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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)
Thanks to our sponsors:
- 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.
- Go to storyworth.com/bestofyou and save $10 on your first purchase!Start taking control of your health today at WildHealth.com/BESTOFYOU
Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
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:
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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.
I am so thrilled to have my friend, Dr. Curt Thompson, on the podcast today. I have been deeply transformed by Curt's work, and in today's conversation, Curt breathes fresh life into a topic that is too easily tossed around and oversimplified-Hope.We take a deep dive into the intricacies of hope from a neurobiological, relational, and spiritual perspective. It's a must listen for anyone going through hard times.
Here's what we unpack in our conversation:
* What's happening inside our brains when we hope? (11:59)
* Steps you can take in daily life to foster hope (17:55)
* The link between hope and secure attachment (15:35)
* How we embody and become hope for one another (21:04)
* Reimagining hope in today's world (22:41)
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Go to Reliefband.com and use promo code BESTOFYOU to receive 20% off plus free shipping.
- Visit seed.com/BESTOFYOU and use code BESTOFYOU to redeem 25% off your first month of Seed's DS-01® Daily
Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
Resources
- Curt's new book: The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope
- Other Books by Curt Thompson: The Anatomy of the Soul, The Soul of Shame, The Soul of Desire
- Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederich Buechner
- Romans 5
- More about "glimmers" in The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation by Deb Dana
- The Bible Project
- Genesis 1-6
- John 1
- James 5:16
- John 18:10-11; Matthew 26:50-56; Mark 14:46-50
- 2 Kings 6:17
- Acts 7:54-60
- The Being Known Podcast
- CurtThompsonMD.com
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so thrilled you're here today, and I'm especially thrilled to bring you this conversation with my dear friend and fellow therapist, Dr. Curt Thompson.
Curt was on the podcast in Episode 58. He was on with his friends, Pepper Sweeney and Amy Cella. It's a great episode and you get a real sense of their friendship. Curt really lives out what he teaches, but I wanted to have him on to talk about hope because I think hope is one of the most fundamental life skills that we all need to develop. Curt has a wonderful way of talking about it.
Curt is an author and a psychiatrist. He's the founder of the Center for Being Known, an organization that develops resources for hope and healing at the intersection of neuroscience and Christian spiritual formation. He's the author of The Anatomy of the Soul, The Soul of Shame, The Soul of Desire, and his latest book that came out, it's called The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope.
Everything Curt does really speaks to me. we get pretty personal today on the podcast–both Curt and I are deep feelers. So when we're talking about this stuff, there's often tears in the back of our eyes.
So you'll hear some moments of quiet where there are tears showing up both in Curt and in myself. It was a beautiful, powerful conversation. I took so much away from it personally. It moved me and I'm so thrilled for you to now join me in this conversation with my dear friend, Dr.
Curt Thompson.
*Music*
Alison: Curt, I realized it started recording, can you say that quote again? I want to capture it. I love that.
Curt: Yeah. From Frederick Buechner, Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
Alison: I love that you thought of that quote as I was asking you how you're doing. It's such a beautiful segue into your book, which is to me this paradox of hope and suffering. The both-and, the one not being able to really exist without the other, which Buechner is getting at.
Always a little bit of both. I'm so looking forward to this conversation. By way of background. We've been going through a series, and this episode will be the last in this series, on these psychology building blocks. I'm calling it Psych 101, these skills that we all need to build to become really a healthy human adult.
We've talked about emotional intelligence, about resilience, about relational habits. I don't think you can become a flourishing, healthy human if you don't understand hope, and if you don't understand how to develop hope, and I love in the subtitle of your book, you talk about the formation of hope, and I'd love to start there.
This is a terrible question to ask, what is hope? Is it a feeling? Is it a mindset? Is it a skill we develop? What's your understanding of hope? We toss the word around a lot. We see it in memes, we see it in cliches, but it's a really deep concept. What is your understanding of it?
Curt: Alison, I would say in some respects, one way to begin to talk about it is that first of all, it's to put it in perspective. Starting big picture and then moving closer in, into who we actually are as real people and with our real stories.
One thing we said when we talk about hope, we're actually talking about something that has to do with our anticipated future. It’s a thing that's happening somewhere. Five minutes from now, five years from now. So it's a future state thing. Then if we consider it very generally, as it turns out, hope is the word that we use that is like a euphemism for any part of my anticipated future that I would find to be something that I would actually look forward to with joy as opposed to looking forward to it with dread.
It’s a hopeful future. Now what's interesting is that without calling it hope, this is what we are doing from the time that we come into the world. We are generating hope. You come into the world as a newborn and you start to cry and mom comes for you and you discover that mom comforts you. Then the next time you do it and the next time you do it, and so forth and so on.
What you're doing is you're developing an anticipated future in which you are gonna be cared for when you are in distress. If that's the kind of family you're growing up in, if we have a secure attachment, for the most part, we form hope long before we call it that.
But what it is, is a future state in which I expect good things to happen. Really the simplest definition: it is a thing that we are doing every time I pull out of my driveway and I drive my car, and without imagining it, I hope that everybody else who's coming my direction stays on their side of the highway.
I hope they do. Now, I'm not thinking that, but that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm driving hopefully.
The other thing, too, that is important, then, is to know that hope is actually a thing that I am in the business of forming neurobiologically. Interpersonally.
We often talk about it as if it is this kind of abstract thing, or at least it's a thing that is independent of anything that I have to do with it. I either have it or I don't have it. Maybe it'll drop into my lap. Maybe it won't. I hope that I'm able to hope. But I don't have any way of being connected to its formation.
Then the other thing that we would say is that hope that is durable, I don't know if we would say always, but it appears frequently that hope that is durable is always formed in the kiln of some kind of suffering.
Alison: Yeah, even in your very first example, the baby who is crying, the impetus for the hope is the pain, is the suffering, is the need. Is that, would you say that in order to hope, one has to suffer? Would you say that they are intimately linked in that way?
Curt: I don't necessarily have to suffer to hope that people will stay on their side of the highway when they're driving toward me. But for durable hope, for me to hope durably, for me to hope in a moment in which my pain is still with me, that's a different kind of hope, and this I think is what Paul is getting at in that passage in Romans 5 that we explore in the book.
This notion that hope emerges in this crucible of suffering. As long as I'm able to recognize that the crucible of suffering itself is preceded by a certain set of assumptions that Paul is making about our relationship with Jesus and about our relationship in the community to which he's writing. I'm not expected to pick up that book of Romans and read it and think, oh, Paul's writing to me, Curt, as the individual, and I'm going to have to suffer and somehow white knuckle myself through perseverance so that I can get to hope.
Paul's writing to a community. It is in the context of that community that we are seen, soothed, safe, secure. The body becomes the person of Jesus to me, in which we are loving people in wild and crazy ways that in that context would have never been predicted outside of the presence of Jesus. In that community, it creates the opportunity for me to reveal myself in my pain to others who are going to be present with me, which enables us to form hope.
I don't form hope for myself. We form hope for me and we form hope for you.
Alison: Yeah I love that. That's a key point in the book. I want to circle back to that “we” hope in the context of community and connection, but I love what you said. I want to pause there because I think so many of us, I was thinking about it as I was reading this book, that Romans 5 passage, it's so familiar.
I've always felt the linear kind of part of my brain. Like you said, it's not that encouraging to me. It's like a hard thing happens, I have to work really hard, then it's sequential. In the end, I might get this feeling of hope. That's a fruit of all this hard stuff. And that's not a super hopeful or pleasant way of looking at it.
You are expanding it–it's more of this virtuous cycle where all of these things are happening simultaneously. It's an action. It's a forming, in the context of community, I want to circle back to that, but I have a question for you before we get there.
There's a way in which, when you talk about hope as being future-oriented, a way of looking toward an outcome that is favorable that we hope will come to pass, it almost sounds a little bit like the opposite of anxiety, where there is this futuristic orientation toward what could go wrong.
It almost sounds to me as if hope is in some ways the antidote for anxiety and it's not positive thinking. It's something much deeper and much more robust spiritually and neurobiologically than the power of positive thinking. Does that make sense?
Curt: Yeah. What I would say in this regard is that we form hope. But what we form is actually a byproduct–I don't form hope because I set out to form hope. I form hope because in my suffering, I allow myself to be revealed to you. I do it over and over again, despite the fact that my pain isn't leaving, which is perseverance.
In the course of that work, I become a person of character that I couldn't have been if I'm trying to do this all by myself, or if I'm trying to do this by myself without revealing myself to someone else. That movement from the suffering, practicing perseverance, the development of character, as we like to say, we always remember our futures.
Our future is only ever constructed out of my remembered past. I don't ever construct a future that I'm not imagining from my past experience in some way, shape or form. So when I talk about hope, what I'm really talking about is an anticipated future that is built out of multiple moments of embedded experience that I commit to memory in which I have experienced my pain in the presence of Alison, who is with me with loving kindness, and my friend Neil, and my friend Rich, and Byron, these people who are with me, and I encode this, and this becomes my source for my anticipated future.
I'm building a neural base of memory of, when I am in pain, I am also experiencing the presence of those who are with me. It categorically shapes and changes the nature of the story that I tell about the pain, including how I experience the feeling of it.
That means that as I imagine, my future becomes one of repeated moments like this. When I do think about my future, that future is coming out of this series of present moments that I have felt, this seabed, if you will, of seeds that we are planting of the presence of Jesus through his body being with me.
