of prayer. We're present to each other as we're trying to unpack what is a simple concept but also, sometimes a complicated concept, this idea of prayer. Even as we're talking, my sense is God is here, you and I are talking, we're trying to think about how prayer functions in our lives and also God is right with us as we're unpacking that.
Suddenly this conversation becomes a living form and we're inviting those who are listening, as you're listening, that's our hope that you would even right now begin to notice. Oh, wait a minute. God is right here as I'm listening. I don't have to shift gears. I can notice where I am and invite God into that. Just as we, you and I are doing right now.
Thank you. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for creating this space for people to connect to God in all of these ways. Tell people how they can find you, how they can find your work.
Kayla: I love having a thoughtful conversation like this. I feel like it ministers to my soul and it offers me an exhale. Thank you for your thoughtful questions and conversations. I love connecting with people in real life. I love hearing your stories, and you can find me at kaylacraig.com, that's where you can find my newsletter to sign up for. I call it a care package of prayers. I have a Liturgies for Parents podcast, that's a weekly kind of meditation, where every Monday I offer a prayer, some scripture, and a benediction, if that is a resource to you in your busy days.
You can find me on Instagram @liturgiesforparents. My personal account is @Kayla_Craig, where I share glimpses of my life. I really love connecting with people. My new book is Every Season Sacred, which is a resource to use throughout the year.
Then my other book is To Light Their Way, which is a collection of prayers and liturgies for parents.
Alison: Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing all of your hard earned wisdom with so many and we're grateful for you and for your family and for all the work that you're doing and sending you with lots of love as you head out into your day.
Kayla: Thank you.
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The Best of You Every Day offers short, daily reflections on Scripture through the lens of emotional health—helping you stay steady, connected, and rooted in love.
