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This week on the podcast, we're kicking off a mini 2-episode series on loving our bodies as a spiritual practice. Today, I dig into the problem of over-spiritualizing and how that does harm to ourselves and to others.

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Here's what we cover:

1. What is spiritual bypassing?

2. Does every problem have a spiritual solution?

3. How we spiritually bypass ourselves

4. How not to be a "friend of Job"

5. The antidote to spiritual bypassing

6. An example of spiritual bypassing from the Bible

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Resources

• See Chapters 2 and 11 of The Best of You, by Dr. Alison Cook
• Episode 46: People Pleasing as Survival, How Jesus Regulated Emotions & the Problem With Toxic Positivity and Spiritual Bypassing with Aundi Kolber
• John Welwood on Spiritual Bypassing
• ‍Job 20 and Job 22
• ‍Matthew 23:4
• ‍Job 42:7-8
• Isaiah 53:4
• John 11:33
• Matthew 5:3-5
• ‍Matthew 25:34-40
• ‍Hebrews 11:1
• ‍Romans 8:28
• ‍Resources for support

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Thanks to our sponsors:

• Go to ⁠www.organifi.com/bestofyou⁠ today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
• Order Dr. Amen's new book, Change Your Brain Every Day today!
• Hiya Health-Visit hiyahealth.com/BESTOFYOU and get your kids the full-body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults.

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Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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Transcript

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‍Alison: Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Alison, and I'm so glad you're here to discover what brings out the best of you. This podcast is all about breaking free from painful patterns, mending the past, and discovering our true selves in God. I can't wait to get started as we learn together how to become the best version of who we are with God's help.

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Hey, everyone, and welcome back to The Best of You podcast. I am so glad you're here. I'm so glad you keep coming back, each week, for these conversations that are just so important. As we navigate all the challenges that we face in our families, in our relationships and, frankly, in this world. There's just so much turmoil, so much chaos, all around us. And, so, I so appreciate this time each week to center our hearts, and to just pay attention to what is happening inside our souls, our minds, our bodies, and to invite God into that process together.

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Today and next week, we're going to do a two-episode miniseries called, Loving Your Body as a Spiritual Practice. I have been in a, pretty intense, process of learning what it means to honor the body that God has given me, as a form of honoring God. 

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This is something I do not think comes naturally for most women, in particular. And it's not something that we hear a lot about in our faith communities. I do think that message is changing. And, so, in today's episode, I want to talk about this phrase - spiritual bypassing. We touched on it in my episode with Aundi Kolber, last week, episode 46. And several of you wrote to me and said, "Can you talk more about that? What did you mean by that?"

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And, so, today, I want to get into what is spiritual bypassing. And then I also want to touch on what does it mean to bring our whole body. And by our whole body, I mean our mind, our heart, our spirit, and the body, the physical body that contains our mind, our emotions, and our spirit All of those things into our spiritual practices. 

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So to get started today - what is spiritual bypassing? Spiritual bypassing, essentially, means using spiritual concepts, platitudes, or spiritual language to bypass or over-spiritualize the real struggles that we face. And one of the ways I like to think about it, it's saying that every single problem, every single struggle of life, can be solved with a spiritual solution. 

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And I want to pause there, and I want you to think about that for a minute. Because I think a lot of us might agree with that. We might agree or have even said, or have even heard, in a sermon, that every problem has a spiritual solution. And I'm going to challenge that just a little bit today. 

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So spiritual bypassing, this phrase, was actually introduced, it's credited to this Buddhist psychotherapist, actually, his name is John Welwood. In the mid-'80s, he began to see a trend in the clients that he was seeing, that they would bypass their pain or bypass the reality of their problems. By using, vaguely, spiritual language like, "It's all good."

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"I'm just going to follow my bliss."

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"I'm just living my truth."

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His clients would just repeat these positive-sounding phrases, that really didn't allow them to get into the heart and soul of what they were really struggling with. And if you remember, again, in episode 46, Aundi talked about how there's a secular version, which is called toxic positivity. Which is using positive phrases to cover over pain or suffering. 

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But there is also a Christian version of this and it's using Christian phrases, Christian platitudes, even Bible verses, to cover over pain and struggling. Instead of owning it, naming it honestly, and bringing it into the light, where God can actually bring the healing. And, also, sometimes the practical, very embodied resources that we need. 

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So here are some examples of spiritual bypassing and how it might show up in a faith community. So maybe you've shared a hard situation with a small group or a member of your church community, and you've heard a version of the following response. So, for example, if you share "I'm really struggling with depression." And someone tells you, "Oh, you don't need to feel depressed, God has given you so much."

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Or "You should just pray more. You should just ask God, if you pray more, god will take that addiction or that relationship problem away."

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Or if you're struggling with forgiveness and you really are carrying resentment towards someone who's really hurt you. Someone might say to you, "Well, God just says you should forgive. You just need to turn the other cheek." But there's no real acknowledgment of the complexity of what that means. 

And, listen, sometimes we do this to ourselves. We constantly tell ourselves, "If I would just pray more, if I had just been in the Word more. If I was just walking closer with God, I wouldn't be having these problems, I wouldn't be struggling. Everything would just, magically, fall into place."

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We tell ourselves these things all the time and we beat ourselves up with this form of spiritual bypassing. "If I was more holy, if I was more faithful, if I was a better Christian, I wouldn't be having this fight, flight response and lashing out at my kids. If I had just spent more time in the Word, today, I wouldn't be behaving in this way."

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Now listen, I don't want to suggest that it is not important to spend time in the Word, to spend time in prayer. To ask God, constantly, for help, meeting us where we are in every detail of the day. That is part of the work of growing in spiritual formation, of allowing God to form us on every level. 

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Some of these things are true. We do need to forgive. We do need to pray more. We do need to be in the Word more. But here is what I want you to hear me say, God meets us in every pain and every problem that we face. 

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But that does not mean that every problem, every heartache, every challenge has only a spiritual solution. I'm going to say that again. God meets us in every pain and every problem that we face. But that does not mean that every problem, every heartache, every challenge, has only a spiritual solution. 

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Some of our problems need very practical solutions. Some of our problems need us to attend to a jacked-up nervous system. That has gone into fight-flight response, as a result of trauma or as a result of stress. And we have to learn how to calm that nervous system through physical intervention. 

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Some of our relationship problems require the help of a therapist or a third party, to help us untangle the knots that have come into that relationship. And it's going to take more than just prayer. Or perhaps the way God is going to help us answer those prayers is to teach us how to bring the problems we are facing in our relationships into the light. Where people who are trained can walk us through it very practically. 

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Sometimes our addictions are going to take medical interventions. We're going to need doctors to help us. We're going to need support groups to walk us through it. These things don't, magically, get solved through prayer or through reading the Scriptures. 

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Now, again, I am not saying that we don't need spiritual solutions. What I am saying is that we limit God, if we assume that God only shows up in spiritual ways. That God cannot also show up in very embodied, physical, ways. 

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Think when we only hear about the spiritual solutions, especially, in our faith communities. We can start to beat ourselves up if those spiritual solutions are not solving the problems that we face. 

In fact, when spiritual bypassing is used as a prescription, oftentimes, it can make us feel more alone in the problems that we face. Instead of sticking close, by you, in the uncertainty or the complexity of the situation you're facing. When someone spiritually bypasses you, in a way they're blaming you for what's happening. 

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"If you were just more spiritual, this wouldn't be happening to you."

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Instead of helping you ask questions or getting curious about the situation that you're facing. Spiritual bypassing minimizes the struggle in the name of a superior faith. And, to be honest, it's what we see in Job chapters 20 and 22. It's what the friends of Job were doing. 

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They were looking at Job sitting there, in all of his pain, in all of his torment, after losing so much. And you just get the picture of these friends coming in with their little spectacles, and being academic, and being like, "Well, you must have done something wrong to be hurting in this way."

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Or, "You must not have been doing enough of your praying, and fasting, and spiritual disciplines, or God wouldn't be letting this happen to you." And they're coming up with all of these platitudes to explain away Job's problems. Instead of setting aside all their certainty, all their spiritual-sounding language, and going down into the pain with Job, and just sitting down next to him. 

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And saying, "Hey, Job, this is hard; we don't get it either. We know you're not perfect, but we also know you're a really good guy. And, frankly, I know I'm not perfect either. And, so, frankly, I know that whatever you're going through, there's no reason why I'm not going through it, because neither of us has it all together. 

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So I'm just going to sit here with you, in that pain, because I don't really get this. And I don't think it's really fair that you're going through this, and I don't really understand it. But I know I can enter into it with you. And I know that together, we can beseech God for mercy. We can ask God for help because I don't have all the answers." 

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But you know what, Job, whoever you are, whatever your name is, and the problems that you're facing, I can enter into it with you, and I can sit here with you. I can bring my whole body, I'm not going to sit here above you, and float above your problem, and analyze it or dissect it or spiritualize it, from a safe place, far away. Where I don't have to be tarnished by the pain that you're feeling. I can stay safe outside of it." That's not real friendship. 

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Instead of floating above your pain, I'm going to come and literally take my whole body, and I'm going to sit next to you, and I'm going to even put my arms around you, and I'm going to hold you. And I'm going to say, "I don't get this either but I'm here with you. I'm going to help you ask questions. Together, we're going to try to find our way through this. I'm not going to leave you alone. I'm going to bring you the literal, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual presence of my whole body. I'm not going to leave you alone."

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That's embodied comfort, that's friendship. That's coming alongside someone from a position of "We are all in this together." And, man, whatever you are facing, maybe, I'm not going through it quite the same way. Maybe my life looks a little less complicated on the surface. But I have enough humility to know that my pat answers are not what you need right now. Because I don't fully understand either. 

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And maybe I will need to speak some words of truth, as I sit with you in this. I start to notice some things, and I can hold up a mirror, and in great humility and with a lot of grace, say, "Hey, I'm wondering if you've thought about it this way." But I'm doing that with humility. And I'm first coming alongside of you, and I'm sitting with you in the dirt, and in the mud, of your pain. 

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I'm not floating above you with all of these easy answers, that do nothing but make you feel more alienated. That's what spiritual bypassing does. It makes us feel alone in our pain. It makes us feel like "If we were just to be better Christians. If we would just pray more. If we would just be more faithful, we could just float up out of our pain and walk around with this numbed-out bliss." And it doesn't work, and it's not the example that we see in the gospels and it's not the example that we see in Jesus. 

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Instead of entering into the pain of a hurting soul with compassion, humility, and the gift of loving presence, or frankly, of practical help. We minimize, we spiritualize, and we make faulty assumptions. In effect, we are wounding the already wounded. 

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We're saying, "If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be feeling this way. You wouldn't be going through this." We're blaming others in the name of our faith. And we become the very people Jesus rebuked when He said, of the religious teachers of His day, this is what He said about them. Matthew 23:4 He said, "They tie up heavy, cumbersome, loads and put them on other people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them."

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They're not willing to go down into the mud, in that pain, in the heartache, in the challenge, of that other person's trauma. Of that other person's pain and actually get in the mud, and get dirty, and say, "Hey, I'm in this with you. I don't have easy answers for you, but I'm here."

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Instead, they stay up out of it and just scold, just judge, just spout out easy, feel-good platitudes that do not meet other people in their pain. We tell the hurting person to be more spiritual instead of doing the holier embodied, more important, work of sitting beside them in their pain. 

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Sometimes we do this to ourselves. Instead of seeking to understand our painful emotions or, frankly, even our reactions to other people that we don't really like. Again, those fight/flight responses, where we lash out. We just ask God to remove them or to work a miracle in our life. 

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And, listen, there's nothing wrong with asking God for a miracle. But what I've learned, living a few decades on this planet is we don't always get the miracle and we're still responsible to do the work.

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Sometimes God answers us with a miracle and sometimes God says, "This is going to be a daily practice." Sometimes we get that miracle of healing. More often God says, "Partner with me to take brave steps each day." You have a part to play. 

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I cannot even tell you, and I'll get into this more in next week's episode, how much God has been teaching me that lately. I so desperately want the miracles, the quick fixes, the easy way out. And, so, often God is saying, "I'm healing you. I'm here and it is not the easy way."

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It is the way that requires digging deeper and facing the truth of what's hard. Facing the truth of what I don't often want to see about my own self, and taking tiny, brave steps every single day. Floundering a lot, sometimes seeing a glimpse of grace, but all the while holding tightly to the hand of Christ.

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Who says, "I am with you as you walk through it. I may not pick you up out of it, but I will not leave you as you walk through it." Spiritual bypassing, we do it to other people, we do it to ourselves, and it's not what Jesus does to us. Jesus walks with us through the valley of the shadow of our lives. 

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< Music >

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Alison: Spiritual bypassing is not what Scripture recommends. Jesus welcomes the beat-up, downtrodden, hopeless, and even doubting souls He encounters. See Job 42:7-8, Isaiah 53:4, John 11:33, and Matthew 5:3-5. Jesus does not exile those people who are hurting and in the messed up middle of their lives. 

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He doesn't say, "Go get yourself cleaned up and then come back to me." He says, "I'm here with you now. I'm sitting with you here at this well. I'm sitting with you here at this pool of exiles. I'm coming to you right where you are."

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I think of the words of Jesus when He said, in Matthew 25, and these words bring fear and trembling to us. Because they apply to all of us and I do not always get this right. Please hear me say that, I know I do not always get this right. Here are the words of Jesus. "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison, and you came to visit me."

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And then, again, He goes on to say, "Truly, I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."

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What are we doing for people when they're hurting when they're suffering? 

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Are we slapping pat answers on them? 

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Are we telling them to pray more? 

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Are we slapping Bible verses on them? 

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Are we saying, "Hey, what do you need? Do you need food? I'll bring you a casserole and I'll sit with you, while you grieve."

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"Do you need something to drink? A cold glass of water? Maybe you need a break. Maybe you need me to take out and just listen while you share with me what you're struggling with. And I won't judge and I won't try to solve your problem. Let me just take you out, and be with you, and listen to you, and bear witness to your pain."

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And maybe I'll offer some insight, sure. Maybe I'll say, "Have you thought of this?" Sure. But I'm going to be with you and I'm going to listen. And I don't have all the answers, but I'm not going to leave you alone. Maybe you're lonely and you just need some company. You just need someone to show up in your house, and not try to solve your loneliness problem. 

But just show up every once in a while and say, "Hey, I'm here. I'm Christ in the flesh. I'm not perfect, but I am bringing my embodied comfort to your doorstep. Can I come in and just sit with you for a minute? Not to solve anything, just to take your loneliness away for one moment."

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What if we went to the friends who are struggling with addictions, with really hard challenges, and said, "Hey, I know you're in a rough place. I don't have all the solutions for you. Could I go with you to a support group meeting? Could I drive you?" And imagine, for just one moment, if that's how we all were with each other. 

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When we share about our own struggle with depression, or anxiety, or we share about our own marriage challenges. Or we share about something our kid is going through, or we share about a hard situation at work or a really hard financial situation. And the very first thing that we were met with were the words, "Tell me more about that. I care, I'm here. I want to learn more about what you're dealing with."

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What if we first started with that? 

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What if we first started by entering in and saying, "I'm here."

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And what if that's how other people met you, in return?

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I can just imagine this way that we are actually starting to be in a community together. We're actually sitting together and listening to each other, and absorbing each other's pain. And guess what, shared pain is half the pain, right there. We're not solving any problems. We're not, necessarily, fixing all the things. 

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But right there is the miracle. Right there is the miracle of sitting with each other in an embodied way. Saying, "I'm here, I hear you. I'm listening, I'm with you. You're not alone." And that same person is going to do the same thing for me when it's my turn, and when I'm struggling. And, all of a sudden, there's so much trust, and there's so much safety, and we're coming together. And this is what I believe it means when we are confessing one to another, "Hey, this is the real truth of what I'm struggling with."

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And it's the other person saying, "I hear you. I'm with you. Yes, me, too, I struggle with these things over here." And, collectively, we are connected to each other and we are becoming a body, an actual body. 

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I just had an experience, recently, with a few friends where we lived this. We came together for a weekend and we just could not stop sharing, confessing, opening our hearts and souls to each other about everything that we were dealing with in our lives. With our kids, with our relationships, with our work. With all the things that we all deal with. It was a holy weekend and it was holy ground.

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We weren't solving each other's problems. Nobody went away going, "Oh, yes, I prayed more and therefore my solutions were solved." We were just living prayer in an embodied presence with each other. We were the body of Christ for each other. 

Before we close, today, I want to talk a little bit about what I believe the antidote to spiritual bypassing is. It's what I call embodied faith. It's a faith that includes our hands, our feet, our nervous systems, our mind, our emotions. It's holistic, it's heart, mind, soul, body. And I want to turn to Hebrews 11:1 to just close out on this idea of what is a healthy faith. Because we do believe that God is in all of our problems, in all of our pain. That God is, ultimately, the one who cares the most about us when we're hurting. And that God is the one who leads us through the valley. 

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So if we look at Hebrews 11:1 "Faith is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It's our handle on what we cannot see." That's The Message version. I want to say that again, "Faith is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It's our handle on what we cannot see."

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Now, there's a lot in that verse, and that is not a verse that encourages spiritual bypassing. Even though we are understanding faith as the foundation of everything, even all the pain that we are dealing with. If you think about it, this definition of faith, in Hebrews, brings together two contradictory ideas. 

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First, faith is said to be like a firm foundation. Foundations are solid, often concrete, literally, concrete. When you pour the foundation of the house, it's usually concrete. You can see, feel, and touch a foundation. There's no question it exists. 

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In fact, every time you walk into a building or enter your home. How often do you think, to yourself, "Oh, I'm walking on a firm foundation? There's a firm foundation under my feet." But you know it's there. You just trust it implicitly. You just trust, for the most part, that that foundation is not going to crumble out from underneath you. That's how sure our faith in God can be no matter what we are facing. Faith is that firm foundation, that God is there no matter what. 

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But here's the second part of that verse. "Faith is also getting a handle on what you cannot see." Getting a handle on something means to grasp something complicated, something puzzling, something uncertain. You try to get a handle on a difficult situation. You try to get a handle on a challenging personality or you try to get a handle on your anger that you feel.

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It's unwieldy, it's wild. It's like, "I don't know what to do with this. I'm trying to get a handle on it, it's outside of my grasp. I don't quite have control over it." So when you're trying to get a handle on something, you're often wrestling with it a little bit. You aren't certain of how to proceed. You don't know exactly what's happening, but you know you need to stick with it. And that is, also, how faith is, it's a firm foundation under everything. It's also getting a handle on something we can't quite understand, we can't quite see. 

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Faith in God is a firm foundation. It's a fact God is there; we can trust Him. Faith is also getting a handle on stuff that's really hard to see, that's elusive. Where God feels mysterious, where we have to feel our way through the dark. We're not sure exactly what this wild thing is that we are facing, that we are dealing with. It's scary, it's outside our control, we can't easily grasp it, and that is also faith. 

Both are true, faith is a fact and it's a work in progress, it's a wrestling. Faith is a firm foundation, and faith is a feeling our way through, sometimes, one tiny step at a time through a long, dark, tunnel. When life is going well and things are working, faith tends to be more like that firm foundation. 

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We can almost take it for granted. We understand that these good gifts come from God. The foundation feels solid, we're good. And it's in those seasons that it is very tempting, from our safe place, way up high, to look down on others, who are suffering and say, "They're not on that firm foundation."

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When in fact our brothers and sisters, or sometimes us, when we are going through the valley, we are just as much in faith when we are feeling our way through that dark tunnel. Where our steps are wobbly and uncertain, and we do not know. And for every step we take forward, we might be taking half a step back, we are also walking in faith. 

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What does it mean to get a handle on faith, when it feels like the foundation is crumbling underneath you? 

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When you're trying to find your way out of an abusive relationship?

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When you're trying to find your way through a challenging set of issues, with a child?

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When you're trying to find your way through a betrayal, in a friendship?

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When you're trying to find your way through a faith community that has hurt you?

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When you're trying to find your way through a job that you absolutely hate and that might even be toxic, but that you need to stay afloat, financially?

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When you're trying to find your way through loneliness and you can't get a handle on it?

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That is still faith. Faith is still a foundation underneath you, even when you can't see it, when you can't feel it, and you can't find those easy answers. In fact, I would argue that is an embodied faith that is even more pleasing to our God. The faith of fumbling. The faith of I don't know what in the heck is happening, God, but I'm getting up this morning. I'm going to try to eat my breakfast. 

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I'm going to try to read the Bible, even though, right now, I don't know exactly what it's trying to tell me because I'm confused. I'm going to pray to you, God, even though I don't know what you are doing in my life. I'm going to turn my kids over to you, even though I can't see how you are helping them. I'm going to turn this relationship to you, God. 

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And then guess what, I am going to keep walking through this day. I'm going to keep nourishing my body with the food that it needs. I'm going to keep seeking wise counsel from people who I trust and I'm going to keep turning away from counsel from people who are minimizing or spiritually bypassing my problems. 

I'm going to take one step, today, to nourish my body, to try to get a good night's sleep. To maybe move my body in a way that releases some tension, that releases some stress. I'm going to reach out to a friend to take a walk. I'm going to listen to some music that calms my nervous system."

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And guess what, I'm going to continue to turn away from those voices of people, who are telling me that if I just prayed more or if I was just more spiritual, I wouldn't be having to struggle like this. Because, in fact, these very acts of taking care of my body, of taking care of my mind, of what I put into my ears, of what I put into my heart. 

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Of taking care of my emotions, of giving myself space to grieve, of giving myself space to be angry. Of giving myself time with healthy friends, who maybe even make me laugh a little bit in the midst of the pain, and who take my mind off of my struggles, that is me living out my faith. That is me trying to get a handle on it, God, and you understand that. You see me here struggling my way through, wrestling my way through, and it's not always pretty, God. It is not always pretty. 

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Sometimes I'm angry and sometimes you're hearing it from me, but I'm still talking to you. I'm still talking to you. I'm still caring for this body. I'm not giving up on myself. I'm still here with this child of mine who's hurting. I'm still here, hanging in by a thread, with this marriage. I'm still here alone because I've had to leave the relationship and a lot of people have abandoned me, but I'm still here, God. I'm not giving up on you and I'm not giving up on myself. 

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And, today, that act of faith might simply be that I woke up this morning and I said, "Hey, God, I'm here. I'm here today, I'm going to live this day." And that is my radical act of embodied faith. The antidote to spiritual bypassing is embodied faith and embodied faith is lived out every single day. 

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Every single day you get up in the morning and you say, "I'm here, God. I haven't given up on myself, yet. And I haven't given up on this person, yet, and I haven't given up on you, yet. I don't know what that's going to look like by the end of the day, but I'm not giving up today, I'm here. And that is my radical act of faith."

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And I will tell you, good and faithful servant, your God is pleased with you. Your God is pleased with you when you keep showing up every single day. And maybe your life isn't that firm foundation, of just feeling all great about your faith, and about God, and about your life. But when your faith is that feeling your way through, trying to get a handle on things, trying to wrestle it through, and you're not giving up on it every single day. You are in the heart and center of a God who loves you, and of a God who walks with you. 

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Whether you feel it or not, He is right there with you in that faith. He is right there with you. Because when we are faithful to this work, of getting up every single morning and not giving up on ourselves, and not giving up on God, He is faithful to us. And I can't promise you that'll come in a really clear solution today, but I can't promise you that He is pleased with you. That He is pleased with you and that you are not alone in your pain. And that your pain will not go unnoticed to the God who loves you and turns all things for good, for those who love Him.

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< Outro >

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you'd take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts and click the plus or Follow button. That will ensure you don't miss an episode and it helps get the word out to others. While you're there, I'd love it if you'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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Phew! Buckle up. Part 2 of my conversation with Aundi Kolber is out today, and it is absolute fire! We set aside the script and got real about our own experiences, including. . .

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1. How people pleasing becomes a survival response

2. The shame we feel when we start to change

3. Alison's unexpected experience of comfort in a crisis

4. Jesus and the Nervous System

5. Did Jesus ever get "activated"?

6. The problem with toxic positivity & spiritual bypassing

Check out Aundi Kolber's new book, Strong Like Water anywhere books are sold!

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Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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Resources

• Connect with Aundi Kolber at www.aundikolber.com or on Instagram or Twitter
• ‍Purchase Strong Like Water, by Aundi Kolber
• Purchase Try Softer or The Try Softer Guided Journey
• ‍Listen to Part 1 of our conversation: Episode 45
• ‍Learn more about the Fawn Response: Episode 14
• ‍Learn more about Trauma: Episode 4
• ‍John 2:1-11 Jesus turns water into wine
• John 11:35 "Jesus Wept."
• ‍James 1:17 "Every good and perfect gift comes from above."
• ‍Matthew 21:12-13 Jesus overturns tables in the temple
• ‍John 10:10 "I have come that they may have life to the full."
• ‍Pete Walker, MA, MFT "Codependency, Trauma and the Fawn Response"
• ‍Dr. Arielle Schwartz "The Vague Nerve and Your Health"
• ‍Deb Dana Rhythm of Regulation
• ‍Resources for support

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Transcript

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Alison: Hey, everyone, welcome back to The Best of You, Podcast. I am so glad you're here today. I can't wait to share with you this second part of my conversation, with my friend Aundi Kolber. It's a special week. This is the week her brand new book, Strong Like Water, is out in the World. I'm sure many of you have already gotten your hands on it. It's an incredible book about the power of strength and really the nuances of strength. That there are different types of strength. That it's not always what we think it is on the surface. 

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And today we get into some really interesting nuances of the conversation. Including a conversation about the fawn response, which is a way of pleasing others, or winning others over, that emerges as a form of a trauma response. And we also dig into a really fascinating discussion about Jesus and the nervous system, and how He models resilience and this flow of strength. So please enjoy my conversation with Aundi Kolber. 

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Alison: We tend to think of activation, or we tend to think of this situational strength. My sense is we might tend to think of it more, obviously, as when I'm in that fight response. Or I'm in just a high, anxious, my body is tense, my stomach's in knots. All those ways in which cues that we are now in that situational strength. What about that fawn response? 

What was so confusing, for me, is my situational strength is pleasing people. That's how I am surviving, it's the fawn response. And how do I become aware of that? 

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Because that seems like a nice, good Christian thing to do. And, for me, with that particular one, because it's so interpersonally linked, I almost need, in that one place, other people to remind me, you being one, of, no, safety doesn't feel like me setting myself aside to make someone else feel okay. Safety doesn't mean playing small so that I don't threaten anybody. Tell me how that piece of it, for those who are listening, whose situational strength is just playing really small is just disappearing.

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Aundi: Yes, thank you for bringing that up. And like we talked about in the other episode, how I led with the fierce part, and then there's the stalwart part. You and I have talked about how much I also resonate with the fawn part, and that is very much a part of my story and my strategies, as well. 

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And, so, I just appreciate you bringing that up. Because this is definitely the nuances where people get missed or where, particularly, in Christian culture, there is this sense of praise, particularly, for women who are living from the fawn response. And that is a very confusing place for the person themselves. Because whereas if someone is in the fight response, you might get interpersonal feedback like, "Whoa". Or if someone's leaving, you might get different feedback. 

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So with the fawn response, there are many things to say. And, honestly, I find the fawn response fascinating and, also, at times, a little bit infuriating, but fascinating. And what I mean by infuriating is just because it's also part so much of my story. So with the fawn response, I really conceptualize it similarly as a place of you're leaving. If we're thinking of it as self, there's a sense in which the self is disconnected from. Or if it's the other language I use, you're leaving the window of tolerance and you're either going to a place of hypervigilance like, "How can I help?"

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"What else do you need?"

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"Oh, can I do that for you?"

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"Oh, but can I take care of that?"

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"Oh, hey, can I just crawl on the floor in front of you?" You can feel the energy in my voice, with the hyper-vigilant fawn response. And then what I would say, because I think there's really more research that's needed with the fawn response. 

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But my understanding, and this is really from consulting with Dr. Arielle Schwartz, which she's done some great work around different nervous system responses. But that it can also go into more of a dorsal-vagal fawn response. So what that means is that, again, it's still situational strength, but it's more from that place of the hyper-vigilant like you've, "Oh, I want to help you. I want to do this." And, then, it's almost the submission piece. Like now it's just, "Okay, go ahead and just walk all over me, I'm good"

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Alison: I'll just roll over and play dead."

Aundi: Yes, "You can just take whatever you want from me." And that's a different energy. And it's important when we're talking about the nervous system, we can track how different states are experienced in our body. The reason why both of these are fawn, and that's not a dissociative response is that the goal there, Pete Walker coined this term fawn response. And it's really about over-accommodating and pleasing, or submitting, to neutralize the threat. 

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It's important to say it's really adaptive and it's a very complex response. This is not something that most people just do, the first time they are in a situation that someone wants something from them. Most folks learn it because, over time, they've learned fighting doesn't help. Fleeing doesn't help. Just playing dead, just dissociating, maybe not enough. 

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What they've learned is, "If I spin myself in circles and give you every single thing that you want, and walk on eggshells around you. And then not say anything, maybe, I will be able to navigate the threat." And, so, that's situational strength 100%.

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Alison: And I love that, again, because then there's no shame because we do shame ourselves for that. And it's, no, that's how you learn to survive, it worked. And even if you find yourself in it, one of the things I've learned is that is probably a cue, there might be some unsafety around me. 

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I want to circle back to this because you touched on this, and you started to talk about how when there's a lot of it. When someone has been living almost only out of situational strength. In that moment of beginning to recognize we can feel shame. Before we immediately go to the compassionate resourcing and we start to see ourselves, we start to observe ourselves. And when we start to observe ourselves when we start to see ourselves. I remember this vividly, for me, when I began to witness and observe that fawn response in action, there was shame in that.

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Aundi: Yes, I love that you named that. And, I mean, from the perspective that I often work, it's like saying, "If shame is showing up, the question becomes what function is shame playing in that situation?" And it may be that in the past it wasn't safe for me to access the resources I needed. So shame may have actually kept me in the situational strength and in the cycle because something in my body was like, "If I don't, there is nobody for me, there is nowhere else to go."

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And, so, I want to be clear in saying, I'm not saying shame is necessarily where we want to live, but we can have compassion for the role that shame has played. And perhaps how it's kept us in the survival mode because it communicated, in some way to us, it is not safe to come out of survival mode. 

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And, so, part of this work, and I talk about this a lot in Strong Like Water. Sometimes people might even feel like it's too much, but this is just my own journey of really wanting people to pace themselves. That pacing ourselves, it's that growth that feels doable. It's the bite-sized pieces where we're not trying to do so much at once. That it, paradoxically, might even be too much for the nervous system to digest by doing so much at once. 

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And, so, I say that even with shame. Even if we can just begin to think about thinking that's it. Maybe we aren't ready to have compassion, yet. Okay, that's fair. 

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Maybe we are not ready to have compassion toward the fawn response yet. Okay, that's fair. 

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First, if we can even just develop the capacity to notice it and just to be with it. "Oh, there you are; I see, from a functional standpoint, here's what you've been doing for me." Over time, what can begin to happen is we may begin to develop some respect for "Oh, the fawn response actually helped me navigate an extremely abusive system."

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Oh, okay, "I wonder what would have happened had I not fawned. How much worse would it have been for me?"

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And, so, again, in our culture, we're not always good at holding that nuance. But I think it's this place where we really honor the role that it has played for us.

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Alison: Yes, I love that. Shame, it's not telling us the truth, it's not where we want to live. And also, I've learned when it shows up, there's a reason. It's a cue to just say, "Okay, hello there, shame, I see you." It doesn't help me to shame myself for the shame. 

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Aundi: That's right. 

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Alison: It's just a cue that there's a wound there, that there's a pain there. And often it's just a matter of letting it run its course, but it's part of this journey. The biggest thing to remember is it doesn't mean that you've done something wrong. It might mean you're doing something really brave. 

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You talk a lot about this idea of becoming flexible and adaptable as this key to strong like water. So give us a little bit of a reminder of what you mean by that. And then I loved this idea that Jesus is actually this beautiful example of that. So tell me a little bit about that.