When I imagine my future, I'm like, oh, Curt, when is this problem that you have that is so awful gonna stop? I think I don't know, but when I think about having it next Friday, I think about the sense that I'm not by myself with this, and it categorically changes it. I have a hopeful future, and that actually circles back around to change my present moment itself.
Alison: It's really a paradigm shift in that it shifts the focus of the hope from the outcome out there and onto the journey, which is, I don't know what's going to happen, but I do know I'm going to receive care and love and kindness and connection and beauty in this moment.
Again, that's not necessarily what we want, maybe the outcome will come, but it doesn't matter. I'm receiving something even more beautiful, perhaps, in the moment. Curt, I'm imagining the person listening, especially if we think about hope being formed literally, from the moment we experience comfort as a newborn baby, as a child.
What happens if we never encoded that kind of positive experience as a child, for whatever reason, as a result of emotional neglect, abuse, traumatic experiences, and so our brain really does go to when bad things happen, I am alone and I don't have a different memory for that.
Curt: My guess is that if they're listening to your podcast, they didn't randomly flip a coin and land on Alison's podcast. They're probably listening to you for a reason. Even if they grew up in a place where they knew very little of a secure attachment, if they're listening to you, it's because at some point and on some level, they are forming a secure attachment with you.
Even if you're not in the room, it's happening because this is the work that you do. I know you, I consider you to be my friend. I love being in the room with you. Who wouldn't love being in the room with you? I'm really serious. Like the sense that if somebody's listening, they're already hopeful and they're hopeful because not because, oh, Alison provides great information, which you do, but they're not coming for your information.
They're coming for you. This is why your listeners are coming and what's happening for them means that, maybe it's not picture perfect because you're not in the room and you aren't sharing meals together and so forth, but there are going to be listeners whose attachments are being formed differently because they're listening to you.
They're listening to us now. We would say to those listeners, gosh, I wonder what it feels like to imagine Alison being with you in your kitchen and having a cup of coffee together, what do you imagine that would be like? I imagine that there'd be a lot of people who would love that.
Why do you think that is? Because you've already had this felt sense, literally, in your chest that this is a woman who's willing to both be vulnerable, but also who listens well. Who's willing to be present with you in the room with the parts of you that are hard. When that begins to happen, that's the kind of experience that we want to have you practice paying attention to.
My hopeless future, my dreaded future, is really me paying attention to the things that I've always paid attention to. Again, this is why we talk about hope being formed. It is not a thing that is going to fall out of the sky into my lap because I want it to.
God takes us very seriously and expects us to be involved in the hope-forming project. For those people who haven't had it at the cradle, my guess is that we would say, oh then we're gonna want to work on finding relationships where that can become possible.
Alison: I love that. It's a spin on you always saying pay attention to what you're paying attention to. That applies to shame but it also applies to hope. Paying attention to that feeling of: there's something here that gives me hope.
Curt: Again, if I were to get up and walk down the hallway at my house, I say I hope that the floor holds. I don't think I'm going to say I hope the floor holds, but I'm living as if I do hope the floor holds.
Why is that? Because I've had an embodied encounter with the floor thousands of times. So when we talk about this kind of hope for relational wholeness, we're talking about putting ourselves in a position in which we can have greater numbers of experiences in which we are being seen in this way that we're talking about in the middle of our pain.
Alison: Yeah. Maybe the first step, if you're someone who struggles with a lot of anxiety, a lot of despair, a lot of hopelessness, however it shows up in your life, is beginning to notice, what are those times when it feels like the floor held a little bit, when it feels like someone, a glimmer, to use, Deb Dana's word, she uses this word glimmer that is like the opposite of a trigger.
It's a moment of hope. I'm not sure she would contextualize it that way, but it's when your nervous system feels all those good things of, okay, maybe I can do this. It's noticing those glimmers and capturing them intentionally. The moment after I talked to that person, I felt a little bit better. Cultivating that, being mindful about gathering up some of those hopes so that you can follow the breadcrumbs to greater and greater awareness.
Curt: I mean, I'm sure that you have this experience when you're in the consultation room with folks. You have an experience with a patient in which something happens and you sense them sensing that they've been seen. There's some moment of felt connection and when this happens in our confessional communities, when there's 10 of us in the room, we pause, we stop the moment and we say, tell us what happened.
We want to draw their attention to what they feel in their chest, what's happened in their body. We want them to be explicit and tell us who said what? What were they looking like? What was the tone of their voice? We want them to practice this.
Then we say, your assignment between now and next week is every day, I want you to rewrite the screenplay of what happened here. I want you to begin to remember. This is the Old Testament. “Remember”. This notion of literally practicing, neurally embedding this moment, such that this becomes what generates your anticipated future, more and more, which is essentially what hope amounts to.
Alison: Practicing hope, really. Practicing it. You talk about that. We have to practice it, to catch that glimmer of it. I love what you also said about secure attachment. I'm curious as a therapist what you think about this. Part of why I appreciate so much what you said about the podcast is because I've thought a lot about what is the purpose of this? Why do I do this?
Some of it grew out of my work as a therapist, and it's fascinating to me. It's not the brilliance of what I say. It's not the therapeutic modality, although I love IFS. There's different interventions that certainly work well.
What people remember and consistently would say to me is, I would start to hear your voice in my head. What would Alison say at this moment? It was never the most brilliant thing I said. It was hope. It was just, oh, Alison would say, and they're starting to internalize that voice.
That's so much of what we need. Do you, does that, you're laughing. So I presume it's humbling. It's both humbling and it's also freeing. It's, oh gosh, this is so much simpler, this work, it's more complex and more simple than we make it out to be.
Curt: Yeah. That's really well said. I'm reflecting on this work that happens in these confessional communities that we provide. We know there is a moment for every one of the participants that typically happens when we hear them say some version of, “I had the hardest conversation I've ever had with my boss yesterday and every single one of you were in the office and I know exactly where you were standing, and Susan, you were actually sitting right beside me”.
Of course it's easy for us to say, I'm making stuff up in my head. I want to say, of course it's in your head in that it's neural. But this is exactly what we do with everything that we do. When a toddler goes off to preschool, she takes mom and dad in her head with her, even though she doesn't know that's what she's doing. The reason she can go off to preschool is because mom and dad are with her.
This is not an imagined fairy tale. No, it is really that people take up residence in the presence of others. So when Paul uses this metaphor of the body of Jesus, there were all kinds of other words they could have used to describe the church. But he's really taking something of this material world and maximizing its efficacy for us, recognizing that taking Jesus literally is the taking of these people that I know, and they're going to be in the room with me.
That kind of work is so antithetical to how we are in our kind of modernist way of thinking that spirituality is this rather abstract thing that happens out in the ether rather than beginning with our bodies. Hope is a thing that actually, as it turns out, is formed by virtue of me imagining that my friend's bodies are in the room with me in the middle of the hardest places.
Alison: I wanted to tell you, I love how in all that you do, you bring us back to this idea of embodied hope. You have been the voice in my head that has helped me understand the power of community. I want you to know that.
For me, I can do the internal work. I can be a good parent to the parts of myself. I can co-parent with God, with Jesus, with parts of myself. I can be with the hurting parts of me. I can invite God.
But boy, to let other humans near those hurting parts is a challenge for me. I talk about that and the way that you describe these confessional communities, the way that you describe the body of Christ as embodied withness, as in and of itself, bringing hope has been so meaningful to me.
I want to say that to you while you're here with me, because you are that embodiment of hope for me. The way that you describe this whole process as happening in the context of withness has really helped me become a hope seeker in my relationships. So thank you for that.
Curt: First of all you're very kind to say that. That feels really good to hear. I'm really, I'm just, I'm taking that in. Really grateful. It's a lovely gift on a Thursday afternoon that I didn't see coming. It's really lovely. So thank you for that, for your words.
I would say, as our friends at the Bible Project like to say, everything you need to know about human beings, you can find out by reading the first six chapters of Genesis. You read that, and there's nothing more, like everything you need to know, it's right there.
One of the very first things that we read has to do with how God formed the human and that he begins with mud and he breathes the breath of life into the humans and nostrils and the human becomes a living being. We might say therefore that if we take away the dirt, or if we take away the breath, that we stopped being human.
So they're both equally important for us to be human, but there is a sequence in which we are formed, and that same sequence, as it turns out, is followed in terms of how our life is actually lived in the world. First we sense, and only then do we make sense of what we sense. First we have an encounter, we behold the word, and only then do we write in John chapter 1 how we beheld. The theology and the written text only follows the embodied experience and it then turns around to inform my embodied experience and so forth. But I think it has been helpful.
I've grown up in the same world that everybody else has taught us. The Christian story is about a set of beliefs and so forth and so on. That's primarily what it is.
But it necessarily involves my body first. It doesn't make sense to me because that's not the world that we live in, but it would have been the first century Hebrew’s world. As it turns out, there is an infinite array of practical ways that we can apply this in the form of healing for our patients. We see that the mechanics that we learned about is walking in lockstep with the story that we hear about in the text.
Alison: How did you arrive at your own experience of, you presumably went to medical school, you become a psychiatrist, you're interested in helping others. How did you begin to conceptualize from a felt need place in your life, oh, this needs to happen in community? This needs to happen with other people.
