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If you’ve ever felt emotionally exhausted—even while doing all the “right” things—this episode is for you.
I’m sharing a personal story and unpacking something I see in so many women I work with: the quiet, often unnoticed pattern of denying your own needs in the name of being kind, helpful, or faithful.
We’ll talk about how these patterns take root, how faith communities can unknowingly reinforce them, and why that emotional exhaustion you’re feeling might be trying to tell you something important.
In this episode, I explore:
* How codependency hides behind helping & overfunctioning
* How the fawn response might be showing up in your life
* The impact of church messages that tell us to "die to ourselves" without teaching us how to live
* What healthy dependence looks like
* Why your locus of control—internal vs. external—matters more than you think
Resources:
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself by Melody Beattie
- Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma by Pete Walker
- Jeremiah 17:9
- Jeremiah 31:33
- John 12:24-25 MSG
- John 1:11-13 MSG
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 5: What is Codependency and Why Does it Matter?
- Episode 14: The Fawn Response & The Hidden Root of People Pleasing
Thanks to our sponsors:
- For 20% off your order, head to Reliefband.com and use code BESTOFYOU.
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- Contact Restoring the Soul today and learn how their Intensive Counseling Process can jump start your journey to the place you want to be. As a special gift for The Best of You podcast listeners, download their pdf called "5 Ways Unresolved Trauma May Be Derailing Your Relationship."
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. 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 Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast, where we're going to slow down together for a moment and listen to the quiet of our own hearts beneath all the noise outside of us. I'm so glad you're here.
Today's episode is for all of you who feel spiritually strong, but emotionally weary. You trust God, you pray, you try to care deeply for the needs of others, and yet something inside feels stretched thin, frayed at the edges, quietly hurting. If that sounds familiar, you may be carrying more than your soul was made to hold all alone.
Today's words are drawn from the pages of the first solo book I wrote. It's called The Best of You, and the book came out of my own life and my own journey of feeling strong in my faith, but emotionally fragile at times.
The book was the heartbeat behind this podcast and behind the work that I've been called
to do, and when I recently asked you through a poll on social media what topics you wanted me to cover on the podcast, the topic of codependency was one of the most commonly requested. So that's where we're headed.
Here's how we'll spend our time. First, we'll name and explore what codependency actually is and how it quietly takes root. Then, I'll share a personal story that shaped my own understanding of invisibility and self-protection and reflect on how faith and church messages sometimes reinforce these patterns.
Finally, we'll look at the invitation of Jesus not to disappear, but to come alive to your truest self. At the end of the episode, I'll share with you some questions for your own reflection and journaling. So if you're weary from trying to hold it all together, if you're longing for something deeper than the surface answers you've been given, this space is for you. Let's take a breath or a sip of coffee or tea together, and dive in.
Every week I talk with women who are moms, who are bosses, who are artists, doctors, teachers, women who are anchored in their faith, and yet feel untethered inside. They ask questions like these: Why do I feel so overwhelmed even though I'm trying so hard to be a good person? Why do I keep running on empty? Isn't my faith supposed to be enough?
Maybe you've asked these questions too. The truth is, you can be spiritually strong and emotionally stuck. You can trust God and still feel lonely, or like you're running on empty.
You can have a deep faith and still feel anxious or invisible in your own life, because somewhere deep inside, you learned that taking up space is dangerous.
I still remember the first time I felt that instinct to shrink back. I was in sixth grade. I was cast as the Queen of Hearts in our school play. I was so over the moon excited about this play. I had the red dress, the collar that stood tall, and I even got those red press-on nails for dramatic flare.
When the curtain rose and the spotlights were on, something inside of me collapsed. Who was I to be so bold? Who was I to take up space? Who was I to try to play this Queen of Hearts? I watched as the other girls seemed to shine as they stepped right into their roles and I started telling myself, why can't I be more like they are?
Just like that, I began to disappear, to crumble inside myself. I missed my cue. I stumbled through the scene, and afterward, I was mortified, filled with shame. I laughed it off and praised my friends and told them how great they were, but inside, a new rule took root inside my soul–don't be too much. Stay small and you'll stay safe.
I'm guessing that you might remember a moment like that in your own story. Maybe in your case, it wasn't a school play. Maybe it was a classroom, a sports team, maybe a family dinner table, maybe it was with your peers. A place where you wanted to speak up or step forward, but some part of you whispered, “don't, you're not enough” or even worse, “you are too much”.
For a moment, let yourself go back to that space, not to stay there, but to honor what you felt in that moment. What was the fear that prompted you to silence your voice in that situation?
What decision did you make about yourself at that moment? What quiet rule did you begin to live by?
These inner rules don't come out of nowhere. They're formed at the intersection of where we've been hurt and where we've learned to survive. Over time, they shape how we relate to others and to ourselves. For many of us, this leads to a hidden pattern we don't often name, but it's called codependency.
Codependency is more than unhealthy relationships. It's a way of being in the world, a way of organizing your life around everyone else's needs, while staying disconnected from your own. It looks like always being the helper, always being the peacekeeper, always being the one everyone else depends on, until one day you realize no one really knows the real you.
Maybe even you don't know the real you. The term codependency was first used in the context of addiction recovery. It described the behavior of loved ones who became so entangled in trying to help meet the addicted person's perceived needs, that they lost their own sense of identity, and even unwittingly began to enable the other person.
Later authors like Melody Beattie helped popularize the concept more broadly. In her groundbreaking book, Codependent No More, Beattie suggested that codependency reaches much more broadly than crafting your identity around someone else's addiction. It's a pattern that can show up in any relationship, where you chronically ignore your own needs in order to care for others.
Often this looks like avoiding conflict at all costs, needing external validation from other people to feel okay, saying yes to others when your heart is saying no, and losing your voice in order to keep the peace.
You start to hide your needs so no one views you as a burden. You begin to enable other people or make excuses for other people's dysfunctional behavior. You might tell white lies to avoid any form of conflict. You might rely excessively on others in order to make even the simplest of decisions. You might discount your own needs, your own wants, your own instincts, your own inner wisdom.
Codependency is often linked to a survival strategy known as fawning. Therapist Pete Walker introduced this term in his book on complex trauma. Many of us are familiar with the idea of fight or flight or even freeze; these are nervous system responses to threats in our environment.
You go into fight mode when you go on the attack or confront someone else, and you go into flight mode when you flee or try to avoid a conflict. Both of these are nervous system responses to threats in our environment. You go into freeze mode when it's almost as if both of those reactions are happening simultaneously. You freeze, which means you feel like you can't respond–a deer in the headlights moment.
The fawn response is a fourth category that's newer to the vocabulary. But I think it's a really powerful descriptor of the way many of us learned to cope or to survive, especially as it relates to codependent patterns.
I think about an experience I had as a young girl growing up in the mountains of Wyoming. We would bump into all kinds of wildlife on family hikes, but one time we actually bumped into a baby fawn. It was laying in the grass, all curled up, blending into the environment around it. We could have easily missed seeing it.
Here's the thing about a baby fawn. They don't fight. They don't come after you. Neither do they flee. They don't run away. Instead, they get smaller. They get even tinier. They attempt to disappear and camouflage into their environment. It's an extremely adaptive survival response.
As psychologists studied the impact of our childhood wounds on adult behavior, they detected this additional conditioned response, this fawn response that doesn't look like fight, flight, or freeze. Instead, it looks like playing small, blending in, muting your voice, shrinking down.
On the outside, it can look like kindness, generosity, and flexibility, but on the inside, it's driven by fear. “If I can hide and stay small, maybe I'll stay safe”. This message is particularly important for women to understand. Now, guys, if you're listening, I hope you'll stick with me because many of you struggle with this too.
But I'm gonna speak directly to the women, because we've been given a whole other set of messages that reinforce this idea that we should play small. As women, we've inherited a legacy of being taught to stay small. Many of our mothers and grandmothers grew up in generations as women who faced extremely limited options.
For example, some of our great-grandmothers weren't allowed to vote, and many of our mothers and grandmothers weren't allowed to apply for their own credit cards without their spouse's signature or approval. In fact, women weren't officially allowed to compete in US marathons until the early 1970s.
Sometimes we can be hard on our mothers and on the generations who came before us. But imagine growing up with some of these pervasive cultural messages. “Your voice doesn't count. You can't depend on yourself. Your talents don't matter”. And if you don't think these messages still affect women today, consider that women are diagnosed with depression and anxiety at significantly higher rates than men.
Let me be clear, this does not show that there's something wrong with women. This reveals the lingering legacy of misunderstanding and devaluing women. We women are tough, and we have been all along. We're in the trenches trying to improve our societies. We're nurturing children, supporting friends, strengthening our communities, and producing important work alongside our colleagues.
Yet we've also paid a price. So many women are taught to put others first before we are taught to cherish ourselves. Faith communities, even with their best intentions, can reinforce these patterns. We often hear messages like, “Sacrifice for others. Put others first. You can't trust your heart. Die to yourself”.
The subtle power of these messages is strong, but the problem is, what if the self you're dying to isn't the selfish part of all of us, but the true self God created in love? When you're taught that you can't trust yourself, you have no choice but to rely on other people to guide you. Furthermore, when you're taught to always put others first, you disregard your own needs.
Taken together, these commonly taught messages leave you with only two options to guide your decision making. Number one, only trust other people. You have to look to external sources to figure out what you need or want. Or number two, to only put others first, to always consider what other people need and want.
Notice how there is no place for you, for your own wisdom, in either of these options. You are focused on meeting other people's needs or looking to other people for permission or for approval. Your eyes are always on them. Nowhere in this equation is there a place for you to sort out who you are and what you want or need.
This isn't healthy spirituality. This is not what God intended. It is one thing to sacrifice in healthy ways for other people. It's another to betray yourself altogether. It's one thing to use the strength that you have gained to help a loved one who's in need. It's another to bypass your own healing work.
When you neglect your own self, your own healing, your own growth, you aren't living out of the fullness of who you are. There's a difference between dying to your ego and disappearing altogether, and this message is particularly important for women to understand. So many of us have been taught to die to a life that we haven't yet learned how to live.
Instead of encouraging you to stay small and sacrifice for others, I wanna give you a counterbalancing message. Here's the truth. Jesus didn't ask women to make themselves invisible. He didn't ask them to play small. In fact, he did the opposite. He spoke directly to women. He honored them and gave them a sense of agency. He empowered them. He sent them out with good news.
I wanna ask you this question today. What if following Jesus isn't only about sacrificing for others? What if it's about coming alive, fully and wholly–body, mind, heart, and soul–to your truest God-made self?
You may have grown up hearing that being kind means never having needs, never getting angry, never taking up space. But kindness without boundaries is not love. It's martyrdom, and
and that is not what God asks of us.
So what's the alternative? If codependency keeps us hidden and emotionally disconnected, what does healthy connection actually look like? What does it look like to be in relationship with others without losing yourself?
I wanna be clear about what it's not, because our culture can give us confusing messages. Healthy dependence isn't the same as hyper-individualism, or isolating yourself from others. Or I'll do me, I only answer to myself. That's not healthy dependence.
Healthy dependence means that you can trust others and trust yourself. You can share your needs and your opinions and your ideas and your dreams without shame. You can set a boundary with another person when it's the right thing to do. You can be in a relationship without disappearing into the other person.
Codependency says, I'll tell you what you wanna hear. It's easier that way. Healthy dependence says, I'd value the opportunity to talk this issue through with you so that we can both be heard.
Codependency says, I need your permission. I can't do it without your approval. Healthy dependence says, I don't need your permission, but I value your perspective.
Codependency says, I can't be alone if you don't give me the validation that I crave. Healthy dependence says, I need time alone to cool off and gather my thoughts before circling back to this conversation,
Codependency says, I can't live without you. Healthy dependence says, I'm better with you in my life.
The antidote to codependency is healthy interdependence. In codependency, we're often looking outward. What do they need? What do they think? How do they need to feel my love?
When we're interdependent with other people, we also look inward. What do I need? What do I think? Can I love this other person and still honor myself?
Healthy dependence isn't always a perfect balance, but it does require mutuality, respect, shared responsibility, and a back and forth and that includes your relationship with God.
God doesn't call you to erase yourself to connect with Him. God calls you to be grounded in his love, both for the sake of others and for the sake of yourself.
Now I know that for some of you, when we talk about honoring yourself, trusting yourself, listening to yourself, your theological radar might go up, and so let me share something I believe Scripture clearly teaches. When the Bible says that the heart is deceitful and wicked, Jeremiah the prophet was referring to our broken state, what some theologians call original sin.
There's something that every single one of us inherits as part of being human, and that is that we're imperfect, we can all go astray. But the very same prophet who declared this bad news about our deceitful state also foretold the good news about what would happen one day when Jesus would come.
In fact, Jeremiah prophesied the solution to this problem in the coming of God's Spirit: I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts through the power of God's Spirit. What had once only been available externally through the law is now available internally to every single one of us through the power of God's Spirit.
This teaching in Jeremiah is underscored by an idea in psychology related to the locus of control. When you have an internal locus of control, you tend to look to resources within yourself, including God's Spirit, to affect change, make decisions, and create impact. You have a sense that you can, to some degree, take charge of your life.
In contrast, when you lead toward an external locus of control, you tend to view what happens to you as outside of your control. You view external sources such as circumstances, fate, or other people as responsible for your wellbeing.
An internal locus of control relates to higher levels of confidence and improved mental health, while an external locus of control tends to correlate with increased feelings of anxiety, helplessness, and depression.
Some psychologists believe that an internal locus of control is one of the most important factors in creating healthy relationships throughout life. It's not that you don't also need trustworthy people in a healthy community around you–you do. But in order to engage those external resources in helpful ways, you have to be able to rely on your inner resources, including emotional cues from your nervous system, your critical thinking, and inner wisdom.
Not surprisingly, women are far more conditioned toward an external locus of control than men are. Women are taught to look outside of ourselves for solutions, and I would argue that this is particularly true in faith communities. But focusing exclusively on external resources isn't healthy.
In fact, research in the psychology of religion has shown that when you recognize that God is empowering you to take action, it's good for your mental health and your spiritual resilience. It's also what we see taught in scripture.
Jesus used a grain of wheat to describe the process of dying to yourself. In John 12:24-25, he says, “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal”.
That's The Message version. I want you to consider this. The grain of wheat represents your old ways of surviving–the pleasing, the producing, the perfecting, the codependent patterns of relating to other people.
Those ways may have worked for a time, but they no longer serve you nor anyone. You have to change. You have to die to those old ways. It's hard. It might even feel like a loss initially, after all these ways have served you in the past. But to become a truer version of yourself, you have to release these old ways.
It's the only way to grow. What if dying to yourself means letting go of those old ways of learning how to disappear, how to please, how to organize your life around the needs of others? What if it means coming alive to the person you really are, the person God made? This idea is echoed in other Bible passages.
Here's what the Apostle John said:
“But whoever did want him,
who believed he was who he claimed
and would do what he said,
He made to be their true selves,
their child-of-God selves.”
Here's what I believe. Dying to yourself means dying to the old survival patterns, the pleasing, the hiding, the shrinking, the playing small. It means coming alive to the true self, the wholeness of yourself, God-made, the one with the courage to stand up for what's right, the clarity to name your calling and your needs, and the compassion to love others without losing yourself.
This isn't easy. It can feel like a loss, like you're laying down a cloak that once kept you safe, but that cloak was never your true covering. Love is. Love calls you out of hiding. It frees you. It fills your soul and flows from within you out into the world around you. So as we close, I wanna ask you a few questions to consider.
Where in your life do you feel the pressure to be small?
What old messages from family, culture, or church still shape how you see your worth?
What is a new message God might be inviting you to consider instead?
What might it feel like to remove your own invisibility cloak for today?
You were never meant to disappear. You were made to be known, to be seen, to be loved as you are. If these ideas have stirred something in you, I'd love to invite you to pause, journal, or even take a walk with these thoughts.
If you're ready to go deeper into this journey, join me next week where we're gonna talk about how boundaries can flow from love. You are not too much, you are not alone, and you are already deeply loved.
This week, I’m joined by someone whose work has profoundly shaped my own healing journey—Dr. Hillary McBride. A psychologist, researcher, author, and speaker, Hillary is a leading voice in the integration of embodiment, spirituality, and trauma recovery. We discuss her personal story as well as themes from her powerful new book, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing.
Whether you’ve struggled with body image, experienced spiritual harm, or simply long to feel more whole—this conversation is for you.
We explore:
* Hillary’s personal story of healing from an eating disorder—and how it led her into her life’s work
* Why body image issues are never just about the body* How trauma fragments our nervous system and disrupts our sense of safety, trust, and self
* What spiritual trauma is and how it can quietly take root in early beliefs and experiences
* How our attachment to God is often shaped by relational wounds—and what healing can look like
Order your copy of Holy Hurt here
Resources:
- Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing by Hillary L. McBride, PhD
- Other books by Hillary L. McBride, PhD:
- https://holyhurtpodcast.com/
- The Birth of the Living God by Ana-Maria Rizzuto
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 48: Loving Your Body as a Spiritual Practice, Why the Flesh Isn’t the Body, and 3 Heresies We Kind of Believe
Thanks to our sponsors:
- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. 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 Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast today. I couldn't be more honored and thrilled to share a really insightful conversation with someone who has helped me a ton on my own healing journey. It's Dr. Hillary McBride.
