Science-backed tools.
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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.

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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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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.

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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

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Transcript

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Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. 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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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? 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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? 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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? 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Thanks to our sponsors:

• Go to ⁠www.organifi.com/bestofyou⁠ today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today
• Visit seed.com/BESTOFYOU and use code BESTOFYOU to redeem 25% off your first month of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic.
• Go to Reliefband.com and use promo code BESTOFYOU to receive 20% off plus free shipping.
• Sleep deeply and wake gently with Hatch Restore - go to hatch.co/bestofyou to get $20 off and free shipping!

Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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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

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Transcript

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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?

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Granger: Three. He was three.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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?

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Alison: That's right.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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?

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I thought, here it is. This is the way.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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?

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Granger: Yes.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Granger: There is a new concept that was introduced to me, and it was hope.

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Alison: Yes, there you go.

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Granger: I could still grieve, but I grieve as those with hope.

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Alison: There you go.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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Alison: Yes, you make mistakes, yes, you mess up.

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Granger: I will cover you.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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It's led you now to actually you've left country music altogether. Is that right?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Granger: Yes.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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?

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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That is probably number one out of everything that I do. It's really on top of the list.

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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.

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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?

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Granger: Yeah. Grangersmith.com or all the social media outlets. I'm just Granger Smith.

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Alison: Thanks, Granger.

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Granger: Hey, Alison. Thank you so much. I sure appreciate you sharing your platform with me.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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Thanks to our sponsors:

• Go to ⁠www.organifi.com/bestofyou⁠ today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
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• Get 35% off your first order of Sundays. Go to SundaysForDogs.com/BESTOFYOU or use code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
• This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.

Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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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

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Transcript

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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***

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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So how did you begin to really experience that? Do you have a moment where you noticed, wait, this is me and God?

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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? 

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Then you wanted to do the same thing for other people. Help create words that we can turn to when we don't.

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Kayla: Yeah, I need to borrow your words and we can share and we can hold each other up in that way.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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”.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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? 

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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.

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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.

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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? 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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? 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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?

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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That is a really powerful integration of spirit and body in that moment. Those are powerful moments throughout the day of noticing.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Then my other book is To Light Their Way, which is a collection of prayers and liturgies for parents.

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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.

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Kayla: Thank you.

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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.

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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)

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Thanks to our sponsors:

• Go to ⁠www.organifi.com/bestofyou⁠ today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
• 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

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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

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Transcript

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Curt Thompson.

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*Music*

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Alison: Curt, I realized it started recording, can you say that quote again? I want to capture it. I love that.

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Curt: Yeah. From Frederick Buechner, Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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?

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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I don't form hope for myself. We form hope for me and we form hope for you.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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?

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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? 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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Curt: Back at you.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Alison: That's great. You're the best. Always grateful for your time. Thank you!

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Curt: Me too. You're very welcome. My pleasure.

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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)

‍

Thanks to our sponsors:

• This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
• Go to ⁠www.organifi.com/bestofyou⁠ today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
• Get 35% off your first order of Sundays. Go to SundaysForDogs.com/BESTOFYOU or use code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
• To start decoding your body's messages, and pave the way for a healthier life visit nutrisense.com/bestofyou and get $30 off your first month and one month of board certified nutritionist support.

Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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Resources

• ‍The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
• Dance scene from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• ‍Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown

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Transcript

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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? 

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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. 

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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.

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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?

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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?

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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.

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And it's really not. 

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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?

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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. 

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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?

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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? 

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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.

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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?

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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. 

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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? 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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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Thanks to our sponsors:

• Go to ⁠www.organifi.com/bestofyou⁠ today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
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• Go to Reliefband.com and use promo code BESTOFYOU to receive 20% off plus free shipping.
• Sleep deeply and wake gently with Hatch Restore - go to hatch.co/bestofyou to get $20 off and free shipping!

Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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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

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Transcript

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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, 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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That's not belonging. And either of those extremes is problematic. So belonging is tricky. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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, 

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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?”

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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, 

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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.

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And then we carry those wounds with us into adulthood.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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? 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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Who are the people who support you? Who are the people who see and honor that you're on your own path? 

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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.

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This is belonging. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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Today, we're talking allll about therapy. I've gathered up the big questions people ask and we're tackling them head-on. Remember, therapy isn't just for crises-it's for clarity, growth, and understanding. So if you're curious about the process or wondered how in the world to get started, this episode is for you.

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Here's what we cover:

1. The most important predictor of success in therapy (18:36)

2. Different types of therapy (29:33)

3. How to find a therapist (12:35)

4. Breaking up with a therapist (42:42)

5. My top tips for finding affordable therapy (12:59)

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Thanks to our sponsors:

• Go to ⁠www.organifi.com/bestofyou⁠ today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
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• Visit hiyahealth.com/BESTOFYOU and get your kids the full-body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults.
• 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.

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Resources

• ‍DrAlisonCook.com/podcast
• ‍dralisoncook.com/resources
• ‍Psychologytoday.com
• ‍Adverse Childhood Experiences Test

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Transcript

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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're tuning in for this series, these foundational building blocks of psychology. And today's episode is probably the topic I get asked about the most. 

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It's “what kind of therapist do I need and how do I find a good one”? Honestly, I get asked this question multiple times a day. Every single day. back in episode 63, I promised you an episode all about therapy. And this is that episode I've gathered together the top 10 most asked questions. These are the questions I get asked the most about therapy, about how to find a therapist, about how to find a good fit, about all the things, 

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And we're answering all of them in this episode. This is an episode to save and to share with your friends and loved ones. Now there's a lot of information in this episode, a lot of practical information, and websites.

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To make it easier for you to get the information you need out of this episode, as well as every episode we're going to do a couple of things. Number one, every episode is transcribed completely and it has its own webpage. Go to DrAlisonCook.com/podcast and on that page you will see a list of every single episode we've recorded.

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If you click on the episode you're interested in, it will take you to that episode's webpage. You will find a list of all the resources. From that episode and at the bottom of that page, if you scroll down, you will see a button that says view transcript, click on that transcript, and you will see this whole episode transcribed.

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That's an easy way to scroll through and get information that you might have missed while you're listening. Secondly, starting with last week's episode 70, that was a dense episode. There was a lot in it, including a lot of practical exercises for managing emotions. Starting with that episode we're going to add a timestamp feature so that you can easily find the portion of the episode you most want to pull out to share with somebody.

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Look for that timestamp feature to return to the part of the episode you really want to go back to, to grab that information. I'm trying to make it easy for you to get the resources you need and to share those resources with your friends. All right. Without further ado, we're going to dive into the top 10 questions I get about therapy. 

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Question number one, when should I go to a therapist? I want to start off with some stats. First of all, a recent study found that around 20 percent of Americans in any given year are seeing a therapist. Now that doesn't account for the people who saw a therapist last year, who aren't currently seeing a therapist right now.

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That's folks who are currently seeing a therapist. And the number is only increasing, especially since the pandemic, the number is only going up. Bottom line, a lot of people are turning to therapy for support. And of those people who are turning to therapy, over 75 percent find it to be beneficial. I want to normalize if you're thinking about seeing a therapist, if you've seen a therapist, it's really normal, no longer is there a stigma attached to it. Most people are going to see a therapist at some point in their life.

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There are a lot of different reasons that people see a therapist; some people have been diagnosed with an ongoing mental health issue, such as a mood disorder or an anxiety disorder. There are numerous types of anxiety issues that people deal with on a regular basis. Many people are seeking therapy as a part of their wellness regime as a way to grow, as a way to become a more whole person, mind, emotion, body, and soul. 

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It's simply another tool in the toolkit to help you improve different areas of your life. There are a lot of reasons that people go to see a therapist. You think about the medical model–most people see a doctor in their life. Hopefully you're seeing a doctor at least once a year to check in on your health. In many ways, this new mental health model is more of a health model versus a mental illness model. This idea that we are all dealing with something at some point in our lives would suggest that at some point you're going to want to enlist the support of a therapist to help you out. It's normal. 

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In many ways, most of us at some point in our life will have a mental health issue that we need to resolve. Here are some reasons that you might want to seek therapy. Number one, if you're dealing with overwhelming emotions–maybe you notice a disproportionate response to things. This could be new or this could be something you've noticed for a while. 

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For example, if you notice that you get disproportionately angry when someone does something annoying. Let's say your kids or your spouse or a friend does something that may be annoying, but you have a big response. You go right into fight mode, you go right into anger. And then later you're aware, oh man, I overreacted. I had a big emotion. Or if you get really big sad emotions. Again, there's no shame in this, but that might be a cue that there's some pain in your life or there might be a wound in your life that needs some healing.

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It's a cue that you might need some attention and you might want to enlist the support of a therapist. Another reason people seek therapy is during significant life changes. What we call adjustment periods. It could be anything from adjusting to having.

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A new baby or adjusting to your children, leaving home, or an empty nest. It could be adjusting to marital life. It could be adjusting to single life, adjusting after a divorce. It could be adjusting after the loss of a loved one. These are normal season-of-life changes, but they stir up a lot of emotions inside of us, and it can be so helpful to have someone walk you through that life change. A third reason, probably the biggest reason that people seek therapy, is for ongoing anxiety or depression that isn't self resolving. 

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It's one thing to feel anxiety, and then to have that anxiety resolve over the period of a couple of days. But if you're dealing with anxiety regularly, for example, if you go back to episode 54, where I talked with Curtis Chang about his anxiety and how persistent it was, that's the time to see a therapist who can help you. Or if you deal with chronic feelings of sadness or depression, that's the time to see a therapist.

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Another reason is if you're aware of traumatic events from the past. Maybe you dealt with emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, and you're aware of that, and you've never really processed it. It's so helpful to have a trained therapist. Someone who is trauma-informed to help you heal some of those wounds. 

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Maybe you're doing as best you can. Maybe you're even doing really well, but you have this awareness of, I've never really talked about that thing that happened. This is so common and it's so wise to say, you know what, I'm going to enlist the support of someone who's trained to help me work through that and help me gain a deeper layer of healing, 

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I like to think of it this way: if you had a twisted ankle and it was hurting you and it wasn't self resolving, maybe you're walking pretty well, you can even go on hikes, but you're always dealing with a form of pain. Why wouldn't you go to a physical therapist to help you heal that pain, to help you restore that part of you to its proper function?

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That's what a therapist does. If you're noticing that you walk with a little bit of a limp as a result of a trauma, or an injury that maybe even happened years ago, a therapist can help you heal that and restore that part of you to the way that it's designed to function. Another reason people seek therapy is relational issues.

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It might be that you're dealing with a relational problem in a marriage as a parent, as a friend, or maybe you're dealing with persistent loneliness. It's hard for you to establish healthy relationships, or you feel unsatisfied with the quality of your relationships. Great time to seek the support of a therapist.