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Aundi: Yes, the nervous system flexibility that I'm talking about, when we go back to this flow of strength idea. Part of how I conceptualize healing is not that we're always living in integrated strength. Because, honestly, that's not necessarily possible. And, frankly, there are just times that our body needs to be able to not even have a conscious thought before it reacts. We actually need that to exist in this world that we live in. 

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And, so, one of the ways that I conceptualize healing is that it's moving toward our body,  our self, and our nervous system, accurately responding to what is in front of us. Now, this really, for me, I could just camp out here and we are going to talk about Jesus with this. But what, I think, is so countercultural here, I mean, this is not only secular culture, this is also Christian culture.

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In a way, secular culture's version is toxic positivity; "Put on a happy face, just smile, everything's going to be fine." And then from a faith perspective, spiritual bypassing might just look like "Just pray a little bit more. Just believe."

It's not to downplay, like what we talked about, we are holistic beings. It's not that faith is not a resource; faith very much can be a resource. But if we have to disconnect from ourselves to our experience, our faith, that is spiritual bypassing. And I would say it's a form of potentially situational strength.

Alison: Say that again.

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Aundi: If we have to disconnect from ourselves in order to function. In order to experience our faith, then we are almost likely going into spiritual bypassing. Which I would say is a form of situational strength.

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Alison: Okay, I'm sorry, I have to pause because I've never really thought about it exactly like what you just said. Which is disconnecting from the nervous system, disconnecting from those cues to go to faith resources. It's not that the faith resources in and of themselves are a problem. There are times when I am connected to myself and I'm connected to my body, and the Word of God is flowing through. It is changing me, transforming me, and beautiful, same with prayer, same with all the things. 

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There are also times in my past when I'm totally disconnected. I'm totally in whatever mode of fight, flight, whatever, activation, situational strength. And I'm trying desperately to remember that Bible verse, and it's another form of anxiety. It's another form of striving, and it's soul-killing. And, so, you're saying, in fact, that is potentially another form of situational strength, it's survival. Not all bad, again, no shame in it. 

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That helped me understand, after I had my stroke, Aundi, in the car, on the way to the ER, I was so activated in my body. And the spiritual part of me was grasping for promises of God, grasping for prayer, and it was not soothing me. It doesn't mean it was bad, but it was confusing to me.

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I was like, "That was interesting." Because in a moment of almost feeling like I was going to die or not knowing what was going to happen to me. Those resources were there but not comforting. And what was comforting was when I got to the CAT scan and the nurse put her hand, I said, "I'm so scared." And it brings tears to my eyes, put her hand on my arm and said, "I know it's scary, honey, it's scary." That's what soothed my nervous system, that embodied comfort and safety. 

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And it wasn't that all those things I was grasping for weren't true. It's just that was a situational strength response, in that moment. And, again, not bad, not good. Just not exactly what I know to feel as that deep sense which I felt after that of God with me.

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Aundi: That's right.

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Alison: That is so interesting.

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Aundi: Yes, I think that's such a good weaving together, that's exactly right.

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Aundi: It's just understanding that there have maybe been times for folks when spiritual bypassing has played a role for them. That they may be, again, like all situational strength, have needed. There was something about that that it didn't feel safe to maybe go to God, for example. So they couldn't bring themselves to God. So they disconnected from themselves and in a way dissociated toward God. 

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And, so, we can honor the function while also naming that, ultimately, that's maybe not really getting us where we want to go. Which is bringing it to our full self. Which is allowing faith, as a resource, to be experienced as a true resource. 

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And not as a way to suppress the body, the nervous system, or the sensations we're experiencing because in that way it can be harmful. And in that way, it may mean, "Oh, I'm going to have to come back to this thing later to process." Because our body is not experiencing the support needed to metabolize the distress that's happening.

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Alison: Yes, that's so good. I'm so glad we're continuing this conversation because I think, man, in that moment I had to come back and go, "What God? Because God is with us when we're in situational strengths, we know that baseline, God is there. But our bodies are not experiencing that and parts of us are scrambling to experiencing that God is there. 

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But that experience, for me, that was the biggest piece I had to process. I was like, "I spend a lot of time with God, why in that moment did I not feel the comfort of God? Is there something wrong with me?" And that's I think something a lot of people feel, and God bless you if you do in those moments feel. There are other times where I felt the comfort of God. 

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But that was fascinating to me and I had to learn to look at it "Oh, isn't that interesting? And how do I resource myself in a new way?" Because, for whatever reason, the thought of death, for me, did not bring that. And I did, I went through a journey of working that through with God and not shaming myself for it. 

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I think so many people have that experience of praying, of trying so hard. That situational strength and, again, we want to be clear, we're not saying God isn't there with you in that. But for whatever reason, that strategy is not actually what your nervous system needs in that moment. And that particular thing might not be the resource that you need to move you into that lived, felt, experience of safety with God.

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Aundi: Yes, there are certainly people who are in situational strength where God is God. So I don't want to put God in a box. It is not to say that apart from anything we do, God shows up in some way and, generally, speaking we are in that survival brain. What is first and foremost going to move us towards that compassionate resourcing and into the transitional strength, is really almost a case by case. The question, "What feels safe to your body?"

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Alison: Yes.

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Aundi: And, so, it's not to say that Scripture couldn't be also a resource.

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Alison: A hundred percent.

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Aundi: It is not to say that a prayer wouldn't be part of the resource, but if it is not, it's okay. It's okay. It's valid. And here's what I would just say, I think, a lot about the Scripture that says "Every good and perfect gift comes from above."

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Alison: That's right.

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Aundi: And, for me, I'm like, "Listen, these things that are communicating safety to our bodies, that's a good gift."

Alison: Amen, that's right.

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Aundi: That's a good gift, and there's no shame in having to use whatever resources are communicating safety. So you can have a foothold into your transitional strength, and then you can make decisions about what you need, or what people you need, or in what ways you need to experience God. 

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The other thing I would just say, that I would just communicate, is that in situational strength, probably, one of the biggest indicators is that there really is no choice. In transitional strength, you have some choices. In that survival brain, situational strength is like you got buckled into the roller coaster, and now you're going. Now, right before you get on the roller coaster, if you can be like, "Hold on, I think I want to get off the roller coaster." That might be possible. And, so, I hope, as folks are hearing this, I hope that maybe evokes some compassion.

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Alison: Yes, Amen.

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Aundi: This is not you being like, "Oh, I don't need God, I don't need support." No, this is your body doing what it is designed to do, which is to survive.

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Alison: That's right. And you know what, it also goes back to conditioning your own childhood wounds. Like, when you go into that situational strength, especially, if it's a crazy thing out of the blue, like what happened to me. You go right back to eight years old where I didn't have a felt experience. I only knew this legalistic way of relating to God. 

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So, of course, it wasn't a conscious choice, it's just where my brain and nervous system went. So tell us, Aundi, I got to have you talk to me about how does Jesus represent this nervous system flexibility? Does that tie in here?

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Aundi: Yes, absolutely. Well, before I say that, what I want to step back and just say is that one of the things that, similarly of the geeking out, that I like to do. I love and, for me, this just roots me a lot in my own faith is that Jesus, this incarnational, embodied God.

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Alison: That's right.

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Aundi: And, for me, that is so vital as I've walked through my own traumas, and healing those experiences. And walking consistently in my career with folks who have been harmed in so many different ways. It is not to minimize the other elements of Jesus's divinity and the bigness of God, those matter. 

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But, for me, it is a love letter. It is an absolute love letter, an invitation to really security and the with-ness of God. That God lived in a body. God lived in the constraints of a body. God was birthed in vulnerable circumstances, wept, and slept, and did all these things that are human and embodied. 

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And, so, I frame it that way first because I cannot overstate the significance of Jesus living in a body. There are so many things; one, we're going to talk about the nervous system in a moment. But even just from this attachment lens, which is also something that I integrate a lot. 

That instead of a God who remains far off, I think the fact that the embodiment of Jesus really communicates, in a very attachment-oriented way, the nearness, the solidarity of God with us. 

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And, so, all of that, for me, is the context in which here is Jesus, this incarnate God living in a human body. And in His life, I mean, in Scripture, we do get pictures of Jesus, but, obviously, I know that there's a lot of His life we never were privy to. 

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And, yet, I think about the flexibility of, for example, going to the wedding, His first miracle, and He is making water into wine. And that there's this sense of celebratory, there's this sense of that is a nervous system experience. You don't just do that through the lens of just like everything is perfectly calm, it's like remaining neutral, all the time.

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Alison: Yes, that's right.

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Aundi: Jesus was not vanilla, Jesus showed up as a human. When He's flipping the tables to the money changers, that's anger. One of the stories that is so sacred to me is when He shows up after Lazarus has died and He sees, I think it's Mary weeping. And just those verses, Jesus is moved and then Jesus wept.

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Alison: Amen.

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Aundi: And, for me, I mean, there's more to that story, He raises Lazarus. He does that. But I just cannot get over the fact that the God of the universe, who already knows what's going to happen first is moved and weeps.

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Alison: That's right.

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Aundi: That is nervous system flexibility. If we go back to what we said, at the beginning of this episode, we are responding appropriately to what is in front of us. Jesus, even in these examples, there is a match there. There is a match in His literal nervous system to what's happening in the situation.

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Now, I think, this is a beautiful example on so many levels. One, it is our own invitation to be matched. To have different emotions, to honor anger, to honor joy, to honor grief, among the many other experiences we might have, and Jesus had. But it could have been different. It could have been communicated to us differently. Jesus didn't have to necessarily weep. Jesus didn't have to show this anger. 

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The fact that He did not only, I think, is an invitation to us in our own humanity, but it's also an expression of the fullness of God with us, in our humanity. It's not like God just being "Okay, I guess you're human; I'll tolerate that."

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It's like, "No, I love you so much and I, too, share those experiences with you, and model that with you, and feel with you." Yes, I mean, all of that inspires me. It inspires me because what I have learned about the nervous system and embodiment. 

I'm like, "There is no true healing on this Earth if we don't bring our bodies." And, so, what a beautiful picture that Jesus shows us what it's like to be fully human and to live in a body.

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Alison: So do you think Jesus went through the whole flow of strength? Do you think He had situational strengths?

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Aundi: Yes, this is the way that, based off of what I know about the body, and just know about Jesus, and also how I viewed Jesus as being both fully God, fully human. It's that I believe He did probably access situational strength and in also the partnering of His divinity. I could see that maybe as I heal, how I'm able to move more quickly along the flow.

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Alison: Yes.

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Aundi: And it would make me wonder if that's maybe that picture. Because it's just I don't know what big, scary, animal would have maybe potentially eaten Jesus in those days or something. But there is a sense in which to be human requires situational strength.

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Alison: It's so interesting. And, so, Jesus experienced it without sinning. I mean, so often, again, there's this link when we're in situational strength is maybe when we are more inclined to lash out or do something. But, again, it gets to there's nothing inherently wrong, it's part of being inherently human. 

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Aundi: That's right.

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Alison: That's so interesting.

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Aundi: It can come out sideways and we can cause harm, and that is real. And I think that's where the language of repair matters, the language of reconciliation and forgiveness, and all those things matter. We aren't perfect, and being in situational strength is also not an excuse for harm. We have to hold the inherent value of other people even if.

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Alison: That's right.

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Aundi: Now, that doesn't mean it's always easy and God makes a way. God makes a way for repair; that's a hard tension to hold, and, yet, you're right.

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Alison: That picture that you painted of Jesus in all the different ways that He showed up in His body. It also strikes me as that picture, sort of we're closing out here, of the integrated strength. Because we've talked so much about... because so much of where we live is trying to move from situational into transitional. But I love when you were describing that picture of Jesus. It's like that's the picture that integrated strength isn't passionless, it isn't emotionless.

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Aundi: That's right.

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Alison: It's not this sort of numb, I think people conflate numb. Give us a little picture of vision, a glimpse, for people listening, of what it feels like. 

And even in your own life, thinking back to that 22-year-old that you start off with in the boo. What is your body experience strength like now, in this integrated way? Knowing, obviously, that we're not always there.

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Alison: Yes, thank you for this question. I think it's really important and you're exactly right, it's not this numb, flat way of being in the world. I think of it much more like a fullness, like expansiveness. And through my own work, I think of it as these younger parts have continued to be integrated, as my fierceness has become integrated. 

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What has happened is that it's not that the fierceness exists less. This is phrasing that Deb Dana uses it's before it was in service of my survival but now it can be used in service of my wholeness, and really the good of myself, and also the good of others. That my adult self can partner. 

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That's what the picture of integrated strength is, it's partnering. It's all those experiences, maybe those experiences that were meant for evil, maybe those experiences that were meant for harm. It's not that we have to celebrate that those happen, but do you know what we do get to celebrate? It's that we survived, that we've learned, that we've grown. The gold that comes from that, that is us.

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And in integrated strength, that feels the most accessible to us. The fullness that Jesus talks about; "I have come that they may have life to the full." And, to me, that is the invitation as often as we can access, as often as we can come back, to come back to that place of honoring all the strength. And as we are able to bring those parts of our stories, bringing those pieces of gold, bringing those woven-in pieces that have felt disparate, and allowing them to exist in wholeness.

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Alison: That's beautiful. I love that picture of all of it. I love that picture of fullness. It's the fullness of all of who you are and the fullness of who we see in Jesus. Thank you for this gift of your presence and this gift of this work Strong Like Water. Please tell everyone, Aundi, how they can find you, how they can find the book and where to connect with you?

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Aundi: Thank you so much, my friend, this has been amazing. I would love for folks to connect with me over at my website, aundikolber.com. You can check out the book wherever books are sold, major retailers like Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, and places like that. I'd love for you to connect with me on Instagram, instagram.com/aundikolber, and twitter.com/aundikolber.

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Alison: All right, everybody, grab your copy of Strong Like Water. It is such a deep dive and, again, it's also just so practical. Aundi and I talk about it, I can be disembodied, and those exercises just bring me right into that embodied variancing. Check that out, and thank you again.

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< Outro >

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Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you'd take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts and click the plus or Follow button. That will ensure you don't miss an episode, and it helps get the word out to others. 

While you're there, I'd love it if you'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.

What an honor to have my friend and fellow therapist, Aundi Kolber on the podcast today for Part 1 of our two-part conversation on her brand new book, Strong like Water: Finding the Freedom, Safety, and Compassion to Move through Hard Things--and Experience True Flourishing

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Aundi and I connected through social media, and she has become the dearest real life friend. It was my absolute honor to have this conversation with her abut her personal story and her new book, Strong Like Water, available for pre-order now.

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Here's what we cover:

1. The problem with being the "strong one"

2. The turning point when Aundi discovered a different kind of strength

3. 3 Different types of strength

4. How to find safety when you need it the most

5. The difference between information and transformation

6. How Aundi has come to understand strength now

Preorder Strong Like Water here

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Resources

Connect with Aundi Kolber at www.aundikolber.com or on Instagram or Twitter

‍Preorder Strong Like Water, by Aundi Kolber

Purchase Try Softer or The Try Softer Guided Journey

• 2 Corinthians 5:2
• Boundaries for Your Soul, by Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
• The Best of You, by Dr. Alison Cook
• The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk‍
• Resources for support

See Also:

• Episode 15: CPTSD—The Pain of A Million Paper Cuts
• Episode 4: What Do I Need To Know About Trauma?

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Thanks to our sponsors:

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Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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Transcript:

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‍Alison: Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Alison, and I'm so glad you're here to discover what brings out the best of you. This podcast is all about breaking free from painful patterns, mending the past, and discovering our true selves in God. I can't wait to get started as we learn together, how to become the best version of who we are with God's help. 

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Hey everyone, welcome back I'm so glad you're here this week. Today, we are launching our first-ever, two-part series with my dear friend and fellow therapist, Aundi Kolber. Aundi is a licensed, professional, counselor and the author of Try Softer and the Try Softer Guided Journey, which are just beautiful, helpful, resources. 

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I recommend them all the time. Aundi brings a trauma-informed lens to everything she does. She is one of those friends who just, as much as teaches, she shows what it means to live in an embodied way. She has a new book out, this month, called, Strong like Water: Finding the Freedom, Safety and Compassion to move Through Hard Things and Experience True Flourishing.

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This book is hard-earned wisdom. Aundi has lived what she teaches others. She has an incredible mind to understand complicated theory, as it relates to trauma and make it practical and digestible. I got to read an early copy of the book. And I wrote, in my endorsement of it that "She reimagines strength as a dance of both tenacity and tenderness. Of holding tight, at times, and of learning when to release. So she gets the nuances of strength, of resilience."

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It's such a powerful book and I can't wait for you to hear this conversation with my friend, Aundi Kolber.

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< Music >

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Alison: This is so fun.

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Aundi: This is so fun. I was just thinking, as I was sitting down for this call, I was like, "What a cool job that I get to do this with my friends."

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Alison: We just get to have a conversation that we might, normally, have back and forth via Voxer only Live, while it's being recorded. Because we talk about this stuff all the time.

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Aundi: We do.

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Alison: So it's pretty cool to have you on here, and I'm so excited about Strong Like Water. I just can't believe it is here and upon us, and launching into the world, while you are near water. I love it that this journey of creating Strong Like Water mirrored this journey of you, actually, getting to be nearer the water. That I know you love so much and speaks so much to you.

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Aundi: Yes, thank you so much. It has been really beautiful because now we are closer to a lot of lakes but, particularly, Lake Michigan, which it's not an ocean, but it's not too far off. And you've been just such a huge part of my own journey, especially, the last couple of years. So it's beautiful to get to have this time with you.

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Alison: It's amazing, because, I think, it's been three years, almost, exactly, since we connected. And, honestly, for people listening, this is one of, there are all these pros and cons of social media. I go back and forth with a love-hate relationship with it. But one of the best things is I have made a couple of real friends out of it, and you are one of those very real friends. That's how we met about three years ago, I'm grateful for that.

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Aundi: Yes, I feel the same; I mirror that so much. There's definitely, still, some ambivalence, I think, valid ambivalence around some things with social media. And there is the opportunity to connect with people at times in ways that, honestly, probably, would have never happened for you and I.

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Alison: Yes, we don't live in the same part of the country. We would have, maybe, known of each other's books. But how would we have known how to reach out and connect to each other? 

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I want to dive in because you open the book with this glimpse of your 22-year-old self. And I want to go back in time to her. She's at the ocean, and she's feeling the weight of a lot of different things. There's this image of her having been super strong and perceived as a very strong person, the wise person. The person other people turn to for support. 

But there's also this foreshadowing, this sense in that story, of there was a lot inside of you that was yet to be unpacked. And, so, what did that 22-year-old you think strength meant?

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Aundi: Yes, thanks for all of the things that you said before that question. That just feels so good to me. That just means the world. But this 22-year-old me, oh, my goodness, bless her heart. I think about that age of myself with just a ton of compassion. And at that age, I had what I would call a very narrow perspective of strength. I would say I had a very rigid perspective of strength. And what that meant to me was it was a form of like, "I'm the only one. It's all on me. If I don't do it, who else will do it? If I don't show up for myself, who else would be there?" Also a sense of nobody else can. 

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And I think this was a reflection of the family I grew up in. But a sense of even if I want help, other people, even if I could ask for help, others may not be able to handle it. And, so, since I in some way seem to be handling it better, then, I should just continue handling it. And, so, there was this sense of almost wanting to protect other people in my sphere. Because I had internalized this belief that because, for whatever reason, people perceived me to be doing well. 

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And there's a sense in which that was true, there were things that I was doing well. But what was tricky about that is that it made it so that instead of receiving some of the care and support that I needed. That acted like a way for people to think that I didn't need that, I didn't need support. And, yes, it was very rigid. It was very, "You just deal with it. You put your head down and you just keep going."

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Alison: Is it fair to say, you and I sometimes flip back into parts language. We flip in between our different languages. It almost sounds like there was a very ferocious, tenacious, you use the word fierce in the book. Part of you strong, very legitimately strong, could get the job done. But you didn't have access to other ways, to other parts of you, that might have needed help or might have needed to understand strength in a different way. 

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That part of you was like, "This is it. This is what we got going. And, so, I'm the game, I'm the one showing up. I'm the one getting things done." This was actually your experience, too. It was reinforced. And, so, that part of you was like, "Yes, this is what strength means; it's me getting the job done." Is that fair to say?

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Aundi: Yes, that's absolutely true. And there is, probably, without getting too deep into the parts work, my guess is that there was actually even more than one. There was, particularly, very bright, fiery, fierceness and then there was more of a stalwart steadfast, keep going, no matter what. And those were like two of my main protectors, in that period of my life. 

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Part of my story is that I am recovering and have recovered, in the process of recovering from complex trauma. And, so, that means that it's complex. And, so, I say those two parts, among many, but those were very active in those years. And I appreciate what you said, that it was valid. It was not, "Oh, you know what, how can I make my life really hard?"

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It was because of what I'm facing in my family, because of the lack of support. Because of dynamics of emotional and psychological abuse. This is the safest way for me to exist in the world 

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Alison: A hundred percent, this was the way you had to survived. When did you begin to realize you might need to rethink this way of being strong? What was that moment that you began to realize, "Huh, maybe that isn't the only way to be strong?"

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Aundi: It was close to that time. That moment that I described, that 22-year-old self, is just prior to me making a huge change. Which was that I, essentially, moved across the country to Denver, Colorado, all by myself. As a 22-year-old woman, I did end up getting a nannying job. And I had one friend from high school that I knew, that I had visited, and that part of that helped facilitate some of that. But it wasn't like I had this full-on plan. 

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But I will say, for me, that's a big God moment in my story. Because there was something in me that was so deep, and so true, that knew that it was the right move for me. That it bypassed, not just bypassed, even my protectors believed that this was the right move for me. Which is saying something because I'm a cautious person. 

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And, so, all that to say, it was that move. I've experienced many of what I would think of as almost like a cracking-open moments. Of the various protective strategies and patterns, and that was one of them. Because, up till that point, the way that I had lived was I was a college athlete. I was an excellent student. I was seen in these roles as being just people could depend on me. I did a good job; I was a hard worker. There were a lot of those things which were good.

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But that was also ways that I used to suppress what was really going on for me, and when I didn't have that. I wasn't playing college basketball anymore. I wasn't on the same track, academically, because that wasn't available to me. So all these ways that had previously existed, they were not even possible. 

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And that, first of all, was very vulnerable and there was a grief to that. In addition, to the fact that I had called off an engagement. I had quit my first professional job. And both of those I'm so thankful for, ultimately, in a way, there was a wisdom to that. But just thinking about that was when I began to think, "Is there a different way?" 

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I think how I would have phrased it "Is there a different way to even be?"

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And, so, at that point, I don't think I had language for the strength part. But I just was like, "Wow, I don't know how to be who I am anymore."

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Alison: Hindsight is 2020, but it's almost like you used the strengths of those formidable parts of you to go, "I need a change; so let's just catapult me into this new setting in Denver, where I'm completely vulnerable." It's almost like this way in which using your strength, you put yourself in a situation where you would have to confront the vulnerability, almost. I don't know, that's what I'm hearing. I don't know if that resonates?

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Aundi: I think all these years later, so we don't live in Denver anymore. But this fall would have been 18 years since that. I think it was early October that I drove across the country, and moved officially. And looking back through the years, I'm grateful because it was the right decision for so many reasons. And, yet, puzzled because it was a part of my story that I'm like, "That is not me." It's me, but it's not something where you're like, "Oh, yes, here's all the times that Aundi did something like this." It's very few.

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But I think something in me like the Bible talks about, Paul writes about it, "We groan." All of creation groans. And there is this sense in which, I think, that's when I first felt that ache of "Is there something more for me?" And the dynamics in my family system were such that I wouldn't have been able to articulate it then. But I really needed to be able to differentiate from my family system. And at the time, what that felt like, to me, is "I have to leave or I will get swallowed up."

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Alison: Yes.

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Aundi: And it was a body knowing. It was almost like it was that space, and the profound sense of just peace that I really felt was God's peace when I was in Denver. And it never went away, it just was confirmed. I was like, "Yes," again and again, just I knew that. And I tried to be mindful of not spiritual bypassing, things like that. But it was such this deep anchored knowing. And that's been such a resource to me through the years. Because when you've had those moments, you're like, "Oh, that's what that's like."

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Alison: Yes.

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Aundi: When you know that and all the systems know, at least for me in that circumstance. And, so, all that to say, yes, it was this really paradoxical where something in me felt called, and led, and almost a deep knowing that, "Something has to change; and I'm not sure exactly how it's going to change, what that's going to look like, but I'm willing to try."

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Alison: I love that. In a way I'm hearing you say "I need to choose myself."

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"I need to put myself in a position where I'm away from all this, give myself a shot." And you did that in partnership with God's Spirit and you never looked back. As much as I know there's still a whole lot more to the story. That decision was, "I am going to choose a life of my own, I'm going to choose myself." And that moment was a real turning point, a real breakthrough, that's beautiful. 

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I'm curious, for you, therapist to therapist, when you land in Denver, did you start doing that internal work first or was a part of you drawn to this whole, "I think I want to be a therapist. I want to learn more about this journey of healing." How did that go for you?

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Aundi: I had never been in therapy before I moved to Denver. I had started to, and was familiar with some pieces around some of the psychological elements. My older sister is also a therapist so that gave me a little bit of a picture, of some idea, and some perspective on this. 

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I had done a little bit of work in my undergrad working with social workers. And, so, I had a little bit of a sense of some things that were interesting to me, and where I felt like I might want to be helpful. I got to Denver, and to be honest, I mean, I had no clue just the level of work that I needed, personally, to do. 

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I think even at the time, I would have been able to say, "Yes, my family's really dysfunctional, there's a lot of chaos." At that point, we had been through a couple of interventions for both of my parents. I had been through some things; I had seen some things. And, yet, I think, partly, our body does this, in my opinion, to protect us. I think sometimes we're not ready to see the fullness of our story. And I would say, for me, that was a part of it. 

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So one thing that really was a gift is that one of the people I connected with really early on, she was a therapist, but she was my mentor. So I wasn't seeing her for traditional therapy. But she was going to Denver Seminary, or she had gone there a few years before. And she just was this really beautiful person, who I knew through one other person. And she was willing to meet with me semi-regularly. 

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And, so, she began to give me some language around some of the things I had experienced. She gave me the beginning understanding of some of what I had been through. And she has remained a really beautiful resource in my life, I'm so grateful for her. And, so, even before I went to therapy, I think that relational peace remained. I think she saw some of herself in me. She had a similar story. She knew that I wanted to potentially go to get my masters.

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And, so, it was a way to support me and it made a big difference. Because, for me, really, it wasn't until I was in my master's program that I went to more formal counseling. But, honestly, I really needed even that pre-step of having that mentorship through an attachment lens was really helpful. Then the other piece that, and this can look different for different people. But a lot of my trauma is attachment related. 

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Brendan and I, my husband, we were introduced pretty, early on, set up for a date very early on when I was in Denver. 

And there was a lot of complicated elements to that because I had been through some things. And I was trying to figure out, "I want to trust myself; I don't know if I can trust myself." Just even to pick someone who would be a good fit for me, and just navigating these layers. 

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But what's so interesting, and what I'm just so grateful for now, is the role of even just a few people, who were safe for me, in my life. And how that, in a way, laid the foundation for so much of my healing. That was a lot of the beginning. But without that, I don't know that some of my deeper healing could have happened.

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Alison: Yes, it makes a lot of sense. What I'm hearing you say is that from the minute you landed in Denver. There was a way in which different people, enough people came alongside to create safety, and you talk about safety in Strong Like Water. To where you could begin to do the work of digging deeper. 

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We still weren't talking a lot about trauma. It was before that was being talked about. I'm curious, when did you begin to be able to feel comfortable with that label? When did you more, consciously, begin to say, "Oh, I need to go down this road?"

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Aundi: Yes, I would say it was a progression over time. Even through seminary, I would not have labeled my experience as trauma. Because at the time, according to the DSM, I didn't fit. And now I actually even see that a little bit differently. But, at the time, I would not have considered it PTSD.

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So this was in the early, gosh, this was 2006, 2006 through 2008. So there was starting to be, in the field, a lot more discussion. But I would say, in my particular program, there wasn't much training around that. 

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I will say there was a lot of really good, I'm super grateful. I got a chance to really do a lot of integrative work with my spirituality. A lot around understanding our stories and attachment. And, so, there was a lot that was really good. And what happened for me is that I graduated, and I was on my journey to become licensed and doing all these things. And it was like another cracking open because I went from this very structured, contained, environment. Where I was like, "I know what it looks like to achieve."

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"I know what it looks like to" fill in the blank. To being like, "Oh, now I'm going to go out in the world and I'm going to be this person. I'm already beginning to try to be a person who offers healing to other people, who create spaces where they can heal." It wasn't that during seminary, that good healing didn't happen. I think that I would say that layers of that began.

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There's a lot of professional understanding of here's what it looks like to do notes, and here are the ethics, and that's all really important. But, for me, it really was because I felt like I didn't have permission. And I think it's part of what it comes down to. Because part of what was going on, in the background, is that things with my family were continuing to get worse and worse. Now, I was quite farther away, so that created a little bit of a buffer. 

But there were several really intense, painful, things that happened just in those years, while I was even in seminary. That, at that point, now I understand I had traumatic energy, I would not have known that then. I can remember trying to explain this to my mentor, and I remember my hands shaking. And as I think about that, I just have so much compassion, I had no idea. No idea. 

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I'm like, "Oh, my body doesn't have the capacity to process the intensity of the pain that is coming up." And most people in my sphere did not understand that. Even therapists that I might be seeing, they did not have that training. And I say that it just is what it is, this has been a progression.

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And, so, it was really a couple of years, after I got out of seminary, and I had been doing some work to get my license. I was doing agency work. There's a lot of things, when you're first wanting to get licensed, that's not for everybody, but you're willing to be like, "I'll just go wherever I can." Which is great to the sense that you get lots of different experience. It's really good to feel out where do you want to work and what do you want to do. 

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But as I did that more and more I had the sense, I'm like, "Oh, wow, there are these people and they know so much about something, for example. But that knowing is not translating to their transformation." And I was seeing it all over. And it was like once you see it, you can't unsee it.

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Alison: I know.

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Aundi: And then the thing was, that was me too.

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Alison: Yes,

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Aundi: Not that there weren't some changes, there were. But some of these big dynamics, in me, I was like, "Why I can know all this information and it still not changing it?"

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Alison: The big thing at the time, for me, at that season I was, there was cognitive behavioral therapy. Where you look at your thoughts and you change them. And I was like, "I can do that with the best of them."

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"I can get rational."

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"I can analyze."

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"I can capture every thought."

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"I can change it to the truth." And it does not get anywhere below the neck. It's not getting to any emotional truth. It's not getting to any embodied truth. So it's interesting, to me, this was really before all of this trauma-informed, and what you're doing such a great job of bringing to so many people. 

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Before it had really broken through into the mainstream, I think, it's fair to say, practice of therapy. And I love what you're saying, you're like, "I could tell, I could see it, there's a lot of information here, but there's not the transformation. And I see it in others, and I experiencing that in myself."

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Aundi: Yes, and I think that's what really motivated me, for me, post-graduation, to seek out additional training. In things like EMDR, integrating somatic therapy with things like EMDR. This is right around the time, then, I think, it's 2015, Bessel van der Kolk released The Body Keeps the Score. There's all this stuff beginning. 

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And, for me, it was this blooming it changed my life. It changed the trajectory of all my work. It changed, for me, everything, frankly, because it gave me a new lens both of understanding, but of deep compassion and of understanding the necessity of things like safety. Of understanding why, I needed to be so strong, a certain kind of strong. And that there was value to that, that I didn't need to shame how I survived. That was God's grace to me, that I could survive.

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Alison: Amen.

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Aundi: And that I was so loved. I have always been so loved. And that, for me, there was an alignment of things that I had known for a long time.

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Alison: Mh-hmm.

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Aundi: Things like Henri Nouwen talks about "Belovedness". There was a sense that maybe for the first time, I could fully hold that, fully integrate that. And not to say that it was always accessible, we ebb and flow. I think in the past, I experienced concepts like that as fleeting versus it being an attachment language, a secure base. 

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Alison: Yes.