Hillary is a psychologist, researcher, speaker and author, known for her compassionate, holistic approach to embodiment, spirituality and healing trauma. Her groundbreaking work has been pivotal in helping countless individuals, including myself, as you'll hear me share with Hillary in today's episode, understand and heal in so many ways, but especially our relationships with our bodies.
She's the author of several books, including The Wisdom of Your Body, Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image, and Practices for Embodied Living. Today we're gonna talk about some of those themes, but we're also gonna talk about her brand new book that's coming out this week. It's called Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing.
I was so honored to play a role in this project. Hillary reached out to me and asked me to lend my voice to the conversation, both for the podcast series called Holy Hurt, and this book that Hillary has written that courageously explores the intersection of spiritual and bodily trauma.
In today's episode, we dive into some fascinating insights on a couple of different topics. We're gonna touch on how body image issues often reflect deeper spiritual and societal wounds, and why simply focusing on body image isn't enough.
We're gonna talk about the profound impact of trauma on our nervous systems and why it leads to fragmentation, disconnection, and such a lingering sense of unsafety, some of Hillary's insights on spiritual trauma, and how it can be rooted in our beliefs and early experiences.
Hillary shares her personal and professional insights with extraordinary warmth and depth, helping us understand how reconnecting with our bodies and addressing spiritual wounds can lead to authentic lasting healing.
If you've ever felt disconnected from your body or even your spiritual identity, or simply long to find deeper integration and embodied wholeness, this episode is for you. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Dr. Hillary McBride.
***
Alison Cook: I'm so thrilled to have you here. I can feel so much anticipation in my body and I will say, Hillary, before we dive into this topic of spiritual trauma, that I really am so excited to have this conversation with you and this beautiful book that I got to be a small part of, which is really meaningful to me.
Hillary: You are a very important voice in it.
Alison Cook: It really meant a lot to me that you included me. Your work on embodiment has meant a lot to me in my own journey. I would love for you to share with my listeners, who may not be familiar with you or your work, a little bit of why that topic became so important to you to write about. That was really the beginning of your public work, if I understand your body of work correctly.
Hillary: Yeah. Thank you for that invitation. I always like to anchor interviews like this in the personal, because that's the place where all of our material comes from. As much as we like to say otherwise, we do this and do it with passion and commitment because it touches some place in us.
The work of spiritual trauma and embodiment are not so separate for me. I can talk about that as I transition us maybe out of my story. But I came to the work of embodiment through my own profound experience of disembodiment. I came to understand embodiment because I didn't actually know how to be in my body.
The background of that is, I had an eating disorder for many years. I had been in the treatment circuit. For anyone who's familiar with the eating disorder treatment circuit, it is often a series of revolving doors that people walk through, wherein we are told as patients, you can't trust yourself, can't trust your body, can't trust what you want for your body.
Here are the guidelines. Here's something outside of you that's gonna tell you how to treat yourself, because you essentially can't be trusted with yourself. I remember I had this one therapist and we actually didn't talk about my eating disorder. We didn't talk about my weight. We didn't talk about my dietary concerns. We didn't talk about any of it.
She really invited me into this consciousness-raising space, where I started to see that my hate of my body and trying to make my body disappear was actually me being a good woman in my faith context and in my sociopolitical context.
When we look at North America, when we look at so many of the religious contexts that many of your listeners come from, I think about how often we are told that when you hate your body, when you subdue your body, when you control your body, when you make your body nothing,
you're seen as more valuable.
You're seen as being good. Like, you're doing it right. For me, that really started a conversation internally and externally with people around, what are the other ways of being? I ended up going to grad school and I was researching body image. I was looking at, how do we actually foster healthy body image?
If we know that there's a relationship between eating disorders and negative body image, could it be that if we have positive body image, it inoculates us against eating disorders? Jokes on me, because I found this whole body of research that said body image is actually insufficient as a way of understanding the full experience of being in yourself.
Because if we break down that term for a moment, image is only one dimension of the human experience. If I have a positive body image, that's great. I like how I look on the outside, but how I look is like what? 1% of who I am? I have an embodiment teacher who says, you have a million miles of unexplored territory inside of you.
Cool. As long as we're thinking about body image, that's great if you like yourself, or that's hard if you don't like how you look. But actually, that's not really the thing that we need to be orienting towards, if we're trying to repair our relationship with ourselves and move through the world in a way where we have integration, where we have presence, where we are connected to ourselves and others.
So I found this research and it was Dr. Niva Piran, her work, and the developmental theory of embodiment. It radically changed the direction of my research and the trajectory of my career. I started talking about embodiment and publishing about embodiment and really trying to research, what is this? How does it show up across the lifespan?
I looked at embodiment for aging women and in particular, perimenopause, for my doctoral dissertation. Embodiment in perimenopause. What does it mean to become even more connected to yourself through that transition? What I found is that there is a story that people were carrying, the people who struggled the most to be in their bodies, and the story that they were carrying was one, my body is unsafe.
That was usually connected to trauma–physical trauma, sexual trauma, experiences where the body felt like the scene of the crime. The other one was, my body is evil or sinful. What I was starting to hear in this work for people is that believing they could even get access to their body felt impossible.
Because they had years and years of people they trusted and family members and Scripture and prayer and any number of theological traditions and whatnot, saying the only way you'll be close to God is if you get away from your body.
Alison Cook: The flesh gets conflated with the body, and it's bad. It's a gnostic heresy.
Hillary: Say it. Say it.
Alison Cook: It’s a heresy that the body is bad. But it is often the message in church cultures.
Hillary: Exactly. What I found is that I couldn't really address embodiment without also addressing spiritual trauma. And I couldn't address spiritual trauma without also looking at the legacy that it has on our relationships with our bodies.
People who grow up in the church are hearing these ideas over and over again, but even just looking at the way that evangelical theology and that movement has shaped so much of the meta-culture in America, I don't know if there's anybody, regardless of their religious ideas or their spiritual practices, who hasn't been touched by this pervasive fragmentation at the level of mind and body.
We have started to see that bodies are subservient or secondary or at worst, evil and awful. That's baked into our philosophy in Westernized, white supremacist, Eurocentric, post-colonization cultures. So it's here, whether we name it as such. It's here, and that's how I think these topics are related.
Alison Cook: You're so right. I promise to the listener we're gonna get into spiritual trauma. But this morning, actually, as I think about that word, “embodiment”, and how you have brought that word, it's a positive. Embodiment is a direction in which one can move.
Just this morning, I have a very spiritualizing, anxious part of me, and when I do parts work with this part of me, God comes into that part, lays a hand, and embodies this part of me. “You have a body”. And I have to sit with that. But I hear your voice, because you've even tried to take it to, “you are a body”.
Hillary: What happens when we say that? Ah, it's a little spooky, isn't it? Yeah.
Alison Cook: You've also talked about when it's really hard to understand our embodiment on that deepest felt level, to take it to the third person. Your body is a she. I can be kind towards something outside of me. I can begin to see my body as almost a part of me. She is a good body.
Anyway, you've discussed this and you've brought this positive trajectory I move toward, versus what is not working. So I wanted to share that with you. Your language is so powerful, and I'm so grateful to you for that vocabulary.
Hillary: Yes. I love knowing how it's living inside of you and the wrestling and the tension and the possibility that it could be more than a thing, that our body could be someone, that it could be an aliveness, and it could be actually our aliveness. I know that can be a little tricky for some people to step into that.
That feels a little scary sometimes, because if I am my body, then everything that happened to my body happened to me. So that can be a tricky one for folks sometimes, but I am appreciating knowing more about how that lives in you. It feels so good.
Alison Cook: It’s scary to be a body in this world as a woman, as a sensitive person. Also it is our holy invitation in this healing process, that it is in fact, good. With that in mind, I do want to segue, Hillary, you speak so beautifully and in such a gentle way about the reality of trauma in
women's experiences. I'd love to hear how it lives in the body, and then move into spiritual trauma. That's a huge question.
Hillary: It's a huge question. There's a scholar named Michelle Panchuk whose work I've become really familiar with. I hope to meet her. I learned from her from afar at this point. But in one of her academic papers, she calls trauma multiply ambiguous. What she means by that is, we use the word trauma to mean so many things.
We use it to mean the thing that happened. We also use it to mean the way it happened and how it lives on in us. Sometimes we use it to talk about the big things that are insufferable. Sometimes we use it colloquially to talk about things that were hard. We can talk about trauma at the level of the individual nervous system as well as systemically.
If I'm thinking about all of those things at once, I come back to two or three main points. The first one would be fragmentation, this kind of split or schism within ourselves or between us and others at the point of overwhelm, which is the second word that often we use related to trauma.
When something is too much for our nervous system to process or make sense of, it feels like such a threat to our ability to be connected, to have our needs met, to survive, that our nervous system tips over into this place of not processing, of not integrating, of not holding sensation in mind.
At the same time of not storing memory, it lives on in perpetuity inside of us, and our nervous system is responding as if the thing is still happening because it doesn't have that sequencing, of feeling over. That's part of our body's way of keeping us alive. It is saying, I'm gonna be at the ready.
Because this is not done, and I need to keep protecting you through dissociation, through terror, through flashbacks, through whatever it is, through this sense of losing contact with the sense of safety in the here and now.
When we think about that word fragmentation, I think it helps us hit the multiple levels of how we can experience trauma. Because trauma, yes, on a neuro-anatomical level, there is a split that happens. We call it the corticothalamic uncoupling.
Cortex and thalamus, two parts of a brain that normally are talking and integrating sensation, presence, emotion, memory ideas, meaning making, time–they stop talking to each other. There's an inability for us to complete a response or get through to the other side of something.
But we can also look at fragmentation in terms of me and you, or me in the world, or me and God, or me and my meaning making system. When something is so big that it fractures something inside of us, another word I would use instead of fragmentation is “shattering”. It touches every part of our life and touches all the ways we relate to other people.
All it takes is a survivor of relational trauma to know, our bodies are really good at generalizing, and it's not the person who hurt us that feels scary. It can be any other person. So that's what I mean when I say there is a shattering. Previously, people might have been good and trustworthy. Because of the trauma, it's not that person who hurt me that I can't trust, but it's any other person who could hurt me.
Alison Cook: When you describe it that way, what's happening in the body, we cannot help that. We can't will ourselves to get those parts of our brains to reconnect. That's not a willpower thing. That's not a, “what's wrong with me”, which is often where we go in self-shame. We're aware–I had this bad experience at this one place. Why do I still feel it? I love how you described the literal fragmentation
Hillary: Yeah. Thank you. You're setting me up really nicely to talk about the spiritual trauma piece of this. The way that I understand spirituality is that spirituality is an inborn human desire for meaning-making, for connection, for a sense of trying to pursue connection.
It's this inborn human natural desire for us to discover, to seek purpose, to feel connected to ourselves and others, and ultimately to God. Spirituality is not what we practice. Those are spiritual practices. That's how we enact our desire to connect. Spirituality is not religion, which is a culture of how we as a group of people say, hey, we're gonna practice answering these big questions we have.
Spirituality is an inborn drive for connection. That's the most simple way of describing it. So let's go back to trauma for a second–shattering and fragmentation. If we hold those two side by side, I don't think that there's any trauma that isn't also spiritual trauma, because trauma at its very core is getting in the way of connection within me, between us, and in the big picture.
If what gets shattered is that sense of, I can move towards others for help, or I can trust my body, or I believe that God is here with me even though it's hard, I don't understand how any trauma at its very root is not also spiritual in nature.
Alison Cook: So this is exactly what I wanted to ask you. Because religious trauma might be a distinct thing as it happens within an institution, but that's what I wanted to ask about spiritual trauma. I think a little bit about attachment theory. I was really informed by Ana-Maria Rizzuto, The Birth of the Living God, and how our earliest experiences of mother love, father love, that attachment, that safety maps onto and shapes and influences our experience of God.
I know that's a simplification of what you're saying, but that is an example of wherever there is trauma or a wound or a fragmentation to the soul, it permeates all of our relational connectivity, including our relationship with God, but also our relationship with other people.
Hillary: Oh, that makes perfect sense. I think we can even simplify it further, or maybe you tell me if it's simplifying or complexifying, that our brain-body system is an association making system. Which means that our brain-body system is always looking for connections between things and it's pairing things, especially things that are threatening and dangerous.
For example, it doesn't take long if you burn your hand on the stove, before you realize you gotta be careful around the stove. When the element is red, it's hot. Or when you're in you're walking in a dark alley, if you feel someone's footsteps behind you and you don't know what's gonna happen next, it would make a lot of sense if the next time you're in a dark alley that you're gonna be on the lookout and you're gonna be listening for footsteps.
You're gonna be watching and wondering, where's the exit? How do we get out? Who's around? Our brain is constantly making associations, and good ones, helpful ones–this is part of our survival. If you think about what you're saying about early attachment experiences, where we learn, daddy's unsafe, mommy's unsafe, daddy hurts me, mommy hurts me, whatever the story is, then you go into a church where people are saying God is like your father, God is like your mother…
Your brain is saying, I'm going to take this impression that I've made over here and transfer it over here. I don't even think we have to talk about it from a symbolic lens. We can say quite literally, the injuries that we have that are encoded related to father, of course, are gonna be pulled up when someone says God is father.
It makes perfect sense from a neurobiological perspective, so I'm glad that you brought it up. That's how brains work. That's true.
Alison Cook: You say it so well, and then I think to myself, then the self-shame comes in.
What's wrong with me, that I think God is mean? What's wrong with me, that I have a fight-flight response when people are talking about God the father? As opposed to, my brain is making an association that is for my survival.
Hillary: Yeah. It's almost ubiquitous that people have that response. What's wrong with me? I would say, again, that happens in religious spaces and culture at large. There is something in trauma literature and in particular, religious trauma literature, that we call hermeneutic injustice.
The idea is that frameworks for meaning making and understanding what is happening inside of us are often deliberately kept from people, such that they can't then know how to make sense of what is happening inside of them, which is a really useful tool to get people to feel shame and blame, and like they need to do more of the things that return them to the place where the injury happens.
There is this cycle of abuse that can happen where you keep people in the dark, uninformed about their bodies, about trauma, about healthy systems, about healthy family dynamics, about power and control, about abuse. If you keep people in the dark about that and you tell them everything happens for a reason, and you tell them that their bodies are bad, and anytime their bodies afraid it's because they're sinning, then it's really easy for people to disavow the messages that bodies give them that say, this does not feel safe.
We hate the body instead of thinking critically about the context that's making us feel unsafe. So what you're saying is, at the very core of a lot of these normative spiritual trauma experiences, people blame themselves because they've been taught to blame themselves without being given the opportunity to look and ask why.
Why do I feel so much shame? Why do I feel so scared? Why? Why is that the go-to inside of me? Maybe it's not because I'm bad. Maybe it's because the context I was in was harmful to me, or that relationship or that leader or that idea injured me in some way.
Alison Cook: When you introduce the Holy Hurt podcast, you ask this series of really powerful questions that I think is a little bit of what you're saying. They're so good.
How do you point to something specific that was so regularly occurring that it was actually woven into the fabric of your development?
How can you name what was wounding when the source of the trauma causes you to sever the knowing that a wound existed in the first place?
Hence, we arrive at adulthood with all of this stuff going on inside of us without the tools to critically evaluate the context. So what do we do? How do we unravel this? How do we begin to heal? I wanna get there, but I wanna circle back to this idea of spiritual trauma.
I think many people listening, when they see those words, are thinking to some degree, it's a trauma that relates to my prayer life. It's a trauma that relates to my experience of church. It's a trauma that relates to my relationship with God. In your experience as a clinician, as a researcher, what are peoples’ lived experience of what we're calling spiritual trauma?
Hillary: Yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this too, because I imagine we could collaboratively make quite a list for people. But I would say it spans everything from clergy sexual abuse all the way to being spanked, which we know in Canada is illegal. It's a form of child abuse.
And being told, this is because God loves you, this is because I love you. The things that many of us considered is how we raise kids. It’s just normal parenthood. My parents are just doing this because they love me and because someone at the church told them to.
There's a whole spectrum that includes the really obvious things that have major religious connotations, all the way to the things that are seemingly not religious in a way, because they're happening in our homes. But I think that probably the most common hallmark of spiritual trauma, and I'd be curious to know what you have to say about this, I believe it is people being told that they are bad to their core.
You are bad and that's why you need Jesus. You're actually fundamentally bad. For people to be told this in a very confusing way that sounds loving and sounds like this is the right way, and we're celebrating you. I think I could boil it down to this: spiritual trauma is believing it is so good to believe you are so bad,
Alison Cook: That's well put. There is an embodied component to that. There's a split. I am bad. I don't think it's biblical, this idea that we have to hate ourselves to know God's love. It makes no sense. I like to emphasize the original goodness. Yes, we are imperfect. Sin is so misunderstood. So I'm with you on that, Hillary, you said that so well. It makes no psychological sense.
Hillary: In any other context, my secular psychologist friends, if they came to me with a case and they said, oh my gosh I'm hearing from this patient that as a child, they were told, you're bad, here are all the things you have to do, under no circumstances would we question it. That's abuse.
The clinical guidelines are so clear. That's extremely damaging to a person's sense of self.
It's the shattering that we were talking about earlier, and yet when we put it in a spiritual context, people say, oh, but this is how we raise children. This is how you actually get close to God.
It is really messy because people feel a sense of needing to buy into that belief as a means of connecting to their community, which is a fundamental human need for survival as well.