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We have all different ways of getting support. We go to church communities for spiritual support. We go to medical doctors for physical support. 

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At some point in our life, we all need to look back because there's not one of us that arrived where we are right now without a wound or two. Every single one of us has something in our past that's worth taking a look at. We all need to look at where we are right now and see how we are doing mentally.

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How are we doing emotionally? How are we doing spiritually? How are we doing physically? And who is attending to me in each of those categories? Again, it doesn't have to be a therapist, but a therapist is a great resource to help you, especially in that mental and emotional domain. 

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And then where do I want to be? How am I doing toward pursuing the goals that I have for myself, am I the parent I wanna be? Am I the friend I wanna be? Do I have the types of relationships I wanna have? Am I growing? A therapist can help you in all of those ways.

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When is it time to get a therapist? When you've talked with friends, when you've maxed out your community, or if you don't have a lot of friends or community to talk with, and you're struggling in any of these ways, a therapist can help. 

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And what I like to say to people is don't wait until you're in crisis to find a therapist because it's really hard to find a good fit when you needed one yesterday.

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I encourage people to proactively locate a therapist that you like, that you build a rapport with. You can meet for a few sessions and they are there for when you need a therapist. When that crisis comes, whether it's for a family member, a loved one or something in your own life, you know who that person is that you're going to call.

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I think it's wise. Just like how you usually have a medical doctor on file, you know who you'll call when you need to see a physician. Similarly, I think it's wise to have identified a local therapist or someone virtually that you can turn to when you're going to need mental or emotional support.

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Number two, (12:35) how do I find a therapist? I get asked this question every single day. I'm going to run you through some really practical ways to find a therapist. Ask people you trust. Referrals are a great way to do it. If someone you love and trust liked working with a particular therapist, there's a good chance you might like that therapist.

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Ask people you can trust. (12:59) You can contact local churches, local seminaries, local universities. Many of them have counseling centers and most of those counseling centers have referral lists also. Ask them for lists of people who provide discounted counseling services.

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If you have local counseling programs, local seminaries, or local universities who are training counselors, oftentimes those institutions offer discounted counseling for people who are working with their counselors and training. That's a way to get low cost counseling. 

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Also ask your primary care physician. Most physicians offices have counseling referral lists for people in your region. On my resources page, dralisoncook.com/resources, there are several links to different online platforms. There's a growing number of virtual counseling platforms that tend to be a little bit more affordable and a little bit more easy to come by for those of you who live in places where there are not a lot of counselors practicing in your local zip code.

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Lastly, there's a huge database called psychologytoday.com. I linked to that on that same website. It's a huge database of licensed therapists of all different types in all different regions. And I'm going to walk you through how to search for a therapist using that database. When people reach out to me and say, hey, can you help me find a therapist in Nevada, and I don't know any therapists in Nevada at this moment in time, this is exactly what I do to help that person find a therapist.

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I'm going to walk you through how to do that for yourself right now. Go to that timestamp or go to that transcript and share this with friends who are trying to figure out, how in the world do I find a therapist? Number one, you go to psychologytoday.com and the first thing you'll see is this big search bar, “find a therapist”, and it wants your city or zip code. You put in your zip code and it's going to pull up a list of all the therapists who are licensed and registered with the Psychology Today database, which is one of the biggest databases there is.

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Now underneath you're going to see these filters and it's amazing–you can filter by the issue that you're dealing with, whether it's anxiety, addiction or maybe it's an issue with one of your children, depression, an eating disorder, grief. You're gonna see a whole list so you can filter by the specific issue. 

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You're going to see an insurance filter. You can filter by the therapist that takes your specific type of insurance. You can filter by the gender of the therapist if you prefer to see a male or female therapist. You can filter by the type of therapy. We're going to get into these different types of therapy, but if you're thinking, I want an IFS therapist, I want an EMDR therapist, I want a Christian therapist, whatever it is, you can filter by that. 

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You can filter by the therapist's age if you're aware that you want to see someone older or younger. You can filter by their price range. You can filter by their faith. If people have identified, I am someone who works with Christians or I am someone who works with Jewish clients. You can really get specific about what you're looking for. And it really helps narrow down the field.

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Question number three that I get is how do I know if a therapist is qualified? And right there on that database on psychology today, you're going to see the therapist license. You can also go to any therapist website. You can go to state licensing databases to look up a therapist's license. But what you're looking for is someone who is a licensed psychologist, a licensed professional counselor, an LPC, a licensed mental health counselor, an LMHC, a licensed marriage and family therapist, an LMFT, a licensed social worker, an LICSW. 

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You also might see that MDs, licensed psychiatrists, sometimes do therapy. Licensed psychiatrists, MDs, are the only type of therapist who can prescribe medication. If you're looking for someone who can prescribe medication, you're looking for that MD. 

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Here's the thing to remember for therapists and counselors and social workers and marriage and family therapists: these are broad terms for professionals who are simply trained in talk therapy. They come from a variety of educational backgrounds. Baseline, you want to look for someone who has an advanced degree and who is licensed by their state licensing board. 

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Beyond that, whether it's a PhD, or whether it's a social worker, or whether it's a marriage and family therapist, what matters most is the relationship, and we're going to get to that. You also might look for specialty certification. If you're looking to work with someone who is IFS trained or EMDR trained or DBT trained, you want to make sure they've been certified or trained in that modality. This is something you can ask a therapist as well.

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Question number four: how much does therapy cost? There's a huge range. It varies based on geography, based on their qualifications. That's one of the things about those different degrees. Typically, the more advanced the degree, the more the therapist is going to charge and that doesn't necessarily mean it's a better fit.

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You always want to ask, do you offer a sliding scale fee? Ask about insurance and check with your insurance. More and more insurance companies are offering a certain number of sessions every year to people as part of their coverage because it simply works. It improves your health. Always check with your insurance provider to understand the coverage before you go out and enlist the support of a therapist.

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(18:36) Number five, how do I know if a therapist is a good fit for me? And I love that people are asking this question. It means that you are thinking about therapy as a collaborative process. And I want you to think about therapy in that way. I don't want you to think about picking up the phone and calling an expert who has all the answers.

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Because there are a lot of therapists who are not going to be able to give you the help that you need. You need to be thinking about finding a fit, finding someone who is good for you. The number one predictor of success in therapy, the number one predictor, is the relationship between you and your therapist. There's no such thing as a perfect therapist. There's no such thing as a guru who will have all the answers that are proven for you. What matters to the effectiveness of therapy is the nature of that relationship that you develop with your therapist.

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The relationship is what heals. The relationship is the most important predictor of a therapeutic outcome. Is it based on mutual respect? Is it collaborative? Are you together moving toward goals? Is it a safe environment where you feel understood? Where you trust this person to be honest with you in a way that you can manage? Is this someone who will repair with you?

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A therapeutic relationship is a relationship. This person is not a guru. This person is someone you are bringing into your inner circle as a trusted advisor. Yes, they are trained. Yes, they are an expert in things that you are not. They know about certain aspects of psychology that you don't know. It is also a relationship where you get to go to that person and say, hey, I didn't like it when you said this, I didn't understand it and it didn't sit right. Can we talk about it? 

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And that therapist needs to honor that. And they need to say, tell me more. This is a collaborative relationship. We've talked a lot on this podcast about the ways we can get hurt by pastors or ministry leaders or parents. Therapists also are in that mix where there's a certain power differential. A therapist is not perfect. They are not going to be perfect. 

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And, they absolutely need to be someone that you can go to honestly and say, hey, I didn't understand when you said that, or this isn't working for me. Can we shift gears or I want to bring something new to the table? It's up to the therapist to be an adult and say, I love that you're asking me this. I want to help you. That's not in my area of specialty, so I can't help you with that, but I would love to help you find someone who can. 

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Can they be a real person with you and listen to an honor what you need out of the therapeutic process? You are unique and healing is relational. You are unique. Your situation is unique and healing is relational. That relationship that you form is really important. It's more important in my opinion than years of experience or therapeutic modality. It's, can I trust this person? 

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Much of therapy is providing a reparative experience for those early childhood wounds. My guest Cindy Gao talked about the importance of those corrective emotional experiences with safe adults in Episode 67. And a therapist is trained to do that, to provide that corrective emotional experience. 

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Now here's the thing. They're not perfect, but that's part of the beauty of a therapeutic relationship. They're going to be ahead of you on the journey. They're going to be trained in ways you're not trained. They're going to have an expertise that you don't have. They are there for you. And can you also go to that person and bring your own needs, your own desires, even sometimes your own feelings of, I didn't understand that. Can you help me understand? A good therapist is going to earn your trust and join you there.

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How do you know it's a good fit? Here's what I tell everyone. This takes a little bit of work, and this is why I encourage you to do this work before you're in crisis. Call or visit two or three therapists in your area. And do an interview. Many therapists will do a short 20 minute phone interview for fit. Take them up on that, or schedule an appointment and say, listen, I want to have this one session to get a sense of who you are and for you to get a sense of who I am and see if there's a good fit.

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If a therapist doesn't like that, you might not want to work with them because that's a really normal and healthy thing to ask for. And you might do that with two or three and see who is a good fit. You're going in, you're inviting this person into your inner circle.

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Take some time to vet the person and get to know them. You can also, after a couple of sessions, reevaluate. You can break up with a therapist. It's okay. If you're in a few sessions and are like, this is not working for me, you can let them know. Hey, you know what? I'm going to move on.

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I want to empower you to know that a good therapist will honor that. They won't gaslight you in that. They won't second guess you in that. They'll honor that. They'll ask you helpful questions and they'll help honor your needs. 

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Here are some questions I want you to think about before you call that therapist so that you can ask them questions strategically. Do you prefer a structured approach where you want homework and you want exercises and you want goals at the end of each therapy session? Or do you lean toward a more open conversation? You want to go in and explore and talk and get insight. Think about that and then ask the person you're interviewing how they work.

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Not every therapist gives homework at the end of every session. If that's something you want, let your therapist know that before you sign up to work with him or her. 

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Do you want a therapist who is more directive, meaning they're going to use techniques, they're going to use interventions, they're going to give you guidance, or do you want someone who's more reflective, who's listening, who's more reflecting back what they hear? People want different things and your therapist doesn't necessarily know that. You have to ask them what their style is based on what you think is going to be most helpful for you. 

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Do you want a therapist who remains neutral and you don't really get to know them, or do you prefer someone who shares a little bit more of themselves, who's a little bit more relational in their approach? Are you looking for someone to build a long term relationship over time, are you looking for someone who's solution focused? 

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You're like, here's the problem that I have. I want to get in. I want to get out. Are you willing to work with me on that? I want to be more goal-oriented. These are all valid types of therapy, but these are questions to ask yourself before you make those phone calls.

