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Today on the podcast, we're diving into this question I keep bumping up against. On one hand, we go to church, and we're told you're sinful; you need to repent, you need to die to yourself.
On the other hand, we go to therapy, and we're told you're wounded; you've had trauma. You need to heal, so you can become more of your true self. So which one is it?
In today's podcast episode, we discuss:
1. What is woundedness and how does it impact our behaviors?
2. What is sin?
3. The problem of shame
4. What about "the other side of sin" - the wounds of the sinned against?
5. What about repentance?
6. An application from the Bible
7. A next step you can take
Resources
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Boundaries for Your Soul, by Alison Cook & Kimberly Miller
- Romans 2:4
- The Other Side of Sin, Edited by Andrew Sung Park and Susan L. Nelson
- Luke 22:54-62 Peter denies Jesus
- John 21:15-19 Jesus and Peter
- Resources for support
Thanks to our sponsor Organifi -Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today!
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone, welcome back to The Best of You podcast. Where today we are going to talk about everybody's favorite or not so favorite S-word, and that is this word sin.
So we're in this series on boundaries and the Bible, and we've been talking, if you've been following along these last two episodes. We've been talking about keeping a promise to yourself. About building trust with yourself.
We've been, really, talking about this internal work that we all have to do in order to gain the clarity and to gain the courage, to set the healthy boundaries that we need to set with other people in our lives.
Because, so often, this work of setting boundaries is the result of some form of activation. Something happens outside of us, that stirs up something negative on the inside of us. Whether it stirs up stress, anxiety, frustration, anger, exhaustion, overwhelm, whatever it may be. We begin to feel chaotic on the inside, and we start to think to ourselves or someone else says to us, "It's time to tighten up my boundaries."
"It's time to get some healthier boundaries."
But what I'm, really, trying to do in this series is to go deep on that internal work that's required to, really, ensure that the boundaries we're setting in our external lives, in our relationships with our kids, with our friends, with our family members, with our churches, with the people in our lives, are flowing from that centered clear place inside.
That they're an actual reflection of who we, really, are and what we, really, need. And that requires us getting to know our own selves. It, especially, requires that we get to know our own woundedness, our own limitations, and I talk about this a lot.
That we have to be able to face our areas of wounding. We have to be able to face our own areas of pain, of woundedness, of vulnerability. Because these are the parts of us that are ours to protect, and we want to be sure we're going about setting the right boundaries.
Setting the boundaries, in the right way, that allow for these vulnerable parts of us to get the care they need, primarily, from us and, also, keep those parts of us from those things in our external lives that cause them further pain.
Now, inevitably, this conversation, about our internal terrain. About building trust with ourselves. About honoring our vulnerabilities. About paying attention to the parts of us that are hurting and that are susceptible to pain, that may have been wounded long ago, and that continue to need our protection.
Inevitably, this conversation brings up this question, what about sin?
"You know, Alison, you're telling me I should trust myself. That I should, in fact, spend time building trust with myself. But aren't I a sinner?
How can I, really, trust myself?
How can I, really, keep a promise to myself?
How can I, really, do this internal work of building trust. Of living from deep inside myself when what I, really, am is a sinner?"
These are the kinds of questions that I get. So let's talk about it. Let's dive in. Let's talk about what about sin?
How are we to factor in this idea of sin?
And, I think, some of the reason this question is surfacing so much. And why I've been thinking about it so much, as a therapist, there's, really, within the last 20 years, this whole understanding of trauma. And this understanding of what it means that we are wounded. That we have wounds in our lives, in our bodies, in our souls, and that these places of wounding are vulnerable.
And that there's a reason, sometimes, that we act out. That there's a reason that we behave in certain ways that, sometimes, we wish we didn't. That we reach for our survival strategies. That, maybe, we reach to please others, to earn the approval of others. That, maybe, we look for love outside of those healthy relationships that we've committed to.
Where, maybe, we are inclined to numb pain with drugs, alcohol, shopping, spending, gambling, you name it. We develop these coping strategies, so often, to help us survive. Because we've got pain on the inside.
And this is what this whole trauma-informed approach to understanding the human soul, the human heart, the human body has raised. It's like, "Oh, my goodness, there's a reason I do the things that I wish I didn't do." And, so, on one hand, we go to a church and our church communities, our faith communities, sometimes, our pastors are saying, "You're sinful."
"You've got to repent."
"You were born with a sinful nature."
So we hear that message and we think, "Okay, I'm bad. I should look at all of this in my life as sin. All of this complexity, all of this messiness, all of this brokenness."
But, on the other hand, maybe, I'm going to my therapist over here and my therapist is saying, "This is trauma."
"You've been wounded."
"You've got to learn to heal."
"You've got to learn to become more true to yourself. To become more whole in your relationships with yourself and other people."
So we've got these two conflicting messages. On, one hand, we're told, "You are a sinner. Repent." On the other hand, you're being told, "You are wounded, heal." Which one is it? "Am I wounded or am I a sinner? And how can I trust myself in the middle of all of this?"
So let's start with this idea of woundedness or trauma. Trauma, as I discussed in episode four, you can go back and listen to that episode. There's, also, a whole chapter on it in my new book, The Best of You.
I look at trauma, as I've dived in so much of the research these last 15 to 20 years on trauma. I boil it down to this idea of unwitnessed pain.
These are unhealed wounds that live inside our souls. And these wounds are where we are vulnerable. It's where we've been hurt by other people. It's where we didn't receive the care that we needed. And, in many cases, it's where we've been hurt, actively abused, exploited, abandoned, by the people who were supposed to care for us, who were supposed to love us.
So where we have these wounds that haven't, yet, been healed, that we may not even know about. We're, really, vulnerable. And here's the thing, shame loves to enter in through these wounds. Especially, where they haven't been exposed, yet, to healing. Where they haven't, yet, been exposed to loving compassion.
Shame sneaks in through our wounds and tells us we're bad. It tells us that what happened to us was our fault. It tells us we're worthless, that we're rejectable, that we are unlovable. It tells us there's a reason we were cast aside.
Shame wants to keep us locked down. It wants to keep us isolated. It wants to keep us from the life that God has for us. We're vulnerable where we are wounded. We're vulnerable to more pain. We're vulnerable to being hurt by other people in the exact places where we've already been hurt.
So when we get activated in our adult lives. When someone else does or says something that hurts so badly. It's often a wound, an old bruise that gets touched on, that gets tripped over. And when we're activated, when our whole nervous system, our whole fight/flight response goes into effect, poised to protect us.
That's how God designed our bodies. Where we're vulnerable, we go into survival mode. We sniff out danger, we sense hurt, and we go into our fight/flight response.
We want to fight. We might want to flee. We might also freeze, and some of us move into fawn, which is where we try to please or win over the very people who are trying to hurt us. And I go, again, into a lot of this in episode four of the podcast and in chapter two of The Best of You.
So our wounds are where we're vulnerable. We're vulnerable to shaming messages inside our own soul, and we're vulnerable to hurt from other people. We're also vulnerable to acting out in ways we wish we didn't. So there's a lot of room for compassion here, and this brings us to this conversation about sin.
< Music >
So, first of all, what is sin? Sin is what we do when we're activated. It's a behavior or a posture of the heart. Sin, simply, means to miss the mark, and we talked about this a little bit in episode 21.
But if we're walking down the path of our life and we're in a good place, and we like where we're going. Sin is this distraction; an obstacle comes our way. Someone digs at us. Someone hurts us. Someone might betray us. Someone might ignore, reject, neglect us, and that old wound gets activated. And we're tempted to veer off that path.
We're tempted to go down a road that might not, actually, be in our best interest. Or in the best interest of this life that God has before us. We, sometimes, go off that path. We might even miss the mark in how we respond to that hurt that comes our way. That temptation that comes our way.
On one hand, we've been hurt, that's our woundedness. On the other hand, we have a choice to make out of that hurt. And, sometimes, that choice we make misses the mark, and we might call that sin.
But there's something I want you to hear me say about this word sin. It's a churchy word. It's a word that has a lot of baggage that comes with it. We have to disentangle this word sin. This idea of missing the mark, making a choice that, maybe, isn't in the best interest of the situation at hand of the moment.
We have to disentangle this word sin from shame. And, I think, that's where there's been such a misalignment in so many of the church messages. We've gotten the solution to the fact that every single one of us has wounds. That every single one of us, is going to be tempted to act out of those wounds from time to time.
In many ways, some of us, our whole nervous system is positioned to miss the mark. It's cued up to go into fight mode, and we, almost, don't have conscious control over it in some moments. That's why it's so important to recognize there's no shame in missing the mark. We can name something without shaming it.
We can name the fact, "Oh, my gosh, I missed the mark."
"I lashed out."
"I reached for the booze."
"I scrolled social media for four hours instead of facing my own pain. And, as a result, I neglected a friend or I neglected a responsibility. I missed the mark." We can name that. We can own that. We can honor that without shame. Shame is never the solution. It's never the solution to our wounds, and it's never the solution to our sin. It's never the solution to when we miss the mark.
In fact, if we don't learn how to name when we miss the mark, as a result, so often of our woundedness. If we don't learn how to name when we miss the mark without shame, it's so very hard to heal.
Imagine something with me, for a moment, where do you think we're the most tempted to miss the mark. To veer off the path. To take matters into our own hands. To go into that fight/flight response.
Do you think we're the most tempted to do that when we're in our most confident? Our most alive, our most joyful, our most peaceful selves?
Do you think that's where we're tempted to miss the mark?
It's not. We're the most tempted to miss the mark. To protect ourselves. To cover up, to hide, to manage other people, to hurt someone else, to lash out, to project on someone, where we are the most wounded.
Our wounds are, intimately, tied to where we're the most susceptible to shame. And where we're the most susceptible to shame, is where we're the most susceptible to missing the mark in our reactions to protect ourselves.
That's why we have to be so honest with ourselves about our own areas of wounding. About our own areas of pain. About our own shaming messages and we have to do that work with such tenderness, with such gentleness, with such kindness.
It's a both/and. It's like surgery to the soul. And if you think about a surgeon, you think about a surgeon who goes into those delicate tissues in the heart. They go in with the finest of tools and they're so careful. A surgeon doesn't go in with a hammer. A surgeon goes in delicately, gently, with precision.
When you become a doctor of your own soul, it requires patience. It requires kindness, it requires gentleness. There's no room for shame. Shame would be like going in with more toxicity, to a place in your soul that's already been hurt. It doesn't work.
The path to freedom, to joy, to this life that God has for us, involves clarifying areas where we might miss the mark inside our own souls, and before God. It involves clarifying when sin does show up. When we do miss the mark. When we do go astray, veering off the path. But that work requires us to be gentle with ourselves.
It requires us to learn to set aside the shaming and condemning poison that often accompanies that word sin. And this is why in these last two episodes, I focus so much on this idea of building trust with yourself.
If you're going to be able to set healthy boundaries and forge healthy relationships with your kids, with your spouse, with your friends, with your small group, with a church community. You're going to have to learn to be tender and gentle with your own areas of wounding.
Because, listen, other people are going to trip over your wounds. They're going to bruise you. They're going to hurt you. Even the best of people, the worst of people are sure going to do it. But even the best of people are going to do it, and this is where we're vulnerable.
We're vulnerable to hurt and we're vulnerable to missing the mark. We're vulnerable to acting out to protect ourselves in ways that miss the mark. And here's what's so delicate about this conversation, and I want you to hear me say this.
I'm not saying you don't get to protect yourself where you're vulnerable, you do. But you've got to build that trust inside of yourself so that you know, exactly, what you need. So that when you do carve out that path in front of you where you are shielding yourself from harm.
From toxicity, from poison, from even the best of people who will hurt you, you are doing so from a spirit-led authentic place.
You're not weaponizing boundaries. You're not lashing out. You're not punishing. You're not retaliating. You're not putting more toxicity into a toxic situation. Instead, you are tending to yourself with care and compassion. And, as a result, you'll no longer put yourself in harm's way.
I want to now touch on this idea called the other side of sin. And this is a book I read years ago in graduate school, it rocked my world. It's called The Other Side of Sin: Woundedness from the Perspective of the Sinned-Against. It's edited by Andrew Sung Park and Susan L. Nelson. And I want to read a quote from the introduction. It says this, "Demanding repentance of sin from the abused, the hungry, and the humiliated is not good news but absurd news."
And I want you to hear this, especially, if you're someone who's been abused, marginalized, oppressed, shoved aside, in any of these big T trauma ways. So many stories in the Bible, show us how God moves toward those who have been the sin against.
And, so, this is another angle on the conversation on sin that we've got to be really careful about. I do a lot of work with folks in recovery programs. Many of these folks having come out of prison. And when you hear back stories behind people's addictions, even their crimes, you begin to understand, very quickly, why they turned to these behaviors. There's a reason.
There's a reason why parts of us do whatever they can do to survive. And we've got to be, really, careful, even if we're naming something as missing the mark. That we not serve that up with a side of shame.
Now, listen, we're still responsible. We still have to take responsibility for our own lives. For our own woundedness, for our own traumas, for our own healing. We have to take responsibility. But remember that we do not heal in the context of self-shame, self-criticism, self-judgment. Nor do we heal in the context of others shaming us, others judging us, others criticizing us. We heal in the context of compassion.
Finally, I want to touch on this note of repentance. Another big, gozy, churchy word. Repentance, simply means to turn away from. We repent from sin, meaning we turn away from missing the mark. We turn away from that detour on the path.
But here's the question, if we're turning away from something, what are we turning toward? We're turning away from, maybe, old ways of coping. Old ways of surviving. Old ways of getting by. Old ways of making it through the day.
We're turning away from that, sure, but what are we turning toward?
We're not turning towards shame. We're turning toward the work of healing. It's turning away from shame. It's turning away from the ways we've learned to cope, from those fight/flight responses that have been so embedded in our nervous systems.
It's turning away from the ways we learned to get love, to seek approval in other people. It's turning away from the ways we learn to numb, to shut ourselves down. It's turning away from the ways we've rejected those tender parts of us, that need our love the most.
Turning away from missing the mark is not turning towards shame, it's turning toward the work of healing. It's turning toward those wounds that are underneath all of those behaviors. So we have to be careful about these words that we use. This word sin, especially, when we're talking about those who've also been sinned against. Which is, in some ways, a little bit of all of us. We've all missed the mark and we've all been wounded.
So we have to be careful about this word sin. Especially, when we consider this idea of the sinned against, which is a little bit of all of us.
We've all sinned. We've all missed the mark, we've hurt other people, and guess what? We've all been sinned against. We've all been hurt. We've been wounded. And this is why I think when Paul talks about it Romans 2:4. He says, "It's God's kindness that leads to repentance." It's God's kindness that leads us to turn away from missing the mark and toward the work of healing.
Now, at the beginning of this episode, I posed this question; am I wounded or am I a sinner?
Am I someone who's been wounded in need of healing or am I a sinner in need of repentance?
And the answer is both. We are both wounded. We've been hurt. We need to heal, we need to face those areas where we have pain.
And, guess what, we also all miss the mark. We go toward reacting, responding, moving toward things that miss the mark. That are not toward the best God has for us.
We've all been hurt by others and, at times, we will all hurt others. This is so important to face in ourselves, honestly, it's both/and. But here's the thing, in order, to face ourselves, honestly, both our areas of woundedness and the areas where we miss the mark. We have to learn how to build trust with our self. We have to learn to face ourselves, honestly, without shame.
And this is what I wish we heard more about in faith communities, "You are not bad."
"You are not a mistake."
"God called you good, beautiful, well-made." Before sin entered in. Before shame started to sneak in with its messages.
You have to learn to recognize how beloved you are, how beautiful you are to God. How tender God is with your areas of woundedness, and with those areas where you have missed the mark. That's the foundation from which we can all begin to heal. We can all begin to participate in God's work of healing.
I want you to consider, for just a minute, the story of Peter denying Jesus in Luke chapter 22. Peter had sworn his allegiance to Jesus. But the minute Peter grew frightened, the minute people asked him, questioned him. People who he perceived to be dangerous said to him, "Do you know Jesus? Were you with Jesus?"
He went in, my guess is, to some sort of fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. His nervous system got the best of him. He was frightened and he immediately said, "No, I don't know him. I wasn't with him." He betrayed his friend, he lied. And, as a result of that, yes, he missed the mark. He betrayed his friend and then he wept, when he realized it.
He felt the pain of what he had done. He faced it. He faced the pain of what he'd done. Of course, he was frightened. It was dangerous. It was a dangerous situation. We can put ourselves in his shoes and empathize and understand, what Peter did in that moment and why he did it. Those guys were scary. They had power over him.
So two things were true, he was terrified and he missed the mark. And here's the thing, how does Jesus respond to Peter when he reconciles with him in John 21, he asks him a question, "Do you love me, Peter?"
He asks it again, "Do you love me." A third time.
"Do you love me?"
He's pushing into Peter. He's pushing into that bruise just a little bit. He knows what happens, he's not bypassing the reality of what Peter did. But then what does he say to Peter as they reconnect?
"Feed my sheep, Peter." He gives him a job to do. He honors him, He respects him. He doesn't shame him, there's no condemnation. There's reconnection and that's how we heal. That's how we turn away from missing the mark, and we turn toward the work of becoming the best of who we are.
< Music >
So what do we do? What's our practical takeaway, today?
When you feel activated, hurt, disappointed or angry, these are all feelings that tempt us to want to miss the mark. These are all feelings that can ignite our fight/flight/freeze and fawn responses.
These are all feelings that can ignite shame, we want to get out of that hurtful situation. We might even be tempted to weaponize a boundary, when we're in that place. Which means we might want to punish someone. Retaliate, take justice into our own hands, or hurt ourselves, punish ourselves, or turn away from the healing God has for us.
When you feel that way, I want you to begin to think about what would it mean to turn away from that instant reaction? Take a pause and ask yourself; what am I turning toward?
I want turn toward the work of healing. I've got a pause. I've got to take that U-turn we talked about in last week's episode. I've got to notice those protectors, those coping strategies, those parts of me that want to go for it. That want to fight, that want to freeze, that want to fawn.
I've got to notice them inside my myself first. I've got a journal about them. I've got to name them to a friend without shame. I've got to get curious about those protectors because underneath is a wound, is a tenderness, is a vulnerability, and I've got to get there first.
Not so that I can let that other person off the hook. But so that I can begin to grow in, truly, getting myself the good things, the true help, the true healing, the nourishment that I need. We tend to get hurt and we tend to get hooked where we have wounds.
So these are invitations to get curious, to take that U-turn and get curious about our own wounds, about our own areas of pain. This allows us to grow in caring and nurturing ourselves deep inside. This is how we build trust with ourselves. This is how we learn to establish healthy guardrails. Healthy boundaries from a calm, clear, brave place.
We don't want to stay stuck in the toxic cycle. We don't want to meet toxicity with toxicity. The goal is to tend to that vulnerable part of us deep within because when that part of us is well cared for. We will have the strength, the courage, the clarity, and the conviction to advocate for what we need from the people in our lives.
We'll have assessed the situation. We will know how to honor ourselves and advocate for ourselves in a way that is wise, and that's the path to freedom. That's the path toward this brave and beautiful life that God wants for each and every one of us.
On this week's podcast we're talking all about building trust with yourself. This *internal* work is so important to the work of setting healthy external boundaries. I share with you an example from my own life and walk you through a process of connecting more deeply to what's actually happening inside of you. As you connect more deeply to yourself, the boundaries you set with others will flow from a calmer, clearer place within.
Here's what we cover:
1. A promise I made to myself and how it went
2. What to do when you're activated by someone or something
3. The importance of understanding your own areas of wounding
4. What is a You-Turn?
5. Meeting & honoring the protective parts of you (before acting out of them)
6. How to get to the root of your own hurt (before taking action)
7. Learning to find your voice from that place of clarity deep within
Resources
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Boundaries for Your Soul, by Alison Cook & Kimberly Miller
- Episode 21: Making and Keeping A Promise to Yourself
- Matthew 7:5
- Resources for support
Thanks to our sponsor Organifi -Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today!
Thanks to our sponsor BetterHelp -Go to www.betterhelp.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 10% off your first month!