To be close, to be connected, to belong–we will do any number of things to belong to people. I think there's no fault in that. We need community. But it's wild how normal these things can sound when it seems like everyone around us believes them too.
Alison Cook: I love also how you're painting the spectrum all the way from the more obvious clergy sexual abuse, which is horrific and I'm so glad you're naming it, to cultures of abuse where there's narcissism.
Our friend Chuck DeGroat writes so well about narcissism, and what we're talking about here, where otherwise really loving parents have inherited or ingested, maybe even in a well-meaning way, a really bad theology. It's in the air that we breathe in many ways.
Hillary: Yeah. I think that can be scary for some of us who are parents. We're listening to this thinking, oh, I don't wanna change my view of my parents. They did some of these things. What should I do? It can be really scary to open the box on what “normal” experiences did I have or did I create for someone that were inherently spiritually traumatic?
What I like to remind myself is, you cannot heal something that you pretend does not exist. So if we are thinking about moving towards integration, the way towards the wholeness that we're after is not to pretend that didn't happen. Also it's important for us to recognize, on some level, trauma in its ubiquity.
It's around us and in us. Gabor Mate writes about this exquisitely, that there's actually something about us being able to see the scale and the scope of it that can move us towards reorganizing our systems, that can move us towards seeing, whoa, no wonder things are awry. We all are fragmented from each other and we use the earth and our capitalist society is more interested in money than preserving relationships.
Oh my gosh, trauma is baked into the foundation of the way that we exist, I would argue. But for me, my journey of spiritual trauma healing has included looking at how I have perpetuated it. It takes a really clear sense of knowing I am good to be able to do that. There's this interesting thing there; when I am connected to the truth of who I am, that I am loved and good, then I don't have to put blinders up to how I've hurt other people.
It actually is part of the healing, not inside of me, but between us, for us to look at, ooh, how deep does this go?
Alison Cook: It is a paradox. Shame keeps us fragmented. I often think it is a miracle, in light of all of the toxicity, that we still catch glimmers of this being who is love and who does call us good and beloved and delighted in. It's a miracle in many ways that triumphs through all of the clutter that so many of us inherited.
I wanna also touch on this for the listener. You do such a beautiful job of validating the different journeys people find themselves on when they begin to do this work of naming, oh, this has been toxic.
Hillary: There are some people, like you said, who need to get as far away as they possibly can from anything that signals danger, of course. That's really hard to do when you've been told that your perpetrator is omnipresent. That's really hard to do when you've been told that the abuser, the person who is making this all happen, is God. God is everywhere.
So I wanna acknowledge the complexity of that. Spiritual trauma is so hard. So there are the people who need to get as far away from that as possible to, like you said, the people who are in this tension of needing to disorganize and reorganize their meaning making systems, their relationship to spirituality.
Then I would say that there are some people on the other end of the spectrum whose religious tradition and spiritual practices will be the thing that helps them navigate and heal and mend. But it's really hard to do that if you believe that God wants you to suffer, that God wants you to be disconnected from your body, et cetera.
So there are some tensions there that people need to work out, but I would say that spectrum is so important to acknowledge, because for some people who are in one place and have found one location of orienting to spirituality as the place where they've done their healing, it's so easy for us to ascribe to other people that it needs to look the same.
I actually think that part of an integration on a we-level is our ability to tolerate difference and still see value in belonging. So stay in the church, if that is what matters to you and that is helping you heal the wounds. I am so glad you are healing those wounds.
As well as the person who's in the church looking at the person who's running, saying, I am so glad you're getting away from what feels scary, the place you were told you had to stay put and sit down and be good. You get out, you run as fast and far as you can, and you have me with you, my hand at your back, every step of the way.
If we can do that for each other, we actually begin to mend on a systemic level, the spiritual injuries that fragment us from each other.
Alison Cook: I love that. I feel that in my body when you say that, I feel like some of the divisiveness of how we're supposed to heal breaks my heart, because it is such a personal journey. I have friends and family members who, to your point, have had to run, and their only way to salvage a semblance of the love and goodness and beauty is to disassociate.
I wanna, quote you Hillary, because I think this is one of the more powerful quotes. “Spiritual trauma is someone handing you an inner critic and telling you it's the voice of God.” That's what we're talking about. When we have to disentangle from that, it may look like throwing the baby out with the bath water to some degree, because it's so hard to disentangle.
So let's talk about healing, with this idea that it will look different for everybody. But on some level, we've associated shame and fragmentation and pain and self-doubt and self-hatred with the voice of God, and we begin to realize this is not in fact God. How would you invite the listener to begin the process of healing?
Hillary: Coming back to safety in the body could be the place people start. It might be the last place people go, because being in a body has been so difficult for them. But I think increasing levels of skill around tolerating discomfort, being able to stay with sensation in the body long enough that we can get to the other side of hard questions and hard conversations allows us to then be able to tolerate the discomfort of being able to say, what if that's not who God is?
That was the story about God I was told, and that story is wrong. There's a great unraveling that happens on the other side of that, and it can feel like a free fall into nothing. If that's a story, how do I trust any other story, and which story is true? What do I do and do I decide or is it someone else's decision?
Who outside of me is gonna tell me what to do? There is an incredible, visceral terror and dis-ease that people feel as they start to pull apart their meaning-making structure. I think, again, this is my embodiment lens, if we can stay with the body and learn how to be with sensation and learn how to talk to our body.
“Thank you for telling me this is a scary question and I'm realizing, body, that this is a lot for us to be with. You're telling me you need to move my body, because there's a lot of energy here”. That allows us to hang with some of those questions over time and learn to be in the uncertainty for a season.
So I would say that being with the body is elemental for recovery. I would also say that finding new connections and spaces for belonging is essential too, because most of us have these experiences baked into our social networks. If you think about being in a church and being raised in that church, it's where you go five times a week and it's your friends and it's your youth group and it's your babysitter and everybody's there.
It's really hard to move away from that meaning-making system and the beliefs and the ideas if it's also the way we get belonging, which as I said earlier is our fundamental need. So if we can find access to connection with people, whether it's through therapy or support groups or peer groups or extending our relationships to people outside of that worldview, then we can begin to think critically.
To bring us back to body image, how do we change our relationship to our bodies, when the world around us is saying, hate them? It's good to make them disappear, alter them, cut them up, chop them off, do all sorts of things.
If we have a subgroup that we identify with who thinks critically about what media is doing and body narratives, then even if we live in this big meta-system that's saying bodies are bad, we actually can protect and preserve our relationship with ourselves because we have relationships with others who reinforce different ways of thinking about ourselves. That's true for body relationships and spiritual remaking.
Alison Cook: The solution to the fragmentation is connection to body, connection to others, I might also say connection to nature. That's been a source for me of embodiment. But that's really beautiful, Hilary. You take it right out of the abstract, it’s so earthy.
Hillary: You said earthy right after you were talking about connection to nature, and I wanna highlight that for a moment because I think part of the question of how have I perpetuated spiritual trauma or how have I benefited from others’ spiritual trauma takes us back to colonization and fragmentation of the land between us and the land.
The way that we use land as a thing instead of aliveness that is supporting our aliveness–it has really been my indigenous friends and community that have taught me, trauma didn't really exist until colonization happened because no one was ever separated from themselves. No one was ever separated from the land.
No one was ever separated from their community and their family. We all lived together. We all had practices. We were all in relationship with medicines and land and ceremony, and that for me was a huge wake up call. Trauma is a relationally mediated process. There's always an element of relationship that helps us heal and some sort of connection that gets fractured at the heart of trauma.
Again, baked into the fabric of our society is a fracture with the land. It is the fact that many of us don't even think of the land as another parent who can hold us, the fact that we don't think about land as a source of medicine and communication and aliveness and vibrancy, you could say, a primary incarnation as some theologians would say.
The place where we actually see God's self revealed, the fact that we don't even think about that or the fact that we don't even think about our bodies, those are symptoms of these downstream effects of trauma that is happening at a major systemic level for us that we don't even know about. I'm very grateful you added land there.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I grew up at the base of a mountain, and that mountain is very much like an attachment figure to me. I tend to attribute that to the Creator, to God. I think about it like top-down and bottom-up approaches in psychology to healing. Top-down is, I go to God and then I appreciate nature. That can be very common.
What you're saying is, go to nature, or go to your body. Start there. And using my words, that will bring us into a relationship with the author of all things good and beautiful and loving and kind. That's beautiful.
Hillary: I have never put that language on it in terms of this material, so thank you for that. That insight so resonates with my work. We heal in a bottom-up way, so of course we would heal from spiritual trauma in a bottom-up way too.
Alison Cook: Yeah. As we close, Hillary, I shared about Holy Hurt in the introduction, but I'd love to hear your heart behind it more personally and also what you are doing in this space, to help folks who have been hurt.
Hillary: Yeah. To tell a brief story, it's not really a story, but it's more of like my positionality as a trauma therapist. Some people think about my work as being extremely heavy and painful and exhausting, and yet what I know is, at the end of the day, I am more connected to a source of hope inside of me.
Not only because I see people mend and remake themselves, but because I see people being brave enough to look at where it hurts and believe there is something of value there. When I think about this project, it is heavy material. It is not easy to walk into and not easy for people to walk into themselves.
But I ultimately think that there is a message of hope in this, because as I said earlier, we can't mend injuries that we pretend aren't there. For us to be able to move towards where it hurts is ultimately us moving towards the wholeness that's on the other side. I mean that for people who are a million miles away from church doors.
Great. Wonderful. Look at what it took for you to have to run so far. I also mean that for people who are in the church who are new to this conversation, who feel scared and overwhelmed by looking at it. What does that mean? Does it mean that I am violating my commitments to these theological positions or my community? Can I even look at this?
What I wanna say to you is, I think this is a love letter to the church. I think that this work around holy hurt is a love letter to religion, because it's a way of saying, hey, if we are not considering the injuries, then we are missing the place where we need to bring love the most.
If we are missing the injuries, we're not seeing how we are perpetuating the injuries. There's such a beautiful example we can think of in Scripture, of Jesus risen from the dead saying, hey, look at the wounds. Look at them. Do not look away from the injuries. There, to me, feels like invocation to say, if we're gonna take our faith seriously, we actually need to see there is something prophetic about the injuries.
So whether you're in the church or outta the church, that's actually not what this is about. My primary orientation in writing this was to tell stories that help survivors. But underneath that, gosh, if we are not changing things at a systems level, we're gonna have more and more people injured by these patterns that continue and we can do it differently.
So wherever you find yourself, I hope that there's something in this book for you.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. I wanna personally thank you again, not just for your work and embodiment, but I think what you're doing here is so necessary and so needed, and you speak with such wisdom. You have such a unique blend of gentleness and wisdom and truth-telling, because that's what you're talking about, is telling the fullness of truth.
I'm so grateful that you put the work into this.
Hillary: Thank you so much. It's not easy work, and I'm so grateful to not do it alone, and I couldn't have written this book, it would've been incomplete, without your voice and the pieces that you added to it. So thank you for contributing and for folks who are listening to our podcast episode, Alison's contribution to the book is so rich.
Alison Cook: There needs to be a very large table of us trying to figure this out. It is not solo work. We need different voices, lots and lots and lots of different voices, and I think that's what I feel–I'm so grateful to have been one voice among a chorus of very different voices trying to untangle some of these knots.
Hillary: Yeah. Well-said.
Alison Cook: Thank you so much, Hillary, for being here. So grateful for you.
Hillary: I loved it. I loved it. When my head hits the pillow at the end of the night, I'll think about this conversation and what it felt like to be in the energy of this work with you.
Do you feel constantly driven to get everything right—to be the perfect partner, parent, worker, or friend? On today's solo episode, Dr. Alison explores the hidden relationship between perfectionism and anxiety, revealing how trying to be perfect is often a disguised way of managing deeper fears.
You'll discover:
* Why perfectionism is rarely about actually being perfect.
* Dr. Alison's own journey with anxiety, perfectionism, and discovering what's beneath the constant need to perform and please.
* The main ways anxiety cleverly disguises itself.
* The surprising, compassionate question you need to ask yourself when you can’t stop perfecting.
* Practical steps to gently uncover the fears behind perfectionistic behaviors, helping you move toward freedom and connection.
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 29: Perfectionism and Proving Your Worth: How to Stop Chasing Approval and Start Living the Life You Actually Want
- Episode 112: Navigating Anxiety—Practical, Compassionate Insights to Recognize and Manage Anxiety
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
- Visit GoGeviti.com to learn more about how you can start optimizing your health without leaving home today and use code BESTOFYOU.
- Contact Restoring the Soul today and learn how their Intensive Counseling Process can jump start your journey to the place you want to be. As a special gift for The Best of You podcast listeners, download their pdf called "5 Ways Unresolved Trauma May Be Derailing Your Relationship."
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. 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 Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. Today's episode is for the part of you that tries really hard to get it all right. You might even say it's trying to get things perfect, whether it's in your work, your relationships, your faith, your parenting, or even just in your image, the way you show up in the world.
This part of you is compulsively trying to make things perfect. And here's the twist. This part of you might look put together on the outside. It might do a pretty good job of keeping things going, of keeping things looking perfect on the outside, but underneath, these perfecting parts of us are often driven by anxiety.
Now, I've talked about anxiety on the podcast before, but this isn't your usual take on it today. I want to explore the way anxiety disguises itself, especially through perfectionism. Not necessarily the loud, “Here I am!” perfectionism that you're aware of, but more the subtle kind, the insidious kind, the kind that looks like overworking, people pleasing or just trying to get everything right.
This is where my own story comes in, and I've got a long history with anxiety, but I began to realize that the roots of my anxiety story started up far before I actually had the experience of feeling anxious. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my own experience with anxiety and how it disguises itself.
Then I'm gonna walk you through what I think is the most important question to ask yourself if you find yourself doing any of these things that masquerade as anxiety. I'm also going to offer you a guided reflection that you can do in real time at the end of today's episode.
So if you're someone who has ever felt exhausted from trying to do all the things for all the people, trying to just get it all perfect, this episode is for you.
Here's the key takeaway that I want you to remember. I'm gonna give this to you right here at the top of the episode. Perfectionism is never about being perfect; it's about trying to manage fear.
In my own story, I never used to think of myself as an anxious person. I was very productive. I got things done. I knew how to connect with other people. I knew how to keep going, and it took me years to realize that what I called a strong work ethic or responsibility, or you can always count on me, was actually anxiety in disguise.
For me, anxiety initially didn't show up as that feeling we often talk about in the psychological sense–a racing pulse or spinning thoughts or even panic, like we're overwhelmed, like the world won't stop spinning around us. It eventually ended up showing that way, but for years it only showed up as different forms of perfectionism.
It showed up as overworking on all of my papers in graduate school as saying yes to other people when I was dying to say no, as trying to perform my way into feeling connected, feeling accepted, and feeling safe in my communities around me. I remember vividly, during one season when I was working full-time, I was also in graduate school full-time as a student, and one by one my friends had started to move away.
Many of them had gotten married, some had started having kids, some had taken different jobs, and increasingly I was isolated in my life, but I wasn't pausing to pay attention to what this shift was doing to the inside of me. I just kept working harder. I just kept coping through taking on more work, through helping more people.
And I remember one weekend where this all came to head really vividly. I had a paper due for a class I was taking. It was on the Psychology of Religion. It was a really interesting class, but I was working on this paper, and in the paper I had to describe this cathedral I had visited in town. I was describing this service and the liturgy and the mass and all the details of what that meant to the different people.
I could not stop perfecting the words. I kept just replacing one word with another word, or one sentence with another sentence, or trying to rearrange paragraphs. I was trying to get the paper to be perfect. It was my way of trying to be perfect.
Some people do this with their physical body. Some people do this with their homes or with their cooking. Some people do this with their work in different ways. For me, it was this process of trying to get this paper to be perfect. I began to just barely become aware–something's wrong here. Something's wrong here.
There is no such thing as perfect, but I couldn't stop myself. The paper was far beyond good enough, but I couldn't stop myself in that moment. I couldn't stop rearranging words and sentences to get it more perfect. A few days later, after turning that paper in, I had the first of a series of panic attacks.
The truth is, anxiety, for years, had been showing up in increasing forms of perfectionism in my work. Because I was disconnected from the anxiety and the fear that was driving that perfectionism, I was disconnected from myself. And the truth is, at the heart of it, I was afraid if I slowed down. What would be left of me if I said no?
I would lose the little bits of connection that I still had. If I wasn't perfect, I might be left behind. But all of those things had already happened. I was deeply lonely. I wasn't connecting with other people. But the productivity and the perfectionism and the hyper-responsibility was keeping me from having to face those very normal feelings of grief, of loss, of isolation.
All of that perfectionism kept me from connecting with the parts of myself that really needed my attention. It took a series of panic attacks for me to finally face all of that pent up loneliness and sorrow that was underneath all of that perfectionism.
Here's what I learned through my own experience and through walking so many other people through their own perfectionism. Anxiety is a master of disguise. It often shows up as perfectionism, as control, as people pleasing, as overproducing, as avoidance, or even overachieving.
Anxiety is really clever and we don't always understand that it’s underneath all of those behaviors. You might be really great at helping others, you might be really great at always being the responsible one, you might be really great at helping keep the peace through managing other people's emotions.
I don't deny that you aren't really good at doing those things, but the question I want you to think about today, as you're listening, is whether there is anxiety underneath some of those behaviors.
Let me give you two contrasting examples. You're hosting a dinner party. You want the house to look nice, you want the meal to be delicious. You work hard to get that done, but at a certain point, you're also able to take a deep breath and say, this is good enough.