Because speaking for myself, I go into this field with a little bit of, I know intellectually we should be doing this in community, but how do we actually do that? In your own personal life, what are some milestones where you realized that there's something bigger going on here than an expert with a patient?
Curt: Yeah. For the Hebrews, coming out of Egypt is the formational story. For me, I finished residency in 1992. We moved to the DC area that summer. We joined a church. That fall, we had our first covenant group gathering.
It's our small group. They call them covenant groups at our church that we are still part of here. There were about, I don't know, eight or nine of us that were in the group. We decided, hey, this would be a good idea since many of us are coming to this group brand new to the church, brand new to each other, for us to tell our stories.
The woman who is now, and has been, my literary agent, Leslie Nunn Reed, who now lives in Dallas, but who at the time was living in the DC area, she was part of our covenant group. Leslie was the first to decide that everybody's gonna tell their story. Take one night, tell their story.
The very first night, Leslie says to us, “I realized that as I approach this, there are two stories I could tell. I could tell the story that would be easy to tell, and that's the kind of story that everybody here would find easy to tell. Or I could tell the real story. I've decided I'm gonna tell the real story”.
It was one of the game changing moments, not in my life, but in the life of this entire covenant group. She told the good, the bad, and the hard, and that vulnerability was like the horse left the barn and there was no getting the horse back in the barn.
From that time forward we began to live a life together in which, and to this day, there are four couples that are part of it. To this day, I would say there's very little, if anything, at least the men in that group, there's nothing about me they don't know. There's nothing about us as couples that for the most part, we don't know.
We have loved each other. We have fought with each other. We have been mad at each other. We have had to repair ruptures with each other. What was interesting about it is that the whole time that this is happening, I'm a newly minted out of residency psychiatrist.
I'm taking care of patients while I'm having this experience personally about the time interpersonal neurobiology rolled around or before that. It became clear that what we were doing in that community was transformational for us. It transformed everything that we are doing.
I think walking into that workshop with Dan Siegel 20 years ago, that it's oh my gosh, these are the mechanics of what we've been doing for the last, however many years, 15 to 20 years. From that time forward, and then you start to read the scriptures, and you're like, holy freaking cow.
Alison: That's right. It's so cool. I love that. Is that the woman to whom you dedicated The Deepest Place? Now I understand even more deeply why that's so formative, because then you could see what's happening and what we've looked at as a spiritual practice, which is the practice of gathering and fellowshipping and breaking bread and all the things that are in scripture, and said, oh, this is actually in our brain.
There is a neurobiological basis for this. This is actually how God designed us and put all that language to it. So powerful. That's so beautiful. I love that.
Curt: Thanks for asking. I love telling that story. Because I love talking about Leslie in that way. I don't think anybody else would have even thought to have told the real story in the way that she did. As does all healing, it upended all of us in the most beautiful and sometimes difficult ways.
Alison: Thank you so much for telling it. That's very brave, what she did. It's a really helpful reminder again, going back to how to begin to be a glimmer gatherer or a hope seeker, someone who's looking for these moments of hope. Right there, she did something in that moment that you were aware of and moved toward. You moved toward that as a group.
Here you are 20 years later or however many years later with this rich, robust experience of hope that you're now pouring out to so many others.
Curt: I, this morning, I was at breakfast with one of one of the husbands of these families, his name's Rich, lifelong friend of mine. On Monday, I'll be with Neil. These relationships, these are not therapeutic relationships, but these are deeply formational relationships for me because they're all part of the larger context.
It's not this individual thing that I've had. It's with each of them in the context of this community in which the community itself is providing a crucible ballast support, but also a certain level of conviction of loving and kindness when pressure needs to be born on. When love is demanding things of us that I would rather it not demand of me. Yeah.
Alison: Yeah, it's real community. It's real embodied withness that is transformational. It is the context of this sort of hope-suffering partnership that is the topic of the deepest place. I want to circle back to when you were saying about how even these words that we're saying right now, being on a podcast, we can form these secure attachments that can do some good.
Everything I think about therapy has a place. It does some good. This has a place, the written words that we do have a place. There's probably nothing that can take the place of that kind of confessional community that you described so well, those real transformational on the ground relationships. I long for people to experience what you experienced with Leslie. I do. I think that's where this transformation occurs. I long for more of it.
You describe it so well in The Soul of Desire, that it's not a replacement for church. It's not a replacement for therapy. It is these communities in real life, these relationships when we are suffering, because suffering will come and you talk about that in the book, we will suffer. It's how do we suffer and how do we cultivate and form hope in the midst of suffering?
Really, Curt, in so many ways, what you're saying is it's in the context of being known. That's what we need. Leslie being so brave in her small group that wasn't set up for this and said, I'm going to tell you the truth today. I'm going to take a chance.
Curt: Yeah. We didn't even know that she was being brave because we weren't even imagining that this is the kind of story that who in their right mind would ever do such a thing to actually take the book of James seriously? If you're not well, confess. In the book of James, if any of you don't confess, tell the truth, tell your story, and all the parts about your story that are unwell, let it be prayed for such that you may be healed.
It’s essentially what she did. She's naming all the things. And, again, the whole notion, it's not good for the man to be alone, and you want to say no kidding. The degree I suffer is in no small part a function of the degree to which I carry it alone.
It is in naming them to a person who is willing to name the same thing to me about their own, that I discover that I'm not alone with this, and it is in not being alone that healing's door is opened. This is where the whole notion of what the Trinitarian theology of the church is such a big deal.
It's so important because of this notion that when Peter whacks off the ear of the high priest's servant in the garden of Gethsemane and Jesus heals him and then says, put away your sword. Do you not know that should I want to, I could call for 12 legions, 60,000 troops, and they would come.
Imagine you hear him say that and your mind is immediately drawn to Elisha and his servant and Jerusalem is surrounded and the servant is panicked and Elisha says, let him see. His eyes were opened, and he saw the host of heaven, the army of the Lord God Almighty. Now, nobody else could see this, but you figure, on Good Friday, it's easy for us to be so limited in our imagination that we don't see 60,000 troops that are at the ready, waiting for their captain's call, and he doesn't call them.
You can imagine, being the archangel, and you're wondering, why is he not calling? This sense of withness, this sense that Jesus has the awareness that he is not by himself, even in the middle of his suffering, because he sees things that even in that space, it would be hard for anyone to see. This is what we are called to be doing.
I'm reading today about Stephen and his stoning. He saw the son of man. There are things that he sees because he is so immersed in this community of the king.
Alison: Such that his face shines in the face of adversity. Yeah. He's not pep talking himself to that. That's a, to use your word, that's an encoded experience of something that is so real that in that moment of the worst adversity of being literally stoned, his face is beaming because he is with that memory, that lived experience of goodness and of love.
You're right, we practice that. I love that. We have to practice that and we have to practice that in community with others. We have to practice that and to use your words, we have to suffer differently. Sometimes I say suffer wisely, but I love you're taking it to suffer a little bit differently.
Tell somebody, get that experience of it didn't necessarily fix my problem, but I wasn't alone and something shifted. Something got encoded inside of me and I'm building on that. I got one, I'm going to look for another one to the point where we become like Jesus or like Steven. It's so beautiful, Curt. I could talk to you for hours. I love talking to you.
Curt: Back at you.
Alison: I love how real it all is for you. I think that's what speaks to people. All of your work comes from the overflow of your heart. I want to close because I ask when I do have guests, I ask them, what is bringing out the best of you right now? What do you hope for right now?
Curt: Okay, so I have in this list in this group of people that I'm with, I've got this covenant group and I've got these three other guys that I'm with every Tuesday morning for the last 25 plus years for confession and prayer and so forth. I say without these people in my life, I'm a dead man.
But in this context I've made a list of people that I have to forgive then there's 10 that are on the list and, you might think, okay, if I'm listening, am I on the list? No, but you're on a list. Okay, you're on a list.
There are people on the list and what has been hopeful has been the work of recognizing there's a certain suffering that goes with, I have to admit, oh I've actually enjoyed holding a grudge.
I've taken pleasure in holding a grudge about something like, I don't think about all these people all the time, but when they come up, I'm liking being pissed. I have good reason for it, but I'm having to burn energy to keep that story alive the way it is.
I'm having to come to terms with oh, this is a story that I have told. Yes, certain things happened, but now I recognize I have now been telling a story ever since it did happen, and I am my problem.
What has been hopeful has been practicing imagining Jesus being in the room with me, with them, and practicing telling a different story. Sharing this with these people in my group, and recognizing that there has been a shift in my posture. Now, I'm imperfect at this, and I still have a long way to go, but for the first time I'm getting to a point where I'm looking forward to not holding grudges.
I would much rather not do that, rather than enjoying it as much as I have been for however long I've been enjoying it. That's something that I can say that has been a hopeful thing. The way you get there is you gotta identify these other things that you're not very proud of.
Alison: I love it. You're practicing hope and you're right, it's that paradox. I want to encourage everybody, it's called The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope. It's that paradox of it doesn't feel that great to look at that, but man, when you do it in the context of safety, in the context of love, it feels great.
It breeds hope. It's amazing. So it is very hopeful. It's such a paradox. It's facing what's hard about ourselves, about our lives in the context of safety, love, compassion. It develops hope. You're going to get to a better place. Tell everybody how they can find you, how they can find your work, Curt.