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And then think about certain characteristics like gender. Do you prefer working with a man or woman? Age: do you want someone older or younger? Cultural background: do you prefer to work with someone who can understand your unique cultural experiences? Faith: we're going to get to that's our next question, but these are things to consider. They're really valid. It's okay to give yourself permission to seek out the type of therapist you think is going to feel safest to you.

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All right, the next question, number six, should I work with a Christian or not? My answer to this is, will the therapist respect your beliefs in your worldview? That's what's most important to me. Now, there are some people who would say, if you have a Christian background, you should only work with a Christian therapist.

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I'm not going to say that. The reason I'm not going to say that is that I know some exceptional therapists who are not coming from a Christian background and they can be really helpful to you and they will honor your faith. 

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Just because someone is a Christian therapist doesn't mean they're a good therapist or doesn't mean they're the right therapist for you. For me, the answer to that question is, will they respect your faith system or will they try to change it, stigmatize it, or criticize it? The number one thing to ask someone, if they are not from your same faith background is to say, listen, I need you to know up front, this is important to me. And can you respect it and honor it? 

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Conversely, if you go to somebody who's a Christian counselor, you might want to ask them, listen, this is what's important to me, but if you start doing this, it's going to be harmful to me. I need to know how you work. 

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Whether the therapist has a faith background or not, will they respect your value system, your belief system and work within it without necessarily trying to impose their values or their beliefs on you? It takes time to build up trust with the therapist. You really want to discern, is this person going to meet me where I am? 

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(29:33) Number seven. What's their approach? What's their modality? Which school of thought are they working with? Now, this is one of those filters. When you go to psychologytoday.com there's a lot of information. You've heard about a lot of different types of therapy. You might be interested in a specific type. 

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The main ones you might consider are: 

1. Couples therapy: You go to a couples therapist if you want the couple to be the center of the therapeutic invention. It's not so much about your individual needs.

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2. Family therapy: A family therapist is going to meet with the whole family and look at the family and try to create harmony in the family system. Also not so much about individual needs

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3. CBT/Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: this is one of the most well researched types of therapy. It's going to focus on thoughts and beliefs and how those thoughts and beliefs influence your emotion and your behaviors. We talked in episode 51 about those thinking traps and how to change them. This is right out of CBT. 

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4. Psychodynamic therapy. These are therapies that delve into the past more. They're looking at unconscious processes, things underneath the surface that you may not be consciously aware of that are driving your present behavior. 

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5. DBT/dialectical behavior therapy, which is a form of CBT, which brings in mindfulness strategies.

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Now you also might consider somatic therapies. Those other forms that I was talking about, CBT, DBT, psychodynamic approaches, these are what we call top down therapies. They start with your thoughts, with your emotions, with memories, beliefs, and then they move down into the way you experience the world, your embodied presence in the world.

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These are more insight driven therapies, these top down approaches. In contrast, bottom up therapies begin at the body or the sensory level and work their way up to influence emotions and thoughts. And a lot of these therapies were developed specifically with regard to trauma because so much of trauma is stored in the body.

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They're going to start by helping you pay attention to what you're feeling in your body, where you're carrying tension, where you're carrying heaviness. You're going to start with grounding techniques to keep you in the present moment to help you contain big emotions.

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Instead of going after the emotions, we're going to learn to pace ourselves in these bottom up in these somatic approaches. We're going to learn how to be in the present moment. I went through a couple of grounding in last week's episode 70. You might start with that, and as you become more aware of how to ground yourself in your body, then you might begin to link to different emotions.

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That's something to think about. Am I wanting something more insight driven? Do I want a top down approach where I'm going to tackle my thoughts or painful memories from the past? I've done talk therapy and what I really need is one of these bottom up approaches where I'm learning how to be in my body and ground myself so that emotions don't overtake me, where I can really regulate myself in any given moment.

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And finally a note about trauma-informed approaches. Trauma-informed approaches are not necessarily relegated to one particular type of therapy. There are some therapeutic approaches like EMDR, like somatic therapies, like certain types of CBT therapy that are explicitly designed to address trauma.

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But a trauma-informed approach can, and I believe, should be integrated into almost any therapeutic approach. A trauma-informed therapist is going to really prioritize the trust and transparency of that therapeutic relationship that we talked about. They understand and are trained to understand how deeply important that corrective emotional experience is in the therapeutic process. They're going to work really hard to build trust, to ensure safety, to ensure the pacing of the process doesn't outpace where you are and what your body can tolerate. 

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They're going to work collaboratively and mutually with you so that the process of therapy does not in any way, shape or form provide further injury because that can happen. And I hate it that it does, but it can. You can go to a therapist, and if they're not using the right technique and if you're not getting contained in the proper way, more emotion can come out than you are ready to manage. And a trauma-informed therapist understands that, and they're going to work with the pace of your body.

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They're going to look at these adverse childhood experiences, these ACEs that we talked about. This is a study I will link to in the show notes where they're going to look at these experiences from the past that so many of us have these big T traumas, these little T traumas that are still living in our body. And they're going to incorporate that understanding of trauma into the therapeutic process.

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For example, EMDR, which was developed in the 1980s. It's a technique used specifically to treat traumatic memories and PTSD. And it's a really beautiful protocol that can be so helpful with trauma. 

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Many IFS therapists are trained with a trauma informed approach. IFS is the topic of a whole six week series starting with episode 39, Boundaries for Your Soul, How to Navigate Your Overwhelming Thoughts and Feelings. That whole six week series is based on my book with Kimberly Miller. It's a Christ-centered adaptation of the Internal Family Systems model, but there's a lot of pacing in that model. 

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We don't go after those buried emotions without permission from the protective parts of your system in IFS. If you're an IFS certified therapist, you understand that people have coping strategies for a reason. And we've got to work slowly and delicately to replace certain coping strategies over time, while honoring the needs of the system. You may have coping strategies that you need to have in place before we go ripping those coping strategies away. 

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If you are aware that you've got big T, little T traumas in your past, look for somebody who is putting themselves out there as a trauma-informed therapist and is trained in some sort of somatic therapy, EMDR, IFS, maybe this very specific trauma informed version of CBT so that you know that they're going to be honoring the pacing that your whole system needs as you heal.

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Question number eight. Where do I start? You start with what you're dealing with right now. A good therapist, as I went through, will know how to pace you, will know how to take you where you need to go. Your job is to focus on what's the thing right now that's getting the best of me.

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What's the relationship, whether it's a friendship, whether it's a parenting relationship, whether it's your spouse, whether it's one of your own parents, it's getting the best of me. It's making me crazy and I need help. Start there. Just start there. It might be thoughts that you can't shake. Self-defeating thoughts. You can't stop comparing yourself with others. You can't stop shaming yourself. You can't stop beating yourself up. 

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Start there. It might be overwhelming emotions. Start there. A good therapist will know how to help you start where you are, ground yourself, pace yourself so that you can get to where you want to go. Start with the thing that is bothering you and a good therapist is going to help you get to the root of that problem and help you develop a plan to get where you want to go. 

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Number nine, how often should I go to therapy? This is something you're going to develop in partnership with your therapist, but I want to give you the different categories that you might consider. Increasingly, they're more and more intensive. These are where you can go somewhere for a week or two weeks to get intensive therapy. If you've been dealing with something for a long time, intensives can be super effective. They're very effective for couples therapy, where you get away from everything and you get right to the heart of the matter.

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In that one week, two weeks, you might even go to a month long recovery center. Those are what we call intensives. And I want to mention that because a lot of people don't realize that those are increasingly popular and increasingly accessible. 

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They tend to be more expensive. Obviously, they tend to take more time, but they can be really effective. And then we go to the more traditional model of weekly therapy. Most therapeutic modalities suggest a weekly starting point or possibly a bi-weekly, every other week. If you've done some therapy in the past but you still want some regular support, you might consider a bi-weekly option.

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Also, it's a great option if your finances are limited and you can't afford weekly therapy. Going to a therapist every other week is really helpful. A lot of clients maintain monthly therapy. This is when you're doing pretty well. It's called maintenance therapy, where you're not really diving into the deep end of your problems.

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You've done some therapy, you've gained some success, but you want to have that monthly check in to make sure someone is continuing to check in on you each month. And a lot of therapists will offer this. And then finally there's that “as needed” category, and this is what I was saying at the beginning when you've identified someone in your local community.

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This is a therapist that I can turn to when I need support. I've developed a relationship, but I don't really need to be in therapy right now. You talk to that therapist and you say, I think I'm finished with this leg of the journey with this particular need, but can I call you again on an as needed basis? Can I call you when a need surfaces? That gives you that option to return if a specific issue arises or for a periodic check in. 

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Finally, last question. How do I know when it's time to end therapy? And I love this question. It really depends, again, that relationship with your therapist. And that's why I've tried to equip you with all of this information. Because maybe you could go to maintenance, monthly therapy. Maybe you could go to an “as needed” basis. That might help you think about how to end therapy.

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Ending therapy can be really hard. It's a loss in many ways. A lot of people might continue on because they're afraid of losing that support. And if you're feeling that way, talk about it with your therapist. Let them know, this has been really helpful for me. I also want to move out of therapy.

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Can we start to talk about that? A good therapist will help you navigate ending therapy. It can be really important to come to closure with a therapeutic relationship. In fact, that in and of itself can be a really reparative experience. I actually went through an experience like that a year ago.

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I had started to see a therapist after my stroke. It was a new trauma. I'd never dealt with it. I formed a relationship with a woman. She was super helpful to me. But there came a point where it was important to me to end that relationship. And I'm terrible with closure in general, in my real life. It's hard for me.

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I decided to use that as an experience to practice. And I went to her and I said, I think I'm doing okay. But it's hard for me to say goodbye. Could we talk about that? And we had a couple of sessions, beautiful couple of sessions, where we navigated saying goodbye, where we honored the validity of a healthy closure.

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And it's one of the most meaningful experiences and it was the right thing to do. I said goodbye to her, but it became a positive experience of closure. I want you to think about that when you go into a therapeutic relationship. 

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Listen, it's okay if you simply can't afford it anymore or it's not working for you and you need to ghost a therapist. It's okay. We're trained. We can take it. It's okay. Sometimes that's what you have to do. And especially if that person really isn't helping you and you feel like they're going to twist it, you can fire your therapist.

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Just do it in whatever way you have to do. But if you've built a really beautiful relationship with that therapist and the thing that's keeping you from leaving the relationship is simply that fear of loss, that fear of letting go, talk to your therapist about that. Talk about a healthy closure.

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Even if you move to an as needed basis, it's a really beautiful experience to get to say goodbye to somebody in a healthy way. And a lot of us haven't had that experience. I encourage you actually to consider that as you consider the process of therapy. With that being said, I'm going to close this episode out by saying, if you're thinking about working with a therapist, ask yourself, what if this is a gift I could give myself for a specific period of time? 