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Aundi: Like, "Oh, no, this is where I go home to. This is where I live. Everything else I do is just an extension of this place where I am secure, no matter what. No matter what comes. No matter if I have to go into a trauma response or I'm able to stay integrated, I am loved."

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< Music >

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Alison: Thank you, Aundi, for just sharing with us a little more of your personal story. I know so many people have come to trust your voice, to turn toward your expertise. And I just, as your friend, what I know to be true, more than anything, is that it is 100% embodied. Everything you say, everything you put out, whether it's social media, what you write, it's coming from a lived experience. It's coming from your authentic lived experience on the ground, in real life. You are, 100%, this person in your own life, doing your own work, as you are showing up for others. 

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And I appreciate you're just giving us a little window, and you do it a little bit throughout the book. You give us little glimpses of how close to home this work is for you. This, literally, comes out of your own experience. And it's just such a gift that you've taken all of that pain, and all of that trauma, and through your own work of healing, created these paradigms, these ways for other people to come in and do the work.

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< Outro >

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Alison: 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 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.

Today's episode is all about how to befriend anger. It's an emotion that can do great harm and one that also has great benefits. Whether you thrive on anger or try your best to bury it, one thing's for sure-we all have to reckon with it. When you learn to work with your anger, it can become a powerful force for good in your life and in the lives of the people you love. Today, my friend Rowena Day (see Episode 31) returns to the podcast as we discuss how we've learned to create space for healthy anger in our lives.

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Here's what we cover:

1. Practical strategies to befriend and build trust with anger

2. The guilt and fear we feel about having anger

3. How to manage anger while parenting

4.  Examples of speaking on behalf of anger vs. from it

5. The problem with comparing our pain to the pain of others

6. Jesus and anger

Be sure to pick up your 3 free Boundaries for Your Soul resources here.  

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Thanks to our sponsors:

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.

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

Visit Brooklinen.com today and use code BESTOFYOU to save.

Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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Resources

• Get 46% off Boundaries for Your Soul & The Best of You
• Inside Out Movie Trailer
• IFS Institute
• Guided IFS Reflections:
  • Insight Timer - KimberlyMiller
  • Insight Timer - Ann-Marie Bowen‍
• Resources for support

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‍Scriptures Mentioned:

• Psalms 51:6 "You desire truth and our inward parts, and in the hidden part." (NKJV)
• Matthew 11:30 "Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly." (Message)
• Matthew 12:34 "You brood of vipers…" (NIV)
• Matthew 21:12-13 "He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves." (NKJV)

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Books Mentioned:

• Boundaries for Your Soul, by Kimberly Miller & Dr. Alison Cook
• The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner
• The Other Half of Church by Jim Wilder
• The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
• Holy Listening, by Margaret Guenther

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Other Episodes in this Series:

• Episode 39: Boundaries for Your Soul—How to Navigate Your Overwhelming Thoughts & Feelings
• Episode 40: 5 Steps to Healing Painful Emotions & Why Parts of Us Get Stuck in the Past
• Episode 41: Boundaries With Fear And Anxiety—How to Calm the Chaos Within and the Joy of Internal Boundaries
• Episode 42: How to Honor Sadness, Set Boundaries with Loneliness, and What to Do When You Don’t Have Time for this Work

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‍Transcript

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Alison: Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Best of You podcast. This is our last episode in this series on Healthy Boundaries for Your Soul. This has been such a powerful series, and I've appreciated hearing from so many of you. Wherever you listen, whether it's Apple, or Spotify, or Amazon, music, or wherever you get your podcast, how much you've gotten out of this series.

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So thank you for listening, thank you for subscribing, thank you for giving me your feedback. I love creating this podcast, and I just so appreciate hearing from you and knowing that it's reaching so many people who need these resources. 

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As we close out this series, I want to leave you feeling equipped and empowered, to do good in this world and to create change in your life and relationships. And one of the most empowering emotions that we have is our experience with anger. Anger is such a valuable member of your internal family. It can alert you to danger, whether you're being mistreated by someone else or maybe you're even in physical danger. 

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It can motivate you to take action on behalf of yourself or on behalf of an injustice that you're witnessing. It can help you point out brave truths. It's also one of our most uncomfortable emotions. It's an emotion we often fear, or don't like, or even exile. Sometimes we push it away. 

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But if we do not befriend our anger, it will come out. It can come out as irritability, as aggression. It can come out as harsh or critical judgments toward ourselves or toward others. 

It can come out as cynicism or bitterness. It can come out as physical tension in our bodies, or anger can come out sideways as passive aggression. 

These little digs, where we get it out, but not really directly in a way that is healthy for our souls and for our relationships. So there's a lot to cover here with this emotion. 

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So for today's episode, I invited my dear friend, Rowena Day, back on the podcast, to be a conversation partner with me, as we discuss this emotion of anger. Rowena was first on the podcast in episode 31. Where she talked about being a peacemaker, and how she had to learn to befriend anger as someone who really loves to keep the peace. 

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Rowena is a writer, an artist, and a spiritual director in training. She's the mom of four children between the ages of one and eight. She and her husband live in Washington, D.C. We met over a decade ago at a spiritual listening community. Where we became friends and discovered each other as kindred spirits, on this journey toward emotional and spiritual wholeness. And we have both worked really hard to create a healthy relationship with anger. 

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It doesn't come naturally for either of us. We've had a lot of conversations about it over the years, and I'm so happy to have her on the podcast today. Let's dive into our conversation about anger.

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Welcome back to the podcast, Rowena. I'm so glad you are here today with me.

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Rowena: Thanks for having me back, Alison. This is a really important conversation.

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Alison: I thought it was so interesting. And I didn't know you were going to do this in that first episode, where you came on to talk about peacekeeping. Where you really brought it back to this experience of anger, and that the two really go hand in hand to be a more effective, more powerful peacekeeper. 

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Someone who really shows up wisely in relationships with others versus someone who just bypasses yourself, in order to keep peace for others. You have to get in touch with your anger. And that really resonated with my experience of being what I would call someone who likes to please others, likes to perform for others. Where I had to realize that anger sometimes felt like a disruptor, in a negative way. 

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Because how can I please someone else if I'm feeling angry? And, yet, the reality is it actually empowers me to the higher good, which isn't just to please or to perform. It's to actually create good, to create real help, to create meaningful change, in the lives of other people and in my own life. So I really resonated with that. And I'm so glad we're going to talk about it today. I'd love to get started, for you to just talk about how have you come to understand anger.

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Rowena: Mh-hmm, anger is such a powerful force and it can create such an internal conflict. And I think this internal conflict is not talked about a whole lot for women because, I think, women are socialized mostly. Maybe not every woman identifies with this. But, I think, it is true for a lot of women that we are socialized to see anger as all bad. 

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And, so, it's very uncomfortable when we feel it in our bodies to know what to do with it. It's a hidden power and a hidden fuel. And it can lead either to destruction, outwardly or inner, inward disintegration or fragmentation, of ourselves. Or it can be a fuel that leads to greater goodness, and integration, wholeness, and healing of fragmented parts of ourselves. 

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And, so, it takes a lot of practice to figure out how to harness anger well and have a healthy self-expression of it. And, so, I think in our society, we probably have a false dichotomy of anger. Where on one side of the spectrum, you can either bypass, suppress, or deny your anger. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you can have an eruption or an explosion of anger. That's like a volcano that just erupts in a really destructive way. 

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And, so, there's this false dichotomy where it's either I suppress it or I explode. And there's just such a range in the middle where there's healthy self-expression of anger. And this is really tricky to navigate when you're feeling it in your body because there's all these other emotions that entangle and wrap around it.

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But there really is a third option to express it in a healthy way. And you talk about this a lot, but the key is to have a lot of curiosity and compassion for these angry parts of ourselves. And we don't want to suffocate the flame of anger or stoke it so much that it's exploding into a huge fire. 

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So I think the fire analogy is really helpful. Like a fire can produce warmth and light when it's contained. But when the fire goes out, there's no light and no warmth anymore. And then if the fire is huge, it can set off a whole forest and cause immense damage. 

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And, so, having a healthy amount of anger in our lives is actually good, and it's a God-given emotion. And it's just so important that we figure out, our minds can think one way about it and our bodies can feel a different way.

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Alison: Yes, it's so true. It's so good. And because it is such a physical emotion, we feel it in our bodies. I think also that's where there's some fear with it. Because if and when you've, and as we say, lost your temper or become angry, it's scary. It's almost like it takes over. It's an activating emotion. So it activates us to move, and to get big, and to yell, do these things that can be harmful. 

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And, so, it really is a process of learning how to have this grounded experience of, sometimes I use the word authoritative anger, of gravitas, of healthy sternness. Because when we don't have enough, when it's too far away, we actually can become passive, or feel like we're a victim of our circumstances, or feel helpless, and that's not healthy. 

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But if it becomes that volcano, or if it becomes that raging, blazing fire that will burn the forest down. We're hurting the people that we love, and we're not being effective in our anger. And, so, I love that metaphor. I think it's really helpful. I think the trick here is to learn how to befriend our anger, to find it in our bodies, so that we can lead it versus either shoving it away, exiling it to where it's not constructive to us, or letting it take us over.

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Rowena: Yes, exactly, I love this part in Psalm 51 where it says, "You desire truth and our inward parts, and in the hidden part, you will make me to know wisdom." 

                        And Jesus also says, "Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly." And this is incredibly appealing. Who doesn't want to live with that sense of inner freedom and lightness, no matter what is happening externally or internally? 

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And having a harmonious internal family system is crucial for this. And anger is a big part of that for me, and for lots of other women, learning to witness this part of ourselves, and see it in front of us, and bringing it to the light with other people. So that truth can come to these inner parts and can be unraveled, and put in its rightful place in our life instead of being exiled within us. 

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It can so easily become a trapped emotion, where you've got fear on the front end for me. And then guilt on the back end, literally, a sandwich with anger in the middle and, literally, trapped by other emotions that are terrified of feeling this feeling, and then guilty for feeling it afterwards.

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So, yes, it's incredibly important to see anger in front of us and then see the other emotions around it that are keeping it stuck and trapped. Either in this ping-ponging back and forth between suppressing, and denying, and then exploding.

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Alison: Yes, or they're stuck, I love how you describe that. I remember when you and I were talking about anger a little bit, last summer. And you described, literally, that feeling of... because those parts of you that were fearful of it were trying to shut it down. And, so, then there's a war inside of you. There's "I'm angry, but I can't be angry."

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Rowena: Exactly, yes, you asked me a question about how anger felt in my body, and I immediately felt a lump in my throat. And it was hard to talk, and hard to swallow, and it was just like, "Wow, this is a physical barrier between my brain and my body that is just trying to keep anger from coming out." And it was so interesting how you think about anger in a certain way in your mind. But then your experience of it, in your body, is so telling and so important to pay attention to.

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Alison: And I remember that conversation, Rowena, because this parts work, that we're talking about. Really what was going on, it was the part of you that was terrified coming up against the part of you that was really angry, and both were valid. 

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And, so, that was that feeling of just literal stuckness inside your body. Like, "What do I do here? I've got these two emotions and, yet, I need to feel a little bit angry because it's real. But the fear was just keeping you from any sort of healthy expression of the anger.

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Rowena: Yes.

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Alison: So as I think about how we learn to access that anger. I think about how Harriet Lerner talks about in her book The Dance of Anger. How our families, our most intimate relationships; whether our relationships with our own parents. Whether our relationships as parents, our relationships with our kids, or with a spouse is that real crucible, ironically and paradoxically, for anger. Because these are the relationships we care about the most. We have the most passion. They're the most delicate, they're the most important. 

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These are the relationships that have shaped us. These are the relationships we're keenly responsible, that we are shaping there are high stakes. And, so, they're the relationships where we want to be our best, calmest, wisest self. Especially our relationship as parents. And, yet, these are also the relationships that tend to bring up these angry parts of us. That without these people bumping it to us, in our space, in our day to day lives, we might blissfully be able to just ignore. If we live, by ourselves, on the top of a mountain, we don't have to deal with our anger. 

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But it's when these people come knocking, and tapping, and bumping into us. These angry parts of us start to come to the surface. And I'll just speak to my own experience. That's when, what you're describing, that fear, anger, "I'm feeling this, but I can't feel this because I cannot blow up this relationship."

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"I'm feeling this but I can't feel this. This isn't allowed here." That's where that real tension inside of us kicks in. And that tension that we feel when those competing emotions come up. When we have that what we call polarizations, these polarized emotions, which you describe so well. "I'm angry and I'm terrified of being angry." 

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That actually creates more tension inside of us. And that's when we're, actually, going to be more susceptible to going to the false extreme or hurting ourselves by trying to exile that anger away. Which was a little more my experience. My experience and a lot of the women with whom I worked, early on, as my work as a therapist. 

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What I would notice is when you don't access that anger in a healthy way, and you really shove it aside. You end up taking it out on yourself. It comes out sideways in some way or another. You end up feeling the bitterness. You feel the resentment. But you won't put that anger on the responsible party, of where it belongs. And, so, you just end up simmering in that stew inside of you. And then you might even end up hurting yourself in that process, and it's so hard. 

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And I've noticed this, as a therapist, when someone is so clamped down on their anger and will not let it come out. Inevitably they're going to hurt themselves and, inevitably, that anger will also come out sideways. It comes out in criticism. It comes out in these passive aggressive ways. Where we find a way to get that anger out, but it's not constructive. I'd love to hear a little bit about your experience with anger.

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Rowena: Yes, boy, parenting has taught me a lot about myself. We cannot teach maturity to our children. We need to possess it and embody it ourselves, in order to give it to our children. And that's been one of my biggest lessons these last eight years of parenting, almost nine. Parenting revealed holes in my maturity that I didn't know existed before. 

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Jim Wilder, who's a neuro theologian, says in his book The Other Half of Church, that "We're not responsible for holes in our immaturity. But we are responsible for repairing these holes later in life. And cleaning up parts of ourselves that are emotionally stuck in younger stages." 

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And, so, before I became a parent, I thought of myself as an incredibly patient person. I didn't have lots of blow ups and I thought I was in control of anger. The hidden message under this belief, however, is that I'm patient and, so, I can control my anger and I don't experience it. 

And, so, thinking of myself in this fixed mindset way, it sets me up for having a low tolerance or immature relationship with anger. Because when you do, inevitably, get angry, it challenges this idea that you have of yourself that you're patient. And, so, then, that's when the guilt kicks in. So then you're fearful of anger, and then you feel guilty for having it because you think, "No, I'm a patient person; how could I have done that?"

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And, so, the reality is you're not either a patient person or an angry person. A mature person must definitely have a high degree of patience. But this doesn't mean rising above anger or eradicating it from our life. It means skillfully using anger constructively. And, so, over the last years, I've been slowly growing in this, and I don't claim to have arrived. 

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But the fear, anger, guilt, sandwich is not such a crippling force for me anymore. And I can have more acceptance and even, sometimes, approval and validation of righteous anger from my other parts. Whereas before it was like all the other parts of my internal family were saying, "No, you can't come out, it is not okay to be angry."

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Alison: Can you give me an example, Rowena, of what that has felt like in your body. And perhaps even looked like to your kids. The difference between suppressing or the tension of, "I can't be angry." To "Here's a healthy expression of anger?" What does that look like? Give us an example.

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Rowena: Okay, so what it feels like in my body when the anger is starting to overtake is like rising in my heart rate. And basically like a physical feeling of the lava starting to rise and about to erupt, if I can't manage it effectively. 

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And, so, it's the feeling of being taken over and the pressure. There's a pressure that mounts, and builds, and you feel this, kind of, in your blood and probably in a clenched jaw, in your hands. Just this need for anger to come out of the body in some way. But then if you haven't practiced the skills to get it out in a healthy way, then it is going to be more on the destructive side.

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Alison: So I love what you're saying. So you've become aware through the work of befriending your anger. When you feel that rising lava. You're in the throes of parenting, and I think every parent listening can relate to what you're saying. You're in the throes of parenting. Before some part of you would just come in and be like, "You can't feel that way." Which I would guess just increases the tension.

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Rowena: Yes.

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Alison: And therefore, actually, makes it harder because it adds pressure. And, so, as you've done this work. Which I know you've done so faithfully to befriend that anger and notice, "Oh, there's a queue, I'm feeling the rising lava." What are some strategies, when you feel that because you don't want to hurt anybody? But you might want to do something, or take on some authority, or speak on behalf of what you're feeling in a healthy way. So what do you do to keep that lava from just exploding? What are some strategies that you've learned?

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Rowena: The first step, for me, has been being more connected with my body and noticing what is happening in the moment. And being like, "Okay, wow, I'm really feeling the pressure starting to rise." And, so, once I can name that for myself, then, I have some choices. 

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Whereas if I don't know what's happening in my body, then, I can't manage it because it is just going to come out without having that healthy sense of choice. So the better I am connected to my body then I can realize, "This is I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it a lot." And I need to just probably name it and be like, "Kids, I'm feeling really frustrated right now, and I'm just going to go take a break for a few minutes." 

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And I've learned that splashing cold water on my face can be really helpful. Just to shock the body and be like, "Okay, you don't have to feel this high heart rate and this pressure internally." And just having that cold sensation is incredibly helpful. Naming it to my kids instead of trying to deny it. And just being like, "I'm feeling really frustrated, guys." It's a lot of work to try to navigate the role, as a parent, especially, when there's multiple kids. 

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And, so, for me, taking a break is helpful and just realizing this is not an emergency. I can come back and deal with this situation but first I have to deal with my own body. And I cannot impart any wise lessons to my children when I am in an activated state myself. They are certainly not going to be able to receive any helpful instruction, when they are in an activated state.

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And, so, just taking away that sense of emergency has been really helpful. I don't need to deal with this right in this moment. I can come back to this. So I might even just say that "I'm feeling really frustrated. We're going to talk about this in ten minutes. But let's just have a cool off period." And that's what I try to do when my kids get activated with each other, it's just not try to fix or solve the problem in the moment. But just say, "Let's have a cool off period. Let's play in different areas for a little bit."

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But we come back to it at another moment and we discuss how they were feeling and what was bothering them. I do my best to try not to take sides, or blame, or shame one kid and to really validate what each child was feeling and thinking. That just increases the anger when they sense that you're taking sides.

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Alison: I love this because what you're describing is this process of modeling. Just, as you said, we have to model for our kids what we are able to do ourselves. And, so, you're modeling this idea of emotional regulation. And the only way to do that is to become aware. It's to do all these things we've been talking about in this series is, "Oh, boy, I feel that tension rising in my chest. I do myself no favors to pretend I don't. I need to get curious about it." We talk about in Boundaries for Your Soul. "I need to take a U-turn." 

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Which is what you're saying is, "I need to actually give myself a little time out. I need to go make sure that my nervous system is calming down. Because I'm not going to help anybody from this activated state. I'm also not shaming myself because this happens." So you're naming without shaming, both to yourself and to your kids. 

Which is modeling emotional regulation. And then you, also, when your kids get activated, you're helping them realize; "You're experiencing anger or you're experiencing frustration, that's not bad. However, you can't take it out on your sibling."

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And it's like the way we parent our internal family maps on to how we parent our external family. And everything you're saying about building trust, you might say, "Let's separate for a second." But you also build trust, "We're going to come back. We're going to come back and reconnect when we're all a little bit calmer." I just love that example.

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Rowena: Yes, I've also noticed from my kids that their anger needs to come out of their body. They can't just be told, "Don't be angry." That doesn't work, especially, for two of my boys, sometimes, they'll say, "Push against me." And they'll feel my force against them in a friendly way, but just it helps so much to get their anger out of their body. It's amazing what some gentle wrestling can do for them. Where they'll feel like, "Okay, I could flush this out of my system because I could push it through my hands." 

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Or for my six-year-old, I thought this tip was strange at first, and was skeptical that it would work, but it really does work for him. He loves to draw when he's angry. And he'll draw how mad he was, and he'll show me his drawing, and he feels so much better afterwards. But he's drawing, and he's just livid, just creating this hilarious angry face or something, and I find that to be such a helpful thing for some kids. And shaking out hands is so helpful, for me, because it's got to come out of my body, too. 

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And, so, my three-year-old will sometimes say, "Mom, shake your hands." We try to discuss a lot of tools for how to acknowledge the reality of anger, in our household. While not shaming and blaming, but not suppressing and denying, and also not exploding. And, so, it's really just a long journey of practicing.

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Alison: I love what you're saying. These are such practical tips, and you've got four kids. You've got a lot going on. And even if you have one child or even just between spouses, anger will be there. Anger will be there. So we have to get creative, and I love what you're saying. It reminds me of the C-word in IFS — Creativity. "Okay, let's all have an angry handshake out or angry art time." Whatever. You're creating a space for anger without letting it take everybody over. That's so practical and so wise, I love that Rowena.

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Rowena: And laughter, laughter, I think is the best way to get anger out of the body. This is the beautiful parenting moments when you're angry, but somehow you can turn into a playful zone and it can't be done authentically every time. And, so, that's okay. But, occasionally, when you can authentically do it to create a sense of play and get people laughing, then it's like the anger just dissipates so dramatically. 

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And, so, whatever creative way you can bring in laughter. Like trying to have a game where you take each other's socks off or something, it's hilarious and kids just love it. Or putting on a fun song and having a dance party. Getting everybody outdoors and just being like, "All right, let's just get outside and go run around."

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< Music >

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Alison: I love what you said; you've got to get anger out of the body, and that's what starts to calm the nervous system.

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Rowena: And, so, often, I think kids get a message like, ''You can only be in my presence if you are in a happy place, in a well regulated place. And if you're not, I'm going to exile you to your room." And, so, I think there's nothing wrong with it in terms of "Let's take a break." Like, "Maybe we can just read some books for a little while." That's very different than the message of "Go to your room and come back when you're in a better place." Going to the room part is not, necessarily, a problem, but it's the way that we deliver that message that is very important for kids.

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Alison: It's so interesting because it makes me think about my own childhood, and you're right. And, inadvertently, I don't think that parents mean to do this. For me I have this memory. I don't have a lot of memories of being angry. I've always struggled a little bit to access anger. 

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But there was this period of time, in high school, where I must have been pretty angry because I would journal. And I would journal so hard. First of all, I would journal swear words, which I didn't swear in real life, I wasn't allowed. But in my journal, I would swear. And I would write so hard that I would rip through the paper and it would just get it out, and it made me feel better. 

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It reminds me of your son drawing the angry picture. And I remember just ripping through the pages and giant letters, words that I felt that were not pleasant words. And this was probably 9th, 10th grade, and it worked, and also I was by myself. I was in isolation. 

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I mean nobody knew that I was doing it, this wasn't said to me. But the internalized message about anger is, "Go off and be angry by yourself, get it all out." Yes, that helped a little bit. But then, "Go back out and be happy with everybody else." And that doesn't work in adult relationships. You have to be able to go somewhere between the ripping the page out of the journal, because you're writing so hard. To "I need to have a conversation about something that's frustrating me." You have to get from A to Z somehow. You need tools to do that.

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Rowena: Mh-hmm, journaling can be super effective to get that ugly version out first. 

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Alison: Yes. 

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Rowena: That we can go and do a more healthy expression of anger. So journaling can be super powerful for naming and getting our anger out in front of us on a page.

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Alison: Exactly. So you have these tools to try to get it out. To get it out of our bodies so it's not just festering there or turning sideways. Again, because if we don't get it out, it will come out one way or another. We will start to get critical. Again, passive aggressive, which are these little barbs that come out sideways, resentful. All this fester, so we got to get it out.

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But I love what you're saying. And as you're parenting your kids and even thinking about it in our own lives, we get it out. We allow ourselves permission to get it out. Maybe in some ugly ways where we don't want other people to see it. God sees it, God gets it, God's okay with it. And then we also have to, once we've defused it a little bit, still figure out how to go back into that relationship. Whether it's a parenting relationship, a friend, a spouse, whatever, in a constructive way, and have the conversation. 

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There's two parts to this anger puzzle that are really important.

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Rowena: Yes, I think, the chapter that you have in your book, The Best of You, about noticing what longing is underneath, is so important. And that cannot be accessed unless you have space to be curious about your anger. 

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But anger is a cue that there is a longing there that needs to be witnessed, and to come out. That's where it's a powerful tool, and it points to something deeper that wants to be named in real life. Like, "I have a longing for a peaceful relationship between my kids, and I feel really sad when they're fighting." And naming that with my kids can be really helpful. Instead, of being like, "I'm so mad that you guys are fighting."

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Naming the longing like, "I really long to have a harmonious household here."

Alison: Yes, I love what you're saying. Where there is that anger, underneath it is a pain, I would say.

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Rowena: Mh-hmm. 

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Alison: And that pain might be a deep longing that we're just not seeing coming to fruition. A need, a desire, and those things are painful. When we take the time to get underneath the anger. But the anger has to be heard first. 

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Rowena: Yes.

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Alison: "I'm so angry at him. I'm so angry at her." 

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Rowena: Yes, often, for me, I think, underneath anger is just a sense of being overwhelmed and longing for more support, or a longing for more rest, or whatever it is. And those are really important things to notice. Because I want to be healthy in my body, and mind, and soul, to be able to parent my kids well. 

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And I learned this really early on from my sister, who is older than I am and has older kids. And she really recommended, when I had my first child, to do some preventative maintenance. And make sure I had some time where I was by myself and could take care of myself. 

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Instead of thinking I needed to be a parent round the clock. Instead of reaching that place of burnout, or utter exhaustion, or fatigue. Having that sense of asking for help and getting support in whatever way you can. 

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And, so, for me, that was doing some babysitting swaps with a friend. Where we would each take care of each other's child, and then we would get a morning or two off a week. And that was so critical to realize early on, I need to take care of myself because that is such an investment in my relationship with my kids." Or powerlessness is a really underlying emotion underneath, or the state, underneath the anger. And, so, if I can identify that, yes, there are certain things that I am powerless about. I can't really control anyone other than myself. 

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So there are certain ways that we need to accept ways where we are powerless. But then there are also ways where we feel powerless. Where we long for more authority, or more agency, or more healthy, effective leadership. And, so, that can be really helpful to name as well. Curiosity and no shame around anger is really important.

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Alison: I love what you're saying about creating space for yourself, to get to the root of what's really going on. And I think that can be hard, as a parent. 

I also think it's essential. I was thinking as you were talking, Rowena, last summer, I was dealing with a lot of anger. It was related to some work stuff that wasn't going right, and I was feeling really frustrated. 

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I was just feeling like I was on my own and couldn't get the help that I needed. And in the middle of that time, my daughter, who loves hiking and loves the wilderness. And she wanted me to go on a backpack with her. And, so, we did this two-day backpack and each day was nine miles. And that whole nine miles going in, it was like the whole way down, the angry part of me. All those angry thoughts, were just given an opportunity to finally be heard by me. Because I had nothing else to do I wasn't suppressing them. There was no one around me to get mad at. 

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And, so, I was just present to them and it was like attuning to all the frustration that I was feeling. All the anger that I was feeling. And then I just noticed, I was like, "Oh, I need to do this." And I wasn't writing, I wasn't journaling, because I was walking. But I was bookmarking; "Yes, that's frustrating."

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Pretty soon, the tears started to pour. And I became aware in that process because, again, but here's the thing, I was walking. I had a backpack on my shoulder. My body was engaged. There was something physical going on that created almost the container for the anger. It's almost like the parts of me knew, and it was a really interesting experience. It almost created this safety. 

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My body was engaged and, therefore, it created this safety for my mind to allow me to become consciously aware of all this frustration that had been building inside of me, and it all came out. And I remember releasing it, there were mountains all around me and it just felt like, "God is here." It took me that whole first day. By the second day, that next morning, I was sitting by the creek, and I finally got to the root of the longing. 

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It took me that whole day and that whole nine-mile trek to let all of that volcano that had been simmering inside of me just come out. Release into God's hands, honor, and validate all those frustrations to the next morning. Where I just remember sitting by the creek and going, "Oh, here we are, God, this is what's really going on. I'm so disappointed. I'm so sad that this is the way this went." And there's peace in that.

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It's just another example of our anger needs our attention, and it needs our attention, in a very embodied way. Whether it's through journaling, whether it's through walking, whether it's through moving our bodies, as you've given so many examples of. In my case, it was almost I needed to take a nine-mile hike because there was that much there. That I had been just shoving aside to get to the root of what's the disappointment?

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What's the heartache?

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What's the longing that's underneath it? Where there God finally comes in. Not that God isn't with us in the anger because He is. But when we get to the root of it and we're like, "Here we are, God, this is the actual thing beneath the thing that I am just so upset about." And it's usually a good thing. There might even be an injustice there.

Rowena: You can't see it and have clarity about it, until you can sit with the discomfort in your body. And get connected with your body, and allow the anger to somehow come out through walking, and it's an amazing way. And then once the anger isn't exiled, then it can flow out. And then you can see the diamond that is underneath it, and you have so much more clarity. And then there's a sense of maybe some action steps you can take from that place, so that you can speak up on behalf of this longing.

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Alison: That's right, and you get to that place of surrender, of "Here's what I do have control over. Here's how I can fight for this. I do want my kids to get along with each other. I want my kids; I do need more help that I'm not getting." But there's also a surrender. 

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That's where that place of, "Here's what I have control over. Here's, God, what I don't have control over." It doesn't mean it's not important and you start to find that balance, that equilibrium inside your soul.

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Rowena: Yes, and we mentioned this earlier, but this is where we have to be aware of the other emotions that are surrounding anger. Whether it's anxiety about the anger, fear, guilt, shame. And those layers are almost the layers that need to be peeled away first to free the anger, to have some space. 

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And, so, yes, I just encourage every woman to get curious about what, for you, are the emotions that might be keeping anger stuck.

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Alison: It's so true, because on that hike the whole first few miles were, "What's wrong with me?"

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"Why can't I just get it together?" It was all the self-shaming. And then you can't even get to the anger until you've actually gotten to all the ways we tell ourselves the guilt. I love how you call it the guilt-fear sandwich. Let's talk just a little bit as we wind down, today, about the role of God. About how God sees anger and how God gets angry.

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I know that we see anger in Jesus. We know that Jesus demonstrated anger, and we know that Jesus didn't sin. And, sometimes, when I read the Gospels, I'm amazed at the ways in which Jesus demonstrated His frustration. Demonstrated even anger that we don't really hear a lot about, I feel like, from the pulpit. We tend to talk more about how Jesus was gentle, Jesus is loving, Jesus is mild, and all of those things are true. And I would say, it's fair to say, you can't read the Gospels without bumping into a fair amount of His anger.

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Rowena: Yes, this is really helpful. I'm so glad that Jesus had a right relationship with anger to model that it is not all bad. It's actually really an important emotion to come out. Jesus was led by His anger in some situations, and that, to me, is fascinating. That it was a force that led Him to turn over those tables. He was so harsh with the Pharisees in a really important way, not in a bad way, just, "You hypocrites." And He was angry with people who were hypocritical and who were claiming to do things for God. But then, under the surface, it was all a show for themselves.

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Alison: I think it's so important when we think about our faith, our spirituality, that anger is a part of it. That we see anger in God, we see anger in the Old Testament. 

Sometimes it's really hard to understand God's anger, and we see it in Jesus's life. And when we get to Jesus's life, I love what you said, I'm so glad we have those examples of where He called things out, sometimes, harshly. 

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His words were not always sweet, they were not always soft. He said, "You brood a viper." And not that we should go around calling people a brood of vipers. Because what we know for sure is that Jesus didn't sin and that it was always righteous. And we better be very careful in how we don't want to look for a license. And, again, to that spectrum, we can rationalize our judgment and our anger based on Jesus's life in a way that's very unhealthy. We better be very careful. 

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And we can also exile our anger and deny or bypass other people's suffering, or injustices, or even our own experience of injustice in our life. "Oh, Jesus says to turn the other cheek." I talk about this in The Best of You. It's a little more subversive than that. Jesus is complex, there's a lot of nuance to Tis anger. There's a lot of shrewdness, there's a lot of wisdom in it, and He didn't sin. 

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And so it is a great example. I think doing a study of the anger that we see in Jesus would be a great example for us. I think one of the things I say the most often is anger, as a member of our internal family, when we have a healthy relationship with it. When we befriended it, when it understands the boundary lines and it lets us lead it, not the other way around. 