What really matters is the company, is the conversation we're gonna have around the table, is the opportunity to be with people that I really love. If this dish isn't perfect or if this part of the house isn't just right, it's gonna be okay. That's the beauty of good enough.
But when you slip into perfectionism, there's an anxious part of you driving you and that shows up more like, “If it's not perfect, it's a complete failure”. You can feel the tension in your body as you work. You're not working from a place of joy, from a place of delight, from a place of overflow. Your work is fueled by that anxious part of you that has to get it just right.
Here's the truth about perfectionism. Perfectionism is never about being perfect. It's about trying to keep yourself safe. Safe from the scrutiny of others. Safe from judgment and criticism. Safe from our own inner shame, our fears of being rejected, of being abandoned, of being unworthy, unwanted, or not good enough.
But here's the thing. Perfectionism will always keep you disconnected. It keeps you disconnected from yourself, disconnected from other people, and disconnected from God. Again, imagine those two different scenarios.
The one where you're planning a dinner party for friends and you know when to say it's good enough, because what I really want is to be with my friends. That's what really matters, and I don't wanna be with the kind of people who wouldn't enjoy coming into my home if it's not perfect. Imagine that kind of freedom.
On the other hand, when perfectionism is driving you, you're not even enjoying the time with your friends. You're so worried that they're gonna see something out of place. They're gonna see some dirt in the corner. They're gonna see something that's not quite right, and you're not even able to take a deep breath and enjoy the camaraderie of the moment.
If you relate to what I'm saying, if there's an anxious part of you driving you toward perfectionism, you know what a dead end road that becomes. There is no perfect–it's an illusion, a mirage. It doesn't really exist.
Here's what I want you to know. The surprising antidote to perfectionism is to ask yourself, what am I afraid would happen if I stopped? What am I afraid will happen if I stop editing this email for the 17th time? What am I afraid will happen if I stop cleaning? What am I afraid will happen if I stopped trying to make everyone happy?
If I stopped over preparing, over-functioning, and over-performing, what am I afraid might happen? Would I feel the angst of what it feels like to show up as a human being? Would I feel alone, unseen, unworthy?
When we name these fears, we begin to loosen the grip perfectionism has on our lives because almost always, underneath our compulsive need, is a fear. I'm afraid they'll be mad at me. I'm afraid I'll be alone. I'm afraid I'll look like a fool. And these fears are very real. I don't mean to minimize them.
Sometimes we face our fears and we realize, I don't even know why I'm afraid of that. That's not real. Sometimes we face our fears and we realize they might be real. I might be in a situation at work or at home or with a family member where I might be criticized if I don't get it just right.
These are vulnerable places. These are tender truths, but it's a little bit of a paradox. As you get to the root of the fear underneath your perfectionism, it begins to loosen its grip. As you get to the root of your fear, you can lead yourself through it. It may be that fear is of something that'll never happen.
Your kids are gonna be okay. Your spouse isn't going to hate you. Your work colleagues already know that you're putting in more than your fair share, and you can walk yourself through that fear and gently tell yourself the truth.
In some cases, you'll get to the root of your fear, and you might notice that, yeah, someone might be disappointed. Someone might misunderstand me. Someone might not like what I did or how I decided to show up. And even if that's the case, you will still be okay.
You will still be loved, you will still be held by a God who is not evaluating your performance but delighting in your presence. You do not have to be perfect to be loved. You don't need to manage every reaction to stay safe. You just need to be here, present with yourself, with God, with this new understanding of what's going on inside of you.
Perfectionism is never gonna get those people to stop feeling or doing or thinking about you, what they're already gonna do, think, or feel. Once you become aware of that fear, you can lead yourself through that situation with healthier boundaries.
The work is never to perfect your way into belonging or into approval or into someone else's good opinion. That's never the path to take. The path is to reconnect with the part of you that's terrified and to let her know, I'm not gonna leave you alone in this.
You are already enough. You are already held by a God who does not need your perfection to earn His love. If you are noticing any of those perfectionistic behaviors driving you, take a minute and ask yourself, what part of me is trying so hard right now, and what would it be like to sit with her and honor her fears in partnership with God?
I wanna close today with a short guided reflection. You can take a minute if you want, if you're at home or in a place where it's safe to pause what you're doing, and close your eyes and follow along with me as I guide you through these questions.
You might take a few deep breaths, inhale slowly, and then exhale. And let your body arrive right here in this moment, and just notice, what's one area of your life where you're trying really hard to get it just right. Maybe it's your parenting, maybe it's your spiritual life, maybe it's your work, maybe it's your physical health.
Notice that part of you that's working so hard to get it right, and see if you can get curious about her without judgment or criticism. Then ask yourself this question: what am I afraid would happen if I stopped trying to be perfect?
Just let that question sink in for a moment and stay curious to whatever it is that comes up.
Maybe you're afraid that everything will fall apart, or that people will finally see who you really are. Maybe you're afraid you'll disappoint someone who's counting on you, or maybe you fear someone else's anger or criticism.
Maybe you're afraid that you'll be seen as lazy, selfish, or irresponsible, or maybe you're afraid to feel how tired or lonely you really are. These are all valid fears. Whatever that fear is, just notice it, maybe jot it down. Notice how you feel when that feeling surfaces, and above all, stay curious and compassionate with yourself.
Take another deep breath as you notice that fearful part of you emerge, and say to that part of you, I see you. I get it. I know you're scared. It's okay. You don't have to hold it all together. You're not alone in this. I am here, and God is here with us too. Together we will find a better way.
Notice how that fearful part of you responds to your presence, to God's presence, to that feeling of not being alone in this. And then jot down one thing you'd like to do. Maybe name that fear to a friend, or simply honor it in your journal, and check back in with yourself later on today or tomorrow.
Notice what it's like when you feel that perfectionism starts to take over and what it's like to acknowledge that fearful part. This is where healing begins–when we connect to the fearful part of us with compassion and we begin to gently show up for ourselves more fully, more wholly, more spiritually alive.
It's okay to feel this fear, but I'm also not gonna let it drive. You're slowly retraining your mind, your body, your spirit, your emotions to trust that you can show up for you. You don't have to be perfect to be safe. You don't have to be flawless to be loved. You are already held just as you are.
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the invisible yet relentless responsibilities that occupy your mind every single day? You’re not alone. In today’s insightful conversation, Dr. Alison welcomes psychologist and relationship expert Dr. Morgan Cutlip, author of a brand new book, A Better Share, to unpack the complexities of the mental load. Dr. Cutlip brings clarity and practical strategies to a topic that often creates tension and misunderstanding within families.
Together, they explore:
* The definition and dimensions of the mental load—physical, mental, and emotional.
* Why women typically bear more of this invisible labor.
* How to recognize signs of mental overload and prevent burnout and resentment.
* Practical, real-world solutions for effectively communicating and sharing responsibilities with your partner.
Get A Better Share by Dr. Morgan Cutlip
Resources:
- Love Your Kids Without Losing Yourself: 5 Steps for Busy Moms to Banish Guilt and Finally Beat Burnout by Dr. Morgan Cutlip
- A Better Share: How Couples Can Tackle the Mental Load for More Fun, Less Resentment, and Great Sex by Dr. Morgan Cutlip
- Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live) by Eve Rodsky
- drmorgancutlip.com
- @DrMorganCutlip on Instagram
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 122: Navigating Anxiety, Therapy, and Spiritual Formation—Balancing Mental, Emotional, & Spiritual Health with John Mark Comer
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- Contact Restoring the Soul today and learn how their Intensive Counseling Process can jump start your journey to the place you want to be. As a special gift for The Best of You podcast listeners, download their pdf called "5 Ways Unresolved Trauma May Be Derailing Your Relationship."
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. 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 Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here today for an incredibly relatable conversation about something that deeply impacts so many women. It's often unnamed, and I have to tell you, this naming for this phenomena was incredibly helpful to me, and I have a feeling it's gonna be incredibly helpful to you as well.
It's called the mental load. Here's a way to think about this. Have you ever found yourself awake at night, overwhelmed by your mental to-do list, or maybe even stewing about tasks you've handed off to others but aren't sure will actually get done? If this sounds familiar to you, today's episode is for you.
I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Morgan Cutlip, psychologist, relationship expert, and the author of two books. Her first book was Love Your Kids Without Losing Yourself, and her brand new book is called A Better Share.
Here's the thing about the mental load–when one person in a relationship is carrying the weight of that mental load, it leads to resentment. It reduces the amount of fun that we feel in our relationships, and that affects intimacy all the way through. This is such an important conversation to have and I'm so thrilled to have it with Morgan.
Morgan combines years of professional expertise with personal, down-to-earth storytelling that you'll absolutely love. In fact, she starts off today's episode with a story about a birthday party she was planning for one of her kids and how it led to a fight with her husband
about exactly this thing, mental load, that we're gonna talk about.
We're gonna unpack what the mental load is, why it disproportionately affects women, and most importantly, how to navigate conversations about it with our partners without defensiveness or blame.
Toward the end of the episode, Morgan gives us some really practical strategies, including how to have regular check-ins and clear communication as you figure out how to create a better share with your partner, as it pertains to all that goes into managing a household.
Dr. Morgan Cutlip is not only an accomplished psychologist, but also a gifted speaker and author. She's committed to helping families find clarity, balance, and joy in their relationships, and she brings wisdom that's rooted in both rigorous research and compassionate practicality.
If you've ever found yourself muttering under your breath or finding yourself growing silently resentful in your relationship, today's conversation will give you a name for what you're feeling and provide you with hope, clarity, and practical guidance for navigating this tricky but essential area of our lives.
I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with Dr. Morgan Cutlip.
***
Alison Cook: I love the opening story in the book, Morgan. It's so relatable. Would you set the stage for our conversation, sharing a little bit about the story of the birthday balloons, which is not really about the balloons, but what they signify?
Morgan: Oh, I haven't had to tell this story out loud yet, actually. The story is about my son's birthday. His birthday happens to fall during the holidays, and then all of our family has birthdays within about three weeks of each other, plus the holidays. Also, my in-laws were coming to visit. We were planning for a trip with my in-laws.
The party, the birthdays, the trip, all of the things were colliding, and it was a really stressful time. I remember saying to my husband, he's like, what do you want me to do for Roy's party? It's our son's name. He's nine. He's not geriatric with the name Roy. But he's like, what do you want me to do? I said, you know what? Just handle the balloons. Start to finish.
I want primary colors, the number eight, and a baseball. That's it. He's like, done. I let that go. It was like I say in the book, it was like a sip of water in the desert. It didn't actually help that much, but it was at least one thing I could hand off to my husband. Then maybe two nights later, we're edging up to the birthday party.
I was laying in bed and I was like, oh gosh. I don't think he actually knows what to do about the balloons.I don't think he actually has them handled. I'm laying there stewing around this and wondering, my anxiety is heightening, and then you always get this experience where you're like, oh my gosh, now I'm not getting enough sleep.
I'm worrying about something now. I'm not sleeping. Now I'm worried about not sleeping. It became this sort of spiral into anxiety. I woke up in the morning and I came up the stairs and Chad is on his computer. He has a spot where he sits and he works. I was like, hey. A little intense, hey, I’m really worrying about something.
I couldn't sleep last night. I'm worried that you don't actually have the balloons handled. He looks at me and he is like, yeah, tell me when and where I should get them from, and what time we need 'em, and what you want. I was like, dang it. I was so spot on with my intuition.
He actually didn't handle it.
I was so wound up, like a tight spring at that moment, that I didn't handle myself the best. I said something like, I knew it. I knew you didn't have this. He's like, my gosh, and then he snaps back because I come in hot. He comes back hot and he says something along the lines of， you didn't communicate clearly.
I pride myself in being a very clear communicator, so he knows that's getting me right where it hurts. We go round and round. In the beginning of the book, that's where I start with, telling that story and then analyzing both of our perspectives. My perspective was, you said you got it. You didn't get it.
If you were confused, it was on you to follow up with me and to clarify and to ask for whatever instructions, and that's on you. His perspective was, you have really high expectations for birthday parties, which is true, which is totally valid.
However, with this particular item in the party, I actually did not care at all. He was assuming that I had these very high expectations. I've never done the balloons. I don't know what to do. I thought I would have a little bit more direction, break apart the story, and offer some perspective.
Alison Cook: It perfectly sets up this idea that you are really dissecting in the book, and it's such a hopeful naming, especially for women, of the mental load. With that word, I'm like, oh, she sees me. I want you to talk about what that is, because in many ways, the story is not about the balloons–it's the mental load you were carrying and what it felt like to you to have that tiny sip of relief, that piece of it being handled.
Before I dive into the deep end, what do we mean by the mental load? What is this term and why is it so important to name it, especially for women?
Morgan: Whenever I define it, I give the general definition that you can find anywhere. Then I give the “in the weeds” definition and I'll tell why that's important. The 30,000 foot definition is: the mental load is the seemingly never ending to-do list that we carry around in our heads that have two key components. The first and the majority of the mental load is made up of invisible things.
This is important to understand because it's hard to explain to people when we're trying to get relief from or hand things off, and also because it's invisible, it's hard to get it acknowledged and appreciated, which becomes a really big part of navigating the mental load as a couple.
The second part of it is that it takes up cognitive real estate. This means that it crowds out space in our brains to do things like find peace, exercise patience, regulate our emotions, and get in the mood for sex and intimacy in our relationship. It crowds these things out.
Everybody has a mental load. That's a pushback that sometimes comes up–I have one too. Of course everybody has one. But when it comes to the home and family life, we see over and over again in research that women are the ones that typically carry the majority of this, even if they're working full-time, part-time, inside or outside the home, doesn't matter.
The “in the weeds” definition, if you'll allow me for a minute, imagine a Venn diagram with three circles. The tasks in the mental load usually fall into one of three domains. The first is the physical and the stereotypical relationship. This is where guys thrive. They're like, gimme a list. Tell me what to do.
I'll mow the lawn, I'll do the dishes. Feel better now? We're like, no, we don't feel better. That creates issues. “I do these things. It's never enough”. So in the physical domain, we actually gotta do the thing.
The second circle is the mental. This is thinking about the steps involved. A lot of our work life falls in the mental domain–making a list, thinking about what needs to be done, what you're gonna cook for dinner or grab from the store. It’s the mental domain.
The third is the real differentiator, and that is the emotional domain of tasks. This is a little bit of a mouthful, but it will make sense to women. It is the ongoing cause and effect calculations that we make on behalf of members of our family to try to maximize positive outcomes and experiences.
It's future projections that we're worrying about. It's thinking about, oh I'm heading out of the house. How do I make sure my 3-year-old doesn't have a tantrum? What's all the stuff I gotta do to safeguard? How do I make sure I make good educational choices for our kids so that they have good relationships, but also a good, educational start?
It's all of these areas that feel like the stakes are really high, and it even goes into dinner and thinking about food preferences. Who's going to eat what, and how do I make sure they eat enough? If they don't eat enough, they get hangry. It's all of these calculations we're constantly making, and this one is very tricky because you can't really hire it out.
It requires a deep knowing of your family. It's hard to explain to your partner if they don't think in the same way, and it follows you everywhere. It will whip you out of the present and pull you, like when I was trying to sleep, back into mental calculations and the mess we've got going on in our minds. It steals our ability to be present, to relax, and all these things.
Here's the last point. The majority of the tasks in home and family life occur at the intersection of these three circles, which is what I call the triple threat. Most tasks, like I said, making dinner, will involve the physical, the mental, and the emotional domains. What happens a lot of times is women will go to talk to their partners and they'll be like, I'm really overwhelmed. I need more support.
Their partner will say, what's going on? They're like, I gotta fill out permission slips. I have to make dinner. I gotta get the kids to here on time and I gotta call the dentist. At the surface, it seems like those are very simple tasks.
Alison Cook: None of these are hard.
Morgan: None of these are hard. Yes. We judge ourselves, which we don't need more of. And then our partners don't get it. They'll say things like okay, make a list. Or, you make it harder than you need to. What's the matter with you? It ends up creating a lot of self-judgment, a lot of shame. It doesn't move us forward in our relationships when it comes to sharing some of this stuff.
When we look around our home at all of the things that have shown up, in our pantry, in our fridge, in our kids' clothing drawers, we can unpack each of these things to reveal all of our head and our heart work in these three domains that was done in order for this to manifest physically in our lives.
It makes sense why we're so overwhelmed. It makes sense why it feels much heavier than these one-off tasks that we can list.
Alison Cook: It is so helpful, the naming, even listening to you and reading your book, that idea that there's a difference between tasks and then that second sphere, which is the process to achieve the tasks. Sometimes my husband and I'll go when we get into this, I'll say, it's actually not a task, it's a project.
Morgan: Yes.
Alison Cook: Naming that helps it. It sounds simple, but it's actually not. What you're doing with that naming, and you do it throughout the book, is validating. There's a different mental process that goes into what seemed simply like, oh, I gotta make dinner, or I gotta do laundry. But that could be a million different things you have to mentally work through to get to that.
It's such a helpful naming. Morgan, you said everyone has a mental load. Is there a way in which women carry it differently than men? I don't wanna make a generalization here–there's always exceptions–but it does seem like women are carrying this mental load more when it comes to household management, even if they work outside of the home.
Why is that? Tell me a little bit about why do women tend to carry this more? I wanna caveat that by saying one of the things you do a really great job of in the book is saying, your partner is not the enemy.