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Dr. Alison's equipped me, I feel empowered, I can dictate some terms. Maybe I'll try it for two months. Maybe I'll try it for a certain length of time. I can say goodbye when I need to say goodbye. I can move to a rhythm that works for me. I can look for what I need and give it a try. 

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You are worthy of healing. You are worthy of wholeness. You are worthy of repairing those painful experiences from your past. I hope for you to have a beautiful therapeutic relationship at some time in your life. I don't wish for you the pain that led you to it, but I am so happy in advance for you the joy of a healthy, positive, healing, therapeutic relationship.

Get ready to level up your emotional intelligence! In this week's episode, we're diving deep into the heart of emotional intelligence, revealing why it's an absolute game-changer. We'll break it all down:

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1. Fascinating research on emotional intelligence

2. 3 powerful strategies for mastering your emotions

3. 5 ways to express your emotions effectively

4. My all-time favorite technique for nurturing empathy

5. 2 unexpected gems of emotional intelligence in the Bible

6. A powerful real-life story of emotional intelligence in the fiery furnace of marriage

‍

Thanks to our sponsors:

Go to ⁠www.organifi.com/bestofyou⁠ today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.

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Go to Reliefband.com and use promo code BESTOFYOU to receive 20% off plus free shipping.

‍

Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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Resources

• ‍Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
• ‍Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Graves
• ‍Ephesians 4:26-27
• ‍Matthew 22:37-39
• ‍John 8:31-32
• ‍Boundaries for Your Soul by Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
• ‍Strong Like Water by Aundi Kolber
• ‍John 8:1-11
• ‍Matthew 21:12-13, Mark 11:15-18
• ‍The Meaning of Marriage by Tim Keller with Kathy Keller

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Transcript

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Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. We are in a new series this fall. I'm calling it Psych 101, but it's really a masterclass for adults who've been adulting in the trenches for a while. 

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This series is designed to teach you the skills you need to take control of the one thing you actually have control over, which is yourself, the way you think, the way you respond, the messages you tell yourself, even your emotions to some degree, you can shape how you respond as a result of your emotions. 

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These are the skills you need to take command of yourself so that you can show up more effectively with others. Research shows that when we develop agency, that is when we develop the ability to take charge of ourselves and guide and shape the way we show up in any relationship, in any situation, in any interaction with someone else. 

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We feel a higher level of satisfaction in ourselves. We feel that good pride of “I just did that thing that is so hard for me to do in that moment”. We feel more positive emotions. We have that feeling of what psychologists call self-efficacy, that I can do it. I have the capacity to change my behaviors, which produces a different outcome. 

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It's an amazing feeling. It's the opposite of feeling crazy. When you think about that colloquial definition of crazy, which is it's doing the same thing and producing the same result time and time again, it's like continuing to beat your head against a brick wall. Nothing changes, but we're not changing the thing that we are doing to potentially produce a different outcome. 

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Self-efficacy is the opposite. You make a positive change. You take charge of yourself in a situation, resulting in a different outcome, and it boosts all of these positive feelings inside. It's a feeling of confidence, of empowerment, of I can affect change in my life. And it starts by changing myself. 

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It always starts with something that we have control over. We can never change another human. We can change ourselves, but as we change ourselves, whether it be an emotional pattern, a thought pattern, a behavioral pattern, we will begin to produce different results in the environment around us.

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That's the big picture goal here.

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We're trying to grow in self efficacy, this capacity to make the small and big changes we need to make in our own lives that produce different and more positive outcomes in our lives and in our relationships and in our day to day. And it feels so good. That feeling of I did it. I did it. 

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And I think about this even before God. I feel like God lights up with delight when we make a change and we exert some influence over the environment around us in a positive way. We feel fantastic and God delights over that moment. 

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With all that being said, we're going to start with emotional intelligence. Now, emotional intelligence is a big concept and I'm going to break it down for you today and give you some practical examples of what it looks like to apply emotional intelligence, but it's something we all need to be working to develop like a muscle. 

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When you think about going to the gym, you're going to work on different muscle groups. Emotional intelligence is that large group of muscles, so to speak, that have to do with regulating our emotions. 

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The term emotional intelligence was first popularized by psychologist and author Daniel Goleman in a 1995 book called Emotional Intelligence, and then there's a second book called Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry that expands on the topic. 

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Essentially what Goleman hypothesized is that EQ or emotional intelligence is as important, if not more important than IQ.

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We all were pretty good about this idea of what's IQ. It's how intelligent everybody is, but what does that really mean? It's usually a measure of our verbal skills or our mathematics skills. We talked about this in episode 50, nine types of intelligence where increasingly we are aware that there are many types of intelligence and the ability to do math or to be verbally intelligent, it's one type of intelligence. 

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Emotional intelligence is one of these types of intelligence that Daniel Goleman hypothesized was super important and sure enough, it turns out to be as important, if not more important, especially in our work and professional lives.

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Emotional intelligence is the ability to do five different things as they relate to your emotions. 

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Number one, to recognize. your emotions. That's one part of emotional intelligence is simply the ability to notice and name an emotion. I'm scared. I'm sad. I'm worried. I'm angry. That's the first step of emotional intelligence is that ability to be able to notice, recognize, and name an emotion. Okay. This is what we try to teach our kids, but so many of us as adults never learned how to slow ourselves down enough to simply recognize and label an emotion.

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Number two, emotional intelligence is the ability to understand your emotions. To process them. That might mean I can first recognize that I'm sad and that I can secondly understand why. I might be sad. What's the context for the sadness? What happened that evoked the sadness? Is the sadness from the past? Is the sadness from something that happened in my immediate sphere of awareness? Is it about a memory? Was it triggered by a thought, or was it triggered by a behavior that I witnessed happening in front of me? 

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Understanding our emotions is a whole separate step from simply being able to label them. It's really important that you begin to process that emotion correctly, because we often misattribute emotions.

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We might say, I'm really angry when your spouse says something to you, when in fact they didn't say anything that should have evoked anger, they tripped over a trigger that might have been from somebody else from 10 years ago. Emotional intelligence is tricky. It's both being aware of our emotions and understanding them in their proper context effectively.

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And then number three, next level, we have to be able to manage them. This is what I'm feeling in this moment. This is why I'm feeling what I'm feeling in this moment. I understand it. And now I have to regulate the feeling. I don't want to act out of the feeling. I don't want to “sin”. 

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If you think about the scripture that says in your anger, do not sin. It doesn't say don't be angry. It does not say that it says when you're angry, don't sin. That's part of emotional management or what we call emotional regulation. I'm aware that I'm angry. I understand why I'm angry and I'm not going to act out of my anger in an inappropriate way. 

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I'm also not going to sideline my anger, managing an emotion or regulating your emotions doesn't mean we stuff them. It means we honor them by considering how our behaviors can reflect those genuine emotions in constructive ways.

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And this leads to the next part of emotional intelligence. According to Goleman, there's recognizing, understanding, managing, and then effectively expressing your emotions. That's exactly what happens now if we're doing this really well. And again, listen, if you've become really good at emotional intelligence, this'll feel like a muscle memory. You've got it in your muscle memory. You go in and you know what to do. 

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But for so many of us, different steps along the way are still really hard. We have to really slow ourselves down to be able to even label and recognize the emotion, let alone to regulate it, to give ourselves a pause, to give ourselves a timeout before we get to effectively expressing it. 

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It's not expressing it, it's effectively expressing it. I'm angry. I need to let you know that. Here's why. It takes a calm nervous system. We can't be in that fight-flight state–when we're emotionally activated, we rush in for the fight. We rush into the conflict with a tone. We're angry. We're yelling. 

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That's not an effective expression of emotions, but nor is flight an effective expression where we run away as fast as we can, because we don't trust ourselves to not go DEFCON 2 on somebody and blow up, so we avoid it. We run away. 

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That flight mode isn't effectively expressing emotions either. It is to some degree managing them. And if you're new to this and you really struggle with that fight flight, going into flight mode for a moment might be a step forward for you to manage it so that you don't hurt someone else. But the goal is that calm nervous system, that homeostasis, where we're aware of the emotion, we're understanding it, we're regulating it.

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We're not lashing out of it, nor are we suppressing it. Instead, we're aware of the emotion. I'm angry. I don't like feeling this way, but I do. This is how I feel. I'm journaling about it. I'm taking a walk. I'm taking some deep breaths to let that emotion flow through me so that it's not quite so intense.

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This is all part of that management. And it's for the goal of this last step, which is, and then I'm going to need to express it. I'm going to need to express it in my journal. I'm going to need to express it to God. I'm going to need to express it with a safe friend, or I may well need to express this emotion with the person who evoked it.

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And I want to do that effectively. This is all part of emotional intelligence. Each one of these steps could probably warrant their own podcast episode. 

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Now, there's actually a fifth component to emotional intelligence, and that is the ability to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others.

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It's not about me and my emotions when it comes to emotional intelligence. It's also about having an emotional intelligence about your emotions. Now, here's the thing. Again, if you go back to episode 50 on the nine types of intelligence, there's intrapersonal intelligence, where you're very gifted at understanding your own inner states.

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You're aware of your own emotions. You're aware of your own experiences internally. if you're naturally high on that intrapersonal awareness, that intrapersonal intelligence, for you, those first five steps might come fairly easily.

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You're really readily able to identify what you're feeling, to understand it, to manage it and to express it effectively. But then we go to that other type of intelligence, interpersonal intelligence. How well do you read others? How well do you attune to the needs of others and respond to the needs of others in an intelligent way?

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That's getting at this fifth part of emotional intelligence. It involves the ability to recognize, understand, and even influence the emotions of others.

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Let me give you an example of what emotional intelligence might look like. Imagine you've been invited to a party. Maybe it's a neighborhood event. You haven't seen these people in a while. You're a little bit anxious.

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You're excited, but you're also where, wow, I'm going to walk into this room full of people. I don't know a lot of people here. I haven't seen a lot of people here. A lot has changed in my life. I'm aware that I'm going to feel anxious. You've prepped yourself for that. You're going to be a little bit anxious.

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You understand that it makes sense. You don't feel ashamed about it. Of course, I'll feel a little bit anxious. That makes sense. When you walk into a big group full of people you haven't seen in a while you've thought about how you're going to manage those emotions.

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You've prepared some scripts. You've thought about how I'll smile. I'll look for this person that I know really well, who I really enjoy. I've envisioned myself walking into the room and what that will feel like when I see the different people.

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I've normalized the anxiety. I've talked myself through it so that when I feel it, when I walk into that room, I can take a deep breath and smile and see what happens. I've done some of that prep work and then I might even say when I'm at the party, I might even say to my friend who I see, say, Oh gosh, this is so fun. And I also feel a little bit anxious. I haven't seen these people in a while. 