Curt: Probably the way that most people are finding it these days is through podcasts that I co-host with my friend Pepper Sweeney. So that's called the Being Known Podcast. That's one way to find me. There's another way through my website, CurtThompsonMD.com. Then there's Instagram. Facebook and what used to be called Twitter. Whatever it is now, can find that on that account,
Then you can find me through the Center for Being Known, which you so kindly and generously spoke at last year. Through that and through this Connections Conference that we'll be having here in about a month. Those are some ways to find me.
Alison: I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but for folks who are interested in potentially doing a confessional community, they can get information about that at your website.
Curt: They can get information about that at my website through the Center for Being Known. Through our practice that does training, it does immersion trainings, intensives for folks. That's called New Story Behavioral Health that's here in Northern Virginia. So it's a way to do that.
Alison: That's great. You're the best. Always grateful for your time. Thank you!
Curt: Me too. You're very welcome. My pleasure.
If you've ever struggled to feel like you belong, this episode is for you. I've struggled with belonging for decades. I couldn't understand how other people seemed to find large groups of friends. But I've figure out how to belong on my own terms. And, paradoxically, I realized-that's exactly what belonging is.
Today's episode is personal, hopeful, and practical.
Here's what we cover:
1. The myth of belonging (9:08)
2. The 2 roads to isolation (5:36)
3. What about social anxiety? (9:50)
4. The surprising path to belonging (20:19)
5. 3 easy steps you can take TODAY (29:50)
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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
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Dance scene from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here and I'm so glad you are joining me for these foundational psych 101 building blocks that we all need to build in order to live the wholehearted lives mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically that God designed us to enjoy.
Today's topic is such an important topic. It permeates every conversation I have. Just this last week in conversations with family members, with friends, with myself, with clients, they were all talking about these hard challenges. What do you do when you are facing adversity, a really hard challenge in your life? And I'll give you some examples of what I mean, but the psychological word that we use when we're talking about this is this word resilience.
And it's something we all need to cultivate in our lives. We don't just automatically have resilience. It's not just something we get, it's something we have to develop mindfully with intention. It's a little bit like emotional intelligence, which we talked about in episode 70. It's something you have to develop mindfully and consciously as you face adversity.
I want to start just by offering a quick definition of resilience. You hear this word tossed around a lot. And one book in particular that I really that gets at the heart of resilience is called Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth.
If you want to go deeper on this topic, that's a great resource for you. But when we talk about resilience, we essentially mean your ability to recover from setbacks or adversity. Whether you're facing some adversity or some setback in your life right now, or whether you've faced a lot of setbacks in your life, including from your childhood, whatever they may be, resilience is your ability to recover and not necessarily let that setback take you out.
And then secondly, you're recovering from setbacks or adversity, and also you're adapting to it and even thriving in the face of challenges. Resilience is this ability to bounce back from negative events and even adapt as a result of negative events so that you can move forward with greater strength.
It requires a lot of mental and emotional strength when we're dealing with setbacks, when we're dealing with adversity. It's hard. It pulls out our fears. It pulls out our vulnerabilities. And so there's a skill here. There's a muscle to facing hard challenges with resilience, where we're not just muscling our way through.
We're pausing long enough to equip ourselves to face this challenge, to gain the new skills that we might need to overcome this challenge, but overall, it means figuring out how to do what we need to do to move forward in strength, claiming the life God has for us.
Resilience isn't the absence of hard things. We are all going to face hard things in our lives. It's just part of life. What do we do in the face of hard things? What do we do when those hard things happen, when those challenges arise?
It might be a challenge at work. You might lose a job. You might be struggling in a job, you, it might be a relational challenge. You might've lost a relationship. You might be struggling in a relationship. You might be dissatisfied in your relationships. It might be a parenting challenge.
Maybe one of your children is struggling with a really hard setback and it's pulling on all of your vulnerabilities and maybe you're feeling ill equipped and you want to equip yourself and become resilient so that you can be there for a child or for a family member or for a loved one who's struggling. There are all sorts of opportunities in life to develop resilience.
Something hard has happened. And what do we do? In that moment, how do you find the mental and emotional strength, both to process what's happening that's hard to come to terms with it accurately, not deny it, not bypass it, not minimize it, not pretend it's not there, but to face what's hard while simultaneously not letting it take us out?
How do we not let it get the best of us when we become so overwhelmed by the reality of what's hard that we actually can't gather up that internal strength that's going to be required for us to work our way through it? This is resilience.
It's a skill that we need. And so many of us were not taught it. Hard things just happened and we figured out how to survive. And then here we are as adults, just still trying to survive. Resilience is something a little bit deeper than survival. Although sometimes we do simply just need to survive. We've got to just gut things out.
But resilience is this deeper sense of, I see what's hard. I'm aware of it. I'm being honest about it. I'm taking inventory of what is mine to face and what is mine to control in this situation. I'm going to equip myself, I'm going to get the support I need so that I can move through this hard thing with tenacity, with perseverance in a sustainable way.
One of the metaphors that for me is the most helpful when I think about this skill of resilience is thinking about facing a mountain. And probably the reason that I love this metaphor the most is I grew up at the base of a mountain, a big mountain. I spend a lot of time hiking in the mountains. It's one of the things my family loves to do to this day. And it's one of the things early on as a young child, I would do.
My parents would take us on these backpacks into the wilderness. I must've been six or seven when I went on my first wilderness backpack. We would gather up our tent and our sleeping bags and our food and maybe a change of clothes, put everything on these backpacks on our backs. We'd get dropped off at the bottom of a trail.
We'd hike into a mountain we'd usually do about three days, maybe two or three overnights. We'd camp out, we'd cook our food, and then we'd find our way back out. We were in the wilderness where there were no phones. There were no people. It was just us and the wild animals. And we would do this every summer for quite a few summers growing up.
And I now do this to this day. If you look at my Instagram stories from time to time, I'll post photos of these treks that I'll take into the wilderness. But as a little six year old kid, you're on this path and you've got this pack on your back and it's hard. You're hiking sometimes uphill.
Sometimes we were gaining a thousand feet in elevation. You're going uphill. You're tired. It's not that fun, and I remember my mom just always saying from behind, you gotta just put one foot in front of the other. And if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you are going to get to a better place.
And so she didn't in that moment dismiss what was hard or deny what was hard. She was saying, listen, we're prepared, we're equipped, we're on a path. We've got the food and the supplies we need for a really fun campfire when we arrive at our destination. All you've got to do is put one foot in front of the other.
And I grew a little bit of resilience on those backpacks. I learned a skill. Here's the thing. We were equipped for those backpacks. We weren't just wandering aimlessly in the wilderness. We had done the work, we had done the prep work. We had looked at the maps. We had found the trails. We'd gathered the amount of food that we needed.
We didn't just rush into the mountain without thinking about the trail that we needed to take. We were wise about it. And so I want you to think about the challenge that you face as a mountain you've got to climb. And if you're at the base of that mountain, you've got to take a moment to pause and think about what tools you’re going to need to find your way to the top of that mountain, because this is going to be a hard journey.
It would be foolish for me to just try to sprint up that mountain because I'm going to run out of food. I'm going to run out of supplies. I'm going to lose the trail if I don't spend some time figuring out where the trail is. I'm going to get lost.
I have to stop and equip myself realistically for the journey that's ahead. And the journey that's ahead is going to be hard. I'm going to have to take it one step at a time, but I'm going to do a lot better on that journey if I know that I've done the preparation that I need to do, that I'm not alone, that I've got the supplies that I need, that I know exactly how far I need to get.
Each day, I'm going to be able to tolerate the difficulty of this trek. We've got to equip ourselves. Resilience isn't just heading out on the journey, it's all of the prep work involved that once you head out, you're prepared, you know where you're going and you've mapped out a trail.
Here's the thing. When you become aware, whether you're a backpacker or not, maybe you're listening to me going, I would never willingly put myself on a mountain trail into the wilderness. And I get that. But think about the challenges that come into your life like that mountain.
You're at the base of a mountain and you have no choice. You've got to figure out how to get over that mountain. And again, whether it's a work challenge, a relational challenge, whatever it is, you're looking at it going, this is too hard. I can't do this. I certainly can't do it by myself. I certainly can't do it with the skills that I've got.
I'm going to need to get support. That is a great step to resilience. It's becoming aware of what you need and what you don't have and being realistic about the challenge that is ahead of you.
But what happens when we get to the bottom of the mountain and we recognize, oh, this is going to be tough. I'm not sure what I'm doing here. This relationship mess is hard. Like I'm too broken or the relationship is too broken and I don't know how to fix it. Or I've just made a mess of things or this has just gotten too hard. I'm in over my head. Or I'm too unhappy. I can't fix this.
What happens is we're vulnerable in those moments. We get overwhelmed and instead of doing the work of saying this is where I need to develop resilience. I'm going to have to name what's hard, get really realistic about it, and then equip myself for the journey. We instead tend to do a couple of different things that don't actually help us face that mountain.
And there are two types of messages that aren't helpful to us that I think were particularly vulnerable to when we're sitting at the bottom of the mountain.
One is that we don't wanna deal with the mountain, and so we just try to minimize it or gloss over it. And there are a couple of ways that we do this. Sometimes we just pretend like the mountain's not there and we just keep doing what we've been doing even though it's not working. Sometimes we blame our circumstances–we just look at the mountain and go, it's so and so's fault, or it's the circumstance’s fault. And so I'm just going to sit here and not really equip myself and just blame everything around me for the fact that I've got to hike this mountain.
