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Choose a category to narrow your search
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.
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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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- DrAlisonCook.com/podcast
- dralisoncook.com/resources
- Psychologytoday.com
- Adverse Childhood Experiences Test
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of the Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you'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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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?
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.
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.
We have all different ways of getting support. We go to church communities for spiritual support. We go to medical doctors for physical support.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
(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.
The main ones you might consider are:
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- DBT/dialectical behavior therapy, which is a form of CBT, which brings in mindfulness strategies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- 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
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's the big picture goal here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Essentially what Goleman hypothesized is that EQ or emotional intelligence is as important, if not more important than IQ.
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.
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.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to do five different things as they relate to your emotions.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now, there's actually a fifth component to emotional intelligence, and that is the ability to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others.
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.
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.
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?
That's getting at this fifth part of emotional intelligence. It involves the ability to recognize, understand, and even influence the emotions of others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That seems like a simple example, but imagine what happens when none of those steps of emotional intelligence are in place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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?
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.
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,
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Thanks to our sponsors:
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- The Best of You Paperback Edition
- More on the stages of psychosocial development, according to Erik Erickson
- Genesis 2:23-25
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I can't believe it's September. We're in the fall officially. I guess not officially, but it feels as if it's official.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now this is an excerpt, which I'm going to annotate from chapter four of The Best of You.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Think about your own experience.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And then I want you to ask yourself some of the following questions. Number one, when have you felt safe with someone?
Who or what made you feel seen?
When did you last feel a sense of purpose?
What do you like about yourself and what is your sense of how God sees you?
And notice what comes up as you consider those questions.
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.
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.
Envision her in detail. What does she look like? What is she doing? Where? Who is with her?
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,
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?
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.
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.
I absolutely loved this conversation with Alli Worthington. We get so real about the toxic traps all around and how to stay sane as a parent. From "parenting book trauma" to bad advice about friendships, we've got you covered. You'll learn practical tips & fascinating research from Alli's new book, Remaining You While Raising Them. Alli's a business owner, podcast host, and the mom of 6 kids.
Here's what we cover:
1. The #1 source of mom guilt
2. The most important question to ask yourself each day
3. How parenting failures actually help kids
4. The surprising research on which relationships are happiest
5. Which friends to keep, and which ones to release
Resources
- Remaining You While Raising Them by Alli Worthington (click here for Audible version)
- AlliWorthington.com
- Listen to The Alli Worthington Show
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- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
- Go to www.simplemodern.com/bestofyou and by sharing your email you'll get a unique discount code just for you or bundle and save for back to school. This should be your go to brand for your family.
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.
Transcript
Alison: Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of the best of you podcast where we are rounding out and closing out this little series on back to school where we're talking all about parenting and kids and how to just be present and attuned to the different things that the young ones in our lives are struggling with and how to bring our best selves into those conversations and into those roles, whether it's as a mom, a big sister, a grandma, an aunt, a godparent, whatever the role is that you have in front of you, maybe you're just someone who is fairly young yourself and just feels like some of this relates to you.
And how do you begin to learn? Whatever role in whatever capacity that you are, where you are trying to, and you'll whatever role you're in this whole series, if you've noticed a theme, the theme is the more we become whole ourselves, the more we become The people that God wants us to be healthy, emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually.
The more we're tending to our own heart, souls, mind, emotion, becoming clear, capable, confident, courageous in our own lives. The better we're going to be for the people who we love, especially our kids. And that's why I'm so excited to round this out with a conversation with a new friend of mine, Alli Worthington.
And Alli has a new book out and the title just really speaks for itself. The title of this book is Remaining You While Raising Them.
And I just, I love the idea behind everything Alli is doing, which is the more we are ourselves, the more we are caring for and attuning to and healing and becoming more and more clear about the people that God made us to be, the more we're going to be able to show up for our kids in an effective way.
It's really hard to shepherd, to lead others. It's really hard to lead. Others through the challenges that they face if we haven't done our own work, right? If we haven't navigated, if we haven't blazed those trails first. And so in today's conversation, I'm so excited. I'm so thrilled to introduce you to today's conversation.
Today's conversation is for every mom who's felt overwhelmed or frankly, a little bit overwrought by all of the information that's out there for parents. Alli just has a great way. You'll hear it in today's episode of just applying practical tips to everyday life. And she's come by her wisdom the hard way. She will tell a little bit about her story in the episode, but she really had to go back to work after a financial crisis in her own family while parenting five boys and a stepdaughter.
So she has lived what she talks to us about every single day. Alli Worthington lives outside Nashville with her husband, Mark, their five sons, and their five sons, she with their, with her husband, Mark, and their five sons. She's a popular Christian woman speaker who travels the country sharing practical advice and encouragement.
She hosts. It's a weekly podcast called the Alli Worthington show. And she's a sought after coach and consultant who has worked with individuals, small business owners and fortune 500 companies. She built her business in 2008 after her family went bankrupt with 42 in the bank and here she is. And she had to do all of that while taking care of these precious babies all around her.
I am so thrilled for this conversation today on how to remain yourself while raising them with Alli Worthington.
*Music*
Alison: Thank you so much, Alli, for being here today. I'm just super excited about this new book and I love the title: Remaining You While Raising Them. You have five boys and a stepdaughter. Is that right, Alli?
Alli: Yep. A lot of children.
Alison: Yes. So I would love to start there. Actually you tell a story in the book about early on in parenting when a teacher reprimanded you a little bit for not having looked in the proper folder for one of your And you had, you talk in the story about how you had gone back to work, you and your husband had lost a home, you'd had a financial crisis, you had, I don't know how many kids you had at this point of this story and you'd started working and I love the picture that you paint.
You had literally set up a business kind of in the middle of your home and I'm just imagining all the chaos around it and you'd really struggled with beating yourself up. And I'd love to just start there for a moment. What were some myths that you still believed as a mom at that point in your early parenting ?
Alli: Yeah. Such a great question. So all five boys were here on earth at this point. This was my middle son. He's in preschool and in preschool they give you a folder full of nonsense and it's, what time did they go to potty, and some scribble that they did and who knows what else, right?
It's not nuclear codes that they're sending home every day as my husband reminded me. The teacher took it very seriously as you want a preschool teacher to do, but I'm coming in, I have all these children. I have a newborn on my arm. I have a business that I have that I'm working on my computer in my living room because I can't even get to my home office, because I'm always with the kids. And this sweet teacher says, I know you don't look in the yellow folder, but there's something really important for you to look at today.
She didn't just say it to me. She said it with all the other moms around. So I just have this weight of mom guilt that my work that I'm doing, my job, the company I'm building, it is ruining my children. I am a terrible mom. My children are suffering. And what stopped me from quitting is we didn't have the financial privilege for me to quit. As you mentioned, I was a stay home mom, and was very happy in the stay home mom role in 2008.
My husband lost his job. We ended up losing our home. We lost almost everything except what fit into two storage units. And I knew after that it was going to take my husband's job plus me starting my company to make sure that we were okay. But had I not had the financial pressure, I think I would have quit.
And I think I wouldn't have followed my calling to build what I built through the years. Now I can look back now and go, he was fine. There weren't any nuclear codes in the folder. It was just to make sure he wore a certain color of socks the next day. But we as moms are so hard on ourselves. And we sometimes think that every little decision we make and every little thing we do is make or break for our children's lives.
Alison: Yeah, I just love the benefit of hindsight, right? You can look back and go, it was a yellow folder. It was a pair of socks, but it doesn't feel that way in the moment. And I think the more you're juggling in a way, the more pressure you can put on yourself. You say in the book, you say, thank God I didn't have the financial privilege to quit.
And I thought that was such a provocative statement that in the moment, and you might have had that been an option for you, but with hindsight, what is it about juggling both the work that you ended up doing in the parenting that you're grateful for looking back, even though perhaps at the moment you felt like the guilt of it's taking me away from my kids, or it's taking me away from the yellow folder.
Alli: I can look back now that I have most of my children at adulthood or beyond. I have two that are still in high school, a freshman in high school and a junior. And I can look back on my work through the years. And no, for sure it didn't harm them. But I was convinced at the time I was harming them. My youngest used to come up to me in the living room when they were all playing and smack my MacBook closed and say, no more work, mommy. And I would go, oh, I'm damaging him forever.
He's just fine. So the stories that I told myself of, I'm hurting my children, my attention is divided, I'm going to have so much in therapy bills just because I was building this company when they were little. None of that happened.
That it is for us to be great moms. We need to model emotional health. We need to take care of ourselves as we're taking care of them. Being a great mom doesn't mean I sat around on the floor and braided everyone's hair and taught them Latin and we knitted socks for the poor. Now, if some moms have the time to do that, that's great.
But sometimes we think that we have to go over and above to be good moms. There are moms who grow their own organic wheat in the backyard and make fresh sandwiches every day. And if it makes them happy, that's great, but it's not what every mom has to do.
Alison: That's right. And you're making such a good point here that if you're doing that because it lights up your own heart, that will spill over to the kids as well, right? Because the kids will pick up, are you doing this because this is just what brings you joy, therefore vicariously it brings all of us joy, whether it's whatever the work is, or are you doing this out of some guilt?
You talk about as a little girl watching, and this really stood out to me because I related to it, watching the women in your family, the older women in your family, just killing themselves to put on these lavish holiday meals and being bitter and resentful.
And you do a great job of implying they didn't feel as if they could give themselves permission not to do it, but there were a lot of ways in which they were doing that not because it lit up their own hearts. They were doing that because they felt like they had to. Tell me a little bit more about that.
Alli: Yeah, I'll never forget. I was eight years old. The first time I noticed it and it was my great aunt, Shirley. She had everyone over for a Christmas celebration, and she's loving, and she's kind, and she's nice, and she's doing everything right, and she had cooked for days. And she told everyone she cooked for days, often.
And I couldn't tell at eight because she was smiling and her words were coming out sweet, but I knew something was wrong. And I knew whatever was going on, I did not want to be a part of. So even though this Christmas celebration with amazing food and presents, even though it was a “happy time”, I wasn't happy being there because I could feel the tension.
It wasn't until I got older and after she passed away, some family members said, oh, she hated cooking all that time. She hated hosting. But she did not feel like she could say anything because she felt like the way for her to be a quote unquote good mom, good family member, was to do all this.
When she felt like she had permission, she could have raised her hand and said, hey, everybody bring a dish. Or I'll do it this year, you guys do it next year. But she felt like that was her role. And as much as she tried to be loving, the resentment and the bitterness came out. And so we can quote unquote, do all the right things. But if it doesn't light our soul on fire, everybody's going to know it.
Alison: Yeah. They'll pick that up. When did you start throughout this journey of parenting, when did you start to arrive at some of these conclusions that you're walking us through in the book –taking good care of yourself, being your most healthy version of you and who God made you to be? When did you begin to really lean into that as a mom and how did you come to that?
Alli: I think it was slow, a lot of it did have to do with watching the women in my family. I grew up with a family who is relatively poor. And I remember when I was getting ready to have my first child, making the decision that for as much as I could, I didn't want to be a mom that didn't take care of herself.
I didn't want to be a mom who had holes in her shoes and her kids didn't. Not that I wanted to force everybody, but I saw how the women in my family had struggled financially, and I knew that I wanted to do everything I could to not just take care of my children, but to make sure that I, as a mom, was taken care of too.
That I didn't have to be a martyr as a mother, and that's just a from a practical sense of growing up in poverty and that slowly just through reading a lot of books and a lot of therapy that I had, they ended up getting through the years turned into I not only need to make sure that I'm okay physically, I need to make sure that I'm okay emotionally because everybody has an Aunt Shirley in their family that feels like she can't speak up for her needs and she's bitter about it.
I didn't want to turn into Aunt Shirley in whatever way that happened because it happens to women really dangerously easily. And I wanted to protect myself from that.
Alison: Yeah. That's interesting. So you had a template in your mind that you very consciously were trying to counter in your own life and which led you to just continually work against that guilt tripping voice in your head. You had it initially, the guilt tripping voice, but you were able to counter it along the way.
Tell us a little bit about these myths. These guilting myths that so many moms, your friends, people in your life, people you work with, that you see time and again.
Alli: Two of the biggest ones are that if we are good moms, our children should be well behaved. That one is huge. And the second one is that we should get it all right. We should essentially be super moms. And the super mom one is so interesting. I'm a huge fan of the Wonder Woman movies. Love them. Love the gold cuffs. Love her whole vibe.
But I was thinking about how if Wonder Woman were a mother, she would completely ruin her child's ability to deal with anybody in the real world because she'd be perfect. She wouldn't struggle. She wouldn't mess up. She wouldn't have to go to her kids and apologize for losing her temper. She wouldn't have to repair a relationship because she does everything right. So her kids go out in the world and they have no ability to deal with real people.
And so that changed my perspective to a mom who does work to be healthy in the sense that yes, we're going to lose our temper and we're going to apologize. We're going to repair a relationship. We are going to verbalize when we have needs. We're going to be able to have boundaries and let our children watch us grow.
We're setting our kids up to be able to be in real healthy relationships when they're older. And if we did everything perfect, we wouldn't. If we did everything perfect, they would go away to college and just be a mess because they couldn't deal with the fallibility of humans.
Alison: I love that. I never thought about it that way, but I often say to people, in the therapy world, sometimes I feel like we put a number on parents because we talk a lot about the importance of parents, that we are the first secure attachment. We are the first place where our kids experience presence.
In fact, a lot of research in the psychology of religion talks about how we are the first glimpse of how kids conceptualize God, right? Because we're that first safe figure. That can put a lot of pressure on parents, but I love what you're saying. Cause in a way, what you're saying is we're also their first glimpse of what a human is.
And how to deal with a human. And so both things can be true. We're incredibly important in providing that first glimpse of safety, that first glimpse of love and presence and unconditional regard. And we're also that first opportunity to work out things that are hard, to see when someone messes up, what they do with it. I love that perspective.
Alli: Yeah, and you can really think about it in terms of when a child is very small, that's when we're always there to comfort and we're building that secure attachment. But as a child gets bigger between years, teen years, especially even elementary years, your child needs to slowly see you as more and more of a human because you are setting that child up for successful relationships in the future. And if we have this mask of perfection, it's not going to help them deal with people in the real world.
Alison: You're right that especially as they age and especially as they develop, we're coming alongside them, another set of eyeballs on the realities of life and a lot of modeling. And again, which gets to the topic of your book, which is the more we've done the work of becoming healthy, the more we've done the work of making peace with the things about ourselves that we don't like with other people, with challenges, with complexities, the more we're going to be able to lead them through their own challenges and frustrations.
Alli: Yeah. And it's been so interesting as people are reading the book, I've heard a couple of different things that have been very surprising. One is that I don't want to negate the importance of the word trauma, but I've nicknamed it parenting book trauma. So many women who've said, oh, I read this parenting book and I couldn't finish it. I wish I never read it. I felt ashamed because I couldn't live up to these standards.
So even talking about motherhood brings up a lot of really triggering feelings for women. And then another thing that I've heard often is, oh, I wish I would've had this book when my kids were young, but really this book is as much for women who have teens and tweens and adult children because for me, what my what my husband and I discovered having adult children is we can't really guilt them into coming to see us.
We have to make sure we're the best versions of us possible to woo them to us, so it’s interesting, just the conversations of all of the terrible experiences that women have had reading parenting books in the past, but also the fact that for some women, we really put ourselves on the shelf and don't work on ourselves in terms of our motherhood after the first year of having our babies.
Alison: Paradoxically, it's not only harmful for us, it does a disservice to our kids. We actually aren't servicing them. I love what you're saying about being the parent of adult children. I found that to be true in my life. And I say this a lot that one of the things you want to do to have a healthy relationship with your kids all the way into your old age as they become adults is frankly, to be so okay with yourself that you're right there when they come back with you to tell you the things that you didn't do quite right,
Alli: –Right.
Alison: –because the more they grow and the more they change and the more they get a little bit of their own perspective on life, they're going to come back and say, wait, why did you do that thing? Or what was that? Or this is what, and the more we've done the work and we can go, yeah.
And we're not triggered by that and we just sit with them and let them process that with us. That's where that connection stays alive. It's not through trying to be perfect or trying to avoid that conversation, right? That's where intimacy comes in. That's the good stuff in any relationship. It's not that we never have the rupture. It's that we really know how to lean into that repair.
Alli: Oh, yeah, or at least we can pretend we aren't too triggered and then we can go deal with it later.
Alison: We can do our deep breathing
Alli: Yep.
Alison: Tell us about, you talk a little bit in the book about different types of moms. Tell me a little bit about that.
Alli: I think that for most of us, we have this idea in our head of what a quote unquote good mom is. And we've all picked that up. Maybe we saw something in childhood or it's just from the awful social media messaging that we're getting all the time. But it is not as if our children are in our lives accidentally.
We are placed together in families by divine design, whether adoption or by birth. And once we look at ourselves and go, what are my strengths? What kind of mom am I? What am I leaning into? Once we can do that, we can stop beating ourselves up for the strengths we don't have. Like me, I'm not outdoorsy.
My cousin, she's an outdoorsy mom. They're always hiking or kayaking. I only want to be outdoors if I'm at an amusement park. Or I'm at Disney World or something luxurious. That's my outdoors, and that's my thing. I like to ride roller coasters with kids, and I like to do fun things like that. My cousin would never do that in a million years.
She wants to be in a kayak. There are moms who love crafts. There are moms who have an organic garden, and they're teaching kids about growing your own food and homesteading. And once we look at how we go about life, what our strengths are, what our passions are, and then go, this is who I am. And this is actually good for my kids.
Because my kids are placed with me by divine design. It's not like us leaning into the fullness of who we are is going to hurt our children unless the fullness of who we are is to be an assassin. But my guess is no one listening right now is gosh, my, the fullness of my life is an assassin, but we really look at our personalities and go, this is my design. My kids will benefit from this. I don't need to mother in any way that isn't natural for me. I think that's really powerful for women.
Alison: It's almost like a strength based approach to parenting. You think about the strengthsfinder, we've talked about that here, where you identify what I have to bring and you do better if you lean into your strengths versus beating yourself up for the things that are not your natural strengths, a great way to look at it.
And I think it's interesting, you've got the parenting book trauma that you described. And also, if you add on to that, the social media comparison trap. Because that's where you're seeing all of that, right? You're seeing all the pictures of all the things you're not doing.
Alli: Oh, yeah. I think social media is such a driver of mom guilt. I did a survey of over a thousand women before I wrote this book to find out what's the biggest trigger of mom guilt. How often do you have it? What's the trigger? It's not us. It's not our spouses. It's not our friends. The number one individual trigger is social media, where you feel like you're doing okay, life is okay, and then all of a sudden you open it up and there's this beautiful video of someone growing organic wheat and you're like darn it.
Alison: Yeah.
Alli: Look at that. I'm not growing organic wheat. I guess I'm a terrible mom after all or whatever it is. We know that social media is a highlight reel, but there is something that happens in our brain. Our brain doesn't know because if we look at family pictures where everyone's dressed in matching clothes and the dog is smiling, and then you look around your house and your teenager's mad or your toddler's having a tantrum and your dog's throwing up in the carpet, something happens in our brain and we can't help but compare.
It's just what happens.
Alison: Yeah. It's that negative voice, right? That cannot see, in that moment, all they see is the perfection in that image and cannot see all those moments, right? That no matter how glamorous or unglamorous they were, that you as a mom were with your child in a moment of need that didn't get captured.
And it's such an important thing that you're naming there to really know and lean into your own strengths. This is not being arrogant. This is healthy pride. Take pride in your own work, take pride in what you're doing. Make a list of it every single day. Write it on your mirror, especially when you're in the weeds of parenting.
Alli: Oh, yeah. And also, I think it is important for us to have conversations like this about the danger of social media. Now, I love social media. I built my company on it. However, if we don't know someone personally and we are following accounts with images and videos of perfection. I am of the belief they should be unfollowed.
Especially because we now have an influencer culture and I'm never going to say, hey, you shouldn't make money however you want to make money. But there are huge accounts out there with images and videos of perfection. And it is all a business. It is not real. If people are selling or people are saying like, here's my outfit and here's a 20% off code, it is a business. It's not natural. And we can't compare our real life to someone else's business model.
Alison: That's a good word. It's a good word. I agree with you. It is just the data on it. The research on it is just unequivocal that it's just not healthy. It's not healthy for our kids to see all the comparison traps. It's not healthy for us. You talk a lot in the book about different habits. What are some things in your own life that have helped you just, again, you've got these five boys, you're running this business, you're in the weeds. What are some of the most helpful tips that have just kept you balanced in those moments?
Alli: That's a great question. One of them, I put in that back section of the book about habits to help us thrive. And it's a simple question that I've learned to ask myself a few times a day. I have pop up reminders that come up on my phone and I ask myself, what do you need right now? Because that question, what do I need?
Most of us go, I have no idea, I haven't thought about myself in so long, but just changing it to what do I need right now has been a game changer for me because sometimes I need a glass of water. Sometimes I need to make lunch plans with a girlfriend because research shows healthy friendships are so important for moms so we don't get taken out by loneliness.
Sometimes I need a housekeeper. Sometimes I need to plan a trip, sometimes I need a snack, it can be big, it can be little, but it keeps me checking in with myself so I don't run myself ragged as a mom and as a business owner. And it lets me check in with myself and also it models for my children that I'm worthy of care.
They are worthy of care and one day they are going to marry women. And we want them to know their wives are worthy of care. They, as their husbands, are worthy of care. We should all be checking in with ourselves every day and going, What do I need right now? What do I need? And give ourselves permission. It's the permission that Aunt Shirley didn't have. And it's the permission that most of us, at different parts in our life, don't feel like we have.
Alison: Yeah, I was just thinking that. Can you imagine if Aunt Shirley had been able to say, what do I need right now? I need someone to get in the kitchen and help me, or whatever it might have been?
The other thing that came to my mind as you were talking was that isn't that what we're trying to teach our children? Learn to ask for what you need, learn to use your words. And so if we're not doing that for ourselves, as they say, more is caught than taught, with kids. So if they don't see us saying, hey, here's what I need right now, how do they learn that's what they need to do?
Alli: Yeah, I could think about so many times in my life I have wanted to play the perfect mom role and I've just sacrificed and then finally I just lose my mind and blow up because I'm so angry because I've just been stuffing my needs for too long. You play nice and you play nice and you play nice and finally you explode and if we can make sure every woman has permission to go, hey, what do I need right now, so we don't have to just play nice.
So we can just continually take care of ourselves, so we don't have to explode. That's the game changer.
Alison: What does it look like for you when you've lost it in a moment with one of your boys? How do you go about the process? This is one of the things women often ask me, how do I apologize to my child? How do I make it right? What do you do when you have had a moment with your kids that you need to go back and repair?
Alli: Oh, it's “I'm so sorry that I did that. I was a jerk in that moment. This is what was going on inside of me”. So I can explain it had nothing to do with them. But it's just, you were unlucky in that moment. And you were part of that moment with me. But I was just like a ticking bomb. And I ask for forgiveness, but just own it.
Alison: Yeah, I love that. I love the modeling for kids when we get it wrong and we go back and let them know because they're going to get it wrong too.
Alli: Oh, yeah. Every day they get it wrong.
Alison: Yeah. And so they're learning. Oh, that's what you do. When you mess up, you just go back and you say, hey, you take responsibility again.
It's not that we're after perfection. It's that we're after that awareness or, again, when you think about that question, what do I need? What do I need right now? I might need a timeout from my kids so I don't explode on them in that moment. And you can say that too to your kids, right now what I need is to just take a little timeout. I'll be back.
Alli: When they were little, I used to do this thing where I would start at 10 and just start counting back to one and they all knew, oh that's mom trying to get ahold of herself and we should scatter or we should be real quiet. Because I was either going to yell at them or I was going to count from ten to one.
And sometimes I counted from ten to one very aggressively. And I didn't understand at the time that it was me regulating my emotions. So I didn't lose it. So I was regulating myself, but it was also a warning to them, hey, we're out of control. Let's give her a moment.
Alison: That's another spin on the counting, the counting to 10. Usually, we're giving kids the time to behave, but we're really giving ourselves the opportunity to stay calm so that when we do enter in, it will not be from that activated place. I love that. What are some other habits? What are some other tips that you found to be particularly helpful in your own parenting?
Alli: Investing in friendships was surprisingly powerful research. I found research that showed that friendships are the happiest relationships, and that our families give us joy and great meaning. But friendships are just happiest because we choose friends because we like them, not because we have to be around them.
And for a friend of mine, author Eric Barker said 30s is where your 30s is where friendship goes to die. And for so many of us, it's true–between our careers and families and so much going on. So I use the concept of bundling friend-time when I'm very busy with my real life and can't get together with friends, that I will find things that I have to do and I'll include friend time with that.
Whether it's talking to a friend on the phone on a commute. I have two friends who make dinner together every Tuesday night in their own homes. So they set up an iPad and AirPods and they talk to each other Tuesday night from five to six while they make dinner. Their families know that's their time.
So it's something they already have to do and it's boring, but they use that to bundle friend time. So for me, I bundle friend time into all sorts of things. I have a business with a friend of mine and we have taken our strategy weekends to Disney. So we're having friend time and work time so I'm always looking at all the things that I have to do. How can I include friends and how can I make it more fun?
Alison: Yeah, I love that bundling friend time. That's great, just being smart so that you don't lose touch with your friends. You build them into your life as best you can. I love that. That's a great tip. I often talk about structuring it, right? So for me, sometimes I'll put it on the calendar so at least it's there on the calendar, like another date, like something I have to do, but I love the idea of bundling it into something else you're already doing. That's great.
Alli: Yeah, I have one friend who loves to organize and she will come over sometimes and go, let's visit but let me work on your closet. And I don't enjoy that at all. So it's fun letting our hair down and finding friends. The key is finding friends who are helping our lives in a positive way.
And that's not necessarily the friend, I use air quotes around friends, that is sitting next to you at PTO or even sitting next to you at church or your neighbor, but really identifying the friends who get you, who you can be your real self with, who you feel better after you interact with them than before.