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And then my friend says, Oh yeah, me too. I was also a little bit anxious about this party and suddenly we're connecting and we're laughing and all those good chemicals are being released. That's an emotionally intelligent way to go about the simple activity of having some anxiety.

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For going into a neighborhood party, you've recognized the emotions. You've understood them without shame. You figured out ways to manage them. It's normal. I'm going to take a deep breath. I'm going to look for a couple of safe people, and then I'm going to express to those safe people what I'm feeling in that moment, which alleviates the pressure of the emotions. I have a connection and all of a sudden there's good chemicals coming in. I'm starting to have a good time. 

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That seems like a simple example, but imagine what happens when none of those steps of emotional intelligence are in place.

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And I see this honestly happen all the time where we've suppressed that emotional awareness. We don't want to deal with it. Instead, we are feeling anxious, but we're pretending like we're not. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm not going to think about it. I'm going to go in. We rush into the party. 

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We might work overtime to make sure everybody else feels okay. We might get busy, roll up our sleeves and start doing all the dishes. We have all these coping tactics for emotions. We don't end up having a good time because we spent the whole party either taking care of everybody else and ignoring our own emotions with all that heightened anxiety still in our body that we're not aware of, but we're overcompensating. 

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We don't have a good time. We're super stressed out afterwards. No wonder we don't like going to parties. We never make a meaningful connection with someone else because we're too busy trying to cope with our own feelings of anxiety that we haven't actually named, understood, managed, and expressed in a healthy way. 

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We leave the party, we end up beating ourselves up because we feel like we were too intense, or we feel like we didn't really connect with anybody. We have all this negativity in our minds because we weren't present to the reality of what we were actually feeling, and then it goes on and on. 

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Over the course of that next week, you bump into a neighbor. Wasn't that party great? Oh, it was fantastic. We smile. Even though we actually had a terrible time because the whole time we were anxious, we didn't know what to do with our anxiety. And now we're cycling through more and more disingenuous connections. We're never actually stating what's true. 

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“That party was hard for me. I get really anxious about parties, and I realized I just talked too much because I was so anxious. I tried too hard and now I'm feeling shame.” 

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We're never really connecting in a meaningful way. Why go through the motions? If the goal of being with other people, of gathering with other people, being in a room with one other person, with five other people, with twenty other people is connection, why go to all that bother if we're not actually connecting? 

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And how do we connect authentically if we don't exercise some of this skill called emotional intelligence? If we're not aware of what we're feeling in the moment, in the first place, this is the baseline for human connection.

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How can I connect with you if I'm denying or suppressing or covering over or coping such that my genuine feelings in the moment aren't even allowed to come to the surface in a meaningful, effective, healthy way? Why are we doing this? Why are we going through all of these motions together if we're not really connecting,

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We do this in our intimate relationships. We do this in our family relationships. We do this in our social relationships. We do this in our church communities. Why bother going through the motions of all the work it takes to be with other humans if we are not actually showing up in a meaningful way, both in terms of understanding our own internal lives, what's happening with me in this moment, and in terms of being connected to what's genuinely going on with you?

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What a beautiful moment of connection when I can say to my loved one, to a friend at a family dinner, I'm hurting today. Yeah, I'm okay. I don't need group therapy, but I wanted you to know that's how I'm feeling right now. How about you? What's going on with you? Oh, you're having a great day. I'm so glad to hear it. Tell me more. I'd love to hear more. 

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And suddenly we're connecting authentically because each person is doing the work of recognizing and labeling their own emotional state of understanding that there's no shame there. This is what's true. This is what's happening, each person is regulating their own emotions. I'm not bleeding all over you. 

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Even if I say something true, even if I say, yeah, it's been a rough day. I don't need you to take care of me. I've done the work. I'm managing my own emotions and. What's also true is I'm still hurting a little bit. And I can sense that you're with me. And you're saying, Oh, I get it. I'm so glad you were honest with me.

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Here's how I'm doing. And there's suddenly this moment of connection. It's real, I'm being real, you're being real. We're not taking care of each other. I'm not trying to cope by avoiding myself and jumping into your problem. I'm not asking you to fix my problem. I'm being real. You're being real. We're together. We're connecting. What a beautiful moment. This is emotional intelligence.

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What does research show about the benefits of emotional intelligence? I've gone through it in the picture that I painted, but essentially emotional intelligence paves the way for deeper, more fulfilling relationships with other people.

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It helps us to connect on gauzy words, but that's what it means when we're actually being real in a moment with another person. We feel seen, we feel understood, we feel known. And that exchange in and of itself brings deep satisfaction and relief. 

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Number two, emotional intelligence produces more resilience. Instead of getting bogged down by our emotions or bogged down by challenges, we are able to approach them with balance. We can honor complex emotions, different emotions–I have a job that I really value. And sometimes it's really hard for me. That's emotional intelligence. When we can really honor the complexity of the challenges we're facing.

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Maybe it's a parenting issue. Maybe it's a marriage, maybe it's a friendship. A lot of things can be true in this moment and I can honor all of those things, which allows me to develop this emotional tolerance or resilience where I don't need things to be perfect to thrive, I can tolerate some ambiguity in a moment.

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This helps us manage stress better because we're more prepared. We start to prepare our bodies. We start to prepare our minds. We start to prepare our nervous systems to cope with things that are hard because we've named them. We've understood them. We're not deceiving ourselves.

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We're not pretending anymore, which allows us to equip ourselves to face the challenging situations that we face. And then lastly, it leads to an approved self concept, an approved sense of satisfaction in yourself, a better sense of well being. 

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It feels good to go, man, I faced that. I can do it. I have a sense of confidence in myself. I can show up for this hard situation and it won't take me out. And that feels good to our system. There's a lot of benefits to emotional intelligence.

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Here's the good news about emotional intelligence. It's not a trait. It's not something you're born with. It's a skill we develop over time. The same as any muscle that you develop in your body. You start to work on it a little bit each day. You start to develop the muscles that lead to emotional intelligence. It's never too late to develop the skill of emotional intelligence.

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Number one, we're going to start with the basics of self-awareness. This is a buzzy psychology word, self awareness. What does it really mean? It's actually really important. And if you think about Jesus, love God, love others as self, you think about self awareness in each of those three points of the triangle, we need to be aware of God's movements, aware of God's spirit.

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We need to be aware of others, aware of their emotional states, aware of where they might be hurting. And we need to be aware of ourselves, of when I'm hurting, of when I'm fearful, of when I'm activated or angry. All three types of awareness are essential to healthy relationships.

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And again, you may be listening to me going, oh, I'm pretty good at God-awareness. I'm pretty good at other-awareness. I'm terrible at self-awareness. Or you might be someone who's really aware of yourself and you have a really hard time reading other people.

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Just start there, that self-awareness right there. That awareness of, oh, this is hard for me. I need some work here. This is a muscle I need to work to develop a little bit more. That is the essence of self awareness. Self-awareness is being really honest, radically honest with yourself.

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There's no shame in self-awareness, it's simply noticing what's true. Right now, I feel insecure. I wish I didn't. Right now, I feel overwhelmed. This feels overwhelming to me. I can't process this. That's self-awareness. If you're feeling that right now, that's awesome. Give yourself a pat on the back.

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Listening to Dr. Alison right now is making me feel overwhelmed. I don't think I can do this. If you're feeling that right now, I want you to pause and go, oh my gosh, that's self-awareness. This is overwhelming to me. 

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Or if you're listening to me right now thinking this is elementary, I know this, why doesn't she move past it? Pause right there. You're aware of something in yourself. I already know how to do this. That's excellent self-awareness. 

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It's simply noticing right now what's happening inside of me. What am I aware of? Am I riveted on what Dr. Alison is saying? This is fascinating to me. That's self awareness. There's no right or wrong with self awareness. It's what is happening right now. It starts with this self reflection. Tuning in and recognizing and naming what you notice. 

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To take a step towards self-awareness, journaling is a fantastic research based way to begin to become more aware of what you're thinking and feeling. There's something about picking up a pen and starting to write out on the page and externalizing the things you're thinking and feeling that helps you see it more clearly. Oh my gosh, that's how I really feel right now. And so you might consider a journaling practice. Start with 10 to 15 minutes every day and ask yourself, what am I feeling? Why am I feeling this way? And start to journal about it. I'm feeling sad today. Why am I feeling sad? I don't know. And you start to follow the rabbit trails of noticing what's happening inside your mind.

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And when the timer ends, stop. You don't want to get overwhelmed by it, but give yourself 10 to 15 minutes a day. Don't censor yourself. There's no right or wrong. It's just, this is what's true. There's no bad or good in this space. This is what is, and you can turn it to God.

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You can say, God, this is what I'm feeling right now. It's what is, I want to be honest with you. The truth sets us free. There's no bad, no good, these are not binaries. This is what. It is in the moment, you're not acting on it, you're simply acknowledging and you're beginning to reflect. 

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These are those first two steps of emotional intelligence, recognizing the emotions and understanding them. You might ask yourself, what happened right before I started feeling this way? What was it that I did? Did I open up a social media app? Did I scroll past and see something? And again, there's no judgment here, no matter how silly it may seem to you.

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Oh, why did that post create such a havoc of emotion inside of me? But honor it, own it. You got some information about yourself. That's good data. That's helpful to understand yourself. That's all you're trying to do. Getting curious is another way to put it. We talk about all the time in Boundaries for Your Soul when you're beginning to look at yourself.

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You're taking a You-turn. You're getting curious. curious about what you notice. No shame. Sometimes when you're working through these first couple of steps of recognizing and understanding, locating what you're feeling in your physical body can be helpful. You might do a body scan where you notice from head to toe where you're carrying tension in different parts of your body.

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Some people tend to be more attuned to their physical body. They might notice that I have tension in my neck or I have a headache or, whatever it is, notice that as a form of self awareness , and then you can begin to ask yourself, I wonder where that tension is coming from. What emotion might be behind that tension that I'm noticing in my neck or shoulders?

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Self-awareness starts with simply beginning to pay attention to your emotional states, to physical tension in your body and journaling is a great way to start taking 10 to 15 minutes to notice what you're aware of each day. 

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And then we're going to move into self-regulation. Now, sometimes the reason we're a little bit afraid to become aware of an emotion is we feel like the emotion will take us over and that's really understandable, especially if you have a history of trauma, if you've never done this work, if you have a lot of pain.

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I don't want to become aware of all that pain because it'll overwhelm me. It's a really normal fear. And again, that's great self-awareness. That's a really beautiful first step of honesty. I'm a little bit afraid of my emotions because I don't know what to do with them.

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And if you're feeling that way, it's a great opportunity to meet with a therapist to work through that. Say, “emotions are a little bit scary for me. And so I want to work through them in a safe, guided setting where I can learn to pace myself as I unpack those emotions”.