And it doesn't actually help us get over the mountain. We're just looking around, laying blame at all the reasons we've landed in this predicament. Now, I want to be clear. There is a place for very realistically taking inventory for some of the things that have caused you to wind up at the bottom of your mountain.
And oftentimes it may well be somebody else's toxicity or somebody else's poor behavior. It may well be that you're sitting at the bottom of the mountain and it's by no fault of your own. Let me be clear. I am not saying that every mountain that we face is always a result of our own doing.
Sometimes we find ourselves at the bottom of a mountain, and we were not responsible for that problem. And also, we still have to, at the bottom of the mountain, while we name the reality of the circumstances that got there, at the end of the day, we have to dig deep inside of ourselves to get ourselves over that mountain.
We can't just live in the area of blaming others or pretending like that problem doesn't exist. It doesn't help us get over the mountain. Eventually, we're gonna have to face the reality that there's something in our lives that's hard and we've got to find our way through it. One thing that we're vulnerable to when we're at the bottom of a mountain is some form of self-deception.
Either we're trying to minimize the mountain, we're trying to pretend like it's not really there, or we're just going to spend all of our time essentially blaming everybody else as if that is going to get us to a solution. It's not. Neither of those strategies is going to get us to a solution, but here's the thing–there's another extreme that I often see us go to. And sometimes I do this too.
We spiral into self-blame, into self-shame, into “I'll never find my way through this. What's wrong with me? Why did I get myself into this yet again?” Usually we've got some narrative about our own failings and missteps.
It's all my fault. That is also not helpful when you're sitting at the bottom of the mountain. When you move into self shame and self blame and self defeat, it's hopeless. I can't do it. I always get myself into situations like this. That kind of self-talk is also not helpful. Neither of those strategies is at the heart of resilience.
Remember, resilience is facing what's hard, honestly. It's taking an honest inventory of all the variables that led us to this place, including the things that weren't our fault, the things that may have been because of someone else mishandling us or mishandling a situation. And the things we've done to contribute to getting there, even if part of what we did that was wrong was trusting somebody we shouldn't have trusted again. We don't want to shame ourselves for that, but we do want to name that.
Honestly, because you fooled me once. Okay. Yeah. Shame on me. But fool me twice, shame on you, meaning now that I have the information that I need, I'm going to pivot and I'm going to course correct and I'm going to get myself out of this situation.
Here's the thing about resilience. It means getting really honest with ourselves without shame and without blame. I'm going to say that again. It means getting really honest with ourselves about our circumstances, about the problem that we face without shame and without blame. We're going to start naming without shame and without blame the things that are hard.
I want to give you an example, and I'm going to use an example from high school. And the reason I'm going to do that is I think so many of us did not develop the resilience we needed at younger ages. And so a lot of the work of developing resilience is going back to these younger parts of us that never learned how to face a challenge with resilience.
I'm going to ask you to put on your best adult parenting hat and look at this young 15 year old illustration that I'm going to paint for you right now, and think about how you would be with a young adolescent, young teenage child who's facing this.
What kind of parenting does this young one need? Because almost always it's the same kind of parenting you will need when you're facing your own mountain. Okay, so imagine you've got this sophomore in high school who has a huge project that's due for school. There's a deadline coming. It's a group project.
This is your child who actually works really hard. Who's put in her best. She really is trying. There's been some issues on her team. She hasn't known what to do with that. People aren't pulling their weight and this project is not coming together and the deadline is looming and she's looking at this going, this is going to fail and it's going to blow out my GPA and I'm not someone that wants to fail.
I've actually tried on this. I don't know what to do. It's due this week. I don't really have time to fix it and it's not coming together. Let's think about it. This is her mountain. What is she going to do in this moment where she's facing the reality that this project isn't coming together and it's due this week?
The stakes are fairly high. There's a grade resting on this. There are a couple of things she can do. She can minimize it. It'll be fine. It'll be fine. I'll just turn it in. It'll be fine.
And it's really not.
She can be angry and mad. She can blame her group. It's their fault it's this way. They didn't show up. And even if that's true, it's not going to help her solve that problem. She can blame herself. She can eviscerate herself. Oh, shame on me. How did I let this happen?
Often our young ones, if you imagine a young part of you, were in predicaments like this, whether it was with a project for school or a relationship that you found yourself stuck in. A relationship that you were aware of that wasn't working. I'm not being treated right here, but I don't know what to do.
And I'm mad at the other person, but I'm mad at myself and I'm going between those two things. In the meantime, I'm not actually getting the help I need to solve the problem. How many times were we in situations like that as kids without the parenting that we needed to come alongside of us and say, listen, let's stop for a second?
Let's figure out what happened so that we can develop a different strategy to actually solve the problem. That's where resilience comes in.
Your 15 year old daughter comes to you and she says, I don't know what to do. The first thing we're going to do is we're not going to shame her. We're not going to join with her and blame everybody else. Because that's also not going to help. We're going to take a deep breath. We're going to calm ourselves and say, all right, let's look at the truth.
What really happened here? You've got a project. You're not gonna get it done in time. Yes, some people let you down. That's hard. We're gonna deal with that. Yes, maybe you feel like you let yourself down. That's hard. We're gonna deal with that. The first thing we got to do is to ask for an extension. Oh, I know that's hard. I know. I know that's hard to do. It's hard to ask for help and you were so brave. You came to me and asked for help and I'm gonna help you.
The best way I can help you is I'm going to equip you to go screw up your courage and ask your teacher for an extension. And you're not going to blame everybody else at this point. You're not going to blame yourself. You're going to let her know, listen, a couple of things went wrong.
And I'm coming to you saying, I can get you a good project, but I'm not going to be able to get it to you by the deadline. Can I get an extension? And we're going to do a brave thing. That's the first thing we're going to do. We're going to name what's hard without blame, without shame. We're going to ask for help.
And then we're going to deal with what went wrong. We're going to come up with a new strategy. If the group isn't pulling through, we're going to figure out how to deal with that. If it's something inside of you that you didn't understand the instructions, we're going to go get better instructions.
If we need to pull the teacher in and say, hey, the group is dysfunctional. It's not working. We're going to do that. I'm going to help you figure out how to solve this problem. We may not be able to save the grade. I can't promise you that. It may end up in a grade that you don't like, and that's a bummer, but you are going to learn how to approach a mountain with resilience, with inner strength, with wisdom, with honesty, with integrity.
Without shaming or blaming while still being really honest about what went wrong in this situation. This is so often the muscle that so many of us didn't develop because we weren't parented through hard things.
Another example, you've got a child who's an athlete. And I think about this a lot in my own life. I was a tennis player. And I really tried hard at tennis. I practiced really hard. I was pretty good. I had a good forehand. I had a great backhand. And it was really hard because you train and you prepare. And then sometimes you get into a key match and you lose and someone else outplays you.
And these are moments of resilience. How are you with yourself, with your child, when they've worked really hard for something and it doesn't pan out? Maybe they don't win the match. Maybe they don't win the game. Maybe the relationship doesn't pan out. Someone breaks up with them. Someone doesn't respond to their bid for connection. Left out.
How do you parent your child when they go through those hard things? Do you try to rescue them out of it? Oh, it was their fault. Those other people, it's, they're the problem, not you. You're perfect. Do you shame your child? What's wrong with you? Why didn't you do better? Why didn't you figure out how to win that match? Why didn't you figure out how to get that relationship?
Neither of those is healthy. Neither of those extremes helps your child gain the skills that they need to deal with adversity, because what they need in that moment is resilience. Number one, validation. Yeah. This is hard. It's a bummer when you lose a match. When you lose a game. It's a bummer when you don't get the grade that you worked really hard to get. It's a bummer when the relationship falls through and you don't get invited to the big event. You really wanted to be included in, first of all, it's hard.
Let's just honor that and then let's look together at what happened, what went awry. What was your part in that? Let's look at that. Honestly, without shame, where could you have improved? What was in your control to improve? What wasn't in your control?
How do we grieve what you didn't have control over? How do we own what you could change going forward? These are the kinds of conversations you have to have with your child.
How do you encourage your kid to go shake the other person's hand that beat them and say congratulations, even as they also honor their own disappointment that they didn't win the match? It's a complicated process, resilience. of facing what's hard, honestly, understanding that sometimes things don't go our way, and also gathering the tools that we need to do better next time, because we really do want to improve in this area. Because we really do believe in ourselves to work through this and come out in a better place.
How do you deal with failure? How do you deal with reality when something doesn't go your way? What messages creep in? Do you tend to want to blame everybody around you?
Do you tend to blame only yourself to the point of shame? There's no shame in noticing. I do tend to blame others or wow, I am hard on myself. Those are coping strategies that you learned in the absence of somebody coming alongside of you and teaching you how to develop those muscles of naming what's hard, facing the reality and pivoting so that you can find a better way over that mountain.
Think about how you deal with challenges, what you feel like when you feel like a failure, when you feel like nothing has gone your way, when you're sitting at the bottom of that mountain. And how do you talk to yourself? This is where you're so vulnerable.
We're not that vulnerable when we're at the top of the mountain, when everything's working, when our relationships are working, our work is working, our kids are great, everybody's healthy, we're happy. We're not that vulnerable to our self-talk.