Morgan: Yeah, it's really important.
Alison Cook: The mental load is the enemy, but it might affect you differently than it affects your spouse.
Morgan: Yes. We can dive into that a little bit more even when we start talking about ways we talk about it. There are a number of reasons why women end up carrying it more. I say in the book, the game is rigged. We do need to understand why, because when we understand why we can jump into our relationships differently.
Again, this naming and defining is really important because it's empowering. It empowers us to make changes to how we relate to things, react to things, in all of these different areas. It becomes very empowering. There are different reasons. One is socialization.
I remember talking to my husband once, because he travels every single week for work, and in the beginning of my motherhood journey, I was riddled with guilt all of the time for the silly things. I go out for an hour to go to the grocery store and I'm like, I gotta rush back. It's silly stuff that I had to look at and examine and change my relationship with, but I was baffled.
I'm like, how do you leave every week and not feel guilty? He says, I felt guilty maybe the first time, but I am providing for my family. That's my role. It's interesting because I work too.
It's not as if he’s the only breadwinner, because I work too. It's an interesting thing and I believe that this is almost a very common experience among men.
When you look at research and you look at shifts after kids, men tend to stress out about changes in sex life and, but then also about providing for their family. They feel that extra pressure. Again, there are always individual differences, but the way we're socialized sets us up to handle these things differently.
For men, they're socialized to provide and protect. These are top priority. They're checking these boxes. It's almost like everything else is extra and a little gravy. I'm not saying it's correct, and we can absolutely shift this in our lives and many people have. I have. But that's a little bit the default.
Women are very much socialized to self-sacrifice for the preservation of our relationships. We are judged based on what our kids are wearing, how they're behaved, and what our home looks like. Our priorities are a bit more on some of these areas, so right out of the gate, we're set up to prioritize different things. It makes us more likely to take on some of the stuff on the home and family front.
Alison Cook: It makes sense. Whether it's nature, whether it's nurture, it is really the reality in general, for most people. I love this quote you talk about, and it's a really interesting perspective. You say, a woman I interviewed on the mental load recounted a story where her husband gave the kids a bath and did the dishes, and then turned to her and said, is there anything else I can help you with today?
She was really angry and couldn't figure out why. He thought he was being so helpful and maybe someone would be super grateful. But for her it was like, imagine telling your husband, hey babe. I took the kids to school. I picked up dog poop. I cleaned those. I thought about dinner. I bought groceries. I filled out permission slips. I enrolled the kids in blah, blah, blah, blah. A million things. Is there anything else I can do for you?
Again, this is where resentment can build. If we don't name it, we can feel that resentment of, I'm carrying so much over here. Do you not see this? I wanna talk about that. What are the signs, the warning flags, that this is becoming an issue? We're starting to feel that resentment based on the mental load.
Morgan: It shows up in a number of ways. One sign can be if you're feeling an incredible amount of overwhelm and anxiety. There are correlations between this experience of being overloaded and more levels of anxiety and overwhelm and burnout.
All these things are individual costs and individual things to check into, and I am just feeling so burdened. Do I feel like I have a weight on my chest that I can't release? It shows up in these almost universally shared ways, where we might be walking around the house, muttering under our breath.
One of the things that I noticed in myself is, I would have this running dialogue as I moved through my home. I'd be picking things up, like, I guess I'll take care of this, and guess I'll do that, and must be nice not worrying about that. Having this negative self-talk and dialogue can be a really good sign that it's time to address this differently.
When your attitude shifts towards your partner and you start seeing them in a pretty negative light, you develop a storyline about them where they're like the villain in the story. Oh, it must be nice having a maid. It feels like you're another child. These types of things are big red flags that it is time to talk about this in your relationship.
That's a problematic dynamic that occurs a lot in these relationships around the mental load. Typically the woman will approach her husband to try to make some changes, and if he does not react in a receptive way, but is defensive, does this tit for tat thing, hardship Olympics, dismisses it, puts it back on her, she has one of two choices, but one of the choices is she gets louder or she starts to chase him.
When this happens, it creates a dynamic where she is the nagging mother. A parental sort of dynamic starts to develop, and this is problematic for the relationship because she will feel a whole lot of resentment and she will not feel a lot of attraction toward her partner, and this will impact her intimate life.
She resents that she's been put in this position to occupy this role. It becomes this really tricky experience.
Alison Cook: It’s a bind because if you don't say anything, then you're silently resentful.
Morgan: Yes, the dynamic gets layered, where you start to lose track of what you're really upset about anymore. But a lot of times we can trace the roots back to this feeling of inequity, feeling of unfairness, feeling of invisibility in the relationship, like you don't have a partner who's there for you, and all of these things that really set the stage for deeper resentment.
Alison Cook: It makes a lot of sense. Let's shift into, how do we bring it up? How do we talk about it in a way that doesn't alienate, that doesn't stir up defensiveness, that is a naming? Versus it feels like this is that hot button issue, you called it the Hardship Olympics, exactly. How do we work through this?
Morgan: I have a lot of strategies in the book, because the hardest part of writing this book is, there's so much nuance in relationships and couples’ experiences, and I really wanted to equip people no matter where they were. A generalized framework is one, you wanna bring this up when things are relatively good.
Don't bring this up when you are frustrated, muttering under your breath and you're like, can't you do more around here? That is not gonna be received well. I know it's hard to ruin a good moment by having one of these conversations, but bring it up in a good moment. It's helpful to give your partner a heads up and ask for when is a good time.
There's something I really need to talk with you about. It's very important to me. I want you to be in a good head space to be able to receive it. When is a good time? And then set the time up.
Another thing that can be helpful, and people love this or hate this, but one of the most common responses I see in my community and when I collected survey data of women is that their partner responds with defensiveness. Love it or hate it, one option is to put that on the table before you enter the conversation.
You try to hedge the defensiveness by saying something like, there's a conversation I really need to have with you. I have really worked up a lot of energy and courage to enter into this conversation with you. I'm feeling nervous and what I'm most nervous about is that you're going to get defensive when we talk about it.
Before we get into talking about this, can you handle it without getting defensive? It does two things. One, if they start to feel defensive, because they're gonna say they can handle it almost always, if they're about to get defensive, it causes a pause where they're like, oof, if I'm gonna get defensive, I'm gonna go back on what I said.
Or if they do get defensive, you can say, “You said that you could handle this, and now it seems like you're getting defensive. Should we take a break? Is this not the time? What are you hearing me say?”. You can check in on some of that stuff, so that can help set it up.
The next piece is, when you talk about the mental load, it's very important and what I see as being the most beneficial way forward–if the ultimate goal is to navigate it differently in your relationship, to frame the mental load as the enemy and you two on the same team.
Alison Cook: That's good.
Morgan: Because modern family life is relentless. We are parenting very intensely. We are distracted by our devices. It's a hustle culture. We feel pressure to be productive all of the time. We have all of these sources of comparison. We are up against a lot in modern family life. If you talk about the mental load in that way, it can go a lot smoother.
It might be something along the lines of, there's something that I wanna name that I've been experiencing. You've probably noticed that I am tense, a little stressed out. I'm not as laid back as you probably remember me being, and it's because I'm overwhelmed by something that is called the mental load.
I'd love to talk to you about it. It's something that I'm experiencing right now in a very heavy way. I know you have your own. But in the home and family life, I feel like I'm carrying a lot of this and I want to find a new way forward together because we have so much on our plates.
We are navigating so much, and I want to find a way forward that works for our family because me being in a good mood and me being in a good space is beneficial for everyone in our family, and it will really help our relationship. Can we brainstorm some ways of moving forward?
Alison Cook: That's good. You're casting the positive goal that you both want. You're getting the buy-in. This is for both of us. It’s also validating, because again, we never know the mental load that our partner is holding. It might be different, and it honors and gives space for that. It invites conversation.
I get this picture in my mind as I'm listening to you. Instead of going at the person with the issue, it's like you're putting something out on the table. You could almost get your book and put it out on the table. Could we talk about this thing that exists outside of us? We're both at the table, side by side, trying to look at it together and come up with creative solutions.
I don't have an agenda. I'm not here to try to get you to do more. I'm here to have an open-minded conversation about this, because I am feeling it. Maybe you are too. I really like that we're a team in this.
Morgan: Yeah. I interviewed men and women for the book, and what men tend to talk about is, I know she's struggling. I feel it. I can tell something's wrong and I want her to be happy.
Men like it when there's peace in the home. It's important for them to own that, but then also recognize, what can I do to help facilitate more of that?
That's another piece worth highlighting in that conversation. You probably feel how I have shifted, and I'm sure it's not enjoyable to you. How do we get to that better place together? A lot of the men talked about that. I know she's struggling. I don't actually know exactly what I need to do to get her to a better place.
There are jerks out there. There are on both sides, men and women, but a lot of men really want their partners to be happy and they want to be a participant in that.
Alison Cook: It's hard because you can get into those tropes on both sides. She's never happy! But for the women's side, “He's never gonna get it!”. We have to be willing to bring in that idea of really seeing each other and committing to try to honor each other's experience, even when we don't fully understand it.
One of the things, Morgan, I love about the book, is that you interviewed so many people and included so many stories from real couples. What were some of the things that surprised you? What didn't surprise you? What stood out to you from that research?
Morgan: It's almost like what stood out was that I wasn't surprised. I've been talking about this for so many years and talking with women in my community and couples that I worked with over the years, and I would see the same themes. What I found is that the same sort of things show up.
Here are some examples. The things that women want most from their partner on the mental load and what I would've guessed: number one, more initiative taking. That makes a lot of sense to me. They want a partner, not somebody that they're coaching.
The second one is, more appreciation and acknowledgement, and I've felt that in my own life. I hear from women where they say things like, if they saw it and valued it, that fills me up. That's such an interesting part of the conversation too, because when we have partners who push back, it's such a shame.
It's like you're missing these really simple ways to support your partner and lift her up so that she can really feel good and strong in the relationship and in how she shows up in family life. Oh my word. I remember going round and round for probably six or eight years, I don't know. I don't even wanna rehash how, with my husband, this idea of me needing more appreciation and he could not get it.
I don't think I share this in the book, but he would do this thing where he'd say, you're a good mom. I was like, no, that doesn't do it for me. You said that about our old neighbor in DC. That's not anything special for me. Then we would fall down this hole where he would say, ah, it's never enough for you. I try and it's not right. You need too much and blah, blah, blah.
One day I just had to lay it out and I was like, you say you don't need these things, but every day when you go to work, you collect a paycheck, and a paycheck is a representation of your value contributed. You get a bonus, which is reflective of how hard you worked. It's a thank you, it's an appreciation.
You get monthly reviews where you have feedback from your boss, where you get propped up and then you go to these banquets that I've sat through for six hours where you're honoring all these employees. You need to understand that in family life, I have no source of feedback except you. It's all unseen.
We had toddlers at the time. I was like, do you know the feedback from the kids? It's a tantrum. I make this wonderful meal and they don't like it. That's my feedback. You are actually occupying a very important position in my life that has a lot of power to lift me up because you are my source of feedback.
It’s such an important shift for him to understand. Women, sometimes we need this. We have a hard time articulating it.
Alison Cook: We're colleagues, and that's language he could understand. Oh, I need to be a good colleague to you. This is your job; these are our different household responsibilities.
Morgan: You do it at work. I do it at home too. Yeah. Also, to frame things as needy to women is really tricky, because a lot of us have received messages around what it means to be too sensitive or have needs. When we ask for stuff from our partners and they push back, we're likely to shut down because we're like, oh, maybe I am too needy.
I'm asking for too much. It's important too, for women to hear, you don't get a lot of these things in home and family life. You don't get a lot of this appreciation that maybe you need, and it's okay to ask for it because there isn't a good source to tap into that a lot of times.
Alison Cook: This is a really important thing. It's not necessarily about a 50-50 split, it's about a feeling. I kinda like that word colleague. It's about co-laboring, co-sharing. There was a book that came out a long time ago, I can't remember the name of it, but it was talking about the economics of a household.
The idea was, figure out what each person is legitimately good at and divvy up the tasks that way, versus based on gender, versus based on who has the career. Hey, this is actually easy for me. I'm a good cook. I was talking to a friend, and she says my husband does all the cooking. He loves it.
Have these conversations like, this is easy for me, and we might be surprised at what a spouse says. I don't actually mind doing this. When you have those open-handed conversations, at least in those moments, to your point about feeling invisible, we've talked about it, we've acknowledged this, it's not being taken for granted.
We’re not making assumptions about who does what. Tell me a little bit about that piece of it, to the point of your book which is called “a better share”. How do we get to a better share? What’s one thing you would wanna leave people with?
Morgan: The one thing that really will make a big difference is having regularly scheduled meetings. I have a “share” agenda in there. “Scheduled Home And Relationship Effort” is what the acronym is, but these regularly scheduled times are where we come together and talk about things, and it's important.
I know the book you're talking about and it's such a genius solution. Fair Play. Yeah. In my opinion, that's the gold standard for the actual logistics of how you hand things off, but when we're talking about modern family life, like in my situation, for example, my husband travels every week so we can divvy up cards, but every single week it changes.
What that means to me is that couples have to have a skillset of being able to regularly talk about the mental load, because it changes literally every single day, depending on the demands and intensity of what's going on in your life. If every time we go to talk about it, we end up in a big fight or we're arguing, then it's going to make this part of our relationship really difficult to navigate.
Ultimately you're gonna get to a place of resentment. I believe that one of the most flexible and important approaches is to regularly schedule time to talk about it. I give an agenda in my book. It's a short amount of time, and you check in, How are we doing in terms of fairness? What's on your plate this week? What's on my plate?
Is there anything I could've dealt with better? Is there any information you need from me to accomplish these tasks this week? Do you have any questions for me? Just hash it out. It has a couple of very important side effects that are really good for relationships.
One, we tend to be really bad at talking about our relationships because we assume that if we're talking about 'em, it means something is wrong. We have to normalize talking about our relationships. We have meetings in all parts of our life, but then when it comes to a relationship, we're like, it'll run itself.
That's wildly irresponsible. The more you do it, the better you'll get at it. The other thing is that women tend to carry, especially as the relationship goes on, the responsibility for managing the relationship. We carry that emotional labor and we're like, how come you used to plan dates and now I'm the one?
It seems like I'm the only one that cares about us, and that is really lonely and isolating and frustrating in a relationship. When you schedule this, you are sharing some of the management of the relationship and that one piece is going to help make a major difference.
Alison Cook: Do you suggest weekly or monthly? Do you have a suggested rhythm for that?
Morgan: I think weekly is best. Everybody operates differently so I get pushback sometimes, and even from my husband when we started doing these. I get so awkward and I was like, so what? Be awkward in your relationship a little bit. Anytime you're learning a new skill, if you're an athlete, you wanna learn how to be a really excellent hitter, how many times are you gonna step in that batting box?
How many times are you gonna go through your mechanics until it feels automatic? The same thing with relationship skills. Be awkward, let it feel mechanical. Eventually it will get more automatic. If you can do it every week, that's amazing because it's changing all the time, and I think as you progress through this and practice it, maybe you don't need to schedule them anymore. Maybe it becomes a normal rhythm of your relationship that you've got natural at.
Alison Cook: I love that. Let it feel awkward for a little while at first, because again, to use your metaphor of in the workplace, this is normative. You have team meetings to make sure we're on the same page. We are a team. We need to have team meetings and we each get to bring things.
I love that. Even if, let's say in your case, your husband travels a lot, or you're holding all the cards, you are holding more of it, at least there's a place where that's witnessed and seen, where there can be some gratitude and affirmation. Yeah. I see that you are holding most of the cards. You are holding most of the load. That can be honored.
Morgan: Yes. That's part of my agenda, which is that you do this expression of appreciation because people need to hear that. You can't overdose on gratitude in your relationship. The more, the better.
Alison Cook: It's such great work, Morgan. It's a fantastic book. You're so practical there. Like you said, there are so many scripts and tips and an agenda for the family meeting. It's such a great resource. I love that you wrote this book. It's gonna help a lot of people. Tell my listeners where they can find the book and where they can find your work.
Morgan: Thank you for saying that. That means so much to me. You can find my book basically anywhere that you buy books. You can also grab it on my website and there are some gifts if you're pre-ordering. That's drmorgancutlip.com. You can find it on my Instagram as well. My handle's @DrMorganCutlip, all one word.
The book's available on Audible as well. I'm the one who reads it. You get all of the downloads and resources even when you do the audiobook. Whatever your preferred mode of taking in this information, you can find it there.
Alison Cook: I highly recommend if you feel any of the weight of what we've been talking about, this is gonna help. It's such an insidious thing that can be so divisive in marriages so unnecessarily.
Morgan: Yes. Isn't that so frustrating?
Alison Cook: People are working so hard and the thing that is pulling them apart is that they're not meeting on how hard we're both working. I love that you've brought this book to life to help people navigate that.
Morgan: Thank you. I appreciate you!
In this incredibly thought-provoking episode, Dr. Alison talks with Sheila Wray Gregoire, groundbreaking author of The Great Sex Rescue. They confront harmful misconceptions about sexual intimacy within Christian marriages, amplifying the often-overlooked voices of women.
Sheila shares powerful insights drawn from her extensive research involving over 20,000 Christian women, challenging damaging narratives and revealing startling truths about sexual satisfaction, obligation, and intimacy.