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You can think about a couple of different exercises. Breath is one of the most well researched ways to slow down emotional responses. if you notice an emotion to take a deep breath, practice breathing in and holding for a count of four. And then slowly releasing that breath. It's a physiological simple intervention that slows down the firing of the nervous system and allows you to calm yourself in that moment. 

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Another way to regulate emotions, especially if you have a lot of big emotions, is a grounding technique called the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, technique. Aundi Kolber writes about this technique in her book, Strong Like Water. I found it to be very helpful to me. It brings you into the present moment in a really manageable way. 

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What you do is you look in the room around you and you identify five things you can see. Four things you can actually touch with your hands, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one that you can taste. And this diverts your attention, bringing you into the present moment and out of big emotions. 

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Again, there's some people who need to bring their emotions into their conscious awareness. They need to try to understand them more. They tend to sideline their emotions. Other folks have big emotions and they need to learn how to make the emotions less big in the moment. 

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As you breathe, you might notice emotions, but you're also noticing them in a contained way without the rapid firing of your nervous system. When you're having a big emotion, start to ground yourself, five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear. Take some deep breaths. Two things you can smell. One thing you can taste and your emotions start to get a little smaller. 

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Now, another thing you can do to help regulate an emotion in IFS, we talk about emotions being attached to parts. And as you connect to that emotion, you can use the power of your imagination to imagine that emotion behind a glass wall where it's with you, but not overtaking you. 

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Anger is here with me. It is not all of me. Sadness is here with me. It is not all of me, a part of me is sad, a part of me is angry. That's getting at that intra psychic differentiation where you allow an emotion to be with you, even as you have a little bit of healthy distance.

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Those are some different techniques. You can use your breath. That's sometimes the easiest place to start and the quickest way to slow the firing of the nervous system. You can use a grounding technique to keep you really grounded in your physical surroundings. You can use that imagination imagining the part of you as separate from you, maybe behind a glass window or a glass wall.

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You name the emotion and you also very clearly remind yourself it's not all of who you are. You can get a healthy distance from it. This is all part of emotional regulation. As you start to practice self awareness, you start to notice emotions. Now, these are some things that you can do to help you manage them. Remember, we're recognizing, we're understanding our emotions, and then we're managing them.

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Managing doesn't mean making them go away. It means keeping them at a healthy distance. Not too big, not too small. Just right, here's the emotion, it's here, it's not taking me over. I'm not desperate to get away from it. And that's when we begin to move into the next step of expressing ourselves effectively, where we speak on behalf of an emotion or we care for ourselves through the experience of an emotion. 

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It doesn't always mean we have to go tell somebody, although that's a wonderful way to express on behalf of an emotion, whether you're telling the person directly or whether you're seeking support from a friend, but you can also do it through taking a walk.

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You can express an emotion through music that helps you metabolize that emotion. You can do it through movement. There are a lot of ways to express emotion. You can get anger out through beating a pillow. These are all ways that we begin to express the emotion, get it out of our bodies in a healthy way.

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I want to touch on this other awareness, this interpersonal intelligence becoming aware of other people's emotional states in an emotionally intelligent way it has to do with empathy. And you can cultivate empathy, you can cultivate the ability to step inside someone else's shoes if it doesn't come naturally to you. And my favorite technique is to simply ask yourself, I wonder what this other person is thinking and feeling. And imagine going through their day, the two hours preceding when you had an interaction with them.

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And the best example of this is when you and your spouse both show up at the dinner table after a long, hard day. I am so aware of the day I've had, I am so aware of what's going on inside of me, but take a minute consciously. This is a decision. It's a muscle you're developing to think about what's going on in my spouse.

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At this moment, what happened the two hours preceding them showing up at the dinner table or my child, or my friend, what happened in their life, the two hours preceding this interaction, they were maybe sitting in traffic, stuck, maybe they had a bad day at work, maybe they had a bad day at school, maybe they had a bad conversation with someone else.

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Imagine what that other person has gone through those two or three hours preceding them coming into your immediate sphere. You are each bringing into that moment of contact a whole world of stressors, a whole world of thoughts, a whole world of feelings.

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And the more you will become aware of your own. And can simultaneously imagine, oh my gosh, that other person, this other being in front of me is showing up to this moment with a whole world of their own stressors, their own hard conversations, their own traffic jams, whatever the things are, and you can begin to remind yourself of that you're going to dramatically improve your ability to connect in that moment. 

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Now, remember, it's not sidelining yourself. Some of us sideline ourselves and we're so empathetic. We know that this other person is struggling so much when they show up at the moment with us. It's not taking yourself out of the equation.

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It's both. Here's what I'm coming to the table with today. All the things that have been hard in my day, all the things I've been worried about, all the things I'm ragged about, and oh my gosh, this person sitting in front of me, same thing. They're coming to this moment in front of me with all the things that are hard for them.

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All those conversations that went sideways, all the ways they're beating themselves. We are both right here with all of that. Let's start getting real. This is emotional intelligence. This is spiritual maturity. This is what it means to become more like Christ. I am so aware of everything I'm bringing to this moment with you guys.

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It's here. It's with me, and I'm going to honor you by. Regulating myself. I'm not going to dump all of this on you because that's not fair to you. I'm also not going to sideline it because that's not fair to me. And guess what? If you are simultaneously doing that same work, you're coming to me aware of everything that's going on inside of you and all that's hard about it.

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And you're also going to be mindful. You're not going to dump that on me. You're also aware that I'm coming to the table with my own stuff. Oh my gosh. Can we have together a beautiful moment of genuine connection? It starts so simply. How are you? Oh man. It's been a day. How about you? Oh, it's been a day.

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Yeah, I see you. Me too. Me too. And you're right there with almost not that many words. You are so present to each other. Yeah I'm pretty overwhelmed. Yeah, I'm overwhelmed too. All right. Good to know. How can we be tender with each other in this moment?

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Or maybe one person is actually doing. Great. I'm in a good place, which frees you to say, I'm struggling. Would you have the capacity to walk with me through some of my struggles as I process them? It allows us to each take responsibility for our own responses and it leads to these beautiful relationships that God designed us to have. 

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Now, in closing today, I want to share with you a couple of illustrations of emotional intelligence from the Bible, and then one from real life that I think is a really great example. The first one that we see is when Jesus confronts those who are about to stone the woman who's caught in the act of adultery. And if you think about this, let's go through the steps of emotional intelligence.

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When the religious leaders ask him, they're trying to test him. And they're like, don't you think we should stone this woman? She's been caught in adultery, right there. They're trying to set a trap for him. And Jesus is pretty calm. 

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He doesn't race to an answer. He doesn't get impulsive. He takes a moment and bends down. He grounds himself in that moment. He puts his finger in the sand, he grounds himself, maybe he's even counting to 10, taking deep breaths, calming himself. There's that self awareness and that emotional regulation in that moment that we see in Jesus.

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He's gathering himself. He's aware of whatever it is that he feels inside, a combination of anger, maybe some compassion for the woman. He's also reading the cues from the woman. My guess is that the woman was hurting. She was in pain. She probably felt shame. She probably felt demoralized. 

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Jesus is picking all of that up. He's aware. He's empathetic to her. He's aware of what's going on in himself. He takes a minute to regulate, and then he communicates effectively, and it's brilliant. “Hey, whoever among you has never sinned, has never found yourself in a position like this woman is in right now, why don't you go ahead and throw that first stone?” 

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That's a brilliant, emotionally intelligent response. He is turning it on them. Hey, you look inside yourselves for a minute. Really? Really? You've never done anything? And then he turns to the woman with empathy. He reads her emotions. He's reading the whole room. He's reading himself and and he's reading the woman with empathy saying, you go in peace, I don't condemn you. You're free. 

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He sets her free of her shame. He knows this woman. He knows what she needs. He's reading her accurately, perfectly. Now we're not going to be Jesus. We're not going to be able to perfectly read a situation, but that story shows all three elements of his self-awareness. His ability to regulate his own emotions, to ground himself, his ability to read the other people around him, both folks who are trying to trap him, whom he calls out and folks who need his compassion. He's reading all of that beautifully.

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Now, there's another example where we see emotional intelligence in Jesus, and that's when he turns the tables over in the temple. We see emotional intelligence there. Emotional intelligence doesn't mean we don't have emotions. When Jesus walks into that temple and he sees it being used as a marketplace where people are exchanging money and selling animals for sacrifices.

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This distortion of his father's house–he doesn't like it. He's aware of the anger. He regulates himself. That act of overturning the tables is not impulsive. In my estimation, in my view, there's no indication that he's out of control.

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It's a strategic move to show and express the depth of his anger. He doesn't hurt anybody. He's not motivated out of cruelty. He's not trying to harm people. He's not beating people up. He's showing the depth of what he feels about that situation. There's self-awareness, there's self-regulation, there's understanding and there's appropriate expression. There's genius in that moment. 

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And there's an example that I want to close with. It's from a book by Tim Keller with Kathy Keller called The Meaning of Marriage. He tells a story in the book about something Kathy does that reminds me of that emotional intelligence of Jesus when he turned those tables over in the temple.

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I want to close with this story because I want to paint a picture for you of emotional intelligence. It's not being a doormat. It's not always being kind. It's a little bit like what we talked about in episode 57 about should I turn the other cheek? This is not being a doormat. This is shrewdness. This is being strategic. This is knowing the power of your emotion, the power of what you feel, aligning the power of what you feel with. 

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The truth of what is good and right in the universe and effectively expressing on behalf of those emotions to impact other people. There's a lot of power in emotional intelligence. And in this story that Tim Keller tells, he and his wife, Kathy have negotiated during his early work as a pastor, he's going to be working crazy hours for about three years. That's what it takes. And she's agreed to that. They've gone in, eyes wide open. He's going to be working all the time for three years to try to build this church.

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And she's, she said, okay, that's going to be hard, but I share this vision with you. Okay. Three years pass and he is still constantly working overtime. He's not making good on his end of the bargain. He's not scaling back and she sees this. 

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Essentially he keeps wanting more. Oh, I need more time. Just a little more time. And she's done. She says I gave you the three years, you're building the church and I see what's going to happen. You're going to become a workaholic. I am never going to see you. And 20 years from now, we're not going to have a marriage.

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This is going to destroy our marriage. I gave you three years. I'm done. You need to scale it back. You need to put your marriage first. (This is my take on the story. I'm imagining this is what's going on.)

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And in the story, she’s smashing plates and he's freaked out. What is she doing? And she is saying to him with laser focus, you are destroying our marriage. What I am doing to our wedding china, I am showing you. What it is that you are going to do to our marriage if you don't reign your workaholism in and she's destroying these China saucers that were a wedding gift to them and he talks about how he thought she had lost her mind, but oh my goodness did she have his attention and later come to find out, she planned it. 