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone, I'm so glad you're here for today's episode of the Best of You podcast. Thank you so much for your comments, reviews, and the feedback you've been giving me. I so appreciate hearing from you, and I'm so curious to hear how it went for you as you made and kept a promise to yourself last week.
I promised that I would follow up on you, and here I am making good on my promise to you. What did you notice?
What surprised you?
Were you able to keep the promise?
What would you change about the promise?
So I made a promise to myself, and the promise that I made to myself was related to someone I'm struggling with, where I'm noticing activation. And what I promised myself was to journal about that every day over the week, and I did.
I still haven't arrived at the action that I'm going to take, but I do notice a little relief inside. Because I gave myself permission to journal about the situation.
I didn't want to act out of impulse, out of anger, out of, even, hurt. And I gained a little more clarity just through the process of journaling. That taking that time, not just taking time to shove it aside or numb it, but taking the time to journal about it. To check in with myself, to think through it from different angles:
"What was, maybe, this other person thinking?"
"What maybe was my blind spot in it?"
"Was there anything that I missed? Oh, but even if I did, I'm still hurt."
So all of those things that took me a week. Just a week of journaling about an incident. I still don't have clarity. I'm still not exactly sure how to proceed in the situation. But I kept a promise to myself that I wasn't just going to brush it under the carpet. That I, also, wasn't going to act out of impulse. I'll keep you posted, but that was what I did this week.
So I want to just give you that example. Sometimes keeping a promise to yourself doesn't, immediately, magically, solve all of your life's problems. But it does get you a little bit of that self-trust we talked about last week. You start to trust yourself.
I do trust myself in this situation. I will know what to do when it's time to do it, and right now I'm in the process of building trust with myself. Again, I'm not going to brush it under the carpet. I'm also not going to act impulsively, or angrily, or rashly. I'm going to give it time. I'm going to consider all the different parts of me.
I'm going to consider the situation, so that when I do act, when I do speak up on behalf of myself, it will be from a place of clarity. I will have built trust with myself. So on your own journey, I will be curious to know what is the promise you made to yourself?
And check in with yourself after a week and just notice. What do you notice?
What surprised you?
Are there any tweaks that you want to make? Or do you want to just keep doing that same thing for another week?
So, in my case, this promise that I made to myself, I'd been hurt by someone. I'd been disappointed by someone, and I ended up asking myself over the week, "Did I do anything wrong in this situation?"
Because it was complicated. I had a lot of emotions around it. I was very angry, I was very hurt, I was very disappointed. But I kept circling back to, "Did I do anything wrong?" And that's a pretty normal thing for most of us, "Did I do something wrong?" Now, here's the thing, if we haven't noticed. If we haven't done the work to bear witness to our own areas of woundedness, it's really hard to get honest about that question.
And, so, I wanted to examine myself. I didn't want to take the other person off the hook, I want to be clear here. I was very clear that I was disappointed, but I had enough trust with myself that I could hold two things true.
One, is I'm, really, disappointed and I am not going to put myself in harm's way anymore, that was true. And because I trusted myself that I wasn't going to put myself in harm's way anymore. It opened up a part of me to say, "Is there anything I need to look at in myself, in this situation?"
And, so, I went back and reviewed the facts from that angle. Again, not letting the other person off the hook, not exposing myself to more harm. I didn't do this with the other person, inside myself.
So I still felt hurt. I still felt disappointed, but I did become aware of the fact, "Oh, my goodness, this trampled on a wound that I've had for a very long time." And I began to realize it's possible that this other person's actions were either not intentional or if they were intentional, they didn't know that this is an area of deep wounding for me.
So two things were true. I was both hurt, disappointed, angry, and I became aware of that familiar old area of wounding in my own life. That's why I needed time. That's why I needed to journal. That's why I needed to get clarity. Because I was aware there was an activation inside of me that was bigger than the actual violation. The activation was bigger than the violation.
And, so, while I want to speak up for myself. While I want to set a healthy boundary, which we're going to circle back to at the end of this podcast episode. I could tell that I, also, first, needed to tend this area of woundedness that goes way back. Goes way back before I ever met this person, and there's no way they have any idea about this wound.
So, again, that's not to minimize the hurt. That's not to minimize the disappointment that I felt, but it did help me to build trust with myself. I could look at myself and say, "Oh, I had a big, capital B, reaction to a minor offense."
I could look at it more objectively. There was an offense, but it wasn't a egregious offense. And that's going to change how I speak up on behalf of myself, how I end up setting a boundary.
So I want you to hear me say that when you have a big reaction. When you have a big hurt, when you have big anger. When you have big resentment, that may well be valid, and you may have been hurt by someone else.
So I want you to hold two things to be true. But I also want you to learn how to look inwardly at our own areas of wounding, because that's where we're the most susceptible to pain, to shame, and to act out in a way that isn't in our best interest.
In this work of establishing healthy boundaries in our external life. We have to go so deep inside ourselves. Because when we've been hurt, when we've been violated, when there's been an offense against us, we always have to really get honest with ourselves,
"Did this person do something wrong?" And, in many cases, they did. A lot of times we're activated because something, indeed, wrong happened.
"Did they do something wrong?"
"What was the wrong thing they did?" And, also, "What is the wound inside of me that, that tripped over?"
"What is that bruise, that unhealed bruise, that they just pushed on?"
Whether intentionally or unintentionally, we need to hold both of those things intentions. Sometimes they did something wrong and, inadvertently, tripped over an old wound. Sometimes, every once in a while, when you do this work, you realize, "I don't think they did something wrong."
"I think they disappointed me, I think that that hurt, but I, actually, don't think they did something wrong. I think an old wound was tapped inside of me." That takes a lot of courage and a lot of self-trust. To go, "Oh, my gosh, did that hurt? And I don't, actually, think they did something wrong."
Sometimes that's the case. Sometimes that's what we'll find. We have to do that internal work to know the difference.
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So let's talk about how to do this work of building trust with yourself. Now, in my first book, with Kim Miller, we talk about this idea of taking a U-turn. So when something on the outside of you activates you or triggers pain, hurt, anger, frustration, envy, any of these things on the inside of you. This idea of taking a U-turn is, to first, look inside yourself, and that's what I did last week.
So I made a promise to myself, "I'm activated. I want to go through a process of looking inside myself. Because that's how I'm going to build trust with myself." And it's tempting when we're feeling really activated, we want to immediately go to, "How do I set the boundary?"
But if we don't, first, do that work of looking inside, of examining our own souls, we may not set the appropriate boundary. We may not set the boundary in the best way. It takes some internal work to get to that external outcome.
What I'm describing here is a little bit of what Jesus, I think, was getting at. When he challenged the crowd in the Sermon on the Mount to work on their own selves first. It doesn't mean letting the other people off the hook. But what He said was, "First, take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." Matthew 7:5.
There's a charge in here, not to just let everybody off the hook, not to be a doormat. But to get to know your own heart. To get to know your own self. When you're feeling angry, what else is going on inside of you?
Is there a wound inside of you? If so, it needs to be drawn in closer so you can give yourself the care you need. And from that place, then determine how to set the healthy boundary outside of you.
And think about it, when you're parenting a young child. When that child has been hurt, you're not dismissing the hurt. But imagine if your own child were to come to you, and they've been hurt on the playground. Someone has done something to hurt them. And your first reaction might be, "I'm going to go after that kid. I'm going to tell that kid, 'You better not mess with you.'"
But when you do that, your own child is still hurting. You've bypassed the work of caring for, and comforting, and soothing your own child, and getting to know what do they actually need?
Do they need you to go stand up to that bully on their behalf, or do they need you to empower them? Or do they need you simply to comfort them? You've got to, first, tend to the hurting child. Then determine what course of action you will take.
And it's the same inside your own soul. You first have to access the hurting part of you, get to know it, understand what do you need, and then determine the external boundary you might set. So when you do this work, of looking inside, you start journaling. Most likely, most of us, the first voices we bump up against. The first voices that need expression, come from protective parts of us.
These are the parts of us that are angry. These are the parts of us that want to blame. These are the parts of us that want to rush to justice, take justice maybe into our own hands. On the other hand, these are also, sometimes voices inside of us that try to talk us down.
That try to tell us, "You shouldn't feel this way."
"You should just get over it."
"You should just turn the other cheek."
Sometimes we have these quote-unquote religious voices that try to protect us, by telling us, "Not to worry about it."
"Not to think about it."
"We shouldn't feel that way."
"We should only think the best of the other person."
These are all voices of protectiveness. These are parts of us, they're trying to help, they're trying to keep us safe. But they're ways that we've learned, from long ago, when we're hurt, to keep us safe. That's why we call them protectors.
Now, these protectors might show up as ego. They might show up as, "We can't let anybody see that we feel this way." That's a self-protective voice.
Or, "We just need to earn their approval, that's just what we'll have to do. We'll have to just work harder to get them to like us, to get their approval, even though they've treated us poorly." These are all the voices of ego, of protection.
Again, there's no shame in these voices. But you want to pay attention to them, and you want to do what psychologists call differentiate from them. Notice them, give voice to them, write them down in a journal, maybe, tell a safe person.
But remember these protective parts of you only see one angle of this story. So we want them to be seen, we want them to be heard, and then we want to say, "Is there more? What else is going on here?" And that's when we get to the tender voice inside of us. The tender parts of us. The parts of us that are hurting.
Now, again, imagine that child, imagine your child. At first, they're just mad, "That person is a jerk, I hate that person. I never want to be around that person again. I can't go back to school." That's all that protective energy that we carry with us into adulthood.
But when you really get down to the root, you get to that tender voice. And that tender voice is saying, "I'm hurt."
"I feel unseen."
"I feel misunderstood."
"I feel so frustrated by their silence."
"I feel discounted, like I don't matter."
"I feel lonely."
"I feel angry." We're getting to the root, when we get to those, "I feel" statements. Instead of, "They are" or "You should".
Those are the voices of protectors. That's when we're in self-protection mode. Again, there's nothing wrong with those voices, they're there for reason. But they are masking that deeper voice, that deeper, "I feel".
"What is the wound inside of me?"
"What is the hurt?"
"What is the root of that hurt?"
"I feel misunderstood."
"I feel discounted."
"I feel angry."
"I feel hurt."
"I feel invisible."
This can be, really, hard to honor inside of ourselves. But it's so important because that's the impact of the wound, and this is where we get into our own areas of wounding. Often, when we're hurt, we go back to one or two of those same feelings. Because we've got these embedded memories inside our bodies. Inside our nervous systems of, "Urgh! I feel discounted. I'm so tired of feeling that way."
And it's so important because we got to get to the wound so that we can give ourselves the care that we need.
< Music >
Finally, it's, really, important to once you've listened to the voice of your protectors. The voices that want to go out and get the job done, and then the voices of the hurting parts of you.
Once you are able to get to the root of that, then you want to come back up to the facts of the situation. And I talk about this in chapter six of the Best of You, where I talk about how our feelings. How we're feeling about something. We, always, want to hold those in tension with the facts of a situation:
"What, actually, happened?"
"What did that person, actually, say?"
"What did they, actually, do?"
"Did they, actually, do something wrong?"
"Were they just being human, and in their humanness I got hurt?"
And we want to hold these things in tension. We don't want to discount the way that we felt, we, also, don't want to discount the facts, both matter. Feelings make us human, they are important, and even if we determine in our self-examination, in our U-turn, that maybe the other person didn't do something wrong. Or maybe they just had a blind spot to a tender part of us.
We can still advocate for ourselves, but we're going to do it in a different way. Maybe upon self-examination, we realize, "Oh, my gosh, that person, really, hurt me. They did something, really, wrong and I'm going to have to figure out a way to stop that. Because I can't expose myself to hurt any longer."
Again, it's no longer about that other person. It's, "I cannot expose this tender part of me to this kind of hurt, whether they intended it or not." And this is how we do this work of building trust with ourselves.
We get to know the different parts of our own soul. The protective parts of us and the vulnerable parts of us, and we start to see it all, really, clearly, and that's how we begin to understand how we're going to go back into this relationship with a strong, clear, voice.
This is where we get to what I call transformational truth. Transformational truth factors in how we feel. Where we're wounded, where we need to be protecting ourselves in healthy ways. It also factors in the facts of a situation, as objectively as we can be, and it also brings in our faith. What does God have to say about this, discernment?
What is the best way, for me, to proceed here? Honoring how I feel. Honoring what I believe to be the facts of the situation, and then saying, "God, how do you want me to proceed?" Building trust with yourself is a practice. It's a whole new way of being. It's learning to honor the contents of your own soul, your emotions, your body, in partnership with God's Spirit.
So that when you do speak up, your voice flows from a connected, authentic place, deep inside. You're no longer being a doormat nor are you moving to the other extreme, of just lashing out at everybody.
Instead, you fine-tune this beautiful instrument God has given you, deep inside, this voice starts to come out of you. This voice that is connected to your areas of pain, that is connected to your fire. This voice that, increasingly, knows what to say and how to say it. It might even come out of you when you least expect it.
This voice, as you build trust with yourself, begins to move from deep within who you are. This work that you've done to make and keep promises to yourself. And it moves into the world around you and says, "Here I am, I have a perspective that matters. I have something I need to say, I want you to hear me. But even if you don't, my voice is here to stay."
It's the place where the truth, of what you've experienced, comes together with the truth of who God is. This is a strong place deep inside from which you begin to shape the world around you. Instead of reacting in a moment or, again, rolling over, brushing it under the carpet, being a doormat, you start to show up authentically. You start to respond. You're connected. You are real. You are living from the inside out.
Who you are on the inside starts to show up in your relationships with other people. You live out of a confidence. You're living from the deepest, truest part of yourself.
So this process of building trust, with yourself, is a process of learning to hold your ear close to the ground of your own life. It's listening for that voice of ego. Those protective parts of you that want to shame you, that want to should you, that want to lash out at other people. It's gently redirecting that voice, letting her be heard, letting her have her say in your journal with your safe person, letting her feel heard.
But it's also saying, "I need you to step back so that I can get to that tender voice inside that's hurting. Both of you get to be here, but I need to do the work of listening well. Listening to the anger and listening to the parts of me, that go way back to these wounded places inside where I felt so invisible, so unseen, so hurt, so cast aside, and I'm going to attend to both of those parts of me."
I'm going to attend to both of those parts of me from the place where the Holy Spirit lives within me, deep inside. I can hold together in truth what I feel, and then with God's help, I can reexamine that situation from a place of having cared for myself first. And asked myself, "What is it I, actually, need?"
"What do I need in this situation? Do I need to mostly care for myself and inhibit my interactions with that other person?"
Or, "Do I need to speak up on behalf of this hurt I've experienced?"
You start to build trust with yourself and you will start to know what you need. And all this work that you're doing to make and keep promises to yourself, to building trust with yourself, to listening to these different parts of you. Even the parts of you, you don't always like, but giving them a voice, giving them a seat at the table.
All this internal work you're doing to get to know these different parts of you, is how you begin to build and establish not only the kind of boundaries that you want with other people. But, more importantly, it's how you begin to build the life that you want. The life that is a reflection of the person God made you to be.
You will start living from within. You will start taking charge of the driver's seat of your own life. It's a beautiful way to live. It's confidence, it's clarity, it's purpose, it's conviction. It's not being perfect, but it's stepping into the driver's seat of your own life.
Today on The Best of You podcast, we're starting a new series on Boundaries and the Bible. And we're starting with what I call the Yes Side of No. So many of us struggle with setting external boundaries because we keep the focus on the other person. But the work of setting boundaries starts inside of you. In today's episode, I walk you through how to build to trust with yourself from the inside out.
Here's what we cover:
1. Why I don't believe boundaries start with No
2. Can I really learn to trust myself?
3. What about sin?
4. What is an internal (vs. external) locus of control and why does it matter?
5. Examples of promises you can make to parts of you carrying pain
6. Examples of promises you can make to your body
7. A challenge to you that we'll circle back to next week.
Resources
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Trust Definition: Oxford English Dictionary
- Jeremiah 17:9
- Sin definition
- Background on Jeremiah from Run with the Horses, Eugene Peterson
- Jeremiah 31:33
- Jesus on the Holy Spirit John 14:16-17
- God called you good before shame entered in based on Genesis 1
- Locus of Control
- Agency definition
- Resources for support
Thanks to our sponsor Organifi -Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today!
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone, welcome back to The Best of You podcast. We are on episode 21. It's hard to believe there's been 21 of these episodes, and I want to move into a new series I'm calling Boundaries and the Bible. And what I'm going to do, over the next six weeks, is take you on a deep dive into many of the topics that I touch on in my new book, The Best of You.
So for those of you who've already purchased the book, we're going to go deeper. I'm going to start with some of the questions I'm seeing the most, frequently from you, related to the book. If you don't have the book, yet, get a copy.
You can get it on Audible, you can get an eBook, you can get it in hardcopy because this is sort of our masterclass. We're going to work our way through it together on a deeper level. With weekly takeaways, weekly homework assignments for you to apply in your day-to-day life.
I've been so grateful to hear from so many of you about what this book has meant to you. And it just strengthens my resolve to want to speak, especially, to women, I know this applies to men, too. But, especially, to women who have felt hidden, invisible, like you don't have a say in your own life. And maybe you even thought you were doing that, that was the right thing to do.
You thought you were dying to yourself. When in fact it's possible you've been dying to God-given aspects of who you are.
So over these next few weeks, I want to help you in this work of reclaiming beautiful parts of yourself. That God made, that God loves, and that God wants to call into being, that God wants to bring into this world. So that you can show up as the very best of who you are. So we're going to get granular in these next few weeks.
So, today, we're going to start with what I call the YES side of NO. And it's the key that I believe is at the root of being able to set boundaries with other people. And it's starting back at the internal work of reconnecting to yourself. Learning to trust yourself and that starts with learning to make a promise to yourself.
It's very challenging to set healthy boundaries, externally, with other people. If you haven't paused and checked in with yourself, and taken inventory and figured out, "What is the promise I have to make to myself?"
"What is the, YES, I need to say to a part of myself? So that I have the courage to do this hard thing. This brave thing in my external life, in my external relationships."
So we're going to get into the external boundaries toward the end of this series. But we're going to start from the inside out. Because so many of us struggle with setting healthy boundaries, externally, because we keep the focus on the other person.
But that's, exactly, what we've been taught to do is keep the focus on the other person. We look for permission. We want them to understand. We sort of want them to validate our boundaries. So if we haven't done this internal work, first, recognizing that it starts within us. It's very challenging to set those healthy boundaries with other people.
I call this starting with YES. It's the YES side of NO, and it's what I mean by this word, selfhood. Selfhood, this is the word from psychology that I unpack in chapter one of The Best of You. Selfhood is not being selfish. It's not saying, "It's all about me. I'm no longer going to listen to other people, or help other people, or love sacrificially." That's not what selfhood is.
Selfhood is not selfishness but it's also not being a doormat. It's also not saying, "I don't matter. My voice doesn't have a say. I'll just shove myself aside." That is not the example that we see in the life of Jesus.
We see in the life of Jesus an example of selfhood. Of a life, wholly, surrendered to God, and, therefore, equipped and empowered to make a difference, to make an impact in the lives of other people and in the world.
We can't do that, it's very hard to empower others to live boldly, to live courageously. To make a difference in our kids' lives, in our friends lives, in our communities lives, if we have not connected and are living, bravely, from our God-given selves.
So for just a second, before we get into the brass tacks here. I want you to imagine being so rooted in your God-given self, that you simply cannot tolerate a fool or a bully.
You see their tricks a mile away, and you know how to stand firm in your power. With God's help, you are a force to be reckoned with. Your boundaries are no longer focused on other people. Instead, they flow from a strength you've built from deep within.
This is what it looks like to start with Yes. Starting with YES, this yes side of NO, focuses the work on strengthening your own soul. Which includes healing areas of woundedness, healing messages you've digested that tell you it's wrong to focus on your own work of healing.
It means establishing a genuine support network. People who genuinely want your best and want to see you putting your truest, deepest, God given-self into the world. It means clarifying your convictions. What matters to you, instead of spinning around like a top trying to please everybody else.