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When we are leading it in partnership with the Holy Spirit, anger is amazing. Anger can empower us to set really healthy boundaries that empower not only our own lives, but empower other people. Anger can help us fight injustices in our own lives and on behalf of other people, and on behalf of wrongs we see in society. It can be the part of us that helps us speak, honestly, that speaks truthfully, even when it's hard. 

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Now, again, all of those things can get misused, but that doesn't mean there's not truth in them. Anger is a really important emotion that can help us create change in our own lives. Create change in a healthy way in the lives of people we love, and create change in this world.

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Rowena: At an Ash Wednesday service that I went to last week. There was a prayer of penitence that was sticking out to me that said, "For our unrighteous anger, bitterness, and resentment, lord have mercy upon us." And I just really loved that it was specifying unrighteous anger and that there is therefore a righteous anger that has space in our life, that God created and is good.

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Alison: I love that.

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Rowena: I think it's so interesting that the Bible talks a lot about enemies, and it's so easy to view enemy as an outward thing. But there's also internal enemies that we can have and I think anger is one of the best examples of that. How we can, inwardly, think of our anger as an enemy, and you talk about this also. That we need to love our inner enemies. And that's part of the healing that Jesus creates, is in learning to love the enemy of anger and befriend it, then, it can be transformed into something really beautiful and powerful. 

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There's an incredible book called Holy Listening by Margaret Guenther has some powerhouse quotes that I wanted to read. And she says, "I am convinced that much of women's tentative speech arises from fear of her own anger. That somehow there will be terrible retribution, divine or otherwise, if she reveals herself a strong person."

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Later she says, "Tentativeness, a kind of clenched teeth, sweet rage..." Which I love that phrase. "May also result from a mistaken understanding of anger. Since women are socialized to believe anger itself is avoidable and wrong, and that its expression is sinful. As a result, a great deal of spiritual energy goes into combating the wrong sin. And the potentially constructive use of anger is neglected. The result is hurtful and destructive to the woman, and to those around her."

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Alison: So good.

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Rowena: I just love how she names that. And then later she says, "most women are not prepared for the question, 'Where do you hurt?' Although they would expect it from a physician. Socialized to put their own wishes aside or at least disguise them, they see the question as an invitation to selfishness or self-indulgence. Instead, it is an invitation to self. Merely naming the source of hurt can expose it to light and air, and thereby bring about healing. 

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As she begins to answer the question candidly, she may reveal, to her own surprise, years of denial and suppressed pain. The cost of faithfulness has been high, and the cost of peacekeeping, the cost of people-pleasing all of those things. And how just important it is to notice if anger is an enemy within us and to befriend it, and to realize that there is a healthy expression of it, and a potentially constructive use of anger.

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Alison: That's right. Two things can exist side by side that gets at that selfhood versus selfishness. And selfhood is actually having a healthy relationship with our anger. Even as we also have a healthy relationship with our desire to do good, our desire to help. These two things can exist side by side. And anger is that part of us that helps us to be more assertive. That helps us to ensure that our needs are not getting sidelined. It's such a powerful emotion. 

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I'm curious, Rowena, there are so many reasons why, I think as women, we fear our anger. We worry about our anger. We don't want to be angry. How do you think comparison factors into that?

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Rowena: Yes, I think there's a real potential for an inner critic to arise and tell ourselves that our story isn't important. That we don't have it as bad as other people. And therefore we should suppress and deny the reality of what is happening internally for us. 

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And, so, I think, that is just really important to name because that can be a powerful blockage that shuts down curiosity of anger. And that needs to be freed up to say, "Yes, there are so many different kinds of pain and suffering in this world. But not to minimize what is going on for each of us."

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Alison: I think that's a big one for me. I think there's a part of me that can always say, "I don't have it as bad as that person, therefore, I shouldn't feel this way."

Rowena: Exactly.

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Alison: And I think that's so important to highlight. And it has taken me a lot of years, my spiritual director saying, "What?" Just because your pain is your pain.

Rowena: And your longings are under there?

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Alison: That's right. I think many of us have that refrain in their head. "That person has it worse. I don't have it that bad, I should just be grateful. I don't want to be entitled." No, we don't want to be entitled. We don't want to think we deserve more. We want to be grateful. All of those things are good and, also, I can be grateful and frustrated with this situation. 

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I can be content and want to see more out of my family, out of my kids, out of my relationship. I can value that person and their efforts, and be disappointed that they've fallen short of what I really needed. Both things can be true, and that's the heart of anger. Anger doesn't have to tell us the whole story, but it can have a seat at the table. It can have a seat at the table. We can sit side by side and say, "Yes, I'm grateful, and this is frustrating." Two things can be true.

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Rowena: Yes, learning to hear the shoulds that we have in our internal dialogue. And also the either/or thinking. And once you can catch yourself hearing, "Oh, I heard, I say, I should." And that's a real big clue, the either/or thinking. If we can catch ourselves in the moment. Awareness is so key to just unlocking so many things and allowing God to really transform us on the inside, and bring truth to these innermost parts.

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< Outro >

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Alison: 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 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.

Today, I am joined by my friend and co-author of Boundaries for Your Soul, Kimberly Miller, to discuss the almighty inner critic, how to get space from it, and how to bring this work into your relationships. Kim describes how she first encountered Internal Family Systems (IFS) and how combining it with Christian faith and practice changed her life.

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Here's what we cover:

1. How Kim finally healed the ache in her heart

2. The most ubiquitous part of the soul

3. Why self-acceptance is better than self-condemnation

4. How to differentiate from painful emotions

5. A real-time exercise for quieting your inner critic

6. How this work translates into marriage

Connect with Kimberly Miller at kimberlyjunemiller.com or on Insight Timer

‍Be sure to pick up your 3 free Boundaries for Your Soul resources here.  

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Thanks to our sponsors:

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

Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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Resources

• Connect with Kimberly at kimberlyjunemiller.com
• Get 46% off Boundaries for Your Soul & The Best of You
• Inside Out Movie Trailer
• IFS Institute
• Guided IFS Reflections:
  • Insight Timer - KimberlyMiller
  • Insight Timer - Ann-Marie Bowen
• John 10:10
• Psalm 23:5
• Psalm 139:16
• Revelations 12:10
• Luke 15:4
• Isaiah 55:6-7
• Matt. 11:28-30
• Boundaries for Your Soul, by Kimberly Miller & Dr. Alison Cook
• Renovation of the Heart, by Dallas Willard
• Hearing God, by Dallas Willard
• The Soul of Shame, by Dr. Curt Thompson
• LeAnne Payne
• Leading Wholeheartedly
• EMDR
• DBT
• Michi Rose - Table Technique
• Disciplines of the Spirit by Howard Thurman‍
• Resources for support

Quote: "The wildness is gentled out of a personality at war with itself."

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Other Episodes in this Series:

• Episode 39: Boundaries for Your Soul—How to Navigate Your Overwhelming Thoughts & Feelings
• Episode 40: 5 Steps to Healing Painful Emotions & Why Parts of Us Get Stuck in the Past
• Episode 41: Boundaries With Fear And Anxiety—How to Calm the Chaos Within and the Joy of Internal Boundaries
• Episode 42: How to Honor Sadness, Set Boundaries with Loneliness, and What to Do When You Don’t Have Time for this Work

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Transcript

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Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You podcast. I am grinning from ear-to-ear and thrilled today because I have my friend and my co-author, of this book we've been talking about Boundaries for Your Soul, with me on the podcast today, Kimberly Miller. 

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Kim is a marriage and family therapist who lives in Southern California with her sweet girl and her husband, Ken. She is an author, she's a speaker, she is a retreat leader. The head of a wonderful ministry called Leading Wholeheartedly, and she is my co-author. 

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We wrote this book Boundaries for Your Soul together. It took us really years in the making. It came out of some of the very first conversations we had. When we very first met and became friends, Kim introduced me in those very first conversations to this Internal Family Systems model of therapy. 

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I'd almost finished my doctoral work and I had not yet been introduced to it. And when Kim and I met, we were talking about our work. We were talking about our love for therapy and our love for faith. And she started telling me about this model and I was just hooked, instantly. 

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We began to lead retreats, teaching other women about this model. About how to integrate this IFS model with Christian faith and practice. And then out of that grew this book, Boundaries for Your Soul. 

So I am thrilled to have Kim here today. Thank you so much for being here, Kim.

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Kimberly: Thank you so much for having me, Alison. It's always wonderful to be with you in any setting.

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Alison: It's bringing up a lot of different parts of me. Because so much of our time, for those few years leading up to when Boundaries for Your Soul came out. Where you and I just talking back and forth about these different concepts, these different ideas. Trying to flush them out, both in our own lives, in our practice, and for the work of this book. So I would love to hear, today, as we get started, how you learned about IFS. And how it's been helpful to you in both your own life and in your practice?

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Kimberly: Sure. Again, thank you so much for having me. And thanks just for being such a wonderful friend, and co-author, and just dialogue partner, over the years. I was living in Boston, at the time, and I had been a Christian since I was young, and I had been serving God. 

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I had committed my life to full-time Christian service at an Urbana Conference when I was in college and I was working for University Christian Fellowship. And, yet, at the same time, I was hitting a wall emotionally and spiritually, just stuck in certain places. And this is, I think, a normal stage of development that people go through. There's that initial enthusiasm and passion when you meet Jesus. 

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And then there is the stage of discipleship and productive surface. And then, oftentimes, people just hit a phase where they just want to go deeper. And there's a frustration that there's not the abundant life, and the joy, that the Scriptures talk about. 

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And, so, that was happening to me. Where I was just thinking, regularly, like, "Why am I not living abundantly the way that Jesus said that I will in John 10:10." And, so, I started seeking help in different places, and counselors, and spiritual directors going to prayer a lot at church. And I was always going up for prayer at the end of the services. 

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And by God's grace and providence, I was introduced, through a friend, to a social worker who was also the wife of an Episcopalian priest. And I told her my normal spiel, about how I was following Jesus, and I wanted to live the abundant life, but I had these areas in my life where I felt stuck. And I stopped and I looked at her, expecting her to say something like, "Do you want to talk about it?" Something that I had heard before, that wasn't really ultimately that helpful to me. 

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And she responded and said, "I can help you." And now I know that what she was doing was she was being a hope merchant. And she had this confidence because she had seen transformation through this model of therapy, and I was intrigued.

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And, so, we started meeting regularly. Ali, I was so eager for healing that we met for 2 hours, at first, every week. So we met for 2 hours a week and, boy, she helped me so much. And it was this amazing experience, for me, of realizing, for the first time, that I had the ability to unblend from the parts of me that were experiencing pain and to care for those parts from my spirit-led self.

You and I began to call it spirit-led self. In IFS it's called the self. And this was revolutionary for me. It was very empowering and I felt like I had agency over my emotions. What was happening was internal differentiation. I was being able to detach from the parts of me that were hurting and to care for them like you care for a child. And it just changed my life. 

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And then what we started doing was praying and inviting Jesus to be present with us, in the sessions. And Jesus was ministering to these parts of me and I had never experienced that before. I'd never been able to access His power, in the place where I needed Him the most. And I was able to do that, in these sessions, and it changed my life, really.

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And then I started feeling like, "I want to share this with the people that I'm working with. The students that I meet with through university that have deep pain in their lives." And that's how I got started.

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Alison: It's amazing. I've heard you tell that story before and I just love the power of it, and you continue to live it. I've gotten to bear witness to you, as a friend, in your marriage, as a mom. Not to mention all these professional hats that you wear, which are so amazing. Where you continue to bring this work into all those different relationships, and it's really beautiful.

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Kimberly: The other way that it really helped me was it gave me a framework for understanding other people. And for making sense of what seemed, to me, like apparent contradictions in other people, in my life. And that brought me so much peace of mind. 

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Because I could finally have a framework for these different people, in my life, that I cared so much about. And I could understand why they behaved in different ways, in different contexts, and said different things at different times. 

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And instead of feeling like I didn't know who anybody was. I started realizing, "Oh, this person has these different parts and that's so good to know. And let me get to know the parts and befriend of those parts." And it just really helped deepen my relationships. And it helped me to trust in the relationships in a much deeper way, instead of being afraid of people.

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Alison: So true. Instead of being confused by people, it begins to explain the complexity that we encounter in people. That sometimes they don't even know they have. And, so, it helps us begin to go, "Okay, this is what's going on there." And it helps us not feel so confused.

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Kimberly: And I've heard that one of the goals of therapy is clarity. And when we don't have clarity, we're stuck. And we're really, like you said, confused and it's really hard to know how to move forward. 

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But when there's clarity and understanding, as we know, Dallas Willard said, "Understanding is the basis of care." And when you understand something, then you know how to care for that thing. Or in this case, it's a person, you know how to care for them well. And befriend the part of them that may be relating to you in a way that is different from their spirit-led self.

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Alison: Yes, or have patience with a part of them that is frustrating.

Kimberly: Yes, it really helps with patience and also perspective.

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Alison: Sometimes, if we think about this word toxicity. Even when we bump up into a toxic part of someone, where we have to set some boundaries with that toxicity. It can help us both have the healthy boundaries that we need and have some of the healthy distance. I get that there are other parts of that person, but I can't access those other parts of that person. Therefore, I have to make these decisions to keep myself safe.

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Kimberly: Yes, preach.

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Alison: Okay, so, I'm curious if this has been your experience, Kim, because, over time, this has become, I believe, my experience. And, so, I'll say it this way, and I'm curious what you think about this. I think most of us run into some form of an inner critic, as one of the first parts we actually bump into. 

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We may not be aware of it; we may not call it that. But in my work with other people and increasingly in, as I get to know the parts of my own soul. Almost always right when I begin to notice some emotion, or some part of me that needs care, or if I'm doing this work with someone else. 

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When you begin the process of differentiating, we talked a lot about this in these past few episodes. This process of focusing, getting some healthy distance from this part of us, from this painful emotion. And you get to that question of - "How do I feel toward it? How do I feel toward it? I don't like it."

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There's almost always this shaming or inner critic, this critical feeling about this way that we feel. And we didn't do a whole chapter in Boundaries for Your Soul on the inner critic, but it's everywhere throughout the book. Because in that step, as you begin to differentiate from a part and you want to befriend it, usually, you're bumping up against that inner critic. And we talk about it in the chapter on shame when we get into the shaming inner critic. 

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But I'm just curious if you have found that to be true. Do you think that inner critic is, typically, one of those first few parts we bump into, both, in your own life and in the work that you do, with other people?

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Kimberly: Absolutely. Usually, when I'm working with a client, the first part that they encounter is a part that's responding to something that's happened in their life. They're feeling angry about something that was said or grief about a loss, et cetera. And then when I invite them to take a U-turn and they focus on the part. And then I ask them how they feel toward it, just like you're saying, that's when it's almost always an inner critic. There's almost always an inner critic there. 

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It's very rare that a person says, "Oh, I just love this part of me." If they happen to be really soaked through with the Holy Spirit, perhaps. But usually it's more like, "Arh, I just can't stand this part of me. I wish it would go away; it's so annoying. It's getting in the way of my being productive, et cetera."

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And, so, we notice the inner critic, and then they have a polarization that we're working with. So there's this critic that's frustrated but, usually, the part is willing to step behind a glass wall. That's my go-to strategy. I know that oftentimes, in IFS, we ask parts to step back. Naturally, I don't want to do that. My inclination is not to ask parts to step back because I feel like they may resent not being welcomed. And the whole philosophy of IFS is all parts are welcomed. 

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But I do find that critics don't get offended by being asked to watch behind a glass wall. So that's my usual strategy, and I've never had anyone resist that. So, yes, I have very rarely not encountered an inner critic, in myself and in others. And usually what I do is I ask the client or with myself, I ask the inner critic to step behind a glass wall and just watch. I'll just say, "Would you watch behind a glass wall for a minute? And then help us to work with the original part that we discover?"

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Alison: So this is great. I love that. And I want, for those listeners, hearing you say, "All parts are welcome". I could hear some of that pushback of, "Aren't there parts of us that we should almost condemn?" So I love that you brought that up. Because I think this is so foundational to this work, especially, for Christians. And we talk about this in the book and, actually, I got this idea from you. I got this concept from you, and it really resonated with me the line - self-condemnation and self-acceptance. 

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I'd never heard it put that way before, but this idea of self-acceptance is actually the soil in which the Holy Spirit brings healing, not self-condemnation. However, I think some of us, not all of us, but some of us come to the table of this work thinking, "Aren't there parts of me I'm supposed to condemn because they're bad?"

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And, so, I want to ask you a little bit about what that has meant for you, that movement from self-condemnation? Because, I think, that's what the inner critic is doing. I think the inner critic, in the best case scenario, sometimes the inner critic is just a voice we've inherited from the past. It's just a bad habit. But sometimes it's a part of us that thinks it's helping by keeping us on the straight and narrow.

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Kimberly: Oh, they have very good intentions. They really think that they're helping, for sure. Whether it's the manager that's being critical of you because it wants you to get in line, and not mess up. Or whether it's an inner critic of the original part that you encounter, and it's thinking that that original part is messing things up for you, and for your system. Either way, I think, all parts have very good intentions. They just have strategies that can be unhelpful. And, so, they need correction. 

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Another thing, Alison, that I've been discovering lately, I should say I'm coming to the belief that inner critics are very young. And it hadn't occurred to me how young they are. Because you think, "Oh, they're so powerful." And they have such strong emotions and such serious emotions, what seem like adult emotions. 

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But if you realize that these are probably parts that developed very early on in your life. May have even started mimicking critical people in your life, around you, and it's, I think, human nature. So I think we just come out of the shoot this way, just critical. 

Think of it like a three-year-old or a four-year-old; they really don't know what they're doing. They really need guidance, and they need to learn the way of compassion. And that's the job of your spirit-led self. We need to become emotionally mature by embracing these young, critical, parts and helping them to see that there's a better way.

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Alison: Yes, that's so good, Kim.

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Kimberly: Yes, and I love what you're saying about self-acceptance, and I think that is a foundation to a life of service. Self-condemnation is painful. It's like walking around with a broken leg, it's debilitating. And it really holds us back from living into the plan that God has for our lives. And God has a plan for each person's life, even for every day, of each person's life, which is incredible. But the Scriptures tell us that. And accomplishing God's plan for our lives takes concentration, it takes focus, it takes work. 

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And it takes work that in some way is helping other people. And one of the lines that we came up with, together, in Boundaries for Your Soul. That really has stayed with me and ministered to me a lot is, "It's hard to help others when you're hurting inside." It's really hard to help others when you're hurting inside. And one of our main jobs on this earth is to help people. 

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And, so, I am so passionate about figuring out how do I get to that point of being able to help other people, so that I can glorify God with my life. And I can't do that if I'm walking around with a broken leg that's not been cared for or attended to. So that's why it's so critical to move from self-criticism to self-acceptance. And that's what this work is all about.

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Alison: I love what you're saying about the inner critic being young. I think that's really helpful because they don't feel young. They feel adult, they feel very stern, they feel very parental, they feel authoritative.

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Kimberly: They're very scary.

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Alison: And you think about little kids, who at times, they can just say what they think. And have really strong opinions, and not really censor themselves or think about the way that they're saying that. It makes sense. It's helpful to differentiate from that part of us and just get that maybe it's on to something. But it doesn't have the best strategy for helping us find our best way forward. 

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And I think all of this really gets into our experience of shame. Because we know that shame is toxic. You and I spent so much time really going round around, "Is there ever a constructive role of shame?" And we really landed on, "No, it's really toxic."

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Our friend, Dr. Curt Thompson, he calls it evils vector. He comes on that strongly about shame. And, so, I think, this inner critic, it's not always connected to shame. But often it's very much connected to where we start to experience shame about ourselves, which is never constructive. 

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So just circling back to that. How do we manage this shaming inner critic? I know you've talked about we ask it to step back or we ask it to go behind a glass wall. But what about when there's really a lot of shame there, and there's a lot of vitriol? I know for me, when I experience shame, sometimes, it takes a slightly different intervention. How about you? What do you think about it when we're talking about it in terms of shame?

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Kimberly: Yes, such a critical topic. And I have experienced a lot of feelings of shame throughout my life. And, so, it's something that I've worked on a lot. In fact, it goes back, for me, so I started naming it and working on it back when I was in grad school. And, so, I've really worked on this issue, Alli, and like I said, it feels like a broken leg. 

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When you feel shame every day. It feels like you're walking around with this broken leg that hasn't been treated, and it really needs care. You really need to tend to this feeling because, first of all, it hurts. But it's hard to fulfill your God-given purpose when you're debilitated by shame. 

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I agree that it's never good. I believe that it comes from our fallen nature. And the enemy, Satan is his name, is the accuser. He's called, "The accuser of our brethren," our brothers and sisters in Revelations twelve. And he wants us to feel shame but that's not the voice of Jesus.

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And, so, how do we get the parts of us to accept the voice of Jesus and to speak truth? And one of the strategies that I've found to be super helpful, Alli, and it's really just like a go-to technique that works for me really well. 

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And it works for my clients and it seems to work in groups also, when I'm doing guided exercises. Is to imagine a table, and this is I believe it was a woman named Mitchy Rose IFS therapist who developed this technique. 

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But I just go to it every time because, first of all, I've seen it work over and over again. Second of all, it's biblical. There are so many wonderful, beautiful, Scriptures about sitting at the table. God wants to invite us to His table. And it's just an analogy in the Scripture, that I believe God wants us to dwell on and to meditate on it. 

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So in this context, what I like to do is imagine the part of you that's feeling criticized. Imagine your criticized child, and imagine the inner critic sitting there at a table, with the Lord, if they're willing to be with Him. You always want to get permission from parts. If they're willing, and check in with them first, and if they don't have any objection. 

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See if they're willing to acknowledge His presence or if He's not there to invite His presence. And I always love to do real time exercises, Ali. So if you don't mind, I'll just go ahead and ask your listeners, wherever they are, just take a breath. And if you would like to close your eyes and just picture a table in front of you. And then picture your criticized child sitting there, across the table from you. 

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Picture the inner critic that doesn't like the criticized child and that's criticizing the child sitting there. And let them acknowledge each other so that they develop a relationship, a more intentional relationship. And realize that they're on the same team and they both have good intentions. 

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And then if they're willing to recognize or invite the presence of Jesus, whatever name they'd like to use for the sacred presence, to be there as well. And just take in His compassion because every time we connect with the Lord, He speaks love, He speaks grace. He welcomes every part of us. He loves us, and this is where there is healing. This is where there is relief from the suffering of shame.

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Alison: Yes, what you're saying reminds me so much of what we talked about, I believe in chapter five, about David's prayer, about setting a table.

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Kimberly: Yes, "you have prepared a table, for me, in the presence of my enemies." And you can apply that verse to your internal parts, that sometimes feel like enemies.

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Alison: Including your inner critic. And this is this pretty radical work of even befriending this enemy within. Which is this part of you that has taken on this really toxic strategy of shaming you. I love also the quote, I talked about this in a prior episode, that we put in chapter seven, from Howard Thurman, that says "It gentles the wildness". Such a powerful quote. Gentles the wildness out of that part.

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Kimberly: He was Martin Luther King Jr.'s mentor, Howard Thurman. And that is such a powerful quote; "It gentles the wildness out of a personality at war with itself." 

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Alison: Yes.

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Kimberly: And I want to be clear, Ali, because it's so important to say we are not suggesting the welcoming of our enemy at the table. Not the enemy, Jesus is very clear that we reject Satan and evil forces. And we have to distinguish between rejecting Satan and the evil forces, and welcoming the part of you that God made, which is good. Because God says that what He had made is good.

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Welcoming the part of you that may have picked up some ways of thinking and feeling from the world of flesh and the devil, that's the source of the evil. And disciple that part of you in the way of Jesus, in the way of the heart, in the way of compassion.

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Alison: It's so good. I love the image of the table, and I love the image of inviting these different parts and imagining them sitting at the table together. And, again, this is that work of internal reconciliation which is bringing these parts. Not just into connection with you and with God, but also with each other, where they learn to work together in healthier ways. 

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So the shaming inner critic loses that strategy. It releases that burden of shame. And maybe it starts to become a little bit more of an encourager, or a little bit more of a cautionary check, or whatever thing is, in a healthy way to say, "Hey, I'm not sure about that."

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Where the other parts start to trust; "Okay, that part is not out to get me. But it is there to help us stay aligned. Stay true to who we are, to who God is, so that work of creating the healthy boundary lines."

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Kimberly: And I wanted to tell you something, Alli, because I love our friendship. We can share with each other how God is healing us, over time, and our friendship is the context of the development of this work. 

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And I had written about a part that I had told you about, that I encountered early on in my work with therapists, which was my abandoned baby part. That I felt that's the part that we identified, when we started to work with my feelings about my parents' divorce. 

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And, over time, that abandoned baby part became more healed and accepted by Jesus. And just, recently, Ali, it started to feel like it was changing its name and it wanted to be called - "My comforted child"

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"My celebrated child" even, isn't that amazing?

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Alison: I love that.

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Kimberly: And it has spent so much time with Jesus and it has a new name now. I would say I used to have an abandoned baby part, but it's not abandoned anymore, it's loved by Jesus. And it's not only comforted, but it's celebrated. 

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And what's so cool is that the inner critic can see that transformation, and then no longer needs to have such a stern strategy of criticizing it anymore. Because it's like, "Oh, I like that part, actually, that's great that you're celebrated. It's not a problem anymore, so I don't need to be critical anymore."

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Alison: Oh, that's great.

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Kimberly: That inner critic can just become, like you're saying, an encourager and advisor.

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Alison: Yes, it has a role, it's just a much more helpful role. That's beautiful, Kim, I love hearing that. Because we did talk a lot about these parts of our own selves, as we were writing that book. And I love that part of you, who's found so much freedom, and peace, and joy in this work.

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Kimberly: Yes, oftentimes, when parts meet Jesus they want to sit on His lap, which makes me think they're really young. They're like little children. And they want to put their heads on His shoulder. I'm amazed, when I'm working with clients. That's so often just what naturally happens is these parts want to put their heads on His shoulder and just let Him hold them. I mean, because He's just so good. He's so steady and calm, and He brings comfort to us and He loves us. So that's really the place to hang out.

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Alison: It's so true that we tend to hear things like, "We need". As humans, we need safety, we need security, we need attachment. We need these foundational building blocks that creates health in a soul. And I think for the listeners that aren't as familiar with the parts language. What we're doing is applying those same concepts to a very specific part because we're multifaceted, as we've been talking about. 

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And, so, when a very specific part of us experiences that secure attachment. That maybe that part didn't get from a caregiver, from a parent, from a mom or a dad. Or maybe they had it and lost it, whatever. That part starts to experience that sense of safety, of comfort, of attachment, that we all need as babies with you there. 

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You're there and with God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, those parts of us start to heal. And that's where we get into this unburdening. They don't carry that heavy burden anymore, of this part of our story where, "Yes, this hard thing happened to me, and the pain of it has now been relieved. The burden has been lightened."

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Kimberly: Yes, I mean, because you knew me back then and I wasn't walking around moping all the time. I was productive. I was teaching. I was living a very productive life. But, yet, I was doing it with this great pain in my heart, which was a part of me that was carrying the burden. 

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And, so, once I realized, "Oh, I can actually unblend from that part." That part of me doesn't have to sit on the seat of consciousness of my soul all the time. I can get healthy, proper distance from the part. And I love how we came up with this term proper distance. 

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I don't know that we invented it, but we love talking about proper distance from parts. Okay, I don't want it to be rejected. I don't want to get rid of the abandoned baby part, but I don't want it to overwhelm me. I want to be in a healthy relationship with it and have good boundaries with it. And, like you're saying, have secure attachment with the part. So we're talking about secure attachment between yourself and the part, and between the part and the Lord, and between the parts, among themselves. So there's a lot of attaching going on.

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Alison: It's truly a family. And that's the other thing I think is important to highlight, Kim. What I love about your circling back to that is it takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. And I love what you're saying; you've had a really full life. 

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It's not that this part immobilized you. But through tending that internal family. Through tending that garden inside your soul, this part of you not alienating it, also not letting it take you over. Just gently, over time, really tending to that part of you, you see the fruit of that, over time. Where there is this real peace there now.

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Kimberly: It sort of snuck up on me, this healing experience, I had recently, of realizing that this part was celebrated and not abandoned. How long has it been? 20 years since I had that original therapy session. 

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And this just happened like a few weeks ago. Where I reconnected with that part as I was doing a guided exercise, in a group. And I realized, "Oh, my goodness, it doesn't want to be called abandoned baby. That's not me anymore, I'm celebrated. Jesus loves me." 

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And it took a long time, but if you stick with it. I mean, it's not that I hadn't experienced relief before. Obviously, I had experienced relief, or else I wouldn't have continued on the journey. But to completely change your name, that doesn't happen every day.

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Alison: Exactly.

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Kimberly: And it had gotten to a point where it just did not identify with being abandoned anymore. And it was like, "No, that's really not who I am." This part wanted me to know like, "I want a new name. I'm celebrated." And, so, I like how we talk about this, it's a slow way to get somewhere faster.

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Alison: I was just thinking that exact same. That was a line in the book that you came up with. We wrote all of those sentences so closely together, that it's hard to tell, sometimes.

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Kimberly: No of that would have happened without you because you came up with the idea of the book. I'll never forget, we were driving in the car, in Washington State and you said, "We should write a book."

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Alison: I know.

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Kimberly: It changed my life, so none of it would have happened without you.

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Alison: But that is that slower way, it's exactly what I was thinking. That's a slower way to get to where you want to be faster. It's really interesting.

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Kimberly: Because, realistically, I never would have gotten there if I hadn't done this slow work of attending to the needs of this part. And that I could have gone in a lot of different directions and never experienced the healing for this part, that I was looking for. So I did get there and I think it was faster than it could have been, and it also could have never happened.

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Alison: And in a way that allowed you to continue to live a productive life where there was enough relief.

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Kimberly: Yes, there was enough relief. And also I was able to put that part in a room in my soul. This is another really helpful technique. Somebody just asked me the other day, " What if you are experiencing symptoms of PTSD?"

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And I said, "One helpful technique is to imagine the part in a room." Because then it's contained within a specific area of your soul and it's not overwhelming you. And it can be a wonderful little room that it loves with Jesus there, and it has windows. 

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Everything that you can do to help contain the part. And anything that assists with internal differentiation, not being enmeshed with it, observing. There's other healing therapy models that have to do with differentiation like EMDR. Although I'm not certified in EMDR. 

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My understanding is that clients are often encouraged to sit in a bus and look out a window, and imagine a circumstance that traumatized them happening outside the window. And that's the technique that helps you get space from that experience. So what we're really after is that differentiation internally. That healthy detachment that gives us a chance to love the part of us that is hurting.

Alison: Yes, it's still connected to but not taken over. It reminds me of DBT, where it's two things can be true. I've experienced this painful thing and I have a full life.

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Kimberly: That's how we realized that this was a boundaries concept. When we realized that the problem that we experienced has been blended with or overtaken by, or enmeshed with a part. Because I was enmeshed with that part of me that was hurting, and that was causing me to feel symptoms of depression. 

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But when I unblended from the part, whatever word you want to use, detached. I don't really like detached as much because that makes it feel like it's too far away because I still want to have that connection. But I was able to get space from the part. I didn't understand that language initially. I was like, "What does that mean, get space from it? 

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So I differentiate. That's the word that really speaks to me. It's one of my very favorite words. I differentiated from the part and then I was able to connect with it from that loving place within me.

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Alison: Yes.

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< Music >

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Part Two

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Alison: What we talk about in the very last chapter of the book, is how we then take all this work we've done to unblend from and create these healthy relationships, with these parts of us. Then we take that into a relationship with another human who has their own internal family that they've got a parent. These different parts of them. And those different parts of them are in relationship with the different parts of us. 

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And I just love that last chapter. Which is really, honestly, I always say this most people come to us, and I'm sure this is your experience. Most people come to us wanting to solve the relationship problems in their lives, first and foremost. 

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And that's where we get at this idea of a U-turn. Because in order to solve the relationship problems in your life you, first, have to learn how to reestablish a healthy relationship with the different parts of your own soul. So you can lead yourself.