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She was angry. She was aware of being angry. She understood her anger. He had betrayed her and he was getting set to betray her for a lifetime and she was not okay with it. She regulated her emotions. She got her anger down to enough of a degree that she could manage them.

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She didn't lash out. She didn't yell at him. She didn't throw the dishes at him. She was not motivated by hurting him. She was in command of her anger. And then she expressed effectively on behalf of that anger. And she knew there was the only way words hadn't worked. The only way to get his attention was this very physical metaphor for what he was doing. 

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She even told him later that she had chosen the saucers for teacups that are already broken. The saucers that she chose to smash strategically were actually ones that were actually ones that didn't have a match anyway. That's how strategic she was. She was not taken over by her emotions in that moment. 

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She was strategic with her emotions. She was making a point. This is what you're doing to our marriage. And she smashed the saucers so that he could see it. And he got the message. She also knew her husband, she knew what would speak to him. 

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This is not a lesson that I would prescribe to you or to my therapy clients. This is a lesson rooted in emotional intelligence. The moral of this story isn't to break wedding dishes to get your spouse's attention. That is not what this story is about. This is a story about emotional intelligence. 

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She was in command of her emotions. She understood them and she harnessed their power to express effectively in a way that she knew this man that she loved and knew very well could hear. The moral of this story is emotional intelligence. 

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What are you facing, whether as a parent, whether as a spouse, whether as a friend that is igniting some emotion inside of you, you're aware of it, you understand it, you're regulating it, and then you begin to think to yourself, what is the best way to express what I need to express in this situation in a strategic way?

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That's emotional intelligence. It's a skill we all need to develop to become the fullest, truest version of our God made selves.

We are all creating the future version of ourselves every single day. We're either moving toward wholeness-or we're moving toward fragmentation. In this brand-new September series, I'm walking you through the most important steps you can take to cultivate resilience, embrace authenticity, and nurture intimacy.

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Today's episode kicks us off with an overview of the key challenges we all face throughout the course of our lives. Here's what you'll learn:

1. The 8 challenges we face from childhood to old age

2. The #1 challenge most of us are still working to resolve

3. Why identity precedes intimacy

4. A proven exercise to help you become your ideal self

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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.

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Resources

• ‍The Best of You Paperback Edition
• ‍More on the stages of psychosocial development, according to Erik Erickson
• ‍Genesis 2:23-25

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Transcript

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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 can't believe it's September. We're in the fall officially. I guess not officially, but it feels as if it's official.

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The kids are back in school and the summer feels like it's for the most part over. This week, we're going to launch a new series. I'm so excited about it. It's one of my favorite things to do. It's called Psych 101, and we're going to go through all of these basics of what it means to become a whole person who can function as an individual, who can function in relationships, who knows how to set healthy boundaries, who knows how to assess and understand misbehaviors and incongruencies in the people around you, someone who has healthy communication skills.

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We're going to go through all the things–this is the stuff I love. This is the teacher in me. It's going to be so much more fun than your old, boring textbooks. I'm going to use real life examples and practical applications so that this becomes your go to guide for everything you need to become a whole healed person. I want to equip you to engage this life God has given you with as many resources as I can. 

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So we're going to kick things off this week with an annotated excerpt from chapter four of the best of you. Now there's a couple of reasons for this. Number one, big announcement: The Best of You is out in paperback this week. So if you've been waiting to get your copy until the price goes down or until the paperback version comes out, this is your week, and so to celebrate that and to celebrate this new series, I'm going to turn to chapter four this week, where I talk about the eight stages of development.

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Now, I promise you, this is such rich, good stuff that is going to help you navigate your life better. It's going to help you understand your childhood and what you did or didn't get. It's going to help you understand how to parent your own children. It's going to help you understand how to reparent yourself. It's going to help you understand the whole context of your life. 

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Now, here's the thing I love the most. You're also going to be able to identify the current stage of life you're in. Each of these stages of life, according to Eric Erickson, who came up with these stages of development has a crisis that you need to resolve.

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Now it doesn't have to be a literal crisis. It's more of a milestone. It's a way of naming the particular season you're in and the different milestones you want to achieve in each of those seasons.

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I love this framework. I think it's super helpful. So without further ado, let's dive into these eight markers of maturity. These eight milestones that help you understand where you are in your own life journey and how to take charge of your own growth.

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Inevitably, when a client comes into my office, they bring me a problem. Usually it's a problem with another person or sometimes it's a problem with their own emotions or the way they're seeing themselves or the world. Regardless, that problem lies within the context of your whole story, the story of your life. The problem that you face today is rooted in a whole grand narrative of the person you've taken yourself to be for your whole life.

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This applies to little problems, and this applies to big problems. If you're having a problem with a child or the way that you're parenting, almost always there's something going on. Inside of you that has a long tail all the way back to the way that you were treated, a message you picked up, a value you've latched onto that may or may not be relevant to the current situation with your child, or if you're having trouble with a parent or with a friend or with a spouse, the first thing we've got to do is get a bigger picture about your journey, about your story. 

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And if you imagine your life as a path with a beginning, a middle, and an end, in order to understand where you are now, we've got to look back to where you've been. We've got to look forward to where you want to go. And we've got to locate where you are now. So we're going to start by looking back.

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Now this is an excerpt, which I'm going to annotate from chapter four of The Best of You.

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Most people aren't born with a deep sense of confidence and clarity about who they are. Instead, children need a healthy environment and guidance at key junctures to develop. In fact, renowned psychologist, Eric Erickson, identified eight stages of identity development. These are the eight stages we're going to go through today.

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Each one represents a milestone you must overcome. And these eight stages highlight that becoming your true self, becoming this whole person, this person that's equipped to face whatever challenges that you face is a process that spans an entire lifetime. It's never one and done. Always in process.

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Here are the eight steps. Number one is infancy. This is really in your first year of life and the milestone you're resolving during these years is trust versus mistrust. That means the central issue that you're going to face in that first year of life that any child is going to face during that first year of life is whether they can develop a sense of safety, a sense of trust in the world and in the people around him or her. Or a sense of mistrust, a sense that the world is not safe. 

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The second stage is early childhood, the first two to three years of life. And the milestone that you have to resolve is autonomy versus shame and doubt. Now, autonomy is this idea of your individuality, your independence, that you have a being, a you ness That's separate from other people. So there's a little bit of individuation that starts to happen when you think of toddlers in those first few years.

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They start to explore away from the caregiver. They start to have a sense of their own autonomy when this milestone is not resolved. A child might develop a sense of shame or a sense of self doubt deeply at his or her core. Where there's this sense of, I can't make it on my own.

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And that child might want to stay blended or merged with the primary caregiver. Now, paradoxically, when this milestone is not resolved, it's typically because there's an. Insecure attachment. So this gets back to attachment. The more secure the attachment with that primary caregiver, the more the child is able to individuate and explore the world around her.

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But when there's an insecure attachment, that child tends to cling, that child tends to want that security. So they stay closer in an unhealthy way to that primary caregiver. All right. Number three, this is the preschool years, ages four to five, roughly. And the milestone is initiative versus guilt.

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During this stage, children began to understand their power in the world. They can take initiative. They might initiate social interactions with other kids. They might initiate work. You might start to notice what they like, what they don't like. When they resolve this milestone, they gain a sense of purpose. They gain a sense of agency, a sense of, I can affect change in my world. I can ask a friend to play and they say, sure, I'd love to play with you. And that feels good inside my body, as a little young child.

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So they begin to develop that sense of purpose. On the other hand, if they don't resolve this milestone, they might develop a core sense of guilt, a sense of being bad or not good enough or not being valuable or having purpose with other people or in the world around them. 

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Number four is during the early school years. And the milestone is industry versus inferiority. Now, again, these aren't necessarily always sequential, but you can think about this when you think about your own kids, that they're walking themselves through these developmental stages.

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And during those early school years, roughly ages six to 11 or 12, children start to cope with new social environments. They start to cope with new academic demands. They begin to develop a sense of competence. They believe in their own power to achieve their self efficacy.

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Which is industry. Or if they don't resolve this milestone successfully, they might develop a sense of inferiority, a feeling of being less than. Other people, this is a big age during which we begin to compare ourselves to others. So often when I work with clients and we're dealing with comparison or inferiority or feeling less than a lot of the memories that surface go back to this age, this fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, when you start to take inventory of yourself as you compare yourself against other people. That's age appropriate at that age. 

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When we get stuck in this stage of development, we bring a lot of that into our adult years. Again, there's no shame in any of this. I'm  trying to describe the process of what development looks like. 

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Okay. Number five happens more during adolescence, during the teen years. This is identity versus role confusion. If you think about your teenagers, your young adults, they're working on finding their identity. They're trying to understand themselves. Who am I? What do I like? Where do I fit into this pecking order? That's what they're trying to resolve, a strong sense of self, a strong sense of this is who I am.

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This is where I fit in. This is how I belong. I'm not like everybody else. I am who I am. This is where, when it's resolved in a healthy way, you start to have a sense of wanting to be true or faithful to your own self. Now I know right here, is where a lot of us are like, no, that didn't happen to me. And this is a lot of what my book, The Best of You is all about. It's repairing the wound at that core sense of self, that core sense of identity where we didn't really. Arriving at that strong sense of this is who I am. I am who I am.

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I can assess myself. I have a healthy self concept. I know who I am. I can reflect on myself. I know how I'm different from other people. I've accepted myself. This doesn't often get resolved in those teenage years, especially for those of us who were parented in earlier decades. 

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We talked about this in episode 66 with Sissy Goff, where Sissy and I were talking about how we were raised in the 70s and 80s versus how kids are raised now and how in many ways a lot of us are over parenting to correct some of the deficits in the parenting we got because so many of us didn't find this sense of Agency, this sense of self confidence, this sense of identity that is so critical for children to find in these early tween and teen years.

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So it's great that we're working to help our kids develop this core sense of self. It's also important that we do the work in our own lives. It's also important for us to continue to do that work in our own lives.

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So now we move into the adult years. Now, Erickson hypothesized that this next stage, intimacy versus isolation, could last anywhere from age 19 to 40 years, and I actually like it that there's such a broad span on that, especially in our modern era where research shows that are young adult children are taking longer to leave the nest in many ways they're marrying later.

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They're staying closer to family longer. And so many of them are still reconciling with this intimacy versus isolation well into their twenties versus at the age of 19. 

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That's not to say it doesn't happen, but the idea in this stage, intimacy versus isolation is that young adults need to begin to form intimate, loving relationships with other people, and they'll begin to experience love, the seedbed for creating a partnership, for creating a family for beginning to create a legacy of their own.

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The Bible talks about this process of development where we leave our own family of origin, our own parents and cleave to someone else. This is a natural part of psychological development. We grow up, we leave the nest, we find someone of our own, we set up a life. And the cycle of life continues, it's beautiful. 