It means learning the skills that you need when other people show up with their toxic behaviors. And we're going to get into the skills in this whole series. It means getting a larger vision of the life you want to move toward. So that when it's time to say, NO, when the distractors and detractors come at you, you're ready. Because you know what you want out of this life God has given you.
So part of this starts with the work of healing wounds from the past. Because these wounds from the past that tell us, "We're not worth more. There's shame."
They tell us, "What we want is bad."
They tell us that, "It's too late."
"We're too old."
"There's too much water under that bridge."
These are wounds from the past, and, so, we've got to deal with these. Sometimes we have to look back to look forward. But we've got to do two things at the same time. One is hold up the hope of the vision of what's yet to come. And the second is go back to those wounded areas in our lives that keep us stuck, and keep us from relating, and keep us from moving toward that vision.
And, so, the metaphor that I like to use, and I apologize to those of you who are not hikers, I'm a big hiker, so I use this over and over. It's like you need to see that vision of that peak that you're moving toward, that destination, where there's a clear view.
Because guess what you see that vision and it keeps you moving forward. But then you're going to move into the hard stuff, almost immediately, you're going to get into the valley. You're going to get into the forest where it's hard to see, and you'll feel lost, and you'll feel scared, and you're like, "I can't do this, I want to go back."
And, so, I want you to, with me, hold that vision of where you want to be. That clarity of being so anchored in yourself that no one can knock you off. No one can distract you from that larger vision you've created with God. And, also, we're going to get into the weeds where it's going to be hard. And, so, we've got to learn to take that one brave step at a time.
So where we're going to start, today, is with this question; Can I really trust myself?
There's a reason so many of us don't do the hard work of looking inward, of identifying that YES, side of NO. That, YES, we need to say to parts of ourselves that have been wounded.
We've been taught not to trust ourselves. We've been taught to bypass our own desires, our own God-given instincts, the inner resources God has given us. Trust is this loaded word we toss around without really understanding what it means.
In the dictionary, we look at trust simply defined as, "A belief in the reliability, truth, capability, or strength of someone or something." So we tend to believe that God is trustworthy. We know that God is reliable, truthful, capable and strong. We rely on that to be true of God, and it is true of God.
Some of us have encountered trust worthiness, trustworthy qualities, in other people. We fundamentally see consistent patterns of reliability, honesty, capability, and strength over time. People have proven themselves to us, so we trust them.
But so many of us have no clue what it means to trust ourselves. In fact, many of us have been taught not to trust ourselves. Many of you may have been taught to distrust yourself. Based on a specific Bible verse that says, "The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked." This is from Jeremiah 17:9-10.
But what most people fail to recognize is that the very same prophet who spoke of the tremendous deceitfulness in the human heart. And listen, we can deceive ourselves, and we're still going to get there, I promise you. To all of you asking me for the episode on trauma and sin, it's coming right around the corner. It might be next week, it might be in two weeks, I'm not sure which, but it's coming. I'm working on it right now.
But we can go astray, that's what sin means. Sin means miss the mark, we deceive ourselves, shame enters in. We start covering our tracks, and we start missing the mark even more. And we start setting off on a path that is away from our true selves and away from God.
So Jeremiah wasn't wrong. Jeremiah was seeing in his day, these are religious folks, in many ways, that Jeremiah was prophesying about. He's like, "Man, you're deceiving yourselves." And the human heart is capable of that, and I don't want to suggest otherwise. I know it to be true in my own heart and I know it to be true in this life.
However, Jeremiah is the very same prophet, who, also, prophesied the solution to this problem of our hearts that can lead us astray. And he talked about the coming of God's Spirit when he said, "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts." This is from Jeremiah 31:33.
So what is Jeremiah alluding to here? Well, he's prophesying about the coming of the Holy Spirit. That in the past, during his time, the law, the code that kept you on the path of being true to yourself and to God, was external.
It was the Commandments. It was the code. But Jeremiah is saying something new is going to happen. God is going to write His law on our minds and write it in our hearts. This is through the power of God's Spirit. That had only been made available externally, up to then, is going to become available internally through the power of the Holy Spirit. And Jesus talks about this in John, chapter 14, He says, "I'm going to send you the Holy Spirit who will live in you."
And this is an unbelievable reality because of the Spirit who lives inside of you. You have access. First of all, you have access to the goodness in you because when God created you, initially, He called you good before shame entered in, before sin entered in.
So we hold these two truths side by side. There's goodness there and there is the capacity to go our own way. Both of those things live side by side. But through the power of God's Spirit, as we cultivate that space inside, where we bring all of who we are together with all of who God is, we can stay true. We can become trustworthy. We can honor a sense of reliability, honesty, capability, and strength in our own souls.
We can cultivate that trust in ourselves, not because we're perfect, not because we're not still able to deceive ourselves, but because we keep coming back to the work. We keep coming back to the work of going, "Dear God, I see. I see this part of me that is angry. I see this part of me that wants so desperately to go take this into my own hands. God, and you see that part of me too." And we begin to hold ourselves together in a spirit of truth.
There's so much to unpack here, and I'm going to stop there because we're going to get more and more, and deeper into the theology of that in weeks to come.
But through the power of the Holy Spirit that comes to live inside of us, we can learn to trust ourselves. It's a process. It's a practice. It's not a once-and-done kind of thing. It's a practice of bringing all of who you are into the presence of who God is.
Sometimes living at peace with other people, means living at peace with disappointing them. It's incredibly important to balance your responsibility to other people with a deep sense of responsibility to your God-given self. It's not only good for you. It's good for other people. Living at peace with yourself is a process of figuring out that balance.
Here's what we cover:
1. How to make peace with yourself
2. Making friends with yourself
3. Living at peace with others
4. Facing your fear of disappointing other people
5. How Jesus disappointed people
6. How to disappoint people with integrity
Resources
- Today's podcast episode is adapted from Chapter 11 of The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- 1 Samuel 15:22
- Resources for support
Thanks to our sponsor Organifi -Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today!
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript
Alison: Hey, everyone, welcome back to The Best of You podcast. This is our 20th episode, and it's really exciting because this is the week that The Best of You, my book, just came into the world. Many of you listening, probably, already have it in your hands. It came out on Tuesday.
It's been so amazing. So overwhelming for me to hear from so many of you, what the book is meaning to you, as you think about a new way to set boundaries. As you think about some of these misconstrued church messages. As you think about what it means to inhabit the self, the you, that God made both to heal and to become more of your true self in God.
So thank you so much for all of your notes. All the ways you've been sharing about the book. It means so much to me to see this work that I've labored over for so many years, really a lifetime. But the last couple of years, really, in crafting the book to have it into your hands.
The Best of You is available now anywhere books are sold, so get a copy. I'd be so grateful if it's meant something to you. If you'd go ahead and leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, let me know what stood out to you. What was helpful to you? That's one way that I get to hear back from you, and it also just helps get the word out about the book to other people. Thank you so much for your support.
So for today's episode because it's book launch week and because the book just came out into the world. We're going to do one more excerpt. I'm going to read the excerpt from the book.
It's toward the end of the book called How to Make Peace with Yourself. And I like to subtitle it; How to Make Peace with Disappointing Other People because the two go hand-in-hand.
And this is one of those sections of this book that has really stayed with me. I mean, many of the sections have stayed with me and I find myself having to relive the words that I write, frequently, in my own soul. Learning to listen to myself, learning to take time to focus on myself. Not to stay self-focused, but so that I can show up more authentically and more effectively with other people, and I've continued to come back to this section.
So I want to share it with you today. I'll give a little commentary on it as I go. I'm not going to read it verbatim. But this is also a section, the piece of this I wrote, again, two years ago after I had the stroke which I read to you last week.
I wrote a blog post about two months after that, after I'd taken some time off, and it was all about learning to disappoint other people. Because I'd had to pull back so much in my life that I felt like I was just disappointing everybody around me and, yet, it was what I needed to do for my own health.
And, so, this section grew out of that period of time, and it's poignant and it means a lot to me this time of year. I hate disappointing other people, as I'm sure most of you hate disappointing other people. And that's why we stay so busy working overtime to please other people, to produce for other people, stay focused on other people, we don't want to disappoint others.
But the problem is sometimes we do have to disappoint other people. And it's a part of this larger process of making peace with ourselves. So I'm going to read to you from a couple of different excerpts along this category of making peace with yourselves. Which means getting over your fear of disappointing other people.
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An interesting paradox occurs as The Best of You emerges from deep inside. You no longer bend yourself into contortions to appear as if you have it all together. You begin to make peace with yourself. You begin to show up as you really are.
Now, in order to make peace with yourself, you have to stay honest with yourself and with God. It means honoring some of your limitations. It means honoring some of your preferences and needs. Making peace with yourself isn't resignation.
It isn't just saying, "Oh, I'll just make peace with all of my flaws and this is just the way I am." That's not what it is. It's a very active process of understanding where you are right now. Some of your limitations. Some of the wounds that you still need to tend. Some of the things that are still, really, a challenge for you. It's accepting that and holding that intention with where you want to be.
It's holding two things at once. It's, "This is where I am right now. I get it. I see it, God, I'm being honest with myself.
I see these parts of me that still struggle with this old thing and I'm at peace in the sense that I know it. God knows it. I'm not hiding from myself. I'm not deceiving myself. I'm not deceiving other people." That's where we experience peace.
Peace isn't perfection. Peace isn't denial, deceiving ourselves, peace is saying, "This is where I am right now, God. I see it and you see it, and it's not where I always want to be. I want to continue to take brave steps each day to heal, to grow, to become more, and more, and more of the beautiful soul that you made and this is where I am today."
There's a paradox when it comes to making peace with yourself. You hold that tension inside of you. The tension between where you are right now and where you hope to be with curiosity and with compassion.
As you begin this process you begin to pause, maybe, for just a second before you please someone else. Before you overextend your limits. Before you try too hard to get other people's attention. Before you shut down the parts of you that are hurting, maybe, you can just pause, for even one second, two seconds, three seconds, and say, "Oh, I see what's happening here. There you are, I know you're there."
It's that awareness. It's not perfection, it's that awareness of, "Oh, yes, there I was, I tried a little too hard there to make them like me."
Or "I worked over my capacity in that moment, but I came back to home center. I came back to home base. I came back to myself and before God and before myself, I named that with curiosity, with compassion, without shame. It's okay. I can be at peace with myself."
It's not saying, "I did it perfectly."
It's saying, "I see what I did, I see who I am, I see where I am right now, and it's okay. It's okay."
Somehow, with God's grace, as God comes in and meets us right where we are, we're okay. We're at peace and it's an amazing feeling. It's an amazing experience. If you're someone who struggles with self-doubt, you learn to make peace with the parts of you that show up, every once in a while, causing you to question yourself. You learn to meet those parts of you with curiosity and compassion.
It's not that, that necessarily goes away entirely. It's that when those insecurities show up, instead of shaming yourself, instead of berating yourself, instead of beating yourself up. You say, "Oh, yes, there you are old familiar self-doubt. I see you there, it's okay, you can have a seat at this table. I'm just not going to let you lead."
Or if you struggle with anxiety or worry. And maybe you've had a break from feeling worry, and, all of a sudden, it comes back and it descends upon you and that can be so frustrating. But, again, what if you could learn to go, "Oh, I see you there, anxiety, I see you there. Here you are again, I know you all too well. You can be there, it's okay, but I'm not going let you take me over."
And we invite God into that, "And, God, You see that anxious part of me? You see her starting to rear up and start to whirl around, again, in my mind. God, just come with that part of me, be with her in those fears. She doesn't have to go away, but I'm not going to let her drive. I'm not going to let her lead."
So making peace with yourself is connecting to all these different emotions. All these different, even wounds that we have from the past that will surface from time to time, and letting them have it seat at the table of our soul, but not letting them take us over. We're leading ourselves, not letting all these different parts of us have their way with us.
You'll make peace with yourself as you stop justifying old patterns of behavior. Instead of trying to justify you simply bear witness. "Oh, I see that, there's that people-pleasing again. There's that perfectionism. I don't have to make excuses for it. I don't have to justify it. I just notice it. God sees it.
There's honesty in my soul. I feel it and I'm also learning a different way. I'm learning to turn toward healing and the possibility of growth and change. I'm learning to honor both the presence of the best of who I am and the fact that I still have some of those blind spots. But they're becoming less blind spots, sometimes, now, I can see them there before they get the best of me."
As you make peace with yourself, you start to notice the presence of a wonderful new friend. Suddenly you become someone who's enjoyable to spend time with. It's amazing to have friends that we love being with who bring out the best of us. And a lot of this book is about learning to cultivate those kinds of relationships.
But you also learn to make friends with yourself and you begin to discover a sense of safety within. And what I mean by that is you're no longer fearful of those parts of yourself that have gotten the best of you before. You know them. You know yourself. You're aware of that tendency to lash out, to be resentful, to be petty, to envy, to play small, to try to earn the affections of other people through people-pleasing.
These are not new things for you, you've made peace with yourself. Therefore, when you're by yourself, when you're in the company of your own soul, you found a new friend. You're no longer beating yourself up, shaming yourself, you're learning to enjoy the pleasure of your own company.
As you've grown stronger, in this way, you now know that living at peace with others includes being faithful to yourself. You can't find peace in your relationships with other people until you've learned to show up as a friend to yourself.
So what do I mean by that? As you become a friend to yourself, suddenly, you no longer want to betray yourself. You enjoy yourself. You know yourself. You understand yourself. You know what you need. You know what you long for. You know what brings out the best of you, and all of a sudden, this has implications for your relationships with other people.
Living at peace with others means paying attention to what you need to stay healthy in your relationships. It might mean, bravely, negotiating change with someone you love. I'll walk you through that in chapter nine of The Best of You.
It might mean staying distant from someone who is not able to respect your boundaries and what you need. So this is where we get to the kicker of this episode; sometimes living at peace with other people means living at peace with disappointing them.
Most of us have been taught never to disappoint other people. We are conditioned to hitch our self-worth to how well we make other people feel. But what if you measured your worth by living from integrity? It's incredibly important to balance your responsibility to other people with a deep sense of responsibility to your God-given self. It's not only good for you, it's also good for other people.
Now, I'm going to get into some of the ways that I believe Jesus showed us an example of disappointing other people. The truth is Jesus disappointed people and we see this in the gospels. He didn't always act in the way His followers wanted, yet He was the prince of peace.
Jesus didn't disappoint people because He was selfish, He disappointed people because he lived with integrity. He always acted out of a commitment to a higher good. He modeled how to, number one, focus on what God wanted versus on pleasing others. Number two, staying true to His calling versus staying focused on temporary distractions. And, number three, He saw the big picture instead of settling for instant gratification, and there's a lesson here for all of us.
As you make peace with yourself, in partnership with God, you might disappoint someone. You can act with integrity. There's a difference between disappointing other people because you're misbehaving, you're lashing out, you are in the wrong. When we disappoint people because we've done something wrong, we need to apologize and make amends.
What I'm talking about here is when we begin to change, when we begin to grow, when we begin to heal and we change our patterns of behaviors, other people might not like it. We train people what to expect from us.
So if we've trained people to expect us always to be at their beck and call, and suddenly we are starting to change. We are starting to prioritize our health, our own needs, even some of our own desires, other people might not like that. It doesn't mean we've done something wrong. It means we're starting to live from a deeper place of integrity inside.
As you make peace with yourself, as you make friends with yourself, as you learn to be with yourself, in this new way, you might have to disappoint other people. And that might be really hard for you at first and it might be hard for them. But you can learn to do that with integrity. And the way to know that you're in your integrity is to look to the model of Jesus.
You want to look for a clear sense of the good things you are moving toward, even as you have to move away or say "No" to other people.
It's all about the good you're moving toward. And when you're focused on that, and when you see that, and when you're clear about that, you may still disappoint other people but you are in a position of integrity. You have conviction inside, and this is a really important distinction.
Here are some examples of what I mean; let's say you or a loved one are going through a crisis and need space for your own healing. You need to say, "Yes" to prioritizing that relationship, that season with your loved one, with your family, with a friend. Which means you might have to set limits with other people and that's acting out of integrity. It doesn't mean everybody will like it, but you know what you need.
Let's say you've taken on new commitments at work, at home, or at church, this means you may have to scale back on old commitments. You cannot please everyone in order to live at peace with yourself and to stay true to what you know you need to be healthy. You may have to disappoint some other people.
This is true if you're going through major life transitions such as a move, a marriage, a divorce, empty nest, or having children. You know you have to let some things go and this might, indeed, cause other people to feel bad, they might miss you. That is not your responsibility. Your responsibility is to stay true to what keeps your soul healthy so that you can show up in those relationships as you need to show up.
Here's the thing, you live at peace with yourself and with others when you learn how to act with integrity. And believe it or not, you can, actually, disappoint other people with integrity. Here are some ways to do that. Number one, make a clean break. It's not kind to try to drag people along when you don't, actually, have the capacity to give those relationships.
If you have to let someone down be clear about it, don't let it drag out. For example, if you have to end a commitment or a relationship, be upfront about it. They might be hurt or angry but they'll also be free to move on apart from you. And it's so funny because sometimes we hold on because we don't want to hurt anybody, but in the end, it can almost hurt them more because we don't set them free to move on, to get what they, actually, need somewhere else.
Number two, don't apologize if you haven't done anything wrong. This is a hard one for a lot of us. I've had to work on this a lot in my own life. But practice noticing, "Wait, am I doing something wrong here, or am I simply making a decision that this person isn't going to like?" And if you're not doing something wrong, practice saying something like, "I regret that I cannot continue in this group."
Or as hard as it is, I have arrived at this conclusion."
You can be kind in the way that you communicate your regret without apologizing.
Number three, be careful about lying or making up excuses. Those little white lies are so tempting when we have to disappoint other people. But they're not good for our soul, especially, if you're someone who's recovering from people-pleasing or codependency.
We often want to soften the blow by making up excuses that may seem more palatable to the other person. But it's not healthy for you and it's not helpful for other people.
Practice stating the facts as honestly and simply as possible, in these cases, often, less is more. For example, you might say, "I need some time to myself right now, I'll be off the grid for a while."
"I have to pull back from this commitment for personal reasons. Here's what I can do to support you as you find someone else."
"I appreciate you and I'm grateful for this invitation. I need to focus on my own self, or my own family, or my own health." Whatever is true in that moment, you can be as general as possible.
"I need to focus on my family right now," for example.
"If you don't hear from me, please know, I am doing what is best for me right now."
Maybe you're at work, "I can't take on that project. In order to do my best at everything you've already given me, I have to say no to this one."
Number four, don't make it about you. When you disappoint someone, it's okay for them to express their disappointment. You can respond with empathy and kindness. You can say something like," I know this is hard. I understand that it's an inconvenience." You can honor their experience without apologizing, getting defensive, or backtracking."
It's also not their job to make you feel good about this decision that you're making. It's wonderful when you have friends or colleagues who get it and who say, "We get it, do what you need to do. We respect your decision." That's amazing, it doesn't always happen that way. But you're not looking for validation at this point.
As you're making peace with yourself, as you're making decisions that reflect the best of what you need to bring into your life, your goal is to communicate honestly and effectively. It's not, necessarily, to get the other person to feel great about the decision that you've made, this comes from a place of confidence.
Lastly, don't take abuse. It's not the other person's job to take care of your feelings. However, it's never okay for the disappointed person to become abusive or toxic toward you. Letting someone down might bring up emotion, and that's okay, but if the emotions turn toxic, simply excuse yourself.
If the relationship has a chance, if it's worthwhile, you'll work through it later on. But if not, it's better to find out now that this is someone who cannot respect your good, wise decision. As you live at peace with yourself, and you face your fear of disappointing other people, you gain humility.
You gain this sense of your own position in the universe.
You're no longer playing God, you're living within your God-given limitations, and that's beautiful. That's a beautiful way to live and you also, paradoxically, gain confidence. You learn that you cannot please everyone around you, and it's not a healthy goal to set for yourself. Instead of pleasing others, you learn the power of living from your true self and saying yes to the life God wants for you.
One of the verses I love in this category is from 1 Samuel 15:22, where he says, "To obey is better than to sacrifice."