Investing in those friendships because I hear a lot of advice about friendship lately and it's basically, whoever you're next to is who you should be friends with and I feel like that's a really dangerous concept for women. We need to be selective and thoughtful about who we let into our inner friendship circles.
Alison: I agree with you. I love that litmus test of, do you feel better about yourself after you've spent time with them? Because you can fall into the comparison trap with friends and you can start pursuing a life that isn't a life you actually want. And it comes back to those gifts as you're saying, like I've noticed.
In my own life, I'm not really a great home decorator. It's not something I enjoy. It's a patchwork quilt. I love it, but I used to feel really bad about it. And you know what I've discovered, Alli, to your point is, friends of mine that are really great at it or good at it.
If someone's really into it, it's all about the attitude. If that's really what they care about, I will feel it the second they leave my home.
Alli: Yep.
Alison: And that's just, it's okay, that I don't want to have to feel that way. That's not going to work. On the other hand, I have friends who are also really into it. And I don't feel that at all because they fully accept me. I fully accept them.
And I think that's really wise, especially when you're in the weeds of parenting and when we're so vulnerable to feeling we're not maybe as good as because we're all gonna feel that we're all so vulnerable in parenting.
Alli: Yeah, we've all had friends who make the little comments and they sting and after we're around those friends, we go, oh, that was awful. Those are the people you need to spend less time with.
Alison: Yeah, it's a really good point about our kids, about anything because it's just it's tender. If you think about this idea of these vulnerable parts of us, boy, being a parent brings out that vulnerability like nothing else. And it is the time you don't want to be erred toward loneliness, of course, but gosh, sometimes really befriending your own company is healthier than exposing yourself to folks who are going to make you feel constantly judged and criticized.
Alli: Absolutely.
Alison: Tell us a little bit before we close here, Alli. What would you want the younger you to know about parenting that you know now if you could go back and spend just a few minutes with her.
Alli: Oh gosh, that is an amazing question. I would tell myself that what mattered was the emotional climate of the home. That having my children feel safe and secure and fully loved is what matters most. And I would have myself dive into a lot of the genetic research about children. That children are really coded in their DNA to be who they're going to be.
And as long as we provide them a healthy home, and nothing horrible happens to get things off track, they're going to be who they're going to be. You can look at twin studies of twins, divided, separated at birth, and they grow up to be pretty similar. And it is fascinating. I think that I fell into some early parenting advice when I was a young mom, religious parenting advice, especially, that almost tricked me accidentally into believing that I was God to my children, that every little thing I did mattered and if I didn't do everything right, their whole future was gone.
But the truth is God and I am their mother and I'm there to love them and discipline them and disciple them and give them something great that I'm modeling. But I don't have the power in one little mistake to ruin their lives. And there's a lot of pressure that's put on moms unnecessarily. That's what I would tell myself.
Alison: I love that. Yeah, we are not God.
Alli: How about you? What would you tell a younger you?
Alison: Oh gosh. I think I would tell myself kind of along the lines of what you're saying about strength, that who I am is exactly what they need. Who I am is exactly what they need. No more and no less. And be that. Because that's what they need. And it's not everything, but thankfully they don't only need me.
They do need me to be fully me. And so who I am is what they need. And I think that's where trying to make up for things in myself that I feel like I didn't have could sometimes trip me up. I had to really work hard on Inhabiting who I am.
I think also, and again, what we've touched on is just the incredible value of modeling–more is caught than taught. The more I show what you do. I love what you said, what you do when you make a mistake, the more you show your own ability to course correct, the more you show when you get it wrong, you name it. You don't blame someone else.
Those kinds of things really are what kids pick up. They're just smart. They see through your words. They see our actions. They see how we're living. They just pick up what's real. Which is incredible, really. It's very freeing in many ways.
Alli: Because all the parenting books that say you have to do these 10 things to be a good parent. No, to be a good parent you work on yourself and the natural overflow of that is a happier healthier household and happier healthier kids. That's what just hasn't been taught to mothers yet, until now.
Alison: Yeah. Thanks. And on that note, tell everybody how they can find your book, your work and all that you're putting into the world.
Alli: Oh thank you. I'm Alli Worthington everywhere. Alli Worthington dot com. Alli Worthington show. The book, Remaining You While Raising Them. It's great in paperback, but I will say, we threw in an audible bonus about the mental load, which I call the mother load. And we even threw in some scripts for how to ask for what you need, how to identify and ask for what you need, whether it's your spouse or other people in your life.
So it's just a fun little bonus in the audible version.
Alison: Oh, that's great. It's a great book. I'm so glad you're saying all these wise things for so many women to benefit from. I have one last question for you, which I ask all my guests, which is what is bringing out the best of you right now?
Alli: I love that question. In my 40s, I decided to prioritize fun. So I'm 47 right now. And I love taking vacations. I have a business coach with business clients. I've been doing retreats for them. I'm taking my team on trips.
I will probably be in Orlando at a theme park six times this year. I was just riding roller coasters a couple of days ago in Orlando, so anytime I get a chance, I'm prioritizing fun, whether it's with my kids or with clients or people on my team. I'm going all out in my 40s.
Alison: I love that. So you're being very literal. You like amusement parks.
Alli: Oh, yeah. So sometimes I take my kids, but sometimes I take my team. Yeah, we're having a blast.
Alison: That's great. I love that. Thank you so much, Alli, for joining us and just sharing your wisdom with us. It's great to have you.
Alli: Thank you so much. It's been great to join you.
Today's episode is straight up fire! I got to know Cindy Gao last year, when she reached out to me about an internship. As a student at Harvard College, she experienced a crisis of meaning and found her way to faith and emotional healing. I have loved getting to know Cindy, and I know you are going to love her too.
This episode is raw and inspiring. It's packed with insight into faith, mental health, and Gen Z.
Here's what we cover:
1. The phrase Cindy Googled in a moment of desperation & what she found
2. What to do (and not do) when a young person expresses interest in faith
3. Why emotional healing & faith cannot be separated
4. The core belief that almost kept Cindy from faith
5. The challenges & longings of Gen Z
Thanks to our sponsors:
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- Ecclesiastes
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- Try Softer by Aundi Kolber
- Matthew Mark Luke John
- Psalm 34:8
- "We all are born into the world looking for someone looking for us, and that we remain in this mode of searching for the rest of our lives." -Curt Thompson
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Oh my goodness do we have a treat for you today! I've been looking forward to having this conversation all summer, and I am so excited for you to hear it.
Today we are going to talk with my assistant and media coordinator, Cindy Gao, about her incredible story of a search for meaning and coming to faith in a really dark place. She is part of Gen Z and I know that so many of my listeners, you have either kids who are headed off to college or you're reading the news there's just a lot of buzz around this generation—what they're dealing with and what they're thinking about and Cindy just has such a unique ability to articulate her own experience with clarity and honesty and sincerity.
I am just so grateful that she was willing to share all of that hard earned wisdom with us as we seek to understand the young ones in our lives, whether they're your own kids, whether they're your grandkids, whether they're just the kids that you care about in your life.
You first heard from Cindy on Episode 62, where she and I discuss your questions about friendship. It's a great episode. I love the wisdom that she brings to it. So you can check out that episode. And she also helped me out in the Best of You Facebook Book Club. So if you were a part of that this past January, Cindy will be a familiar voice to you.
I first met Cindy last November, almost a year ago. She reached out to me via email. She was looking for part-time work. I was in need of assistance. She came on as an intern and she's been helping me out ever since. She's just been such a gift to me. And when I first heard her story, it just stayed with me. It's just such an incredible story and a beautiful example of how God works through Google, God works through the pandemic, through even the isolation that was so awful. God met Cindy in such a powerful way through all of those terrible circumstances and he wants to do that for all of us and all of our kiddos to find us, to restore us and to heal every single part of us.
I love this story and I'm so thrilled that Cindy shared it with us today. Cindy Gao graduated from Harvard College in 2022 with a major in economics and a minor in psychology. She is married and she's starting her master's degree in counseling at Denver Seminary this fall. She was on the Canadian national fencing team for five years and was a six time national champion fencer. You'll hear a little bit more about that in today's episode. She's just a great woman. I'm thrilled to have gotten the chance to get to know her. There's just so much wisdom here for all of us as we work together to help each other become more whole.
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Alison: I'm so glad that you're here with me today, Cindy, we meet every week, but this week is really special that we get to know more about your story. So thank you so much for being here today.
Cindy: Yeah, I'm so excited to be on again.
Alison: That's right. Yes. This time we're putting the spotlight on you. All right. So you reached out to me via email about a year ago, maybe a little less than a year ago, just letting me know a little bit about your story, of coming to faith partway into your career as a student at Harvard. One of the things that was really important to you on your spiritual journey that we're going to learn more about today was bringing together this mental health piece with theology and with your faith journey.
I'd love to start a little bit backtracking to the beginning. Tell us a little bit about your background. What were you raised to believe about faith, about the nature of reality, about the purpose of life? Tell us a little bit. Set the stage for us about what Young Cindy was thinking heading off to college. What's your idea about the world and about faith and things like that?
Cindy: Yeah. I grew up in a suburb close to Toronto in Canada. I was raised by an immigrant mom, and both my parents are from China. So my mom raised me and my brother on her own, really, while my dad worked in China. He visited a few times a year, but from a very young age, I knew how hard it was for my mom to be raising me and my brother.
Also since we were immigrants, I felt a lot of pressure to assimilate to North American culture in order to belong and feel safe and really for my mom, she believed that this path towards safety was through prestige and success and having other people's approval. So really, ever since I can remember, I spent every waking second trying to achieve and perform and be recognized and seek my safety through that sort of stuff, through the high regard that other people would have of me.
Yeah, I got pretty much straight A's since kindergarten. I made sure I was always very positive and bubbly, so people would like me socially, and then I was also a really high level athlete, starting from fifth grade. I started fencing, and then I started competing on an international circuit from my first year of high school up until my last year of college.
So I guess to paint the picture, essentially, on the outside, I'm this really confident, bubbly, high achieving, really decorated, scholar, athlete, popular kid. But, what's really going on in my heart is that I'm being driven by really deep fear and insecurity. And I just think about whenever I got my good grades, or won a competition, or was elected a student body position, I never felt proud of myself, really or confident in those moments.
I felt relieved. Relief for avoiding the alternative situation that felt really dangerous.
Alison: Which would have been what?
Cindy: Not winning. Not winning and losing felt like it wasn't an option for my survival. Saying that out loud, I understand that I would have been able to survive if I didn't win, but in those moments it really felt like life or death.
I was so stressed out. I tried so hard for everything. And for most of my childhood I would say it worked out like I did win a lot of things. But yeah, to answer your question about reality and what I believed about my purpose, I'm just going to get pretty raw and honest here, I believed that I had to make up for how bad of a person I thought I was.
I saw how hard I made my mom's life. Growing up, my mom tried her best, but an experience that really impacted me deeply was when I was in kindergarten, I was afraid of the dark and I couldn't sleep at night, and I would knock on my mom's door and she would just be so upset with me.
But I couldn't control my fear. I was just scared. But that kind of made me just believe that this unchangeable part of me was just causing my mom to suffer. And that's basically this core belief that I had of myself was that I was just bad and I needed to spend my whole life working to offset that.
Alison: Yeah, children pick up these burdens. It makes sense that a part of you picks up a burden. That mom's stress, even if that's not literally being communicated, that you see her stress, you see the pain she's in and you tell yourself, a part of you tells yourself, it's my fault. I am responsible. And so then you're working overtime to make up for that.
So that's that life or death, the stakes. And what I hear in everything you're saying, Cindy, is a really activated nervous system. You're in a state of fight flight, most of your growing up years to try to Get that hit of, I can't bring, I, I can't lose, I can't let this drop because it's not just, and it's not rational, I understand that, but there's this sense of it will, this will bring more pain to my mom and I will be responsible for it if I don't get this just right.
Cindy: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Alison: Yeah. So tell me a little bit about Cindy, were you raised with any kind of particular religious worldview or faith background? Did you guys go to church or anything like that?
Cindy: No, well, I remember when I was in first grade going to church a few times, but something happened at church. There might have been some church drama, and my mom was hurt by a family in church, and then we never went again.
But I would say I grew up very agnostic and I grew up in an environment where it was even a little bit hostile towards Christianity, painted this picture of Christians as just people who weren't very rational, just believed in crazy miracles and didn't think too much about what they believed and also judged other people for not believing what they did.
Yeah, I'd say that was the environment I grew up in.
Alison: Yeah. And then, so what, tell us what happened. So when you reached out to me, the extent of the story that I know is you told me a little bit about how you were, what year were you at Harvard when you
Cindy: I was a junior when COVID hit.
Alison: Okay. You told me that there was a point at which you started Googling meaning
And through that Google search, that's what ultimately led you to an experience of faith in Jesus. So tell us what led to, so everything you've said up till now, you're super successful. You are, I would assume up until you go to Harvard, I don't know, but you're not happy, but this is just the only way you know, and it's working in a sense.
Cindy: Yeah.
Alison: The exterior, it's working, people like you, you've got those accomplishments, you're now getting into Harvard. So what happens in those first two years of Harvard that leads you to that moment of Googling meaning?
Cindy: When I first got to Harvard, I was still trying to achieve, trying to make my mom proud of me, and to see her happy.
And I remember very distinctly sophomore year I was working so hard, I was sprinting on a treadmill every day. And my mom fell into the deepest depression I've ever seen her in. And I just felt so helpless. And I soon followed suit, because I knew I was pushing myself to my limit. I couldn't try harder physically than I was, but it still wasn't enough.
Externally I seemed to be thriving, but I knew, some part of me deep inside knew that something wasn't right. I felt really empty inside, and every time I tried to bring it up with my mom or my friends, I was met with, “Oh your life is so good, Cindy just don't think about that”.
And, that was really hard for me because I knew something was wrong, but whenever I tried to talk about it was, “Look at your life. You're so lucky. Look at all these things you have”.
Alison: Yeah, you started to become aware of cracks between the external you and the inner you that's not feeling very great, but I hear what you're saying you went to the people around you who were caught up in that same mindset going, “You have everything”.
And so you're not getting that validation of someone saying, “Tell me more–what's going on”. So you're probably feeling even more isolated to some degree.
Cindy: And that's what led me to really question the meaning of life. If this is what people are telling me, and what I have always thought is supposed to be the meaning and purpose of life is to get these achievements and have all these things that I have. But why do I feel so empty and so devoid of meaning and purpose?
And yeah, that just stopped me in my tracks and I fell into a pretty deep depression starting in sophomore year. And then COVID hit my junior year and I really had to stop living my fast paced life when COVID hit because everything just shut down and slowed down. And that's when I really started having all this time to be alone with my own thoughts and my own anxiety and had to face all this internal angst that had been building up for a while
Alison: Your old coping tactics of just running, pursuing, achieving, producing were stripped away during that time. Oh, wow. And were you also isolated, literally? You had to be alone in a dorm room, probably?
Cindy: Yeah, we got kicked out of school. That was actually a pretty scary moment for me because my parents were both in China at the time and so I was actually completely alone, just me, in Canada In a house all by myself. So that was really scary. I thought it would be temporary, but it wasn't.
Alison: Yeah, okay.
Cindy: That's pretty much the backdrop of when I started Googling, “Why does everything feel meaningless”? And it was a pretty desperate move at that point. I never thought about doing anything to actively end my life but I was definitely in a state of suffering. It was a pretty desperate move by me to Google that.
But yeah, when I googled that I was scrolling through all sorts of different web pages and resources and I found the book of Ecclesiastes. And this is a book in the Bible that starts out with, “Everything is meaningless”.
And I got sucked in. I just kept reading it and so much of it just resonated so deeply with me. The author talks about how he's achieved all this wealth and done all these things that people seem to care so much about. And he's like, “It's just the blowing of the wind!”
And I was like, “Oh my gosh! That's exactly how I feel”! That was the beginning of this journey for me to explore more deeply what meaning and purpose is.
Alison: It's like you found someone finally who validated your and mirrored your experience versus what you're getting from your friends. He's saying, it was Solomon who wrote Ecclesiastes, he's I got everything and it feels empty. And you're like, “Oh my gosh, I'm not alone”.
Cindy: Yeah. That connection and validation I felt was so life-giving. So life-giving. And I really needed that because, as I said before, whenever I tried to bid for connection in my relationships, I was shut down with “Get over yourself, like your life is really good”.
But here I was reading this book that validated what I was experiencing and I just wanted to go deeper. So that's how I got sucked into reading more of the Bible and connecting with Christians.
Alison: So what happened from there? So you're at a really desperate moment. You start connecting with Ecclesiastes. You start reading more of the Bible. What, where do you go from there? What, tell us what happens next.
Cindy: I really wanted to talk to people who read Ecclesiastes and I wanted to understand how they found meaning and purpose. So I, and everything at this point was shut down, we were still in the pandemic, in the initial stages of it. But I reached out via email to a Christian campus group at Harvard, and it's the Cru Campus Group.
And I just said that I'm curious to talk to some Christians, that I didn't want to be Christian, I didn't really want anything to do with Christianity, but I just had some intellectual questions. And they connected me with a small group called Big Questions, and it was so amazing. I remember meeting every Friday, and I'm so excited every Friday for those two hours that we met through Zoom.
It was a place where we really explored deep existential questions. And I met Christians and non-Christians alike who were really engaging in these questions. And I also met Christians who actually had really intriguing reasons for God.
They weren't just Christian because their families were. They weren't just saying “oh, I just believe in this stuff because it's true”. They had put a lot of thought into their faith and there were such rich conversations about the nature of reality and historical evidence for Jesus's resurrection and I didn't believe all of it right away, but it was so interesting these conversations.
And it helped me rethink a lot of the assumptions I had made about Christians from growing up.
So during this time, I was also reading the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, telling the story of Jesus. Ecclesiastes was what I was really in for, but I then also wanted to read the other parts of the Bible, and, the Bible is centered around Jesus and the Gospels tell his story, so I went there next.
And the stories of Jesus just hit me like a train. I was reading about His life and seeing how he acted and how he really did not people-please. He did not live for the approval or praise of other people.
He went against his own family sometimes, to live out who He's meant to be and I saw that and it was so inspiring. I saw in the life of Jesus what I needed. This strength that I saw in him to be able to do that? I was like, I need that. Where is that strength coming from?
And there's other parts of the Gospels where Jesus talks about the Pharisees, and he's criticizing them for judging people who aren't following the rules. And this whole time I thought that Christians were just supposed to be like that. But then when you read the Gospels and Jesus is criticizing people who are like that, you really have to be like, “Oh, this isn't what Christianity is about”.
Christianity is not about just judging people and imposing all these rules on people's lives. It's so much more than that. It's so much deeper. And so I would say all of those things just drew me further in.
And one last thing I'd add that was really important for me was that I met safe adult Christians. They were the first people I felt safe sharing all this pent up pain and anxious thoughts with. I had never shared those things with anyone before. And I shared it with them and I experienced the healing that happens when you share hard things, and there are compassionate people present with you.
And all of those things just changed my life. And I didn't need any more convincing after that. I was like, this is the way to life. There's no other way towards life. This is it.
Alison: It's like your nervous system had that healing reparative experience from those first of what it feels like to feel seen and soothed and loved and safe. And it's almost I hear you saying there's a bunch of different things, but that was one factor for you of, when the psalmist says, I've, or I don't know who says this in the Bible, but “I've tasted the goodness of God”.
You experienced it. It was intellectual, but you also experienced it–Oh this is what I've been needing is this kind of acceptance and unconditional love.
I want to ask you, and we'll circle back to this because I, there were some key ingredients that when we circle back to talking about Gen Z and more general issues here for folks who are listening, because there were some really neat things that Christian groups on your campus did right.
I'm thinking about that big questions group. I get the sense it wasn't high pressure. There wasn't an agenda. There was a lot of authenticity. People were just allowed to show up with their questions and ask them. Because my sense of you is you would have seen right through. A hard sell. That's what brought you in is genuine interest, not someone trying to proselytize you.
Cindy: Yeah. And I do have to say, if someone tried to just tell me what the gospel was and ask me to ask Jesus into my life, at that point, I would've run away. I would've been like, Nope, I'm outta here. That's not what I'm looking for right now.
I just want to have some conversations, and I don't want to feel pressure to not be in the place that I am now. I want people to be with me where I'm at, and not to push me in the direction they want me to go.
Alison: That's right. Yeah. You'd known enough of the pressure system. Your whole face just lit up when you talked about those Friday evening zooms where you could just ask the questions that were actually on your mind and show up. As that part of you that had been so buried deeply inside that was really hurting.
Yeah. Oh man, it's just such a powerful story. So you've talked Cindy a little bit to me here and there about how it seems as if fairly shortly thereafter you did take an interest, I don't know if it was through books or if you saw somebody in faith based therapy. Tell me a little bit about that.
You're in this journey of thinking about Jesus, of reading the Gospels, of getting to know other Christians. Your nervous system is having this whole different experience of a way of being. So there's a lot going on at some point in here, you come to a whole body experience.
People can have an intellectual belief and never have really tasted the good, and hearing you, it's like mind, body, soul, emotion, every part of you is like something here is true. This is a whole body experience. And so this is happening. And then somewhere in there, you also started to be drawn to some Christian mental health resources. And I'm just curious how that played into your journey.
Cindy: Yeah I would say it's inextricable, the mental health and emotional healing and my faith, those two things had to come together for me. A big barrier for me to accepting the gospel was this core negative belief I had about myself, that I was bad and unworthy.
And I had lived experiences that shaped those beliefs for me. I had experienced things growing up that I interpreted to mean these things about myself. And, for someone like me, hearing the gospel that there's a God that loves me, that I'm worthy, that I'm good, that's gonna trigger a lot of cognitive dissonance in me.
That does not align with what is true. And I'm not gonna be able to just latch on to that story when I have so many experiences that back up what I believe to be true. And it was always very intuitive to me that I would need this deeper unpacking of what has shaped me to believe these things about myself.
And no amount of theology was going to help me just bypass that pain and believe this new story. You could tell me all these facts, quote all of this scripture to me, and it would do nothing. I would just be like, ah. I understand that's what's written in the Bible, but I physically do not feel that to be true, sorry but I don’t exactly know what’s wrong with me.
I had to choose a different approach, and in the psychology/therapy field, we learn about corrective emotional experiences. And that's this idea that your healing doesn't come from insight alone. It's experiential.
I needed corrective emotional experiences with safe adults, like therapists that I found, like the Cru staff in my life, who showed me that when I share my emotions, that doesn't make me a bad person.
Like, maybe it's possible that there are people who care about me enough to want to know how I'm doing, and they care about my suffering. I thought that these adults were gonna respond in a way that's gonna shut me down and all those things, because I had those experiences in the past.
But when they didn't, I started to be like, oh maybe it's possible that I am not a bad person, I'm not just complaining. Could it be possible that I deserve better? Could it be possible that I'm worthy of being treated this way? Could it be possible that there is a God who loves me?
That's how it went for me. And without those sort of experiences I just would not have been open to the gospel.
Alison: Yeah. There's something so powerful in what you're saying about this. You can have all the world's best theology, but there's that lived experience where the parts of your soul, your nervous system, whatever, whatever words you want to put on it. You are experiencing the truth, the whole body, the lived truth of the words.
Otherwise it's just words. And you can want to believe it and you can even intellectually believe it. But yeah, I just hear you saying it was through and you knew something in you. There was something in you that knew. You gave yourself permission to almost expose yourself to a different way of someone being with you and someone experiencing you. I would imagine that was pretty intense.
Cindy: Yeah, it was. Honestly, Alison, reading your book Boundaries for Your Soul, and I also read Aundi Kolber's book, Try Softer, and reading about these psychology/mental health/therapy fields, ‘cause you guys are in that intersection between faith and mental health and therapy–it gave me insight and helped me understand that I needed to form this basis of safety and allow my pain to be seen.
The insights that you guys drew from your field of study and how you integrated that with faith, it made a lot of sense to me. And it helped me to take that risk, because it is a risk to expose yourself again. But yeah, I knew I needed to do that in order for my pain to be seen, to make room for hope. I had to, that's just how the process goes.
Alison: It's so interesting listening to you because I could see it so easily. You could have the intellectual, you could have the joy of wanting to believe this. And if you had bypassed the pain, it would have come out at some point, but I love that you, and this is the work and now you're going in to do this work, which is so beautiful.
I love that you almost instantly were like, I got to go deeper. I got to do that. The healing work as part of this whole thing, it's not. optional. It's not a la carte, it's part of it. It's intertwined. That deeper healing work is intertwined with really absorbing and metabolizing the truth, which isn't just intellectual.
Again, it's the true experiential truth of a God who is ultimately this safe place for us, but when we've never had an experience of safety, how in the world do we understand that? That's just abstract until other people show us what that experience of a presence, a loving presence, is.
Cindy: Yeah. And even just reading the Bible, that is the sense that you get of what God wants for us. He does not want us to just know all these scripture verses and be able to quote them off. He wants us to experience His love. He wants us to feel the safety and strength that comes from truly believing that He loves us. Unconditionally.
He loves us so much that he would send his son to die for us. What kind of people do we become when we let that truly sink into our souls? That's it changes who you are on a very deep level. And that's what God wants for us. It's not just this behavior change that he's looking for.
Alison: Head knowledge, behavior change. Yeah, we really short sell it. I don't want to ask you to speak for all of Gen Z. That would not be fair. But I do think some of what you're saying speaks to the cry of a heart of the generation that wants more of what you're saying.
Before we get there, I want to touch on one other point, which is that you told me at some point that speaks to this whole body transformation that was going on. Mind you, you're still at Harvard. You're still like, doing classes. I'm assuming this is most of that junior year where you were remote, but you told me that at some point, maybe this is when you return to campus, that your nervous system had undergone such a shift in how you experience things that it would be hard for you to be around the anxiety, the fight flight kind of crowd, the achieving producing crowd, your prior friends.