But when you're at the bottom of the mountain looking up, you get really clear really fast at the types of messages you tell yourself. And you're in need of truth. In these moments, we don't need someone to just come alongside us and tell us what we want to hear if it's not true, but we also don't need shame.
We need the actual truth, the truth that frees us, that surgical wisdom that comes in and says, I see you, I see where you are, yes, this is hard. You might have even made some mistakes. I see that with you. Let's just pause there. Can we name those mistakes that we've made without shame?
I also see that other people have let you down. That's also true. Some people didn't come through for you. Some people didn't do what you had hoped they'd do. That's hard too. That's also true. We can name that and honor that without blame. We can name and honor the hard without shame and without blame.
I'm with you right here in the debris, as we look at the mountain and we see the debris scattered all around us of what didn't work, what's my responsibility and what didn't work, what's other people's responsibility and what didn't work.
I get it. I'm here with you. We're going to be okay. I can't promise you that I'm going to fix this exact set of circumstances. I don't know if I can rescue you out of this relationship. I don't know that I can rescue the vestiges of this work situation, but what I know is that I'm going to sit with you in this moment and help you face what's hard.
Honestly, that's what we need. We need this from ourselves. We need to be that wise parent that comes and sits with the young, scared parts of ourselves and says, I'm here. I get it. I'm not going to dupe you. I'm not going to gaslight you. I'm not going to pretend like it's not what it is.
I see you. I'm here with you. Let's name what's hard and I'm going to sit here with you long enough until we pull in the support and the strategies and the tools that we need to climb this mountain together.
Now, here's where our spiritual resources come in. And I like to think about this as co-parenting, the younger parts of us that are terrified of this mountain and are terrified of the mess that we feel like we've made or that other people have contributed to helping us make.
We've got that wise inner parent, that Spirit-led self, as we talk about in Boundaries for Your Soul, that can help us reparent ourselves and sit with us in something that's really hard without shame and without blame. And then we have another parent and that is the God who loves us.
Who similarly comes and sits with us in the mess as we face that mountain and says, I may not pick you up out of this and just catapult you over the mountain, but I will sit here with you in what's hard. I will sit here with you while you cry. I will sit here with you while you get to the bottom of what happened, what went wrong.
And when you're ready, you crawl up into my lap. I'm going to hold you tight. I'm going to help repair you. I'm going to help you pick up the pieces. And then I'm going to take you by one hand and we're going to find a trail through this. And as we find that trail through this, you're going to grow a whole new set of skills that are going to lead you to a better place that you would never have gotten to before if you hadn't bumped into this mountain.
I believe when we face what's hard, we want God to rescue us out of it. But instead, God comes alongside us in the face of what's hard and he helps us face the truth. Honestly, he doesn't try to talk us out of what we feel. He says, yeah, this is hard. I get it. Yeah, it is a mess. You're right.
I'm not scared of this mess, but I'm with you in it and I'm helping you look at it. I love you and you're precious and your mess isn't too much for me and I'm going to walk with you into all the details of your mess. And I don't know that we're going to save this particular situation, but I will promise you this: as we together face what's hard and start to get up together, you will not be alone.
As I walk you up to the foot of that mountain and set you on your way down a brand new path, telling yourself the truth when you partner with the God who loves you means telling yourself the whole truth about what's hard about what's not working and about what's messy and about what's scary.
And also the whole truth about the hope that you have that nothing is wasted, that with God's help, you can pick up all these pieces and assemble a whole new path where the truth about what's hard exists side by side with the hope of the new future that's going to be even better than the one you didn't get.
That's the essence of resilience. It's holding hands with what's hard, realistically on one side and holding hands with the God of all hope on the other and walking forward down the new path, one brave step at a time.
We all feel defeated by the challenges we face from time to time. I have talked with so many people recently who are facing what feels like impossible mountains to climb. I recorded today's episode as a result of these conversations-I wanted to encourage you personally as you face what's hard in front of you.
Here's what we cover:
1. The phrase I lean on for resilience
2. The 2 pitfalls that tempt us when we face challenges
3. Scripts for parenting yourself through a hard time
4. How to develop mental & emotional strength
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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
- Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth.
- A trek into the wilderness (from my Instagram Stories)
- Boundaries for Your Soul by Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
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'm so glad you keep coming back for these conversations. I love showing up each week. Knowing we have this appointment with each other, where we're going to connect in this way.
And actually I have a little bit of a spoiler alert. For next week's episode, I have a very special guest who actually, in his own way, puts his neurobiological understanding on what is actually happening as I'm talking here on this podcast and you as you're listening.
And it was a really beautiful moment. I cannot wait to share it with you. I. think about you whether you're driving in your car or cooking a meal or taking a walk, or maybe you're at work and you just need some background noise to get yourself into a different headspace.
I think about what I want to share and It meant so much to me, again, to understand that there's actually something really cool happening between us as we connect together for this podcast. And I bring that up because today's episode is all about belonging,
What does it mean to belong to each other? And this is a word I've struggled with a lot my whole life. I can fairly easily find a home within myself. I can find a way to be with myself. I don't mind being alone and I really enjoy being a safe place for other people, but it's been very hard for me most of my life to feel a sense of belonging to a group.
And I'll talk about that a little bit more personally today. I'll give you some examples, both from my life and from different authors that have helped me understand this. But before we get into that, I want to just talk about what is belonging, what does the word mean, and then move into how I understand it metaphorically and some examples of how we can grow in this feeling.
And I really believe a lot of belonging is a feeling of being connected to other people. It's really rooted in an emotional state. People can tell us all day long, no, you belong, you're part of the group. But if we don't experience that at a felt level, we can feel really isolated. Like we're not part of the group and that's a painful place to be.
It's a place I've been acquainted with for a lot of my life. And so I'm just really thrilled that you're here with me today to talk about this. Here in this place where we belong to each other, we show up each week with each other and there is a form of belonging in that. So I'm just delighted to have this conversation with you here.
Belonging is this word that gets at how we experience ourselves in relationship to others. Do we feel connected to others? Do we feel valued by others? Do we feel esteemed by others?
Do we feel included? Do we feel accepted? Do we feel embraced by others? And I'm using that word feel for a reason. There's an emotional connotation to belonging because a lot of it is how we experience being part of a group. Do we genuinely feel like we belong in our families?
These are my people. This is my friend group. I belong here. When I show up here, I am valued. I know that these are my people.
And that gets into the second component of belonging. It's related to these groups of people, our families, our communities. It could be an organization. Do you feel a sense of belonging with the company you work for or the school that you attend or the school that you perhaps teach at or the hospital where you work?
Do you feel a sense of connection to that place? Like you're a part of something bigger than yourself? It could apply to your church community. Do you feel a sense of belonging there that you matter, that you have a role that you contribute and that you're working together towards something bigger than just what we can do by ourselves?
And the thing about belonging that's so tricky is that it requires us to show up as we really are. This is a lot of what I talk about in The Best of You.
It requires us to show up authentically as we are on one hand, while being accepted for who we are and valued for who we are on the other. So you can be really good at being true to yourself to such a degree that you are just going to be completely yourself. You don't care what anybody else thinks, and you can end up alone.
You can not have an experience of belonging, but gosh, you were true to yourself. And sometimes we can see that extreme in our culture today that we're so into being our individual selves, my truth, what's true for me has to exist above anything else. We sacrifice a little bit of this belonging. To some degree, in order to belong with other people, we have to be able to flex and adapt to the needs of the group.
It requires some of that emotional intelligence. We talked about how it requires some of that resilience. In order to belong to a group of people, whether it's a family or a friend group or a church group, we're not going to always perfectly understand each other.
Sometimes people are even going to hurt us or offend us or not fully understand or irritate us. If you've been part of a family, you get it even in the best of families, there's friction, there's conflict at times.
We don't want to so mute our individual selfhood, our sense of who I am in order to fit in so that we lose ourselves. That's not healthy either. That's not belonging. Belonging isn't: I'll just turn myself inside out and leave half of myself at the door so that I can fit into this group of people.
That's not belonging. And either of those extremes is problematic. So belonging is tricky.
I say it this way in The Best of You: it's a dance of togetherness and apartness, of dependence and autonomy. It's a movement. It's a rhythm. It's a dance. Belonging isn't static.
If you think about those wonderful Jane Austen movies like Pride and Prejudice or Little Women, they dance in community with other people and there's a flow to it. They're always connecting to each other, even as they're interacting as a group.
And we don't have a lot of models for that in our modern society. You can think of a sports team where there's a group of individuals who each have to play a role in order for the team to get the job done. I think that's a really helpful metaphor.
You can think of an orchestra. Where every unique individual person has to play their instrument, has to play their part. And when they all are playing their part together, it creates a beautiful harmony. The group creates something much more beautiful than. Any one individual could create but each individual within that group, within that orchestra has to play their unique part.
And so these are some metaphors for belonging. When you belong to that orchestra, your part matters. You need to show up and play it, but you have to play it in harmony with the rest of that group. And if at any point you try to take over, you're going to actually cause problems for the melody. But if you don't show up at all, the melody isn't going to be complete.
So this leads me to the first point I want to make about belonging today. And this is from Brené Brown. She talks about this so beautifully in her book, it's called Braving the Wilderness, which is really a book about belonging,
One of the things that she talks about is the difference between belonging and fitting in. And I think this is so important to understand, and here's what she says: sometimes we will take fitting in as a substitute for belonging. Fitting in says “Be like them to be accepted”. Belonging says, “This is who I am. I want you to accept me but this is who I am. I can't not be who I am. And if I show up as I am, will you accept me?”