So many of us go right to sacrifice, "We'll sacrifice ourselves for other people." But in Samuel, he's saying, "It's better to obey. It's better to operate out of conviction. It's better to operate out of integrity before God, and that might mean disappointing other people."
As you learn to honor both yourself and other people, you start to show up in the same way Jesus has shown up for you, with honesty, love, and intentionality. You are anchored in your own integrity, which equips you to show up far more effectively with other people, even when you disappoint them.
You're not supposed to meet every need around you. Every need is not your call to serve, and the truth is other people won't meet all your needs either. As you work toward living at peace with yourself and with others, here's a prayer that I've found helpful, and I adapted this from the Serenity Prayer that is often used in addiction recovery programs.
"God give me the courage to stop pleasing others. The confidence to show up as my true self and the wisdom to know how to live at peace with others without betraying myself."
At the exact moment I began to bring The Best of You to life, I encountered a trauma that would literally knock me off my feet, forcing me to test everything I hoped to write about. Today is almost the 2-year anniversary of that trauma. It's unbelievable to me that this book is coming out next week. In today's episode, I read this very personal story from the introduction of The Best of You, along with some added commentary. It's a tender story. Thank you for holding it with me.
Quotes:
- "I didn't lose my faith in God as my life slowly unraveled; I lost faith inmyself."
- "If you are never taught how to develop-and trust-your own sense of self, you have no choice but to blindly trust other people. How can you possibly forge healthy relationships with others-if you don't first understand how to show up as the person God made you to be?
Thanks to our sponsor Organifi -Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today!
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Resources for support
Transcript
Alison: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Best of You podcast. I'm so glad you're here today. This is a special episode of the podcast for two reasons. First, my new book, The Best of You comes out next week, Tuesday the 13th.
But, secondly, what's at the forefront of my mind, and my spirit, and my body right now is it's nearly, to the day, the two-year anniversary of a trauma that occurred just as I was bringing The Best of You into life. And I write about this trauma in the introduction to the book.
So in today's episode, I'm going to share that introduction with you. I'm going to read it. I will also provide a little bit of my own commentary on it. And, so, this is a tender story, and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to share it with this podcast community today.
Before we dive in, I want to remind you that this is your last chance to get all the pre-order bonuses that I've made available for you when you pre-order The Best of You. These bonuses are good through book release day. That's through the 12th of September, which is just next week.
So if you're planning to order the book don't wait another day. Head over to anywhere books are sold. Order the book, and then go to my website, it's dralisoncook.com/book, and you'll get so many pre-order bonuses, they're all available for you.
They include the first three chapters of the book now. The Best of You Devotional, which is the devotional we created just for you.
You'll also get lifetime access to my video courses, including my Boundaries for Women video course.
My Claim Your Yes Relationship bundle, which includes two videos, one on how to calm your emotions. And you'll get access to my two-part webinar series Five Toxic Behaviors and How to Protect Yourself. And it's all available, for you, when you pre-order The Best of You.
Head over to my website, again, it's dralisoncook.com/book. There are so many freebies there for you. So get that book now, before those freebies run out. When the book comes out, next week, it's going to be in your hands.
All right, so here we go. This is an excerpt, with some special commentary, from the introduction of The Best of You.
< Music >
The Best of You almost didn't make it into being. As a clinician, I had longed for an accessible practical guide, that laid out key elements of how we heal. A sort of therapy in a book, that brings together the best of faith with the best of psychology, in a way that speaks, especially, to the unique needs of women.
But at the exact moment I began to bring this book to life, I encountered a trauma. That would, literally, knock me off my feet, forcing me to test everything I hoped to write about.
It was a Friday Night Lights kind of night. A crisp September evening in the football-loving town of Sheridan, Wyoming.
After six months of lockdown, with our two-college aged, remote-learning kids, I was getting ready for a quarantine-style date night with my husband. A country road, tailgate dinner, complete with takeout from a favorite restaurant eaten under the stars.
Eager to get dressed up, for the first time in forever, I headed into our bathroom to put on some makeup. As I pumped concealer onto my finger, I noticed something strange. It was as if my finger was completely disconnected from my body. Prepped for the, seemingly, simple task of gliding over to my face. This finger was stubbornly refusing all my mental efforts to move it.
In a matter of moments, a body I had, for the most part, trusted to perform basic tasks was suddenly completely unresponsive to me. As hard as I tried I could not move that finger. I felt as powerless as if I were trying to use my mind to transport a book across the room by staring at it.
Ironically, the day before I had sent out a blog post on learning to trust yourself. A therapist for nearly two decades, I had started writing out observations from my work. In two years, my blog had grown to more than 30,000 readers.
That responsibility instilled a sense of fear and trembling in me. As I pressed send each week. In this particular post, I had been able to put words to something that I had wrestled with for decades.
"If you are never taught how to develop and trust your own sense of self, you have no choice but to blindly trust other people. How can you possibly forge healthy relationships with others? If you don't, first, understand how to show up as the person God made you to be?"
As I wrote this blog post, my usually busy mind had felt oddly calm. As if the letters had taken on a life of their own and dropped onto my screen one by one. Crystallizing years of personal struggle and professional pondering.
I had nurtured a deep faith in God in college. A formative move on my not so faith-filled Ivy league campus. But I somehow managed to remain completely disconnected from my own sense of self. Descending into a decade of self-doubt and chronic people-pleasing.
I never lost my faith in God. As my life, slowly, unraveled I lost faith in myself. It took a PhD in both religion and psychology, combined with a midlife meltdown to dig myself out.
And this blog post was a culmination of reflections on what I had observed in my own life and in the lives of the women who had come to me for counseling. This is the exact message I have to give, I thought. We have to develop a deep connection to our own sense of self. Work that goes hand in hand with trusting the one who made us.
Developing a strong sense of self is paramount to living the life God has for us. It's essential to healthy relationships with other people. It involves a deep understanding of your strengths, needs, values, and purpose.
It's finding and expressing your unique voice in all kinds of relationships and situations. It's trusting that you have what it takes to meet the challenges you will face no matter what life throws your way. My message had never felt so clear. After I hit Send and shut down my laptop, I'd had the profound feeling that a disconnect deep inside me had finally reached its end.
Now, as I stood in front of the mirror, not 24 hours later. I was trying to make sense of another disconnect I could not possibly have predicted. My finger simply would not move.
"Is it asleep?"
I wondered, fleetingly, searching for a familiar category to describe what was happening.
"No, this is not that."
And I began to register a terrifying observation. My finger is no longer responding to the cues my brain is sending it and I started screaming for my husband.
"Joe!" I yelled, holding the unresponsive finger out in front of me.
"Joe!"
As Joe rushed in, I tried to explain what was happening. I could hear my words slurring, like they were coming out in slow motion, and I started staggering as if I was drunk. It was, suddenly, no longer only my finger that had disconnected. It was my hand, my arm, and just like that, the whole left side of my body.
I was on the floor when we both realized what was happening.
Only in my forties, with no known medical conditions, I was having a stroke.
While I had been laboring over my blog post, only one-day prior, a blood clot was making its way into my brain.
My husband rushed me to the emergency room where doctors went into action, and immediately worked to mitigate the damage of the clot.
Three days later, I was able to walk out of the hospital my body, relatively, unscathed. But my heart and my soul would forever be changed. The terror of that moment evoked understandable anxiety. And I found myself traveling down an unwanted path through shock, fear, and bargaining, that I had so often accompanied my clients on.
I had to surrender in a whole new way to a process of healing from the emotional aftermath of trauma. The irony was not lost on me. Suddenly, I entered poignant season of practicing everything I taught.
Each day I would find ways to, gently, soothe my anxious mind, noticing and moving toward what brought glimmers of relief. I honored the tears that showed up, often, in the middle of the night.
I leaned into loving relationships. The presence of which was a marvel to me, after years of healing my own painful patterns of relating to other people. And I talked with God, honestly, instead of hiding doubts, fears, and even anger.
One sunny afternoon, a few months after the stroke. I found myself alone in the middle of a hayfield as my husband fly-fished nearby. I looked up into the enormous blue sky, encased on all sides with golden yellow, and asked God, "What is it that you want me to do with this life You've given me? You, certainly, have my attention."
And as is God's way I sensed not an easy answer but a loving nudge in a new, but also strangely familiar direction. Where God asked me questions.
"What is it that you want to do with this life you've been given? I know you. I see you. I want you to use the gifts you've been given."
I wanted to write The Best of You.
This book you are reading is my answer to God's question. What I want, at the core of my being, is to teach you how to do the hard, beautiful work of becoming and trusting your truest deepest self in partnership with the God who made you.
You may not have had a life-threatening stroke that brought you to a place of examining what to do when life gets the best of you. But I have no doubt you've had pain. You've suffered through loneliness, loss, self-doubt, or betrayal.
You've no doubt asked God, "What is it that you want from me in this crisis, this relationship, this heartache, this life?"
You've no doubt begged God to show you the way forward. The way out of the struggle you're facing.
The problem is that healing, whether it's current heartaches or past wounds, is rarely a one-time event. Healing is a process. A practice, a way of becoming more of who you really are.
It's the work every single one of us has been given to do.
It's the work that I believe is at the center of God's heart.
Healing starts within us and flows out to our loved ones, our neighbors, and our world.
I'm not here to give you easy answers. I don't presume to understand the sometimes strange ways of God. But I do know this to be true, whatever you are facing you have one of two choices. You can turn toward the work of healing this beautiful life you've been given, or you can turn away.
You can turn toward this question, I believe God is asking each and every one of us. "What is it that you want to do with this life you've been given? I'm listening."
< Music >
This is the introduction to The Best of You, and it brings up a lot of emotion still to this day, as I read it. Just replaying the tape of that night, of driving down main street in this small town where I grew up. Just all the thoughts that flashed through my mind in those moments of wondering if I would be okay.
One of the thoughts that I had as you read, in The Best of You, you'll get to chapter three. My husband, who helped me that night, was a widower when I met him with two young children. And, so, the cost of what had happened to me, was not only scary for what it meant for me. But what it would mean for him and the two children I had helped to raise.
I took several months off, completely, after that stroke. I needed the time to heal. I needed the time to understand, deeply, what had happened. I had to come to terms with some false ideas about what I believed about God. About some guarantees I thought we had in this life we've been given.
And I will tell you this, as you read the book you will see. I don't believe that we get easy answers from God. I don't believe in quick fixes, or clichés, or platitudes that so many of us have been offered.
But I do believe this, I believe that God is in the business of healing, our souls, our hearts, and our minds. And I believe that we can grow deeply in understanding how to bring more kindness, more, love, more patience, more gentleness, more goodness, more faithfulness, not only to the people around us but to ourselves. And that is the fruit of healing and that is what I wish for you.
Next week, I'm going to read from and talk about the last chapter of the book. Which gets at what I believe it means to heal. What I believe it means to live at peace with yourself, with God, and with others.
This is not an easy journey. I know so many of you listening are going through such hard things. But please know that as we turn toward the work of healing.
As we turn toward the work of inviting God into everything we're experiencing, even the hard things, even the anger, even the doubt, even the desolation, even the confusion.
As we honor and name those experiences, and we invite God into them. Instead of shoving them aside or trying to will those feelings away, we begin to experience a freedom. The spaciousness of a soul that is known inside out. The fruit of a well-lived life.
Thank you for joining me today on The Best of You. I can't wait to join you here next week.
This week on the podcast, we're talking about selfhood. Many of us have been taught that "self" is bad. But there's a big difference between selfhood and selfishness. Furthermore being selfless is not always the right choice. Reclaiming a healthy sense of self is not opposed to faith. In fact, learning to honor yourself goes hand-in-hand with honoring the One who made you. I get personal this week, because this journey is deeply personal for me.
Here's what we discuss:
1. My own story of loving God but not having a self
2. What is the difference between selfhood and selfishness?
3. Why is selfhood key to healthy relationships?
4. How selfhood is the missing first step to setting healthy boundaries
5. What does the bible have to say about selfhood?
6. Jesus's example of selfhood
Key Point
- Selfhood is what you bring into your relationships. It gives you the courage to show up bravely, with integrity, even when it means pointing out hard things or honoring your limits. It's an understanding that in any relationship, two people have perspectives that matter, and you are one of those people.
Thanks to our sponsor Better Help -Go to www.betterhelp.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 10% off your first month!
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- For more on selfhood, see Chapter 1 of The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Genesis 1:27
- Matthew 16:24
- Matthew 5:37
- Ephesians 2:10
- Luke 6:12-16
- Luke 2:46
- Mark 14:32-34
- Matthew 23:13-36
- John 8:1-11
- Matthew 14:23-24
- Resources for support
Transcript
Alison: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You podcast. Where we're going to talk, today, all about this word— selfhood and how it's different from selfishness.
Selfhood is a word I wrestled with so much growing up. And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my own story of coming to terms with this idea. And then walk you through what I think it really means to become a self. That we have a self and that this is not incompatible with loving God. With loving the God who made us to be a self.
So this is a, really, meaty episode as all of these have been. Because selfhood is really the cornerstone of all of these other topics. We confront ourselves through our wounds. We see the ways that, we behave in ways we don't like, or we don't like things about ourselves. Or we see our trauma responses, or we see our attachment wounds. All these things we've been talking about, and really when it gets done to the root of it all, we're trying to heal the self.
So what is it, and how is that not being selfish to focus on healing the self? So lots to dive into today. Before we get started I want to remind you, it is not too late to take advantage of all the free gifts you'll receive when you pre-order The Best of You.
Remember that subtitle— Break Free from Painful Patterns, Mend your Past and Discover Your True Self in God. This book came out of my own story of struggling to find my own self, and I'll share a little bit more about that with you in today's episode.
But when you pre-order the book you will get so many freebies. You'll get the first three chapters. You'll get entry into my Boundaries for Women Video Course for free. You'll get an entire bundle, that includes two video teachings on emotions, on healing from childhood wounds, from parents. There's a free devotional. There's the recording of my two-part Five Toxic Behaviors webinar.
So all of that is yours when you pre-order the book. It helps the author so much when you pre-order before it comes out on September 13th. It's coming soon. So get that order in before September 13th and take advantage of these options.
I also want to note, if any of you are part of small groups, women's ministries, church groups, you can get a 40% discount on orders of 25 books or more. So what that means is for just about $400, you can get 25 books for your whole group.
Plus, you get all of those other free bonuses. You can work through everything together. And also if you order 50 books or more you also get that same 40% discount. All those bonus items, and on top of that, I will schedule a live virtual conversation exclusively for your group.
So I'll give a talk. I'll take your questions. I'd love to join your group, your community, as you read that book together. So check out those discounted items. All of the information that you need is on my website. It's dralisoncook.com/book. That's dralison - one L- cook.com/book.
So let's get started on today's episode, selfhood versus selfishness. So I want to tell you just a little bit about my own journey with this idea of selfhood. As a young woman of faith, in my twenties, I had a pretty dramatic experience of coming to faith in Jesus.
I grew up in a Christian home. I always believed, but I didn't really fully grasp what it meant to know the living God. To really have that personal experience of a relationship with Jesus until I got to college and it was beautiful. It was a beautiful experience. I mean, I changed. It changed everything. I think about that time and it is almost like that experience of falling in love. It's like all of a sudden the sky was bluer. The trees were greener.
It's like I had entered into a whole new world of knowing this God who loved me, and it was very real, and I loved that period of time. And it was a time of growing and so much understanding of God, and of the Bible, and of Jesus. And I will never, ever, forget the wonder of that time. It's been foundational to who I am today.
But here's the thing something also happened during that time. And that is, this, I began to absorb some messages that I shouldn't, also, simultaneously attend to my own self. I shouldn't, also, simultaneously grow as a person. That to grow in my spiritual life meant that I should deny or completely set aside my personal growth. My growth into being a fully formed human. And what I mean by that, specifically, is I should... these are the messages I absorbed. But I'm not saying this is correct, I'm saying this is somehow what I absorbed.
I grew in my love of God, but I was simultaneously absorbing these messages that I shouldn't pursue my dreams. That I should set aside my talents, sacrificially. That I should never think about my own wants or needs. That I should always focus only on other people.
I really sort of tried to live out this dichotomy of following Jesus, following God meant a complete denial of myself. And it was a misapplication of what I believe Jesus meant by this idea of, "Deny yourself to follow Me." And I unpack that fully in the first two chapters of The Best of You. I unpack that, and I'm not going to unpack that, fully, in this episode today. I'm going to dive into a different component of that. But I just want you to know that that was my story.
I really tried, literally, to live out this idea of love God and only focus on other people. And it's as if anything that stemmed from me, I shouldn't matter. If I wanted something that was self and self was bad.
I assumed that following God meant that I must completely obliterate any sense of - I - altogether. Misconstrued church messages, really, combined with some childhood wounds to create this unhealthy pattern. That eventually in my early thirties led me to a breakdown.
I essentially had to take time away from my graduate studies, for almost three years, to correct that fallacy in my thinking. To learn what it meant to heal myself. And that three years was not taking a break from God, it was filling out what it means to follow God. Following God does not mean not becoming your true self. In fact, I believe following Jesus leads us on a journey to becoming more of our true self. But I didn't understand that for a decade.
For a decade I thought they were two separate things. Following Jesus meant completely obliterating myself and it didn't work. It led to burnout. It led to loneliness. It led to anxiety, and it led to a life that I do not believe is the life God wants for us.
And this is the cornerstone of all the work that I do. We are to follow Jesus. We are to love others and we are to love others as we learn to embrace, and honor, and become our true selves. All three of those things matter. God is at the center of it all.
God is at the center of helping you become who you really are, the person God made. To become the self, the You that God made. God is at the center of that process. So that leads me right into what do I mean by selfhood.
So selfhood is a term from psychology, really, and it refers to your individual identity. It's what makes you a distinct person from everyone around you. You have a special youness, it's what is beautiful about you. It's what God delights in about you. It's what other people need from you, is you being you. The you that God made that's your selfhood.
Selfhood is marked by healthy confidence. And what I mean by that is a thoughtful awareness of your strengths, your preferences, your values, and even your limitations, and some of your blind spots.
Selfhood isn't this persona that you put into the world. "This is my true self." That's persona. That's ego, and we get into ego in the book, that's not selfhood. Selfhood is this very honest, humble awareness of who you are. What you like, what you're good at, what you think about things, your preferences. It encompasses the depth, the deeper things about you. The stories that you carry, even some of your wounds.
Uncovering this deep sense of self doesn't just happen. It's a process that happens over time. And we talked about this a little bit in the last episode on attachment. When you don't have those secure attachments early on in life, it's hard to develop a strong sense of self. Because we don't develop a self in a vacuum.
We develop a self in relationship with those earliest caregivers. With those earliest people around us, and there's this term called mirroring that psychologists used.
When you're a child, when you're an infant, the people, the adults in your life mirror. They hold up a mirror to show you who you are. In healthy environments that mirror is honest, and loving, and, "I see you."
"Here's what I see about you."
"Here's what I notice you're good at."
"Here's what I notice that is hard for you."
"Here's what I notice some of your blind spots might be." Because we're not perfect. We have those fallen natures too, but it's not shaming. It's a seeing. It's a noticing. And as other people witness you and see you, you begin to see yourself. You begin to develop a sense of who you are.
"Oh, this is who I am. I'm someone who loves going to school. But I'm someone who also hates recess because it's confusing to me, and I don't know how to navigate social groups." I'm just making things up.
"I'm someone who would love sitting in a corner and reading a book all day long. But I struggle with going out and making friends."
Or you might be someone who, "I love going to school for the social. Man, I want to just talk to all the people and visit with my teachers all day. But, boy, when it comes time to doing my homework, it is hard for me to sit down and focus."
These are normal experiences of learning about yourself. There's no shame in any of this. But when you're not seen. When you're not witnessed, early on, you don't understand a healthy sense of yourself. Which, again, is just a healthy confidence.
A healthy confidence in both your strengths and some of your limitations, your struggles, and what you like, what you prefer. What comes naturally to you, what your gifts are, what your talents are, what your passions are, what your convictions are. All the goodness you want to bring in the world. All the goodness that God placed inside of your body and soul, this is selfhood. It includes acknowledging what's hard and celebrating the gifts you've been given.