And I, these are my words, but it was almost as if you were saying, ‘cause your nervous system had experienced a different way of being in the world, I don't have to just move through life in a constant state of stress and fight flight that it was hard for you for a while too. You had to almost extract yourself during that season a little bit. Can you tell me a little bit about that? And are you comfortable talking about this?
Cindy: Yeah, I can try. That was a really hard thing to navigate. I took a gap year right after my junior year and that's where a lot of what we've talked about really happened for me. All these insights and seeking healing and beginning to open up to people that all happened during my gap year. And then, I was really scared to go back to Harvard to finish up my senior year because I didn't want to fall back into the same patterns I had when I was there last.
Alison: Totally. Yeah.
Cindy: And I mean, I look back and I don't think I necessarily did everything perfectly. It was so hard, but yeah, I did have to learn to give myself permission to say no to a lot of things my first three years of college, I partied a lot.
I lived such a fast paced life ‘cause I didn't want to ever be alone with my own thoughts, but I knew I needed to embrace a slower lifestyle. I needed to say no to a lot of parties and things that were going on and that was really hard. And I had to navigate changes in my friendships.
That was really hard, because my friends also had to adjust. It was like I was a new person and not the same person that they knew from before. And so navigating all of that was really difficult. We talked in that Q&A episode about friendships about the guilt that comes up when you change as a person and how that can affect your friendships. You feel guilty because you're like, Oh, my friend is actually uncomfortable because I've changed.
And it's not because they're a horrible person, but it's just, it's different. So it's uncomfortable. And, is that my fault? Oh no, I don't want to make people uncomfortable but I can't go back to how I was. And so really, learning to sit through that, and be okay with disappointing other people because And that's what Jesus did, he disappointed so many people because he just needed to be who he was. And he wasn't gonna change himself for other people, so I remember always reminding myself that my senior year of I, this is really hard, but this is the path to life. I need to be who I am.
Alison: And Cindy, what I love, the fruit of the spirit is so evident in what you're saying. It's the humility of it's, I don't want to hurt anybody. I love these people. I'm not trying to send a message. It's just, this is what I have to do for my health and wholeness. This is what I have to do to be more like the person God wants me to be.
And I love the humility in that, but when there's that humility, there's also sometimes more of that sensitivity. to, it's almost easier to put on the mask of starting to judge other people, which is why sometimes Christians it's, we don't have to then face the pain of that feeling of separation.
There's such a genuineness in what you're saying. I just needed to save my own soul. I needed to mind my own heart, mind, and soul in these old ways, whatever they were, whether it was overperforming, whether it was trying to distract myself by staying busy all the time, I have to make different choices.
And I do think about Jesus a lot, he had to stay true. It is the narrow way. It's not an easy way. It is the way of life though. So I love that. I'd love it if just here at the end, if you would share with us a little bit again, not asking you to speak for your generation, but what do you think?
So as you, as about your story and about listeners who are sending their kids back to college or are preparing their kids for college or , I just am curious, some of your thoughts about what do you think other folks in your generation are needing or longing for or seeking as it relates to faith and wholeness.
How can we be more mindful and more attuned to those needs as adults as those safe, hopefully moving toward those healthy adults. What would you say about that?
Cindy: Yeah. Mental health is something my generation talks a lot about. A lot of us are struggling with anxiety and depression and, a whole host of things that are, that we're struggling with internally. And it's really interesting because Gen Z, we have enjoyed so much progress in terms of all these technological advances, advances in medical care, and we just have access to so much more stuff than ever before.
And it looks like it's so much easier for us to navigate life, technically. But, I would actually say it's been extremely hard for my generation to navigate life emotionally and psychologically. We grew up with cell phones and the internet and, you're like 13 and you're reading about all the tragedies that are happening around the world on your phone.
And you're scrolling through them one by one. And, our brains are developing, we're so overwhelmed, there's so much going on, there's, we're also exposed to, cyberbullying, or, all the social pressures that you feel when you're in person at school growing up, we had to feel that also online, you don't get a break from that when you leave school and go home, you're wanting to belong and wanting to fit in. You can't only care about, Do I fit in, do I belong at school?
You also have to care about your online ever present persona. And a lot of us just grew up so overwhelmed and constantly alert and emotionally burdened. We have access to so much technology, but how do we navigate that? I don't think we necessarily know. Having opportunities doesn't guarantee that we have the wisdom to navigate those opportunities.
So we need people to guide us and lead us to resilience and emotional intelligence and these sorts of skills that we can't learn just from the internet. We need the presence of other people in our lives, teachers, parents, safe adults who we can talk to about our feelings.
We have so many feelings. And we really need safe places to talk about that. We need unconditional love.
Alison: It really makes a lot of sense. In last week's episode I talked with Sissy Goff, who is a therapist, and she talks about anxiety, but one of the things she talks about is how, it underscores what you're saying, which is it's really on the adults, it's on the parents. We can't, as adults, sit around and bemoan the state of, it's no, we have to be a safe place.
We have to figure it out and walk in there with you and hold that calm space with you so that your nervous system has a chance to release some of all some of that cortisol and some of that toxic stress that you're carrying around. We have to do. our jobs, if it means we have to get off line, if we have to do what we have to do to regulate so that you have someone to help you find those reparative emotional experiences with. It's really interesting what you're saying. Yeah, it's pretty profound.
Cindy: And I would add, people in my generation, we're all trying to fit in, to be accepted, to belong, to be cool, maybe. And, what would be great for parents to be able to provide to their kids, or just adults to be able to provide to people that they're leading:
As adults, you have all sorts of fears and desires for these kids, in your lives. But the big blessing for those kids would be, in the situation that the kid ends up doing something that you didn't want them to do or they didn't do something that you wanted them to…Do you think you can still be that safe person for them to talk to about it to walk with them through that?
Because as kids, we are sometimes maybe even pushing those buttons like hey, is there a point where we will no longer be accepted by you? Where we will have to hide from you? And we want to push that sometimes. And having that safe experience with an adult, it's like a lived experience of what God's love is for us.
God has high standards for his children. And those standards don't change if the children don't want to fulfill those standards, but God continues to pursue our hearts and continues to be our refuge and our sanctuary when we fall short and when we do the things that break his heart.
And that's a very lofty thing to ask of parents, but it will give your kid a lived experience of God's love. And that will change your kid's life.
Alison: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good word. Preach that. It reminds me of what Curt Thompson says, something along the lines of “we're all born into the world looking to be found”.
And when you're describing whatever the kid is doing, even if it's to push you away, they're trying to be found. They're trying to say, will you come find me? Will you come after me? I love that. Is there anything else before that you want to add or answer? You've done such a great job. Oh my gosh, you're so articulate.
Cindy: I've really enjoyed this conversation. We could probably talk for hours about just all the stuff.
Alison: I know Cindy, you are just you're so articulate. I appreciate just your perspective and you're sharing your perspective. And I find myself as I listen to your story thinking I'm, when you paint that picture of being all alone during the pandemic and facing the existential realities as painful as that was. If there's a severe mercy in it to use that, is it forced to the surface? But I just think of how many kids are probably feeling that. And I just so appreciate your, you're sharing it with us. What would you want? Your younger self? I don't know, maybe back to 13. What would you want her, or whatever age.
What age feels good to you?
Cindy: Maybe four?
Alison: Four. Yeah. What would you want your four year old self to know that you know now?
Cindy: This is interesting. I'm still currently pretty deep in the process of grieving my younger self and when I think about some of the ways that I interpreted the world and messages about myself, it just brings tears to my eyes and I feel my body tense up as I remember how unsafe I felt and how deeply troubled I was always feeling.
My heart just breaks for her, but my younger self can sense that, and she knows that I feel that way about her, and that's really healing. Yeah, I guess I wish that she would know that she's a gift, and that she's not a burden. I wish that she would know that she's good. But, yeah, I don't even know if current Cindy is fully there yet. I guess that's also my wish for my current self.
Alison: Yeah. Yeah, I love what you're saying. There's a paradox of grief, of having to revisit and the pacing of it too, the pacing of revisiting and knowing that we have a whole lifetime really to do the work of it. Re parenting those younger parts of us and helping them to understand what we know.
But I love that you're getting little glimpses and that she's getting little glimpses from you and from other people around you. So it's beautiful what you're, all the work you're doing to give her what she deserves, which is just that. One of the things I love about IFS work is when we invite these young parts of us to unburden, they almost always want to dance and play.
It's always really light, and I just think about that for you, when about your little four year old girl, that's what I'm like, ‘cause I, I picture this hard working and I'm like, Oh man, I just hope she gets to have a ball. And I know you've been having, you've been doing a good job of helping her out. And what is bringing out the best of you right now?
Cindy: Yeah, what you mentioned, allowing that younger part of myself to play and be silly. I have spent the past two months this summer in a really small town in Illinois. It's called Dietrich. It's where my husband and his family live. There are 800 people in the whole town, and it's been really good for me.
From my story of just always chasing prestige and feeling a lot of pressure to always get the best job or like the most prestigious whatever it is, in this town, I feel none of that. It's so much easier for me to give myself permission to do less here, to slow things down, to just have fun and relax.
And that's been so good to me.
Alison: Every time we would get on the Zoom to talk this summer, you'd be like, I was at a carnival,
Cindy: Yeah!
Alison: –or I was at a fair. It's funny listening, in the context of this conversation, there was a sort of wonder about you, just like that childlike wonder oh, she went to a fair.
And it was just so cool to see you just enjoying it. That's cool. I love it. Let's see here. I cannot wait to hear more from you as you enter into this new chapter of your journey at my alma mater, at Denver Seminary, where you're going to be studying counseling. One thing I love about you, Cindy, is you are very clear about not putting that pressure back on yourself.
You're doing it because you love it. You're doing it because you want to learn, you want to grow and you're really good about just being very clear about your intentions. And so I would love to, I cannot wait. I'm so excited to vicariously hear what you're learning about and what's bringing you life as you go through this journey.
But we just thank you so much for just sharing your wisdom with us. You're just a gem and just such a gift. You've been such a gift to me. It brings tears to my eyes. I remember when I got that email from you and there was just something about it, the way you wrote it was so authentic.
And I was really on this journey of needing help and not knowing how to get help. And we just started talking and both of us had very different seasons of life, but committing to being very true in the moment with each other about what we needed and our different growth curves and just effortlessly figuring out how to work together.
And it's been such a gift to me. So I'm just so grateful for you and grateful for you sharing this wisdom with us today.
Cindy: Oh, it's been a really big blessing for me to be able to work with you too.
Alison: Yeah. It's fun.
Alison: Thank you for being here and we'll I'm sure we'll hear more from you down the road.
Cindy: Hopefully!
I am thrilled to be back this week, diving into an incredible conversation with beloved therapist, Sissy Goff! We're tackling the topic of anxiety and its ripple effect on our kids and on our parenting styles. With 30 years of experience guiding kids and parents, Sissy brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. Plus, she's sharing tips from her latest book, The Worry Free Parent.
We cover so much in this episode, including:
1. A parent's most important job
2. Why we are seeing more anxiety in kids (and parents)
3. 5 parenting traps
4. A parent's surprising superpower
5. Sissy's moment of hope in the Covenant School shooting aftermath
Do you have questions about friendship for Dr. Alison? Leave them here.
Resources:
- Connect with Sissy on Instagram or at raisingboysandgirls.com
- Pre-order The Worry Free Parent by Sissy Goff and get a free bonus chapter
- Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna LembkeRelated Podcast Episodes
Related Episodes:
- Episode 65: Vulnerability, Parenting, and Letting Go of Control—Inside A Guy’s Perspective With Our Friends From Dadville
- Episode 6: Do I Really Have an Inner Child? What It Means to Reparent Yourself
- Episode 54: Can I Pray My Anxiety Away? A Surprising Approach to the Anxiety Pandemic & How to Walk Yourself & Your Kids Through It
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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.
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week’s episode of The Best of You podcast! I’m so glad you’re here. I missed you guys last week. I took a mini break during the middle of the summer, and I’m so happy to be back today with you with a brand new Back to School series. This series is about parenting and kids and culture. This will apply to you if you’re a parent, but even if you’re not a parent, we’ve got some really great topics on anxiety and the culture in general and how to stay healthy as an adult human which is what all of us need, not only for our own kids, but for every kid and all the people in our lives.
You’ll see a theme through all of these episodes. The more we do our own work to become healthy, to become whole, to become centered, to learn what it means to honor those C words, those C words we talk about in Boundaries for Your Soul, and also back in Episodes 39 and 40 on the podcast: Calm. Confident. Clear. Creative. Curious. Courageous. Compassionate. Connected. Right? These grounding words where we know we are leading from that Spirit-led place inside, from a calm nervous system, where we’re leading ourselves, and we’re leading our emotions not the other way around. Right? When we’re in that place, we’re going to be the best parents we can be. We’re also going to be the best neighbors, the best aunts, the best uncles, the best siblings, the best godparents, the best grandparents. . . all those roles we step into with greater clarity and with greater courage, when we’re calm and doing the work ourselves. So, these episodes are really for all of us who are trying to show up effectively in the lives of the people we love.
So in today’s episode, I’m talking with a fellow therapist, Sissy Goff. Sissy’s amazing, and we really get into today why it’s so important for us to not parent out of worry, out of anxiety and what holds us back from that. Why is it so hard not to let our worry and our anxiety take us over, especially when we’re parenting, but really in any challenging situation. And some of the even really well-intentioned coping tactics we all have that actually get in the way of allowing our kids to grow and develop and thrive and develop their own coping strategies as they deal with worry and anxiety. So this is complicated to tease out, right? We’re trying to parent our kiddos through worry and anxiety, meanwhile we have to deal with our own worry and anxiety in order to do that.
So if you’re looking for more resources as you’re listening to this episode, first, please check out Sissy’s brand new book, called The Worry Free Parent: Finding the Confidence You Need so Your Kids Can Too. And that’s exactly what this book is about. It’s a real deep dive with a ton of practical content to help you figure out how to major in the majors, what’s important, what matters, let go of what you can’t control, let go of what’s not yours to control, so that you can show up in the way that your kids need.
And another resource you might consider, are Episodes 39, 40, and 41, or my book with Kim Miller, Boundaries for Your Soul, which is all about differentiating from parts of us. And particularly, in this case, you’d be differentiating from an anxious part of you as it comes out in your parenting; from a worry part of you as it comes out in this world—and learning to take charge of that part of you so again you’re leading from that calm, clear place inside, where you’re showing leadership. So you’re majoring in what’s major and letting go of the rest, and you’re seeing clearly to help guide your kids through the challenges that they face.
So with all that being said, I’m so thrilled to bring you today, my conversation with Sissy Goff. Sissy is the Executive Director of Daystar Counseling Ministries in Nashville, Tennessee. Since 1993, she has been helping young kids and their parents find confidence in who they are and hope in who God is making them to be. Sissy is a sought-after speaker for parenting events across the country and is a frequent guest on media outlets including CNN, Good Morning America, Inside Edition, NBC, and Christianity Today. She is the bestselling author of 13 books including her brand new book, which we talk about today: The Worry-Free Parent: Finding the Confidence You Need So Your Kids Can, Too. It’s such a great resource. Sissy’s a gem, and I’m so thrilled to bring you today’s conversation.
Music
Alison: Thank you so much for being here, Sissy. All of my work is with adults, primarily women, and I don't work much with children. I did a little bit during my internships, but I was so thrilled that you have this book coming out and have so many questions for you and and really excited to have you on the podcast today. So thank you for being with us.
Sissy: I'm so honored to get to be, I've long been an admirer of yours and it's fun to get to connect and be kind of in person as much as we can be.
Alison: I know. Thanks to technology. There's so much more we can do this way. I kind of want to dive right in. Sissy. I mean, you've been working with kids for 30 years. Is that right? And I'm curious, what, what got you started? Why kids? Why did you start out specializing, working with kids?
Sissy: I wonder how many counselors would say this very same answer. But I became the person I wish I'd had in my life growing up. I grew up in a family where we didn't talk a lot about emotions or what was going on. I mean back in the 70s nobody was really talking about that a lot.
No one was passing feelings charts around the dinner table to talk about that. And I was the kind of kid who smiled all the time, no matter what was going on. And I had a lot of really amazing mentors in my life. But I would have loved to have had someone who had said,
“Hey, Sissy, no one smiles all the time. There's got to be more going on inside of you”.
And I didn't. When did you start doing this work?
Alison: Oh, it's been about 25 years ago, myself. Yeah.
Sissy: So similar. And I didn't even, I did not know a person who was in counseling. I didn't know people talking about counseling. And the only person I ever heard of doing something like this, you're going to laugh because we're probably, I'm older than you probably, but we're close to the same age, was Marlena from Days of Our Lives.
And she was a child psychologist. And I thought, well, that sounds cool.
Alison: Wait, was she really? I forget.
Sissy: I think so.
Alison: I wasn’t allowed to quote unquote, to watch Days of Our Lives, but I would sneak it because, and frankly, part of it was similar to what you're saying, because in the eighties, when I grew up, we still weren't really talking about feelings. And so some of the only ways you could get that was through television.
You'd hear people having these dramatic conversations or whatever. So that is so interesting that Marlena was a child psychologist,
Sissy: Can I ask you how you got started?
Alison: As a therapist? Yeah, I love this. We can definitely go back and forth because I love talking to other therapists so much. For me, it was very much, it was, I didn't yet know when I started to become a therapist. It was less about thinking–I still thought I had a perfect family. Although through the process of becoming a therapist, you kind of realize all the ways in which all of our families, even the best of our families, don't get it right.
And I love in your book that you talk about the fact that yes, in many ways we are learning now how to focus on mental health. And we talk about our feelings with our kids more, but we're all still in progress. We're all still learning. for me, it really was, my specialty is in faith and psychology, my PhD is in religion and psychology.
So for me, I had this really deep faith in Jesus. I had a really strong faith, but I had no clue who I was. I didn't know myself and I didn't even know that it was okay to think about myself, to look at myself, to understand myself. I thought that was selfish. So everything I've done is all about really focusing on, wait a minute, it's not selfish to look at your own feelings, to understand your own needs, to think about your own nervous system.
Psychology was coming alongside my faith–it's great to know a lot about God. We need that. And also we need to know about ourselves. That's part of becoming a human, a healthy, whole human.
And I love that you're taking that to parenting. The best gift we have to give to our children is to become our whole selves, which means we've got to deal with our own anxieties. We've got to deal with our own fears.
Sissy: Yes. Yes. That's a beautiful way to put that, to become our whole selves. And we get to reflect more of Jesus the more we know of ourselves because we're able to be more authentically the parts of him that he's placed inside of us. So cool. Thank you for sharing that with me. I love hearing that.
Alison: Yeah. Well, I love that you became that person that you had wanted to have been there for you. You became that safe attachment figure for other children, which is really what we're doing as therapists. We're becoming that reparative experience.
Sissy: Yes, exactly.
Alison: I love that. So as I read the Worry Free Parent, one of the things–I don't want to project onto you, but as I was thinking about what you were doing through my therapist lens is I could imagine you've worked with kids for 30 years. And through that, you're also working with parents. And I imagine, because it's really a book to parents, and in such a gentle, beautiful way, I hear you coming alongside parents saying, you guys are really the solution here.
You're the solution to your kid's anxiety. Tell me what, what led you to want to write this book, especially to parents?
Sissy: Yes. Exactly that. I mean, I can think of a parent I met with not long ago who came in and she was very concerned about her daughter and her level of anxiety. And the longer I sat with this mom in my time with her, you know how it is when someone's really anxious. It's like it wafts over to you.
You can't help but absorb it. And I was feeling it as I sat there with her and tried to be really gracious and say, “Have you ever thought about going to see somebody yourself? Tell me about your family history, all of that”. And she said, which I so appreciate, she said, “I have a very limited amount of funds and I have a very limited amount of time. And so I've got to prioritize getting my daughter in”.
A lot of parents feel that way. And that feels like good parenting. I mean, I'm going to take care of my child first. And with this mom, it was evident that what her daughter really needed was for her mom to do the work herself first.
Everything we know about family systems tells us the cogs are dependent upon each other and they're keeping each other turning. And so if the daughter had gotten help and not the mother, then nothing would really get better. And so I wanted this mom to get help herself because it's a trickle down.
I mean, it's contagious. And her daughter was young enough. I really did feel like the source was the mom and in her most well intentioned loving heart, she was missing it.
Alison: Yeah. Exactly. I love that. That in our most well-intentioned moments, we can still miss the very thing our kids need, which is for us to take that time, maybe even a little bit away from them, in order to become healthier so that the time that we're with them is more constructive, is of a higher quality, has more of that non anxious presence.
I know so many of the moms I work with, they think that more, more, more, more, more is better. And I'm always saying, actually, what's better is quality. If you can give those kids some quality moments of that non-anxious presence. You say in the book, and I thought this was such a powerful quote, you say, “A parent's job is to be the calmest person in the room”.
Sissy: That's a direct quote from a parent I was meeting with. I mean, it was a beautiful statement by this dad and this couple that I work with who are doing an amazing job with their kids.
They don't have parents that have modeled neither one of them anything that they want to do as parents and so we do parent consults at Daystar where parents are coming in to talk about their parenting and things they could tweak and that's what we were doing.
And he was talking about how they both get angry with their daughter more than they want to, which I feel like you and I could talk about that. I'm hearing that from parents more than I've ever heard it before.
And he said, I was yelling at her and all of a sudden I heard this voice that I had recently heard at a conference I went to who said, “I'm the CEO of my company. A CEO's job is to be the calmest person in the room”. And he said, “ my job as a parent is to be the calmest person in the room and I am blowing it”.
Alison: You're bringing up such a good point. Why are we all so on high alert right now? There's so much going on in our world.
You see all the things parents are dealing with. There's so much that we are dealing with, let alone our kids. And to myself, sometimes probably our collective nervous systems are activated. There's lots of research on all the reasons why, I don't know if there's any way to quantify that over history, but we certainly know this isn't a calm period of our history,
I guess what I first want to ask you is, you've been doing this for 30 years–are you seeing more anxiety? The stats are telling us kids are more anxious. I'm sure parents are more anxious. Do you actually see that in your practice?
Sometimes I look at the stats and that there's truth in them. And I also wonder, we're also diagnosing more. Right? We have more names to put on these things than maybe we did 30 years ago. So tell me, you've had a bird's eye view with kids. What do you think about that?
Sissy: Oh, I love that you're saying that. I'm so glad we're friends now because we think very similarly. Yes, we're diagnosing more than we've ever diagnosed before and we're over diagnosing so many things today and at the same time, yes, I am seeing more anxious kids and more anxious parents than I ever have before.
Especially for children the average age of onset used to be eight, it's dropped to six. And I would say for elementary school age kids, I'm seeing it more than I ever have. And then there is this significant uptick around puberty.
Alison: Mm hmm.
Sissy: So in those two time periods, I'm seeing it. I mean, among adolescents too, but especially those ages.
Alison: Do you have any sense of the why?
Sissy: Like you said, there's so many things we can talk about. I have never felt like there was as much pressure in as many areas of a child's life. And I don't think it's pressure that parents are putting on kids. It's cultural pressure that kids are supposed to be excelling academically in ways that I don't think it would have even occurred to us that we could do as well as kids are putting pressure on themselves to do.
They're supposed to be excelling athletically, artistically, and be doing five different activities at all times and in leadership positions. Honestly, there are times that , “How do I become a lobbyist and go to the government and say, we've got to do something academically”?
It's too much for kids. And I really do believe that. There's so much pressure. We could talk about technology. that parents are over-parenting right now. When you're talking about how things have changed and asking why I got into this, when you think about the 70s and 80s, especially in the 70s, the only parenting book was Dr. Spock. And all that I know he said was “smile a lot at your kids”, because that's the only thing my mom took from it.
And she smiled a lot and my sister and I, ironically, that's the compliment we hear the most–is that we smile a lot. Here, you and I are speaking to parents and adults from a mental health standpoint, but there's so many people giving input into all the things that parents and all of us are supposed to be doing.
And that is lending itself to parents feeling more like failures than ever before. I mean, there's so many things that are factoring in. You could speak to this, more than I could even. I'm seeing parents who are overcompensating for what they felt like they didn't get.
And so they're over-identifying emotionally with their kids and they're hearing them and attuning to them, but they're not giving 'em coping strategies to work through it.
Alison: Yeah. We're being really candid here, listeners. So here are two therapists giving their thoughts on, I sometimes think of it as the pendulum. I was probably on the back end of the, “children should be seen and not heard parenting approach, which is, you don't talk about your feelings. All the focus is on behavior.
Especially when you bring the Christian overlay into it, which was part of my experience. And I do see what you're seeing. There's so much attunement and obviously we need attunement. We know that attachment is so important and also, children need boundaries. We know that children need resilience. We know that children need to learn to cope. We know that children need to be able to survive hard situations.
And so I do think you're right. I do think that the pendulum can swing so far the other way to put so much pressure on parents, but it's also not so good for our kiddos who sometimes need to learn a little bit the hard way.
Again, it's that healthy balance of that book Dopamine Nation. Have you read that book? The author talks about the pleasure pain principle and how we need a little bit of hard things because that actually regulates in the brain the pleasure. We need the balance of both. We have to learn how to deal with challenging things in order to have that proper balance. So what you're saying makes a lot of sense to me.
So in your book you talk about different parenting traps, one being the helicopter parent. What are some of the other ways that you see parents out of really good intentions, but not quite getting it right?
Sissy: Yes, and I'm glad you said that and that's what I mean as we're being candid, that's what I would want to take it back to again if you're doing any of these things it's because you're a really good parent and you're trying so hard to love your kids. You want the best for them and out of that wanting the best, helicopter parenting is definitely one.
I kind of made these up based on what I'm seeing the most and one of them would be snowplow parenting, that idea of we're going to clear the path ahead of them so they don't have to deal with hard things. We can make the bump smooth and make it really easy on them.
Backhoe parenting, where I'm going to clean up their failure because I don't want them to have to deal with the repercussions of their failure. It is too much.
Sidecar parenting, which I feel like we both see a lot. This is what I went through when I was growing up. A parent thinking, “She's like me. So I'm going to step in because I assume that she's feeling exactly what I felt. And so she's going to be in the sidecar zooming around with me”.