You'll learn:
* The 4 harmful teachings that negatively impact sexual intimacy
* Why “sex as obligation” is so destructive for women
* How to reframe your sex story with your spouse
* Practical steps toward recovering true intimacy
Sheila's compassionate yet bold approach offers hope, clarity, and practical wisdom for those longing to rewrite their sexual stories, reclaiming God's true design for intimacy.
Resources:
- The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended by Sheila Wray Gregoire
- The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex: (And You Thought Bad Girls Have All the Fun) by Sheila Wray Gregoire
- 31 Days to Great Sex by Sheila Wray Gregoire
- She Deserves Better by Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky
- The Marriage You Want: Moving beyond Stereotypes for a Relationship Built on Scripture, New Data, and Emotional Health by Sheila Wray Gregoire and Dr. Keith Gregoire
- The Good Guy's Guide to Great Sex: Because Good Guys Make the Best Lovers by Sheila Wray Gregoire and Dr. Keith Gregoire
- Genesis 4:1
- baremarriage.com
- Bare Marriage podcast
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 125: Recovering From Purity Culture: Dismantle the Myths, Reject Shame-Based Sexuality, and Move Forward in Your Faith with Dr. Camden Morgante
- Episode 126: Restoring Wonder & Play in Intimacy—Navigating Sexual Brokenness, Safety, and Vulnerability with Therapist Sam Jolman
Thanks to our sponsors:
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- Contact Restoring the Soul today at www.restoringthesoul.com and learn how their Intensive Counseling Process can jump start your journey to the place you want to be. As a special gift for The Best of You podcast listeners, visit www.restoringthesoul.com/bestofyou to download their pdf called "5 Ways Unresolved Trauma May Be Derailing Your Relationship."
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. 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 Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here with me this week. Today, we're exploring a topic that deeply affects so many people, yet it so often remains cloaked in quiet struggle. It's the complex world of intimacy within Christian marriages, particularly the misconceptions around sex.
On the podcast, we focus on holistic mental health, which encompasses our hearts, our minds, our spirits, and our physical beings. We understand that a calm and clear and well-cared-for nervous system not only influences our mental and emotional and spiritual health, but also our physical health, including our sexual health.
Sexual intimacy is where the emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical aspects of ourselves converge. It's such an important component of how God made us. yet there are so many times that couples and women in particular don't experience sex as fun or romantic, or even as a way to feel more connected to the person they love most in the world,
Sam Jolman, a past guest on the podcast (Episode 126), writes in his book, The Sex Talk You Never Got, “Sex isn't a bodily function or even a need. It's a story, and it's laced with meaning”. He says it's vital that couples learn how to write a better sex story–one that increases connection and passion and intimacy.
I love this phrase that he borrows from Emily Nagoski, where she calls this “adding more to the plot”. I love this way of viewing sex as a narrative, as a story, rather than an act. We can write different chapters to our stories and we can add more to the plot. In many ways, a woman's voice and understanding of this story has often been overlooked, especially in Christian faith communities.
Women's experiences with sex can be complex, not only because of the way God designed us, but also because many women, in fact, research would suggest a third of all women, one in three of all women, have had a past experience of sexual abuse or pain.
That's all the more reason why it's so important to uncover the beauty and significance and deeper longing and voice of a woman's sexual story. That's why I'm so excited to welcome a very special guest, Sheila Wray Gregoire, to the podcast today. Sheila's been a pioneer in bringing a woman's voice into the conversation about Christian sex.
I first learned about Sheila's work at a retreat for Christian women authors. Her bestselling book, The Great Sex Rescue, was repeatedly recommended as a vital resource. As a clinician who has primarily worked with women, I've struggled to find literature that honors and highlights a female's perspective within a Christian context, which is why Sheila's work is so important and groundbreaking.
She conducted a profound survey that launched this pivotal book. It's a survey that involved over 20,000 Christian women. And it unearthed some startling truths about the impact of certain teachings on marital and sexual satisfaction, challenging and reshaping some of the harmful narratives that have not fully recognized a woman's perspective, especially within Christian faith communities.
Today we're going to discuss those findings, as well as some really beautiful reframes about how Jesus respected, valued, and honored women. Sheila Wray Gregoire is a popular speaker, marriage blogger, and award-winning author of seven books, including The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex, She Deserves Better, and The Great Sex Rescue.
She also has a brand new book out, written with her husband, called The Marriage You Want: Moving beyond Stereotypes for a Relationship Built on Scripture, New Data, and Emotional Health. I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with Sheila Wray Gregoire.
***
Alison Cook: I'm thrilled to have you here today. I first learned about you at a retreat with Christian women authors, and it was right at the tail end of the pandemic. It was the first time we were all meeting. Of course, the topic of sex would come up, and I was the resident therapist.
I wasn't there as a therapist, but people always ask me for book recommendations, Sheila, and I struggle as a Christian clinician. I think really highly of Esther Perel's work, I think Emily Nagoski is doing really good work, and at the same time, they don't come from a Christian worldview.
So that can be an obstacle for some people. I really struggled.
I was asking them and everybody was saying, you've got to get a hold of The Great Sex Rescue. So that's how I first learned of you. I’m so grateful for what you're doing to try to debunk some of the unfortunate messages about sex, especially in evangelical churches, and try to cast a new vision.
I'd love to start today with you telling us a little bit about this survey that you did. You surveyed over 20,000 Christian women, and that served as the impetus for the book. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
Sheila: Let me tell you how we got started. I had been blogging about sex and marriage for about a decade. I have two master's degrees and a degree in sociology. I was a researcher, but I stayed home with my kids. So I did a lot of writing from home. As they became teenagers, I started speaking a lot, and I was doing marriage conferences and we were producing all of this material.
I was writing The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex or 31 Days to Great Sex. But the one thing I didn't do was read other people's books. I figured, they love Jesus, I love Jesus, we're all saying the same thing, but I was really afraid of plagiarizing. I didn't want to read anyone else's stuff.
Then one day, I was on Twitter. It was called Twitter back then. And people were fighting about whether they needed love or respect, referring to Emerson Eggerichs’ bestselling book, Love & Respect. I thought, I have that book and I've never read it. This is an amazing way to procrastinate, because I didn't want to work that day.
So for the very first time, I went and I grabbed someone else's book, and I turned to the sex chapter. It was like a nuclear bomb went off in my living room, because I read things like, “If your husband is typical, he has a need that you don't have. And that need is for physical release. If he doesn't get physical release, he'll come under satanic attack. Why would you deprive him of something which takes so little time?” And I called my team.
Alison Cook: So it was guilting women into having sex, shaming women into having sex, which is so helpful.
Sheila: I also don't know why you would brag about it taking so little time, but whatever. So he's saying this, and I called my team, and my daughter was working for me at the time, and she had a psychology degree. She had done a lot of work on survey development, and Joanna Sawatzky, a family friend, was working for me when she was home with her baby, and she was a statistician with a master's degree in epidemiology.
We were like, we’ve got to do something. If this is what is being said to women, how is that impacting people? What is this doing? We decided to do what we hoped would become the biggest survey that's ever been done of evangelical women. So we asked women to rate their marital and sexual satisfaction using some validated question sets.
Then we listed a whole bunch of different beliefs. We said, hey, have you ever been taught this? Or did you ever believe it? From that, we were able to see how certain beliefs impact marital and sexual outcomes.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Can you tell us some of your key findings, both about the beliefs and and the impact of those beliefs?
Sheila: Yeah, I like to say we had six big findings. I'll tell you the numbers first, because those are fun. They're depressing, but they're fun. So first, the number 47 is a very important number, and that's our orgasm gap. 95% of men almost always reach orgasm in a given sexual encounter, compared to 48% of women.
So we have a 47 point orgasm gap in the evangelical church, and we also have an incidence rate of sexual pain disorders of about 23%. Evangelical women suffer from sexual pain at least twice the rate of the general population. We already knew that going into the survey–I'd already written a lot about sexual pain because that was part of my story too.
One thing we were specifically looking at in our survey was why. What is correlated with sexual pain? We managed to identify four big teachings. There were actually more, but we talked about four of them in The Great Sex Rescue that really hurt women.
Alison Cook: Can you tell us what they are?
Sheila: Sure. Okay, we'll start with the big one. I like to think of this one as like the one ring to rule them all, in Lord of the Rings terminology. I think everything goes back to this one. But it's the idea that a woman is obligated to give her husband sex whenever he wants it. We call that “the obligation sex message” and roughly 40 percent of women said they believed that going into marriage.
When they got married believing that, their chance of experiencing sexual pain increased to almost the same statistical effect as if they'd been abused. Yeah. Our bodies interpret obligation as trauma.
Alison Cook: It makes so much sense, and I guess you are adding a layer to the fact that something like a third, I don't know the exact numbers right now, but a third of all women have experienced some sort of sexual trauma or abuse. So already women are struggling with not having had consent on some level, and then suddenly you're being told to have sex on demand.
You're adding trauma to trauma. That's what I would hear from Christian women. It's not my area of expertise, but it comes up in the course of “Man, I love my husband. I want to be in a sexually fulfilling relationship. What's wrong with me?”
Let's say, in the best case scenario, you're going into marriage with a wonderful man, but you are in that category of women who've had some really hard or traumatic sexual encounters prior to marriage that haven't been necessarily healed because we don't talk about sex well, even with the best of men.
You're going to struggle a little bit. You're going to take that into marriage. Then, when you add on these messages that you were unpacking, it puts so much burden on women.
Sheila: It really does, and that “obligation sex message” hurts you even if you haven't been a victim of abuse, and even if your husband is good. That's what's so key, is it's not always about the marriage dynamics. It's the fact that these terrible things that we grew up believing really hurt us because they made sex seem like a threat.
It’s not what God intends. Genesis 4:1 is a super funny verse. It says, “Adam knew his wife Eve and they conceived a son”. I remember in junior high reading that and thinking, God's embarrassed of saying the real word. But what if that's not what's going on?
What if God was serious? Because the root for “to know” there is the same root when David says, search me and know me, God. So sex is supposed to be this deep knowing. It's supposed to be like, “I am bringing everything that I am to the bedroom and you're bringing everything you are, and we're gonna totally know each other”.
But obligation tells a woman, it doesn’t matter what you want. What you need is irrelevant compared to what he wants. So now sex isn't knowing, it's owing. It's an erasing of you as a person, and that's a traumatic thing.
Alison Cook: Yeah, it is. It is. What are a couple of the other lies that you uncovered?
Sheila: There's one that's very closely related, that a wife should have frequent sex with her husband to keep him from watching pornography. So if your husband watches porn, it's your fault, because you're not giving him good enough sex, which is so wrong.
Also, it makes sex into something coercive, because if you have to have sex to stop something bad from happening, then that's coercion.
Another one would be, and this is related to what we believed as teenagers, that boys are going to push your sexual boundaries, and you need to be the gatekeeper. When girls grew up having to be the gatekeeper, they learned that you had to separate what your body is feeling from what your mind is feeling, and now it's very difficult to inhabit your body when you're having sex.
Alison Cook: I thought that was so fascinating how you named that in the book. That message alone, putting the locus of responsibility in a woman's body, does something to divide her mind from her body, which you can't magically repair once you're ready to “go all the way”.
It makes so much sense. That's not the way we're designed. We are whole-body beings. If we've been conditioned to disrupt those natural feelings, there are so many mixed messages that are constantly firing in the nervous system.
Sheila: Yeah, totally. That's why that particular message was highly correlated with arousal problems. Once you're married, it’s highly correlated with orgasm problems. Mindfulness was too difficult.
Alison Cook: So on that note, I've heard you say, and I thought this was so interesting. “Wait until you're married to have sex, but don't have sex until you're aroused. Figure out the arousal piece first”. What do you mean by that?
Sheila: Oh gosh. We've got some more stats coming on this in our new marriage book, The Marriage You Want, and it is so depressing. But when you look at the first time a couple has sex, if they waited for the wedding, that subgroup of the survey respondents, we asked, hey, did you bring her to orgasm before you tried intercourse?
Or did you bring him to orgasm before you tried intercourse? We were far more likely to bring him to orgasm. Okay. So women are helping him with orgasm first, but he’s not helping her. Then when you say, okay, who actually did reach orgasm in your first sexual encounter? I don't remember the exact numbers, but 87 percent of men did versus 11 percent of women, maybe.
It's incredible when you look at how lopsided our first sexual encounters are. There was a really neat study out of the University of Toronto last year, I think 2022, which found that your sexual debut, the first time you have consensual sex that involves intercourse, if she reaches orgasm in some way, her libido is really likely to be basically the same as her spouses or her partners.
But if she doesn't, then her libido is more likely to be lower. So our sexual debut matters. I think about all of these Christian couples having sex for the first time, not caring about her pleasure at all. Because when you wait for the wedding, it's this big thing. Oh, we finally get to have intercourse. You have intercourse, and you weren't waiting for her arousal.
It didn't flow organically from something you were doing. We're doing it backwards. I'm not saying that people should have sex before the wedding, but think about what happens when a 17 year old has sex by accident.
They weren't planning on having sex, but they were making out for three hours, and then they got more and more excited. And that is what is supposed to happen. There's supposed to be this sexual response cycle. Now, not when you're 17, but that's the way your body is supposed to work.
But what do we do? We get married and then, oh, now we finally get to have intercourse. So you don't do any of the other stuff. You don't know what you're doing. You feel embarrassed.
Alison Cook: Even psychologically, we live in a culture where we have to be preparing our girls and boys for healthy sexuality. It's not enough either to give them the abstinence message that I got in the eighties or the purity culture stuff, obviously, which got so toxic in the nineties and two thousands. You're right. It's delicate to talk about it, but I love that you're looking at the facts.
Here's what's happening for women. Sheila, I really appreciate that you're trying to amplify the voices of women and women's experiences, to try to close that gap. You do these reframes and you start off the book emphasizing the mutuality of sex.
It sounds so simple when I say it, but it's actually a profound reframe. “Sex was designed to feel good for both people. Both people in a marriage desire sex”. Instead of “guys want it, girls don't”, you're really trying to reframe that messaging. Tell me why that's so important for women.
Sheila: Think about what we have normally heard over and over again in almost all of our marriage bestsellers and sex bestsellers. It's that men have needs. Men have sexual needs, and women need to meet them. We see that in For Women Only. We see it in His Needs, Her Needs. We see it in Love and Respect.
Sex is a need that men have, not a need that women have. It's called a need. God created men with these needs, and it is your job to meet them. That is so often the message that we get about sex. That it's not about our autonomy. It's not about our desire. It's about a man using a woman's body to meet his needs.
That's not an intimate thing. That is a very shallow thing. When you talk about sex that way, I'm amazed that we then berate women for having no libido, because what do we expect? If you tell women their whole lives, hey, men have these needs that you need to meet. Why would any woman get excited by that?
Every Man's Battle, that book series, sold 4 million copies. It literally called women the methadone for their husband's sex addictions. Do they think that this is going to excite women, that this is going to make women want to have sex?
Alison Cook: It's so dishonoring to both men and women. You say that in the book, it's so one-dimensional. It's such a caricature of men. It's so dishonoring to both.
Sheila: The last teaching that we mentioned that really hurts is also really dishonoring to men. It's a huge one, and it's the idea that all men struggle with lust. That's hugely destructive. That's one of the biggest reasons that women lose libido, is believing that or hearing that as a teenager.
The authors of Every Man's Battle literally say that men don't have a Christian view of sex–what they're saying is that men were made inferior to women. There's something wrong with men that women need to fix. So women were created as sin management tools for men. We are sin management tools. That is not sexy, people.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's not helpful. It's not helpful. You're really clear about that. I’d love to go back to what you were saying about that biblical idea of knowing. That word was not a mistake–Adam and Eve knowing each other is the same term that David used to ask God to know him.
I heard you say something to the effect of, this evangelical framework in particular has turned sex from knowing to an unknowing or an unseeing, especially of women. I think that's really profound. That's part of why this book is touching a nerve in women, is that longing to be known and to be seen. What would you say to the woman listening, who has that longing? Where can they start to begin that journey?
Sheila: Yeah if we want to fix our sex lives, first of all, we need to believe deep, deep down, truly believe that we matter. Because we've been told all kinds of messages that we don't. Sex will never be intimate unless we know that we matter, that we know that we can speak up, that we know that we can say, hey, I don't like this, or I do like this, or I'm not really feeling it right now.
We need to be able to speak up, but we can't speak up, if we feel like we don't matter as much, or if we feel like he's going to sin if I don't do this, that's not a healthy dynamic at all. I think there are a lot of misconceptions around whether or not sex contributes to intimacy, because they're often used interchangeably.
In sermons, when pastors are afraid to say the word sex, they'll say intimacy–that marriages need physical intimacy, as if intercourse is automatically intimate. It's actually not. 16 percent of women reported that their primary emotion after sex is feeling used. That's not intimate.
That means that for them, they would feel closer if they hadn't had sex. Then there are others that may not feel used, but they don't feel good. There are a lot that really are not enjoying it and it's not bringing them closer together. If their husband watches porn, if he has a pornographic view of sex, a pornographic way of relating, if sex is shallow, then it's not going to make them feel more intimate.
But a lot of men don't know how to share their feelings, don't know how to open up and be vulnerable. For them, sex seems like it provides connection without making them have to do the work of connecting. So they feel connected, but they're actually not.
I think that we need to get away from speaking about sex as if it automatically is intimate, because it's not. And that's something that I think women need to hear–you're not alone if sex makes you feel lonely.