Selfhood is what you bring into your adult relationships. It gives you the courage to show up, honestly, as you really are with integrity. Even when it means pointing out hard things or honoring your own limits. It's an understanding that in any relationship, two people have perspectives that matter, and you are one of those people.
Now what's the difference between selfhood and selfishness? Whenever I talk to people about the importance of getting to the root of who they are and healing their core sense of self. I get pushback in the form of these questions.
"Well, isn't that selfish?"
"Didn't Jesus teach us to deny ourselves?"
"Isn't it good to be selfless?"
These are some of the messages we've been taught and my answer is this, there's a big difference between selfhood and selfishness. They're not the same thing.
Furthermore, being selfless is not always the right choice and it's often misunderstood. So here's one way to illustrate the differences. Selfishness says, "It's all about me. It's my way or the highway."
Selflessness says, "It's all about you. Whatever you want, I'll disappear to make sure your needs are met." That's selflessness in an unhealthy way.
Selfhood says it's about both. It's about you and it's about me. And the best way I can honor my relationship with you is to show up as my true self. Because when I bring my true self, my selfhood into this relationship, and you bring your selfhood into this relationship, man, we can create something beautiful together.
Selfhood is necessary to establish healthy relationships. It's necessary to live out your potential and to create the life God made you to inhabit. It's not being selfish, but it's also not being a doormat.
Without selfhood your decisions are driven by guilt and fear. You tend to take the path of least resistance. You tend to work over time to please everyone else. You prioritize the opinions of other people instead of honoring your own authentic wants and needs. You don't show up as the best of who you are. You don't live out of the best of who God created you to be.
< Music >
Okay, so, I want to give you some more examples off selfhood. It's not selfishness and it's not being a doormat. So selfishness says, "My wants and needs always come first."
Selflessness says, "My wants and needs never matter."
Selfhood says, "When I express what I want and need, I will forge healthier relationships with other people."
Selfishness says, "I pursue what I want no matter who gets hurt." That's selfishness. "I don't care about anybody else, I'm pursuing my dreams." That's not realistic. You know, if you care about other people, you have to consider the wants and needs of other people and the people that you've committed to. That's not what I'm going for here.
Selflessness says, "I never pursue my dreams. I bury my talents, even when it hurts me, and I do that in the name of lifting everybody else up. But really I'm just completely disregarding the person God made me to be."
Selfhood says, "I develop my own talents because that's what God asks of me. And I also help others develop theirs." It's both/and.
"I'm not going to bury my talents because I can't, that's not what God's called me to. But I'm also going to come alongside you and say, 'Hey, what are your talents? What are your gifts? How do we pursue those together in harmony?'" Do you see the difference?
I'm really trying to drill down on this because it's an important one, and I don't think it's taught on enough. Last one selfishness says, "I always advocate for what I want and need. I never defer to others. It's all about me." This is not healthy. This is not healthy for our relationships and it's not what God wants for us.
But, on the other hand, selflessness says, "I never state my needs. I always defer to others." That is, also, not healthy. That is, also, not the life God wants for us.
Selfhood says, "I consider my needs. They're important to the health of myself and of my relationships. And I consider the needs of the people I love. I consider both. I take them both into account and I have to figure it out." And it's a little bit harder.
It takes a little more time to figure out, "Man, here's what I need today. Here's what my spouse needs today. Here's what my kids need today, and all of those matter. I've got to figure out how to navigate and how to negotiate through all of those." And that's what, essentially, The Best of You is about.
It's how to walk through that negotiation. Because it's complicated to be a true self, that also cares about helping other people become their true selves. This is nuanced. When you live from a strong sense of self, here's what I want you to hear me say your YES and your NO becomes strong, clear, and powerful.
In fact, developing a sense of selfhood is the most foundational step to setting healthy boundaries with other people. It's really hard to set boundaries with other people when you don't know who you are?
What you want?
What you need?
What talents God is asking you to develop and steward?
If you don't know what you're saying yes to in your own life, before God, it's really hard to figure out the healthy boundaries that you need to set with other people. Selfhood is that missing building block, upon which we begin to build the healthy boundaries in our relationship with other people.
Here's the good news it's never too late to start choosing yourself. It starts with paying attention to the corners of your own body, soul, and mind. It starts as you listen for the voice of what brings you life, becoming yourself. This you that God made you to become is a process of learning to pay attention to what matters most to you. It starts by learning to pay attention to your convictions— What do you really think?
What do you really believe?
It starts by paying attention to the health of your body— What does your body need?
What are the cues your body is giving you? It starts by learning to ask for help. What do you need?
What do you need to ask for from the people who care about you?
It starts by saying yes to your talents— What are your passions?
What are you good at?
What do you long to bring more of into this world?
It starts by paying attention to your own inner longings. It starts by paying attention to your God-given self. And this is not selfish, I'm going to say it one more time. This is how you heal. This is how you become the person God made you to become. And as you become more of your true self, your God-given self. You will discover that you have more goodness, more wisdom, and more capacity to bring to the people around you.
Finally, I want to close on a note about what does the Bible have to say about this idea of selfhood? Well, selfhood is rooted in the idea that you were made in God's image and that comes out of Genesis 1:27.
You bear the image of God inside your soul. You were made to reflect who God is in a unique way, through you. I think sometimes we have this idea that we're supposed to be more godly. But what if being more godly, reflecting more of God's image is becoming more of you? The person God made uniquely to reflect the qualities and the character of who God is.
What a beautiful thought, but we're not taught how to do this, and this is my passion. This is what The Best of You journey is all about. "You are God's handiwork created to do good in this world." That's Ephesians 2:10. And the truth is Jesus gave us an amazing example of selfhood during a short time on earth.
Now hear me out on this one, a lot of preaching in our faith communities focuses on Christ's selflessness. But that idea often gets misconstrued. The selfless acts of Jesus were always rooted in the clarity He had about who He was and His larger purpose.
Jesus understood the power He had and He chose to wield that power sacrificially, wisely, for a greater purpose. Jesus was no doormat. He wasn't. He knew who He was. And, so, often what I see, especially for women, is we see this selflessness as living like Jesus.
But I don't see that reflected in the person of Jesus, I read about in the gospels. Jesus had a strong sense of Himself and when He gave up Himself it was out of a strong sense of who He was and, again, for that greater purpose. It wasn't just people-pleasing or laying down, playing nice, being a doormat for other people. That is not the example that we see in Jesus.
When Jesus said to deny yourself, Luke 9:23 among others, He understood the difference between denying your selfishness. Your old ways of coping and surviving, whatever those might be, and they might be your propensity to please other people.
He understood the difference between denying your selfishness, denying your old ways, and denying your selfhood. Your God-given, image-bearing self. This is your soul made to shine who God is through your life.
Hear me say that again, He understood the difference between denying your selfishness. Your old ways of coping and surviving. Your old ways of trying to keep other people happy, even. He understood the difference between denying your selfishness and denying your selfhood. The best of who you are. The best of who God made you to be.
Jesus claimed and protected His identity as God's beloved son. Which allowed Him to heal people, transform lives, and ultimately change the course of history by His death and resurrection. His ultimate act of sacrifice was rooted in a rock solid sense of who He was and whose He was.
He gave up His life from a position of strength. Do you hear the difference? He gave up His life from a position of strength. That's not being a doormat. And I want you to hear me say that, if you're someone who's been encouraged to die to yourself. To stay in an abusive situation, that's not the example we see in Jesus. And there's so many ways I unpack that in The Best of You because it's so important to me.
He gave up His life from a position of strength. It was rooted in a clarity of purpose. Sometimes Jesus wielded the power of His selfhood angrily. Sometimes He stood up to other people. Sometimes He showed mercy.
Jesus' example is very different from the kind of selflessness that comes from not knowing who you are. In fact, Jesus strong sense of self empowered Him to sustain healthy boundaries. He demonstrated a clear pattern of letting His YES be yes and His NO be no, that's Matthew 5:37. Whether He was taking time for Himself or spending it with other people.
When you live from a strong sense of self, I'll say it again, your YES and your NO becomes strong, clear, and powerful. That's the example we see in Jesus. Now there's a whole bunch of examples from Jesus' life. I'll give you a couple here. Jesus said yes to choosing friends carefully, Luke 6:12-16. Jesus said yes to developing His potential, that's Luke 2:46.
Jesus said yes to asking for help, Mark 14:32-34.
Jesus also said some healthy nos. Jesus said no to toxic behavior, Matthew 23:13-36, to name just one. Jesus said no to bullies and abusers John 8:1-11, to name one of many.
Jesus said no to being on all the time, for performing all the time, Matthew 14:23-24.
The example of Jesus is so important, especially for us women, to understand. Because so many of us have been taught to sacrifice as Jesus did, without also being taught to develop His strength.
In order to love and lead others, as Jesus did, you have to develop a strong sense of self. This is so important. This is the message I have for you, not just for this week but for every week to come. In order to love and lead others well you have to develop a strong sense of self.
I hope this week, as we close, you will take a moment as you consider this question, what brings out the best of you? Consider some of these questions—
What needs are you dying to have met?
What convictions are you aching to protect?
What or who do you want more of in your life?
What step could you take toward unlocking your potential?
These are the kinds of questions that are going to help unlock what brings out the best of you. What brings out your true self. What helps you become that self, that you? That beautiful you that God made you to become and is inviting you to step into.
Thank you so much for joining me. I look forward to seeing you next week on The Best of You.
Today's podcast episode is all about church hurt. A church is a family-at its best it's a place to learn about God, a place to heal, and a place to give & receive in community. But just like any family, when leadership turns toxic the results are devastating. You have so many questions for me about the pain that comes at the hands of a church family. I enter into today's episode with a spirit of reverence and a prayer for all who have been hurt in this way.
Here's what we cover:
1. What is church hurt?
2. The problem with the term church hurt
3. Why anyone with power (pastors, leaders, parents, and yes, even therapists!) hold great responsibility.
4. Examples of church hurt
5. 3 Red Flags for toxic church cultures
6. The problem with groupthink
7. How do I heal from church hurt?
Key Point
- God doesn't force, control, or manipulate you. God meets you where you are tenderly, and He wants to restore the goodness in your life that was taken away from you by an abusive leader.
Thanks to our sponsor Better Help -Go to www.betterhelp.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 10% off your first month!
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Groupthink
- Greatest Commandment
- Micah 6:8
- Matthew 5:1-12
- James 4:6
- 1 John 4:7-18
- Galatians 5:22-23
- Matthew 23
- Mark 9:38-42 and Luke 11:43-44
- Luke 17:12-16 and John 9:6-7
- Mark 2:15-16, Luke 7:36-39 and John 4:25-26
- Resources for support
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Best of You Podcast. Where we are in round two of a series called Psychology Buzzwords. This is a Listeners' Choice Edition, so you voted on these words. These were the words you were most interested in hearing about from me. And I want to pause here to just encourage you to pick up a copy of my new book, The Best of You.
In the book, I unpack a lot of misconstrued church messages, and what I do is I try to weave in wisdom from psychology. With what I believe is the true wisdom behind a whole bunch of these messages that have come out of the Bible. That have been misapplied, misinterpreted, and misconstrued to keep people stuck in toxic relationships and in toxic patterns of behavior.
So if you're someone who's been hurt by some of these messages. If you've been taught to deny yourself to the point of you don't even have a self anymore, you feel like a doormat. Or you've been taught that your emotions are bad, so you don't know how to relate in a healthy way to your emotions. Or if you've been taught not to trust yourself, and that's led you down the road of really unhealthy relationships with other people. Or you've been taught to turn the other cheek, in instances, where that verse was misapplied and misconstrued to teach you to put up with abuse.
Or if you were taught to honor parents in a really narrow way that doesn't honor the reality of what that verse actually means. You're going to want to pick up a copy of this book. I go into so much detail about how psychology comes together with the wisdom of Scripture. To help us become the whole, beautiful people, God made us and wants us to become.
It's available now for pre-order anywhere books are sold. You can go pre-order and when you pre-order, it comes out September 13th so we're just a few weeks away. When you pre-order, you will still get, up until September 13th, access to so many freebies. Such as my webinar, Five Toxic Behaviors and How to Protect Yourself in a biblical way.
My Boundaries for Women Course. I have a whole- Claim Your Yes bundle, which includes a video teaching on three steps to calm your emotions, that's based on my first book. You get the first three chapters of the book now and a special devotional just for you.
So head over and order the book anywhere books are sold. Then go to my website, it's dralisoncook.com/book and claim all those free gifts. Those are going to be there for you through September 13th, when you'll actually get the hard copy book into your hands.
So let's get started with the topic for today of church hurt. So, first of all, what do we mean by church hurt?
There are a lot of people who don't like this term. They think it really minimizes the damage that can be caused by church. I'm using it here because it is sort of the buzzword. It's the word that we see, and, so, I want to unpack that. And what I would say is church hurt, this idea of church hurt, covers a broad range. There's a spectrum of toxicity, of hurt, within a church community.
On one end of that spectrum is abuse, it is spiritual abuse. It is spiritual trauma. And this is when these really clear cases where someone in authority abuses their position and their power, to take advantage of either a person or of a whole parish and create a toxic environment.
There are degrees of that. There are some churches where it's just pervasive. The leadership is so toxic. There are other churches that there are some health and there is some toxicity. And then there are those churches where they're mostly healthy, but we still get hurt. And it's really important to understand that large umbrella, no church is perfect.
You're going to get hurt when you go to church. But church hurt, this term really gets at those wounds that are created as a result. And I talk a lot about a spectrum of toxicity, where there's more toxicity than there is health. And, so, because there's more toxicity, you're really getting hurt more than you're getting goodness.
What we want to strive for, no church is perfect, what we want to strive for in a church is that at the minimum, "Do no harm". It's the Hippocratic Oath that we have in medicine, that we have as therapists, and I think it applies to church communities. Let's, at the minimum, try to "Do no harm" or if we do harm to take ownership for it and I'll get into that.
But church hurt is. It is a little bit of a nebulous term because we're really not talking about just, "Man, that hurt. That person at church hurt me today." That's a little bit of a different thing. We're really talking about something more toxic, something that really creates a wound, all right.
So church families are such important places to grow, to give, and receive care, to learn about God. We need faith communities. They're such important places to learn and to grow. But just like a family where there's an absentee or an abusive parent. When church leadership turns toxic, and I'm going to talk to you about how that happens, the results are damaging to hearts, souls, and minds.
So church leadership holds a lot of power. But that power includes a lot of responsibility, then if someone misuses their power we're going to define the result of that as abuse. And all abuse means when we look to the dictionary is, "A bad effect." Or "For a bad purpose".
It means misusing one's power for a bad effect or a bad purpose. And church hurts stem from experiencing someone else abusing their power.
A church has the power to gather, encourage, and heal God's people. Church communities can help you encourage yourself and others. Give thanks and marvel at God's wonders. Grow in humble, honest, self-awareness. Pray with other people, grow in wisdom and the knowledge of God. Care for those who are most vulnerable. These are all ways that church communities are so important.
But when a church leader abuses his or her power, it has the opposite effect. Such as causing discouragement and disappointment in yourself and others. Feelings of anger, shame, confusion, and bitterness toward God. Toxic movement toward rigid self-denial and self-hatred. Bypassing or denying the painful emotions versus bringing them to God, honestly.
False ideas about God versus the God Jesus embodied, and further wounds to the ones, the vulnerable ones who've already been hurt the most. So here are some examples, a woman whose church disappears after she gets a divorce from her abusive husband, they shun her. They don't support her, and here she is, on her own, trying to raise these kids. Having gone through a traumatic event and that church has abandoned her. That's a wound. That's a wound that's created.
A young child is taught that he will burn in hell, if he makes friends with the wrong kinds of people. That's not a message that a child can stomach. And I've worked with people, over and over, and over, who are taught these really graphic awful things as children and it's become a trauma.
There's like a terror about doing the wrong thing or stepping outside of the line. And they're taught this message in a way that it's just that it hurts the soul. It doesn't bring the soul into the safety of a loving God. A young couple is forced to leave a church after they speak up about the misbehavior of a narcissistic pastor. They might even be shunned by that community.
Lastly, maybe, you open up your vulnerable with a pastor. With someone in leadership at your church about your depression. You trust them and you are told that your depression is your fault and that it's because you lack faith. This creates a wound. This creates distance between you and a loving God.
This creates a wound to your soul that doesn't need to be there and that is wrong, and this hurt is not of God. It's a hurt that was created by humans who are taking on the authority of God, especially, if they're in leadership, and, so, it hurts. It has that impact, that weight of authority, and, so, you're confused.
You're like, "Man, is this my fault?" You feel shame?
"I can't get over this depression, this anxiety. I'm in the pain of this divorce, and I'm being told that it's my fault."
"That I'm the one that's wrong, that I'm sinning, and that I have to fix this to get right with God."
And it creates a wound that's toxic to the soul and it's not your fault, and this is what we mean by church hurt. This is what we mean if we really want to call it, what it really is by spiritual trauma. This is a wound to the soul, at the hands of people who are supposed to be representing a loving God.
Now, listen, I have so many friends who are pastors who are on the front lines of church ministry, and you might be listening to this podcast. And I want you to hear me say, no church is perfect. No pastor is perfect. One of the key signs of healthy church leadership is humility. Is the humility to say, "I don't know, I'm going to get it wrong."
We're not after perfection, listen, we therapists get it wrong. We could do a whole episode on therapist hurt. We hurt people too. This profession hurts people. I'm not here to go after pastors, but churches are like a family. There's something sacred about a church community. It's a family, God set it up this way. It's the body of Christ, and churches, like families, are comprised of wounded people. But it also has the power of a family. We trust our church communities, our faith communities, like we trust our families.
We think our families are supposed to be safe, are supposed to be for us. And we think our churches are supposed to be safe, are supposed to be for us. And, so, when they betray us, it hurts. It creates a wound. In many cases, it creates a trauma or a complex trauma, as we discussed in the episode on CPTSD. A bunch of paper cuts add up to a big response.
Now hear me say this, the presence of wounds, in a family or in a church, does not mean a church is toxic. We all have wounds. Every family is wounded. Every church is wounded. It's how we face our wounds. It's how we own our wounds. It's how we honor our wounds, honestly, with humility and transparency with one another and, most of all, before God, that's what makes the difference.
In a healthy family, each family member manages and works to take responsibility for their own struggles. This is right out of Galatians 6:2 that we are to take responsibility for our own burdens, for our own selves, which means self-awareness.
It means knowing here are my blind spots. Here's where I'm not going to get it right, whether you're a parent, or a pastor, or a ministry leader, or a church parishioner, or an elder. Whatever position of responsibility you have, I have as a therapist, and say, "Man, this is my blind spot. This is where I know I'm going to get it wrong, first and foremost, inside myself I know that, and before God I know that. And with a few safe people I know that."
So healthy families, healthy church families, commit to a process of becoming aware of where they have blind spots. Of where they're still healing, of where they fall short.
Unhealthy church families take a different path. Take a different path toward becoming toxic or abusive toxic church environments. Like a toxic family environment that has gone so far down the path where it's become toxic. It's more toxic than it is healthy, again, it's a spectrum, but it's moving far away from that healthy church culture.
It's all about the inability to come humbly before God with our own brokenness, from the leadership down. It starts in a family. It starts with the parents and in the church, it starts with the leadership. We need communities. We are healed by communities, but we are also wounded in communities.
So I'm not here to say we don't need faith communities. We do. We need them to be healthy. And we need to all do our part in that, me too, I just want to say, I feel so much humility in this episode because I get it wrong too. I get it wrong too.
We all are going to get it wrong. It's not that we're not going to get it wrong. It's how we are humble about that. It's how we come before each other in that. It's wise to guard your heart when entering into any kind of relationship, even a relationship with a church family.
So in today's episode, I want to equip you, how do I identify church families that are healthier versus those that are more toxic. So that you can be wise in how you relate to that community. That is so important for your spiritual and emotional health.