And then parade float parenting, where I'm going to make this as fun as it possibly can. And we're going to entertain ourselves along the way. So you won't feel any sadness or anything hard.
Alison: How do you encourage parents who are listening, how do you mitigate? How do you begin, because all of this is driven by anxiety. To bring this back. I was thinking about how there's all these headlines screaming about anxiety. Our kids are anxious, it's such an anxious world.
The news is half of what's feeding all of the anxiety and the response to all that is more anxiety. We start to clench. Our nervous system goes into that fight, flight, stay. We start to get more anxious and we double down on the anxious parenting, which is the exact opposite of what it means to be the calmest parent in the room.
When we read all the headlines, when we see all the anxiety, when we see all the landmines and the pitfalls that our kids might be even headed toward, the response is not to double down on one of those styles that you listed. It's actually to take a step back and do the work of calming ourselves.
So how do we do that? Right? The first step I would think is to begin to understand, gosh, this is the voice of anxiety. This is the voice of anxiety. I've got to take a U-turn and do my own work to work through my own anxiety. So how do you talk parents through that?
Sissy: Yes. And I wonder if you experienced this too. There's something that happens with the amygdala. That's the part that's taking over, as we know, that it's almost like when you lived in a dorm or a sorority house and one person would start their period and then everyone's on their period.
I feel like one amygdala gets activated and everyone is in that place where everyone's screaming, panicking, going down in the spiral together. I don't know that that's scientific, but it feels like it's what happens so much of the time.
So, okay, so what to do? The first thing I would say is, and again, I feel like I'm preaching to the choir. We probably have the same ideas, but I want every family to have a code word. And a humorous code word is even better, so it could make you all laugh when you say it, but anybody in the family has the authority to say, “Watermelon” or whatever it is.
And when that is said, we're going to stop. Because like you said, if we're functioning out of our amygdala, we're not going to get to a rational place. There's going to be no productivity in conversation. There's going to be no healing, no reparations, nor restoration.. I can't even get to the words, you know what I mean. So, nothing good is going to come, like you said. And so, we need a pause. A word that makes us pause. And we each go to our separate spaces.
And I will say to parents, “It is fine if you need to go to the bathroom and lock the door, it is absolutely fine to get away from them at that moment”.
And then it was funny when you were talking earlier, Alison, I was thinking, I would bet you're an amazing therapist, because even the way that you talk as you're engaging with someone, you talk slowly and I can hear your breath. My breathing is being regulated as I'm hearing you talk and breathe.
That's where we need to start. We've got to slow down with parents and we've got to get their bodies calmed back down so their blood vessels can dilate, the blood flow can shift back to the cortex, all the things that we know.
Because it's easy for people to feel like mindfulness is really hokey pokey and there's nothing to it. Instead, it changes the chemistry of our brains in those moments and we can come back and have that healing conversation.
Alison: That's so true. And no matter what, you have seen it all. You are truly working with parents who have seen the worst of the worst. And no matter what, I want people to hear it, going back to that breath of, I am here in the moment. I have what my kids need in the moment. They have my love.
I always think, Sissy, that is how God loves us. God doesn't always fix it. God doesn't always make it better. God doesn't always clear the path ahead of us, but God is always with us. And that's what we're modeling for our kids. We may not be able to fix it for them. We may not be able to make it better. But you know what? We're going to be with them through it and that's what they need.
We have to find that in ourselves. And I love that you'd go through such practical mindfulness, grounding, breath work with parents. That really works to keep you in the moment with those kids. And that's what they need.
Sissy: And anxiety pulls us right out of it. We are not there with them in those moments.
Alison: The other thing I love that you talk about in your book, Sissy, is another fantastic quote, “If you don't learn to stop criticizing yourself, that very same criticism will spill over onto your kids”. Tell us a little bit about that. What's the danger of our own criticisms for our kiddos?
Sissy: well, I would say I am one who has a lot of critical self talk and somebody said that to me. A good friend said that to me years ago. She said, “you cannot hate yourself that much without some of that hate spilling over onto the people closest to you”. And it had never occurred to me up until that point that that's what happened.
Are you an Enneagram person? Okay, I'm a One. What are you on the enneagram?
Alison: Three wing Two. I always tell Beth McCord I'm a two and a half. I ask her if that's the real thing. 2.5.
Sissy: 2.5, that's good. That's a great combo. Yes, so you do too then with some three. I mean, I'm seeing parents do this more than ever, where I feel like they're being so hard on themselves and so critical of themselves, and there's no way to stop that voice from spilling out onto them, because we have such high expectations of ourselves, and we're not meeting them, and inevitably, we end up putting the same high expectations on them, and maybe it's not academically, but in terms of their character.
Our work, as you said before, our work is always going to ripple over onto them. And so when we're learning to have a kinder, gentler voice with ourselves, we're going to have a kinder, gentler voice with them. And like you said, it doesn't mean we don't have boundaries. It doesn't mean we don't give them consequences. But at the same time, we're compounding the problem if we're all in this shame spiral together.
Alison: Yeah. There's such a difference when you're in a calm place yourself. When you say to your child, “I love you and we're not going to do this now”. And it actually carries more authority and more weight when we are calm than when we're activated and yelling or trying to extinguish a behavior versus entering into it with that.
Again, we're humans. We're fallible. We make lots of mistakes. I love in the book that you say “we get 50% of it”.
Sissy: Dan Allender. Well, and what you're saying Alison, one of the things I've seen happens is all the trends we could talk about. Kids are struggling with self-regulation more than ever before. Part of what I'm watching happen in counseling is kids, rather than learning to use coping strategies, are using their parents as coping strategies.
And so I'm a child and I've gotten all in my amygdala and I'm reactionary at this moment and upset. If I can draw you into that battle with me, then I'm going to have an emotional release and I'm going to feel better because I got all that out. Which we know is a terrible pattern to be learning for the rest of our lives, if that becomes how we process our emotions–by drawing someone else into a fight.
Alison: Wow, that's so interesting. It's sort of like, it's almost like co-regulation, but the unhealthy version of it. Instead of co-regulating them in the sense that we become that calm presence, which allows them to regulate themselves, we get drawn into it with them.
Sissy: Yes, I never thought about it like that. That's exactly what it is.
Alison: That's so interesting. I love that you talk about this in your book toward the end about trusting your gut. And it goes back to something you said about, there's so much information out there. This information highway can kind of freak any parent out.
There's so much, it's almost the opposite of what we had right when we were little. There was almost no information. Now there's too much. It's saturation. And so I love that in the middle of that, you're saying at the end of the day, you are their parent. You know what they need.
Talk to us a little bit about that. It's good to read books. It's good to learn about these things. We need to educate ourselves. But at the end of the day, we are the parent. We are the ones God has put in our child's life.
So what's that balance? How do we know when to kind of let the noise fade away and be in that moment with our kids? How do we know how to do that?
Sissy: Well, we've got to do our own work. I mean, that's the biggest piece of it because the danger of anxiety with kids is being like the worry monster. With teenagers, I talk about it being the worry whisper, but we all have that voice in our heads.
And with a kid, with a fifth grader, it is really easy to say, “You are not sick. There's no way you're going to throw up at this moment”. There’s worry spiraling you around that. What you and I would both know is that we could track development and know what kids are going to get stuck on in terms of the worried loop of thoughts based on their development because it's the worst thing they can imagine at that age.
For parents, the worst thing that you can imagine is something happening to your kids. But instead of being able to say, I'm not sick, I'm not going to throw up. It feels real. Anything that you start to perseverate on as a parent can feel like this is my intuition and I've got to take care of my kids in this rather than “I'm in a worried loop and I'm stuck”.
And so like you said, teasing that voice out, learning to recognize that that’s anxiety. That's not my gut. That's not my intuition. That's not the Holy Spirit speaking through my gut. And then learning to trust. Pray and trust that that's God's voice and that's certainly what I do as a therapist more than anything.
I pray that my gut is in line with the Holy Spirit and that's what I've learned to trust the most in a conversation with somebody as to where to go next. As to the question to ask. And for parents, intuition is a superpower and the more they use it, the more they lean into it, the more they'll trust it.
Alison: Yeah. I love how in the book, you go after anxiety. It's a tool of the enemy because paradoxically, it actually takes us away from that God-given intuition, that God-given-Holy-Spirit-led gut. And so I love what you're saying. I kind of want to slow this down here for the listeners.
Number one, learn to identify the voice of anxiety. In the book, you say, give anxiety a name. It's a part of you. It's a part that needs you to learn to differentiate from it. When you name something, you're saying this is not all of who I am. I'm putting it out here. I'm separating out from it.
You give some great names, and you do it with kids where they can really learn to identify, this is the worry voice. This is the worry monster. But that's what we do as parents too. We have to start to go, this is my anxious voice.
So number one is identifying that. I would suggest for those of you listening, if your heart rate is up, if your pulse is high, if you're in that state of fight flight, if you're tense, if you're feeling panicky,
Sissy: –with the same thought circling back around and around,
Alison: –all of those things are a good cue. It's your worry. And then you've got to do those other exercises: you go through the grounding, the mindfulness, the calming, so that you're not making decisions out of that anxious place. And that's what taps you back into that gut.
the big part of it is first identifying when we're in the anxious mind.
Sissy: Yes, exactly. And again, it's hard to do because the issue feels more valid than any other topic that our anxiety is going to attack.
Alison: What do you see as the most common things that anxiety is going after? In one section of the book, you gave a list–you did a poll on social media, and you sort of created a list of the kinds of things anxiety is saying, the ways that it's speaking. Can you share some of those with us?
Sissy: Two that stand out to me right now, off the top of my head: One is attaching future meaning to present problems. I remember a mom who said to me, “We were on a trip and my daughter threw her trash at the trash can and she did not put it in and she left it there for the cleaning people to pick up. She is not going to learn how to function as a human!”
I get that that was disrespectful and unaware. And we're making this a little bigger, maybe, than the situation warrants, but that same version of the story I have heard thousands of times. Something my child's missing right now means that they're not going to be able to drive, they're not going to be able to have healthy relationships, they're not going to be able to xyz. We project and project and project and project. And so that would be one.
The other, and when I did that social media poll, in some ways it may have kind of birthed this book more than anything, but I was so disheartened for parents about their own sense of failure. That's what I felt like they were circling around the most. The thought of, “I'm not doing it right. I'm not doing enough. I don't know how. I'm not the right parent”.
All the things, all the places we go in our heads when we're not our healthiest selves.
Alison: And that voice, whether it's the anxious voice or a critical voice, when we're leaning out of that, that's what then is actually bleeding out to our kids. It's what's leaking out to them. They're picking up on that. It can feel righteous in a weird sort of way–that's not the right word–to beat yourself up. I'm a terrible parent.
But it's not helpful. It's not helpful to us and it's not helpful to our kids. So what's a way to reframe that? How do we reframe that voice in our heads as we begin to notice it?
Sissy: Well, it's part of that code word of wanting parents to back up in the moment and do the breathing. And I want parents to think about why am I anxious in this moment? Because as much as parents feel like failures, as much as they're getting angry, it's typically because what they're wanting for their kids in that moment is really good.
E.g. I'm angry as we're trying to get out of the door for school, really, because I know my child's already had five tardies this semester, and if they get another one, they're going to have to go to Saturday school, and then they're going to miss the birthday party that they really wanted to go to.
So it's all of these good things I want for my kids, but the delivery is off, and I'm getting angry instead of stopping myself and saying, I'm wanting more for them in this moment than they do.
I'm more invested than they are. I've got to stop and let them deal with the consequences. But that reframing idea of, I feel anxious because I care about my kids, I'm trying to be the best parent I can be, it enables us to have a kinder, gentler voice towards ourselves.
Alison: Yeah, I love that. I had a friend years ago and sometimes this comes back to me, but she would say the phrase, “sometimes you have to let the ceiling fall”.
And when you were describing that moment. like even in my own life, still something will happen–I'll get sick, I had COVID recently and I had to cancel some things and it can feel like the world's going to end.
And it's such a good reminder that the world doesn't end. It actually keeps going. It's okay. And the more we pause to really notice those things, there's a gentleness to that even in those parenting moments.
I love what you're saying. Like, I don't want my kid to get another tardy and the world won't end. We're gonna be okay. We're here really that changing that self talk inside of us and sort of showing up with that with our kiddos.
Sissy: Yes. And if that parent could think, not only is the ceiling not gonna fall, but I know that suffering produces perseverance. And perseverance, character and character, hope. And so what my child is learning in this moment is hope, which is so much more valuable than the fact that they're gonna get another tardy
Alison: Mm hmm. That's good. Oh, that's so good. Sissy, as we kind of wind down here, tell us a little bit about what's bringing you hope as you work with kids, as you work with families, as you work with parents. What's bringing you hope?
Sissy: I'm going to go to a really dark time before I come back to that, if that's okay. We have a little summer retreat program for the kids during counseling. So I have been there this summer and I've been in worship every night and really rich teaching and all of those things this summer.
But when you ask that question, where I went to was I have been very involved in the Covenant School. A friend of Catherine Koontz, the head of school and I have spoken over there a lot of times and we have a lot of Daystar families that are there and so I was at the reunification center that day and walking closely through that with the school and the families and you know, it's one of the worst things that is imaginable in our world, certainly as a parent, as a therapist.
I mean, it's unspeakable. Because I'd been there anyway, I ended up being on some news programs talking about it because of being local and all of that. And one of them was CNN and I had gotten a call to go down early in the morning to be on this live CNN broadcast and I get really nervous on things like that and I certainly don't want to but I certainly do and I was nervous about going and I was so emotional and exhausted and depleted.
This was the very morning after it happened and I was supposed to be there, I can't remember, 5:30 in the morning and I went down, and I had not thought about the fact that it's cold in Nashville in March in the mornings. and I thought we were going to be inside some kind of trailer. And I go down, and we're outside, and I'm a nervous wreck.
And I'm standing there. I didn't even know what it was going to look like. And it was like across from the White House. you see all the people lined up, and all the people are lined up on the street. And, I'm waiting to go on camera on live TV, and when I get cold, my kneecaps shake.
That's such a silly thing, but I don't know why they do it, but my kneecaps were shaking. I don't know if it was more cold or nerves. And I turned around and the street we were standing on was directly opposite the Covenant School. And this was late March. And so here was the sign for Covenant.
And that means you're entering onto their property. And I was, you know it's the darkest day I've ever experienced living in Nashville. And then next to that sign was the sign for the Easter services. And I thought, that's it. Like, there is nothing else we can say on our darkest day that I remember other than, he is risen. And this is the reason we even have Easter.That hope, that reminder of hope has really carried me. Every time I go back to that, every time that has spoken to me more powerfully than anything.
Alison: That even in the midst of this darkest hour, he has risen.
Sissy: Yeah.
Alison: That is, that's it. That's the basis of our hope. And I love that. I mean, against the backdrop of everything you're trying to communicate through what you do and through this book, that's why we have to do this work of staying calm and staying in a place of hope.
That's it. While we are still living, while we are still on this side of heaven, we have reason to hope and we have reason to give that hope to our kids. Yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you so much for the work that you do.
Sissy: Right back at you, Alison, you are delightful to talk with.
Alison: Oh my gosh. I imagine you among all of these kids and I'm so, so grateful. And I know it's not easy. I know you see really hard things and such good work that you're putting into the world. So thank you for that. Tell people how they can find you, how they can find your work and this beautiful book that's coming out into the world.
Sissy: You're so kind. Raisingboysand girls.com is our website and it connects you to all things related to us. And we get to be a part of the same family, the same podcast family, which is so fun. So we're podcast cousins. We could call ourselves that at TSF and you can find that at Raisingboysandgirls.com and then I try to be as active as I can on social media helping parents as much as possible.
So @SissyGoff on Instagram and then David Thomas who's my male counterpart. He and I both are doing things on raisingboysandgirls.com.
Alison: Great. I love it. Well, please get yourself a copy of Sissy’s book. It's so practical. So wise. So gentle. I mean, you really struck a balance of giving some real truths in a really gentle, encouraging, beautiful way. So, check it out and, I have one last question I ask all my guests, which is what is bringing out the best of you right now?
Sissy: That's a great question. I would say I have a senior dog. She is almost 15 and she doesn't sleep as much as she gets older. And so she has gotten into the habit in the last year of waking me up at 6 or 6:15 every morning. I didn't used to wake up that early and it is bringing out the best of me. It has taught me to have margin in a way that I wasn't having before and I love it.
Alison: I love that. Well, thank you so much for being here, Sissy.
Sissy: Alison, thank you for having me. Thank you for your voice in the world and the difference you're making.
Alison: Thank you.
Research shows that many men are struggling and not sure how to get support. So I asked our friends from the Dadville podcast to come on and talk about how to encourage the guys in your life! What a joy to host this insightful and fun duo! Jon McLaughlin and Dave Barnes are best known for their careers as musicians and song writers, but on their off-time, they encourage and inspire us on their popular parenting podcast, Dadville.
You'll find so much wisdom in this conversation, including:
1. How to find joy in the dream vs. the destination
2. Guys and vulnerability
3. The true goal of parenting
4. Why we all have to face our own blind spots
5. A beautiful picture of letting go of control with our kids
Do you have questions about friendship for Dr. Alison? Leave them here.
Resources
- "Art is never finished, only abandoned." -Leonardo da Vinci
- "Whenever we come together to share strengths it breeds competition; whenever we come together sharing our weaknesses, it breeds community." -Anonymous
- The Timehop app
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Related Podcast Episodes
- Episode 32: Productivity and the Never Ending To Do List: How to Stop Hustling & Embrace the Joy of Enough
- Episode 28: The Pain of Performing For Others and How to Claw Your Way Out with Toni Collier
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Transcript:
ALISON: I really loved the conversation that we had when I was on your podcast. The thing that I'm most interested in, and I think my audience will be really interested in, is this friendship dynamic–how you guys are so open about how you're growing as men through being dads.
Also, this way that you've connected to each other. There's so much research right now that shows that men struggle in making friendships. They don't know how to do it. We're seeing this with young boys too. How do we help men connect in ways where it makes sense to you? That’s intuitive.
And I love it that you guys are really doing it. You're so open and transparent about what's been hard about even being in therapy from time to time. And then you have this clear connection to each other.
So I want to get there, but I would love personally to hear a little bit more about your background as musicians. Tell me a little bit about your journey.
DAVE: Take it away, Jon.
JON: Take it away, Dave.
DAVE: See, that's how humble we are. We're constantly trying to make way for each other. So Jon's story is, which he'll tell you, he grew up basically playing piano since his fingers could move, which is one of the reasons he's so good at piano. But I got to do it kind of later.
I played drums growing up, but when I went to college at Middle Tennessee State University here, I kind of got into songwriting and singing and really loved that. And it was a totally out of nowhere God thing. I mean, there's no way to explain what I do for a living other than God's very dynamic and catastrophically wonderful intervention in my life to change the inertia of my direction, where I was going.
Not in any dramatic way. I mean music, singing, and songwriting was not anywhere on my radar at all. And so when I was there, I started playing and really enjoyed it and singing and stuff. And then moved here and pretty much started immediately. I worked for another producer for a while and kind of did a record with him. And then, since then I've done it full time. And so that's 20, whatever it is, 22 years now.
Nashville is the place to do that if you're going to do it because it's got the ecosystem and, you can, you can do it here because there's a way to do it. And so I think that's some of why I continue to keep getting to do it.
But, and, I think the longer you do it, you sort of find other things to supplant a little bit of it, like I write songs for other people now too. And we have the podcast. There's just, it's like doing music in 2023 is a wildly different thing than doing it in 1985.
JON: It means that you don't do music full time.
DAVE: Yeah. Well, I should say, and Jon can speak to this too, but, if you really do want to have a family, if you want to be home and sort of have any kind of home life, you really do have to sort of figure out other things to do to sort of help that so you're not gone all the time.
But, I love it. I mean, I wouldn't do anything else. Ever, ever, ever. It's the best.
JON: Yeah, like Dave said, which I do want to point out that Dave's kind words are very kind, but it's also a way of him saying like, “Oh, you guys have been doing this your whole life? Grammy nomination? Oh,I started doing this.”
ALISON: Right. You got a head start.
JON: But yeah, I grew up in a really musical family in Indiana. And the family is all still back in Indiana. I'm the only one down here in Nashville. And Dave is actually a huge part of me and my family being down here. We moved down here about nine years ago, but I grew up in Indiana playing classical piano from the, I mean, I don't have any memories of not having piano lessons,
DAVE: That's amazing.
JON: And extremely grateful for it because I have no other skills, and so I don't know what else I would do. I'm glad that podcasting is a thing, because then it's like, well, I guess I could do that. As long as Dave's with me, I think I could do a podcast.
DAVE: We listen to people talk well, is what that means.
JON: That is exactly what we do. We have smart people like you on, and you help us get from week to week. So yeah, I moved down here with my family to kind of, dabble in the “writing for other people” thing as well.
Once my oldest daughter came along, up until that point, I had only written and toured for myself. And I had this panic moment when Luca was born, I was like, I can never leave the house again. I'm never, well, I can't leave now. Like Amy, my wife was always on the road for seven years. She came out on the road with my band. So it was a huge shift. And Dave was starting to write for other people around that time and having massive success.
And so I moved down here and kind of dabbled in that it did not work out for me to write for other people. I know nothing about country music at all. And so I still tour and write for myself and I do this podcast with my neighbor Dave.
ALISON: I hear from both of you that you've had to make some hard decisions along the way. There's these dreams–big dreams, big talent and some success. Tell me a little bit about how you've arrived at some of those, the maturity, I guess, that is required to both hold on to dreams and steward talents that God has given you.
And also make these hard decisions around your family and being a dad and being a good friend to each other. How does that, how does that play out for you? What are some of the milestones where you saw some of those decisions staring at you in the face and had some come to Jesus moments?
JON: Yeah, I mean, as you're talking what comes to my mind, and what comes to my mind often especially living in Nashville and doing what we do, is you have to make–I don't know how to say it exactly–but you have to decide to enjoy the life that God has given you. Because there are a thousand different ways to see your life as a failure, and sometimes it feels like there's one little tightrope of a way that you can enjoy it.
And it's there, but you have to decide to enjoy it. I mean, not to throw labels under the bus, but there is a way that they can, and artists as well, can turn successes into failures, where you do something, it hits, you're on the chart, and you were like, oh, we weren't even, we were just, the goal was here, and we've exceeded that, well now, let's move the goal to here, because all these people are. We're in the top 20 now, and then, well, let's get to the next goal.
I mean, Dave has had many number ones. He had this massive song with this artist that Dave, you posted the other day, which I thought was a great post because, and he wrote this really well written caption underneath it that was celebrating the song that had this massive success.
And it got to number two. That is an insanely massive success.
There's a way that the labels and there's a mindset you can have where you can be like, yeah, we thought it was going to be number one, and we didn't quite get there. And you're like, wait a minute, this is a huge success story here that we should be celebrating.
And it's easy. Again, in this town with all this activity, with all this creativity and talent, it's really easy to take that mindset of like, well, I've got this, but it is nowhere near that or that or that. So in order to survive, you kind of have to choose to own the enjoyment of your own life and your own talent.
DAVE: Yeah, it's, it's true. That's well-said Jon. And thanks for saying that. I think music is to me (Jon has heard me say this 5,000 times), but music to me—
JON: Change it up. Change the wording up.
DAVE: Okay. Music is a lot like roller skating and I've never gone here, but let's see what–oh, you've heard that one.
I think it's a lot like professional sports in that it really is kind of a young man's game/young woman's game. And so, it runs on dream juice, it's like, it's all about what the next thing is and where you're taking it and where it's going. It's not so much about maintenance, it's about what the next thing is and what gets hard.
And you asked such a good question, Alison. It's like, what gets hard as you get older and your priorities change is that it really doesn't help your business the minute you have kids and you get married. You have kids and you have this home life.
Your dreams start to divert, and all of a sudden this engine that has run on this juice suddenly, your family is the new engine that runs on that juice. And so you're looking at this thing at the side, kind of going like, “Man, what are we gonna put in that now”?
And so it's really tricky. It's a weird occupation that way because it's like, I laugh with a lot of my friends because novelty is king in our industry. And so you spike fast, you come out and you catch, and all of a sudden you shoot, you're at the top of that chart and then you're kind of like somewhat descending the rest of your career. And you'll stay and you'll plateau. But like, I laugh with my friends because we'll go get coffee, and they got the CFO job, CEO job…
ALISON: They climb.
DAVE: …they're climbing, and I'm kind of waving on the way down a little bit. Thankfully, it doesn't mean you can't have a career, it doesn't mean that you can't be successful and still enjoy it, because Jon and I both do. I mean, I've probably never enjoyed it more, which is great.
I don't feel like we've ever been better at it, if you think about the 10,000 hours principle, but at the same time, it's a tricky job because you kind of realize a lot of your friends are now hitting their peak and you kind of do that in your twenties when you're us, because that's when it is the most valuable, it's the most interesting, it's the newest, you got to go see him live. He's awesome.
And then, the 10th time you've seen somebody live, it's still great, but some of that magic has changed into nostalgia, which is totally fine, but you really have to have maturity about it to your point, Alison.
It's like you kind of have to know how to, and like Jon is saying, to think about it, to not walk off stage and go, “Man, when I played here three times ago, there were three times more people”, but instead go, “Man, there's still people coming to my shows that really enjoy it, and I still can do this for a living, you know”?
ALISON: It takes some soul work. You guys have made choices and we all have to do this work. Whatever your job is, somebody's always got a bigger boat, whatever the thing is in your life.
But for you guys, you didn't have to make the choices you made, you've made decisions to keep your souls intact in some sort of way, shape or form that you didn't have to make, and I guess I'm curious, what do you attribute that to?
I love your image of the tightrope. To kind of stay on it, continue to love what you do, but not fall off either side–the side of giving up everything, losing your soul, but to stay on top, killing yourselves and all your relationships, and I think the other side of that tight rope might be giving up all together on these beautiful talents.