And what happens to so many of us is early on, if we go back to childhood, because that's where this all gets formed in our bodies, in our minds, in our nervous systems, somewhere along the line. Maybe it was early on in our families. Maybe it was at school with other kids. We showed up as ourselves. And we didn't get accepted. We didn't get received.
Maybe we were overlooked. Maybe we were bullied. Maybe we were just ignored. And that hurts, when you show up in the fullness of who you are and other people look at you funny or don't accept you, or maybe even make fun of you.
It hurts, especially at a young age. And so we learn how to hide. We learn how to camouflage ourselves. We learn how to put on that cloak of invisibility because we don't want to hurt. And so we decide early on, it's just easier to fit in, to just play along. Because then I won't have to have the hurt of being different, of being ostracized, of feeling othered, of feeling isolated, of feeling alienated.
And in our young minds at that age, we see only two options. We look at it as social survival. The stakes are high. We've either got to fit in or we're alone. And that aloneness is just too hard. And so we work to fit in. And so many of us, every single one of us, is walking around with wounds from those formative periods of time,
Whether you had wonderful parents or whether you didn't, we all pick up wounds around belonging very early on in childhood, where what we really want is to be received by our peers. And we just didn't know how to maneuver that dance of being part of a group where we honor others and also are being true to ourselves. It's really a sophisticated skill that most of us just simply didn't learn.
And then we carry those wounds with us into adulthood.
And I tell this story, it's an illustration in The Best of You, imagine yourself as a young girl in middle school, and imagine there's a school dance, and actually this is based on my own experience because I was always terrified of most of the social functions that were happening in middle school.
I didn't want to go. They weren't appealing to me, but I felt this inner angst of “everybody's doing it”. All my friends are doing it. Everyone's excited about it. What am I going to do? Sit home? And I didn't have the internal strength to just own it.
And in this story that I tell, this girl is wrestling with herself. What do I do? Because this is just not something that's appealing to me. I love my friends. I want to hang out with them on Saturday, but I really don't want to go to this school dance. And so imagine a wise parent, a wise adult sits down with her in that moment and helps her understand herself.
Do you need to go? Are you not going because you're afraid? And maybe you need to push yourself to go. Is it really just not your thing? No, thank you. Maybe I'll go to a dance in high school. Maybe not. Is it really genuine that you would just rather be outside, or you would just rather be doing anything else and this just isn't your thing?
Giving her the courage to be true to herself while simultaneously honoring her friends. And can you imagine if as she steps out and says, you know what guys, I don't want to go, I think it's cool that you want to go, I want to hear all about it tomorrow, but I'm going to sit this one out because I just rather do other things on this Friday night.
Imagine if she had the courage to do that and then her friends said, that's awesome. Good for you. We're bummed. We wish you would come, but we can't wait to tell you about it on Saturday. Imagine the basis that these young women would be forming for a healthy sense of belonging going into adulthood.
I'm true to myself. I speak up for what I need and what I want, and sometimes that deviates from the group. And so I try to communicate that really clearly and also the group that I'm a part of honors my differences, even as they move forward with what matters to them.
And yes, sometimes we have a little bit of conflict or have a little bit of friction and we have to negotiate and we have to work that through. But as we do that, we are part of something bigger than ourselves. We become part of something beautiful, something that will last, something that doesn't require us to betray ourselves, something that doesn't demand that other people validate every single thing about me.
It doesn't demand that everybody else prop up everything I do. You can disagree with me. We can have different opinions and simultaneously be part of something bigger than ourselves because we need each other. And the fact that I'm a little bit different from you, and maybe I disappoint you in this moment, ‘cause I'm not going to go do that thing you want me to do, but guess what? That means I'm going to have some perspective that you may not have when you actually need me to be a little bit different from you because I can see your situation a little bit more clearly.
Our differences are what helps us gain perspective. Our differences are what help us see each other more clearly. And so if we're exactly the same and we're all just trying to perfectly fit in with each other, we're not actually seeing each other. It takes a little bit of divergence in order for there to be connection. If I'm over here living my life, climbing my mountains, working out the path in front of me, I have a much better perspective to look over at you in your life and say, hey, here's what I see. Let me come alongside you for a minute.
I've got a vantage point that you can't see on your path. So if I'm busy over here, tending to my own life I'm going to be a better help to you in your path. And yes, there are times when we're not always together, when you've got to go down a curvy road in your path and I can't necessarily go down that with you because I'm trying to keep myself on my own path over here. But I see you.
I cannot wait to meet with you when our paths converge again in a day and two weeks, whatever the interval is for our relationship, that's how we belong to each other. We don’t have to try to live somebody else's life or be somebody that we're not, or pretend that we're all the same.
You have your own mountain to climb. I have my mountain to climb. Your mountain is not mine. My mountain is not yours. I can't climb your mountain for you at the end of the day. I've got to climb mine. I can't go climb my child's mountain for them. I can't climb my spouse's mountain for them, and they can't climb mine.
At the end of the day, when I look up to that peak where I've got to go, I'm the only one that can completely and 100 percent take that path to the top of that mountain. But here's the thing, what we can do together is I can head over to your mountain and walk with you for a part of the path. I can go join you.
You can come over to mine and say, Hey, I need some help. Can you help me down this leg of the path? ‘Cause I'm scared. This one's scary. You can come and walk with me for a part of mine. Sometimes I'll see your path more clearly. It's not as scary because I don't have all the baggage that you're carrying as you have to go down that leg of your path. That leg of your path isn't as scary to me.
I'm like, I can do that. I can come over there and walk that leg with you because you know what? I haven't dealt with some of the things you've dealt with. So this is okay for me and you can come over and walk a part of mine. But at the end of the day, we are each on our own paths. We can help each other.
Sometimes our paths intersect and it's beautiful and we're walking a season of life together. And those are beautiful moments where our paths are really joined for a period of time. Whether our kids are the same age, or whether we're in a work project together where our paths are really intimately connected and it's really cool, and then sometimes our paths veer apart again. This is the dance of belonging.
When we are both clear about the path that only I can take and also deeply invested in each other getting to where they need to be. That's when we are part of belonging. And so I want to ask you today, who are the people whose paths are intertwined with your path, who maybe you need to pull in a little bit closer.
Who are the people who support you? Who are the people who see and honor that you're on your own path?
You've got your own challenges. You've got your own dreams. You've got your own desires. And they've got theirs, but you see each other. You can see their path pretty clearly and they can see yours. And therefore you become really helpful conversation partners to each other. You become people you can turn to for illuminating parts of the path when the path gets dark.
This is belonging.
It's belonging deeply to yourself and to God, while simultaneously understanding that you are part of a bigger journey. You are part of a bigger series of mountain peaks, right where everybody eventually is finding their way through to this beautiful vista where together we will look back and go, oh my gosh, together we did that.
We summited this mountain and here we are, we made it and we couldn't have done it without each other. And also, sometimes during that hike, we were walking on our own because no one else could exactly do that leg of the journey for us.
Now I spend a lot of time in nature, as you can tell from these metaphors. And for me, the learning curve was, I don't have to hike the path alone. I can sometimes look over and see a fellow traveler and say, Hey, could we walk this path together for a little while? And that is the muscle I have to work to develop. It's a muscle that's hard for me. To join forces with folks on the path.
You may be different. You may be somebody who has worked so hard to join forces with other people that sometimes it's hard for you to go out on your own for a moment and say, you know what? I got to leave the pack for just a minute because I'm losing myself just a little bit.
And it might be the pack of your family. You love your kids, you love your spouse but you're losing yourself. Just a little bit. You've given too much over to the group and you actually need to say to your family, to the people you love, you know what, I got to go out on my own for just a minute.
I got to explore some of my own interests. I got to explore some new friendships. I got to explore some new ideas. And maybe your family won't like that. They may not know what to do with that, but when there's health there, you can gently name that and say, I love you. I'm going to come back.
I'm going to be a better mom. I'm going to be a better spouse. I'm going to be a better parent. I'm going to be a better friend. If I can go out and learn this thing about myself and pursue this desire and pursue this interest or get this healing, it's only going to be better for the group, because if I'm not my whole self, if I'm not my full self, I'm actually depriving the group a little bit.
So some of you, that's your call right now. You're aware: I've given a lot of myself to this group, whatever this group may be. I've given a lot of myself and I've lost just a little bit of myself and that's okay, I'm not going to blame them, but I do need to course correct.
I do need to go out on my own and explore a little bit of a different path. And I'm going to bring the goodness that I find back into this group. And you know what? Maybe this group, while I'm away exploring a little bit, maybe they're going to learn some new coping skills that actually won't be bad for them either. Maybe it'll actually be healthy for them to learn what it's like to journey a little bit without me nearby. Maybe they'll be okay.
And so that may be your invitation. And if that's you and if you're listening and you're like, yeah, that's me, I want to just encourage you to consider that tap on your heart, that nudge from the Holy Spirit, that longing to pursue an interest or a dream or a healing path that is a little different and you're a little worried.
You're like, I don't know what they're going to think of me. I don't know what these people in my life that I love are going to think of that. I would just encourage you to name that, to not let that fall by the wayside.