So here are three red flags for what could become church hurt. So these are three red flags to look for. Number one, a disrespect for your personal boundaries. Just because you join a church family doesn't mean you get to check yourself at the door. You get to show up as a whole person, just as you do in your own family.
A family, if we apply Family Systems Theory, from psychology, bringing in family systems. It's a system of a bunch of different people and it functions in a healthy way, when there's a role for each person. When each person gets to function, optimally, within that system.
There's not one person that's taking over and then other people are getting shoved aside, every person, we work in a healthy family to create rules, where every person gets a chance to shine. Every person gets a chance to come to the table with their gifts, and that requires that dance, that I talked about in last week's episode on attachment. That dance of togetherness and apartness, "I want to be with you and I want to show up as my true self." It's both.
"I want to be part of the family and I get to bring my individual gifts to the table."
And, so, if you're a part of a church family, and they're not honoring your boundaries. They're not honoring your personal autonomy, that's a red flag. And here are some examples of how that might show up.
Number one, be aware of rushed or forced vulnerability. Trust is built over time. That's true of any relationship, including a relationship with your church. So if you're walking in the door and you're being asked to share every, sort of, detail of your life, on day two, that's a red flag. Trust is earned, and are they going to honor your boundaries?
Let's say you're in a conversation. Maybe you're meeting with a pastor and he's saying, "Tell me your life's story?" And you've been hurt, and maybe you've got a tender story, and you say, "I want to open up to you. But what I just want you to know, for now, is that I'm divorced and I'm looking for a new church."
Can they honor that? Can they say, "Thank you so much for being here. I look forward to getting to know you."
Or do they immediately jump in wanting to know every detail. Starting in with judgment. Starting in to tell you who, what, when, where, and how it should be for you, and they don't even know you. That's a red flag. Trust is earned over time. Forced vulnerability isn't healthy vulnerability, it's manipulation, and you want to watch out for that because we see that in certain church cultures.
Now I'm going to just say it right here, it's true for your therapist too. If your therapist is stigmatizing you or shaming you because you want to pace yourself in how you open up about your past, that's a red flag there too. So we're not off the hook on this. But any kind of situation in which you're being forced to tell details that just don't feel like they're honoring, you get to pace yourself in how you open up to people.
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Number two, an oversimplification of hurt, of what it means that we hurt. This oversimplification of, "You're a sinner." That's it. That's the only thing you need to know. We need to talk about sin in churches. Yes.
We miss the mark, we need to understand that. We also need to understand that sin is complicated, and I'm going to do a whole, I promise you, I keep promising you, I'm going to do a whole episode on this. But there's a lot to sin and a lot of times those people who are acting out the most, have been hurt the most. And we need to understand there needs to be a posture of compassion.
Yes, there needs to be a posture of truth, but there needs to be a posture of compassion. And, most of all, we need to not sense shame. If there is shame from the pulpit, if you're being shame, now, sometimes we can feel shame. But if you're being shamed, that's a problem, I'd watch out for that. That's a red flag.
Instead, look for a church that is willing to tackle heart issues. That is willing to talk about things like depression, doubt, loneliness, anger, with nuance, without shaming you.
Can the pastor talk about these subjects, honestly, maybe, even with humility? "I don't understand this, but I do know if you're experiencing this, that you're not alone." Are you hearing about these topics in a non-shaming way?
Do people talk openly about feelings like being lonely, or being angry, or being sad?
Is there a space for you to show up authentically?
Notice how people treat others who are struggling. A healthy church encourages an environment of compassion. We see it in how members talk about other members.
Are they gossiping?
Are they stigmatizing?
Are they judging?
Are they shaming?
Or is there for the most part, again, no one is perfect, a posture of humility, of compassion, of openness.
I'll never forget an experience I had, in my twenties, of being part of a church group, and the pastor would preach these amazing sermons. I still remember some of them to this day, but there was a culture in this community of just hatred, vitriol, behind closed doors. It wasn't the pastor, necessarily. I never, necessarily, heard him, but this was the environment that he was fostering, so I don't know what was going on.
And I was like, "How am I in this environment? Where I'm hearing these messages from the pulpit and I'm hearing the people listening to these message saying hateful, cruel things about God's beloved children?" And that tore me up.
That experience right there and I wasn't even the direct target of it, and it tore me up. If you're hearing that pay attention, that's a red flag.
How are people treating each other and how are they talking about people, maybe that aren't even around?
How are they talking about other people? And I'm not talking about theological differences, I'm talking about basic human kindness here.
How are we treating other people? That's a red flag.
Number three, a lack of humility and openness. Wise, church leaders enable space for a diversity of perspectives. Now that's not to say that a pastor may not have conviction about certain church topics, I think they should.
But healthy church leaders can say that, "Hey, this is where I stand on this, I want to be transparent about that.
If you would disagree with me, I'm open to that. Man, I want to have that conversation with you. You're welcome here. I just want to be clear this is where I stand, but you're welcome here. You don't have to agree with me on everything."
Controlling church leaders expect group think, what psychologists call group think. And that means that every member has to tow the party line or risk being kicked out. If you disagree you're out. This kind of control can take the form of rigid expectations and demands, with little room for nuance or healthy dialogue. Especially about minor issues but even about major issues, there's room for dialogue.
Unhealthy church leadership can take the form of celebrity worship. Where everyone is expected to adore the leadership, the leader, the pastor. And if you are to be like, "I'm not sure, I agree with them on this." You're out. That's what I mean by this group think, you have to be a part and you have to think the same way as everybody else, or ooh you're out. That's not healthy. It's not healthy in families, it's not healthy in churches.
In any family environment, whether it's a family, or a church, or a country, or a nation, these are all systems of people. There is got to be room for healthy disagreement. There has to be room for dialogue. That doesn't mean we don't have convictions. It means, we say, "This is what I believe. This is what I believe to be true. I'm curious about why you disagree and what you think. Can we honor each other, and listen to each other, and maybe disagree at the end of that conversation, and still respect each other as humans made in the image of God." That's it.
We have to have a posture of curiosity about each other and that's modeled by the leadership. That's modeled by parents, in a family, and that's modeled by church leaders in a church community. If a church won't create space for people to engage topics, honestly, how are they helping you grow? How are they helping you bring your real questions, your authentic questions to the table?
Whether it's in a small group, or in a Sunday school class, or in some sort of group setting where you're saying, "Man, I heard this sermon but I don't know if I agree with this, help me understand?"
How are you growing? If you can't engage your questions, honestly. People heal as they are invited into healthy, honest dialogue, through healthy relationships.
Remember even the best of churches will let you down from time to time. They are comprised, we are all comprised of unhealthy people. You're going to bump in to some toxic people, even at church, and that doesn't mean the whole church is toxic. And you can use your behaviors, that I teach in the webinar, maybe you love your church, and, man, there's just someone there that's really tough. We all have to deal with this. You can use your strategies to protect yourself with that person. That doesn't mean that whole church community is toxic.
But what I'm trying to describe here are systemic issues that come from the leadership down. Manipulation, criticism, shame, controlling tactics that pervade the community, cruelty. These things become pervasive in the community, that's not healthy. That's not a healthy environment.
Instead look for church communities, church leadership, that respect boundaries, that care for those who are hurting. That show a posture of kindness and compassion even when there's conviction about certain issues, there can still be a posture of kindness and compassion, and there's humility.
There's room for differences of opinions. You get to raise your questions. This is the place where you can find healing and where you can find spiritual growth in community with other people. A church family should be focused on supporting its members to grow in learning how to love and receive love in return. So that you can love God, love others, and honor yourself. Just as Jesus taught, "Love the God, with all your heart, soul strength, and mind." That's what we're learning about in church, how to do that.
How to care for others as we also care for ourselves, all of those three are important in church communities. There are plenty of healthy church families out there. I promise you they're out there, so don't give up on your search. But be wise, especially, if you've been hurt before and if you have been hurt before, get the healing you need.
So that leads us to the last section of this episode. How do I heal from church hurt?
The process of healing isn't always easy. It can be hard to face the pain that we've experienced in this environment we wanted to be safe and we thought would be safe, so we made ourselves vulnerable. And then this environment betrayed us, man, that is painful, and I want to honor that and validate that pain. It can be really hard to disentangle God from the misrepresentation of God by unhealthy church communities.
So, understandably, a lot of folks get angry. They get angry at God, but other folks aren't angry at God at all, they're just angry at the church community. Some folks decide to leave church to maintain their relationship with God for a season. So we have to be really clear about when we're angry. What are we angry with God?
Are we angry with the church community?
Is it a little bit of both? And both are okay, God can handle both.
But if you're struggling with the pain of church hurt. If you're noticing that it's hard for you to be a part of a faith community, that you, kind of, have to grit your teeth, or that you experience anxiety, or that you don't trust yourself, or you don't trust the community, please know that you're not alone. And that as you heal yourself you will learn how to enter into a faith community with wisdom.
Knowing that there are going to be folks with blind spots. Knowing that any faith community is going to have its share of ups and downs, and there's going to be nicks and bruises, just as there is in any relationship.
But as you heal yourself, and empower, and equip yourself, you can navigate a healthy faith community in really beautiful ways. And you can become a part of co-creating a healthy community with the other members.
So it starts with healing yourself because you take yourself into that church family. You don't have to be at the whim of the church. As you heal yourself, you gain skills so that you walk into that church door equipped to know how to protect yourself in a healthy way.
So the first step toward healing, as we discussed already in part one, is to name that church hurt as an abuse, as a wound from which you've got to heal. You've got to name it to yourself, "Man, that pastor attacked me where I was the most vulnerable." That was an abuse of power.
"Man, they taught me that I wasn't worthy of God's love. That was an abuse of power."
"They told my secrets to other people. That was an abuse of power, that hurt me."
"They told me my abusive husband's behavior was my fault. That was an abuse of power."
"They told me my depression was evidence that I lacked faith. That was an abuse of power."
And the purpose of this step is not to harbor resentment, it's to name what's true. The initial process of healing hinges upon you naming what happened that was wrong, and that you need to heal from.
Number two, separate the church hurt from God's character. Some aspects of God's character are crystal clear throughout the Bible. If you feel busted up or beaten on by a church community, it's so important to take a step back for a moment, if you're able, and to remind yourself who God is apart from the hurtful actions.
I'm going to give you some examples. "God loves justice, mercy, and humility." Micah 6:8.
"God is for the poor and spirit, the grief stricken, the humble, the brokenhearted, and the peacemaker." Matthew 5:1-12.
"God stands against the proud, and He is for the humble." James 4:6.
"God is love." 1 John 4-7.
"And God's presence shows up as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." Galatians 5:22-23.
And if this has not been your experience of a church community, that's not the spirit of God.
You might also look to the life of Jesus and notice how He interacted with various types of people. Jesus had His harshest words for the abusers of power. To the religious leaders who judged, criticized, oppressed, and hurt others.
He was harsh with these folks, guys, and this is fear and trembling here, we don't want to be these people. From Matthew 23.
Mark 9:38:42 [00:35:29.00] (not sure) and Luke 11:43-44, Jesus doesn't have kind words for those who abuse power to hurt others.
Jesus drew close to people who were hurting, wounded, sick, and suffering. He didn't blame them for their suffering nor did He marginalize them. He encouraged them. He helped them in practical ways in many times, and He treated them with respect.
See Luke 17:12-16 and John 9:6-7
And then there's the marginalized, those who were shoved aside to the margins of society. Those who came from the wrong side of the tracks. Jesus purposefully intervened for those folks. You can see so many stories of Jesus siding with those who've been shoved aside and oppressed in Mark 2:15-16, Luke 7:36-39 and John 4:25 and 26.
Now, listen, if you've been hurt by Scripture, go slowly, it's okay, I want to paint that picture for you. That I do not believe that God of the Bible is a God who creates these toxic, shaming, cruel, painful, controlling, environments.
But if it's hard for you, if the Bible's been used to hurt you. I just want to paint that picture for you, but pace yourself in your journey of healing.
Finally, step three, if you've experienced church hurt, it can cause you to feel helpless and alone. And you're going to need to set boundaries with those who have caused the pain, and that's a hard process in and of itself. But you do need to heal and you may need to seek help outside of the church. Whether from another church, maybe, you just go to another place for a season where you experience a little bit of a safety.
Maybe you go to a counselor who understands spiritual abuse and spiritual trauma, where you can get the healing you need. Maybe you find a small group of trusted advisors, people who can help you process what happened to you, where you get someone to witness. We need to heal in healthy environments where people witness, what happened to us.
It's wise to enlist the help of other people, and then over time you can reclaim your spiritual practices. But give yourself a chance to heal, especially, if the Bibles been used against you. If prayer has been used to manipulate you.
If sermons have been used to try to control you. It may take you a minute to learn to trust again, and that's okay, give yourself time. And it's normal to feel that wound, kind of, bruised in some of these settings where spiritual practices are taught and that can be confusing and painful. So be gentle with yourself, God is gentle with you. God can understand it. God can meet you in those tender places and provide the healing you need.
God doesn't force, control, or manipulate you. God meets you where you are tenderly, and He wants to restore the goodness in your life that was taken away from you by an abusive leader.
Today's podcast episode is another packed one all about attachment. Be sure to listen all the way through for some thoughts on how attachment wounds impact our human relationships and our experience of a loving God.
Here's what we discuss:
- Why I think we're not just one attachment style
- What are 4 different attachment styles?
- Can your attachment style change?
- The key ingredient that creates attachment
- How to create secure attachment with your own children
- Why our attachment styles create confusion in our adult relationships
- How to see attachment wounds as a cue to get curious about yourself vs. a source of shame
- A picture of healthy attachment 80's slow dance style vs. Jane Austen style
- My thoughts on God and attachment
Key Quotes:
- If you struggle to feel God's love, to experience what it's like to be held by the God of the Universe who loves you, who knit you together, and who is present to you every moment of every day-the God who is a breath away-I want you to hear me say, it's not your fault.
- God doesn't blame you for that. He doesn't blame us for those wounds that we carry. He doesn't blame us or shame us for those. He doesn't blame us for the wounds of our childhood
- We are whole-body people and our whole bodies are affected by attachment wounds. We can't will ourselves to that experience of loving presence. Our bodies have to experience safety to heal.
Thanks to our sponsor Organifi -Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker
- Try Softer, by Aundi Kolber
- Research on Attachment
- Pride & Prejudice
- Little Women
- Matthew 5:4
- James 4:6
- 1 John 4:7-16
- Galatians 5:22-23
- Psalm 34:8
- Resources for support
Transcript
Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You podcast, all about attachment. So, before we get started, just one last reminder, that it's not too late to catch my August webinar series, Five Toxic Behaviors and How to Protect Yourself.
We had over 500 people Live last week for part one, which was really about these five toxic behaviors. Most of them have come out of these buzzwords you've wanted me to cover, but we haven't been able to get to on the podcast.
Part two is next Thursday at 8:00 PM Eastern, but if you register, you get the recordings for both. So even if you can't attend Live or if you missed last week, go ahead and register and you will get a recording emailed to you. This is a bonus content. This is a freebie for you when you pre-order a copy of The Best of You.
You can pre-order wherever books are sold. It comes out September 13th, it's getting so close. I can't wait for you to have it. But in the meantime, this is my way of thanking you for showing early support.
Pre-order the book, save your confirmation number and head over to dralisoncook.com/book, where you can claim your free bonuses. One of which is this August series. It's really been so powerful. So cool. So great to get together Live.
I really liked hearing from you, hearing our questions in real-time. I hope to do more of these over the coming months.
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Okay, so today let's dive into our topic. What are attachment styles and why does it matter? So this was a, really, popular vote. A lot of you wanted to understand attachment styles. And I want to be honest with you, there's a part of me, for those of you who have read Boundaries for Your Soul. There's a part of me that gets a little bit leery of all this talk of attachment styles. Because it's almost, sort of like, "What's my Enneagram number?
Or like "What's my attachment style?" Meaning it's unchangeable or once I know what my style is, I can just define myself in that way. And I always give this caveat about labeling yourself because, first of all, attachment styles can change, as we'll get into. You can move into a secure attachment style, number one.
Number two, I believe we're multifaceted. So, again, if you've read my book Boundaries for Your Soul, it's all about this internal family that we all have. The Internal Family Systems model of therapy. Parts of you might be able to attach very well. Whereas other parts of you might have very insecure attachment.
So I don't think we're, necessarily, one style. I think we're a little bit more complicated than that. And, furthermore, research shows that we can move toward healthier attachment. Toward an experience of healthy attachment, even if we didn't get secure attachment as a child.
Now we're going to get into all of this and it is really important. I don't want to minimize the topic. It's one of the most important topics in trauma research, in understanding CPTSD, which we discussed last week. There are two books that I cannot recommend highly enough. I think I recommend these books, almost every single podcast.
The first is my friend, Aundi Kolber's book, Try Softer, it's incredibly thoughtful, accessible overview of trauma of attachment, of all sorts of things that we talk about on this podcast. She's an excellent resource for you.
And then the other one is Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guidance Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma. That's a book by Pete Walker. That's just a really comprehensive, accessible overview of a lot of these topics.
So please check out both of those books, especially, as they relate to attachment and CPTSD, and all of the things we talk about in this series. Just excellent resources for you.
All right, let's get started. What do we mean by attachment? Well at its simplest form, it's the safety. This experience of safe connection, safe bonding to a caregiver that every baby, every infant, needs to survive on some level.
When a tiny baby is held in loving arms, she experiences safety in her body, in her nervous system, in the depths of her soul. And, even though, you can't remember that in your conscious mind. This experience of being held, and it's not just physical, and we'll get into that.
But this experience of physical and emotional safety is foundational to a strong sense of self. It is foundational to this nervous system's homeostasis. We've talked about Fight/Flight/Freeze/Fawn. Those are all an activated nervous system that's in survival mode.
Well, this experience of safety, of security is the opposite of that. It's this clear, calm place, and it starts in the nervous system at the moment you're born. At the moment you are held by someone else. We are designed to be connected to other people. We are designed to develop in relationship, in healthy, securely-attached relationships.
So if your caregivers nurtured and comforted you, provided you with healthy touch, and their presence, and we'll get into what I mean by presence. You develop, what psychologists call, secure attachment.
You have a foundational experience of another human as safe, as trustworthy, and you absorb, deep inside your own body, what it's like to feel safe, held, soothed, to be witnessed, seen.
To have someone be present with you. This presence is really powerful. It's an idea of how we begin to experience what God is like. And we'll get into that attachment with God a little bit later in this episode. We got a lot to get into.
So here's the thing, research suggests that at least in the U.S. most people are securely attached. And by most, I just mean the majority, and estimates are anywhere from over 50% to around 60 to 65% of people are securely attached.
Now I would give the caveat of what I said at the beginning. 80% of you might be securely attached. But I still believe parts of us can experience insecure attachment, a lack of safety. I think it's a little bit more complex than we're just one thing, one attachment style.
But I just want to give you that overview, that over 50% of Americans, at the very least, do experience some level of secure attachment. But that does mean there are a lot of folks who are experiencing not very much secure attachment. Let's say it's 45%, whatever, somewhere in that range of folks who are insecurely attached. Even if they have a little semblance of attachment, they're still struggling to feel that safety, that connection.
So here's what I want you to understand, and this is really important. There was a study done in 2000 on attachment I'll link to it in the show notes. But what they found is that this critical aspect of attachment, is not so much based on whether or not you got all of your material, physical needs met.
You may have had food on the table. You might have had clothes. You might have had educational opportunities. Your parents might have shown up at the dinner table every night. We talked about this last week. That's not what really creates secure attachment.
Now, if you had those things that's what I mean by like parts of you might understand safety. In the sense of you get that there's predictable behaviors. That people can behave predictably. Parts of you might have had some safety in the sense that you had a home. You had a roof over your head, you had food on the table.
But here's the thing, real, secure attachment. Real, deep down, every fiber of your being secure attachment is about presence. And what do I mean by that? Well, what this study found is that it's nonverbal, primarily, communication that leads to attachment. And, by nonverbal, that just means did someone attend to your emotional cues?
Was someone present to you when you came home sad, after a hard day at school?
Did someone ask you questions?
Were they curious about you?
Did someone notice, when you were a toddler, that something seemed off with you?