JON: Yeah, I mean, I think that some of the things that have kept me going are, like Dave, I absolutely love creating music and performing music. I love it. I would do it. I mean when people ask like, what would you do if money were no object? You have a billion dollars in the bank.
What would you do? I don't know. I would get more massages, but I don't think anything In my life would change, you know what I mean? I would like to get the house painted. I don't know.
So like, that is huge. I mean there is what I'm doing, and what Dave and I are doing, there is like a soul and our souls are involved, so it's easier to not be quite so drawn to the results of something.
And I'm not saying that I'm above that. I have a new song coming out here soon. I'm like, I want it to do well. I want it to get on some playlists. I want people to hear it. So that's still there, but there is a very real element of “the work is already done”. I created this song that could do nothing.
I could even not release it and I still have a huge box checked internally of like, I created this thing. There's this beautiful relationship with the art itself. Not to sound cheesy there.
ALISON: I love that. Because the irony of what you guys are saying is I think it could be Daniel Day Lewis who will still have that feeling of “it could be better”. That tension that you're describing is probably endemic in any creativity or work.
So the illusion is, if I got to that number one or if I got to that, whatever, I'll finally feel good, but the reality is you get there and there's something else.
And so what you're saying is so beautiful–that the work is constantly remembering: “I created this beautiful piece of art.”
DAVE: That's it.
JON: Well, and that's another thing that is huge. I think it is a huge gift that I have seen time and time and time again–that sort of myth of like, you get to the top of the mountain and you've made it and there is no “made it”.
There's nothing up there. You can get to number one but there's always again there's always some way that you can spin it. If you're doing it for the wrong reasons, there's some way that it won't give you what you are looking for.
If you're needing success in your job to give you something, it's not going to give it to you.
DAVE: It's ladders that lead to more ladders.
ALISON: It's so true. Yeah, and I think, again, it's such a subtle nuanced thing where there's ambition, there's drive, there's talent that are not bad things and you want to do well, of course.
I think sometimes in the Christian community especially, it can be too easy to have sort of a pseudo-humility or to kind of repress that all together. I see this in women. I'm sure it's there for men. You guys tell me. You want to do well, but you don't want to find your identity in it, because that is a house of cards that is never going to last. And I kind of hear that ongoing work for both of you.
DAVE: Well, I think the thing you have to realize at some point, all of us, and it doesn't matter, industry or gender, we are co-creators. Like, we are the church, we are the bride to Jesus, and that means that God initiates relationship with us. He initiates. So much of our relationship, it's two ways, it's like God being with us and us being with God.
And I think when we think about creation and jobs especially, and really anything, we have to get to this place. And it's such a struggle for me where it's like we have to let go. We have to create and then stop. We have to work and then stop. We have to, because one of the parts of faith that's so paramount is realizing that I have done what I feel called to do and I can't do anything more than that. And it is God's from now on.
From this point, we push the boat out and we wave and we go back to our family. And I think it's really hard when we attach too much identity to what we create. We forget that there's a faith element at play that we do the best we can with our part of that creation, but it ends. It's a finite thing.
I quoted this last week, I should look this up, but one of the famous painters said, “No great art is finished. It's abandoned”. And I think that's true with a lot of kinds of work.
We all kind of feel like, man, if you could give me 10 more minutes, I can get these numbers right. Or whatever, I don't think it's specific to creation or creative careers. But, I think it's easier to understand where you feel like, God, let me fix that part right there, the bridge, we could get that a little more…and at some point it's like, it doesn't matter.
You really have to trust that I've done my best, I'm abandoning. It's probably a better metaphor, honestly. It's like, I'm abandoning this work to God so he can finish it and fulfill it. And some of that stuff never gets finished and you get really sad. You realize like, man, that didn't achieve what I wanted it to.
And then some does. But I mean, I think the eternal perspective, if you can have that perspective and lay over our current experiences, it's game changing because you reprioritize everything. You realize that kids are the real work. Our family's the real work. Our church is the real work. Our relationships are the real work. The work is wonderful.
Like our jobs are wonderful, but they're going to burn. Like it's all going to burn. It's not going to heaven with us. Now what God can use it for in our lives to shape us and mold us to become better people is very valuable.
And some of it has really profound work in the world. I mean, I believe Jon, our music, and your books. These things do matter. They have eternal weight, but not near what we think they do.
And I think the sadness I see, and one of the things that I think compels me so much with Dadville is to sit with other men and hear them going, “I think that too. I love my work. I want to do well, but gosh, the real work for me is with my kids”.
Jon and I laugh all the time. One of our great qualifiers as dads is like, we want our kids to want to come home when they're 25 and hang out with us for a weekend. Like that's a win. Like we have done it. And to me, if you're not careful, you're going to have a lot of awards on your wall and kids who don't want to come home.
Is that really what you want? So I think when you lay the eternal perspective on top of that, and you go backwards to forwards, you realize like, oh man, to get there, I need to make some different decisions.
Because that means probably less awards on my wall, but kids who are like, man, we're coming home next week, dad. And you're like, “Yes!”. And so they can end up staying in that room that was going to have the awards anyway. So it all works out.
ALISON: I love that. Tell me a little bit about parenting. Tell me about, first of all, the ages of your kids roughly.
JON: So Dave and I, our kids are exactly stair stepped. Dave has three and I have two in the middle. Mine are 10 and almost eight. And Dave, yours are 11, seven and…
DAVE: They're 11, nine, and six about to be seven
ALISON: How has becoming a parent, becoming a dad, brought out some of your own growth and your own healing? ‘Cause that's a pretty deep thing, what you said, like I realized, “here's what I actually want. I've now got to reverse engineer my life to get there”. So how did that bring up stuff inside of you then to ensure that happens?
DAVE: Can we end here and just, it's been a great podcast. I've really enjoyed it. I've really, really enjoyed it.
JON: You know, one of the first episodes we did was with this guy named Steven James and he was our first expert that we had on the podcast and I have quoted that episode so many times. I mean, it was years ago and it was such a pivotal moment for me as a parent.
Because there was this one scenario that I was talking about, I've said it a million times, but where I was worried about Luca, my oldest, it was like she was going to school for the first time, kindergarten starting, the parents are having a meeting, the kids are all outside playing, and I could not focus on anything that was happening in the meeting. I was looking out the window, looking at things like, is she playing with other kids, is anybody being mean to her, is she being left out.
And she was kind of playing by herself the whole time and I'm like, I really want her to make a friend. Like these kids are playing together. Why isn't Luca over there? You know? And he's like, dude, that, this is 1000% your problem. Luca is fine. She was playing with a leaf. She was fine.
So that was kind of my first lesson in that. I mean, it was one of those moments where like, he sort of pointed this one thing out to me and it's like when you see an ant on the ground and then all of a sudden you see like another ant and then a thousand ants it was like, oh I can see how I'm doing this ten times a day with the things that I'm worried about it really sort of like trimmed away a lot of what I thought were my legitimate concerns with my daughters and really made me see like, okay, some of these are actually them and let's keep those all these other ones, you really need to work on those for yourself.
And it made me realize how important it is to operate, and this goes for anything, but as a parent, as a husband, as a friend, as a coworker, I mean, how important it is to, as much as we can, operate out of security and health.
Start there. As a parent, how much of my behavior during the day, like at the end of the day when I lay my head on the pillow, how much of the way I handled any given situations was because of me and what I was going through and the baggage in my head and what I was bringing into the room, versus what the situation actually called for. It's made me, it's kind of forced me to realize those elements that are at play.
DAVE: Which I'd been telling him for years!
JON: Years, years in song, and I never listened.
DAVE: Yeah, I mean, I'll say two things quickly. I think one, it's given me a lot of grace for my parents. One of the things that I think is really easy as you grow up and mature is to get to that age where you suddenly see that your parents didn't do everything right.
And for some people that's 15. For me it was kind of like late, late teens into twenties. And it's easy to kind of go scorched earth with that, kind of come home and be like, let me tell you everything you didn't do right.
And boy, when you get engaged and married, that quadruples because you have somebody else going, “Hey, so fun fact about your mom or your dad…”. But I think when you have kids, you suddenly realize, “Oh man, this is hard. This is really hard”.
There's a guide in that we have the Bible, there's a guide in great books, but there's not a guide guide. There's no definitive answer to every problem you're gonna have. And I think for me, that was a huge moment to realize like, man, everybody's kind of doing the best they can, whatever that looks like. And that's going to change according to what they were given as kids and their parents. But that was helpful.
And then I think the other thing, kind of what Jon and I talk a lot about, it's like this idea that you can only take your kids as far as you've gone yourself spiritually and emotionally. And so it's compelling to continue to do your own work so that you can keep trying to lead your kids that way, as opposed to truncating that.
And then when they're 25, past your maturity, and they come home and go like, man, dad's like a 10 year old when he gets mad, or he can't talk about this one thing cause he just? I think we've seen on Dadville so much where really wise people say like, “Hey, I gotta keep keep doing my work.”
JON: Mm hmm.
ALISON: Yeah. We talked a little bit about when I came onto your podcast, and you guys have said it so well, the goal of parenting isn't perfection. It's what you're saying. It's to keep that connection ongoing and that's where the rubber hits the road is really when your kids are adults.
Do they want to still come to you? Is there a safe place for them to come to you and say, “Actually when you did that, that wasn't great”?
And you can take that because that's what keeps connection alive. That's what keeps connection alive. It's not that your goal is that your kids won't ever have a problem with you or ever come to you and say, hey. It's that you will be safe enough so that when they do, you've done enough work and all humility to say, you know what, you might have a point there.
JON: Right.
DAVE: And so we say it again, I almost wish people would hit the 15 seconds back and hear what you said twice, Alison, because what kind of deluded people do we think we are, that we are going to parent in a way that our kids at 30 sit down with us at Outback Steakhouse over at Bloomin Inn and go, “You know what guys? You stuck it. You stuck the landing. I have come out unscathed. I have only amazing things”.
And I think we all laugh at that, but I think if we're really, really honest, I can dysfunctionally operate in a way like I'm trying to have the perfect card here. Jon does such a good job talking about this, but this idea that it’s not what we're shooting for. We're really trying to keep communication lines open and to be real and authentic and the rupture and repair idea that for what we do to rupture, we come back to repair.
If I'm not careful, I'm in my sinful fallen brain going, man, I want to ace this, I'll take an A-”. it's a terrible way to go about life because it assumes way too much control. And the sense that there is such a thing as sort of doing it right.
JON: Right. Yeah, and I get terrified when I'm in this headspace. I have to let go of the myth that I'm gonna nail this, that I'm gonna hit some sort of parenting bullseye. It doesn't exist. But, when that day comes and they do come back home and they sit down with Amy and I and they're like, “Okay, here are some of the things that were hard”, I want to know what they are. I want to be one step ahead. Because they're going to come in and they're going to say the thing that I'm going to be like, “No, no, I nailed that”!
DAVE: I was at every single game, ask your mom!
ALISON: I love that.
DAVE: I say this every now and then, especially when you meet your spouse, that there's this analogy I always use. There's a tableau in your house that you've seen a hundred times walking out the door.
You know that tableau. It's the Barnes tableau. Then you bring your spouse and they look up at it and they're like, “Is that a woman eating that bear?” And you're like, “That's the woman that eats a bear. That's Deborah”. And they're like, “That's disturbing”.
You're like, “When I say it out loud, that is really disturbing”. And then you sort of work your way through this tableau and you have this part and it's like, that's some weird family stuff. And you're like, now that you are here, it does feel weird.
And to Jon's point, I don't want to be like, “Honey, that's the bear eating woman. Why are you mad about this”? But I can go, “We do have a bear-eating woman on our table”. We need to be okay with that.
ALISON: Yeah. It's like the shame that comes from being caught at something we didn't have a chance to pre-condition ourselves to acclimate to. It's vulnerable.
DAVE: That is it. So then the question is how do you not get surprised in the community? It's people that can be in your life that look at you and go, “Hey Dave, like you have this quirk and I love you and we love you and we're committed to this relationship, but you kind of do this when this happens”. And you're like, “Oh shoot”. And they're like, “It's okay, we're here”.
But when you've had that conversation 15 years before your daughter sits down and has that conversation with you, you're able to go like, “You're right, honey. Like that's actually one of my blind spots. And I know that because I'm in a group of people that love me enough to go like, Hey, you kind of have this blind spot”.
‘Cause if you don't have that community, that is going to be a really hard conversation, a really hard conversation. And I think if you look at the history of mankind, especially America over the last 75 years, you think about the greatest generation and the generations that follow, they're coming back from World War I and II and rightfully so, they want to be left alone with all the trauma that's happened.
But what that hands down generation to generation is this mentality of “Hey, we are individuals. We take care of ourselves. That's none of your business”. We have seen, and our parents' generation has seen when you try to sit and have this conversation with your parents, it does not go well. Because “Who are you to tell me how I failed? Do you know who failed me? My dad, who left when I was five”.
And all that is fair, but I think it doesn't invite this communal learning. That is absolutely part of our faith. I mean, there's nothing to me that's as compelling about Christianity as the idea that we are a body. And that God is always pushing us toward each other. Always, always, always.
Without it, you have these conversations, again, like Jon said, where they come home at 30 and they go, “Dad, you get really, you get really mean when this happens”. And you want to go, “No, no”.
But if you've had someone sit with you 15 years before and go, “Hey bro, you get really mean with this” you're like, oh shoot. So it becomes a common vernacular and you know, and again, that's your work. That's the work.
You're sort of spelunking the end of yourself to it and hopefully in a healthy way to kind of go like, oh, I may have some blind spots after all.
ALISON: It's a muscle you have to exercise. And if you've never exercised that muscle to be able to see your own blind spots, to be able to see what's hard about yourself, shame hardens you. I have a friend who says “shame doesn't age well”.
And so because of all that shame. If you've never had a little bit of exposure to the little bit of, “oh, ouch, that hurts that you're seeing my family in this way”, or “you're seeing this side of me”, but “oh, I can survive it”.
And actually, it draws us closer. And actually, you still love me. If you haven't been working on that incrementally, it builds and builds and builds to the point where you become that older person that can't take any real feedback. That can't be seen.
Part of why I wanted to have you guys on is what you're doing on your podcast–creating a space for dads, for men, to have these conversations as only guys can, with a lot of humor. And it's fun, but there's a lot of depth in it–you bring so much of the depth and the fun to it.
I know a lot of my listeners are going, “I don't know how to get my husband to engage in community in the way you guys are talking about, where he's open to some of these hard conversations, where he's doing this work of seeing some of his own stuff”. And so talk to me a little bit about that.
How do we encourage men to do exactly what you're describing, which is be in community, be talking about what's hard, be talking about what's scary about being a dad. This is really vulnerable stuff. How do we encourage that?
DAVE: Well, I was looking at your questions, and I loved this one because I think it's a wonderful question, but I actually thought about this for a while and I think that the two things that I thought about and you're right, I don't know that there's a definitive answer, but the two things I found myself thinking about is one, I think there has to be an agreement that everyone is struggling with something. There's no such place where every man is good. Like, I'm good. I'm good. It's like that in the Christian space, especially.
That is antithetical. Like that's not a reality. Like God didn't create perfect guys who roam the earth for 80 years and then die. So it's some degree we, as men, are all struggling with really a myriad of things, but I would say especially a few things, whatever they are.
So I think there has to be an understanding, moms, if you're thinking about your husband, it's in there, it is in there. If we believe anything about humans, it's in there. And then it's about, my favorite quote, Jon has heard me say this quote many times, but I think it's especially potent in this conversation, which is, I heard someone say, “Anytime we come together sharing our strengths, it breeds competition. Anytime we come together sharing our weaknesses, it breeds community”.
And so the thing that I always encourage my friends who are struggling in this space is like, start being really honest. And that sounds crazy. Cause guys like, no, no, no. But I think two things, I think that, and this, I think Alison, you may have said this, but men do a better job looking in the same direction than they do at each other.
So that's a fishing trip, a drive, a trip together, watching sports. That usually helps a little bit cause it's not quite as intense as really seeing somebody and being like, I'm really struggling with lust. And they're like, do you mean with me or why are you staring at me like that?
So I think, one, try to think of ways that we can be together as men that don't maybe feel quite as imposing.
But two, I did this when I heard that quote. It changed my life because I realized that I had these friends who I had a really hard time connecting with. I love them dearly, but like we couldn't and so literally it became sort of like a joke like I would sit and be vulnerable and it would it nine times out of 10 elicit amazing conversations and relationships that were so helpful to me because I would go, “Hey, can I, can I just, I'm having a really hard time with this right now and I don't know what to do”.
And nine times out of 10, they go, “Dude, do you know how hard that is for me”? And all of a sudden you're like, here we go. We're in. Let's go. Yeah. Oh yeah. And it would take the bravery of going like, Hey, and it doesn't mean you have to be like, like the most bear you've ever been, but I think sometimes go like, “Hey, my kids…” And not like they're hard or I don't like, they're being punks, but say like, like let's use emotion words and say “they're, they really make me sad sometimes”. Like, or “I'm really struggling with feeling like I'm not being a good dad”. It is rare that I've ever had that conversation. So I'd be like, man, that sucks.
And you're like, okay, that was good. High five. And we're out of here. But you usually find somebody goes, “Dude, me too. Like last week”. And then you're off, you're off to the races. And so for me, it's become a test pattern that I love doing, which is like, in those moments of friendships where I'm like, why is this not working? It's probably because nobody's being vulnerable.
It's probably because we're not being honest because the minute we are, it creates this crazy bond, and it gets easier the more you do it. Because everybody is, again, it goes back to point one, like some everybody's struggling with something.
You're not gonna find somebody who's like, I don't have problems, and if you do then they're probably not gonna be a great friend anyway. I wouldn't advise hanging out with whoever that is. But I've found that for me that has been wildly helpful for me and my friendships.
JON: Yeah, I don't know that I have anything to add to that. I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said. I mean, it, it, it really is, I guess, about who's gonna take the first step. Who's gonna, in a group of guys, I mean, we always laugh about this, Amy and I, Dave and I, you can have a group of guys do a guy's night and the night after the girls do a girl's night and like I'll come home from a guy's night and Amy will be like, Oh, was Matt there? Yeah, he was there. Oh my gosh. How's his mom doing? She's in the hospital. I'm like, Oh, I actually didn't know that. You didn't talk about that? You hung out for four hours? What'd you guys talk about? We were joking the whole time, which is great, which is great.
But I do a thousand percent agree with Dave in that I've never been in a situation where or somebody in the room makes some one little baby step toward out of like jokey land toward vulnerability and is left hanging. It doesn't happen. And I think that like Dave said, the more you do it, the easier it is, and the longer it's been since you've done it, the bigger that lie of “you're the only one, they don't want to talk about how they yell at their kids because they don't yell at their kids. You yell at your kids, no one else does'' grow.
You said you're not sure if there's an answer to this question. I don't know that there's an easy answer to the question other than:
Somebody's got to take that little baby step toward vulnerability and believe that they're not going to be left hanging because like Dave said, everybody has something that they want to talk to somebody about and it's not as socially acceptable for a myriad of reasons in our society for men to do that. And I think the older you get, the harder it is.
ALISON: And how do your wives encourage you toward male friendships?
DAVE: I'm not saying that we do this well cause I think this takes a lot of time and wisdom, but the older I get, the more I realize there are times I look at it and you go, “I don't know that I can help you with this. I think this is better with your girlfriends”.
And I think the same for her to look at me and go like “This sounds like stuff I'm a little under qualified to answer” or “It's not appropriate for me to be a part of”. And I don't even mean lust, I mean because I can't relate to you. I'm not gonna be able to look at you and go like I know that life.
Or you can give terrible advice because you go “Well then stop doing it” because it's easy for you not to do it as a man, or a woman.
And so I think a lot of wisdom comes from knowing what are the things that are not for me to navigate with you. Because I can't relate to it, and there'll be a woman that, for my wife, that she could sit down, and that woman goes, I know exactly what you're saying, where I could be like, let me think about that.
I mean, I could get that. I don't really feel that way. So I think some of it is knowing hey, when is it not my turn to do that,
ALISON: It's, it's so interesting. The whole thread through all this, we talked about art, creativity, work. We talked about being a dad. We talked about friendship, this whole friendship thing. The whole theme is really about letting go of control. And I think of that metaphor where you were saying you push the boat out, you do your best and you push the boat out with your art.
But in a way, Jon, when you were talking about your little girl, being at school in a way, you did your best, you equipped her and then you had to kind of let her go that day and not micromanage, her, and obsess over is she making friends, you kind of let it go and trust her to God.
There's this constant kind of, it reminds me of these attachments that we talk about where. healthy attachment isn't grabbing on. It's this back and forth. It's this flow of pouring in and then letting go. And it's really the same with our spouses. If we see our husbands hurting, and I hear this a lot as a woman. We see them feeling lonely or we want to go get them their friends.
You might instead say, “I wonder if there's some guys that you might want to check in about that”, and then you gotta let it go. They might not. You can't orchestrate it. There's sort of this theme of you say what you can, you might name something even, even when you guys are talking about with a group of guys, you're like, well, I can try to be vulnerable here, and then I let it go. And typically guys take the bait. Sometimes they don't,
DAVE: Well, and you know what's hard? I think that you're saying too, and this is, I don't know that there's harder work, personally, maybe in life and relationships than marriages where you're trying to respect, where you're, one, trying not to be too codependent, because I think we are all that way, even in the sneakiest levels, because it feels great when your spouse comes to you and goes, hey, I need help, and you're like, “You've come to the right person”!
But to have enough wherewithal and wisdom and maturity to go, I want to answer this so badly because it would make me feel so good and it'd make me feel good with you looking at me that way. It's, “I don't know that I can help you here”.
The healthiest marriages I know have so much of that, that they really are two people that are married to each other. They're not one person. They are in some ways, but that is a hard discipline to have. But the thing that comes from it, and here's a full circle to your point. When I say, “I don't know if I can help you”, it actually pushes my spouse back into community. And I think there's nothing more dangerous to me than seeing older couples who are their best friends and they have drank the Kool Aid until they're both green.
And you're like, you guys have lost the plot because you're mirrors. You're echo chambers of each other, agreeing with each other into oblivion to where you're irrelevant as people anymore because you sort of agree with each other and live in your little mountain and you're not coming back down to earth with the rest of us.
And then the healthiest couples are the ones that are absolutely the opposite. They're in community. They're going, “Hey, my husband has these guys that he talks to that stuff about. And some of it I don't even know about. And some of it we talk about together. And then I have my women”, and I think that is really counterintuitive in some ways.
You think, well, we're married. We're the safe place for each other. And yes, you are. But again, this is a communal experience. Like this is meant to be shared. And some of the most dysfunction I've had to deal with in my marriage is believing that thing that I think the church really has to be careful with, that “you are one in front of the Lord”.
And so husbands, you stand before your wives and you answer for them. And some of that is true, some of it is true, but you have a relationship. Your husband has a relationship with God and with people. And I think we have to hold that space carefully because it can really compound that struggle already.
Because he doesn't need friends when he's got you. Like he's gonna tell you everything and then you listen and he's like I'm good. We're instead of having the discipline to be like, “It's gonna be hard, but I don't know honey, why don't you talk to Fred about that?”
“Oh, okay. Well, usually you want to talk about it.”
“Well, maybe I shouldn't do it anymore”.
It's hard to do. God bless Fred.
ALISON: Yeah. The image that I use is the overlapping circles of the Venn diagram. We don't become one as one unit. We have a steadfast overlapping portion of our two circles that is the bedrock, but we also each have circles off of that and some of them don't overlap, and so I really appreciate what you're saying there.
You know, marriage is... it's autonomy and connection. But that's this whole tension of holding things loosely where you can name some things and you know sometimes our partners don't do the things that we want them to do, but that doesn't mean we can't name a couple things and then be really healthy in our own circles.
It does take a community. Again, for our listeners. I would encourage you to check out the Dadville podcast and encourage your husbands and your significant others and the guys in your life as well.
I think a lot of folks would benefit from it, but especially the guys because you are having these kinds of conversations in a way that's so relatable as guys. And so I appreciate that you're doing that. And I hope you'll keep having these conversations as a place for men, for dads.
To hear guys talking about exactly what you guys were talking about. “Oh yeah, me too. Cause I'm hearing that on a podcast now. It's one level removed from vulnerability”. And I think it's. So great that you're doing that.
JON: We have a ton of fun on the podcast and thank you for bringing our credibility up by coming on the podcast. Hopefully there are guys all around hearing stuff that probably their wives have said 10 times. But they hear it someplace else and then they're like–
DAVE: They hear in a deeper octave. They're like, actually that resonates with me.
ALISON: So tell me a little bit about what went into, what was your decision to start it out of your friendship? I think it's really neat.
JON: Well, so, as I said before, Dave is my neighbor. Literally, we could share Wi-Fi. And sometimes we do. We've known each other for 20 plus years. And our kids play together all the time.
We're often sitting in our backyards on our porch, like talking about our kids and talking about our lives and our kids are our lives right now, to a great extent. And so one day Dave was like, “Hey, would you want to do a podcast called Dadville?” And I was like, “Yeah”. And that was it.
DAVE: Yeah. It's what you said, Alison. Ultimately some of the subterfuge afoot is that we're trying to create a venue for dads to talk about what they actually really love to talk about that they don't always get the venue to do. And that's their kids and their family.
I don't know many dads that if you really cue them up to talk about their kids they that they’re like “I'm good”. I think and I'm not gonna go on like a society bender about why the world doesn't do that, but it's not great at doing that.
There's not a lot of great venues. Guys at business meetings aren't going, “Can we pause? How's Carla doing”? That's not happening and so it's fun to kind of feel like hey, this is a place we can do that. Let's talk about that. What are you scared of? What are you excited about? What, what are you learning? What do you want to do better.
We've been so encouraged because people really enjoy it. And I think people enjoy hearing that because there is a communal sense to it.
ALISON: I love that you've created that space where it's normalizing guys talking about what matters. In closing, I want to ask you two questions. You guys asked the question of me.