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I love that story that you talk about how you began to bring this work into your relationship, with your husband. Can you tell us a little bit about that, Kim? What is that been like for you? To bring this work into your relationships, especially, the one with your husband.

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Kimberly: I'll start by saying that when I first met Ken, I was already very much into using the Soul Care method. And he did not warm up to it at first. I think like a lot of people that first hear about the idea of having internal parts, he was skeptical and suspicious.

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And then one day, thanks be to Pete Docter, we got to go see the movie Inside Out in the theaters. And we laughed all the way through that movie. And we walked out of the theater, and he looked at me and he said, "Okay, now I get it." It was so helpful, and that really changed our lives. 

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And we started talking about the different parts of us. And he started talking about his criticized child. And then we realized that what was happening, sometimes, when there was tension between us is we had sparring protectors. And we realized that what we both needed to do is take a U-turn. So he is so great at taking a U-turn, and he's always the first to do it. He really models it so well in our relationship. 

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And, so, if our protector parts start battling one another, he'll just say, "Okay, let me take a U-turn." And then we'll start to talk about the parts of us that are activated, and name them, and then that calms us down. 

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And I think one of the things that recognizing parts does is it helps us to regulate our emotions, and put things in perspective. And get proper distance from the parts that are overwhelming us. And then we're able to speak on behalf of them. 

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And this is really a process of growing in emotional maturity. Little children don't know how to do this. They don't know how to say, "There's a part of me that's really angry right now. I love you, but there's a part of me that's angry right now, can we talk about it." A three-year-old can't do that, I promise.

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Alison: And a lot of adults can't. Because we didn't learn how to do that, as kids, we don't know how to do that as adults.

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Kimberly: It's a skill that one has to learn, it really is. We know how to say, "I'd rather not go there for dinner." That's not so hard. But when it comes to a painful emotion. And some people can't even say that, they can't even express their preferences. 

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But a lot of people know how to say, "No, I'd rather not be in that environment."

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Or "I was bothered when such and such said something." But how much more difficult is it to speak on behalf of a part of you that's really filling hurt. That's really feeling tender. And this is an important life skill to develop if you're going to have an intimate relationship. Because issues are going to arise, that you have to talk through.

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Alison: It's so true. And, so, I've touched on it very briefly, but give us an example of the difference between speaking from a part versus speaking for, and this could be with anybody. With a partner with a friend. This, to me, is one of the most profound things about this work because it just takes everything down a notch. So that you can have a very calm conversation with somebody.

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Kimberly: I'll use the example that I write about in the book, about my husband, Ken and I having to deal with the mail. 

When we first got married the mail would mount up and neither of us would go through it, and it would just really bother me. I mean, because we get so much mail and I would get overwhelmed by it. And I would just find myself being so reactive, and anxious, and angry about it. And it was my birthday and he said, "What do you want for your birthday." And I said, "I want you to go through the mail with me."

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And he had a part that got activated, he felt criticized. But we talked it through and we ended up having a lovely dinner and he gave me a sweet present. And then we also went through the mail together. But, anyway, I guess the example of speaking from a part would be to say, "I'm so frustrated that there's mail on the desk all the time." 

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A way of speaking on behalf of a part would be to say, "First of all, Honey, are you available for me to share something that I'm feeling?" Ask for an appointment and then when the other person is available to say, "I really love you. I love being married to you. I appreciate all that you do every day." So express appreciation and reaffirm your commitment. 

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And then just say, "Would you be open to hearing about a part of me that's activated right now." And then just say, "I have a lot of appreciation for you, and there's a part of me that's feeling anxious if the mail isn't getting opened on a regular basis." So that's an example. 

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And it takes a lot more time but, again, it's a slower way to get where you want to go faster. Because it'll end up getting you the results a lot quicker. And then there's not as much tension or no tension, in the environment anymore. And I don't claim to be perfect at this, but we're aiming for progress, not perfection. 

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Alison: Yes. 

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Kimberly: And it's a lifetime process. I think it takes a lifetime to develop this skill. And even just being able to internally realize that you're activated, is a very good first step. And curiosity is a great starting point. I used to think curiosity and compassion were the best starting points. But compassion is actually asking a lot of a person. 

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And I think it's very helpful just to say, "Let's just begin with becoming curious about this feeling of reactivity and what's that about? When he's focusing on reading the paper instead of being with me. And that must mean that I'm not important to him." 

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There's a lot under there, and I need to really pause and take a look at why I'm feeling so reactive about it. And then move in the direction of speaking on behalf of.

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Alison: Yes, it's so interesting, to bring this full circle, to that inner critic. Because I think when we haven't done the work inside of ourselves, or when we're on the front end of it, that inner critic comes in. 

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We see the mail we're annoyed, and then we're either mad at ourselves. And then that inner critic turns also on the other person, who's not taking this problem magically away, that they may not even know. Maybe it's not bothering them, they don't care. 

So all of a sudden, that inner critic is now mad at us, they're mad at this other person. And then we can speak from it, which is, "What's wrong with you? You don't care about me. Why don't you help me out? I don't even know what just happened."

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And, so, all that work that has to happen internally to, first of all, validate, "Wait a minute, this is causing me stress. This is causing me anxiety for numerous reasons, that go beyond just the mail." And this is the thing in marriage, it usually is these little things, initially, yes, they start to pile up. 

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But the more you begin to get curious, I love that you went there. Get curious about, "Okay, what is going on? Why is that so activating to me?" Not from a shaming place but from a validating place. Then that allows you to go into that conversation with the other person, without criticism, which is never helpful to relationships. 

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Kimberly: No.

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Alison: And to go into it with curiosity. Naming, again, naming is so important. Without shame, without criticism, "This is what's happening inside of me. And then together can we figure out how to solve this problem." It's just so much healthier, but it does start from the inside out. This work of how we bring it to that other person is really critical, to that conversation going well.

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Kimberly: That's right, and owning what is going on inside of you and sharing about that, at a time when they're available. I can't stress that enough. Being aware that the person you're in a relationship with, whether it's a friend, or co-worker, or spouse, they've got their whole life going on, themselves. And they're not necessarily where you are in your mind. And it's really important to ask for an appointment to talk. Because these are really important things to talk about, and you want to do it at a time when they're available. 

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And then also a little tip that I've learned is never bringing anything like this up after 06:00 p.m., at night because people are just spent by then. So do it at a time when you're fresh and you've got space. And it may be that you have to put it in the calendar, but it's important. It's as important as whatever else is in your calendar. 

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Alison: Yes.

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Kimberly: Make space for it and then take a U-turn, stay on your side of the tennis court, own what you're experiencing. And use the opportunity, as a trailhead, to walk down a path of worrying what's going on with your inner world and find the curiosity within you. Extend that curiosity to the part of you that's feeling activated. 

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And then another phrase that's really helpful, is to think of the context as a torment. The mail, for me, can be a tormentor. Because it can be an opportunity, for me, to learn about myself because of the reactivity that it causes in me. 

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It sounds like a benign example, but for some reason, I think it's also because I'm an Enneagram One. And I really like for my environment to be clean, and orderly, and just seeing all the paper causes clutter in my psyche. But I've really gotten good at unsubscribing and discontinuing things, and just doing a lot electronically just as much as I can. I make it a daily practice to unsubscribe and discontinue.

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Alison: Oh, that's cool, good for you.

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Kimberly: Yes, it's just one thing a day, yes, it really helps a lot. Anyway, that's a whole another podcast.

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Alison: That's what I was going to say. How do you use this parts work as part of your ongoing spiritual practice? Because I talk a lot about how you can do it in the context of therapy. And I think it's important to do it in the context of therapy, especially, when you have a lot of trauma. When you have a lot of deep pain that you've never unpacked, that you've never looked at. I think it's important not to do it alone. 

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It's important to do it with someone. And I also think this work is something we can incorporate into our daily practice, as we get to know the contents of our soul. So how do you use it in your own daily spiritual practices?

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Kimberly: I had an IFS therapist, for a long time, and now I feel like I've so internalized the process. And I really learned, over the years, what it was that I was really wanting to get to in therapy. Which was the encounter of the part with Jesus. And now I really do that just on my own, on a daily basis in prayer. And it helps me to journal and journaling facilitates that divine encounter. 

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I do what you might call solo IFS, so I usually write out a thought that I'm having such as, "I'm feeling anxious about speaking tomorrow." Or something like that. And then I just write whatever other parts are speaking or I write what they're feeling. And then really quickly after that, within a few lines, I start to sense the Holy Spirit speaking. And I start to sense my Spirit-led self-comforting the parts, and responding in truth and love to the parts, and the parts relax. 

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I also do this through just imaginative prayer. I'll just close my eyes and picture a table, that really works for me, like I said. I just picture the part of me that's anxious, or sad, or hurt, sitting with Jesus and just listening for His voice. I also love to do it in guided exercises, with groups.

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So, actually, you helped me start, together, you and I started a group. Again, it came out of our conversation. A group that meets on a regular basis, and we have a facilitator that leads us in a guided exercise. 

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So I do that on a regular basis, and that gives me a chance to be led in the experience of seeing parts connect with Jesus. And there's Insight Timer, there's a lot of good recordings on Insight Timer. I think, Anne-Marie Bowen just posted something, she's been encouraging me to do it too.

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Alison: She does. I'll link to that in the episode, for folks who want to see what these guided exercises are, they're really helpful.

Kimberly: Yes, she is a Christian IFS therapist and just posted some Christ-centered IFS exercises to help you connect parts to Jesus. There's one that I did that's on my website, so I encourage your listeners to go there and find it. 

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But, yes, journaling solo IFS, mapping out parts, drawing a picture of the different parts. What I should say is I map out what the parts are saying on a piece of paper. So I put the voices or the thoughts of managers in one corner of the page. 

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The voices and feelings of firefighters in another corner. And then the exiles at the bottom and then the spirit-led self in the middle. And then the voice of God will usually speak to me, somehow, and I'll write that down in the middle with the spirit-led self, too. So that's a really common spiritual practice that I undergo.

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Alison: Yes, it's super helpful, I do that too. I write out, I journal out the different voices in my head. And, like you said, with practice it comes more quickly, that ability to breathe into the reframe, the Holy Spirit-led reframe.

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Kimberly: I love that. 

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Alison: Yes.

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Kimberly: Yes, I love that. I love that integration of psychology and spirituality, that's beautiful. The Holy Spirit-led reframe. I love to pray, "Lord, help me to differentiate from this part. Lord, please let this part of me know that you love me and you care for this part of me."

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And He responds. He says, "Seek my face while I'm near." 

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And I'm working on this book I've told you about called Inviting God. And I just have been going through the Scripture, just looking at all the different places that God wants us to invite Him into our lives. And it's become really clear to me that God wants us to invite Him in, and He wants to minister to us, and He's right there. 

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He's right there for us, but we need to bring the parts of us that are hurting into His presence, so that He can minister to them. Just like a doctor can't operate on a person who's not staying on the operating table. And we need to present the hurting parts of us to Him and then He heals us.

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Alison: Yes, I love that. It's so beautiful. It reminds me of the passage that we talk about, I think, in chapter four. About how Jesus goes after the lost sheep and He leaves the 99 to go after the one. And it applies to the parts of our own soul, that even if we're doing all right but there's one part of us that's hurting, God cares about that part of us, too. 

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And this is the process of our lives. This is the work. This is the work of becoming more spiritually and emotionally whole. In my experience it sure means life is never boring. There's always a way to tend the garden, tend the soil of our souls.

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Kimberly: It takes courage, Alison, because it's easier to just let yourself be distracted all the time, and it's easier to avoid these feelings. But I just encourage everyone to really lean in to this process because God wants us to be free. He doesn't want us to live enslaved to firefighter parts that have a grip on us, or manager parts that just won't relent, or won't relax, or exile parts that are just constantly living under the weight of heavy burdens. 

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He doesn't want us to live like that. He wants us to live freely and lightly. And He invites us to come to Him when we're burdened and promises that we'll live freely and lightly when we do that.

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Alison: I love that. Tell us about any projects you're working on; how people can find you?

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Kimberly: Yes, as I mentioned, I'm working on this book that I'm calling Inviting God into the Broken Places. And it's really an elaboration of step three of taking a U-turn. Just really going deeper into that experience of encountering Jesus, where we need to meet with Him. And then I'm also working on a mental health Bible. There's different types of Bible. So I'm talking about the Word of God, but there's different publications. 

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I'm not talking about there's a nutrition Bible. I'm not talking about just something like that. I'm talking about the Word of God, but published in a way that that highlights the ways in which the Bible facilitates mental health. 

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And working with a publishing company to come up with ten articles on ten topics, so it'll be 100 articles of ancillary materials to go along with Scripture passages. As well an index at the beginning of the ten topics so people know where to find those passages, on whatever topics that they're struggling with. So that is the project that I'm working on right now. 

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And then I'm also preparing to lead a retreat here in California, in May. So I have those things going on and I'm on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, but really the website is the main place to find me and to connect if you want to reach out.

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Alison: Which is kimberlyjunemiller.com, we'll link to that.

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Kimberly: Exactly, just my name. 

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Alison: That's awesome, Kim. That Bible sounds amazing. I can't wait for that. We will be so excited to hear more about that. I have a couple of questions I ask everyone. I've never asked you these questions, so I'm very curious to hear your answer. What or who is bringing out the best of you right now?

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Kimberly: Oh, I would say right now you are.

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Alison: Oh!

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Kimberly: [Inaudible 00:16:21] topic and it was like people that have helped me to live out my God-given calling, and that's definitely you, Alison. Friends who are challenging me and loving me right now, probably, Ken more than anyone, my husband. 

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And I've got a couple of girlfriends that I work closely with, Elizabeth, you know her. My friend Lauren here and she supports me in my ministry, as well. Do they have to be alive? Because there's so many authors from the past that I read a lot, that really speak to me. 

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I think books just really get my mind just active and I just get so inspired by people like Dallas Willard. I'm reading his book Hearing God right now. And just a few pages of that book, I'm just so excited about listening to God's voice. Friends, family, wonderful books get me in the writing zone. And, then, God's Word when you said, "What really brings out the best in you?" Spending time in Scripture it really builds me up.

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Alison: I love that. What needs and desires are you working to protect?

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Kimberly: Really time with God. Time with family and friends. Time to work and write. Time to exercise and cook healthy food, and, of course, time to open the mail.

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Alison: That's always good. Until someday it goes away, which it, might.

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Kimberly: I think, less and less.

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Alison: Yes, oh, Kim, it's so fun to be with you and have some of these conversations again. I'm so grateful for you and for the work that you're doing and putting into the world. And I so appreciate you coming here today to share with us about your life and about these topics, just grateful for you.

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Alison: Thank you so much for your friendship, Alison. Ever since I first met you in Boston, since Jeff set us up for that tea, that we had, it's just been such a life-giving friendship. And thank you for who you are and all that you're doing and just the incredible impact you're having on so many lives. It's a beautiful thing to see.

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Alison: Thanks, Kim. 

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< Outro >

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Alison: Thank you for joining me for this episode of The Best of You. Be sure to check out the show notes for any resources and links mentioned in the show. You can find those on my website at dralisoncook.com. That's Alison with one L- cook.com.

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Before you forget, I hope you'll follow the show now so that you don't miss an episode. And I'd love it if you'd go ahead and leave a review, it helps so much to get the word out. 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.

You need your pain. Grief makes you real, and disappointment can inspire creativity, change, and growth. Sadness brings texture to the joys we experience. And yet, it's also not wise to let sadness take us over. In today's episode, we discuss how to set healthy boundaries with emotions like sadness and loneliness.

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Here's what we cover:

-The surprising benefits of sadness

-3 types of grief

-The science of tears and how they help us

-What loneliness needs to heal

-Childhood play and how it informs your adult dreams

-What to do when you just don't have the time for the pain

Be sure to pick up your 3 free Boundaries for Your Soul resources here.  

‍

Thanks to our sponsors:

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

Listen & subscribe to The Snack Show - https://tinyurl.com/TheSnackShowPodcast

Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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Resources

• Get 46% off Boundaries for Your Soul & The Best of You here.
• Inside Out Movie Trailer
• IFS Institute
• Episode 39: Boundaries for Your Soul—How to Navigate Your Overwhelming Thoughts & Feelings
• Episode 40: 5 Steps to Healing Painful Emotions & Why Parts of Us Get Stuck in the Past
• Psalm 23
• Isaiah 53:3
• The House that Built Me, by Miranda Lambert
• Rebuilding Beautiful, by Kayla Stocklein
• Matthew 5:4
• Psalm 68:5-6
• Resources for support

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Transcript

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Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Best of You Podcast. I just want to tell you how much I enjoy doing this podcast. I have heard from so many of you how much this podcast means to you, and I can't even tell you, as we're approaching episode 42, so ten weeks away from a year, how much joy I've gotten from creating this podcast. 

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Oftentimes when I'm talking to people about their dreams, and what they long for, and what they want, and what they desire. I often say, "What were some of your childhood dreams? When you were by yourself, what would you do that was just pure joy?" Because often that's a cue to what our real longings are. What our real dreams are. And, for me, it really was this playing school. It was getting to talk to people about the things that I found really fascinating. 

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And that's what I get to do every single week, with this podcast, is talk to you all about these ideas that I think are so fascinating. And that have informed my own life, and informed my practice, and inform my work. And the fact that you're responding to that and that it means something to you, that's just the sweet spot, that's just the joy. That the thing I love to do is resonating and connecting with you and what you need, that's the magic. That's the magic. 

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And, so, thank you so much for your feedback, for your encouragement, for your responses. I appreciate the ways you've been sharing this podcast with your friends, 

with your family members, and with other people. We just continue to grow every week, and it makes me excited. I just have this sense of God ushering in His healing through these means, through technology, through modern technology. And I just pray with you, as we learn to honor these parts of ourselves, in partnership with God's spirit, that we would just bring more healing, more goodness, more beauty, more kindness. More of this compassionate self-awareness into our lives, into our relationships, into this world that is so desperately in need of it. 

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So thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing it. I also want to add, that today is my birthday. I wasn't planning to record this episode today, but it also feels very right, and timely, that I'm recording this episode on my birthday. It's one of those birthdays. 

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I actually have very complicated feelings about it. It's a little bit of a milestone birthday. And when we have complicated feelings, usually, that's a cue that there are different parts of us. Different parts of you have different feelings about this birthday. And today we're talking about these vulnerable emotions. These emotions we tend to want to exile, in particular, sadness and loneliness.

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And, so, today, as I was reflecting on my birthday, on these complicated emotions I have about it. And I've been steeping myself, as I prepare for this episode, in thinking about sadness and loneliness. It actually came together for me in a really beautiful way, personally. And that is this a part of me is really happy and deeply grateful, today, on this milestone birthday. 

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I am very aware of how grounded and anchored, and content I am in the work God has given me to do. How content I am in my family in my relationships, in my life. There's a lot of sweetness on this birthday. And that ability to recognize the health, the goodness, the joy, is very much informed by the reality of sadness and loneliness, that has characterized a lot of my adult life, especially, my 20s and 30s.

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These experiences from the past that are not as much part of my current reality, of my present realities. But that have very much played a role that I'm experiencing today. The happiness that I feel today, is informed by the sadness and the loneliness I have experienced in the past. And because I can still connect to those parts of me, I haven't eradicated them. They're a part of my story; but they've been reintegrated into this larger, more beautiful tapestry of my life.

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I can enjoy the present happiness in a much more complete, a much more nuanced, a much more textured, vital, beautiful way. I see the fruit of all of these parts of me. There's a humility in the gratitude I feel today. Because parts of me understand deeply what it's like to experience life's fragility. When sadness and loneliness are very palpable and very close at hand.

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And, so, I appreciate more deeply the experience of today because of, not despite of, the sadness and the heartache. But because of their part in this story that is my life. 

There's a way in which the sorrow, the parts of me that are acquainted with grief, with loneliness, with sorrow, give texture and illuminate the joy. 

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It provides a fuller picture of all of the whole of this story of life that we're all in the business of creating. We're in the business of working out this story that is our life. The acquaintance that parts of me still have with those experiences of sadness and loneliness, creates a more beautiful harmony as I experience the whole. 

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And, so, today, as we look at two of these emotions that are such a deep and vital part of every human experience, sadness and loneliness. I want you to consider that while these emotions are challenging to navigate, especially, when you get really lost in them. And I've been there at different times of my life, and I've walked numerous people through those valleys. 

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When you're in the valley and all you can see is sadness, and all you can feel is the aloneness. We all go through those valleys, some people more than others, but they are real. Those valleys are real. 

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But when they begin to be held within healthy boundary lines, in your soul. And they begin to come together with other parts of your story. Other parts of you that begin to experience joy, and begin to taste goodness, and begin to experience connection, they become beautiful parts of who you are. That light up the landscape of your internal life in beautiful, nuanced, textured ways. 

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And, so, I don't want you to eradicate these parts of you. I do want you to learn how to establish healthy boundary lines with them. So that they create color, so they bring a little texture. They bring some nuance like those flutes in that middle school band, we talked about in episode 39. They bring some beauty and some nuance to your story, but they don't tell the whole story of who you are. 

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So I want to start off with sadness by saying, first of all, you need your pain. Grief, sadness, suffering, sorrow, disappointment, while painful, these emotions make us real. They are part of being alive. If we got rid of those emotions we would not understand the feeling and experience of joy, of happiness, of excitement, of anticipation, of hope. Those emotions go hand in hand. 

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Part of the joy that we experience is because we're aware of what it feels like when things are hard. It's a very odd dichotomy, but it's one that even Jesus experienced. "He was a man who was acquainted with suffering, with sorrow, with grief." And He was also a man who understood joy. 

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We don't want to numb out. We don't want to shut down these harder emotions, they help bring us alive. They also help us understand resilience, which is something that we need to survive. They can fuel our creativity. Our ability to connect with other people and bring life and bring innovation. 

They help us to understand what it's like to walk so closely by faith, when we are walking through the shadow of the valley of the dark. When we have a sense of God's leadership. Even though we feel alone, and scared, and maybe even lost a little bit. 

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The pain of our lives can drive us to seek Jesus, to seek out other people, to dig deeper into ourselves, to grow. And I'm not saying that makes it okay, but I am honoring that pain can have a byproduct of teaching us resilience. Of teaching us how to be stronger, of teaching us how to change certain things. To fight for what is good and honorable in our lives. 

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It could fuel purpose. Sometimes when we're hurting, when we're struggling, when we're sad, we start to look for purpose. We start to look for meaning; and we can gain new insights. And those insights that are hard won in the battle of our suffering. Can lead us to be incredible channels of empathy, and healing, and hope, and goodness for others. 

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So we need our pain, we need our sadness. We need our sorrow to help us become more of who God wants us to become, on this side of heaven. In this world that desperately needs us to be real, as we show up to our own lives and to other people. And that means coming into contact with our sadness, with our sorrow, with the things that are hard. 

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The trick is not to let those emotions overtake us. To feel like they're all of who we are. The trick is to keep our sadness, to keep our sorrow within healthy boundary lines. And that'll be easier at different times of life than others. 

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There are times when we're just in it. When we're just in the hard stuff, and we're really in it, and we need anchors around us, we need other people. We need anchors to keep us going. To keep us strong until we can get to that place where the light starts to break through. We start to see our way forward and we start to climb out of that valley. We don't stay in the valleys forever. And when we're in the valleys, we need support to guide us. 

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But those valleys also become beautiful places that when we look back on them. When we look at our suffering from the rear view mirror, we say, "I'm grateful for that. It was hard, I don't necessarily want to go through that again. But I'm grateful for what God did in my life through that season. And for the good that I have to offer out of those places inside my soul."

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And, so, I want you to consider, as you're listening today, what's your relationship like to your own sadness. Is it an emotion that's very close to you, that you access readily? And you have to work to keep it within healthy boundary lines, so that it doesn't take you over. Maybe you're somebody who struggled a little bit with depression or struggled to remember the good. It's easier for you to sink into the sorrow. And there's no shame in that, but it's just something to be aware of. 

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For some of you, listening, sadness comes fairly easily and you have to work to remember the joy. You have to work to keep that sadness within healthy boundary lines. And remember that there are other parts of your experience, there are other parts of your stories. And, to be honest, folks who are very well acquainted with sadness tend to be highly empathetic. They tend to be highly in tune with the suffering of others. It's a beautiful quality, and I don't want you to shame yourself if you feel that your sadness is fairly close to you. 

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In fact, I want you to honor that as a gift and, also, think of that sadness as just one part of you. And some of you listening feel like sadness is a little further away. It's maybe harder for you to tap into it. Maybe you have very healthy protectors that just keep sadness far away. Maybe you're someone who produces, or performs, or pleases some of those P-words, and that helps you keep sadness at bay. Or maybe you're someone who has a little bit of anxiety or anger, and all of those things are more present to you. 

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And, so, you don't as easily or often dip into that well of sadness. It doesn't mean it's not there. It's just a little more far away from you. It's a little more foreign to you. And for those of you listening who find that sadness is farther away, there's no shame in that either. I would encourage you to consider your relationship to sadness, and consider that it is an important part of your internal family. That grief and that sorrow isn't something to shove aside. That it's something to bring into relationship with these other hardworking parts of you. 

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That sometimes sadness can remind you, "Hey, it's okay to slow down."

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"It's okay to ask for help."

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"It's okay to need support."

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Sadness can help you bring yourself back into balance.

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So whether sadness is close to you or whether sadness feels far away. This is an opportunity to just get curious about your own relationship to this God-given emotion. An emotion we know Jesus was deeply acquainted with. This is an emotion that is not to fear, not to exile, it's an emotion to get curious about. 

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What are some of the benefits of sadness? Well, number one, we've all experienced loss in life. We've all experienced some pain. And those losses, those parts of our story, are worthy of honor and respect, right? These are parts of our story that we can exile, or we can honor, and reintegrate into this larger narrative that is our life in a healthy way. They can help us become aware of these losses, or of burdens, that we may still carry with us that need our attention. 

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They can help us understand our own hearts and the things that we deeply love, the things that we deeply value. Where there is sorrow, there is something that we've grieved. 

There's a good thing, a beautiful thing that we've lost. And that helps us understand, "Oh, wait a minute, I'm someone who valued that friendship or who longed for that thing. And the sadness reminds me that there was good in that longing. That I'm someone who cares about these relationships, that cared about that thing. And while there's loss in owning that, that's also a cue to some of my God-given desires. To some of my God-given makeup. 

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These parts of us that carry sadness, that carry loss, can help us develop empathy and come alongside others who are suffering. It's a channel for connection to other people. Sadness can help us honor the reality of our story and the hardships we face. And I like that word honor; to honor those parts of our stories, they're real. We survived something. We got through something.

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Sadness helped us get through that. Sadness told us you're alive, you're human, and that is something to be sad about. And if I weren't sad, I'd be a machine, I'd be a robot. I'd be an unfeeling person or I might even be a sociopath. I wouldn't care. 

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Well, that's not what it means to be human. Our sadness reminds us that we're human and that we experience loss. And, gosh, if we could shut that off, that would not be a good thing. We don't want to be robots in this world. We don't want to be people who are cut off from our feelings. And sometimes our feelings get the best of us over and over again. 

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You hear me saying we want to set healthy boundary lines with our sadness. We don't want it to take us over and we don't want it to go away. It reminds us of what's real. It reminds us of people that we've lost, that we love, that we do not want to forget. That we want to create a space to honor, even as other parts of us are able and ready to move forward. 

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This is what I love about this parts model. Parts of us grieve even as parts of us hope in a future that we still have before us. This is health. This is health that both of these things can be true. I can honor my heartache about that loss, about that hard thing, about that hurt. And I can also honor parts of me that are hopeful about the future. That are even looking forward to a future. Those two things can exist side by side, and in fact, they should exist side by side. In fact, they both help make us more complete. They make us whole. They create a harmony. 

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Now, sadness can get too close. And when it's too close to us, we can be overtaken by feelings of sorrow, of suffering. We can even move into victim mentalities. Where we just feel like we're destined for a life of sadness. We can shift into depression and despair. We can feel worn out, and exhausted, and burdened, and heavy laden. 

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When sorrow gets too big we can stay ruminating and stuck in painful memories from the past. Instead of healing them and allowing them a proper place within our internal family. We can move into shame, self-doubt, even false guilt, some insecurity.

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So we want to keep sadness within healthy boundary lines. When it gets extreme, it can take us into some dark places. And if you've struggled with depression, you know this. And there's no shame in this, it happens. But, again, we don't want to exile the parts of us that carry sorrow altogether. We want to welcome them as important members of our internal family and help them find healthy boundary lines within our soul. 

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[00:20:42] < Music >

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What happens when two friends who love snacks and have mostly differing opinions start a podcast? Welcome to their weekly journey with Jami and Fallon, who love laughing as much as they love food. Follow along as they live their motto - "Live, laugh, snack." I love Jami and Fallon. I get to work with them on the TSF network. They are awesome humans, and they are just having so much fun on this podcast. 

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Who doesn't need a laugh right now? And who doesn't need some insight into some great-tasting snacks? Each episode is 30 minutes long. They release every Friday. If you are someone who loves a good snack or just enjoys listening to two great humans, have a great time together, listen and subscribe to The Snack Show it's anywhere podcasts are found.

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It's helpful to think about three different categories. The first is when we experience sadness over the loss of something that was good that we wanted. The second, that sometimes surprises us, is there can be sadness or sorrow over the loss of something painful. And then finally there's the sorrow or sadness about a lost dream. Something that might have been. Something that we longed for, that never was. And all of these things can cause sorrow or sadness in different ways

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When you think about the loss of something good. And this is why we get into this very delicate relationship between sorrow and joy. If you're someone who has moved a lot. That was the source of a lot of my sadness and loneliness in my adult years as I moved around a ton. 

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And, so, I was very untethered from communities. I was very untethered from this very anchored childhood, all the way through 18 until I left for college. And, so, I understood what it felt like to be tethered, very intimately, to a real present community. And then suddenly in my 20s and 30s I was very untethered, it was the opposite. And there was so much sorrow around that loss, of that anchoring community of my childhood. 

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I just couldn't recreate it, and a lot of that was my own choices. I made a lot of movements. A lot of us who are part of sort of Gen X, if you relate, we started moving around. We didn't stay where our families were. And everybody started moving around, and our friends started moving around, and nobody was in the same location. And it's created some good things; we had these different opportunities, and it created a lot of loss. A lot of loneliness, a lot of untethering.

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And then technology came into that in the '90s and the 2000s. Suddenly, we're all on technology and that contributed to some of the untethering. It created some ways that we could reconnect, but it also wasn't the same thing. 

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And, so, there's a lot of sadness in that untethering. And, so, there's a loss of something good. It's a good thing to become aware of, "Oh, my goodness, there was good in that. And, so, I'm sad now because I missed something that was really beautiful and really good and I can't fully recreate it."

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And, so, what do we do here? What do we do with the sadness? Because the sadness is telling me something important and I've got to figure out how to move forward, not back. I can't get stuck in what I don't have anymore. I've got to figure out how to take that sadness, let it inform me about what I value.

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And I tell this story in Boundaries for Your Soul, in the chapter on sadness. About, for me, it was all about revisiting that community of my youth and letting myself grieve. I didn't know how special it was until I left it. It's all I ever knew. I literally was born in the same house that I left when I was 18, and went off to college. 

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And, so, all of that safety, all of that security that was no longer there, suddenly, in my 30s. And I'd been living in all these different cities and no permanence, no stability of community. And I was like, "Oh, my gosh, that's a loss. I am sad about that." And I didn't even know it until it overtook me. And slowly I began to listen to that sadness and let it inform me, so that I can make wiser, healthier, decisions moving forward.

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I couldn't recreate the past. I couldn't go back. And I talk about that Miranda Lambert song and that song still makes me cry when I sing it. It's the song about "The House That Built Me". This poignancy of that feeling of home that I'd had, but that was gone and would never be again. 

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And also that sadness informed me. It began to tell me I value roots, I value anchors. I need to figure out how to move toward that over the next few years. I can't magically bring it in, but I can begin to move toward it. I can begin to reconnect with some of those people that made me feel so tethered in my youth. I began to return to Wyoming. You'll hear me talk about the mountains of Wyoming; that's why they're so important to me. 