So there's this idea of presence. You could have had all of your physical needs met. But if you think about it, and listen, all of us who are parents are, probably, shuddering right now. Because think about how many times you're feeding your kids, you're getting them to school, you're getting them in the car. But you're not really present to them. Your mind is a million miles away.
This happens to all of us and I want you to hear me say creating a secure attachment, especially if you're a parent who's listening, is not being 100% on all the time, you're human. There's a psychology term called good-enough parenting. And just even a few moments each day of being present to your child is huge.
It doesn't have to be 24-hours a day. Make a little bit of time each day to really be present to your child. Even just in nonverbal ways where you are aware that you're orienting toward your child. You're reading the cues, you're checking in, you're showing curiosity.
But, again, going back to you as a child. If you were in a home where your parents were never present to you. Maybe they were so taken up in their own mental health issues, in their own pain, in their own grief, even.
We can have compassion for our parents, but that doesn't mean they were present to us. So that's where it starts. It's really with that emotional presence. That's what we mean by secure attachment. And if you didn't experience that kind of secure attachment, that presence with a primary caregiver as a child. Your internal alert system, your nervous system tends towards survival mode.
You tend to cope with anxiety through the fighting, fleeing, freezing, and fawning that we talked about in episode 14. Your nervous system kind of scrambles, it's looking for that.
We're designed for that. It's looking for that safe place, that safe harbor. And when it's not there, your nervous system gets amped up and you try to look for it in other places.
Now, sometimes, you'll find it in other places. You'll find it in a grandparent, in a teacher, in a friend, in a babysitter, which is beautiful. That's great. Think about that experience. There's a reason you have that memory. Your nervous system registered safety. God designed you to feel seen, held, soothed by another person.
So if you didn't get that with a primary caregiver, you may have had that experience with someone else. And, therefore, your nervous system got a glimpse. Got a glimpse, at least, of what secure attachment feels like.
So, again, we're not all one thing. You may struggle with attachment. But even that glimpse of what safety felt like is a cue, that's what you want to move toward. That's what your nervous system can start to move toward as you start to heal.
Children's brains continue to develop well into adulthood, at least, into the mid-twenties we know. And because of that your brain can continue to take in these experiences of secure attachment over time. It's never too late to start training yourself, and even after, even if you're an adult. Even if you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, your nervous system is designed to heal.
I think this is a lot of what happens in the therapy room. It's a secure attachment. It's that experience of being attended to. Someone being present to you, someone seeing you. And even those of you who have had that experience in therapy, and have said things like, "I feel something different here but I'm also aware that this feeling is unfamiliar to me."
There's that gap in your experience of, "This feels safe, but, man, I never really had this before." That's a cue about your attachment style.
But, again, this is why therapy can be such a helpful place to retrain your nervous system and your body to experience what safety feels like. And it happens in the context of relationships, that wound is healed in the context of relationships, but it also happens inside of you. Your nervous system begins to glimpse what it's like to access that calm, clear place inside.
All right, so let's move into the key attachment styles. This is what everybody wants to know, so let's just go there. So researchers have observed a lot of different attachment styles. I'm going to focus on the four-most common.
And how they studied this, is they would observe what would happen if you separate an infant from a caregiver for a brief period of time. They'd watch what would happen with infants.
So children with a secure attachment might show a little bit of distress upon separation from a caregiver, some of them more than others. But they will be so happy to welcome that caregiver when the caregiver returns, and you can observe this.
You notice the eye contact, the physicality, the, "Give me a hug." The arms open. There's this connection you can see when that infant is reunited with the caregiver. Where there's that secure attachment.
Second, we go to an Anxious Resistant style. In this style, the child shows that distress upon separation. Similar to the securely-attached child. Very few children love to be separated from their caregivers. That's not abnormal, if your child has a hard time getting out of the car to go to school. That doesn't mean they have an attachment issue. That's very normal that they show that distress.
Securely-attached children will be thrilled to see you again. They'll just, "Ah!" You'll sense that warmth when they return to you.
Anxious resistant attachment, these children continue to show anxiety when they're returned to the caregiver, they're not attached. It doesn't provide that comfort. And, so, when researchers are studying children they'll see this. The child is distressed upon separation and they continue to be distressed even after the caregiver returns.
Then we move into avoidant attachment. So these children stay pretty calm when the parent leaves and they don't embrace the return. So third avoidant attachment. These children remain calm upon separation. It's as if they don't even notice that the caregiver has gone and they don't, really, notice their return either.
This child is just, sort of, in their own world. They're, kind of, disconnected from the caregiver. Some of this is intuitive, if you think about it.
Okay, and last we get into what's called disorganized attachment. And this is the one that's the most linked or correlated with trauma. With childhood trauma, with abuse. And it's, really, where there's just ambivalent or erratic behavior in relationship to the caregiver.
There might be a running toward and then an angry hit. There might be high anxiety, with an extreme vacillation to a different emotion. There's this disorganized, unpredictable, erratic behavior around a caregiver.
So here's the thing, attachment theory suggests that we bring these styles into our relationships as adults. So as I was reading through those, I was describing how infants react when a caregiver leaves the room.
But, if you think about it, you will begin to notice ways that you might be in your marriages, with your children, with your own parents, as an adult. You might notice a secure attachment, that maybe you don't like it when your spouse leaves to go on a business trip. But at the same time you're fine and you're so happy when they return, and there's just this homeostasis.
Again, there's this calm in the health of the relationship. You might notice that you hate the separation, and listen, this can happen with people you love.
This can happen with people who are actually treating you well and that's why it's confusing. This is why attachment styles are so confusing. Because you'll notice a high amount of anxiety around the separation, and then you're angry with the person when they return.
And I want to be clear, in this case, let's say the person hasn't done anything wrong. They went away. They did something not to be mean. They weren't giving you the silent treatment. They weren't doing something. They just had to go to work, or they had to like leave on vacation, or they had to go visit another family member. And they return and you're really angry with them, and it takes you a while to reconnect.
It doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. But that's that remnant, that residual effect of your own attachment style. It was hard for you to connect. Maybe you didn't have that experience of safety with your caregiver, and that part of you is still alive inside of you.
And, so, now you're with this person, especially, this happens in intimate relationships. Where that person is that first feeling of safety, that first feeling of connection, and then they leave. And you're like, "Wait, they just left me." And you feel abandoned and maybe they only left for a couple of hours.
And then they come back and you're upset, and you're crying, and you're like, "Why did you leave me?" And then you're like, "What is wrong with me?" This happens. Well, you're becoming aware of an attachment style. You're becoming aware of, and I don't like to use the word disorder, I just don't like that word. So I'm going to say, you're becoming aware of something about yourself.
It's a cue. "Oh my goodness, it may be hard for me to feel secure."
"It may be hard for me to feel secure. Even when that other person isn't doing something wrong."
And this is where it's so confusing because you might think, "Well, why did you leave me?" And they're like, "Well, I needed to go to the grocery store." Or "I needed to go on this work trip."
And you don't realize that that big response you have, and this is what we talked about last week with CPTSD. You have that big emotional response upon their return. And you think you're so angry with them, and then they're like, "What was I supposed to do? We talked about this." They don't understand, and you're confused. You're confused. And I just want you to know this isn't your fault. This is the way. This was the environment that your nervous system was shaped in all those years back.
So it's not your fault. Your nervous system, as a baby, needed that person to be with you in a consistent, predictable present way and they weren't. And, so, you don't know what it's like when someone walks away or leaves you for a healthy reason.
Your nervous system experiences that as abandonment. It's not your fault, that's survival mode. So that's why this is just so important and so profound to our relational health.
Because if we don't realize one of two things, we have to realize A, did they do something wrong? Did they, in fact, abandon me? If they did that's a different issue. Then we're in some toxicity. Then we do need to address that differently. But what if, option two, they didn't do anything wrong, but "I'm experiencing it as abandonment. I'm experiencing it as pain."
Oh, my goodness, we don't need to shame ourselves for that. But we do need to understand that. And this is where it's tricky. This is where it gets hard in relationships. Because sometimes we don't know, is it them or is it me, or is it both of us? Is there a dynamic? And these are getting into the deep waters, we'll follow back up on that in another episode.
But this is why attachment style matters. This is why it's so interesting to all of us because we're all trying to figure this out.
"Am I avoidant?"
"Do I stay un-neutral?"
Or are you married to someone who is avoidant? They're just always in neutral and it's almost like you feel like, "I don't even know if they notice I'm here." And that can hurt. That can hurt. That's a survival strategy. That's the way their nervous system was formed.
No one ever conditioned that little infant to understand and recognize presence. So their nervous system just went numb. It's avoidant attachment style, and it may not be about you at all. It's something that needs to heal within them.
If you are someone who's avoidant. You learned to just kind of shut down and you don't register the pain of someone leaving, even the healthy pain of momentary separation. But you also don't register the joy of reuniting of reconnection, which we all need in our relationships.
And then Disorganized attachment is another one that's really challenging for people. Again, if you know you're a trauma survivor and you have sort of erratic responses to people, and it's confusing to you. Why one minute you feel so close and then the next minute you feel abandoned?
And, again, all of this goes back to, Gosh, is it them or is it me?" And it can really make you feel crazy. And I want you to hear me say, there's so much here. And I prayed over this episode because there's just a lot here.
I don't want you to get so hung up on, "Which attachment style am I?"
"What am I?"
What I want you to hear me say is if you're noticing some disconnect in your primary relationships. I just want you to get curious about that question. "Is this person really hurting me?"
"Are they really abandoning me?"
"Are they really doing something wrong?"
And maybe they are. Or "Is it possible that I don't know what safety feels like and I'm confused? And can I genuinely answer that with, 'I'm not sure without shame?'" And if you're not sure it's a great time to get help. Seek out the help of a counselor. Begin to recognize when your own attachment style is keeping you from that healthy back and forth.
Now, I want to get into this. There's so much in this, I keep going on and on. But here's the thing, healthy attachment is a dance of connection and autonomy.
So we need to understand healthy attachment before we get too much further into the weeds of these disordered attachments. Because, I think, that's what happens, we get into the weeds of, "What's my attachment style?" We don't understand a picture of healthy attachment.
I like to use the word connectedness because it's all-encompassing. Connectedness is a dance, it's being together and it's being apart. It's knowing you belong to someone, even as, paradoxically, you understand you also belong to yourself.
So healthy attachment is that understanding of "I'm connected to this other person and I'm also deeply connected within myself." And, so, we have this dance, and I often use this metaphor in my writing.
I talk about it in my book. I talk about this a lot in my upcoming book, The Best of You, the metaphor of the old-fashioned dance. And if you've ever seen those movies, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, they do these dances. And, I think, it's so powerful and it's so different from the slow dance of the '80s that I grew up with, where you're just clinging to each other. That's not really a picture of healthy attachment or connectedness.
In these old-fashioned dances, they move. They're always connected to each other, but they move in and out. They move apart and away, and sometimes they even interact with the other people around them.
Go watch one of those movies and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. There's connectedness, there's togetherness and apartness, and it's seamless. It's this dance. It's knowing when you've talked through and you trust somebody that when they say, "Hey, I'm going to miss you so much when I have to leave on this work trip for a few days, and I can't wait to see you when I get back." And you miss them.
But you're, also, so happy to have some time to yourself, and you're so happy for them to have that time. And when you return it's such a sweet reunion. It's trust. It's safety. And, so, this is a picture of connectedness. Of this dance of togetherness and apartness.
Now, remember, if you didn't get that experience of secure attachment as a child. Think about attachment, and I really go through this in chapter four of my new book. But if you think about it, a parent's, job as an early baby, you are really being taught at such that formative age, that healthy dance.
Your parents' job is to wean you, think about that term weaning. Slowly, over time, you're learning to separate out from your parent. Pretty soon you start to play with other kids, you even go off to school. But you're aware that parent is there. You're connected to them, but you're also able to leave them.
And you're so glad to walk back into the house and reunite and tell that parent, that caregiver about your day in a healthy, in an ideal world. You see that dance? That dance of togetherness and apartness. That is what I call connectedness, healthy attachment. It's a dance.
And if you think about parenting, throughout the course of your child's life, you are leading them more and more to be able to leave you. It's not that they're becoming less connected to you. As your children leave you and eventually move away, and eventually go on to create lives of their own. Securely-attached children stay connected to you.
And guess what? They more easily leave you as a result, it's a paradox. Children who are insecurely attached, have a harder time leaving home when it's time to leave home. When you have that safety, it's easier to leave and to forge your own healthy relationships with other people.
And guess why? Because you're connected. You know in your body, in your nervous system, in your soul that, that parent, that caregiver, that person who loves you is always going to be there for you.
And, so, it's easier to leave in healthy ways. It's easier to go out and forge that life of your own because that connection is strong. And, so, I just want you to hear me say it's never too late if you didn't get that.
Remember what I said, at the beginning, you can learn this through other people, through other relationships. Our brains are always forming. Our neural pathways can change. They can change. You can heal. You can learn how to have this dance of connectedness.
I want to leave you with a note about God and attachment, and this is about a 100 more episodes in and of itself, this topic. But listen, your parents and early caregivers also gave you a glimpse of what it feels like to be seen and held by God.
And if you struggle with that, maybe, you know God loves you intellectually. But you struggle to feel God's love. It may be a symptom of your attachment style. It may be an attachment wound. It isn't your fault.
I want you to hear me say that these attachment styles tie into how we relate and experience God's presence in our lives. And this is such deeply, holy ground, to me, that I'm going to leave it for another episode. I also write about this. I have a whole chapter on this in The Best of You. It's such an important topic.
But I want you to hear me say that if you do struggle to feel God's love. To experience what it's like to be held by the God of the Universe who loves you. Who knit you together, and who is present to you every moment of every day. This God is a breath away. A breath away, and if you struggle to experience that, I want you to hear me say, it's not your fault.
This is most likely an attachment wound. It's not your fault. You may know, intellectually, like I already said, I'm going to say it again, that God loves you. But if you struggle to experience it right now in your body you might notice a tension.
We are whole-body people and our bodies are affected by trauma. Our bodies are affected by insecure attachment. We can't will ourselves to that experience of loving presence. We have to experience it. Our bodies have to experience it. We have to experience healthy, physical touch. We have to experience presence, safe, loving presence.
And depending on the level of trauma you experienced, your nervous system may take a while to really absorb that. To really register what that feels like, and you may need another human being to model that for you. Before you even begin to understand the presence of the God who loves you. And it's not your fault, and God doesn't blame you for that. He doesn't blame us for those wounds that we carry. He doesn't blame us or shame us for those. He doesn't blame us for the wounds of our childhood. Please hear me say that.
I want to leave you today with some verses to remind you of who God is. If you've struggled because of the wounds of your past, to experience that safety that people talk about. But for you, you want it, you long for it, you crave it, but it's hard for you to find it in your body, in your soul.
I want you to hear me say that, "God is near the grief stricken. God is near the broken-hearted." This is Matthew 5:4. And even if you can't feel that or experience that, it's true. So take my word for it today and then know that your body can learn what that feels like. What that presence of Jesus feels like.
"God helps the broken-hearted, the crushed in spirit, the humble." James 4:6.
"God is love." Love is a presence it's not an idea. It's an experience of belonging. That's 1 John 4:7. "God is love." God is a loving presence. God's presence.
The presence of God's Spirit shows up as joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, patience, self-control." These are the Fruit of the Spirit, Galatians 5:22-23.
And then Psalm 34:8, again, "The Lord is near the broken-hearted and the crushed in spirit." And if you haven't experienced those truths, please know it may be because your nervous system never had that experience growing up. You never got that presence that creates secure attachment. And, so, it's hard for you to really know and trust all these ideas about God.
"They sound nice, but how do I know?"
And as you heal your body, and as you heal your soul, and as you begin to travel down this road of healing. You can begin to experience a little more glimpses, a few more glimpses of what that presence is like, all right?
Remember that healing is a process, it's not a one-time event. And as we close today, I want you to consider the question, what brings out the best of you in the context of this conversation?
Who or what brings you a glimpse of safety, a glimpse of loving presence?
Who brings that to your body?
Where does your body relax and feel safe?
Notice that glimpse of safety, that's a glimpse of God. That's a glimpse of what God is like. Thank you for joining me, and I look forward to seeing you next week on The Best of You.
Today's podcast episode is packed. Phew! You wanted to talk CPTSD (or complex trauma) so that's where we're going, with a side note on trauma & faith communities and some thoughts on what it *really* means to find safety in other people.
Here's what we cover:
1. What is CPTSD?
2. What are the symptoms of CPTSD?
3. How does it impact healthy self-trust & an experience of safety in other people?
4. Why I don't believe you are a label
5. My thoughts on trauma and faith communities
6. 4 key ways to heal from CPTSD
Resources
- Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker
- Try Softer, by Aundi Kolber
- The Best of You: Break Free From Painful Patterns, Mend Your Past, and Discover Your True Self in God, by Dr. Alison Cook
- Episode 4: What do I need to know about trauma?
- Resources for support
Key Quotes:
We're not only spiritual beings, our bodies are affected by trauma. Our thought life is affected by trauma. Our emotions are affected by trauma. And, so, we need spiritual solutions and we also need psychological solutions. We need physiological solutions. We need emotional solutions. We need a whole toolkit of solutions.
A safe person doesn't say, I'll rescue you. A safe person says, I see you and I love you, and guess what I'm going to bring some of my own wounds to the table. So let's honor each other, let's hold space for each other's wounds.
Thanks to our sponsor Organifi -Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone. Welcome back to this series on Psychology Buzzwords, Listeners' Choice Edition. These are the words you chose. I put out a poll and you voted, you let me know the topics that you're the most interested in.
Today's topic is CPTSD, Complex PTSD, and you're seeing this word a lot on social media, in articles. It's really kind of a newer concept. It really originated in the early 1990s, we'll get into that. And one of you, really, wisely and astutely, pointed out to me, "These aren't really buzzwords in the sense that-" A buzzword implies something like jargon, that's trendy, that might be passing. These are very real terms.
In fact, all of these terms, in both of these series, are not really buzzwords in the sense that they're very real, substantive, meaty terms. In fact, you guys wanted me to go into the deep end on this series, which I'm really excited about. But what I mean by that is simply that they are trending.
These are words that we're hearing more and more, and more. And, so, it's all the more important to understand them correctly. Because these are words that are describing really important, powerful, psychological concepts that a lot of people face.
Now, these are not new concepts. People have dealt with trauma, toxicity, all these things we've been talking about since the dawn of time. But we've developed, out of the field of psychology, this new vernacular for describing a lot of these things. And I think we've gotten more accurate in how we describe these things. So it's so important to pause for a minute, which is why I'm so glad you want me to talk about these, and say, "What are we really talking about here?"
Now, before we dive in, just a quick reminder, please sign up for my August webinar series. It's Five Toxic Behaviors and How to Protect Yourself. I talk a lot in this episode about the importance of learning skills, when there's been an absence of healthy parenting, or when you've dealt with some painful events in your life.
You need to learn skills, that's one aspect of healing. And that's one of the things I'm going to teach you in this webinar, is I'm going to really focus on skills, scripts, communication strategies, practical ways to learn these new skills. To sign up for it, it's free when you pre-order my new book, The Best of You, which is also chock-full of healing and skills.
So preorder to the book, and then as my thank you to you for your early support. You get entered into this two-part webinar series in August. If you can't attend live, I will be sending out the recordings. So preorder the book and then go to my website. It's dralisoncook.com/book to sign up for the webinars. You'll get everything emailed to you, including the recordings, if you can't attend live.
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All right, so let's go ahead and dive into what is CPTSD, or I may call it Complex Trauma for short. Because CPTSD is a lot of letters to say, and I will probably fumble over them if I keep trying to say them a lot.
So we have to start this discussion with this idea of if there's a C, which is for Complex, before PTSD and we touched on PTSD. What is PTSD? We touched on that in episode four on Trauma, healing from trauma.
PTSD is a diagnosis. It's in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that psychiatrists and psychologists use to diagnose folks. The PTSD diagnosis arose out of a lot of soldiers who were returning from war, which is a traumatic environment, a traumatic situation. These soldiers were returning home and experiencing night terrors, flashbacks, hypervigilance, which means your alert system is on high alert, on all the time. Muscles are tense.