Because there's an invitation in that nudge that's not only for you, but I guarantee you that it will also be for the good of that group. You gotta go out and get a little more tuning for your instrument so that you can come back and play just a little bit more vibrantly with the whole.
Okay, so whatever that is, whatever that longing is, I want you to pay attention to that. This is part of belonging. Remember, belonging isn't just being part of a group, it's being yourself in a group.
And so if you've skewed too far toward prioritizing the group, take some brave steps toward cultivating this part of you that needs your attention that's a little bit different. Maybe you're going to expand into a new group, and you can have both groups, and that's even better. You don't have to just have one group. Maybe you find another group and you have elements of yourself that are present in both groups.
On the other hand, if you're someone who has been such a lone ranger, who does things all on your own, and it's really hard for you to make yourself vulnerable to a group, you've also got an invitation to belonging.
What are you afraid of when it comes to considering belonging to a group of people? Maybe you've been hurt. Maybe people have betrayed your trust and there's a good reason you don't trust anybody and you don't open up to a group. You've learned that the hard way. And listen, I relate to you in many ways. I relate to that, but there's an invitation before you that the people who have hurt you in the past do not necessarily represent the people who will love you in the future.
Who will honor you, who won't shame you, who won't ostracize you, who won't hurt you. Who will say, tell me more about you. We like that quirky thing about you. We think you're cool. We want you to be more of you. Those people are out there. I promise you, you haven't found them yet. You've been hurt. Do not stop searching for them. They are out there.
These are the people who, even if they don't understand you initially or disappoint you initially, will continue to work for your trust. They exist. Please keep looking for them. There are good people out there who want to know you, who believe in you, who understand the complexity of you and who want to invite you in, not to take you over or to squash you or to force you to be someone you are not, but who want to bring you into love you as you are.
Those people are out there. As my friend Ginny Anne said back in episode 61, where I had my sister and my two childhood friends on, she said, do not rest until you find those people who will honor who you are while inviting you to be a part of their lives as they are. That's reciprocity, that's mutuality, that's belonging, and those people are out there and you are worth being found.
When it comes to belonging, whatever your invitation, whether it's to find a little more of yourself or whether it's to find the people who will accept you as you are, I want to give you some practical steps you can take because to be honest, the steps are the same regardless of which invitation is yours.
So here are three things I want you to do this week. Number one, I want you to notice something you actually love, and I want you to do it publicly. Now, here's what I mean by that: I want you to think of something you love doing, a preference you have, an opinion you hold, a conviction, anything that really means a lot to you that you're a little bit nervous about doing publicly.
What do I mean by publicly? It could be with your family. It could be with a friend group. It could be a church group. It could be on social media. It could be on social media. Where you just take a risk and do something, post something publicly there. If you do tag me, I'm not on there that often, but if I see you, I'll notice it.
But I really mean this. I want you to think of something you love, something that makes you feel a little bit vulnerable, a little bit even silly inside. And I want you to do it.
I want you to take just a small step toward that. Just a small step. Maybe go for the low hanging fruit. Maybe when no one's around, just look up a class or look up a practical thing you could do to pursue that desire or that longing and then take a step and then gather up your courage and maybe name it to the folks in your group, again, whether it's your family, whether it's a friend group, whether it's a church group.
I'm going to do this thing. Notice how they respond. Do they support you in that? Do they get curious? And if they don't, that doesn't mean that what you're doing is wrong. It might mean that you're going to have to do some harder work of weaning them a little bit.
Maybe they have an expectation of you that you're going to have to shift. You're going to have to train them to see you a little bit differently because you need to expand. You need to broaden and it doesn't mean you want to hurt them. It means you want to add more to yourself so that you can add more to them.
How does the group respond if they get toxic? Groups will get toxic if you want to deviate from the group norms. And if that happens, pay attention because why do you want to be with people when you have to turn yourself inside out to make them happy, that they can't support you in doing something that's good for you, that will ultimately bring more vitality to the group?
So I want you to notice any fear around stepping out to pursue something that's different from the group, test it a little bit, see how they respond, and then take some more brave steps. You're trying to be a little bit more true to yourself while simultaneously being in community with other people. So there's no shame in this. You're practicing a muscle.
Number two, I want you to notice who around you evokes a feeling of connection or belonging inside of you. Now, here's the trick about this one. I want you to think outside the box. I want you to notice it where you least expect it.
Who's someone that you're like, you know what? It doesn't make any sense, but whenever I'm with that person, I feel safe. I feel like I can really be myself. Isn't that interesting? I want you to notice, where do you experience that where you don't expect it?
And this was a big one for me because early on, mostly in college, was when I realized that the groups that I often wanted to belong in, I felt like I should belong in these groups, but they left me feeling cold. I don't feel accepted and then I feel down on myself and that's not pleasant, so I'd rather be by myself.
I dealt with a lot of that in college, and so I began to pay attention to where I felt acceptance and belonging. It's not in these groups where I feel like I am supposed to feel it, so where do I feel it? And almost always I noticed it in the most surprising places. And I'll give you some examples from my life.
I have a lot of friends who do not share my faith. One of my closest friends is an atheist, and I noticed this back in college. I love having conversations, open dialogue, intellectual conversations with anybody who is curious about big deep topics. I don't care what they believe. It is a place where I find belonging.
And the thing is, I found those people in places that were unexpected. Now in college, it's a little easier because we're all interacting. It was a secular school. I was a church girl. And so people would be curious about that, who weren't of my faith background.
And I remember two people in particular, one was a guy, his name was Caesar. We had nothing in common, absolutely nothing. We could not have been more different. He was from the heart of New York City. I was from rural Wyoming. I am a Jesus loving Christian. He was a, marijuana smoking fraternity guy. We had nothing in common.
And we loved to talk about faith together. And I didn't have an agenda with him. We just talked because we were curious and interested in those topics. And there were so many others. I can begin to count: Danielle and Jennifer and David and Brian. And, all of a sudden, all of these people started to surface that I didn't have a lot in common with on the surface. And that I loved having these intellectual conversations about deep topics.
I began to experience belonging. Now we weren't a group. We weren't friends with the same people. I didn't know who their friends were and they didn't know who my friends were. But each one of those interactions helped me glimpse a little bit of belonging.
To this day, I don't tend to experience belonging as a part of a visible group. And what I mean by that is a part of an identified group where 10 people all have the same best friends. I have a collection of treasures and the treasures that I have in my life often don't even know each other, but I experienced belonging with each one of them and they experienced belonging with me.
And that became my form of belonging. I tell you that because I want you to know that belonging shows up in a lot of different ways. If your family was not a place where you experienced belonging, you can create a collection of treasures, a collection of family members who become your place of belonging.
And it might be really random. It might be a work colleague, it might be someone that you enjoy hiking with that you really have nothing else in common with. It might be a teacher who works with your kids and you just notice there's a rapport and a connection and a sense of belonging and you hadn't really thought about it before because maybe they're not someone you would expect yourself to hang out with, and I really am drilling down on this because it's been one of the most profound things in my own life when I feel cut off from groups or I feel like I'm not connecting.
I always go back to where I feel belonging in the most unexpected place and I start there. It could be the clerk in the grocery checkout line where you just notice this is a kind person. This is someone who I enjoy seeing when I come to the grocery store every week and I feel seen in this interaction, in this exchange.
That's a glimpse of belonging. Build on that glimpse. Where do you find a glimpse of connection, a feeling seen, a feeling like yourself and a feeling like you want to see the other person and move toward that?
And finally, the third one, this one is a little more abstract. I want you to imagine the people you want to be around you in heaven. Okay? That's what I mean by when we get to that peak and we look around and we see ourselves with these people, these fellow travelers, who are those people for you?
Maybe they're authors that you've never even met. Maybe they're people from the past that you've never even met because it's heaven. It can be anyone. But what I want you to do is open up your imagination to see if you could sit down and have dinner in heaven with anyone, who are the people you would want to have around you?
If they're people who are living, but you can't be close to them. Who are those people where you just would be like, man, I just want to talk about how we got here, about who you are. I want you to know who I am. And again, these are glimpses. These are glimmers of where you feel alive. That's where you feel belonging.
And then backtrack from there. Read those books, find those authors, find those podcasts, and then think to yourself, what are the qualities about those people that I enjoy, where I feel seen, and begin to focus your attention on that. And I promise you, as you go about your day to day life, you'll begin to bump into people who bring that out in you because you're thinking about it.
Where your attention goes, so go your actions. Suddenly you'll start to become aware of, wait a minute. I might find people like that. If I go to these types of situations, I might find people like that. If I spend more time fishing in these ponds, maybe I could find some people where I would find this sense of belonging
So three things this week. Notice what you actually love doing and do it publicly, do it in a group, do it with the people that you love and just see what happens. Take a risk.
Number two, notice who or what evokes that feeling of connection or belonging inside of you that's surprising, that's off your radar that you're like, gosh, that is weird. I do connect with that person. And move toward that.
Number three, use your imagination and imagine yourself in heaven. When this is all said and done, who are the people you want to be connecting with? The people you want to be around you and then backtrack from there, reverse engineer and think about where you might find people like that in your life, where you can be the fullness of who you are while being with other people.
Stay connected all week long
The Best of You Every Day offers short, daily reflections on Scripture through the lens of emotional health—helping you stay steady, connected, and rooted in love.