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I began to build in ways of reconnecting to those beautiful images. The anchoring of the land of that mountain face that I would look at every single day until I was 18, into my present and future reality.

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I let that sadness, that grief, that feeling of loss, help me reintegrate important things that I valued into my life. Some of you feel sorrow over a person that you've lost. Maybe someone who has passed away, who is no longer with us. 

Maybe a relationship that is gone and that person cannot come back. That relationship cannot come back. And that sorrow reminds you of love. It reminds you of love. It reminds you of the beauty of a human life. Of a relationship that brought something to you that might have healed parts of you. And even though that relationship is gone, a part of it remains because it changed you. That person might be gone, but that person remains because they changed you. 

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And, so, that sadness, while it's so hard to face, also, reminds you of the tremendous good that that person brought to you. And that still lives on, not just in that memory, but in the part of your soul that has forever been changed by that person or by that relationship. 

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And, so, while the sadness is hard and the grief is hard, it points you to something deeply good. Something deeply beautiful. Something God brought into your life to change you and to bring good to you, and you'll find ways to honor that good. You honor that person, or that relationship, by holding the good that they brought to you alive and by celebrating that. This is how we honor grief. We honor the people and the good things that we miss by honoring the parts of us that have been forever changed. By those situations, by those people, by those relationships. 

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This is the work of healthy boundaries with sadness. Where instead of letting it take us over and consume us and destroy us. We let it bring up the very best. Not only of who we are but of these other people and of these other relationships that have enriched our lives.

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We want to honor those other people with the goodness that we bring into our life, as a result of having been touched by those humans. This is the work of grief. This is the work of honoring our sadness because our sadness points us to something that was so deeply good. This is the work of healthy boundaries.

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It's not exiling our sadness. It's not saying, "Oh, God, I just won't go there, you took that person for a reason." It's also not saying, "I'm going to dwell in that sorrow and I'm going to let it take me out, and keep me from living this life that I still have."

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It's saying, "I'm going to honor the place that person had in my life. The place that relationship had in my life by becoming even more of the person I really am. I honor them by moving forward with this beautiful life."

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Now, this is a process, this takes time. You can't rush this process, but I want you to hear me talk about this healthy balance. There's a little bit of a tension in our souls. This is delicate, nuanced work of honoring the sadness. Even as we let it shape us into someone even more whole, even more beautiful. Even more of a reminder of the way that person or that relationship left a lasting impact. 

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We can also feel sadness over the loss of something painful. Something that reminds us of a really complicated, maybe, even, terrible chapter of our lives. Now, this is complicated grief, complicated sadness. This is where we get into the complexity of trauma. 

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I've worked with numerous women who have had to get out of abusive relationships. And there's a grief involved with that too. There's a complicated grief. There's the grief of, "It took years from my life."

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There's the grief of "There was a little bit of good there or I wouldn't have been in it." But then that good went bad, that good went awry. So there's complexity. There was something there at the beginning that then turned toxic. 

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And, so, I have to grieve both the lost years, the lost time, and I have to grieve what I had hoped it would become. So there's nuance to that loss. When something went sideways, when something went bad, a relationship or a person. 

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We have to sometimes grieve the loss of a childhood that we never had. Where there was complexity in our relationships with our parents, there's sorrow there. And the sorrow doesn't, necessarily, just simply point us to something that was good. It points us to a really complicated part of our life, where we suffered at the hands of someone else's toxicity.

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And, so, we're sad that we got ensnared in that. We're sad that that person became that toxic thing. We're also sad about what we didn't get, and this gets complicated. And there might be some anger there close, side by side with the sadness and that anger needs to be there. 

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And, so, there's a little bit more complexity to working through that sadness. And people sometimes feel a lot of shame or a lot of frustration with themselves. "Why do I feel sad about this relationship?"

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"Why do I feel sad about this person, this parent, this ex? They only mistreated me. Why do I feel sad about that relationship?" Well, that sadness is there for a reason. That person was all you had. You didn't know any better, at the time, when you were a kid or when you were in that relationship. They did provide parts of you with something, even though now you know that it wasn't healthy. Overall, there was something you got from that at the time, that was all you knew. 

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And, so, your grief is complicated. And you want to do that work with someone else. Don't do that work alone of teasing apart the different layers of sadness. The grief over something that even was toxic. And the ongoing grief, if the person is still in your life. 

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So every time I bump against this person, I have grief over the fact that that relationship is gone. And I have grief over the fact that that person was never the mom, the dad, the spouse, the ex-spouse, that I wish I had had.

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And, so, grief can be a little bit ongoing and we have to nurture that relationship to it, so that it stays within healthy boundary lines. Grief work is often ongoing. It doesn't happen on a dime. It's a way of tilling this garden inside your own soul. And you can find ways as you, tenderly and compassionately, care for those parts of you that carry that grief. Where it doesn't go away but the burden is eased, the burden is lightened.

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And that's what Jesus says, again, that He comes and He says, "My burden is light." It doesn't mean the burden isn't there, but He steps in and He helps you carry that burden. And it becomes a little lighter and it begins to inform you of the person you want to be, and the kind of relationships you want to form, going forward. And you till that soil with care because it matters and your story matters. And you want to honor that part of your story without letting it take you over. Without letting it rob you of the best of who you are.

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And then, lastly, there is this loss of what might have been. The loss of a dream that can no longer materialize. The loss of a certain way of living, that has been curtailed by a physical limitation. Or a quote-unquote "Happily ever after." It's not the life you had imagined for yourself, but it is the life that you have. And there's disappointment with that and there's loss with that. And there is also beauty that can come from that. 

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And, man, this is the work and the work is not to let one run roughshod over the other. If you too quickly go to "There is purpose and pain."

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Or "There's beauty and brokenness." You risk exiling that sad part of you that needs to be heard, that needs to remind you of the disappointment, of the loss, even of the anger. And, also, if you let that part of you take you over, too much. You risk missing out on the ways in which God wants to help you weave together another beautiful story. 

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Really I appreciate the work of Kayla Stoecklein on this. She writes about her experience surviving her husband's death by suicide and raising their children. And she just talks in very profound and very nuanced ways of the heartache, and the sorrow of that, and the ways in which she's continuing to create her own life.

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There's a lot of nuance and texture in this work of creating healthy boundaries in your own soul. I want to remind you that roughly one third of the Psalms express lament. Lament, signifies faith, not weakness. It shows that you're hanging on. It shows that you value the good things in life. 

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So when you notice pain, or you notice sadness, or you notice disappointment, don't try to shoo it away. Instead name it, befriend it, extend compassion toward it. "There you are, sadness, I see you there. It's okay, you can be here with me and I bless you for this grief you're reminding me of. I don't want you to take me over, but I do want you to be here with me. You're welcome here; and God welcomes you too."

Jesus said, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." We won't know comfort if we don't first honor the sorrow. We won't understand the deep and meaningful ways that God meets us, in our sorrow, if we don't first acknowledge it to ourselves and to a few safe people. 

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Now, for those of you for whom sadness can be hard to let in. I invite you to consider a part of you that might be sad. What if you could befriend it? Not so that it takes you over, but so that you can tend it. 

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What if you could honor its pain? And in doing so, it might even soften a little bit to become this very tender, very sweet place inside your internal family. What if instead of fighting to keep it away? The tears that it holds are part of what will bring you even more connection to your God-given self and maybe even to other people.

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You know, crying is such an interesting thing when it's done in a safe, supportive environment. And it's so healthy for us, that it releases endorphins and other good chemicals. It reduces stress and it can function as a deep form of self-soothing. It can help you sleep better. It connects us to hope, paradoxically.

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A good cry can really open us up to more connection to others and to more connections to God, which opens us up to hope. The release of sadness is a prayer of surrender. So often your tears say, "I don't have the answers. I have no more words. I simply have the reality of these human emotions." And that is my form of prayer right now. If you have much buried pain, please don't try to cry it out all alone. Seek help from someone who can help hold some of that pain with you. 

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But, regardless, we don't want to let sadness take us over, but we also don't want to exile it either. It's a beautiful part of being human. It's a beautiful member of your internal family. We want to have a healthy relationship with our sadness. 

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So as we close, I want to answer a question. Essentially the question was this, "I struggle with sadness and loneliness. But I am so overwhelmed with the things I need to get done in my life. I'm a parent, I work all the things. How do I do this work when I have such a busy life? It feels so overwhelming." And I really love this question. I want to give you a couple of really practical nuggets, especially, with sadness and also loneliness. Though sadness and loneliness are not the same thing, but they are similar in one way. And that is that they scare us because they can take us over. 

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And, so, the thing with both sadness and loneliness is that when they take us over, when they get big, they literally depress or suppress body function. So they're the opposite of activating. Activating emotions are things like anxiety, anger, those amp us up, they get us going. 

Sadness and loneliness slow us down. They suppress us. That's where the word depression comes on. They depress some of our bodily functions. 

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And, so, as is suggested in this question and it's like, "I don't have time to be sad. I don't have time to be lonely." And, so, I want to address that briefly here because that's very real, I get it. I mean, we're busy parents, we're working. And you can start to maybe feel those emotions tug at your soul and you're like, "I don't have time for this." And I hear that all the time. 

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And here is what I want to say, a couple of things about that. Structure is your friend. And in order to build trust with those emotions, so that they don't take you over. Because here's the thing if you don't honor them, and if you don't tend to them a little bit, they will start to come out. They'll come out sideways. They'll overtake you when you least expect it. So you don't want to completely ignore them, but you can build trust with them and you do it by scheduling it. 

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And here is an example, if you're a parent and you've got a bunch of kids. And you've got a kid come home from school and they've had a really bad day. And they want to tell you all about it because their friends were mean to them, and they're really okay, they're not dying. They're not in an emergency. And you've got stuff to do. You've got a commitment. And you cannot just drop everything and be present to their every emotion. When you've built trust with your child, you can say to your child, "Listen, I want to hear all about it. I'm so sorry this happened to you. I can't do it right now, but we're going to circle back later tonight after dinner. I've got time after dinner, I want to sit down and I want to hear all about it."

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You schedule it and then you got to circle back because you're building trust with them. And you can do this with your kids and it's actually healthy because it teaches them they're going to be okay in that emotion. They're not going to die. You're going to be there for them. You can't drop everything in this moment, but you're going to circle back, so you build trust. You're teaching them emotional tolerance that they can tolerate their emotions. 

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A couple of things are going on there that are really valuable. This gets into healthy boundaries. "I want to be present to you, I can't do it right now. So here's the time that we're going to do it.” It's the same with these parts of our souls, this is the goal. 

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Now, again, at the front end of this work, you may need to schedule the time with a therapist. Because if you've never looked at your sadness or there's been a lot of loneliness there, that you haven't wanted to look at. You will want to do that with a therapist who can help you pace that process.

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But this is the goal, I want to paint you a picture of when you schedule that time. When you notice, "Man, I am sad about that and I don't have time to be sad about that now." Instead of shoving it aside, you mentally think to yourself, "Where can I talk about that grief? Can I call a friend and say, 'Hey, listen, can we take a walk on Saturday, I need to talk to you about something?' 

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Can you tell a neighbor, 'Hey, listen, could you have coffee with me tomorrow? There's something I need to get off my chest.'" And what you're saying to that part of you is, "I see you there; I am not going to just shove you aside. I've scheduled some time to really dig into you, or I'm going to schedule some time to journal about you later today."

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And this leads me into tip number two. When you are reaching out to a friend, to a neighbor, even to a therapist, to someone at church. Whomever it may be, to your small group, communicate on behalf of that sadness, on behalf of that loneliness versus from it.

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Here is what it sounds like to speak on behalf of it. "Hey safe person, who I trust, 

I am going through something. I'm not sure what it is, but I wanted you to know that I'm struggling with some loneliness. I'm struggling with some sadness. Would you be available to talk it through with me? Could we have coffee? Could we have lunch? Could we take a walk this weekend? Because I'm noticing this and I need to have a place to talk about it."

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What friend isn't going to be like, "Yes, I'm there for you, let's do it." Because you are taking responsibility for that emotion when you speak on behalf of it. You're saying, "Here is what's going on with me. I'm aware of it; I need some support for it. Would you come alongside me as together we begin to unpack it?" This is friendship, this is connection. 

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And it's so different than just downloading on a friend.

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So when we first name, and befriend, and extend compassion for ourselves and say, "Here's that sadness again. You're welcome here but, man, I don't have time for you right now. Gosh, loneliness is really closing in. It's not good, I'm going to work but, then, I'm coming home and there's that loneliness. Or it's just a little too lonely on the weekends or when my kids aren't at home with me, boy, that loneliness is there. I'm lonely in my marriage even. I don't know what to do with that, but I need to get support for that."

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When you focus and you befriend, and you're not shaming yourself. And you're a little bit differentiated from it. You can actually reach out and get the help that you need in a more strategic way, that honors the busyness of your life. That says, "I don't have time to do this this week but, boy, this weekend I'm getting some support for that part of me.

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And you start to care for that part of you, just as you would care for a child in your own family. 

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I want to remind you, again, today, as we close, that if you are suffering. If you have sadness inside of you. If you are lonely, there is a God of the universe who honors those parts of you, who loves those parts of you. Who wants to help you create healthy, beautiful, boundary lines within your own soul where we can get comfort to those parts of you. Where we can get community to those parts of you. I love the psalm that says, "God is a father to the fatherless, a defender of the widows. He sets the lonely in families, He leads out the prisoners with singing."

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It starts with honoring, with naming, with befriending. And, then, with God's help getting those resources to the lonely, to the sad parts of your soul that are so precious and so worthy of your care and God's love.

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< Outro >

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Thank you for joining me for this episode of The Best of You. Be sure to check out the show notes for any resources and links mentioned in the show. You can find those on my website at dralisoncook.com. That's Alison with one L- cook.com.

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Before you forget, I hope you'll follow the show now so that you don't miss an episode. And I'd love it if you'd go ahead and leave a review. It helps so much to get the word out. 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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So many of us live at war with ourselves. We hate our anxiety or battle with fear. We beat ourselves up or try to get rid of these parts of us. But this approach only makes things worse. One of the most surprising ways to calm your anxiety is to stop waging war against it. In today's episode we discuss how to honor your fear and soothe your anxiety so that you are in charge of them, not the other way around.

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Here's what we cover:

1. A picture of healthy internal boundaries

2. How anxiety tries to protect us

3. The surprising truth about fear

4. How to establish healthy boundaries with both fear and anxiety

5. Fear and the Bible

6. 5 Steps to work through fear and anxiety

Be sure to pick up your 3 free Boundaries for Your Soul resources here.  

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Thanks to our sponsors:

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

Hiya Health-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

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Resources

• Get 46% off Boundaries for Your Soul & The Best of You here.
• Inside Out Movie Trailer
• IFS Institute
• Find a Christian IFS Therapist
• Episode 39: Boundaries for Your Soul—How to Navigate Your Overwhelming Thoughts & Feelings
• Episode 40: 5 Steps to Healing Painful Emotions & Why Parts of Us Get Stuck in the Past
• Mindsight, by Dr. Dan Siegel
• Genesis 1
• Psalm 16:5-6
• Exodus 4:1-10
• Luke 12
• "The wildness is gentled out of a personality at war with itself." Disciplines of the Spirit by Howard Thurman
• Resources for support

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Transcript

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Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. Where we are in the third episode, in this six-week journey into healthy boundaries for your soul. And before we get started, just in case you haven't, yet, had a chance to go pick up those three free resources. They are still there available for you. 

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It's a map of the soul, which we went through in episode 39. There's an 11-day PDF devotional that will take you through, basically, the biblical background for some of these key concepts, that we're talking about in this series. And then there's a guided audio reflection. It's a 10 to 12-minute guided exercise where I walk you through those five steps we talked about in episode 40. 

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You can actually extend the length of it. This is really helpful when you're first learning to pay attention to the contents of your own soul. To listen to what's happening inside of you, as I guide you through it.

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You can just pause it if you need more time. Don't feel like you have to go at the pace of that guided audio. Just pause it, take the time you need, and then hit play for the next question prompt. Those resources are available for free on my website. 

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And you'll also find there that link to get both my books; Boundaries for Your Soul and The Best of You for essentially the price of one book. It works out to be 46% off when you buy them together. It's just a great bundle that my publisher has put together just for you. 

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So in episodes 39 and 40, we talked about what it means to have different parts of your soul. What are those different categories of parts are. We also talk through a five-step process of getting to know a part of your soul; to focus on it, befriend it, and invite God to be near it. To unburden it from any belief burdens, or feeling burdens, or messages all the way from the past that are still operating, often, outside of your subconscious awareness.

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And then to reintegrate that part of you into your soul in a healthier way. And, today, and for the next few weeks, we're going to get into how to set boundaries with specific emotions. We're getting into this idea of internal boundaries and I'm going to talk more, in today's episode, about what that means. And then we're going to get into fear and anxiety, today. And then we'll move through some of the different emotions over the next few weeks. 

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The most commonly researched emotions in psychology, there's five of them. They're happiness — that's the only "Positive" quote-unquote emotion on this list. The others are sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. 

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Disgust is an interesting emotion that's linked to our morality. It's very much linked to this idea of judgment, disdain, and even shame. So it's a really interesting emotion. And if you've seen that movie, I've talked about it, I think, in every episode, the Pixar movie, Inside Out, those are the five emotions that they feature as characters in that movie. It's happiness, they call it joy.

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• Sadness
• Anger
• Fear
• And disgust. 

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So these are very common emotions. So here's the thing, emotions are complicated. They're connected, and I really like how this IFS model, that we're working through, it talks about emotions as connected to these parts of us. 

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Emotions are connected to beliefs that you hold. They're connected to memories that you have. They're connected to a whole narrative about your experiences, in this world, that go all the way back to childhood. They're linked to complex neurological systems inside of you. We don't just have emotions in a vacuum, they're complicated.

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So, for example, sadness, when you experience sadness, usually, it's associated with a lot of things that you believe about sadness. Your own relationship to sad events. The ways those events have impacted you, in the present. The ways in which sad events have impacted you in the past. You may have created narratives around sadness, such as, "I've always been sad."

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"I'm always destined to be sad. I don't know what happiness feels like."

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Same with anger. Anger might be tied to certain messages you've come to believe about yourself. "People are never trustworthy."

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"People will always let me down." And that goes back all the way to memories you have stored from your past. So these all tie into those burdens, we talked about in step four. Where these parts of us carry burdens, and often these burdens show up as emotions. 

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So emotions are complicated, and emotion is tied to a part of us that has a whole narrative about what's happening in front of us. And emotions are linked to each other as well. Anger often shows up as a way to keep pain or sorrow away. Sometimes we get mad at ourselves when we feel fearful or even when we feel sad. 

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Sometimes we exile our anger and that's when anxiety can kick up. When we're overthinking, overanalyzing, trying to keep everybody happy. And really what we need to do is get to the root of some anger that will empower us to take action. So these emotions, also, have relationships with each other. And this is, again, why I love this movie, Inside Out, even though it's a kid's movie, is it shows those interrelationships. The way that these emotions compete for authority in our soul. 

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Sometimes these emotions are too close to us. Sometimes they are too far away when we exile them. Some of these emotions we wish we had less of, we want more space from. And some of them we've disowned, we've denied, we've shoved aside, and we actually need them to come in a little closer. 

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All of these emotions need our leadership from that place inside, where the Holy Spirit lives. Where we're the best of who we are. Where we can name what's happening in our souls and lead ourselves wisely. And this is where we get into internal boundaries. 

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So what do we mean by setting boundaries with an emotion? Because typically when we think about boundaries we think about our external relationships. "I need better boundaries with my parents."

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"I need better boundaries with my kids."

"I need better boundaries with my friends, with my work." Almost always, when people come to me and say, "I need better boundaries." They are not talking about the contents of their own soul. We're talking about these other people.

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The truth is we need both. We need healthy boundaries inside of ourselves and we need healthy boundaries with other people, and the two are very much linked. For example, guilt is a great example. A lot of us have a hard time setting healthy boundaries with other people. Because we have been taken over by a part of us that is a guilt-tripping part of us. 

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And, so, we have to learn to set healthy boundaries, internally, with a part of us that guilt trips us erroneously. Not the true guilt of conviction, but the fault guilt of always thinking that we need to do what other people want us to do. We have to first differentiate from that part of us, internally. Set healthy boundaries with our guilt. Learn to reintegrate guilt in a healthy way, so that we can set healthy boundaries with other people.

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These two things, these two different types of boundaries, work in tandem. This idea of psychological boundaries is rooted all the way back, in the mid-20th century. With psychiatrist Murray Bowen, who was an American psychiatrist who really developed Family Systems Theory. And, again, we talked about the family as a system of interrelated parts. This is our literal family. If you think to your own family, there's a bunch of individuals who all work together as a system. And just as I said with our emotions, no one individual in a family exists in a vacuum. 

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Every individual in your family; whether it's your kids, whether it's you, whether it's your spouse. Whoever it is that lives in your household, is both shaped by the other family members and shapes family members. We both are shaped by and we exert influence over the other people in our lives. 

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This is the crucible of healthy boundaries. Families are a collection of individuals. And there are two things that go on in those early formative years, as part of a family, whatever your family look like. The first word is interoception. Interoception is all the perceptions, noise, and sensations inside of you, that you have to learn how to make sense of. It's the cues your body is sending. It's your fight/flight response in your nervous system. As a baby it was hunger; hunger is rooted in interoception. 

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How do you know you're hungry if you're not connected to your digestive system, and the signals it's sending to your brain? And that makes you cry as a baby, that's interoception and it also gets at our emotional cues. And then there's exteroception. Exteroception is how we take in data from the surrounding world, through our five senses. Through what we see, feel, taste, smell, and touch, both are important. 

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We need to attend to what's happening inside our bodies, inside ourselves. And we need to be able to read the cues that are coming to us from the people around us. And a lot of us, I talk about this in The Best of You, and I think, especially, women are over-conditioned toward exteroception, we read the room. We read the room. We know what's going on with everybody around us far before we know what's going on inside our own selves, both matter. And the family is the crucible for this.

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And, again, getting back to Bowen, he emphasized the importance of boundaries as a way to create health. As we exist both as individuals and as part of a collective, it's both. And boundaries are the key to that, and this is what I want you to understand about boundaries.

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So often in our current vernacular, I hear boundaries being talked about as this negative thing. "I need boundaries" is a way of saying, "I need to get that person out of my life."

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"I need more space from that person."

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"I need more distance from that person."

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Now that may well be true, but the reality of boundaries is they're not negative. We need boundaries in all of our relationships. We need boundaries because we exist both as unique selves and as individuals. There is no one on this earth; this is both the good news and the frustrating news of existence. There is no one, on this earth, who is exactly like you. Who will see experience, feel, and understand the world exactly as you do. You are a unique individual and that's beautiful. You are as unique as every snowflake. God made every single one of us completely unique. We have a completely unique experience of the world around us. 

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If you've heard that phrase people will say "No two children grow up in the same family." And it's true., everybody's perception of their family is a little bit different because we're all just so unique. And we're processing all that data, both internally and externally, in slightly different ways. This is our individual selfhood. This is what I talk about in The Best of You. 

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This is not a bad thing and, simultaneously, we are a bunch of selves that are intrinsically connected with a bunch of other-selves. We do not exist in isolation. We do not thrive in isolation. We need other people. Other people influence who we become. 

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And, so, we are also part of a whole, we are part of a collective, and boundaries are what help us navigate that. Boundaries help me understand where I end and you begin. Your emotions are not my emotions. You do not read my mind. You may not even understand how I feel or what I think, and that does not make you a bad person. It makes you a different person. We are different. We are differentiated from each other. And, again, this is both the joy and sometimes the frustration of relationships. 

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I mean, wouldn't it be nice if someone just completely stepped inside your own skin and saw the world as you did? But in a way, also, it wouldn't be nice, it's going to be boring. The reality is there's beauty in the different parts. There's beauty in the whole, in the harmony, in our relationships with other people. Your perspective helps me understand my perspective. 

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Even our differences; even where you see something slightly in a different way than I do. When we have that conversation it's like "I don't see it exactly as you do, but that was helpful to me because now I understand my own perspective a little bit better. And, now, I hope you understand your perspective a little bit better." This is Psych 101. This is foundational. And when you think about all these problems we're having in our world today. 

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It all gets back to this fundamental reality that there's a me, there's a you, and we are different. We have different perspectives. We have different experiences. 

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We have different lived realities. We have different ways of interpreting both our internal world and the cues that are coming at us from our external world. And the beauty of a relationship is we need each other to arrive at increasing degrees of truth, of reality. 

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I do not have the full take on truth, on what is real. I need your perspective to help me enlarge my perspective. You need my perspective to help you enlarge your perspective. This is the beauty of relationships. We need to be firmly rooted in our own perspective and how we are seeing the world, and confident enough in that to understand I also need to hear your perspective. Your perspective is going to help enhance mine. 

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It's not going to take me over; it's going to help me see the truth, and to see reality, and to see what's going on more realistically, more honestly, more accurately. This is the way God made us, and boundaries are what help us delineate those differences.

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And this comes from the work of Bowen. Bowen believed that healthy boundaries are essential for individuals to develop both a clear sense of self and to avoid getting caught up in what psychologists call enmeshment. Which means, "I lose track of myself and, so, I just take on your identity."

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And we see this happening in relationships. When you don't have a strong sense of self, you start to just like what other people like. There's a movie, from the '90s, with Julia Roberts, it's called Runaway Bride and you see this played out in that movie. Where she just takes on the identity of all her different fiancé. And then she ends up getting to the altar and she freaks out because she's like, "I don't even know who I am; I've just taken on your identity." And it's a funny, cute romcom, but the truth is it happens to us. If we don't have a sense of ourselves. 

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We just take on the identities of the people around us. And then the other extreme is also true, where we just are so full of our own perspective. This is where we get into narcissism or counter-dependent, where we don't care what anybody else thinks. We just don't care because it's just all about me. Neither of those extremes is healthy.

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Healthy boundaries help us delineate relationships where you get to be you, I get to be me. And then together we get to negotiate a way forward that's more beautiful, that's more whole. That gives us, together, a combined, a shared experience of reality that's actually more complete.

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So in this work of setting healthy, internal boundaries with emotions, with parts of ourselves, we're really getting into this interoception. And, again, so many of the people I see, especially women, this is where we struggle. The internal life, the contents of our own souls are foreign to us in so many ways. We don't know how to read the cues that are coming to us from inside our own souls. So this work of establishing internal boundaries is exactly the same as that of external family. It's this family of parts that you have inside of you. 

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And, oftentimes, emotions are the best first line of how we begin to understand we have a part of us. It's like, "Oh, there's that anger. There's that sadness that I can't shake. There's that fear." These are connected to parts of us. 

They're our first window, our lived experience, of these parts of us that we need to begin to get to know so that we can differentiate from these parts of us. They are not all of who we are and establish these healthy boundaries. 

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So these different emotions can exist within healthy boundary lines, within our souls, because we need these emotions. None of them is bad. We need them, but we need to be able to navigate through them. So that they stay within healthy boundary lines, within our souls.

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I want to just pause here and remind you of this beautiful truth, that God is the originator of boundaries. And just to underscore this idea that healthy boundaries are not a negative, they're not a bad thing. Sometimes they're frustrating and it's hard work, both internally it's hard work, and externally it's hard work. But if you think about the creation story, the very first thing that God did was to establish boundary lines. He delineated day from night, land from the sea. He engaged in the process of naming and differentiating different things, one from the other.

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These boundary lines are part of the created order. They're pre-fall, if you will. There's this beautiful harmony, this order, that God creates out of chaos. And this is exactly the same thing that happens in our families, in our relationships, we create order out of chaos. And it's the same thing that happens inside our souls. We begin to create order out of chaos, by participating in this work of naming and delineating the parts of our soul. 

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And just think about it, I want to cast a vision here for a second. What an amazing feeling it is if you've glimpsed this, even, in your family, in your marriage, in your friendships, where the boundary lines fall in pleasant places. Where everybody involved is thriving as individuals and as part of the collective. Where as an individual, who you are, your identity, your talents, and your preferences are honored. And you are also deeply invested in honoring the talents, preferences, opinions, and needs, of the people around you.

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It's such a beautiful feeling. You have those glimpses in your family when everybody is okay. And they're just being their beautiful, individual selves and at peace with each other simultaneously. This is the hope, this is the design, and we have lots of ruptures in our families, even, in the healthiest of families. The goal is not perfection. 

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But when you get that glimpse of, "Oh, this is so cool when it works." When we're just in sync together. When we're all just thriving, this is a picture of healthy boundary lines. And it's the same inside your own soul. Where it's not the absence of some of these emotions, but there's just this being at peace with. 

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There's being at peace with the different parts of yourself and you're just thriving, and you're good, and you're at peace. And it's not because you're just happy, there's other emotions involved there. And you're also at peace with the different parts of yourself, with the different parts of your own story. Even with some of the hard parts of what's happening in your life. This is the work of naming. This is the work of healthy boundaries for your soul.

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Let's get into fear and anxiety. These are two of the most common emotions. In fact, fear is the most common emotion mentioned in the Bible. Which is very interesting because a lot of folks write to me and feel like they've been shamed for feelings of fear. 

That there's a lot in the Bible that says it's wrong to feel fear, which I'm going to debunk today in this episode. And then we get at anxiety, which is a cousin of fear, but they're not exactly the same thing. 

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Anxiety is the most commonly reported mental health concern globally. Globally. It's just so common. So many people deal with anxiety and we don't really want to feel anxious. These are not emotions we want to have. And, yet, I would maintain, I would set forth before you today, that these are part of our God-given design, they're not bad.

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The goal is not to eradicate all anxiety and fear, at least, on this side of heaven. We need these emotions to survive. We want to get them within healthy boundary lines. Let's start with anxiety. Anxiety is a normal and often healthy emotion. Everyone experiences it, at some point in their life. It's a feeling of worry or unease about something. It can become intense, or excessive, or maybe long-lasting. 

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It might start to interfere with your day-to-day activities. That's when we start to talk about an anxiety disorder, where if for a prolonged period of time beyond what is considered quote-unquote "Normal". Your anxiety is inhibiting your day-to-day functioning. You might need to get on medication. You might need specific therapeutic techniques. This is very common, it can happen for a wide variety of reasons. I'm not going to go into that today. But at its baseline, anxiety is actually a normal emotion that all humans experience.

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It helps keep us safe. There are things in the world about which we should be a little bit anxious or even a lot anxious. Same as sadness. There are things in the world about which we should be sad. There are things in the world about which we should be angry. 

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Anxiety is no different. It gets problematic when it gets extreme and it starts to take us over. But in a healthy amount, within healthy boundary lines, anxiety can signal the presence of a real fear that needs your attention. It can inform you when you are overwhelmed, when your mind or your body is overwhelmed. It can protect you by warning you about things that might go wrong. It can alert you to danger. It can remind you that you are tender, that you are a sensitive soul, and that you are not a machine. That you are a human being.

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Anxiety tends to be future-oriented and creative. It tends to think up all things for you to worry about. Things that may or may not actually have a bearing on your current reality. It tends to try to protect you, anxiety is a protector. When we talked about those managers, firefighters, and exiles, anxiety tends to be a manager that's trying to protect you. It's trying to keep you safe. 

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And, oftentimes, when it gets extreme it can keep you from facing the real fear, that actually needs your caring and can be almost a distraction, by stirring up all this worry about things that don't really need your attention, don't really need your worry. And keeping you from the actual fear, the vulnerability, that actually does need your attention. 

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So anxiety functions as a protector. Fear, on the other hand, comes in as that exiled vulnerability. Fear tends to be focused on a specific present concern. Anxiety tends to step in when we have an untended fear. 

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So I want you to think about that, for a second. An example I like to give about anxiety is that it just tends to be all these floating distractions. It's like, "This could happen." And it's like that game of whack-a-mole at the fair. It's like, "This could go wrong." It's just all this stuff going on in your mind. 

And, sure, any one of those things could go wrong, but it's completely missing the point of the root of the issue, almost, always. Which is one of these basic primal fears, which tend to be along the lines of, "I'm going to be rejected."