You might be reacting really quickly and with a certain amount of intensity to maybe minor things, but that's because your body is still in that fight/flight state, as a result of the trauma. We went through a lot of that in episode four on Trauma. So you can go back to that episode and learn more about what we mean by PTSD. But the thing is PTSD tends to be tied to a specific event.
There's exposure to a death, or a violence, or maybe an injury. Something happens that's traumatic and your body responds to that. And if you don't get the care that you need in that moment, we always talk about this on here. Trauma isn't just the result of being exposed to something awful. Trauma is the result of not getting the care you need after that exposure.
Because your body can heal. But if you don't get the care that you need, after that exposure to a traumatic event. Those chemicals that course through, that give you that fight/flight response. That give you that adrenalized response that you need in the moment, stay in your body.
And, so, you don't return, as we discussed last week, you don't return to that calm centered place. You may not even know what that feels like. And, so, that's what happens with PTSD. You're exposed to a trauma. You come home, all of a sudden, you're just supposed to be this normal person, but your body is like, "Something terrible happened."
And, so, your body is still responding in the current situation that maybe isn't traumatic, based on how it was conditioned by this traumatic event in the past. That never really got healed.
So what does it mean to bring the complex into PTSD?
What does it mean to move into CPTSD?
Well, think about it this way. Maybe you're somebody who wasn't exposed to a one-time traumatic event. Maybe you were exposed to constant neglect as a child. Maybe you weren't cared for emotionally or physically. Maybe you were exposed to constant patterns of bullying or manipulation. Maybe you were raised by a caregiver who was addicted or mentally ill.
And, so, there was just, kind of, a constant environment around you of what I like to call a million tiny paper cuts. Maybe it wasn't one big event. Maybe it was a million tiny events that began to have an impact on your soul, on your body. And that's how I like to explain CPTSD, complex trauma, to the people I work with.
Is it like a million tiny paper cuts that create these wounds, as opposed to one big gash. It's a chronic exposure, a pervasive exposure, over time to pain, to being mistreated, to toxicity. And these traumatic events, when it comes to complex trauma, tend to happen in the context of interpersonal relationships.
They tend to happen with our primary caregivers. But not only with our primary caregivers, they can happen throughout the course of our lives, in our communities, in our neighborhoods with our peers. Where we're exposed to just constant, sort of, paper cuts to the soul. And these early injuries affect the way that we develop. They affect our core sense of self, especially, when no one comes in and guides us through them appropriately.
Because this physical and emotional pain of neglect, or of being mistreated. These are often inflicted by our primary caregivers, by siblings, by teachers, by our school or church environments. Where we're misunderstood consistently, or labeled, or marginalized consistently.
And, so, we start to take ourselves to be less than. We start to take ourselves to be not good enough. We start to develop an identity around this experience of constantly being mistreated, or unseen, or shoved aside, and this is what we mean by complex trauma. It's complex because it's woven into a lot of the different fibers of our being. Maybe even every fiber of our being. Depending on how much care we got apart from these painful experiences.
Now, CPTSD is not an official diagnosis in the DSM, yet, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It, sort of, builds on and expands on this idea of PTSD. On this idea of interpersonal, relational trauma. To say that, "Man, repeated exposure to pain, and to wounds, and to trauma during childhood leads to symptoms." And these symptoms are different than the symptoms we've categorized as PTSD, it's a different thing. And, so, here are some of those symptoms of what we're calling complex trauma.
Number one, your emotions are affected. You may experience overwhelming emotions. In fact, you may find yourself almost regressing is a word that psychologists use, or you'll have an emotion that feels like that 10-year-old inside of you.
That you might even be aware of. Like, "I think I'm overreacting here, but all I know is I feel like that helpless, stuck, child that I felt like in fifth grade." And, so, you feel like you have these big emotions and you don't know what to do with them.
And this is, again, I want to reiterate, we talk about this a lot on this podcast, this isn't your fault. These emotions need your attention. They're cues, they're trailheads, that maybe in the moment, someone actually gave you a real paper cut. Meaning maybe someone said something that wasn't super nice, but they really didn't mean major harm.
Maybe your spouse was short with you, or maybe your spouse just didn't even have the perfect response to a need that you had in a moment. And you have this big emotional response as if that person just cut you to the core. And they're confused because they're like, "I get it. I'm sorry that I didn't give you the exact, right response, but you know I love you. You know I'm here for you."
And you're confused because you're like, "I know. I mean, I know that. I don't know why I just exploded in that moment." That's an example. That's a symptom that there might be some complex trauma there. That there's big emotions inside of you from all the way back, a long tail back to the past. And they're coming out in this moment of a small infraction.
Where just a normal human is being a normal human, and not really trying to hurt you. But it did hurt. But maybe it was little hurt not major hurt. But you're exploding or reacting as if it was a major hurt. Because your body doesn't experience it as one little paper cut, one little hurt.
Your body experiences it as a million and one paper cuts. And that one paper cut is building on a million over the course of your lifetime, and you just don't have any reserves. You don't have any tolerance. You don't have any reserves for it. And, in fact, this person might even be safe. And, so, those emotions, that backlog of emotions, feels like it can come out. So that's one example.
Number two, a lot of shame comes with that. And the reason is you know. You're like, "Why are my emotions so big?"
"Why do I react in such a big way?"
"What's wrong with me? I feel like there's something wrong with me." So that shame comes into it, and shame can just be toxic, and devastating, and big, when you've survived a lot of these micro traumas. A lot of these million paper cuts, this complex trauma. You feel a lot of shame because you feel like there's something wrong with you.
And I want to say to you right now that shame it's there. It came in as a result of your unhealed wounds. But the first thing you got to do is recognize shame for what it is, it's just shame. It doesn't have the real story that you're beloved. That you've been through something really hard, that it's not your fault.
So you've got to learn to identify that voice of shame and learn to not let it lead you, or guide you, or drive you. And we'll get more into that in episodes to come.
Another example of something you might experience. If you've been through this kind of complex trauma is deficits in attention or your self-awareness even. And then, also, in your self-perception, your self-esteem, how you take yourself to be.
And, again, this gets at that idea of shame. You lose connection with that core sense of self. Of, you know, "I blew it in the moment, but I'm okay. I can reset. I can come back to home base. I fundamentally trust myself, and, yes, I can get off kilter." We all do.
But there's that fundamental sense of self. Well, that's really hard if you've had this pervasive pattern of a million tiny paper cuts, of CPTSD. It's really hard to connect to that core sense of self. And, so, there's a lot of shame. There is a lack of a healthy or even the way God sees you, and I'll get into that more in this episode. That there's a misguided sense of yourself.
That, "There's something wrong with me."
"Why can't I just be like other people."
Instead of saying, "Oh, man, I've been through a lot. I respond in this way for a reason. There is a subtle shift there between, "What's wrong with me?" Which is beating yourself up. And, "Wow, this is a cue. There's some way in which I respond to people that I need to get curious about."
And then, lastly, you may notice significant distress in how you show up in your relationships with other people. You might notice a lot of anxiety. You may notice fear of people leaving you. You may distrust yourself and your ability to be loved. Your ability to love and receive love. You may have ideas about relationships that are idealized. Like, "I just need that one safe person who will make everything okay?"
Because you don't know how to trust yourself, or you may avoid people altogether.
"Nobody is trustworthy."
"I can't let people in."
As opposed to this healthy dependence. Which is, "Nobody is completely trustworthy. But I trust myself enough to know that I'll advocate for myself when I need to."
That, "I can go into a relationship and I can notice when someone else isn't treating me right. And I know how to take care of myself. I know how to advocate for myself."
There is that sense of self. Again, we're coming back to that sense of self, that empowers you, and equips you, and gives you that confidence. To know how to discern safety in other people and how to protect yourself when you bump up against toxicity. There's a self-trust there that is lacking because no one ever taught you how.
So there's a lot to this CPTSD that we're not going to get to all of this in this episode. In fact, next week, spoiler alert, we're going to go into attachment. Which was another one of your top-most requested topics because this all does relate very much into attachment. This is all interconnected.
And you start to get a picture of this idea of what does it mean to be a healthy self? And that a healthy self means starting to heal from either these million tiny paper cuts, or these big, deep gashes, or both. It could be both, and start to learn to heal that sense of self. Because that sense of self is what also allows you to heal your relationships.
Now, paradoxically, healthy relationships, bumping up against safety in other people helps you heal yourself. The two go hand in hand, and we're going to get into that. But all of this does get back into attachment. We'll go more into attachment next week.
I want to just pause here and give a note about labels. So, in so many ways, what we're doing here with these words, these diagnostic categories, these labels like PTSD, CPTSD, Trauma, Attachment Wounds. What we're doing is just trying to give names for pain, for wounds, for human suffering.
And, so, maybe we used to say things like, "Oh, someone is sick." In biblical times there's so much about this person was sick. Well, were they physically ill?
Were they mentally ill?
Were they someone who had been wounded, and abused, and hurt by others? There were just different categories. Different ways of labeling that some much more stigmatizing than others.
So, right now, what we're trying to do in psychology is get more clarity around these categories of behaviors. There's a reason that you're like this, and we can put this word around it such as CPTSD. That says, "Listen, maybe you didn't have this major traumatic event."
Maybe you had a halfway normal family, on the surface. Maybe other people looking inside of your family would be like, "Look, there's a mom, there's a dad, there's a sibling." You had your needs met. You had dinner every night. It looks, quote-unquote, "Normal" on the outside. Who would describe that as quote-unquote "Trauma"?
But on the inside of that family there was this million tiny paper cuts. That could be criticism. It could be manipulation. It could be neglect. There could be so many different things. And I go into a lot of this, again, in my new book. My new book, The Best of You, really takes you through a lot of some of the key ways that these million tiny paper cuts occur.
But the point is you didn't get the nourishment. The care that you needed, and, so, your sense of self isn't quite formed in the way, that parts of you know, it could be.
I want to recommend a book. There's a wonderful book called Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker. It’s a beautiful book, a roadmap really, to how to find your way through complex trauma. And it is such a helpful resource.
But returning, again, about labels is that no label is perfect. And you want to be careful about putting yourself in a box. We don't want other people to put us in boxes. Nobody wants someone else to say pigeonhole you, or put you in a box.
We also want to be careful about putting ourselves in boxes. Because any of these labels, we're hopefully improving. The labels, I think, it's healthier to say to somebody, "You know what you're showing signs of complex trauma."
I think that's healthier to help someone understand themselves. Than saying some of these stigmatizing things from their past. Such as calling people mentally ill or disturbed. When, no, in fact, your body is responding in an appropriate way to a lot of pain, to a lot of suffering.
So I think these labels are improving. I still think we want to just be careful because they're not all of who we are. These are descriptions of your experience of pain. Of your experience of suffering, and they're important to get right.
But you are more than a diagnostic label. You are. These descriptions are important. And, also, you are still a beautiful soul made in God's image. Your soul can heal. It may take a lifetime, depending on the level and severity of the trauma you've been through.
But your soul is beautiful. And even this story of trauma that you're learning to understand about yourself. And if this diagnostic category is helpful for you to go, "Oh, I think that fits me. I think my trauma was complex. It was a, an exposure to a whole lot of different things over a period of time. That's still describing your experience. It's not the sum total of who you are.
You're still a beautiful soul made in the image of God. That's who you are. You're a child of God. You're a beautiful soul. And this diagnostic category, this label can help you understand why you show up in the world in certain ways.
Why you show up in relationships in certain ways.
Why certain emotions seem to take you over.
Why you struggle so much with shame.
Why it's hard for you to trust a spouse that is in fact trustworthy.
Why it is hard for you.
Why you want to run away, when you know what you really need to do is have that hard conversation.
These help us understand the WHY of those things, but they don't ultimately define your core self.
So I wanted to just briefly touch on how we understand this idea of complex trauma, biblically. Well, here's the thing, we are holistic people. We're mind, body, heart, soul. We're complex people to use that word, again, complex.
And, so, there's not a one-size-fits-all to becoming the people that God made us to be. And, oftentimes, in faith communities we focus in on the spiritual, and that makes sense. Because these are faith communities. These are spiritual communities, and there's nothing wrong with focusing in on the spiritual in a faith community.
But I think what's happening, and I'm going to do a whole another episode on this, because you guys asked this great questions. So many of you, and it's worthy of a whole series, not just a bullet point in an episode. But this idea of what is the difference between trauma over here, and what I keep hearing it about as like sin. Sin nature over here in my faith community.
And I'm going to do a whole thing on that because it's just such a important question. But, for today's purposes, what I want to say is this is in our faith communities. In the best of a faith community, there's toxic faith communities, for sure. But in the best of a faith community, you're going to hear spiritual solutions.
We can go to God to know that we're loved. We can pray. These are spiritual solutions and there's nothing wrong with that. They're real. Research shows that prayer, that being part of faith communities, that understanding a loving God is helpful to our mental health.
Here's the problem, we're not only spiritual beings, our bodies are affected by trauma. Our thought life is affected by trauma. Our emotions are affected by trauma. And, so, we need spiritual solutions and we also need psychological solutions.
We need physiological solutions. We need emotional solutions. We need a whole toolkit of solutions. So that's not to say that spiritual solutions don't have some corner on what we need as humans to heal, they do. But they're only one part of the story.
And, so, just to give you a teaser where I land on that, when it comes to being a trauma informed, faith communities. I don't know that faith communities have to become therapists.
But I do think it's confusing for folks because we're starting to understand all this from psychology. Where we're starting to understand, "Wait a minute, there's a reason I lash out. And I don't want to lash out. And I know it's not how God wants me to be, but there's a reason I do it, and it's because of this trauma. It's because I have this fight/flight response that I can't control. It doesn't necessarily let me off the hook, but there's also a reason for it. So I can have compassion for myself."
So what we need to begin to do is help faith communities understand, "Let's approach things spiritually. Let's also leave room for the psychology, for the physiology of human behavior." They're not incompatible they go hand in hand. But I will say this the root of all healing, whether it's spiritual, physiological, psychological, emotional is compassion.
We don't heal in the context of shame and judgment. We heal in the context of compassion. We change in the context of compassion. So this idea of sin, and missing the mark, and trauma, I'm going to circle back to that.
But I do want to just pause and say understanding the reasons why you act the way that you do. Understanding those reasons why you might have developed a substance abuse issue, or why you have an anger management issue, or why you avoid relationships, or why, as we discussed last week, you constantly people please, you fawn. Understanding why helps you show compassion for yourself, and it's how, I believe, God shows up with us.
It's not that God says, "That's great that you do that, keep doing it." That's not it. But it's that God comes alongside you and says, "Yes, I get it. Of course you do this thing. Of course, there's a reason."
There's no shame in the way God puts His finger, on those areas of our lives that need healing. There's compassion. So we name it without shame. And it doesn't mean we get to say, "Well, I'll just always be this way."
It means, we say, "Oh, I've got to go on a journey of healing, and that healing may take a long time." And we start to talk about it differently. We might say, "Yes, I do, I struggle with anger. And I may lash out at you and I'm sorry, when I do. Here's why I do that. It doesn't make it, okay, and I want you to know that I'm working on it. But I just also want you to understand where I'm coming from and my story." We have these stories to tell, and these stories are a big part of who we are.
All right, just to wind up here. I want to touch on a few ways that we heal from CPTSD. Number one, we have to establish a sense of safety, both in ourselves. And this starts with self-compassion.
This starts with naming— "I've been through a lot in my life. I've got to stop beating myself up. I've got to stop blaming myself. I have to start getting curious about all these paper cuts that have become my soul. About the pain of what sometimes feels like I shredded soul. And I've got to stop minimizing that. And I've got to start saying, 'Lord this is what I see, help me take that first step.'"
And then we got to find safety with God because God doesn't shame us. I already said that, but I'm going to say it again. God says, "I know. I know what you've been through. I've seen it. I was there with you, even though you, maybe, didn't feel me there with you. It's okay. It's not too much for Me, I'm with you."
And then we also need to reestablish safety in relationships, and that doesn't mean finding this safe mythical unicorn, that just magically makes us feel better. Which we get duped by because sometimes that person shows up and we're like, "Oh, they are wonderful." But no one human being can be that safe, they're going to let us down.
So what I mean by finding safety in another person is another person who's honest. Is another person who can hold space for you, as you say, "I need you to know that my soul is feeling, kind of, shredded. I've been through a lot. And I'm doing my best to heal but every once in a while, these things will happen. You'll see me fold into a shame spiral. You might see me run away. You might see me doubt you when you haven't done anything that's untrustworthy. And I just need you to know that."
And then here's what a safe person does. A safe person says, "I see you and that's okay. I'll hold space for you. And guess what? Here's the wounds I bring to the table." They don't offer to be your rescuer. A safe person doesn't say, "I'll rescue you."
A safe person says, "I see you and I love you. And guess what? I'm going to bring some of my own wounds to the table. And, so, together let's honor each other. Let's hold space for each other. Because as we do that we will heal together."
Because as the old adage, and it's a cliché but it's so true, says "Shared sorrow is half the sorrow." When you could share your pain with someone else who sees you, and they don't set themselves up as your rescuer, as you're healer. But, instead, they come alongside you and say, "I know. I get it. I see you. I'm not afraid. I honor those parts of you. And guess what? I've got some of my own and we can honor each other in this."
That is how you begin to establish safety and relationships. Continuing through here, as far as healing, you have to begin to pay attention to painful thoughts and emotions. And this is the topic of my book Boundaries for Your Soul, where we walk you through a process. It's based on an evidence-based model of therapy IFS. You can find an IFS therapist.
But you walk through a process of really learning to connect to big emotions. Connect to overwhelming thoughts or thoughts that may not be serving you. May not be telling you the truth. And there's a method for this, this is a process. This isn't happening in a one-time zap of the wand. And, so, this is a process, depending on how much you struggle with overwhelming emotions and with painful thoughts. Get a therapist to help you with that.
Another model of therapy, I've talked about on here, that is really helpful with this is EMDR. EMDR gets at a lot of the body component of this. Learning how to find safety in your nervous system. Again, another part of healing from CPTSD is grief work. There's grief in recognizing what was lost. There's grief in realizing that you didn't get the care that you needed, and that had an impact on you, there's grief in that.
Sometimes we don't want to face that. We'd rather minimize because it's too painful to face the grief that, "Man, if I'd had the care that I needed, I wouldn't have to be going through this." And there can be anger in that too. So get help get support for that portion of this. But there is some grief work in healing.
Next there's skills that you have to build. There are some skills you can learn. Skills about like how to communicate on behalf of your experience. How to identify emotions and communicate on behalf of them?
How to set healthy boundaries as opposed to fighting or fleeing?
How to have healthy and courageous conversations with other people?
How to establish trust with yourself. There's some skills you can learn?
Again, a lot of those skills are what I go through in my book, The Best of You. But all of this establishing safety, reconnecting to thoughts and feelings, grieving, and then learning new skills. Guess what? It's hard work. It's a journey but you begin to become this amazing person. And it's so exciting and so life-giving as you begin to see progress. And you start to see this new life that you are creating because it's never too late.
I mean, listen, as people of faith, we believe the soul lives forever. So we've got forever to live as these new, healed, and healing people. So it's never, ever too late to start healing. Because we've got forever to continue that process, and to become the whole people that God made us to become.
So, listen, we've got so much more to go into and I look at next week's episode on attachment, really a, sort of, part two of this conversation. And we'll continue on with deeper and deeper layers of this, especially, this piece about how we deal with this idea of sin coming from faith communities and trauma coming from psychology in future episodes.
But for now, please just remember that you are not your diagnosis. You are not your worst day. You are not your pain. You are a beautiful soul doing the hard, brave work of healing, and that's the best of you. That is the best of you for today.
The best of you says, "One more step that's all I've got to take, and I'm so proud of myself for just that tiny step that I took today."
Thank you for being here. I look forward to seeing you next week.
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The Best of You Every Day offers short, daily reflections on Scripture through the lens of emotional health—helping you stay steady, connected, and rooted in love.