JON: What do you want your kids to say at your funeral?
ALISON: I would like to hear your guys' answers to that.
JON: It's tough and at this moment I sympathize with all the guests.
DAVE: Yeah, all of a sudden I'm like, why do we make people do this?
JON: No, it's hard because obviously there's so much. It's overwhelming whenever you distill it all down to a moment like that. There's too much in there. How do I sum it up?
This gets to what we talked about a little bit before. If I heard them say, “We could tell him anything. He would always listen. And we knew that he loved us unconditionally”. That would be, I would be elated.
What more could you want if we had that relationship and they knew that they could always tell me anything, knowing that because part of the frustration of becoming a parent and one of the best parts about becoming a parent for me was this feeling and it has affected my faith.
It has affected my relationship with my parents. It's this feeling of like it's a different love than you've ever felt before. It is this Unconditional love that exists in no other relationship. It's in a different category, you know and part of the frustration day to day when I'm talking to my kids sometimes is I'm like, ah, there's no way I can really get across to you how much I love you.
You can't get it across. And hopefully one day if they have kids, then they'll, they'll feel it. And then it will inform their relationship with me and with God. This unconditional love. And so if at the end of my life they say in some sense, “We knew that and we knew that we could always go to him”, that would be amazing.
ALISON: That's beautiful.
DAVE: I think mine would be that they could always go to Jon. “Dad's gone, but gosh, we can still go to Jon.”
JON: Jon's still here
DAVE: kidding, no, I think two things. There's a million answers, but I think the main two that I think of right now, are one that “I will miss him”, because I think it'd be powerful to think that you ended well, that it wasn't sort of like we were kind of waiting for this a little bit. And “We love him, but like, boy, it got weird there at the end”.
But I feel like I see that a lot with parents where it's like, as they get older, it gets trickier. I pray that I can end that well, that they still feel that they do miss me.
And then I think exactly what Jon said–I think some version of them knew that I loved them, which is really simple. But it's true, that they'd say we never doubted that.
ALISON: what would you want that younger you to know about being a dad that you know now?
DAVE: Jon?
JON: I think whenever we have guests on Dadville who are further down the road, if their kids are older or they're out of the house or whatever, I do feel like Dave and I we laugh about this, but we always have a string of questions that have the theme us asking them to tell us everything's gonna be okay. Please tell us it's all gonna be okay. And I feel like that would be what I would want to say, because that's what I wanted to hear.
And that's what I still want to hear. But I would want to say to my younger self, “I know it's hard. relax and enjoy it. And because it's all going to be okay”.
ALISON: I love that. That's great.
JON: And also Dave's going to want you to do a podcast in a couple years. And try to get 75 25 if you can
DAVE: Also, bet on the Patriots. Every Super Bowl they're in, bet on them.
JON: And then, “Go Buccaneers”!
DAVE: I agree, except for that one. My biggest struggle, and I actually feel like I've done this pretty well, but I can't say it enough to myself, it's to be present.
I have this app called Time Hop and it's my favorite app. Every morning it is one of the first things I look at and it takes pictures from whatever day for every year and you've got pictures on that day and it's such a sobering reminder of the speed of time.
You know here's what you're doing a year ago today, two years ago today, three years ago. And there's so many times I see my kids and they're tiny, and I'm like, I would give a million dollars to have an hour with three year old Ben, or two year old Zanna. But at the same time, I'm like, I feel like I did a pretty good job of being still, but I think that's something I would really double down on. It's like, as much as you can think to be present, be present.
JON: I do love that app because Dave will send us + our wives, we have a text thread, and Dave will often send us that day's picture because oftentimes it's like our kids together. And so I do feel like that is a sort of a hack that we have that our parents didn't have that helps us stay in that mindset.
Be present and also know it's never going to be enough. It's always going to go by too fast.
DAVE: I remember with Ben vividly putting him down to naps and taking my hand and feeling his legs and his arms and his little head and thinking, remember the weight of him, how he feels on your neck. It's going to go away. And I couldn't be more present.
I was like Neo in the matrix and I was like, Oh, that's the way it was. Look at his little folds
JON: I love how you do that with all of our guests, too, that we interview.
DAVE: Yeah, yeah, I do. And I hold them tightly. And I feel they're their shaved faces
JON: Their stubble.
ALISON: You guys are great. So, to close out, what is bringing out the best in you right now?
JON: I mean, to answer on a lighter side, I feel like this summer has been great. The summer has always been, for me, it's always tricky because it's like the kids get out of school, and I am guilty of always having like, rosy colored glasses for the future. Like, this summer is going to be the best! The girls are never going to fight! We're going to eat healthy all the time!
And then it's too busy. It's too busy. We have too many trips and the next thing it's like what? We're buying backpacks already?
This summer has been really great. I feel like this summer taking my girls to the pool, I'm kind of doing some of the things that selfishly I did as a kid and liked. And I want to do those things with my girls and I feel like the summer has so far been really great. We've had our tough times because we have kids and we're humans, but it's been great.
ALISON: That's cool.
DAVE: You know what I love during the summer is dusk. Right as the sun is setting, we were playing baseball in the backyard last night at like, whatever that is, 7:30. And that little time of the day, it's so sweet. It's like right before everybody's going to bed, but I was running around the backyard and I was like, man, this is wonderful. That little magic hour in the summer to me, it's so great. So I think that's been really fun.
JON: I love those moments where you can appreciate quietly with yourself. It can be random moments. This is one of those moments.This would make the montage of my life. This little innocuous moment right here.
ALISON: That's beautiful. I love that. Well, thank you guys for coming on and sharing with us a little glimpse into your world and a little glimpse into the Dadville podcast. Tell everybody how they can find you and connect with your work.
DAVE: It's www.dadvillemindspring.net17227. Look at Alison's face, haha
JON: This is where Dave and I are terrible. We are comical. We're always like, do we have a website? Where do people get Dadville? (Here’s their podcast link: https://pod.link/1517698133)
ALISON: It's great. You have great conversations. I think if you're listening and you're like, “Oh, I'm worried about my husband” or “I'm worried about my boyfriend. I'm worried about my son”, it's a great place to start—to listen to some guys who have got a lot of depth and are super relatable talking about real things. Really appreciate you both.
JON: You have been very kind. Thank you for having us on.
DAVE: Yeah.
This episode is an absolute must-listen! If you're a woman journeying through your 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond, or if you're parenting a daughter, you don't want to miss this conversation. We dive into women's health, including menopause, perimenopause, hormone shifts, reproductive health, and ways to empower young women and girls. Dr. Leslie Appiah is a nationally-acclaimed OB/GYN who has helped women and girls for decades. Her practical and insightful approach is such a needed voice for all women.
Here's what we cover:
1. The impact of hormones on mental health
2. How to get relief for perimenopause and menopause symptoms
3. When to consider an anti-depressant
4. Why your physician might not have a clue
5. How to find one who will!
6. How to empower your daughters to live free of body shame
Do you have questions about friendship for Dr. Alison or Dr. Appiah? Leave them here.
Resources
- Seek Dr. Leslie's services through the University of Colorado
- Called To Medicine website
- The Menopause Talk with Oprah, Drew Barrymore, and Maria Shriver
- Find a Certified Menopause Provider
- Submit your questions related to women's health here!
- Resources for support
Related Podcast Episode
- Episode 63: Spiritual Direction, the Power of Listening, & How to Attune to Yourself and to Others
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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.
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week’s episode of The Best of You Podcast, where we are diving into some of these “therapy adjacent” ways of tending to your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. And in today’s episode, we’re going to dive into the physical health side of things, because especially if you’re a woman, you know that your hormonal health, especially during some of these key seasons of life, really has a tremendous impact on your mental, emotional, and even your spiritual health.
I’m so excited in today’s episode to introduce you to my friend and colleague, Dr. Leslie Appiah. She is here to talk to us all about women’s health, including hormones, menopause, perio-menopause, reproductive health, and some of the practical things you can do to make sure you’re trending to your hormonal health especially as it impacts your mental and emotional health. This is a fantastic episode. We get so practical. And, Dr. Appiah has agreed to come back on a future episode of the podcast to dive into our questions. As you're listening, please go to the show notes or to my website dralisoncook.com/podcast and look for The Best of You Question Doc. You can enter your questions into that Doc, and we will address those questions with Dr. Appiah in a future episode of the show.
Dr. Leslie Appiah is a nationally acclaimed Ob/Gyn-Gyn physician who specializes in the reproductive health of girls and women. She is also a Professor and the Division Chief of Academic Specialists in Ob/Gyn at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She is the founder of Called to Medicine, where she coaches female physicians to create and sustain satisfying careers in academic medicine as well as provides resources to help women advocate for their reproductive health care. We’ll talk a lot more about that in this episode.
She is the author of more than 50 peer-reviewed manuscripts and book chapters and given over 100 national and international lectures and workshops on women’s and children’s reproductive health. She serves as chair of several national and international committees on reproductive health and is the recipient of numerous awards including:
- The 2022 American Medical Association Women Physicians Inspiration Award,
- The 2022 American Medical Women’s Association Exceptional Mentor Award, and
- The 2020 Baylor University Distinguished Alumni Award
She is also a 2022 inductee into the American Gynecological and Obstetrical Society (AGOS) and an alumna of the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program.
She lives in Denver, CO with her husband and 2 middle-school aged children. I’m so excited to bring you this conversation all about women’s health with Dr. Leslie Appiah.
Alison: I am so delighted to have my friend and colleague on today to talk to us about women's health and the overlap between our medical health and our psychological and emotional and even our spiritual health that so often is divided into these silos where you go see a medical doctor and then you go see a therapist when in fact a lot of these things overlap.
I'm so thrilled you're here, Leslie, to talk to us today about all of these things.
Leslie: Thank you so much for having me, Alison. It's my pleasure. And I'm excited to talk about these things. As you've stated, it has a big impact on women, their mental health, their physical health, and their ability to care for themselves and their families. And so it's super important.
Alison: Yeah. So I want to start just asking you a little bit about your journey. Tell us about yourself. You're our first medical professional on the podcast. Tell us a little bit about how you got interested in medicine and women's health in particular, and what fueled your passion.
Leslie: Absolutely. Well, I'm one of the lucky ones where I was able to really figure out what I wanted to do very early in life. So at age nine, I became interested in pregnancy. My friend got pregnant and I was able to go along her journey with her. And I was just fascinated by the idea of helping a woman to bring this healthy, beautiful baby into the world.
And so I knew at age nine, I wanted to become an OBGYN. And so really just stayed on that course, college, med school, the whole time never deviated for at one moment. I thought I would become a literature professor because I love literature. And so that was a moment in college. But really my heart was with caring for women.
Alison: From age nine.
Leslie: from age nine. I knew at age nine. So I entered college medical school and never really deviated from that.
And in medical school, I had the opportunity to shadow a reproductive endocrinologist. So a physician that specializes in infertility and reproductive tract. And in that experience, I was able to see her perform surgery on an adolescent who was experiencing reproductive health difficulty. And I just fell in love with it.
This young girl, it had impacted her ability to function at school and just her happiness and mental well being and to see the condition corrected. And to see her just so thankful, I knew I wanted to do that. So I decided to pursue a fellowship in pediatric and adolescent gynecology after completing residency in obstetrics and gynecology.
So specialty training in adults and kids and helping them to have their best reproductive health.
Alison: That's amazing. It's so interesting because I was actually just talking to my daughter about this, who's now a young adult, around how thinking about women's reproductive health starts very young. Now. I mean, when I was young, we weren't talking about it, but now they're really talking about it starting much younger.
Is that right?
Leslie: Right. And you know, the age of development is about the same. It hasn't changed much. So the average age of menses or having a menstrual cycle is age 12. And that's only slightly different from, you know, several decades ago. And when you compare it to the pre-industrial age, women started much later.
With better nutrition, we started a little bit earlier. But for the most part, you know, menses is around age 12 and breast development is around age 10. But we are discussing it more because now we know we can help young girls with the difficulties that they have.
Whereas in the past, it was one of those “grin and bear it” type things.
Alison: And when you say difficulties, what do you mean, Leslie?
Leslie: Menstrual cramps, right? And we see endometriosis in adolescence. We see ovarian cysts in adolescence. Women suffered. And so we told girls, this is what it's like to be a woman. And, and we all just kind of suffer, but it's a problem, right?
Because it affects the ability to go to school. Some girls can miss up to five days of school a month if we don't intervene or try to address their difficulties, can't participate in sports, can't spend time with friends, girls become anemic, right? So there's so much that can negatively impact their quality of life that we can now intervene.
Alison: I love what you're saying–for so long it's just been like this is what it means to be a woman.
You suffer. And only recently, you know, is there more and more research, more people like you coming alongside saying, no, we can alleviate some of this suffering. Being a woman doesn't just mean you have to suffer. And I just, I'm so grateful for people like you who have devoted your lives to alleviating some of that suffering.
Leslie: Thank you. No, I completely agree. I think about the annual exam, right? So we start having annual exams, you know, really as adolescents, the well child exam and then in our 20s. And I don't think that, unfortunately, we do a good enough job of preparing women for what to expect as we enter perimenopause. We spent a lot of time discussing contraception and pregnancy, but we don't discuss the hormonal changes that women are going to experience and the fact that they're going to experience this in their thirties.
We discuss perimenopause in our forties, menopause in the fifties, but just as fertility is declining in our thirties, so are our hormones. And so really we need to be discussing this with women very early on. Too often I hear women say, “No one prepared me for this. I don't know what's happening to my body. I'm now having hot flashes, joint pain, I can't sleep at night, I'm crying all the time…” and we should be prepared for that right? This is not a surprise.
Alison: It's so true. I have so many friends who've said to me, “I turned 40 and I kept going to my doctor, like, ‘What is wrong with me?’ and the doctor was like, well, your body is changing, but nobody tells you.”
You kind of get prepared for adolescence, right? Like there's this sense of, I mean, hopefully there's this sense of your body's going to go through changes. You might have growing pains, you know, these things are going to happen. And so when it happens, it's hard, but at least, you’re prepared.
Leslie: Can I add another thought on that? I think even in adolescence, we make that experience aberrant, right? We say, well, you know, teens go through these things and they're going to be terrible. And all of that is normal. Right. They're going through these huge hormonal changes, and we should normalize that, and we should embrace that, and we shouldn't make adolescents feel as though something is wrong with them, and they're just a burden to have around, and you know, oh, if they could just behave.
It's normal, and so if we can normalize that experience, we can then also normalize what women are going to go through in their thirties and forties and prepare them and then how to manage it. Right? It doesn't feel good. It's not great, but we know it's going to happen. So we should prepare women for it.
Alison: I love what you're saying. There's almost a stigma or women feel some shame. I just watched the movie that's out right now–”Are you there God? It's me, Margaret.” Have you seen that?
Leslie: I haven't seen it.
Alison: It's all about, you know, coming of age. And I just, it just took me right back to those feelings as a young girl. There's shame involved and then as an older woman, right, there's shame and all this stigma and I love what you're saying to normalize.
This is just what our bodies do. This is actually amazing that our bodies do these things and just talk about them.
Leslie: Right. And then how can we help women go through these changes, right? So that it does not have a negative impact on their quality of life and they're able to function. I mean, you know, that's the age that many women are able to really take on their careers full force, right?
Because they've been raising children in their thirties and early forties, and then to be encumbered by, you know, sleepless nights and be worried about how you're going to present in the boardroom and the office because you're sweating. It's just not fair that we don't help women be ready for this.
Alison: So let's talk about this because you're, you're exactly nailing it. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on was because there's so much overlap between mental health and our physical health and this whole menopause thing, whenever I see women or talk to women who are in their forties, fifties, I'm hearing now it should be even earlier. And there's any of these symptoms, right? That we're talking about fatigue, irritability, sleeplessness, brain fog, joint pain…
We can be so quick as therapists to go down the road of depression, anxiety, not that that may not be the case. A lot of this is in the context of changing hormones, right? So what should women who are experiencing some of these things that we're talking about, what would you recommend they do to attend to this hormonal side of things?
Leslie: Absolutely. And to your point, you know, there are several times in our lives that we experience these hormonal changes, right? So premenstrual women have that dip in estrogen and they become symptomatic postpartum, right? Wide swings in hormones and then the perimenopause.
So these are times that women are going to be particularly vulnerable to mood disturbances. And, studies show that as women enter the perimenopause, they're 45 to 70% more at risk of experiencing depression than they ever did in their premenopause. So women on average–let's say 25% would experience depressive symptoms in the perimenopause two years before the menopause–we're talking 45 to 70% increased risk of experiencing that.
For women who are feeling sad and very tearful, it is important to first check in with your mental health provider because the first line for treatment is going to be, you know, antidepressants, right? After you've dealt with the behavioral things, right? There are things sometimes in our environment that we can change and we need to address.
But after looking at antidepressant therapy or discussions around it, cognitive behavioral therapy, all of those things that we use to address depression, we know that estrogen replacement improves depressive symptoms for women in the perimenopause. We don't see that same benefit in the menopause. So once women are in their fifties, we don't see that.
And it makes sense because the mood disturbance is as a result of the fluctuation in the hormones. Once the hormone levels fall and they're steady, we aren't going to see such depressive symptoms. It's the fluctuation, the up and the down.
Alison: I want to pause there. This is all very interesting to me because I talk to my friends about this all the time. So what you're saying is the fluctuations that start late thirties, early forties, there's fluctuations in the hormones that lead to the increase in propensity to depression.
Once you cycle through it and you come out the other side, when everything balances out, even though that estrogen is lower, are you saying you kind of hit a new baseline?
So here's my question. Do you hit a new baseline that is just more depressed in general, or does your body sort of catch up and it's kind of like going through puberty, you even out, and then you feel more like yourself.
Leslie: Right, right. It's not that you're going to hit a baseline of depression. It's that you're going to kind of go back to who you were, how you felt before going through that transition. And so again, we see that during those times premenstrually, postpartum, and then in the perimenopause.
And the studies really do show randomized controlled trials have shown that adding estrogen replacement therapy to patients who are on SSRIs, SNRIs, or who don't use that therapy, does improve their symptoms. And then you can reassess as they're going through the menopause, whether or not they need the antidepressant therapy or even the estrogen replacement.
Now, you know, estrogen we use for hot flushes primarily in the perimenopause, but there are many, many benefits to estrogen as we are in the perimenopause.
Alison: Leslie, let's, I want to back up. I could just dive in. Let's make sure all our listeners know, because again, so many of us haven't even scratched the surface of what this all means. Technically, how do you know you're in menopause?
Leslie: Absolutely. So the definition of menopause is 12 months of a cessation of menses. So when women have had no menstrual cycles for 12 months, they are by definition in the menopause. The years preceding that are the perimenopause. When menstrual cycles become irregular. Sometimes they start to shorten, so they become more frequent.
Some patients have heavier menses, or some women have heavier menstrual cycles, some women have lighter menstrual cycles, but they'll ultimately start missing menstrual cycles. And that's the perimenopause. And usually that's between ages 45 to 51. So the average age of menopause is 51 to 52.
Alison: Okay.
Leslie: But again, even before women start to experience the irregular menses, they start to feel some of those vasomotor symptoms, the hot flashes, the night sweats, the mood changes.
And it's interesting, even as an OBGYN, I experienced that in my thirties and I did not know what was going on, right? It never occurred to me that I was experiencing hormonal changes. I changed my mattress. I changed my clothing. I changed all these things.
I thought, what in the world is wrong with me? Like, why is this happening to me?
And then they just stopped after several years and I just sort of ignored it. And now I'm in the menopause. And so it's back. But, so yes, we start to experience those symptoms even before our menstrual cycles become irregular.
Alison: So that whole period, it could be 10 years, it could be eight years, you know, anywhere before you have that full year of cessation of your period, your hormones are going to be fluctuating. And that's that whole period when you're going to be more disposed toward depression, toward irritability, in addition to a lot of those physiological symptoms, which is just good for women to know if you're in that, you know, late thirties, forties, and you're experiencing some of this, a lot of it. That potentially could be a result of these fluctuating hormones.
Again, I love what you're saying, Leslie. Check it out with a mental health provider and also check it out with your, would it be your OBGYN?
Leslie: Yes, it would be OB GYN. There are some internal medicine providers and some primary care providers who specialize in women's health, but it would have to be someone specialized in women's health. Not all primary care providers, not all internists feel comfortable with women's health. And so if a woman were going to rely on that, that would be the recommendation to look for someone with expertise in women's health.
And I will even say not all OBGYNs are well versed in menopause. And I think women know that, right? Because we've been seeing our OBGYNs for our entire lives. And yet we are not prepared for this because not all physicians have that experience. And I will say this.
The Women's Health Initiative that came out 15, 20 years ago did many good things, but one of the downsides was that a lot of women were pulled off of their hormone therapy. But even worse than that, education around menopause and hormone replacement therapy was discontinued in our medical education.
So there is a generation of physicians who don't understand hormone replacement therapy, don't understand the menopause because hormone replacement with therapy is not for everyone, right?
But you need to understand the menopause, you need to understand perimenopause and what women are going through because it's really harmful to dismiss these symptoms for women.
Alison: I love what you're saying. I mean, I love how you said that. Again, just, just for listeners to hear that there's suffering involved in the sense that your body is not functioning right. You don't feel well. And you're, like you said, oftentimes your kids are older, you've been looking forward to maybe having more capacity, more bandwidth.
And then suddenly your body doesn't feel well. And you don't know if it's depression or if it's your body, either way, even if HRT isn't an option for you, there are still other things to try.
Leslie: Yes.
Alison: And I just want to add, Leslie, I mean, my experience with, you know, the medical community is, I've had very few people who know what to do. I've had very few doctors. So that's so interesting what you're saying, that a lot of doctors just haven't even been trained. It's like this whole missing piece in their training to help a woman in her forties who has these vague symptoms to understand what she's going through.
Leslie: Yes, I remember as a resident, a patient would walk in with these symptoms and you would almost go into a catatonic state yourself because you would not be prepared to have this discussion.
And this could be a 45 minute discussion, right? So there's nothing worse than a woman feeling gaslighted for going in and saying she's having these symptoms and someone say, well, yep, it's that age or, you know, go get your thyroid checked.
And yes, we should check all of these things, but for the vast majority of women, it's the perimenopause, it's the menopause and we need to know how to help them. Period.
Alison: Yeah. So just to recap here, you should definitely see a mental health provider, but look for a physician that somehow specifies that they've been trained in women's health too–physicians trained in perimenopause, that they've got some knowledge, or you're probably going to walk away frustrated.
Leslie: Absolutely. And the North American Menopause Society certifies providers in menopause. So one could Google “certified menopause provider” and find one in their area. And that would be my recommendation because those providers are going to give evidence-based care. They're going to discuss the full range of options, right?
Non-hormonal to hormonal, behavioral, dietary, exercise, the entire gamut to make sure that women choose the option that is best for them. And what I find, Alison, is some women just want to understand. It's not every woman who even wants an intervention, right?
Some women just want to understand, “What am I going through? What is this? How long is it going to last? And what kind of things can I do, support wise, to get through this?”
And we honor that. We honor that.
Alison: I love that. You use the word gaslighting. Nobody wants to feel crazy. You know, this is normal, right? There's a name for this. It's going to last.
Now I want to ask you, Leslie, you did mention once you get through the 12 months where you are now full on in menopause, what happens after that?
Do you suddenly just feel fine? Does it take a little while? Are your hormones still, you know, when, when can you anticipate? Because I'm thinking of women who are like, okay, I've got a name for it. This is what I'm going through. You know, at least now I know I've got these options.
And then the question is, when will I feel better? When will I feel more myself? And, and I know it's different for every woman, but give me a sense of what happens to the body after you're officially in menopause.
Leslie: Sure. So unfortunately, Alison, it gets worse before it gets better, to be honest. and part of me, I struggle with the definition of menopause, right? Because it kind of gives the impression that this is a finite period, right? The 12 months you stop having periods, you're in the menopause. That's really when symptoms tend to get a little bit exacerbated and women can experience the hot flashes, night sweats, mood disturbances, brain fog, lack of focus, joint pain for seven to 10 years.
Yes, after you're officially diagnosed with the menopause, you’ll experience that for seven years on average,
Alison: Wow.
Leslie: I have women who are on hormone therapy in their late 60s, early 70s, and, you know, trying to discontinue it, they're very symptomatic. So some women just have those symptoms for a really long time.
We know that there are some ethnic variations, some ethnic groups, Hispanic women, Asian women, African American women tend to sometimes experience menopause differently. Part of that is cultural, how menopause is discussed in the culture, right? For some cultures it is discussed for many, many years and decades.
So people are prepared and they plan to go through it and they're better prepared. And in some cultures where these things are taboo, women may experience more difficulty because they're not as prepared or aware of what to experience.
Alison: Interesting. So as you prepare, when you use that word, I know you've kind of gone through the gamut of, but is that what you mean by where you prepare, you adjust your diet, maybe you adjust your exercise, maybe you even create more margin?
What, what do you mean by prepare? Do you adjust your expectations to some degree so that you're not stressed all the time because you can't figure out what's going on with you?
Leslie: Right. I think that's primarily adjusting expectations, understanding what you're going to experience and that there are options for you. And then what those options might be. I think knowing is a good thing. It decreases part of the anxiety and stress around it. The studies show that the Mediterranean type diet is supportive of menopause in terms of severity of symptoms, the cognitive challenges that women experience, you know, decreasing the amount of alcohol we take in, and being as healthy as we can be.
Alison: Mm hmm.
Leslie: It's going to be particularly helpful during that time. Smoking cessation is going to be helpful during the perimenopause. So those sorts of things are things that women can do to help mitigate some of the symptoms that they experience. I think just a lot of self care and understanding, “I'm not feeling well today, so I'm going to dial back a little bit if I can”, right? Not everybody can, but “I'm going to dial back a little bit on the intensity of what I'm doing”, to try to mitigate the symptoms.
But you know, hot flashes might happen seven, 10, 12 times a day, you know, so you can't always avoid that. But those are some of the things that women can do.