"I'm going to be abandoned."

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"I'm going to fail."

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"I'm going to make a fool of myself."

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"I'm going to be alone."

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These existential fears are usually at the root when all that anxiety kicks up. All that internal chatter, "What if?"

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"What if I'm going to be alone?"

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"What if nobody's going to love me?"

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"What if I fail?"

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"What if the floor falls out underneath me and everything falls apart?" Which is a fear of losing control. There's a lot of that underneath anxiety. And it's fascinating, to me, that distinction that so often all of that worry really goes right back to one of these really basic existential fears. Of "I'm going to make a fool of myself."

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"I'm going to be alone."

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"I'm going to be rejected."

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"I'm going to be abandoned."

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"The floor is going to fall out."

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"I'm going to just spin out, no one will be there."

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And, so, much of this goes back to attachment wounds. To our childhood, to being made fun of. To the feeling of being alone, when someone did leave us. So much of these very deep-rooted fears go all the way back there. And when we can get to the root of them and go, "What is really the worst thing that's going to happen? Well, somebody might not like me."

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"Well, someone might walk away from me."

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"The ceiling may fall, right?"

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"The worst case might happen. I might lose someone to something." And here's the thing when we can get to the root of the fear and go, "That might happen." It's not brainwashing yourself. It's not telling yourself those things might not happen. Sometimes the hard stuff happens. Listen, I've been a therapist for a long time. I've also been a human for a long time. Sometimes the hard stuff happens, I'm not going to try to tell you otherwise. But what I will tell you is when you get to the root of that fear and you go, "That hard thing happens, I'm not alone."

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And you can start to face that fear. And you can start to resource that fear. And you can start to get support for that fear. And, then, you can start to be brave. We can't be brave if we don't have fear. We're not human machines, we're human beings. 

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When we get to the root of our fear, there's an opportunity to go, "What do I need to be brave? What support do I need? What assistance do I need? What reassurance do I need from God, from the people around me? What help do I need to ask for, to be brave in this situation?"

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Because this situation is kicking up all my anxiety. My anxiety is just telling me, "Red alert. Do not go there, this is only going to end badly. All these things are going to happen." But I need to do this hard thing, whatever it is. 

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And, so, then, you get to the root of your fear, which is vulnerability, "I am terrified, I'm going to lose everybody I love if I do this brave thing."

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"I am terrified, I'm going to make a complete fool of myself. I will be a complete failure."

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Whatever the fear is, "I'll fall apart." Anxiety often thinks it's keeping us together. Because anxiety is activating your nervous system, which keeps you in that fight mode, so it's energizing. And it's like if your anxiety steps back, just a little bit. If you get just a little bit of distance from it. You don't understand that feeling of not having that activated nervous system, that can feel very foreign, initially. And that's another fear that anxious protectors will have.

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"Who will you be without me?" Anxiety will say, "I've been your best friend since you were very young. I've been there for you." And it's not untrue, and that's why we want to extend compassion and befriend these protectors. They have worked hard to help us survive. 

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And, so, I'm already getting into the five steps here. But when you begin to focus and name anxiety, "There is a part of me that is anxious about this." And you differentiate from it, and you name that. It's just creating this cacophony inside of all the things that could go wrong and it's not helping me anymore. 

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And you begin to focus on it, and you name it, and you sense where it is in your body, you get an image of it. And, then, you befriend it and you thank it. And you say, "Man, anxiety, you have been trying to help me all these years. You've been trying to be a friend to me." And, so, you don't shame yourself for it, but you differentiate from it.

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And you say, "You know what, anxiety, I need to ask you to take a step back." And then you find out, "What are you afraid will happen, anxiety, if you were to take a step back?"

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And you'll sense a sense of, "Well, what will I do? Anxiety is how I show up in the world. It's how I protect myself. It's who I am."

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What if it's not? What if you could get just a little bit of space from your anxiety, and tap into that spirit-led place inside of you and discover other parts of you? Oftentimes, there's an angry part of you that is much more equipped to take brave action. Anger's a little bit braver than anxiety. Sometimes there's a part of you that needs to grieve. And then, also, there's this fearful exile that simply needs your presence, not all your scenario planning.

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That simply needs you to say, "It's okay to be afraid. You're frightened, it's okay this is scary. But let's make it a little bit scary. Let's resource ourselves compassionately. Let's get ourselves the help that we need, so we move this into a little bit of afraid versus giant afraid. So that we can actually take some brave action." 

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It takes fear to have courage, and our anxiety is a little bit nervous about that. If it keeps us distracted, if it keeps us just worried, we may not actually get to that place of grounded courage. That says, "This is a little bit scary and I can be brave. I can be brave." And when anxiety is held within these healthy boundary lines, it'll let you do that. It'll be like, "Okay, it makes me a little bit nervous. I'm not sure I like this but okay." 

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It doesn't necessarily go away altogether. And I want you to hear me say that fear and anxiety don't, necessarily, go away altogether. We need them to survive. But when they're contained within healthy boundary lines. And the anxiety dials it down just a little bit and says, "Okay, I'll stop just throwing out at you all these landmines. All these things that I'm worried about."

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Take a deep breath anxiety is rooted in the nervous system. We've got to take that deep breath and calm the nervous system. We don't analyze our way out of anxiety, typically, that just adds more fuel to the fire. Instead, we have to breathe our way through anxiety. We have to take deep breaths. We have to ground ourselves in our body. We have to become more aware of our physical surroundings.

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And, then, we come into contact with that vulnerability inside that says, "Yes, I'm afraid. I am afraid this is going to be hard. This is going to be scary. This person might not like this. This is going to feel foreign to me. This is uncomfortable to me. This is new for me, I don't usually do this, but I'm going to be brave."

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And suddenly we're tapped into that calm, clear place inside where fear is there and, even, anxiety is still there a little bit. We can still feel its energy fluttering off to the side, but we're tapped into our God-given selves. We're tapped into the best of who we are, and we start to lead ourselves through it. And we start to take one brave step at a time. And we've got some healthy boundary lines. We've dialed down our anxiety to a dull roar. It might still be there, but it's no longer taken us over.

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We've connected with the fearful part of us. We've honored it. We've even validated it, yes, it is scary, It is scary to do this brave thing. To say no to this relationship. 

To take on this new project that you're terrified to take on. You're not sure if you can do it. You're afraid you'll fail, you'll just completely be annihilated. These fears are so existential, "We'll be alone."

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"No one will ever love us." We validate that part of us. 

We say, "It's okay, I see you. God sees you. We're here, it's okay. Put your hand over your heart. All right, let's take it one brave step at a time." And suddenly you're leading yourself, those parts of you don't need to go away. They do need to learn to let you lead them, not the other way around. 

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I want to touch briefly on fear in the Bible. I hear from people almost every day, struggling with the fact that they felt shame about their fear. Shame about their anxiety. And I just want to be really clear that this is not a biblical understanding of either fear or anxiety. 

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In fact, we see fear all over the Bible. Some of the greatest heroes of our faith were very fearful, were very anxious. Moses is probably the one that is the most common. You just see a lot of anxiety, a lot of fearfulness, in Moses. He didn't want to step up and lead when God called him to do it. He was fearful.

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Some people think when he talked about having a speech impediment, that he may, in fact,  have had a stutter. That he may have had a hard time getting his words out. Maybe he had a fear of public speaking, I don't know. 

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But what I do know is that he was fearful and God didn't shame him for that. God honored that it was real, it was true, and He named it. God brought him Aaron and He said, "I'm going to resource you. I'm going to get you support. I'm not going to ask you to do this alone." And He brought him, Aaron, his brother. And He said, "Aaron's going to help you." And there's a lesson there for us that we don't need to feel shame in our fear.

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When Jesus shows up with people and says, "Do not be afraid." It's not a shaming thing. It's not a "What's wrong with you? Why are you fearful?"

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It's a, "I see your fear and I'm here with you. I see your fear, I get it. I see it, let's name it, let's call it out. There's fear here and I'm with you." There's a reassurance. I love this, where Jesus says to His followers in Luke chapter 12, "I'm speaking to you as dear friends, do not be bluffed into silence or insincerity by the threats of religious bullies. True, they can kill you." He's not trying to brainwash them. 

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"Yes, they can hurt you, sure, but then what can they do?" There's nothing they can do to your soul, your core being.

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"Don't be intimidated by all this bully talk." He says, "You are worth more than a million canaries." In verses six through seven. "Don't be afraid of missing out you're my dearest friends. The Father wants to give you the very kingdom itself." Verse 32.

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Jesus assumes that His followers will be frightened by very real threats in the world around them. That they might be intimidated by bullies. That they might be fearful of going against the crowd, of losing people, of being rejected. These were real fears. 

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He didn't try to pretend like they weren't. He brings their fear out into the open, He names it. And when we name without shame, fear has a way of losing its power, same with anxiety. When we name without shame, "Yes, there you are, anxiety, I see you there. I'm going to take some deep breaths. I'm going to ground myself. I'm going to ask for some support. I'm not going to shame myself for this."

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When we shame ourselves for things, it kicks up even more tension, even more chaos, inside our souls. When we name, we start to tame. That's what Dan Siegel says "To name is to tame." It helps bring relief to these parts of us that gets so anxious, so fearful, and so worked up.

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So here we're going to go through the five steps. If you deal with a lot of anxiety, a lot of worry, whatever degree it is focusing on it simply means to name it. This is what it is; naming without shame. When you focus and you befriend, you're simply saying, "Yes, this is a part of me. A part of me worries a lot. A part of me feels anxious a lot." 

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I just named that. I just bless that part of me. "You know what, sometimes I don't like it. And you know what, I'm going to forgive myself for that, for the ways I've beat myself up for that. Because you know what? This is also a beautiful part of me. This is a part of me that's sensitive. 

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This is a part of me that wants to be prepared. This is a part of me that likes to plan ahead. That likes to be equipped to deal with uncertainty. This is a beautiful part of me." And, yes, sometimes, does it get out of hand? Yes. Yes, it does and that's okay, that's when we just name it to tame it. Not to shame it. We just name it to say, "Oh, yes, there you are, old friend, worry, old friend, anxiety, I see that you've flared up."

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That's a cue; what are we afraid of here? And then name the fear; "I'm afraid I don't have what it takes."

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"I'm afraid I'm not good enough."

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"I'm afraid I'm going to be alone."

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"I'm afraid they're all going to hate me."

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"I'm afraid I'm going to be a fool." Let's just name it; "You can be here too." And you start to just name the different parts of your soul, and they start to soften, they start to relax.

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Again, this isn't magic, sometimes this can take years. If you've had years of struggling with anxiety, with fear, this doesn't just happen overnight. But you start to focus and you befriend, and you just bless these parts of you. You just bless them, God sees them. God does not shame you for them, and then you invite God in. And you say, "Hey, God, here we are again, here's that anxiety."

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Not to magically take it away. We can pray from that anxious part of us. Those are these Hail Mary prayers where we're like, "God, please, please, please." And almost it's activating to your nervous system. "God, please, take this anxiety away." We're praying from that anxious part of us. This is a little different; when we name we befriend, and we say, "There it is."

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And, then, we get a little distance from. And, then, we say, "God, you see that anxiety. Help me take a deep breath and connect to that deep place inside where the Holy Spirit lives. 

Where there's calmness in my nervous system. Where I'm embodied. Where I have feet on the ground. Where I am in touch with the body you gave me. Where maybe there's another person here who reminds me, 'I'm okay.'"

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This becomes a form of prayer. It's a deep breath prayer of "You see the anxiety, too, God, and you don't shame me for it. 

You help me resource myself through it in, sometimes, very practical, concrete ways." And then we unburden, what are some of these old messages that the fear underneath the anxiety still tells us?

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Things like, "I'm just not worthy; I'm not good enough."

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"I'm going to be alone; I'm going to be abandoned."

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"No one will ever want to be with me."

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"I'm going to be a fool."

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"No one's ever going to love me."

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"This is just all of who I am."

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These are some of those fears. "I'll just always be this way." We just name them, again, not to fix them, not to rationalize our way out of them. But to just name them and then unburden them. What if? And this is where that beautiful  what-if question comes in, "What if I am worthy?"

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"What if God does love me, no matter what?"

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"What if, even, if someone leaves, I'll be okay?"

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"What if I'm stronger than I think?"

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"What if I'm more courageous than parts of me believe?"

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"What if I'm more anchored in goodness, in truth, in beauty, in God's kindness, than I really feel?"

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"What if it's really going to be okay?"

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"What if I'm not alone?" What if? You don't even have to convince yourself of it at this point. Just what if? This is how you begin to unburden.

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"What if that part of me that, so long ago, started to believe that no one would ever bother with me? That people will always leave me. What if that part of me could unburden that belief, find freedom, and find the healing that that's not true? And what if I was worth people staying? And what if I'm still worth people staying?"

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And you know what, even if they don't stay, in this case, there will be someone who will stay. There will be. There will be someone who will stay. This is the way we start to unburden, and we get to the root of that fear. It's brave to face these fears. It's so brave. And don't do this work alone. If you've been dealing with a lot, and you've been holding a lot in, don't do this work alone. Get someone to come alongside you, a therapist, a coach, a spiritual director, a small group, a dear friend. But just get to the root of that fear and just name it. 

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And here's the thing, it may not go away entirely, but you're going to resource it. You're going to reintegrate that fear and say, "Guess what, fear? Now you get to be a part of me that reminds me that I need support. I need resourcing. This thing that's hard for me to do is scary. 

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It's hard for me to get up on a stage and speak to a room full of people. And because it's hard for me and because I've been wounded there before. Because someone made fun of me in the past, I'm going to get you support, fearful part of me. I'm not going to make you do it alone, I see you. And I'm going to ask someone for help. And I'm going to learn what I need to help you stay calm when I go do this brave thing.

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I need to say no to this person. I need to break off this relationship. And it's really scary to a part of me because it brings up all my old attachment wounds and I feel like they're going to leave me. But you know what, fearful part of me, I see you in that and I'm not going to shame you for that. And I'm going to get you support for that. 

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And, so, guess what, we're going to come up with a plan; where I'm going to talk to my therapist before I schedule that breakup. So I get you the support you need. I'm going to talk to that friend right before and right after that breakup or I'm going to journal right before and just let you fly free with all of your fears. And I'm going to honor and witness all of your fears, and I'm going to let you have your say.

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And then we're going to close the journal. And then I'm going to pick up the phone and make that hard call, and we're going to do it together. We're going to do it together. So you don't have to go away, but I'm not going to let you dictate the decision."

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Do you see how this starts to become the healthy boundary lines inside your own soul? You begin to create more spaciousness inside for your spirit-led self, for the best of you. For this God created you to start to kick in and lead you in freedom, and in truth.

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This is a process of internal reconciliation. You're reconciling with parts of yourself. You're no longer at war with your anxiety, at war with your fear. You're not trying to get these parts of you to go away or just leave you. Instead, you're reconciling yourself to them.

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You're going, "This is a part of me. This is a part of my story. And I'm going to be reconciled to the fact that I'm someone who sometimes deals with some anxiety, deals with some worry. I'm someone who has these fears from time to time. I'm reconciled to that. I'm at peace with that." Which doesn't mean resignation; it means I'm at peace with that. Which means I can lead myself through it with courage. I can lead myself through it with courage. 

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These parts of me are no longer my enemies. Instead, they're my cues; "Oh, my goodness, I've got to ground myself in my body. With anxiety in particular, I've got to take some deep breaths. I've got to slow things down, and I've got to be brave. I've got to be brave when it comes to facing this fear."

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And I love this quote from Howard Thurman, who was a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and he said it this way about reconciliation with the parts of ourselves. He said, "The wildness is gentle doubt of a personality at war with itself."

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When we stop being at war with ourselves and we start to reconcile with these parts of ourselves. And just name them, and bless them, and befriend them. 

And name them before God and invite God to be with them. Not to get God to magically make them go away, but to let God help us lead them. We start to gentle our way out of the wildness, out of the chaos, and we start to know ourselves. We start to understand ourselves, and we start to say, "Okay, this is a fear that I have."

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Listen, just recently, I got a question from one of you about a fear of public speaking. And I thought to myself, "Well, isn't that ironic?" I have that fear and I publicly speak all the time, and it kicks up anxiety inside of me. It doesn't go away. But I've learned over time what resources I need to help me be brave when I do it. 

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And it is a delight and a joy to honor that fearful part of me. And not be at war with it and say, "Oh, you get to be here what do we need? Here's what we need before, and here's what we need after. And I am so proud of you that you showed up so bravely to let me do that hard thing." And suddenly I'm at peace with myself. I'm not trying to get rid of these parts of me that also make me who I am, and they make you who you are. 

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If you have these fears of getting up in front of other people. These fears of saying no to other people. These fears of trying something new; that's a little bit out of your comfort zone, don't eradicate that part of you, bless it. And see what it needs to help you be brave. We don't get these opportunities to be brave, to be so proud of ourselves if we don't first honor the fear.

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Do you ever feel like a part of your soul is trapped in the past, holding you back from fully embracing the present and moving forward? Pain, fear, worry, or even bitterness can weigh heavy on our hearts and minds. This is a common experience for all of us at times. In today's episode, I guide you through a 5 step process of healing and growth. We'll discuss how to mend the parts of your soul that are causing you distress.

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Here's what we cover:

1. 5 Steps to healing painful emotions

2. How to overcome criticism, shame, and judgment

3. 4 Questions to grow in self-discovery

4. A surprising way to pray throughout the day

5. Why parts of us struggle to experience God's love

Remember, this journey is a process, not a one-time event. With the right tools and guidance, you can learn to make peace with the parts of yourself.

Be sure to pick up your 3 free Boundaries for Your Soul resources here.

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Thanks to our sponsors:

• This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp-- Go to www.betterhelp.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 10% off your first month!
• Organifi- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
• Brooklien-- Go to Brooklinen.com today and use code BESTOFYOU to save!

Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

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

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Resources

• Get 46% off Boundaries for Your Soul & The Best of You here.‍
• Inside Out Movie Trailer
• IFS Institute
• Find a Christian IFS Therapist
• Episode 39: Boundaries for Your Soul—How to Navigate Your Overwhelming Thoughts & Feelings
• "A part of you was left behind very early in your life: the part that never felt completely received. It is full of fears. Meanwhile, you grew up with many survival skills. But you want yourself to be one." -Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love
• Anatomy of the Soul, by Dr. Curt Thompson
• Mindsight, by Dr. Dan Siegel
• Matthew 11:28-30
• Luke 15:4
• Resources for support

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Transcript

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Alison: So last week, in episode 39, I walked you through a map of the soul. And we talked about how parts of the soul, any one of these three categories, whether it's your manager parts that won't stop working, won't stop pleasing, won't stop perfecting. Or if it's your firefighter parts that won't stop shutting down or numbing. 

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Or if it's these exiled parts, these more painful emotions right. If you're noticing in any one of these categories and don't worry too much about the technical terms. 

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We talked about what happens when any one part of you gets out of balance. When any one part of you starts to take you over in a way that is leading to behaviors, or feelings, or relationship patterns that aren't good for you. 

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And, so, today, I'm going to walk you through a five-step process of getting curious about the parts of your soul. This is a way of becoming your own inner detective. And just as you care for your own children, if you have children. Where sometimes you have to just really pay attention. You go, "There's something going on with my child. I don't really understand what it is, but they're not behaving as they usually do or they seem off emotionally."

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And you have to become a detective; you have to start paying attention, asking questions, showing curiosity. You don't want your child to shut you out or push you away if you go in too hard, especially if they're older. If you're parenting young adult children, you have to be really tenuous in how you get curious about behaviors or emotions that you see that are concerning to you. But you just start paying attention, and you're trying to find your way in. You're trying to get to the root of what's going on. And it's the same process inside your own soul. 

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These parts of you need you to attune to them just as your children, in your real life, need your attunement. And, so, there are two keywords I want you to think about, as we walk through these five steps today. 

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Number one is getting curious. Showing curiosity toward yourself, and it's curiosity versus criticism. "I wonder why I just lashed out at that person."

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"I wonder what's going on, that I'm still feeling the pain of that interaction."

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"I wonder what causes me to always say yes when what I really want to say is, 'No, thank you'". Do you hear the tone of that curiosity? Versus how we typically talk to ourselves which is, "What is wrong with me? I'm so stupid."

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Or "Why did I just do that again?" And you can almost feel the tension when you start to come down on yourself. Your whole body gets tense, and your nervous system, then, gets activated. But when you show curiosity. It's asking a question; "I'm curious, I wonder what happened? There's no shame, it is what it is. I may have to go back and apologize, sure. But really, I'm just curious about what was going on inside of me." It's such a powerful way to be with yourself. 

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And then the second word is Compassion. To show compassion toward yourself. Sometimes that can be a little harder for people, especially, if you're doing things or behaving in ways or feeling things you wish that you didn't. It's like, "Really, I'm supposed to be compassionate toward myself?" But the truth is this we heal in the context of compassion, not in the context of criticism, shame, and self-judgment. 

And, so, those are two words I want you to think about throughout this episode. Get curious about what you notice inside yourself. Even as I'm talking, even as you're listening to this episode, just get curious. And also consider showing yourself compassion. 

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Here are the five steps. These are based, again, on that model of therapy called the Internal Family Systems Model of Therapy. They're a condensed, consolidated version that my co-author Kimberly Miller and I came up with for our book Boundaries for Your Soul, number one is focus. Now, this may sound counterintuitive to most of you. "Why would I want to focus on a negative or a painful emotion? Don't I want to not focus on it?" 

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But here's the thing, when you focus on an emotion, an unwanted feeling, a negative thought, about somebody else or about yourself. What you're doing is what psychologists call differentiating from it. When you become aware of an emotion and you name it, it's almost as if you bring it out in front of you. You get some distance from it. Instead of that emotion just taking you over and being what you feel. 

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So if you're noticing envy, for example, it's an uncomfortable feeling. And the minute you go, "Oh, my gosh, I'm dealing with envy right now. I don't like it, but that's what that is." You've just named it, and you've got a little distance from it. 

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When you differentiate from an emotion, you move into a different part of your brain. There's an actual, really, interesting neuroscience to this. Where your prefrontal cortex comes online and you begin to observe the emotion that you're having. So suddenly you're in two parts of your brain. You're not just in your amygdala, having all the feelings without that prefrontal cortex online to observe it. 

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So suddenly you're in two parts of your brain. You're observing, you're witnessing the emotion you're having. "Oh, my gosh, I'm angry." But that anger is now out in front of you, it's not taking you over. 

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"I think I'm sad. There's a little bit of loneliness there." Again, notice that curiosity, "I am aware that this thing is going on." Suddenly, it's inside of your conscious awareness, which is such a healthier place to be when it comes to your emotions. 

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When you're not aware that you're having that feeling, those emotions are operating. They're just operating outside of your conscious awareness. And who knows what you're going to do out of that emotion because they're there, but you're not in charge of them. But the minute you focus on the emotion. You name it, you bring it out in front of you. You might write it down, you might visualize it, and that's part of that guided audio reflection. 

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If you download that from my website, it's a process of sometimes people visualize the emotion, whatever it is. Whether you just name it, or write it down, you are becoming aware of it. And that awareness is key, suddenly, you're in charge of that emotion, not the other way around. You can see it more clearly. 

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When you focus on a painful emotion or a negative thought and get curious about it, you can give that part of you the leadership, the wisdom, or the care that it needs. And if you think about a doctor or a surgeon who's working to heal a wound. How can she heal that wound, that's acting out in some way, or causing pain in some way, without first finding it, focusing on it, and seeing it clearly? 

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So this step of focusing, not to hyper-focus on it, but to put your attention on that uncomfortable, that negative emotion, or that thought that's causing you frustration. "Oh, that's what that is." We're just naming it, no shame, no judgment, just naming. "I cannot stop comparing myself."

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"I am worried. Worry has really gotten the best of me."

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"I'm angry. Anger is really close to me right now." This is all part of focusing. It's naming without shame the emotion or the thought that you're having. Now, if you're having trouble naming or focusing on the thought, or the feeling that's causing you a problem, or that's trying to get your attention, here are some questions to help you. 

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"Where am I feeling this emotion in my body?" For example, do you notice your mind feeling like it's going to explode? Or do you notice tension in your body? Do you notice it in your heart? Like your heart is aching. Do you notice it like a pit in your stomach? Just getting a cue of how you're experiencing this emotion or thought in your body, can help you identify it better. 

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Another question you can ask yourself is, "If this was an image, what would it look like?" For example, you might feel it's just like fire coming out of your brain. That's how I feel when I'm angry, it's just like my head feels on fire. Or you might notice swirling, spinning thoughts, just going, going, going. Like a tick, tick, tick that you can't stop. And that's a form of worry or a form of overthinking. 

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You might notice yourself just feeling blank inside, like a blank wall or a brick wall. There are all sorts of ways that God has gifted us with imagination. And this is where our right brain, creativity kicks in to help us understand what's happening in our hearts, minds, and bodies. 

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And, so, if you have that sense of the way that you experience that emotion, or that thought as an image, it's a super helpful way to get clearer about it. This is how God made us. We're creative, we're imaginative beings. And, so, don't shy away from using your imagination to capture how you feel. 

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Another way is to think, "Is there a thought or a belief that you can focus on?" So instead of it being an emotion or a feeling in your body, is there a word, or a thought, or a belief that is taking you over? Maybe it's a negative opinion about somebody else. Maybe it's your own inner critic that has a very clear phrase that it says to you, to try to beat you up or get you to do what it feels like you should do. 

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And then as you're focusing, consider if this is a familiar emotion. Has it been with you for a long time? Often these parts of us go all the way back. We store past events and our responses to them, our emotional responses, our physiological responses to them, in our implicit memory. 

And, so, you may not be consciously aware of why you are responding the way you are, in this current situation. But it's possible that a part of you is stuck in the past, and this situation is taking you back to an old memory, almost, outside of your conscious awareness. 

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And, so, it's very familiar to you. You're like, "Oh, yes, this is how I used to feel in 6th grade when this thing would happen." And that's great information to understand this part of you better. Becoming more aware of your thoughts and feelings is a skill you can practice every day. It leads to what psychologists call emotional regulation. As you can acknowledge and name what you feel, just as simple as "I feel angry."

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"I feel jealous."

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"I feel sad." Just that act of naming begins to soothe the brain's limbic system, and it helps you gain access to other regions of the brain. You can check out Dr. Curt Thompson's work in The Anatomy of the Soul or Dr. Dan Siegel's work in Mindsight if you're interested in the neuroscience of this. 

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But just naming what you're feeling and beginning to pay attention to it without shame, in and of itself can bring some relief. This is a practice. 

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Step number two is Befriend, you're going to befriend this part of you. This is the step that is really hard for some people, especially, if you have a really active inner critic. Because often when you give these parts of yourself this attention, you will notice that you don't like them. "I don't like that part of me."

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"I don't like feeling that way."

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"I wish I didn't have that."

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And, so, we have to address this internal resistance because, as we talked about, we don't heal in the context of criticism, including inside our own souls. So as you focus on this emotion, this thought, this part of you that you're working with. Ask yourself how am I feeling toward it. And if you notice that there's a lot of criticism, a lot of inner clamor, like, "Aah, that is just argh, we do not like that part of me." 

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Pay attention to that and turn your attention toward that other part of you, whether it's an inner critic, an inner skeptic, an inner naysayer, or whatever it is, or even maybe you feel sad. Maybe you've noticed that there's an angry part of you and then you feel sad about feeling angry. Just notice those other feelings and there's this really cool thing, and it sounds too good to be true. 

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But as you begin to do this work and you notice, "I really just need to get curious and try to understand this anger and beating myself up about it is not helping." And, so, you can ask that part of you, that part of you that is so used to beating you up, "Could you just give me some space?

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Could you just take a step back? 

I'm trying to get curious about this anger because, to be honest, if I can get curious and show myself some compassion, I'm going to be able to arrive at a better solution. So you begin to retrain the critical part of yourself, the skeptical part of yourself, whatever it is. To give you some space to lead yourself from that spirit-led place within. Where you can be present to yourself without judgment, without shame. 

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So this step involves extending compassion toward yourself. And this is a step that is so important to all of this work. You're beginning to retrain how you connect with yourself and beginning to notice those critical voices. 

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It's a process of noticing, and naming, and then pivoting to, "Can I be with this part of me, with this emotion, with this negative belief, with compassion? Is it possible that showing compassion to my anger, even to the parts of me that carry shame? To the parts of me that carry insecurities. To the parts of me that are fearful; is it possible that if I show compassion toward myself in this moment, it might actually lead to a better way?"

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These parts of us tend to soften in the context of compassion. And I want you to think, again, about parenting your own kids, if you have kids. And if you don't have kids think of a niece, or a nephew, or a child, they need you to connect with them before you can help them change. Connection precedes, change. 

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If you just walk into a room full of kids and start telling them what to do, they might do it in a minute, but they're not going to like it. But if you walk in and you connect, "I see you there, I know your name. I'm here with you. I'm not going to shame you. I need to understand you so that we can figure out a better way." You're authoritative, don't get me wrong, but you're not shaming, you're not judging, you're not criticizing. You are connecting before you try to change the action. 

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So this is the model for how we want to start to be with the parts of our own selves. "It's okay, I get that you are terrified. I'm not going to berate you for that any longer. We're going to take a deep breath. We're going to own it. We're terrified, this is going to be really hard. I don't even know if I can do it. It's okay, I see you. I see you, it's okay. You get to be here at this table. There are other parts of me that are a little bit braver and that are going to take over now. But I'm not going to shame you or berate you that you're scared." 

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And then suddenly you start to notice that part of you soften. "Oh, okay, if I can be a little bit afraid, then I won't take you over." And you start to create these healthy boundaries. "You can be here, fear, but I'm not going to let you drive. I'm not going to let you take me over." And you start to connect to yourself in a more compassionate way. 

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< Music >

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Step three, and this is for folks who have a faith background. You invite God to be with you and, especially, to be with this part of you. We are emotional, thinking, and spiritual beings, and there are tremendous spiritual resources available to us. But so often when we are in pain, when we are fearful, when we are angry, we feel like we have to solve that on our own. Instead of naming what's happening and inviting God to be with us in that. "God, I am angry. Can you be with me in that anger?"

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And, so, often, so many of us have been trained that we have to make that go away. That if God shows up, well, then we can't be angry. But I want you to consider Jesus and the different emotions that Jesus had. I'm not convinced that God is there to shoo those emotions away. What I believe is that God comes in and helps us gain clarity. "You know what? You're angry for a reason, and I get that."

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"I'm angry with you."

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"Let me carry some of that anger so that you don't go off and do something stupid. So that we can be wise in how we act on behalf of that anger, but I'm with you. I'm with you."

Or "I see that grief and I grieve with you, and I can carry some of that grief with you. I'm not here to take it away, or shame you, or tell you that you've got to spiritualize that grief. That somehow your grief is a sign that you don't have faith. Ah-ah, I'm here with you in it. I grieve, too, for those atrocities. They break my heart, too, and in fact, I can carry some of that grief with you so that it's not so heavy for you."

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This is what I think it means when Jesus says, "My burden is light." It doesn't mean we don't still carry some of that weight. But He comes along and He makes those burdens a little lighter because we're not alone in them any longer. We're not alone in those painful emotions. 

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So we invite God to carry some of that with us and help us be wise in those emotions. And this is where the heart of this work, as a spiritual practice, comes to light. In my own life, I often first take inventory of the parts of my own soul that need my attention. So in the morning, I might just make a list, "I'm tired, this morning."

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"I'm defeated."

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"I'm excited."

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"I really don't want to pray. I just want to get going with my day, today, because, I think, I can handle it today." 

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Whatever it is that I'm feeling I just make a note of it, and then I invite God into that experience. This is prayer. This is prayer, "God, I just wrote this down on a piece of paper. Would you come look at what I wrote down on this paper, too? Would you help me?" 

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Not so that I can shine it up and be all set, so God will be happy with me because that's what so many of us have been trained to do. But so, "God, this is just real right now. I'm fighting every instinct to just bypass my quiet time, today, and hit the ground running because I got so much to do and I'm just going to get it done on my own. So could you just own that with me and see that that's where we're at?"