Alison Cook: That's really good. That's so important. Maybe don't start with sex as in the act of intercourse. Maybe start back all the way up to dating when we're 17. What does it feel like to be sitting in the movie theater with your husband, and start there, almost back into that feeling of connection, of closeness.
We don't have to go right to “let's make the sex great”. It's almost like we have to re-tap into that innocence, that play, that got lost somewhere along the way. That is well before the actual intercourse, that flows naturally from that excitement and from those good feelings.
Sheila: I think play goes away for very obvious reasons. So let's say you have a Christian couple, and they want to wait until they get married. They do, or maybe they might've had sex a few times, but it may not have felt that great, whatever. Okay. But they go into marriage, not really experiencing great sex yet.
The first time they have sex, when we asked women to name the main word that they felt after their first time having sex, the most common word was bewildering. That's not a good word. That is not a good word. But it's the most common one that we got.
You have sex, you have intercourse, and it wasn't what you thought it was going to be, but often he has a really good time. It feels good for him and he wants it again. He wants it to reassure himself that they're going to have a good sex life. He wants it because it feels good. Maybe they keep doing this and it never feels good for her.
She starts to believe, “I'm not sexual because he wants it all the time. So he's obviously sexual and he orgasms really easily. So he must be more sexual than I am”. We forget we were made differently. Our bodies react differently to stimulation or types of stimulation that we like, or types of stimulation that bring you to orgasm.
When we asked both men and women, Do you do enough foreplay? 96 percent of men and 88 percent of women say, yes, I do, or yes, he does, if she frequently reaches orgasm. But if she doesn't, 71 percent of men and 52 percent of women still say that he does enough foreplay.
So that's over half of women think that he does enough foreplay, even if they're not reaching orgasm. What that tells me is that we've internalized the idea that we're broken. We're not sexual. Because the first time you have sex, or the first few times, it works for him and then his experience becomes the default. It has become the norm.
Alison Cook: It works in one sense, in a very finite, tiny, limited understanding of “works”. I hear what you're saying–it's the normalized messages. “It's working for him. It's not working for you”. As opposed to, it's actually not working for either of us in the fullness of how God intended it.
Sheila: Yeah, because sex is supposed to be mutual, intimate, and pleasurable for both. That's the short form that we use all the time. If he's the only one really enjoying it, then honey, you're the one being deprived, yet we use those verses against women so much. “Do not deprive him”.
Look, if he's had an orgasm every week for seven years and you've never had one, you're not depriving him by not having sex very often. You are so deprived, or maybe you are reaching orgasm, but sex makes you feel used. You're still being deprived because sex, the way God intended it, is mutual and intimate and pleasurable for both. It's not merely intercourse.
Alison Cook: Yeah. That's so good. It's so good. You go on to these different pillars of sexuality. Again, it's recasting a message in the mutual way that God intended sex to be. It should prioritize both partners. Sex should be pressure free. Sex is a gift that is freely given. Sex should put the other first.
Both members of the partnership have to put the other first. Sex should be pure. It sounds so simple, but it's actually so revolutionary, especially for women. I really appreciate all the work you did on this and all the research to back it up. Any other findings that you think are really important for women to hear?
Sheila: This is actually a finding from a men's survey. So this one's from the book, The Good Guy's Guide to Great Sex. But I have some good news about pornography, because we often hear bad news about pornography, and for very good reason. Porn is super destructive in marriages.
But what we found is that if a guy's been watching porn and he quits porn and he gets rid of the objectified view of women before he marries, he's pretty much going to have the same sex life as if he'd never watched it.
So porn doesn't ruin your life forever. I think that's important to hear, because one of the problems with purity culture is that we tell girls, hey, if you have sex before you're married, you've ruined everything. I think we're doing the same thing today to both boys and girls who watch pornography.
If you give it up and you get rid of the objectified view of women, you're actually in pretty good shape. Now, if you don't give up porn till after you're married, you don't necessarily get all of the intimacy and great sex that you would have, but it's not that big a difference.
It's not like it's a huge difference. You can still have a really great sex life and a really great marriage. I want people to hear that. Porn is something that an awful lot of people put behind them, but it isn't enough to get rid of the pornography. You also have to address, why is it that you turn to it in the first place?
What are you hiding from when you use it? If we're using porn as a self-soothing technique, which quite often people are, to avoid boredom, worry, insecurity, shame, whatever, then what are you gonna do in its place? How are we going to address those things instead? Because I think what often happens is people try to white knuckle it.
They say, okay, I'm going to quit. That doesn't work, because you have to look at the underlying things. But when people put the work in and when they do quit porn and quit the objectification of women and get rid of that obligation message, they really can flourish. It doesn't mean that it's over now, big caveat there.
If a guy says he's quitting, but he won't let you see his phone and he's not going to go to a counselor, he hasn't really quit. I'm not trying to say that you should let all the husbands off the hook. I'm saying if he does the work, there is great hope.
Alison Cook: Yeah, the way you're describing it reminds me of any sort of addiction model. I work in the internal family systems model. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, where there are three parts of us. One part is that firefighter, that self-soother, that escape artist, that you have to replace with healthy comfort.
Anything that you give up, if you use willpower, you're not healing the vulnerability underneath, which is what leads to intimacy. But I love that note of hope, that it's so possible. The impetus to reach for porn isn't because the wife isn't doing her job. It's something broken or hurting that needs healing inside of you. It can be healed, and also it’s important that ownership is taken.
Sheila: Yes, and if there are pastors listening to this, please stop blaming women for men's porn use. It's unbelievable how often people say they wouldn't turn to it if the wife was doing more. The vast majority of porn use pre-dates the marriage. They came into marriage already watching porn or using porn.
So this isn't on her. This is a habit that he formed. This was a form of yes, self-soothing that he started. It's not on her. Okay. Big soapbox here. Sex and porn are not substitutes for one another.
That's the insinuation. “He wouldn't watch porn if he had sex with you”, but porn is using it for your own gratification. Sex is a deep knowing. Those are two opposite things. They're not substitutes. They're opposites.
Alison Cook: That's so good. Sheila. The other thing I really like that I've heard you say gets at how we've located, whether consciously or subconsciously, whether it's been intentional, whether it's been a complete horrible oversight, we've located the problem in women's bodies.
The other message that women have gotten is, you're responsible for men's lust. In some cultures, men are taught, don't look at the women or don't be alone with the women. I love how you said this. You said the solution to men's lust is not to stop seeing women. It's to learn to truly see women.
Jesus, you say, saw women. I love that. I want the women listening to hear that. You're not the problem. Jesus sees you and knows you. That is so powerful. I love that.
Sheila: Because this whole advice to men, to bounce your eyes, don't look at women, that is seeing women in the same way that pornography does. So you know, they're told, hey, the way to beat lust and porn is to not look at women. But in both cases, you are seeing women primarily as a sex object.
You're seeing her as a threat to you, a threat to your purity. That's not how Jesus sees us. Jesus didn't refuse to look at women. Jesus chose to truly see us.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that's right. In our fullness, in our wholeness.
Sheila: Yes. The solution to lust is to learn to actually see women and not objectify, but learn to respect women. That's what we need to be teaching our boys.
Alison Cook: That's right. Which ironically then leads to that intimacy, that curiosity about who the whole person is, that then will lead down the road with the right woman, with your wife, the better sex if you're seeing her as a whole person.
I love that. I have one last question that I like to ask all my guests. Sheila, what would you say to the younger version of you, maybe however old she was, based on what you know now about this sexual journey?
Sheila: Speak up sooner. I spent a lot of years and like I said, sexual pain was a big part of my story for the first few years of marriage. I pushed through because I didn't want to deprive him. I wanted to be a good wife. I was afraid. I was afraid of all kinds of things. But speak up because you matter, I would say.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. Thank you for your work to uncover a lot of these lies that have hurt so many women. Where can people find you and your work and what do you have coming up next?
Sheila: We're at baremarriage.com. I have the Bare Marriage podcast every Thursday. I write on my blog almost every day and all my social media links are there. Instagram and Facebook are super fun. You can also find our orgasm course, our libido course there and my books.
Then coming out this March is our book, The Marriage You Want, which my husband and I wrote together based on our matched pair survey that we did last winter. It's going to turn the Christian marriage industry on its head because it's not saying any of the typical Christian marriage stuff.
Here's the stuff that actually matters. I'm really excited about it. It's going to be such a healthy and biblical book.
Alison Cook: I love it. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for giving us your time today. I appreciate you.
Sheila: Thank you. I appreciate being here too.
In this week’s episode, Dr. Alison explores the pervasive issue of narcissism—a term that's become increasingly relevant in today's culture. From toxic relationships to leadership failures, the influence of narcissism is widespread, affecting many without us even realizing it. Dr. Alison explains what it is and offers strategies to protect ourselves from its insidious effects.
You'll discover:
* The true meaning of narcissism beyond the buzzword.
* How to recognize love bombing
* The dangers of gaslighting and manipulation
* The tactics of triangulation
* Practical steps to guard your emotional health and develop resilience.
Resources:
- Episode 1: What Is Narcissism Really?
- Proverbs 4:23
- Psalm 1:1-3
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 13: Dr. Alison Answers Your Questions: Criticism, Narcissism, and Boundaries
Thanks to our sponsors:
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. 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 Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. Today, we're diving into a topic that is so important. It's one that affects so many of us in ways we may not even realize, and the topic is narcissism.
We hear this word a lot these days. It gets thrown around in conversations about toxic relationships, leadership failures, and even the broader culture we live in. Lately, I feel like I’ve seen this deepening pattern of what I would call image management, where we live in a culture where there's so much focus on the persona, on perception, on how to craft my image about how other people see me.
Whether it's through social media, whether it's through reality television, whatever it may be, there's such a focus on that image, on that perception, on manipulating how people see me.
There's so much focus on that, as opposed to a focus on this inner work of really becoming a person who is good and kind and true and confident and empowered and full of life.
Where there's this deep well of goodness and character and integrity. That takes work to invest in, that process of becoming a whole and true person. Sometimes, and I'm going to be honest with you, when I'm looking at the culture around us, I get a little dismayed.
I feel like the focus is so much on those surface images, on the persona that we want the world to see us as, that we are neglecting the much more important and deeper work of really attuning to the parts of our own soul.
It's brought to mind this conversation about narcissism. We hear this word a lot, but what does it really mean? More importantly, how do we protect ourselves from it? Not only in our relationships–how do we spot someone with narcissistic tendencies so that we can protect ourselves–but also from the particles of narcissism that exist in the air around us, in the culture around us?
How do we protect our own souls? Here's the truth. When we aren't deeply connected to our own emotions, our own boundaries, and our own Spirit-led inner compass, our own inner wisdom, we become more vulnerable to the manipulation, to the gaslighting, to the emotional entanglements, to even some of the superficial posturing in the world all around us.
And here's the even harder part. Many of us were never taught how to prioritize this inner work in the first place. Many of us have been taught to look to others, to be trusting of others, to prioritize being loving toward others. These are all good qualities, but as important is what the Bible says about not being naive, about being wise, about being discerning, about being shrewd as the serpent and innocent as the dove.
We so often have not been taught how to do this work, to listen to our own inner wisdom, to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, who cues us to dangers in our environment, to untruths in our environment, to agendas in our environment that are not of God.
The Bible itself affirms the importance of this inner compass. Proverbs speaks of guarding the heart because everything flows from it. Jesus models inner integrity where he is never swayed by flattery, nor does he shrink back in fear.
He stands strong and anchored and rooted in the power of his inner conviction. In a world that is increasingly chaotic and confusing, where everyone seems to be trying to manipulate the truth for their own agenda, one of the most powerful things we can do is cultivate this Spirit-led inner discernment within ourselves.
It takes work and it takes attunement, but when we truly know our own selves, we can begin to recognize manipulation faster. We can more quickly get to those healthy boundaries and we can learn to trust our instincts, that God-given inner alert system, and our spiritual discernment. That's why today's episode is so important.
I'm going to first share with you an excerpt from an old episode. It was actually the first episode of The Best of You Podcast, where I talk about what narcissism really is and the signs to watch for. Then, I'm going to come back in with some commentary about how to protect yourself through doing this inner work.
So whether you've experienced a narcissistic relationship in a church community, in a marriage, or in your own family, or whether you're someone who is troubled by what's going on in the world right now, you feel unsettled and you can't figure out where the truth lies, I hope this episode will help provide some clarity for you.
Not only in what to guard against, in the world around us, but also the incredibly powerful gift God has given us of agency and holy discernment within our own selves. Let's dive in to talk a little bit about “What is narcissism really?”
(See “Episode 1: What Is Narcissism Really?” for transcript)
***
Alison Cook: I want to shift now to talk about some of the specific toxic strategies that narcissists might use in their relationships. Because again, this is about arming yourself with knowledge.
The first one is what's called “love bombing”. You may have heard this term. It means that at the start of the relationship, this person might shower you with intense affection, flattery, and gifts.
They shower you with all the right things to woo you. They might say things like, I've never met anyone like you. I love you so much. You're my soulmate.
They might say these things very quickly. It might even throw you off guard a little bit, but it also feels good. But the problem is that this doesn't gain traction over time. The actions don't line up with the words. You're left with this vague feeling of confusion.
They're saying one thing, but we're not getting any deeper. I'm not seeing how their actions back this up. I'm not sensing any depth to this. This feels really on the surface.
Number two, this word gaslighting gets overused, but can really happen. This is where someone with narcissistic tendencies will try to distort reality. They'll try to make you doubt your own perceptions and your own sanity.
They might say things to you like “That never happened. You're overreacting. It's that you're sensitive. You're the problem”. They try to maintain power by making you question your own memories, your own emotions, your own experience. It's a really effective strategy, because we're human and we're imperfect.
We do sometimes overreact, we do sometimes misremember things. This is why that pattern of behaviors over time is so important to remember. When you're in a new relationship, whether it's a new faith community, whether it's a new friendship, whether it's a new love relationship, whether you're trying to figure out whether to trust someone in leadership, be wise and exercise some caution.
If someone's coming on really strong at the start of a relationship, inside your own Spirit, hold that posture of “actions will speak louder than words”. There's a quote that I love that says, your actions speak so loudly, I can't hear your words.
This is the kind of thing we want to watch for. Your actions speak so loudly, I can't even hear your words, because your actions are telling me everything I need to know. You're doing the things I need. You're showing up with integrity. You're honoring me in actions every single day. That means so much more to me than words. Your actions are speaking loudly. Watch for the actions.
Number three, we talked about this a little bit in Episode 147 with Adam Young, triangulation. Someone who has a very fragile sense of self, who cannot stand in their own inner conviction, will try to triangulate. They'll try to bring in other parties. They might say things to you like, well, my ex never acted like this, or my other friends don't question me in this way, or no one else in our faith community is raising these issues.
They might even be more overt. Like, look at all these followers I have. Look at how many friends I have. Who are you to question me? Someone has to triangulate, to bring in other people, to make themselves feel good. I would be curious about their actions.
When someone is healthy and strong in their own inner conviction, they don't need to rely on that kind of triangulated herd mentality. They know they can say, listen, my actions speak for themselves. I'm not perfect, but my actions speak for themselves. Look at my actions. I don't need to convince you of the truth of my character, of the integrity of my character.
Number four, blame shifting. They'll often shift blame onto others. They'll blame others for their own flaws instead of taking responsibility. “You're the selfish one,” when actually they're the one being selfish. “You have anger issues”, when they're the one who is actually raging out of control. They want to avoid accountability and they're constantly shifting the blame onto you.
Lastly, playing the victim. They flip the narrative to make themselves look like the victim, even when they're the one causing harm. It might sound like this. “After everything I've done for you, this is how you treat me? I was trying to help and now you're attacking me?” They're trying to manipulate emotions and avoid responsibility.
A healthy person can say something to the effect of, I hear you. I get that you're hurt. I understand. They might even take it one step further and say, I'd like to share with you my perspective, because that wasn't my intent. Two things can be true in healthy relationships: I didn't mean to hurt you, and I can honor and validate that this was hurtful.
A healthy person can have that healthy two-way back and forth. They're not constantly playing the victim. Now in church environments, this can take on an even more insidious and subtle approach, with spiritual gaslighting, where someone uses Scripture or religious beliefs to invalidate your concerns.
“Well, you need to pray more. God told me this. So you're actually questioning God”. Someone's hiding behind God to defend their poor behaviors. “You're being rebellious. You're being divisive”. I've heard this one a lot, where there's toxicity in leadership.
Again, there are ways to hear people out and hear their concerns and honor someone's humanity. It doesn't mean, if you're a leader listening, I know this can be hard because sometimes people come to you with complaints and you're like, I'm doing the best I can. You don't have to honor every single complaint someone brings to you as a leader.
Sometimes you can say, “I get it. That's hard. I want to hear you out”, even as you're reckoning with the fact that you've got to lead in this way. But there's always humility at the root of that. You're never trying to gaslight someone else.
Another thing I see, and I hate to name this, but it's true so I'm going to, is this kind of false humility, which is a form of image management. This is so prevalent in our culture today, but we do see it in our church cultures too, where someone wants to appear humble. They want to appear self-sacrificing.
They want to appear deeply spiritual, but they only want to appear that way for public admiration. So this might look like serving very loudly and visibly, while secretly behind closed doors, seeking power or trying to get ahead out of selfish ambition instead of really trying to lift up other people.