Alison: Yeah, it's a chunk of time. If you think about the perimenopause all the way out the other side, which is what you're saying, it can have a long tail out the other side too, until you really come to baseline. And I know it's different for every woman, but I'm also thinking as I'm listening to you, that you've got all of the different options that you've laid out medically.
And then I can imagine that getting mental health support, maybe even an antidepressant, could also be part of your treatment. Even if the bulk of the symptoms are a result of the hormone fluctuations, there's no shame in that, and it certainly could be helpful, even if you're someone who hasn't gone that route before, that might be a route that could help.
I could imagine that it could be a way to just care for yourself. Just give yourself a little extra help to deal with some of the irritability and that kind of thing, especially if you're still parenting or you're working full time or you've got serious demands. That could be a way to get yourself some relief.
Leslie: Absolutely. Absolutely. Many women are just going to need an antidepressant. We could do cognitive behavioral therapy, but some of us are going to need an antidepressant. Even women who have never experienced depression ever in their lives before, have an increased chance to experience it.
We know that having had depression and anxiety before, you're going to be at an increased rate of experiencing it again. I think that the study for women's health across the nation showed a two to four fold increased risk of depression. And that four fold part is for women who have had depression in the past and women who have experienced adverse life events. And what we are seeing is that that plays a big role in the mood disturbances around the menopause, a history of adverse life events,
Alison: Are you talking about trauma essentially?
Leslie: Trauma, exactly trauma, yes, that is going to increase it.
And so those women will need antidepressant therapy. And I think what women sometimes misunderstand about it is that it doesn't have to be forever, right? There are adjustment type disorders that we can use antidepressants for 6 months, 12 months, a year, 2 years. And then wean women off and they do fine, right?
This is a period of time where we're experiencing an adjustment to a new phase. And it is okay to use these therapies. Many times they're just really low dose, uh, therapies that women need, um, around this time.
Alison: I just love what you're saying because, again, there's just no stigma and I think about a lot of conversations right now are happening in the mental health field around trauma and around healing, CBT, some of these other modalities, IFS, EMDR, and a lot of it's amazing and a lot of it gets at let's heal the the childhood memories, let's heal the wounds and we don't want to just necessarily treat the symptoms. We want to get to the root.
But when it comes to something like what we're describing–perimenopause, menopause–where there's this huge hormonal change, you could CBT yourself all you want and you're not going to fix the fact that– correct me if I'm wrong–that your serotonin and your dopamine levels are changing and that's just a physiological thing and an SSRI can provide some relief. We have to function.
Leslie: Right. And CBT, you know, and talk therapy, and those other therapies, they're going to take a while to work. If you're getting down to those adverse life events, it's going to take some uncovering of layers. And women have to go to work tomorrow, right?
Not that antidepressants work immediately. They also take time, but people have to function sooner than later. And so it's going to be a combination of those things.
You know, one of the things, to your point, I think networks are really, really important for women. I think it's important for adolescent girls, right? To have these positive support groups, systems in place that they can talk through things and women who are in the perimenopause and menopause are going to need the same thing, right? We're going to need that because it takes a stigma away.
Alison: So good. It's so true. You've got to find your person or your people with whom to go through it together. Don't go through it alone.
Leslie: Right. And that and that's for all kinds of mental health things and just life in general. I think about how to build resilience and how to have an overall sense of wellbeing. I think those networks are important in teaching girls how to find healthy networks as adolescents.
That's part of what we do as a pediatric and adolescent gynecology provider. I talk to all of my girls, all of my patients about their friends and their peer groups, because all of that plays a role in their mental health. All of that helps them to manage these fluctuations in their hormones. Who are the people that you spend time with and how are they supporting you, right?
And I think that's really important for women. And thankfully we're talking about this more, you know, Oprah has her series out. And so this is what women need to have these conversations and these networks and these dialogues to help us get through this.
Alison: I was so glad when I saw her put it out in the public conversation in a destigmatizing way. I want to talk a little bit about–we kind of did this in reverse order–I also want to touch on, while we have a little bit of time left, how you also help women advocate for their reproductive health, starting with young girls.
I'm curious, what would you say to our listeners? How would you want them to be promoting reproductive health in their daughters?
Leslie: Right. Yes, absolutely. So I think first, we as adults are going to have to become educated in what is fact and what's fiction, right? There are a lot of myths around all sorts of reproductive health issues around fertility, abortion, menopausal health–there's just a lot of myths.
And I think women, we need to educate ourselves about these things so that we can have honest, open dialogue with our girls, because our girls are going to get the information from somebody, right?
And we want that information to come from trusted sources. And so part of teaching girls to advocate for themselves is to help them understand what is factual about their health. And that is why we encourage parents to bring their young girls to see a gynecologist. It's between the ages of 12 to 13. And that freaks some people out because they think, “Oh my gosh, I'm not going to bring my daughter to a gynecologist at that age. I don't want her to have a pelvic exam and we're not doing that.”
But we are having a conversation about what is normal and what is abnormal in your development–breast development, discharge, pubic hair, body odor, what emotions you might feel as an adolescent. We have discussions that are age appropriate.
At age 12, we're going to talk about your body changing. As they become older, we'll talk about the hormones and the emotions that they're feeling and how to manage those emotions. But I think the more the girls can have these conversations with physicians who know the truth, the better they can be prepared to advocate for themselves as they get older.
And part of what we do is we talk about advocacy, right? When a girl comes in, we make sure that the appointment is very centered on her. What do you feel comfortable with? What do you feel comfortable not talking about? So we begin to empower them in that visit. So that when they walk outside of our office, they can be empowered in their relationships with other people.
Alison: That's amazing. I love what you're saying. So as a parent, you can rely on (and I would assume) these gynecologists who've been certified in a specific way. It's like a parent has a wingman, right?
These are hard conversations and there you've got a doctor, a trained physician who can help your daughter normalize and understand what's happening with her body. I love that, which equips her to not feel shame about it, to not feel stigma about it, to have someone to talk to about it, to be more likely to talk to her mom about it, or her dad about it, or her friends about it in a healthy way.
Leslie: That's absolutely right. And you know, I think many parents also think that we're going to talk about sex and how to have sex, but that's not what we're here for, right? That is a parent's role to have those discussions. We will probe as appropriate and provide appropriate information because we want girls to be safe.
But that is not the primary focus of that visit, right? The primary focus of these visits is to help girls understand their changing bodies–what's normal, abnormal and how to advocate for themselves. And we start that by giving them power and autonomy in that visit.
Alison: That's amazing.
Leslie: Right. And so women start having those conversations with their children and then women also need to begin to advocate for themselves.
I think, I mean, we know women are intimidated by physicians. Even as adults, women go into the doctor's office and they present their complaints, and if they're not heard, they sort of leave it at that, right? Because they don't want to push back against their physician or alienate their physician.
But really then you should just find another physician, right? If the physician that you see is not hearing you, then you need to find another physician, because you need to feel totally empowered. It has to be with your reproductive health provider. And so I just encourage women to do their research, interview different physicians and to see who they can truly partner with in their care.
And so that's my goal in terms of helping women to advocate for themselves. What is the knowledge that you should have? Right? What is fact? And then what are your options for care? And then hopefully women can take that with them to their physicians and find someone who really wants to partner with them in their journey in their reproductive health journey.
Alison: Gosh, that's such a great approach. And it's so interesting listening to you, because it's the same thing I say to people about therapy. I always say to people, you should interview a therapist–you should interview a couple. And so many people have this idea of, “I go to my medical doctor and they're the expert and I just have to take, you know”, as opposed to this idea of partnership.
And I would say the same thing to people about therapists, but it's so fascinating to hear you say that. Similarly, about a gynecologist or an internal medicine doctor that go to a couple, see where you feel comfortable, see where you feel like someone's inviting you, you know, where you're going to partner together around your health.
Especially as women, when it comes to your reproductive health, you need to have some agency in that.
Leslie: That's right. That's right. And, you know, it's intimidating because there's all these co-pays and you have to pay a copay for this doctor and then will insurance cover that doctor?
Women can really start online looking at the physician bios. What do they say about how they view health care? Are they there just to do things correctly and pick the right diagnosis, or are they there to really support you through your journey and do shared decision making? And the biggest honor for me is when a patient comes to me and says, I researched you. I researched everything about you online and I decided that I wanted you to be my physician.
And unfortunately, some women wait six, eight months, a year even to see me. They refuse to see anyone else because they've decided that they want to see me based on what they've read and the reviews. And I take that seriously, right? So when I see that patient, that patient has set the bar, right? They have told me what they expect and I am going to live up to that.
And so I partner with them and help them to make the best decisions by giving them the evidence and then seeing what's comfortable for them. That's what we should do.
Alison: I love that, Leslie. I want to have you back on at some point, if you're open for it, to take some of our listener questions for you, because this is just such an important part of our holistic health, our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health is especially as women, and I just so appreciate all that you do, all that you pour out for so many people.
I want to ask you this because I ask all my guests and I'm curious, what do you wish your younger self knew? I would imagine your younger self would have been in medical school studying a lot of this stuff. What do you wish you knew about your hormonal and medical health as a woman, when you were in your twenties that you know now?
Leslie: Yeah. You know, that's a great question. I think that fortunately I was an athlete, and I'll start there because I think physical health is really, really important to an adolescent girl's mental health. And it's important to our health as we get older, partly because we learn how to engage with others when we're doing competitive sports and those sorts of things, and our bodies are the best that they can be.
So thankfully I was an athlete. And so I felt very confident in that part of who I was in terms of physical wellness. I would say that networking and identifying people who were the best people for me is something that I didn't know how to do and I didn't know how to do when I was younger in my twenties. I developed that a little bit better as I entered college and formed a really great network of women in college, but I would say, and this is not medically related, but I would say figuring out what you're good at and just doing that.
Like don't try to be someone you aren't. Don't try to strive for other things because people do them. Really identifying what I am good at, and doing that. I think that builds your self-esteem and that helps you to make better decisions in your relationships, and it helps you, I think, to advocate for yourself because your esteem is developed.
That's what I would say to my younger self. Health-wise, I would say there were no concerns there, but I would say in terms of developing that confidence, self-esteem, I think doing the things that I was best at is the advice I would give my younger self.
Alison: I love that you've, well, you've certainly found a niche.
Leslie: I love what I do. I feel fortunate to be able to do it. I love hearing women's stories and, and really just being present for those visits. And so I wouldn't be doing anything else. I love this.
Alison: I love it. How can our listeners find you? I know you primarily work with other female physicians, but how can folks who are listening find you and learn more about what your services are?
Leslie: Absolutely. So as you know, I am the division chief of General OB GYN at the University of Colorado. And so I am fortunate enough to be able to provide consultative services under that role as a faculty member. Individuals can seek services from me through the University of Colorado.
And then you spoke about the coaching. So my company, Called to Medicine, allows me to coach and support young female physicians to continue to build their career in academic medicine, cuz I think it's so important that women remain in medicine and that we remain in academic medicine so we can train future leaders so that we can make sure that women are involved in research and in research studies and push the initiative forward for women's health research.
One of the things we didn't get to talk about was kind of where the research is going with perimenopause and menopause, but we need more research and we're going to need women and women from diverse backgrounds, geographically, ethnically, socioeconomic status wise, to be able to push this research forward.
And so that is partly achieved through Called to Medicine. And then the last part of that, as you stated, was to help women to advocate for themselves and, and would love to just share knowledge and education so women feel empowered.
Alison: Well, we will link to your company website in the show notes. You're amazing. Leslie, I've just loved getting to know you as a person and I love getting to know more about your professional passion and all that you're doing for women and girls and just so grateful for you and other female physicians.
If you're listening and you're in the field or you have friends who are in the field or you have daughters who are in the field, please send them to Leslie's website, Called to Medicine. We need you. There's just been, for too long, unnecessary suffering for women, so thank you. Thank you so much for what you do. And thanks for being with us today.
Leslie: Thank you, Alison. Thank you for having me on. And I'm so thankful to have been able to get to know you over the last few years and that you're doing this podcast and really just shining a light on all of the things that women and humans experience. And so I appreciate you. And I would love to come back and answer questions from your audience.
Alison: I'm thinking we need to do that. That would be really cool. Thank you. All right. So everybody check out The Best of You Question form if you've got your questions for Leslie and we'll plan another Q and A in the future.
Imagine if someone sat with you and listened to you attentively for as long as you needed. That's what I experienced through a series of spiritual listening retreats. And today, I invited the Rev. Dr. Stephen Macchia and a spiritual director in training, Rowena Day, to talk with us about the practice of spiritual direction and deep listening as one component of your mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
This episode is so rich, so soothing, and so deeply nourishing. As a therapist, I have found spiritual direction to be a powerful part of my own mental health practices. It's also taught me so much about how to become a better listener in my relationships with others.
Here's what we discuss:
1. The deepest need we all have
2. How to attune to your own soul
3. The neurobiology of presence
4. What to do if quiet is hard for you
5. The links between spiritual and mental health
Do you have questions about friendship for Dr. Alison? Leave them here.
Resources
- More about the Emmaus Certificate in Formational Leadership
- The Spiritual Journey 3-book series by David G. Benner
- "God shows up disguised as your life."-Paula D'Arcey
- Visit leadershiptransformations.org
- Seeking God Together by Alice Freiling
- Crafting a Rule of Life by Steve Macchia
- Ephesians 3:16-19
- Psalm 62:1-8
- Romans 12:1
- stevemacchia.com
- Email Dr. Alison to be connected with Rowena
- Resources for support
Related Podcast Episodes:
- Episode 31 and Episode 44 with Rowena
- Episode 47: Spiritual Bypassing vs. Embodied Faith & How Not to Harm Those Who Are Hurting, Including Yourself
Thanks to our sponsors:
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If you've been searching for a better alternative to traditional healthcare and want to take your health to new heights, visit www.WildHealth.com/Premium to apply for membership.
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.
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Visit hiyahealth.com/BESTOFYOU and get your kids the full-body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults.
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.
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of the best of you podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you keep coming back this summer. We finished up a series on friendship last week, but I felt like there was still more to mine in that well. There are just so many questions I get about how to increase support, whether it's through therapy or through some of these other ways that we're going to talk about in these next few weeks.
So this is a little mini series. I'm not even sure it's a series. I'm going to do a few episodes just on other ways to increase your support, other ways to make sure that you are flourishing in as many ways that are in your control, that are in your capacity to control.
We can't control everything. Sometimes life is just hard. Sometimes we're struggling, but there are things we can do to pull in support. And again, I think about that MEPS, that mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual and Each of those dimensions, we need to be checking in and thinking about where do I need a little bit of support?
Where do I maybe need a little bit of input? Where do I need somebody checking in on me? And so in these next few episodes, I'm going to talk about some of what I call these therapy adjacent ways that you might want to consider.
Now, I'm also going to talk about therapy in one of these episodes and really walk you through different types of therapy, what kind of therapy, how you find a therapist, all those kind of brass tacks questions. So there's a lot we're going to cover in these next few weeks. Stay tuned. You're going to find some practical ways to continue to increase your support network.
So today I want to talk about spiritual direction. I've mentioned spiritual direction frequently on the podcast. It's something I use. I have a monthly spiritual director, and I have for years. I was part of a spiritual listening community, which I've also talked about in prior episodes.
It's a really unique way of getting support. It's not therapy. It's also different from what many of you know as discipleship. And we're going to talk about that, but it is someone checking in on your soul, checking in on how you're doing in your relationship with God, in your spiritual life, which actually bleeds out into all your relationships, right? Because when you're connected to yourself and to God, there's a way in which you show up more effectively in all of your relationships. So these all overlap, but spiritual direction is a very unique way to get support. I've invited two of my dear friends on to talk to us today about what spiritual direction is, about what you might expect from it and how you might find one.
We'll talk to the Reverend Dr. Stephen Macchia, he's the founder and president of Leadership Transformations Inc., also known as LTI. LTI is a ministry that focuses on spiritual formation and the spiritual discernment processes.Steve is an ordained minister. He's a speaker. He's a retreat facilitator, a ministry mentor and coach, and he's a spiritual director himself.
He's also the author of 16 books, including his latest, The Discerning Life, Broken and Whole. Crafting a rule of life. We talk about that in this episode. It's a wonderful book that I've used many times and the Baker bestseller, Becoming a Healthy Church. These are great resources for anyone who's interested in thinking about how to make our churches healthier spaces.
We talk so much about what's hard about church and Steve is someone who's really coming in and saying, let's figure out how to make churches healthier, how to really make churches a place where we're growing. Deeply, and I really respect him for that. And then I also asked Rowena Day back on the podcast, you know, Rowena, she's been on the podcast before in episodes 31 and episode 44.
She's a writer, an artist, and she's a spiritual director in training. She's going through the process of becoming a spiritual director. She's also the mom of four children between the ages of one and eight. And she and her husband live in Washington. DC. She and I met over a decade ago in one of those spiritual listening communities put on by LTI and led by Dr.
Steven Macchia. So please enjoy this conversation about spiritual direction, spiritual discernment, and how to grow spiritually as one component of your mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health.
*Music*
Alison: So to get started, Steve, I would love to hear a little bit about how you got interested in spiritual formation, spiritual listening, spiritual direction. I know you were a pastor for many years and then you started this organization that's more centered on these spiritual formation practices. So tell us a little bit about how that evolved in your life.
Steve Macchia: Well, I was on the pastoral staff at Grace Chapel in Lexington, Mass. for 11 years in four different pastoral positions. And then I went to a group called Vision New England, where I was for 14 years. And in the middle of that time, I said to a friend of mine, it seems like everybody in my life has an agenda for me, has something they want from me. And I need someone objective to listen to me. and help me sift and sort my way through my spiritual journey.
And this good friend of mine said, you need to meet David Freihoff, who is an Episcopal monk with the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And I had the audacity at that time because I was, you know, a professional ministry person. I had my sport coat and tie on every day, and I went to my office and I led my organization. And I had the audacity to invite him when he was in my area to stop by because I wanted to interview him and see if what my friend had to say was really true.
When he walked into my office and he graciously said yes to that invitation, which is amazing to me, he had blue jean overalls and a t-shirt and open toe sandals on. And he sat down across from me in my professional desk setting. And as soon as he opened his mouth, I knew he had something that I desperately needed and wanted. And it was a real heart for God, a real genuine, simple, yet beautiful way of relating to Jesus.
To make a long story short, he has been my spiritual director for more than 30 years. And every month or so I go to see him and I tell him my tale of woes or my questions about God or my issues or my joys, my delights. You know, it's a relationship founded on attentiveness, listening and teaching me how to be more attentive to the work of God in my life and to the biblical text as it comes alive in my spiritual or prayer closet journey, and in my daily life experience. And he came alongside me, he was willing to take this on, take me on, and a role that has become a life-changing role, the role of a spiritual director.
I learned from him how to be a spiritual director, and then our organization, Leadership Transformations, almost immediately when we founded the organization 20 years ago, we started a program called SELAH in training people in spiritual direction that Ro is going to be joining. And I guess the rest is history, but for me, Alison, it all began with a single relationship of a very godly, Christ-centered, humble, gentle, holy man, who I knew I wanted to spend time with, and he's listened to my soul ever since.
Alison: Steve, tell me a little bit about what you mean by agenda. I thought that was interesting. You said prior to just sitting with this humble person who asked questions, you felt like everyone had an agenda. What do you mean by that?
Steve Macchia: Well, you know, if we're not prayerful and contemplative and reflective, we are actually quite manipulative in life. We have agendas for people. We have a way that we want them to live or to act or react to us, to the people around us. You know, we're in a marketing culture where we're constantly trying to present a message that others will... absorb or receive or buy or whatever. And same with others coming at us. I just felt like I was surrounded by people that needed something or wanted something.
Alison: And this is even in the church community.
Steve Macchia: Oh, gosh, yes. We’re a bunch of human beings that are within the Christian community with needs and wants and desires. And so they may have wanted my attention for financial resources from our organization, or they may have wanted my attention to promote their program or their particular ministry.
I worked with a regional ministry with about 80 different denominations and 6000 congregations, and there was always just a need that I needed to fix or take care of. And I just was looking for someone that didn't have that need and had instead a real desire to companion me as a brother. No other pretense attached to it. No other agenda attached to it.
Alison: That's so powerful. Rowena, how about you? What led you to participate in this spiritual listening community that you and I both partook of? It's called Emmaus. Steve, it's part of your organization. You guys set it up. And it's a series of, I would say, would you call it group spiritual direction in a way, Steve?
Steve Macchia: Exactly, that is what it is. We didn't always call it that, but that's what it was.
Alison: So it's a little bit of what you're describing where there are small groups of people where we are simply listening to each other in a structured way. Rowena, what led you to feel the need to take part in that in your life?
Rowena: I think I've always been fairly introspective, just the nature of how I'm wired. But I think there was a desire to find some companions on the journey and I'd never heard of spiritual direction, but I experienced it through a one-day women's retreat that LTI offered and I signed up for an hour slot. And I just remember feeling, wow, this is... very nourishing.
I think our souls are looking for satisfaction and you know, we can spend a lifetime looking for it in anything and everything. And God is our creator and he made us and he made us to be satisfied in knowing him and finding kind of the grounding of our being in him. And so I think just the work of the spirit in me kind of creating that desire to really seek, you know, what is going to really satisfy me? And that is knowing God deeply and within myself and knowing myself and just feeling like I can inhabit the world, just securely rooted in God and who He is and who He has made me to be.
I just found spiritual direction such a life-giving, nourishing way to pay attention to my own soul. And then to do that within a group, in a mass, and to kind of have the space held and certain structures in place to help us as human beings practice some holy restraint so we're not trying to fix and solve each other, but we're really able to set ourselves aside and listen to that person and be listened to was just, like, you don't experience that in life in very many places. And it just, I think it just created conditions to really begin to grow and thrive.
Alison: Yeah, I think of the psychology term attunement as very much linked to what's happening in this idea of spiritual direction or spiritual listening. It's someone attuning to another soul. So it's me attuning to you. It's listening to your words without that agenda, as you said, Steve. It's hearing literally the words that you're saying. There's that attunement that we need to come alive. We are not designed to live alone in isolation. It's that embodied presence that we bring to each other.
Just here before we dive in too deeply to kind of differentiate between the work of therapy and the work of spiritual direction, I want to point out that there is an attunement component to both. When we go see a therapist, a therapist is attuning to us, hopefully without an agenda. How would you see the difference, Steve? I'll certainly weigh in as well, but I'm curious how you differentiate, because I know you're very clear to make that distinction. I've participated in both and there is a clear distinction. I'd love to hear from you how you see the distinction.
Steve Macchia: I like that word attunement. It reminds me of a tuning fork, you know, where you're tuning to the particular sounds where there's some connection and unity to the sound. When I look at spiritual formation in general, I see spiritual formation generally, the attunement, if you will, to the true God, and the true self, or the true me. The more I get to know the true God, not all these false gods and false representations of God, but the true God, and if I get to know the true me, not these falsehoods or pretenses or things that we're trying to present to the wider world, but instead to just be the true person that God made us to be, made you and me to be, the more we get to know that true you and that true God, that's how we're being spiritually formed. And the closer in proximity and in parallel and attunement to both, the healthier, the stronger, the more vibrant, the more alive we become.
So when I consider all of the caring ministries or caring relationships, we do have counseling, we do have coaching, we do have mentoring, we do have discipling, pastoring, spiritual direction. I think all of those are healthy, vibrant, important roles and relationships, and I do think it's important for people who are serving in any one of them to know what they're distinctly offering. Because for me, I'm a pastor, I'm a coach. I'm a discipler. I'm a spiritual director. I need to figure out when I'm with a particular person, what do they need me to be in order to be the best I can be as one to continue that attunement. To help attune their heart to God's heart and their heart to the true nature of how God made them to be rather than listening to lies or listening to the falsehoods of others or listening to the pressure points of others or the stresses that others are bringing upon us.
Now, how do we listen to God? How do we listen to ourselves and to provide as pure of listening as I can so that what I'm doing is I'm giving voice back to the person I'm sitting with as a directee saying what I'm noticing. Here's what I'm hearing. Here's what I'm sensing. Here's maybe a way to get maybe closer in touch with God's purpose or plan in the midst of that story.
But the difference between that and counseling is I think a spiritual director is less directive, interestingly, even though the word director is there. It's far less directive. Whereas a counselor, you go to a counselor because you want feedback, you want help. you're in an issue, you're in a relationship that's not healthy, you're trying to make some decisions and you want feedback, you want the wisdom and the counsel of another and that's good and that's important but for me what I try to do as a spiritual director is I try to create space where there's pure listening, like you and Ro experienced at Emmaus, as pure as possible.
There's no such thing as completely pure listening but to get to it as purely as possible. All I want is to be there for you. I want to dive into your story that when I'm giving voice to, if I'm giving voice to anything, that you would say, absolutely, that is what I'm saying. As opposed to, “No, you know, you missed that point. No, I wasn't saying that.” or “I wasn't meaning that”. That means I missed the point. I wasn't a good listener.
If I'm a good listener, a good attentive attunement specialist, that person, if I say anything, that person's going to have maybe tears in their eyes and say, “That is exactly what I said”, because I think what–and I think you'd agree, Alison, as a counselor–people don't want to be fixed. They don't want to be corrected. Everyone does, however, want to be listened to. And if we can provide healthy, God-centered, them-centered, attentiveness, I think we're serving them well.
So there's crossover in these roles. They're not totally separated by a big fence. There's some permeable membrane that's attached to all of these caring roles. But I think when I'm in a spiritual director role, I really just want to spend as much, 80% of the time maybe, listening,
and then 10% of the time, let's sit in silence, and 10% of the time, I'll give you some of my noticing.
Alison: Yeah, yeah, I love that. So when I participated in the spiritual listening community–I did it for two years, it's quarterly retreats, so I did eight retreats–I was a therapist at the time. I was trained as a therapist, and it, to me, felt like it brought in a missing piece. They are different. And it brought in a missing piece during that experience.