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But there can be disruptions in this stage of life where perhaps you reach adulthood and you're able to work and you're doing all sorts of great things, but you really struggle with intimacy.

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You really struggle with forging a deep, meaningful, intimate partnership with another person. Again, there's no shame in this. In fact, in many ways, this was part of my story. It took me years into adulthood to learn how to develop intimacy. I had good work, I had great friends, but dating was a challenge for me.

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I struggled in this area and I work with a lot of people who do, whether you're married and struggled to form a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship with your partner, or whether you stay single and struggle to develop an intimate relationship, that is the milestone of this young adult season from the age of roughly 19 to 40.

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Next, number seven, the stage is generativity versus stagnation. Erickson hypothesized this was the milestone of middle adulthood from roughly age 40 to 65. Again, those numbers change a little bit as people are retiring later, as people are working longer, But the theme really holds true.

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This stage is characterized by learning to create good work, by learning to understand your legacy, your generativity, your contribution to this world. It might be through raising your kids. It might be through the work that you do. It might be through ministry or through service, but during this season, you're really cultivating that lasting impact you're having.

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And it results in a sense of stewardship, a sense of care. When you navigate this milestone, and oftentimes if you're a mom who's been raising kids, you might go through a couple of phases with this.

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You might have a first phase of really pouring into your kids, and then as your kids get a little older, you might go through another phase of figuring out another way that you want to contribute. You see this also with people who have different careers. 

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The first leg of their life is building their career. And then as they get into their forties and fifties, they think more about how do I want to help others? How do I want to take some of the success I've gained and poured into the next generation? Now, again, these steps are. iterative. They're not necessarily always sequential. You might have been doing some of this in your twenties and thirties, but in general,

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This is a helpful guideline to think about the different stage of life you're in. And then finally, I love this. I love that Erickson goes through the whole life. We look at number eight, integrity versus despair. Erickson estimated this roughly late adulthood after 65.

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Again, in our modern era where we're living longer, this might be coming at 70, 75, even 80, depending on your health and your relationship to work and family. But in this stage, this older age, the milestone is this sense of integrity, this sense of a life well lived, this sense of looking back over your life and feeling good about the choices you've made and making peace with the choices you wish you hadn't made.

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That's what we mean by integrity. There's a sense of wisdom. Of bringing things together before God, of reflecting and finding peace and integrity in the wholeness of your life. And then if this milestone or the preceding milestones that led up to it, don't get resolved, it can lead to despair.

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It can lead to a really hard relationship with aging. And I see this too. I see folks who haven't done the work and they're hanging on to old ways and they're hanging onto old grudges and they're hanging on to old resentments and they're hanging on to old shame. And it only gets worse as they age.

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You're moving in one of two directions throughout your life. You're moving toward growth, you're moving toward wholeness or. You're moving toward the opposite. You're moving toward fragmentation. You're moving toward disintegration, which ultimately leads to shame and despair.

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These are the consequences of the choices we make in life. Here's the good news. It is never too late to begin to tackle the milestones of whatever season of life that you're facing. 

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Now I go through this whole process of forming an identity, forming your sense of you-ness, as I like to say, your sense of selfhood, wherever you are. That is the topic of The Best of You. The whole book takes you through that whole process of becoming a whole person, a whole you and all of those spokes that come out of it.

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It's not about you. It's so that you can contribute to a legacy. It's so that you can live a life of purpose. It's so that you can live a life of integrity. It's so that you can live a life that's characterized by intimacy and meaningful relationships. That's the purpose of developing a strong sense of self.

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And I think it's so important to understand in this world where we can focus so much on love, we can focus so much on finding that one right person, we can focus so much on finding that one right friend, when the best way to do that so often is to first focus on the work of becoming true to your own God given self.

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Here's what I call I before we, here's what is critical to understand when it comes to establishing relationships as an adult, identity is necessary for intimacy. This means that a healthy sense of self is vital to creating healthy relationships with other people.

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Now, listen, this is true in marriage. This is true with friends. This is true with your kids. This is true with your parents. It's not  true for you. It's also true for the other person. If you have a strong sense of self and the other person has a strong sense of self, you're going to be able to forge a great relationship.

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But if you have a strong sense of self and the other person is stuck and not growing, it's going to be really hard to forge a healthy relationship with that person.

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In fact, in Erickson's framework, a stable sense of self grows out of years of cultivating deep roots as you seek to understand your purpose, your challenges, the gifts you have to bring, and it's out of this strong sense of self that you learn the meaning of what Erickson calls fidelity or faithfulness.

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This is a fruit of the spirit. Which I define in the psychological sense as the ability to commit yourself to other people and to the world around you with integrity.

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It's really hard to demonstrate faithfulness to others in a wise way, in a healthy way, if you don't first know how to be faithful to yourself. Furthermore, faithfulness to yourself, I would argue, shows faithfulness to the God who made you.

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Faithfulness to God involves faithfulness to self. Faithfulness to self involves faithfulness to God, the two go hand in hand. Faithfulness to yourself involves understanding what you need to thrive. It means prioritizing the care of your mind, your heart, your body, your soul. , it involves honoring the unique gifts God has given you.

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Faithfulness to someone else involves understanding what they need to thrive, prioritizing the care of their mind, heart, body, and soul, and honoring the unique gifts God has given them. Do you see how both matter? I'm faithful to myself. And I'm faithful to you as I'm faithful to you and I honor you. I'm also simultaneously needing to be faithful to myself.

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Both matter. One cannot exist without the other. It's difficult to show up faithfully for someone else if you don't also know how to show up faithfully for yourself. But most people don't arrive at adulthood with a strong sense of self and to complicate the situation Most people enter into their most important relationships with other people before healing Their own sense of self

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Instead of seeking to heal ourselves first we jump right into relationships as a cure for all that hurts as you think about your relationships. Did you jump into a relationship before you really understood yourself? Now that doesn't mean that you jumped into an unhealthy relationship.

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It's possible that the relationship you jumped into has helped you nurture a strong sense of self. That's great. It also might mean you jumped into a relationship where you have to backtrack a bit. Doesn't mean the relationship is bad. Doesn't mean you need to throw the relationship away. It does mean you might need to pause for a minute right where you are and do some work to catch up to yourself. To catch up to the wholeness of who you are so that you can bring more of your full self into. Your relationship.

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Think about your own experience. 

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Did you have that strong sense of fidelity to your God given self as you entered into adulthood? Think about that younger you. For a moment. What was she like? What was she looking for? Did she stumble into a relationship that actually in many ways has become that safe crucible in which she can grow and develop and become more of her true self?

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Or did she stumble into a relationship that became a source of pain, a source of anguish, a source of taking her away. That's okay. Whatever it is, notice and take comfort in the fact that you're not alone. There's not one path to wholeness. Whichever path you chose, it's never too late to course correct.

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Here's what I know to be true. If you're willing to face yourself, honestly, including what's hard, you can heal your core sense of self. You can heal it within the context of your relationship. You can also heal it in yourself.

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The beauty of this work yields incredible results. As you heal yourself, you will start to create the relationships you crave. Now, listen, I'm not saying every relationship will magically fall into place, but I am saying this, as you heal yourself, you'll start to discover the kind of people that you truly want and need to bring into your life.

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And you start to honor what I call the I inside of you. Becoming your true self is not a destination you arrive at. It's not a process of trying to make all your relationships perfect. 

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Instead it's the work so often of going back to those very formative first four building blocks where you learn to regain a sense of safety, a sense of trust, if you didn't get it early on. It's the work of developing that sense of safety in yourself and with God.

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It's the work of developing that sense of autonomy, of identifying what you think and what you feel. It doesn't mean you always act on what you think and what you feel, but you can identify it, you can name it, you can honor your own autonomy. 

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It means going back to those early stages of when you first tried to show initiative and correcting painful experiences. It might be learning how to reframe messages of guilt or self doubt in your mind, going back to those painful wounds where someone made fun of you, where someone didn't guide you through the jungle of social survival early on. 

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It's learning how to reparent yourself as you bravely take a step to reach out to new friends at this stage of your life. It's the work of going back to that place of industry versus inferiority, where maybe you struggled in school or you struggled with a task and you started comparing yourself negatively to other people.

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It's the work of going back and naming that and healing that wound and then updating yourself that you no longer live in that place. You can now take brave steps to develop a sense of agency in your life. It might mean taking a step to pursue a dream, write a blog, take a job, learn a skill.

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And instead of shaming or guilting yourself, reframing those messages. This has been hard. No one taught me how I wasn't guided through a process of learning how to develop my purpose, but I can do it now. I can walk myself through it with kindness, with gentleness. I can bring people around me who encourage me instead of knocking me down. 

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You can go back to those first four roots and develop a sense inside of what it means to feel safe, to feel seen, to have purpose and to understand without a doubt that you are irreplaceable and that no one can take your place on this earth. This is the work of wholeness. The work of healing.

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As I read through those eight stages and gave you a little snapshot of each one, I want you to think about which one stood out to you the most: which one you feel like you might still be needing to resolve. 

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And then I want you to ask yourself some of the following questions. Number one, when have you felt safe with someone? 

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Who or what made you feel seen? 

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When did you last feel a sense of purpose? 

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What do you like about yourself and what is your sense of how God sees you? 

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And notice what comes up as you consider those questions.

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Here's what I love about these eight milestones of development. It's not about looking back. It's also about looking forward. It's about envisioning where you want to get. And so to close, I'm going to read to you this benediction I wrote for the best of you about envisioning your future self. Take a moment to envision your future.

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Think about those milestones we talked about, that integrity you want to have as you look back over your life, that generativity, that feeling of having contributed what you feel you could contribute. And as you envision that future self, however many years from now, imagine her free of the weight of your current pain, a future version of yourself who has moved through the darkness and found an even better place. She knows who she is. She knows how to experience deep intimacy. She knows what she has to give and she has a sense of integrity.

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Envision her in detail. What does she look like? What is she doing? Where? Who is with her? 

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And as you envision that future version of you, that future version of what you want to feel like, of what you want to experience as you look back at yourself right now, 

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Ask yourself, how would this future version of you understand the current situation you're facing? The current decision you might need to make the current struggle that you have. Maybe it's your self-doubt, maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's confusion. Whatever it is, imagine that best version of yourself, that person you long to become in your future and ask yourself how would she respond in this situation? What qualities does that future version of you have readily available to her? Is it wisdom?

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Is it confidence? Is it strength to know that this is hard, but it really is going to work out? Imagining that future version of yourself, that place you want to get. What Erickson calls integrity, can help you shape the decisions you make right now.

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So as you move today, consider who you want to be in the future. That person you want to be in the future and then take a look at where you are right now and take one brave step toward becoming a truer version of yourself.