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And God may not magically take that away, maybe that's the best you do for prayer that morning. But that was a prayer and God's now in it with you, and you're not alone. And these parts of us begin to trust God in a different way. "God, there is a part of me that is so worried about my child, about my spouse, about this friend, about this situation. I am so worried, God, I can't stop myself from worrying, and I'm not going to shame myself for that. 

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But, God, I know you see that worry and I'm going to lift that worried part of me up to you. And I'm going to ask you to help other parts of me that you've made. The parts of me that can just take a deep breath, the parts of me that can put one foot in front of the other, to be emboldened, to be strengthened. And I'm going to ask you to help me nurture that worried part of me that's actually getting in my way, but she's scared, God. 

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So come be with all of me, today. Here it is, I'm not hiding anything from you. I've just bared my soul open, you see it all, it's all there anyway. Here it is, it feels like a mess, this morning. 

Here it all is, God, let your light shine into every corner of my soul, you see it all. You see it all. I don't have to fix it to come to you, here it is, God. Here's my heart laid open bear."

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Right there is a little glimpse of hope. A little glimpse of you are not alone. A little glimpse of relief. A little glimpse of, paradoxically, wholeness. You're not hiding anything. And, so, this work becomes a form of prayer. It becomes a spiritual practice, and you start to pray for parts of yourself as you would pray for a close friend. 

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For example, maybe you're aware of the chronic people-pleasing part of you. This part of you that just sneaks in and you can't make it stop. And, so, you get a tiny little bit of differentiation from it. Just a tiny little ability to go, "Yes, when I go into this situation, I am just going to turn it on and I'm going to start pleasing everybody, and I'm not even going to be able to stop myself. 

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God, I just want to name that. I just want to name that. Would you help me take a deep breath and get just a little bit of space, some healthy distance, from that part of me? I'm not going to be able to solve it altogether. She's been with me a long time. But what if I could just take a deep breath, with your help, before I say any yeses, today. I'm just going to try to take a 10-second pause before I do any perfecting. When I worry, I'm going to just take a deep breath, God, and invite you to be with that part of my soul."

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Again, this isn't magic, this is a practice, but, over time, as you practice bringing each of these parts into your own conscious awareness, you begin to differentiate from them inside of your soul. You begin to name them; you begin to get curious about them. You begin to show compassion for yourself because there's a reason these parts of you are there, almost, always going all the way back to childhood, in ways that you've been conditioned by the past. 

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As you begin to get to know them, you begin to build trust with yourself. And in partnership with God's Spirit, these parts will begin to soften. They will begin to trust you to lead them, not the other way around. 

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Now, I want to talk briefly about steps four and steps five. We go into great detail in Boundaries for Your Soul. So if you want more resources, especially, on this unburdening part, I would refer you to chapter seven. There are a bunch of lists in chapter seven, of Boundaries for Your Soul, on a lot of the fears and burdens these different parts can have. So I'm going to just touch on this here. Those first three steps are really where I want you to focus because that's sort of the entry-level of this work. 

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But some of these parts of us carry burdens from the past, and these relate to these wounds from childhood. These burdens are extreme beliefs or feelings that parts of you have taken on, as a result of painful experiences. When you're a young child you can't process complex events. And, so, at some point, you interpret events in ways that maybe were not helpful. And, so, parts of your soul hold on to these beliefs all the way into adulthood. 

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So some examples are, these are common examples. Let's say your parents are divorced. "My parents got divorced, so I'm destined to get divorced, too." This is sort of a common belief burden that can lurk in the corners of our soul. 

Or "I have to take care of others to earn their approval, there's just no way around it." I talk a lot about this in The Best of You, in chapter two, this fawn response. Where a rational mind, in the present day, knows this isn't true. But parts of us really believe, all the way back in our implicit memory, there's this memory stored of, "I have to take care of other people otherwise I'm not worth anything."

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And, so, there's this weight, deep inside, that's really hard to change. And your rational brain won't, necessarily, change it. You might notice a vague sense of distrust of others, that goes back to childhood wounds, of being taken advantage of, of being hurt. You might notice deep-seated, self-doubt that doesn't really make sense anymore because you're doing okay in your life. You've figured some things out. But there's a part of you that's stuck back in childhood. 

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I see this all the time, those childhood years are really formative. Parts of us get stuck back there and they take up these burdens. And, so, again, rationally, you may understand that you don't need to feel this way anymore or think this way anymore. But this part of you still does get stuck back in childhood. And to further complicate matters, parts of us get mixed up about God, too. Developmentally, young parts of you don't know the difference between, say, a caregiver and God. 

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And, so, when a parent, or a church leader, or another adult disappoints you or misrepresents God, a young part of you picks up this idea that God is not trustworthy. That God does not care about you, that God has abandoned you, and it makes sense. Because those first initial caregivers are our first glimpse of what God is like and, so, there's this wound. 

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And, so, part of you is like, "I believe that God loves me. My theology tells me that's true. The Bible tells me that's true. I believe God is good, but there are parts of me that just cannot experience it." And whenever I hear that; I wonder, is there a wound? Is there a burden that goes all the way back, where somebody did not give you the care that you needed? That did not give you that lived experience in your body of what goodness, of what love, of what somebody being present to you feels like? 

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And, so, how could you know that when that part of you never got that? And, so, it can be frustrating because you're like, "I believe this. I wish I could experience this." And it's pretty common. And, so, if that's your experience, please know you're not alone. You might pick up beliefs like, "God is a harsh taskmaster who is there to punish me."

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Or "I have to be perfect to earn God's approval."

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These parts pick up these messages and they can go really deep. And, again, it can be frustrating when parts of you know this isn't true, but you just can't let go of it. And, so, this step of unburdening is all about connecting to these young parts of us, hearing their stories, where they picked up these ideas and inviting them to be in this new reality. Where you, and God, and a few safe other people can help them understand a different experience of love. 

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A different experience of whatever that mistaken belief or burden they've picked up. In this case, healing is experiential it's not just cognitive. There is a reparative experience that happens as you connect to a deep part of yourself, to a part of your story, that never got heard. 

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Henri Nouwen talks about going and bringing, home, parts of us that got left behind. And this is the work of deep healing. And this is work that I would encourage you not to do alone. You can do this in the safety of a therapist's office, especially, if you've got trauma or deep, unhealed pain. 

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You can do this with a small group, with safe people, where you learn to bear witness in a safe, healing way to each other's stories. But this is a really beautiful step. I want you to know about it because if you're someone who relates to what I'm saying, there is a way for you to repair that part of your story. 

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And then, lastly, finally, this fifth step of integration. I love this step because this is the step where these parts begin to take on new roles. And, so, you've begun to connect to each of these parts. We all have a lot of different parts, but we all have our go-to parts. In Boundaries for Your Soul I talk about three-key parts, for me, the people-pleasing part of me that just smiles and nods. And it's always, "Okay, oh, sure, I can help."

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"I can do whatever you need."

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"I'm good."

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"Never worry about me." This part of me that's just so familiar to me. I've had it forever and I work with her all the time. And then there's a numbing out part of me, an avoidant part of me, that is like a brick wall of avoidance, that just will not go to the painful places. And in my own journey of reclaiming long lost desires, long lost dreams, that I wasn't invisible, in fact. That I'm not always okay, and that I also have needs. 

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And, so, these are three of my go-to parts that I've gotten to know, I've gotten curious about. I've spent a lot of time showing compassion, understanding their stories. Doing this work with other people, and in the privacy of my own heart and with God. And this integration piece is so beautiful because it's where you start to see each of these parts take on their original God-made role.

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And, so, in my case, that part of me that just smiles, and nods, and is so pleasing, and makes everybody else happy, and just to a degree where I start hurting myself. There is a kindness to that part of me. There is a gentleness to that part of me who, very so genuinely, never wants to harm a soul. Who would, if she could, and was God, which she is not, take on the burdens of everybody around her. She is the highly empathetic part of me and these are good qualities. 

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But she has learned that she does not get to take charge of the controls of my soul because when she does, it is not healthy. She takes me way beyond my own limits. Which ends up causing harm to me and also causes harm to other people, when I can't follow through because I have human limits. And, so, empathy is a great example. 

Like joy, if you watch the Inside Out, a Pixar movie, which is good quality but cannot take over the seat of your soul because there's also got to be a place for sorrow. 

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In my case, I've had to learn to let her be kind but within healthy boundaries. And that means she has to make place for parts of me that are also suffering. Parts of me that need empathy. Parts of me that need to be seen by other people. 

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And, so, these parts of me have learned to take on new roles. They let me lead them. The part of me that is just a brick wall of avoidance. Sometimes that's helpful, when I do need to muscle my way through something because I'm on a deadline. But that part of me is no longer allowed to operate outside of my conscious awareness. 

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And, so, that part of me becomes the part of me that reminds me, "It's time to shut down in a healthy way."

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"It's time to play."

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"It's time to do something silly."

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"It's time to do something besides work." 

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Each of these parts is now reintegrated. They each play an important role, as I have, more deeply, more skillfully, more wisely, learned how to lead the parts of my soul and I would not be able to do this work apart from the God who made me. It's paying attention to each of these parts with the help of God's always kind, always present, always patient, always truthful presence to help guide me. 

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And as I become more whole, more of all of these things, and can lead myself wisely, I have expanded my capacity to show up for other people in healthy ways and within healthy boundaries. The two things go together. The healthier the boundary lines fall within my own soul, the healthier I show up with other people. This is a spiritual practice that leads to emotional, mental, and spiritual wholeness. We will never arrive at perfection. 

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Do not get me wrong, I still get out of balance. But so much more quickly, I know how to course correct, and I know what to do. I know how to find the part of my soul that needs attention, and I've built trust with these parts of myself. This is my prayer for you. Start by getting curious. Just getting curious, you don't have to fix anything. You don't have to heal anything. Just start getting curious about the parts of your own soul. 

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Start showing compassion for what you notice. Which might even mean starting by showing compassion for that inner critic, who works so hard to keep you in check. And, lastly, invite God into this process every single step of the way. The good shepherd who left the 99 to go find that one lost sheep, and who wants to do that very same thing inside your own soul, He cares about every hair on your head, and He cares about every lost, or wounded, or hurting part of your soul. 

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< Outro >

Thank you for joining me for this episode of The Best of You. Be sure to check out the show notes for any resources and links mentioned in the show. You can find those on my website at dralisoncook.com. That's Alison with one L- cook.com.

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Before you forget, I hope you'll follow the show now so that you don't miss an episode. And I'd love it if you'd go ahead and leave a review, it helps so much to get the word out. 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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We all need a map to our soul. A way to understand the emotions, the wounds, the areas that feel broken. That's what I love about the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of therapy-it provides a map that everybody can incorporate into their daily spiritual practice. It's your guide to navigating overwhelming thoughts and feelings.

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Today on the podcast, I'm walking you through this map, including the following:

1. A picture of wholeness

2. The cost of not tending your inner life

3. A map of the parts of your soul

4. The 3 types of parts we all have

5. How Jesus relates to each part

6. What it means to have healthy boundaries inside your soul

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Thanks to our sponsors:

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

Hiya Health- 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

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Resources

• Get your 3 free resources here!
• Get 46% off Boundaries for Your Soul & The Best of You here.
• Inside Out Movie Trailer
• IFS Institute
• Episode 4: What Do I Need To Know About Trauma?
• Episode 35: Change is Hard–Why We All Need to Detox From Unhealthy Dependencies From Time to Time
• "Try thinking about this place as the core of your being-your heart, where all human sentiments are held together in truth. From this place you can feel, think, and act truthfully."  The Inner Voice of Love, by Henri Nouwen
• "We need to have spaces inside ourselves where we can have a feeling, an impulse, or a desire, without acting it out." Boundaries, by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend
• John 14:16-17
• Matthew 23:25
• John 8:1-12
• John 5:1-18
• Resources for support

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Transcript

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Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this episode of The Best of You podcast. I am so glad you're here, and I am so excited to start, today, this brand-new series on Boundaries for Your Soul. It's all about turning overwhelming thoughts and feelings into your greatest allies. 

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It's really all about emotional and spiritual wholeness. It's a deep dive into the center of your God-made soul. It's the heart of everything I do.

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In fact, as you listen to these episodes today and, especially next week, you will hear so much of my approach to this work of becoming emotionally and spiritually whole, in partnership with God's Spirit. We have so much to cover here. 

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Next week I'm going to walk you through five steps to identifying and understanding a part of your soul that needs your care, that needs your attention. And then we're going to take a deep dive into different emotions that can be tricky and challenging and hard for us. So it's going to be a great series.

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And, so, before we get started, I want to point you to some resources I've provided, that will help you as we move through this series. So there are three free resources on my website. One is a PDF - Map of The Soul. We're going to go through that map today. 

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There's a PDF devotional that takes you on this whole journey, and there's a guided audio reflection. This is a way for you to practice this framework, that I'm going to teach you today and next week, with me guiding you through it. Some people learn more through visualizing. Some people learn more through reading, and some people learn through hearing. And, so, I've got three ways for you to engage this work. 

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They're all at my website, it's dralisoncook.com/ifsbundle. Those three resources are there for you for free. You will also find there a link to get my first book Boundaries for Your Soul, which is a detailed overview of this approach. As well as my book, The Best of You, which also alludes to this approach. You can get both books together for the price of 1, which is 46% off.  The link to that special discount bundle also there at dralisoncook.com/ifsbundle. 

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As always, if you are someone who is dealing with trauma, or unhealed pain from the past. If you have emotions that you haven't really looked at, and they're pretty deep. And you have a sense, "Ooh, that's going to be scary." We've talked about this in the episode on trauma. Please do not journey alone. 

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There is a list of all kinds of resources; including support groups, counselors, IFS therapists who operate from a faith-based perspective. All of those resources are at my website dralisoncook.com/resources. Including thoughts on how to go about finding a therapist. So please don't take this journey alone. Find those resources at dralisoncook.com/resources.

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So I want to start off, today, by talking about wholeness. Wholeness is this thing we want. We want to feel whole. We want to feel aligned. We want to feel at peace with ourselves, is another way, I think, of thinking about wholeness. It's things coming together. It's harmony. It's a sense of being undivided. It's integration. It's a good feeling. 

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When we feel united inside of ourselves, we feel at peace with the decisions we're making. We feel at peace with our past, we feel at peace with the people in our lives. This is the picture of wholeness that we all want. 

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The problem is that we tend to think of this idea of wholeness as the absence of conflict, as the absence of tension, as the absence of challenges. We tend to think of it as this magical place we'll arrive. When we just are suddenly at peace with ourselves and with the world around us. 

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And if you think of a puzzle, this is the best metaphor I can think of, where there are all these pieces laying around. And you have to take your time to, painstakingly, take each piece put it together in its proper relationship with the other pieces, to create this beautiful picture. The pieces matter to the whole. If you lose some of those pieces or you can't figure out how to put certain pieces together, you miss out on that whole. There's a process, there's work, to be done inside our souls to get to that picture of wholeness. 

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And, so, this is what I want to walk you through, today, is the pieces. We first have to understand the pieces, the parts, of our souls, in order to bring those parts of our souls together to create this beautiful wholeness. 

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This harmony, this way of being in the world that is a little bit lighter, a little bit easier, a little bit more calm, a little bit more clear. Where we're really operating out of all of who we are, in a way that is emotionally and spiritually integrated. This is a lofty goal, that's why we're doing a six-week series on it. This is a lofty goal. 

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So today, I want to give you a map of these parts. A framework, a way of understanding the different parts of your soul. Because in order to get to the wholeness, the harmony, the piece, we have to understand the parts. 

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Our interior lives are murky; we can't see the parts of our souls. If you get a broken arm, you know something is wrong, you can see it. You can go to a doctor and point to it and they can help you mend it. But when a part of your soul is out of alignment, or hurting, or broken, or shoved so far aside, that you can hardly even find it. What do you do? It's murky in there. 

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And, so, in my work, I've developed a great respect for an evidence-based model of therapy, that looks at the soul as an internal family. 

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Just as you parent in your own family, right, where every part of the family, every family member has a role to play, every family member is valuable. Every family member needs to have a voice, and then somehow all of these voices have to come together in some sort of semblance of harmony where everyone is honored. It requires a lot of negotiation, right? To help your family to thrive.  Not everybody gets their way. It's how we learn to get along with others, right? We have to learn to negotiate. We have to learn how to speak up for ourselves, and also have to step back to give others a turn.

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In a healthy family, no one individual is taking over the family, but also no one individual is getting shoved aside or not getting heard. It's a lot of work to create harmony in a family.

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And this is the way of your soul, your soul is like a family. 

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Now, if you've seen the Pixar movie Inside Out, I would encourage you to go back and watch that film as you listen to this series. It's a great film. It's a children's movie, but it's great for adults too. And it depicts a little bit of what I mean by these family of parts, these different emotions where you've got fear, you've got anger, you've got joy, this “will” to be happy all the time. You've got sadness, you've got disgusted sort of this eye rolling part, all existing inside the minds of each character. And each one of those emotions, each one of those parts is vying for control of that person in any given moment. And it's a great picture of what happens inside our own souls.

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Now this Internal Family approach that Inside Out does such a great job of depicting is based on the work of psychologist, Dr. Richard Schwartz. Dr. Schwartz, in the early 1990s, came up with this model of therapy, it's called Internal Family Systems. And it's this way of viewing the parts of yourself so that you can lead yourself to wholeness, to harmony. 

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It's an evidence-based approach to therapy. I also view it as a spiritual practice, it's a deeply spiritual approach. 

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And in Boundaries for Your Soul, which is my first book with Kimberly Miller. We combine this evidence-based approach, IFS, Internal Family Systems, with Christian faith and practice. 

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And, so, this is an approach you can use every day, in your life. It's also an approach that people can use, with the help of a therapist, to heal deep trauma, to heal deep wounds, it works for all of us. It's a way of orienting to the parts of our soul, so that we can lead ourselves with clarity, with courage, with compassion. So that we can lead the parts of ourselves wisely.

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The basic premise of this approach is that we're all comprised of parts, and it's pretty simple. If you think about your day-to-day, you can imagine a part of you might be tired and wants to stay home or call in sick from work. Another part of you is saying, "No, we can't do that, we got to get ourselves through it. We got to get to work."

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Right there, you're experiencing some inner tension. Some inner conflict between two parts of you. A part of you wants to go out this weekend, and a part of you wants to stay home. A part of you is tired, another part of you won't let you stop working. 

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We're complex. 

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We're comprised of different parts, and wholeness doesn't come through choosing between the different parts or shoving 1 part aside. It comes as a result of learning to attune to these different parts of you, to pay attention to them, and to negotiate within yourself the best way forward. This is a way of leading the parts of yourself in partnership with God's Spirit

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Now, I know some of you may think, "Gosh, this sounds like a lot of work. It's hard enough to raise my kids, and get to work. And how am I going to do this work of parenting my own soul?" And I get that, I mean, this is the biggest thing that's on my heart. Is to encourage you that creating space for this relationship with yourself is as important as all the work you put into the relationship with other people. And it's a deep, profound part of your relationship with God. 

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Now, here's the alternative, what we tend to do, if we don't do this work, and I have done this, listen, I have done this. I lived my life this way for so long. We do a couple of things; we work really hard to show up well for others, we please, we produce, we perform, we peace-keep, we hustle, we get the job done. We go and then we shut down, we numb it out, we escape. We do whatever we have to do to try to fill up our gas tank so that we can repeat the cycle the next day. Work hard, shut down. Work hard, shut down. Go. Numb. 

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We bounce between those two things, and I've done this, I've lived there, but we end up divided. We don't feel like we're showing up as the best of who we are, and we're not. Because there are parts of us that are being tossed away by the wayside, and this is what I want to walk you through today.

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According to Dr. Schwartz and his model, there are three categories of parts of the soul. The first category is that one; that go, please, produce, perform. 

Get through the day, show up for work, do all the things, get the job done. These are our manager parts. These are the parts of us that protect us by preventing bad things from happening. At least, that's what they think, "We just got to get this done."

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"We just got to keep people happy."

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"We just got to get everything more perfect, and then we'll be okay."

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"We just got to keep putting on performing, making sure no one sees what we're really feeling on the inside." 

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These are our manager parts. These are parts of us that worry and analyze over and over and over when they're not really solving the problem anymore. They incessantly people please, because we're terrified of what other people are going to think about us.

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They're the parts of us that keep working long hours, long after we needed to take a break, they overanalyze, they overthink. They are critical primarily of ourselves.  

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These parts of us think they're trying to help by forcing us, shoving us, criticizing us, berating us to make sure we never let anybody down  or never let anyone else see our vulnerabilities or our areas of weakness.

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And then we get tired because we are not machines. We are human beings. And so this second category of part kicks in and Dr. Schwartz calls this category firefighter parts. They're called firefighters because they come in to put out the flames of pain after you start to feel overwhelmed. They are the parts of us that just wanna shut it all down. They numb, they escape. They indulge in whatever feels good in the moment just to make it through the end of the day.

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These parts are often operating outside of our conscious awareness. If you've ever found yourself mindlessly surfing the internet for hours on end, you can't believe it. When you look at the clock that all that time had passed, they reach for the credit card and just start buying things. When you don't really have the money to spend and might not even need the things.

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These are the parts of us that go to food or sleep or exercise or otherwise good things, but to an excessive degree, that's not healthy. These are the parts of us that  binge  television for hours on end, they can turn toward excessive daydreaming of fantasy life. And these are the parts of us that can also turn toward addictions like alcohol, drugs, pills, anything to put out the flames of pain inside of us.

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And this is the dichotomy. We are working hard, and then we are shutting it all down. We're out of balance. 

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Now, here's the thing, there's a third category of parts. And these are the parts of us we don't often want to face, but they're the parts of us that we need to attune to. That we need to connect to, to bring ourselves back into harmony, and Dr. Schwartz called these parts exiles. 

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They're called exiles because we shove these parts aside. They're the parts of us that harbor shame, fears,  self-doubts and insecurities, our hurts, our wounds,  and our unhealed pain. They harbor feelings of being less than feeling worthless, of being unappreciated, unseen, invisible, alone.

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These are the parts of us that need our care and God's healing the most. But we are so busy managing or shutting it all down, that we don't get these parts of ourselves the care that they need. 

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And as a result, sometimes these exiled parts ambush us. They take us over.  They've been left alone at the corners of our soul where they're not getting the care that they need, and then they can take you over and suddenly you can just be overwhelmed with sadness. You can be overwhelmed with pain. Sometimes we exile anger, and you might find yourself overwhelmed with anger. They come roaring out from where they've been exiled and overwhelm us with the fear, the heartaches, the self-doubt that they carry. 

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We're out of balance and we begin to think of ourselves as only sad or only lonely or only broken, and we lose sight of the whole.

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This is just one part of our story. It's not the sum total of who we are. Your depression, your sorrow, your fears, your anger, your loneliness. Yes, they are real and they are not the sum total of who you are. They are not your identity. And when we get outta balance, these parts of us can start to feel like all of who we are.

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The truth is there are two opposite and equally unhealthy ways of relating to these parts of your souls. One, you can keep them too close to you, right? And you become that one part of you. And that's what we saw in the Pixar movie Inside Out when one part tries to take over. But you can also push these parts of you too far away.

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If you're too close, you risk being overwhelmed by them. And if they're too far, you risk being cut off from them only to be influenced by these parts of you in harmful ways.

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Our job is to learn to lead each of these parts of us wisely.

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Together, these three categories of parts create a whole. None of these parts of you is bad. Please hear me say that. We need the manager, parts of us  that get us up in the morning, that help us comb our hair, that help us clean up the house, or get the chores done and put our best foot forward. But they become problematic when they take over, at the expense of the other parts of us. 

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Same with those firefighters, they are not all bad. We need healthy relief, healthy comfort, healthy distractions, healthy escape. We talked about that in the series on detoxing. The goal of a detox isn't to remove our coping tactics, it's to find healthier ones. But these firefighters can get really problematic, if we are not aware of them, they're sneaky. They sneak in and they get us to just, mindlessly, numb out, instead of giving ourselves the care that we actually need, and these exiles are precious - These are the parts of us that remind us that we’re human That we’re tender, vulnerable, and that we have needs. They remind us to slow down, that WE might be the one who needs our attention:

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I wonder what that loneliness is about. Let’s not sideline it. But let’s also not let it overwhelm us. Let’s get curious about it and talk with a friend about it.

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These are the parts of us that help us identify where we have needs and where we need to learn to speak up on behalf of ourselves with safe people. They are the parts that need our compassion, our attention, our kindness, our patience, our gentleness the most.

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So how do we know when we are out of balance, when a part of our soul needs our attention?

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Well, the biggest cue is when you find yourself doing something at an extreme. You might notice, 

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“Man, I just cannot stop working. I am exhausted. I've worked long past my deadlines. I just can't stop myself. I wonder what else is going on inside of me.”

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OR

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“I cannot stop analyzing this situation. I'm not getting anywhere. It's not helping me, but I can't stop. I need to slow myself down and pay attention. Some part of me might be hurting and this, all this analysis, all of this, you know, mental paralysis is not helping.”

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Or

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“I cannot stop saying yes or pleasing other people. It's like a compulsive need meeting and I can't stop and it's starting to hurt me. I wonder if there's a part of me that needs my care, how can I slow it down to discover what's really going on inside of me?”

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 OR  

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“I just checked out for hours, like I could not get myself to do something.”

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And so you start to become your own detective. We start to pay attention to the different parts of our soul, so we can bring ourselves into alignment. And next week, I'm going to walk you through a five-step process of doing that. But for today, I just want you to begin to recognize these different parts of yourself, and begin to notice when maybe a manager part of you is taking you over. 

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An extreme emotion, like anger, like frustration, like worry, like fear, doubt—a lot of things can serve as a cue to pay attention. It's like a light on that dashboard of your car, when it goes off saying, pay attention to your car.

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Something isn't working quite right. These extremes are an opportunity to get curious. A part of your soul needs your care. Now, remember we talked about this in episode four on trauma. Do not take this journey alone. If it feels overwhelming to you. Bookmark it. Say, “wow, this is something I might need to pay attention to with the help of a therapist or in the safety of community.”

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Now, here's the good news. At the center of all of these parts of us is the place inside you where the Holy Spirit lives. And, so, often we tend to look externally to God to solve our problems or externally to other people. And I talk about that in The Best of You, a lot, in chapters two, three, and four. Where we forget about this internal place inside of us. Where the best of who God has made you to be, your God-given self comes together with the power of God's Spirit to help you lead yourself wisely. To help you lead yourself with wisdom and in truth. 

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This place inside of you, is a place where all of you are comes together with all of who God is to lead these parts of you into wise, brave, action. You have this inside of you, it's the best of who you are. And part of our job, as humans, is to begin to peel back the layers of all of these parts so we can access this beautiful place inside of us, and lead ourselves wisely.

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Henri Nouwen talks about this place inside of us as, "A place of truth, where we hold ourselves together with compassion." 

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Dr. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, talk about it as "A place inside where we can become aware of our different thoughts and feelings.” We can name them without shame, and without judgment, and without criticism. We can just be with the parts of ourselves with compassion.

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Dr. Schwartz called this the “Self.”

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And in Boundaries for Your Soul, we call it, "the Spirit-lead self." It's the place where who you are comes together with God's Spirit, and you can lead yourself well.

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Before we close, I want to give you a metaphor that I really love to describe this process, as well as examples from Scripture. And then next week, we're going to get into a practical five-step process to begin to do this work inside your own soul. Of just paying attention to the different parts of your soul, and learning to lead the parts of you wisely.

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All right, in my experience, both as a therapist and in my own life, I came to find out that we are so often trying to operate in our lives without connecting to this place inside of us. Where God's Spirit helps us lead the parts of ourselves well. And the metaphor that I love is it's like a middle school band. 

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Now, I played in a middle school band and it was chaos. And I want you to imagine this middle school band without a conductor. The trumpets are over there just taking over. They think they're knocking it out of the park. They think they're in charge, but they’re playing too loud. 

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The flutes are playing so quietly or out of tune, you can barely hear them. They're such an important part, but if they’re not led well, you can miss them. 

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And then we got the drums, in the background, and these guys are just having a ball, they could care less about anybody else. They are just beating in whatever way feels good to them, and it's chaos. 

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And imagine a wise, capable, kind conductor steps up in front of the band and begins to slowly, methodically, with such wisdom, such tenderness, such compassion begins to help each of those parts play their role well. 

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Suddenly the trumpets are in key and they're playing at the right tempo, the right volume. The flutes come in and sound so beautiful, adding a gentleness, a serenity to the melody, and the drums are back there keeping everybody on beat. Suddenly, you have a beautiful harmony, and that wise conductor has helped each of those parts play their role well. 

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We all have access to that wise, inner, conductor and that's our job. It's to begin to learn how to show up for these parts of ourselves with wisdom, with gentleness, with honesty, with direction, with leadership. So that we can show up in the world authentically, from all the way down deep inside. 

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So that the insides of who we are begin to match how we show up on the outside. 

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This is the work of becoming more whole. It's how we heal the different parts inside of us. It's also how we show up to be a healing force, for good, in the lives of others. 

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And as you consider these different parts of your own soul, I want you to think about the way that Jesus interacted with three different kinds of people in the Gospels. And I love this because it maps onto these characters inside our own soul. 

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So number one, we see Jesus interacting with the sanctimonious, the stubborn, the self-sufficient religious leaders who thought they could do it all on their own. They thought they knew the right way, and they didn't really need Jesus. They were just going to get it done on their own. 

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And how did Jesus respond to those folks? He often asked them to take a step back. He accused them of shining it up on the outside when the inside remained empty. 

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And then Jesus also engaged with those who were straying; the sinners, the ones who were cheating, who were stealing, who were lying, who were engaged in adultery, and all sorts of things like that. 

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And how did Jesus engage those folks? He did not shame them. He named what was happening and He invited them into a different role. "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." 

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"Your faith has saved you, go in peace." He did not shame them; He gave them a new role.

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  And then, finally, we see Jesus engaging the suffering. Those who were sick, whether mentally, emotionally, or physically. For reasons beyond their control, they have been marginalized by society. And, yet, Jesus invited them to draw closer. He welcomed them in and gave them purpose, "Get up, pick up your mat, and walk." You have value here.

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You matter.

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You are no longer invisible. 

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And here's the thing, we all have a little bit of all three of those types of people inside our own souls. Those sanctimonious, stubborn, sometimes, self-sufficient manager parts of us that just think, "We can muscle our way through and get it done on our own."

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And then we have those parts of us that just are so tempted to stray. Just drown it out in that bag of cookies, in that endless scrolling, in that entertainment, in that alcohol, in whatever it is, that will just shut it all down. 

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And then we have the suffering parts of us that are so weary, so silenced, so invisible, in the corners of our own soul. 

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And Jesus comes in and He helps us reorient our own soul, to create a more beautiful melody. 

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"It's okay, inner critic, you've done your work telling me all the ways i’ve gotten it wrong, today, could you please step back. I'm in charge now, and I know a better way. 

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I don't need to pick up that bag of cookies, that alcohol, that credit card, that numbing. I need to rest, reach out for help, dance, or play or be silly instead, in this moment."

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And, "Sadness, you're welcome here. I don't want you to take me over, but you have a seat at the table. It's okay to be here, you are welcome."

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"Fear, you can be here, too, you don't get to drive. You don't get to take control of this decision. But I see you, you can be here, you can also have a seat at the table."

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And suddenly it's like our inner lives become this grand boardroom, where all these parts have a seat at the table. Our inner critic, our fear, our worry, our sadness, our people-pleasing parts, our perfectionists. 

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We start to honor each one, and the good intention behind their actions, when we are leading from this place inside where the Holy Spirit dwells. Where we can hold all of these parts together in wisdom, and in truth, and lead ourselves into a brave new way forward. This is the work of becoming whole. 

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We start to course-correct with patience and with intention.

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This is the work of taking every part of your soul and bringing it into the light of healing, so that you can begin to lead yourself well with joy, even with some playful energy. You start to delight in parts of you that sometimes make you roll your eyes; you're no longer shaming yourself. You are delighting in the intricacies of how you were made, 

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This is the beauty of healthy boundaries inside your own soul.