I actually had a profound experience of feeling freed to go back into the work of being a therapist. As you well know, Steve, you were part of it. Because it brought in the piece of the listening without agenda, which freed me as a therapist to realize, “Oh, the Holy Spirit is right here”. And even if I'm doing a therapeutic intervention, the Holy Spirit is still right here with me. I'm not doing it alone. It's not on me to be the expert.
In my field, we can feel like we have to be the expert, not necessarily fixing a problem, but providing the right diagnostic intervention. And as I was part of that listening, I was astonished by the power of the structure. For the listener who isn't familiar with the structure–and I think it's a fantastic structure for folks to use in small groups, informally on your own, where we're so quick to pile in with our advice: “Here's what to do, have you thought about this? This is what you should do”, which just adds more noise to our souls–I was astonished by, you know, each person would get, I think, something like 15 minutes to share, uninterrupted with the timer. And then after that 15 minutes, sit in silence for a certain amount of time, and it's vulnerable. You've just shared. And then you're sitting and everybody's sitting with you in what you've shared.
Nobody's jumping in to fix, to offer advice, to analyze. And then the next round is people reflecting back to you verbatim words that you said. I heard you say this word five times and it is so powerful. I learned so much from that and I'm curious.
Rowena, for you, you know, what stood out to you? I would say for me, what stood out the most was that the vulnerability of simply being heard and then having people reflect back words that they heard me say. And it kind of spoiled me, to be honest. Because now if I go into a small group setting or a group of friends–and I do this sometimes and there's no shame–but when I'm in a setting and people just jump in, I'm like, “Oh, oh no, I just need to be heard”. You know, it really spoiled me.
So I'm curious, Rowena, for you, what stood out from that experience.
Rowena: Yeah, I think it's the uniqueness of people holding space for you, and holding up a mirror to you of words that you said. You can say, “Oh, wow, I did say that several times”. And then you can kind of sit with that and ask God about it more. So it's really interesting. I feel like we are all sort of these acorns that are trying to germinate and bust out of the soil and grow. In spiritual direction, I think the distinction is that the Holy Spirit is the sun and the water helping the acorn grow and then maybe the director is like a fellow acorn over here, maybe adding some nutrients to the soil just by listening.
But it requires such trust that God is real–that he's here–that I don't need to be the one to fix. And it requires such a getting out of the way and holding ourselves back in like a holy restraint kind of way that is just so counter cultural and counter intuitive. I think David Benner says in his book about spiritual direction that “relationships are malnourished from a lack of attention”. And so spiritual direction is a way that we can give attention to our relationship with God. And that creates just such a nourishment for us when we actually take time and then we have someone companioning alongside us. It's so powerful and it helps all of our individual acorns and collectively to really germinate and grow.
Steve Macchia: I was going to say that one of the elements here that both of you are mentioning is the gift of silence in community. I remember going early on, before LTI was even born, on silent retreats. I didn't know anybody in the room. But after a weekend, I was tearful to say goodbye to these people. Never had a conversation with them. Never never talked to them. Even over meals. The meals were silent meals.
But at the end of the weekend, we're like hugging each other saying goodbye. We don't know anything about each other except that we shared a weekend in silence And I remember praying at the time, “Lord, I want to do this with people I know, not just strangers”, and God answered my prayer through the ministry of LTI to be able to experience community without conversation.
Silence is a bonding mechanism. It's a way in which we're bonded together. So like in our Emmaus communities that both of you are part of, in those times together, they were blanketed with “Okay, let's just be let's just be together”. But let's not say anything, you know, because words are going to destroy the moment.
And think about it, the most intimate things that we do with the people we love the most are not about conversation. It's about presence. And the gift of real, authentic, genuine, deep presence is a healer. It's a restorer. It brings vibrancy and life.
And so I just want to say that what I love about spiritual direction and group direction is I love surprising individuals or groups with blocks of silence. Because what happens in the silence is that God through his spirit taps on the shoulder of our hearts in unique and marvelous and wonderful ways, surprising ways, mysterious ways. And if we're not creating that space, we can go through an entire life without experiencing the fullness and the richness of what we're describing today.
So, yes, Alison, I agree. I am spoiled by the community that I'm a part of and creating life for others. When I go into those other settings where people like talking over each other or fixing, it feels like fingers on a chalkboard and it bristles within me. But it's because my heart has been in touch with the longing of being known, being heard, being with. And I think that's what we're wanting. I want to put emphasis on that, you know, that quiet space together is actually amazingly healing and restorative and enlightening.
Alison: That is a whole word. I don't want to put words on it. That's powerful. It's presence.
You know, my mind is going even to the neurobiology of that, that there is something powerful happening when two human beings are present with each other regardless of words. And perhaps, in an embodied way that transcends what the mind can do.
Steve Macchia: Well, Alison, maybe you've done some research or study on eye contact. You know, it's through the eyes that we actually fall in love. It's through the eyes that we actually notice, when our eyes are fixed or locked on each other and we're in good space, it's the eyes that bring it about. So I'd love to know from your professional expertise, what is it about the eyes? What is it about eye contact? What is it about? Reading the story beneath the eyes.
Alison: The gaze, right? The gaze of that loving mother. The gaze that takes in the child. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is the research on attachment that shows that secure attachment is presence. It's not words.
You know, a parent can say all the right words, but if they are not present, whole body present, calm nervous system present, where we're not in that fight flight, adrenalized state where we are so calm inside and we are with that child, right, through the gaze, through the calmness of the nervous system. That's what creates that attachment.
And if we think about God, it's so interesting, I've never thought about this. But of course, that's how we experience the withness of God. It's very rarely through a word.
Steve Macchia: Yeah. And it's our withness that's our witness, you know. It's when we are with, that we actually have something to say about another. Rowena, you're an expert in this as a young mom, you've got all these kids at your feet and you're constantly giving them complete attention. I don't know how you do it.
Rowena: Thankfully, being in God's presence is especially helpful. I often think of the imagery that he uses of him being a mother hen and gathering up all the chicks under the safety of his wings. That picture in my mind is so powerful and helpful to me when I feel like maybe there are different parts of myself that are running around little chicks, maybe some of them with their heads cut off or something, and God is like, come on, gather under here and let me put my wings over you.
All the parts of me can be heard and witnessed and attuned to and have the attention and the care that they need. And that kind of feeling of being held is really powerful, held under his wings. That sense of care for my own soul, then, is helping me in real time try to do the same with my kids. Not necessarily needing to fix their emotions, but just being with them and kind of gathering them and saying, I'm here with you, it's going to be alright.
And then the other sort of imagery that comes to mind with spiritual direction is this phrase, “being a physician of the soul”. There's this wonderful quote: “What does a physician do when someone comes with a bleeding wound? Three things; he or she cleanses the wound, aligns the sundered parts, and gives it rest”.
That's all the physician does. He or she provides an environment for the natural process of healing to occur. And so I think in spiritual direction and doing the training, it’s just such a helpful reminder that God made our bodies to heal. And he also made our souls to heal. If we can remove some of the obstacles and the barriers, the natural course of healing will occur.
And that has been so real in my own life. I find it incredibly powerful to witness other people in that way and know that I am not the physician who's actually doing the healing. But God designed us to heal if we just come into his presence and can attune to different parts of ourselves and then he can let the natural course of healing take its place.
Alison: It reminds me of that acorn, right? So much of what you're both saying is the acorn, or any sort of seed, is designed to burst forth and become the beautiful thing that it's supposed to become. Our job is to provide the right soil, remove the weeds of distraction (which is so often the noise and the advice and the agendas), and cultivate that soil so that seed can grow.
Prior to my experience with this kind of thing, I would be in my prayer closet thinking, okay, I'll be with God. And somehow that needs to only be between me and God. And what spiritual direction or these spiritual listening communities do is bring it into relationships. You are with another person.
For the listener, typical spiritual direction is a monthly rhythm. You meet with someone typically, not always, but typically once a month. It is a practice. There's a rhythm to it. And that rhythm–there's a withness with that. It's saying, “I need another human body that is not trying to fix me, is not doing therapy on me per se, but is with me and bearing witness to me in my process of becoming”. So there is a witness, it's just a unique kind of witness.
Steve Macchia: Exactly. And it is an important practice to be trained in. Not everyone is fit for this. So we need to understand that they may be more fit to be in more of an active discipling role or pastoral role.
All the old ancient monastic communities that were providing this for people that were coming to them–sort of like, “Brother, give us a word”, kind of thing–they were trained to be, as Row said, soul doctors. In fact, I will often ask my directees, “So how is it with your soul today?” as an opening question. Or we'll sit and just do Lexio for a few moments in a particular verse or a psalm or something that's just to quiet our hearts and minds. And it's generally where I see men one-on-one–I see men and women in groups–but when I'm sitting with another man and we're sitting in quiet, which they're not used to, you know, just quietness.
There's a little uncomfortableness to that. And then I'm reading the passage of Scripture, and then I'm saying you can break the silence however and whenever you want to. Generally, they're surprised what they say after the silence because they came in with a particular thought or concept or idea or relationship or question or issue that they're wrestling with. But in the silence, when we're together in the word and in prayer, they can often end up going in a different direction that may actually be more fruitful for their life, their walk with God.
Because we wanna always be pointing people back to the biblical text or their walk with God or the state of their soul, so that it becomes a prayerful, reflective space that both director and directee are engaged in. And as the director, you're not doing much direction, even though it's called that. It's really providing space for this person to give voice to their experiences, their experience of God or their experience with others.
So it's out of that experience, it's out of that place of need, where we're able to step in as active listeners, and hopefully have some spiritual maturity to us that we can actually be a voice in the wilderness for them that allows us to offer a word of hope or a word of comfort or a suggestion to sit in a particular passage of scripture or whatever. So it's a beautiful thing when it's fully embraced and not distorted, it is really a beautiful space to create for another.
*Music*
Steve Macchia: One of the questions that I've been wrestling with of late is all the issues of the day, not just of a particular person's story, but whether it's political or human sexuality and how that's really been front and center for so many racial, ethnic issues. One of the things that spiritual direction gives a person is a voice to how they're reacting or responding to those issues.
It's not just necessarily a personal issue that you're coming with, it may be a lament that you're coming with or a heart's concern for a loved one that's gone a wayward way in any one of particular areas. So what a person comes into a direction session with is all over the map.
It's not just your prayer life. It can be a tough relationship, it can be a tough issue of the day. I like defining passion as that which exists somewhere between what brings a tear to your eye and an angry fist to the air. Somewhere in there, between the tearfulness and the angry fist, resides your passions.
So we can create space where people get in touch with what they're passionate about, what they're interested in, what they're concerned about, what they're carrying, it could be personal, but it could be more corporate or collective.
So I think that's what I just wanted to mention. It's not just that we're talking about, you know, a person's time in the Bible and praying. Spiritual direction can be misunderstood that way. No, it's actually pretty broad. It's like counseling, like therapy in that way. You can't predict what the issues are going to be that are gonna enter the space with the person who's gonna give voice to where they are or where they're at.
Alison: You're reminding me of a quote that my spiritual director said to me recently, which I believe is attributed to either Richard Rohr or I want to say Paula DRC. “God shows up disguised as your life.”
Whatever is happening in your life is where God is. When you go to someone for a spiritual direction, it's not just limited to your “spirit”. There's no bifurcation–whatever is happening in your life is where God has an invitation for you. It doesn't matter where that is. Your God shows up disguised as your life.
That's a really helpful word because sometimes I'll think, “I gotta think about my spiritual questions for my spiritual director, you know, what am I thinking about God”? As opposed to, “Whatever's happening in my life, in my soul, whatever I'm worried about, that's where God is. That's what God cares about. That's where there's an invitation for me”.
I'm curious, Rowena, you've now entered into training to become a spiritual director. What prompted that and how is that going for you? And I've noticed just being your friend, I'm not surprised when you told me that you were going to embark on a journey of becoming a spiritual director. I see those qualities in you, that ability to hold space so subtly, but so powerfully for other people. Tell me a little bit about that journey for you and what that decision was like.
Rowena: Hmm. I think when I read the quote about being a physician of the soul around 10 years ago, something really resonated with what I felt called to do. That would just be a very powerful way to spend my life. I can't quite describe it, but it was a very deep feeling of being drawn to this.
I think it's also because I experienced the power of it–of being attuned to and of being deeply listened to–that it's just such a needed thing in this world. And I want to grow in that ability to listen and hold space for others and help them attune to their own souls and to God.
So I don't think I chose it myself. I think somehow God put that desire and that longing in me, and in listening to my own soul, that became apparent. And it was just a matter of waiting for the right timing for my family. So it's really exciting to finally be beginning and to start meeting with directees and just to feel the “rightness”, like, “Oh yeah, this feels like this is something I'm meant to do”.
Alison: How do you find, and Steve touched on this, but how do you find pockets of the kind of quiet that we're talking about, that we so desperately need? You are parenting four really young kids, so your life is probably far from a quiet, contemplative life. I think a lot of our listeners will think,
“Gosh, that would be nice, but where do I find that?” How do you find those rhythms in your own life?
Rowena: Hmm. Yeah, I have a real need, I think, in my mind and my body. My mind is very active with lots of thoughts. And so it often feels like a snow globe shaken up. And it's like the silence is kind of what helps everything kind of settle and then there can be calm and clarity within. And I just know that about my inner being.
I need a babysitter at least twice a week for a couple of hours so I can have a little bit of time to attune to myself so that I can show up as kind of that more clear snow globe rather than being shaken up all the time. It's really easy to live in this world in that constant state and I just can't function there permanently so I need it and I have to carve it out.
So for me, that is during nap time or yeah, intentionally kind of carving out some hours with a babysitter just so I can go for a bike ride and read a book and journal. And yeah, it's just really vital for me in this season.
Alison: I love that. Yeah, it is very much whatever the season, because it's true, even when you have more time, there is always something you can do to drown out the quiet. There's always something. We can turn the radios on in our car, we can have a podcast on all the time, we can be on social media. And it is a discipline.
One of the things I know I did when I was in that driving phase of parenting, where you're in the car all the time shuttling kids to and fro several hours a day sometimes, is I would start a practice (after this whole Emmaus experience where I began to realize that quiet is our friend) of not turning anything on while I was in the car.
It's not necessarily optimal, but it was an amazing difference in my life. No radio, no podcast. Just sitting in the quiet for at least as long as that car ride. It gave me that moment of just noticing what was in my own mind, what was in my own soul, just attuning to myself.
Steve Macchia: And what I hear in that is the discipline of Sabbath. And Sabbath is really foundational to the deeper life. Without Sabbath, you won't go deep, period, end of story.
It is commanded and invited by God. It's not something that's just in the Old Testament. It's something that Jesus came to fulfill in the use of Sabbath because all of the religious leaders, the Pharisees, had really made rules and regulations around Sabbath and basically nearly destroyed Sabbath by over-regulating it. And Jesus came to set them free from that which was bringing them down and into bondage.
Even within the text and the Ten Commandments, you know, there's that reminder that we're to remember that we were once enslaved. but we are now set free. And being set free is to be in Sabbath practices on a weekly basis, but also Sabbath moments on a daily basis or a day by day basis.
So when you, Alison, say that you turned the radio off as you were driving kids around, that's a Sabbath, that's a choice towards Sabbath. Or Rowena, when you say you're gonna get a babysitter and just take a couple hours or take a bike ride. That's the craving within us that exists universally for some space.
And when we don't want it, it's because we've chosen distraction as our main drug of choice to drown out that which we need to wrestle with in the silence. And that's why silence and solitude has often been described as the crucible of transformation. It's the place where the deepest work occurs. And if we choose not to be in those Sabbath, quiet, restful moments in our life, we'll end up living the entirety of our life, inch deep and mile wide.
So Sabbath and Sabbath practices, it's one of the things I'm trying to awaken within the pastoral world that I connect with because pastors will tell me over and over again, Sabbath is impossible, or that Sabbath is only possible when it's not a work day. No, you need Sabbath. Every soul needs Sabbath. God knew what he was talking about.
It's the only commandment that was applicable to him because he chose to do Sabbath himself. So we listen for that in spiritual direction. We listen for the soul that's troubled or the soul that's distracted or the soul that is constantly in need of noise or motion.
And when we create space as a spiritual director to just quiet ourselves, to be more attentive, more reflective, it's basically introducing a Sabbath-like experience for a person to say yes to that invitation within us, to get to know God at a deeper level, rather than running ourselves ragged, letting this world define who we are and what we're becoming.
Alison: I love that. And I would add if you're someone who's listening who finds it very challenging to sit in quiet as a result of so much pain inside–trauma is something that can surface in silence. It's nothing to feel shame about.
And that's one of the areas where I would say therapy becomes that place of Sabbath where you're with someone who can help you begin to pace yourself as you work through a lot of the noise in your soul that has built up over time as a result of trauma, as a result of no one attuning to you. That's where a therapist can help you pace that so that you can arrive at this place where your nervous system understands, “Oh, I can be quiet with myself and that feels okay”.
So that's another way where those two areas I think can work together. I know for me early on, sitting quietly, before I even arrived at Emmaus, I tell the story of having a series of panic attacks at the end of graduate school, and being in the quiet during that time would have been too much.
I needed people, I needed bodies, to help me understand what was happening. And as I healed that, then I brought in spiritual direction as a much needed reminder of, “This is what it feels like. I can take deep breaths. I can be with myself”.
It's just such a valuable practice that I've kept in my life since meeting you, Steve and Rowena. I would love to close by asking both of you, what would you encourage our listeners to take as next steps if they're listening and going, “I long for that. I long for what they're describing”. What are some next steps people can take? I have some ideas, but I'd love to hear from both of you.
Steve Macchia: Well, my obvious answer would be to connect with us at leadershiptransformations.org. There are resources, there are workshops, there are programs and opportunities for you to at least get a handle on what is spiritual direction and what does it look like and how do I find a spiritual director?
Because I would say, Alison, that anyone in Christian leadership needs to have a spiritual director. Now, I would say that across the board, because there's something about the objective voice in one's life, helping you listen and attend to the voice of God. And if you don't have that in a spiritual friendship or spiritual director role, you're missing out on something that will take you to a deeper place.
And I wanna say too, on the comment you just made, ethically for me as a spiritual director, if a person is sharing stuff that really belongs in the counselor's office, I must and will refer that person because I don't want to take on things that I can't handle.
And if it's an issue that you can handle as a therapist better, it is incumbent upon me to make sure that person that's come to see me gets better care by a trained therapist or trained counselor. So if we can work cooperatively between the areas of people care, the better off we'll always be.
It's sort of like an ethical commitment that we as spiritual directors need to make. If they need a counselor, we find the best counselor for them to deal with their issues in a more therapeutic way. But I think steps to take would be to invite a friend to be a spiritual friend. Invite a person into your life that you know and love and trust. And just say, Can we get together and just kind of talk soul stuff together? It's like, what are we noticing about God or not God? You know, is there an absence of God or a presence of God? And let's just start having conversations. And maybe we could practice healthy listening to each other and not fix or correct or change or one up each other. And just through a simple relationship, let's see where that grows. So that would be one way to just get it started.
Rowena: I think Alice Freiling's book, Seeking God Together is an incredible resource if you're interested in doing this with a couple of friends. To gather those friends together and to read that book, it gives some extremely practical tips for how to set up group spiritual direction time and questions you can ask each other and it helps establish the boundaries for that group setting. So I have done that in the past and that has been really, really profound to practice with other friends. That was before beginning SELAH. So that's another step that people can take.
Alison: I would make a plug for your book, Steve, Crafting a Rule of Life is a fantastic book I recommend to people. And we haven't talked too deeply about this, but this idea of a rule of life is very little about a rule and more about rhythms of these spiritual practices. It's a really deep and practical book on how to create these rhythms in your life, kind of like Rowena and I were talking about.
It could be as simple as “I don't listen to music in the car”. That's a rhythm for me that helps me. Or “I get a babysitter for my kids every two weeks” all the way to “I meet with a spiritual director once a month”. Or it's just a really great introduction to this idea of having these rhythms of quiet, having these rhythms of attuning to the contents of your soul.
Steve Macchia: Thank you.
Alison: Is there anything else that either of you would like to see? And then I want to give our listeners a chance to learn about where they can find you both.
Rowena: I just keep thinking of the verse from Ephesians where it says, “I pray out of his glorious riches, he will strengthen you through the spirit in your inner being with power, so that Christ can dwell in your hearts through faith.”
And I think that's kind of the essence of spiritual direction. What it can do is be a place where God can strengthen our inner beings with power through the Spirit and enable us to live in the world from a richer, fuller place where we can really inhabit our lives alive, present, awake, embodied, in the here and now, not stuck.
Or that's one place where we can work through places in life we are stuck, but it can be a place where God can bring a lot of freedom within ourselves. That's just what I feel like God keeps sharing with me is “I want you to be free within yourself”.
And I want all of my children to be free within themselves and to have everything stripped away that is entangling and enslaving and distracting and to find that rest inwardly and that freedom. And so that's, I think, the taste that I want listeners to get from what spiritual direction can offer. It’s the way to get free within yourself, unencumbered by things that are weighing you down and being able to emerge in life as your full self empowered by God. And that is a beautiful thing.
Alison: I love the way you're both describing this rest that is so much deeper than taking a nap, which is also important, but just this inner rest, where no matter what's going on in your outer life, there's an inner ability to find that calm. Being at peace with yourself, being at peace with God–that is the freedom that I believe God wants all of us to have. I love that, Rowena.
Steve Macchia: And I would add that Psalm 62 verse 1A could be a breath prayer for a person to just embrace, and it's very simply my soul finds rest in God alone. It doesn't come in any other place. It only comes in God. So learning how to rest in God is really learning how to trust God. Trust and rest go hand in glove. The more I rest in God, the deeper I trust Him. The more I trust God, the more I'm able to rest in Him.
We often use the word trust and rest rather flippantly, but to really take those words and have them be a part of our true identity as men and women of God, that we wanna learn how to trust, we wanna learn how to rest. And when we rest, we trust, when we trust, we rest. And it's out of that trust and rest that we find peace and joy in our relationships and in our service, in the communities that God has placed us in.
And finally, just to say, you know, by doing this, by finding a spiritual director, by taking care of your soul, it's not selfish to do so. It's actually good, solid self-care by which you become more fit to serve another. So when you're in a healthier place, when you're in a better space, when you have greater clarity about who God is and who you are, you can present yourself to the wider world with a far better way of serving another.
Otherwise we are going to be that manipulative presence that constantly is wanting to push or pull a person according to our interests or desires. And I have that problem. I'm a controller. I like to know, I like my family to know what I think about their decisions. I like to tell Ruth what she needs to do, and I got to stop constantly because that's not what they want. That's not what they need. They need my presence. They need my love. They need my affection. They need a more secure me to be present with them so that I can love them more impactfully out of a genuine heart for them. And I think that's with all of us.
We're all selfish, we're all kind of into our own ways. But if we really want to be a servant for another, it needs to come from that genuine, deep trust and rest in God that I'm not here to prove anything, I'm here to offer myself as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God and to others. And that takes time to strip that false self away in order to mine the deeper places that really matter the most.
Alison: Mm. I love that. I love being with you both. I feel the presence from both of you and have been so blessed and honored by your impact, both of you in my life, to help me learn what that means. And I'm just so grateful.
Thank you for your time today. I would love for our listeners to know where they can find you and where they can get a hold of you if they're interested in learning more.
Steve Macchia: Very simply for me, it's leadershiptransformations.org for the organization and stevemacchia.com for the books and things that I've created over the years. So leadershiptransformations.org is the go-to place.
Alison: And I can't recommend more the different workshops and different options that you provide for people to learn about this way of being with yourself, with God, and with other people. And what about you, Rowena? Are you going to be taking new directee clients?
Rowena: I am open to it. Right now, I can't really be found anywhere on social media. I just sort of realized that at this time in my life, I can't invest much time in those platforms, but I am interested in taking some directees, just a few. And so, yeah, if there's anyone who lives in the Washington DC area and would like to do it in person or I am also available over Zoom. We could connect.
Alison: Email me, how about that, if you're interested. I first of all love, I think both Steve and I are nodding our heads here, like, and wanting to honor and validate your choices to keep certain clutter out of your life. I mean, that right there is evidence of your own rhythms, right? This isn't a rhythm that I can have right now as to be available publicly.
And I know I've gone through seasons like that myself and want to honor that, I can also attest to the fact that you'd be a wonderful person for anyone who would like to get started with spiritual direction.
You can email me on my website, dralisoncook.com, and we'll get you hooked up. I also believe through SELAH, Steve, your spiritual direction training program, there are, is there a search engine where people can find spiritual directors through the Leadership Transformation website?
Steve Macchia: Yes, it's just it's SELAH, S-E-L-A-H, which is the word that's used in the Psalms for pausing between various verses. So it's got a great meaning, the word SELAH itself. So when you go to LeadershipTransformations.org, you just do /SELAH or go into the search icon and put SELAH in our spiritual direction. And there's also a listing there of spiritual directors that have been trained by us that are all over the country, different parts of the world.
Our SELAH program continues to multiply. We've got SELAH East on the East Coast, SELAH West in Arizona, SELAH Europe in Scotland and SELAH Anglican in North Carolina for the North American Anglican church. So it continues to grow, God continues to bless. If you're at all interested in that program, you should apply early and just make your interest known.
Alison: Beautiful. I love it. Well, thank you both for all the goodness you are bringing into this world full of noise. Just the beautiful presence that speaks so powerfully. I'm so grateful for both of you.
Steve Macchia: We're grateful for you too, Alison.
Rowena: Yeah same.
Steve Macchia: Kudos to you for all the wonderful writing and speaking and podcasts and blogs and all the rest. Keep up the good work, okay?
Alison: Thank you. Likewise.
*Outro*
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts and click the Plus or Follow button. That will ensure you don't miss an episode, and it helps get the word out to others. While you're there. I'd love it if you'd leave your five-star review. I look forward to seeing you, back here, next Thursday. And remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God, you heal others, and you stay true to your God-given self.
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The Best of You Every Day offers short, daily reflections on Scripture through the lens of emotional health—helping you stay steady, connected, and rooted in love.