Sometimes I see this in the form of people really loudly saying, “I do this all for God's glory. It's only for God”. But really, they like the recognition and loyalty. I'm going to be honest. I'd almost rather our Christian leaders say publicly, something to the effect of “there are parts of me at times that really do look at the numbers and that really do want people to follow me and like my work”.
That's part of being human. I also hope that through my own feeble and complicated human efforts, that somehow the goodness of God would be revealed to people in need of God's love and God's goodness. I tend to be drawn more toward folks who take that posture, where there's that self-awareness of our own human frailties and complexity.
Another way that I'll see some of this narcissism play out in church communities is through shaming and public call-outs, where individuals are called out publicly, in meetings, or even in prayer groups. That gets really insidious, to pressure them into compliance, where there's this kind of gossip.
“Some people in this church are being divisive and we've got to call them out. We've got to hold them accountable”, when in fact those people are really and truly trying to stand up for what's right and what's true and what's good. That person in leadership is simply trying to avoid taking accountability.
It's toxic to faith communities. So how do we protect ourselves from narcissism in our relationships, in our cultures, in our communities? Number one, we have to learn to honor our own God-given instincts. This is to the point of that internal work that we are often talking about on the podcast. If something smells funny, pay attention to that.
Notice that part of you. Get curious about it. It takes some time to learn how to attune to your own inner compass because our own compasses can get out of whack at times. I'll be honest with you. At times, I've had to call a friend and say, I'm really triggered by this behavior, but I'm not sure if it's my own past wounds that are heightened to this particular type of leadership, or if this person is really doing something wrong.
That's number two–get a few trusted advisors to bounce things off of, to help you grow in that holy discernment, to give you that objective take. “I see it too. What you're saying doesn't sound good. I think your instincts are right on”. Or to say, “listen, I hear what you're saying and I get it. I've had a different experience with this person. I found that they can actually take accountability”.
Number three, again, another big part of this inner work is to learn how to differentiate from the approval of others. We've been talking about this a lot recently on the podcast, that when we need external approval at all costs, we set ourselves up for being manipulated by others. It's never right to try to manipulate or exploit or hurt someone.
But our part of the equation is to get really good at being okay with sometimes introducing healthy conflict into a conversation or relationship. Sometimes, I call it “testing the relationship”. Introducing a different opinion, introducing a preference, introducing a question mark. I'm not sure I agree with you on this, or I'm not sure I see it the same way you do. Are you open to hearing my perspective?
You're testing that relationship a little bit, and that takes some core strength, because they might not like it. That person may ghost you. They may try to manipulate you. They may turn away from you, but better to find out on the front end of any new relationship.
So here's the bottom line. The more deeply you know yourself in partnership with God's Spirit, the more intimately you are connected to your thoughts, your emotions, your boundaries, your internal compass that God has given you to help you navigate your way through life, the less vulnerable you will be to narcissistic manipulation.
This isn't just good psychology. This is spiritual wisdom. Proverbs 4:23 tells us, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it”. Guarding your heart isn't about building walls or shutting people out. It's about wisdom, discernment, and clarity.
It's about learning to recognize when someone is drawing you into dysfunction versus when someone is inviting you into a true, healthy, deep relationship. When you know yourself, when you tend to your inner world with honesty and care, you become someone who cannot be easily deceived.
You become someone who doesn't fall for flattery, manipulation, or guilt-tripping. You become someone who walks in strength, wisdom, and deep alignment with God's truth. I want to close with Psalm 1:1-3, “Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on God's law day and night”.
Remember, God's law is written on your heart, through the coming of the Holy Spirit. This is what Jeremiah prophesied and Jesus made true in John 14. God's law has been written on your own heart. “That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season. the leaves will not wither. Whatever you do will prosper”.
When we root ourselves in truth and God's wisdom and an honest relationship with our own soul, we become like that strong unshakable tree. We stop being swayed by flattery, fear, or manipulation.
In this episode, Dr. Dan Allender, a pioneer in Christian counseling and the founder of The Allender Center, joins Dr. Alison to explore the raw, real work of marriage, trauma, and intimacy. Known for his groundbreaking book, The Wounded Heart, Allender has spent decades teaching how personal trauma shapes relationships. And on the very day of his 48th wedding anniversary, he openly shares how these dynamics continue to play out in his own marriage.
In this episode, we dive into:
* The surprising (and hilarious) fight he and his wife had the night before their anniversary
* Why marriage is both heaven and hell—and why that’s actually a good thing
* The childhood wounds that have impacted his own marriage
* Why logic doesn’t help when we get emotionally hijacked
* How to fight well and grow through conflict
Check out The Deep Rooted Marriage anywhere books are sold.
Resources:
- The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse by Dan Allender
- Episode 147: Breaking the Cycle—Making Sense of Your Family Story and Healing the Trauma of Being the “Chosen Child” with Therapist Adam Young
- The Allender Center
- The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight by Dr. Dan Allender and Dr. Steve Call
- Romans 8
- Matthew 7:3-5
- Romans 2:4
- Romans 8:38-39
- 1 John 3:1-3
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 137: The Mindful Marriage—Overcome Pain Cycles and Discover the Surprising Secret to Lasting Love with Ron and Nan Deal
Thanks to our sponsors:
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. 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 Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I couldn't be more thrilled to share with you today's conversation with Dan Allender. Dan is a hero of mine, and for so many of us in this field of trying to bring together the best of psychology with faith and Christian spirituality,
Dan is a trailblazer in the field of counseling, especially known for his groundbreaking work in the book, The Wounded Heart. Adam Young refers to the significant role that Dan's book played in his journey in last week's episode, Episode 147.
Dan has also played such a significant role in training Christian therapists. He is a pioneer of a unique and innovative approach to trauma and abuse therapy called the Allender Theory, which has brought healing and transformation to hundreds of thousands of lives by bridging the story of the gospel and the stories of trauma and abuse that mark so many.
Many of you are probably familiar with his work at The Allender Center, which is part of the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. The far reaching impact of Dan's work on so many of us seeking to combine Christian theology with psychology cannot be overstated. It's incredible.
To my delight, I discovered that the day on which Dan and I recorded today's episode was in fact, his 48th wedding anniversary. He's such an authentic, true soul. He opens up right away, telling me about a fight he and his wife of 48 years had on the eve of their anniversary. And that's what I loved about this conversation and about this brand new book that Dan has written.
It's called The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight, and it's filled with really honest stories. He doesn't mince words. He's a truth teller. In our conversation today, he shares some new stories about his own marriage and he talks about how he and his wife have learned, over these 48 years, how to uncover the deep roots of trauma in each of their individual lives and how those deep roots impact their ongoing interactions with each other.
This is such a powerful episode. I particularly love his challenge at the end of the episode about what he would like all couples to know about the reality of what it means to leave one's family of origin and cleave to your new partner, and how important that is to the health of your marriage.
He also shares, at the end of the episode, some personal reflections on his own 48 years of marriage. He had me laughing and he had me crying throughout this episode. I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with one of my heroes in this field, Dan Allender.
***
Alison Cook: Dan, I have tears in my eyes. You've been such an amazing mentor and role model to so many of us in this field.
Dan Allender: Thank you.
Alison Cook: I'm so thrilled to get to have this conversation with you today. I feel so honored.
Dan Allender: Me too. These are the kinds of things where people don't realize how fun this is. Yeah.
Alison Cook: We put on these headsets, but really it's our modern way of getting to connect.
Dan Allender: Yeah. I prefer it to be in a nice coffee shop, but it's hard to bring in a few hundred other people or a thousand or whatever.
Alison Cook: Yeah. This new book, there's so many things we could talk about Dan, but I was saying before we started recording, I love what you're doing. You and your co-author, Steve, bring in this lens of trauma into marriage, and you write about it so beautifully. It's in many ways intuitive.
We know we bring our baggage into marriage, but the way that you're speaking into this current moment, where a lot of us are aware more and more of our baggage, how then does it affect our most significant relationships?
Dan, I would love it if you would start, like you do in the book, with a little bit of your own story and some of your own stuff that you unwittingly realized–oh my goodness, this is now coming into my marriage.
Dan Allender: First and foremost, Alison, what a delight to be with you. The reality is, people often see therapists or people who write books as those who have it all together and therefore want to offer from their vaunted high self the glory that we would wish other people to participate in.
But last night, Becky and I, my wife today of 48 years, our fight was over whether a baked potato was actually fit to eat. Whether it was done. We're in it. We're in it far enough that all of a sudden you realize, oh my God, we are actually having not a knock down drag out, but an unpleasant interaction.
So in some ways, to begin this process, as we've been married 48 years, it's getting worse and it's getting better. That's often the key to a good marriage. There has never been for me with any other human being more of a taste of what I believe eternity and heaven will be like.
But I'd also say with no other human being have I ever had such a taste of hell. Again, to hold that and to be able to say, what we have written is a good book. But it's an honest book about the reality that no matter how well prepared, thoughtful, and educated you may be, your marriage is one of the hardest relationships. And certainly, it's meant to be one of the best relationships you'll ever be in.
Alison Cook: I love the honesty. There's this quote toward the end of the book that I thought was so good. Essentially, it's about war. You say, “It is not likely at your wedding that the officiant said a war had to be fought for these two to be at this altar. Even more unlikely is that they'd continue. Now, in fact, there will commence an even greater war.”
It is a very hopeful book. But that reality testing pushes so much against our culture, especially in the last century in American culture, what we've come to understand to be love. And yet you and your wife share a beautiful love and some beautiful moments that bring you to tears.
Dan Allender: Oh, thank you. Again, there's no relationship, as I've said, that matters more to me. Yet, if you were to see the interaction, it's over a freaking baked potato. You'd go, what in the name of God is wrong with this couple?
The answer is that the reality of brokenness, the reality of sin, the reality of our own stories play out in every arena, but particularly, for some reason, our kitchen is the ground of engagement, to the degree we don't have language to name what's actually happening. We're lost in the fog.
Again, we're clearer about what happens than we may have been five or ten or twenty years ago. That only gives you the access to begin the process of humbling, honoring, blessing, and engaging the other for the ultimate purpose of drawing one another to be more like Jesus.
If that's not the goal, I get it. I get it. I like comfort. I like convenience. Marriage is the great character transformation place.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that word, humble yourself, that word, making conscious choices. So there's a fight, you tell them the story in front of the fridge, so it sounds like it might not be unlike the baked potato fight.
Dan Allender: Yes, I'm telling you, we've had, since COVID, I would say 80 percent of our conflict has happened in the space of our kitchen.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Let's talk about it, Dan, because you talk in the book very candidly, at least in your own life, about where some of that comes from. Here's the thing that's interesting, 48 years in. You can have all the self-knowledge and know, because in the book you talk about as a kid, food scarcity, the way that it triggers you.
You can know all that, your spouse can know all that, but still in that moment, you can get hijacked by that young part of you. It's not that it stops happening, it's what you do with it.
Dan Allender: I love that. It's so important to underscore that. When we, again, divide our brain in terms of left and right hemisphere, and again, it's too general, but there's some truth to the fact that our left hemisphere is much more logical, linear, able to “think”. Our right hemisphere is far more affective, far more visual, far more affected by the reality of trauma.
So what happens when we get hijacked? We got hijacked over whether or not the fork went deep enough into the baked potato to warrant being said to be done. I didn't think it was. She did. The kitchen has been the realm of where my wife has felt both her deepest pleasure and power.
It has been the realm for me of a lot of warfare. To begin with, my mother had borderline personality disorder. She was eccentric. She was incredibly powerful. She could be weak and frail, and then like Cruella de Vil. And you never knew what moment, but food was never her realm.
She didn't care whether or not we had food. A normal meal of mushy canned peas, corn, and ham baked on one side and pretty much raw on the other, that was actually a pretty big good meal. The rest were Swanson TV dinners.
Becky's world was a world in which she had a pretty vicious and cruel mom, but who loved to cook. So the kitchen was the one place where love was shown. So when I walk into the kitchen, at some level, the haunting presence is, this is a war zone. For Becky, it's a world of love and lush and delight, smell, good flavor.
For me to in any way question, or have any significant influence in the kitchen, oh my gosh. For some people, it's a bedroom. Again, not to say that we have not had our own sexual struggles with both of us having histories of past abuse, but the kitchen! A lot of struggle.
Alison Cook: Yeah. When you're describing that, I think about it through an IFS lens. You talk a lot about the brain in the book. There are so many different ways to look at this, but it's almost like parts of you when you walk in that kitchen, no matter how much work you've done, there's some stored memory.
It's in you, and so to this day, sometimes that comes up. I guess there are a couple of questions in that. One is, we can try to know, every time I go in the kitchen, okay, I've got to be on my best behavior. The willpower thing. But sometimes that can make it worse.
Dan Allender: Oh, it inevitably always makes it worse, because the pressure you put on yourself to escape what you perceive to be judgment only creates much more sensitivity to it.
Alison Cook: So if we can't do that, then we're going to have to acknowledge, from time to time, this is going to happen. We're going to erupt.
Dan Allender: Yes.
Alison Cook: How do you do that? Do you know that together?
Dan Allender: Again, without going through the entire dialogue, there was a point we started laughing. Because it was ridiculous that we're having what seems to be a significant war on the eve of our 48th anniversary over a baked potato. But, in the moment, and it's such an important category to understand about trauma, there are triggers.
Even if these events are 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, our brain is wired for safety. When we have a sense of threat, even if it's not conscious, there is going to be a biological process of stress and chemical production. Cortisol is the one that most people know about, but adrenaline, noradrenaline, catecholamines, they're all working at that moment.
I'm being flooded with stress biochemicals over something that doesn't matter. Put ketchup on the baked potato, it'll be fine. To be able to have language, to be able then to go, oh, we're both getting triggered here. Oh, this is not the direction we thought dinner would go. But then, instead of being conciliatory, like “Oh, I'm sorry, oh, I'm sorry. Forgive me. Yes, let's have dinner.”
That's good. I'm not by any means saying that's not helpful, but to be able to go, wow, what came online for you and for me? A good portion of our discussion was going back to stories we've told one another multiple times and new stories about the reality of what gets triggered in that moment.
The more you understand the context, the roots of what's flooding you, the better you can be, on behalf of the other, bringing both compassion and kindness, but also curiosity. Gosh, were there other things going on in the day that brought us to this point? For us, we couldn't come up with anything other than I was standing in the realm of where my wife feels like she gets to lavish me with goodness.
I was questioning her. But again, whether the baked potato was truly done or not, you can imagine whether it's about sex, whether it's about finances, whether it's about where you vacation, almost every area is going to have the realm of difference. And difference, for most of us, triggers a sense of threat rather than warm, engaged curiosity.
We feel challenged or we feel threatened, and that now brings us into, how do you manage in the broadest sense of the word, any sense of threat? I'm much more of a stress-oriented “fight”. My wife is far more stress-oriented “flight”. So the fight-flight response of trauma, in the initial first five years, worked really well for us.
Until she began to mature and began to name my bluster and verbosity and intensity as contrary to the man I claim I want to be. So as we began to grow together, let's say growth itself always has at its core, a transformation that feels more dangerous than whatever the status quo was.
Alison Cook: Wow. It's deep. Hence the title of the book, The Deep Rooted Marriage. Okay, so Dan, the good news for the listener is, it's worth it. The reality news is, we're going to be doing this. I often find it hard to figure out referrals for couples in therapy, because there are a lot of false promises. There's a lot of, if you do this, this will happen, and scripts, tips, those kinds of things that can be helpful.
But in those moments that you described, that happened last night, it almost always involves these childhood parts of us. It does. There's this adaptation of IFS called “intimacy from the inside out”. Are you familiar with it? It's one I actually think is really powerful, because you don't solve anything.
What you do is you find compassion for your spouse. To your point, what was happening for you? You are recognizing that young part of me. I want that young part of me to be with me. But because I'm complex and because sometimes that young part of me shows up in the kitchen, it means that sometimes this thing happens.
You talk it through so beautifully in the book, how both you and Becky and your coauthor and his wife give your different viewpoints of the argument. For example, let's say at the fridge, where you walk us through what was happening to that young boy inside of you. Maybe then the Lord works on her pride. Maybe I need to get curious.
There's something here that is the magic of intimacy, of love, of marriage that doesn't necessarily take away those rough patches.
Dan Allender: If there's a portion of the Bible that I would say I go to often, it'd be Romans 8. It begins with, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. What if there was no condemnation in the context of our marriage? Now that's not the case, but what if?
What if there was a way of engaging one another with hurt, with difference, with struggle, but without contempt, without condemnation? We're not a contempt-free marriage, but it's one of our intentions. Whatever you make as an intention, here's the craziness. It exposes where you're not becoming what you intend, but it also creates the pathway for it to become more and more a portion of your life.
I want to have a contempt-free marriage. We fight, we argue, we see things differently on almost every spectrum. Nonetheless, it's actually fun. It's actually entertaining. There are moments that her differences knock me off my rocker to a point where it's like, I don't know how you married me.
It's one of the best con jobs I ever pulled off in my whole life to get this beautiful, remarkable woman to marry me. Yet, back to that image, there have been harsh moments where we feel the name Satan, meaning the accuser, the devil, from the Greek word diabolos, meaning the one who divides.
We’ve felt accusation. We've felt division, and it always brings to the surface, as you put it so well, the younger parts of us that either knew developmental trauma, which everybody does, but also very unique trauma. She had a significantly emotionally abusive mother. She has her own history of past abuse, which I'm allowed to say because it has been part of her public story.
Same with my mom. So having a mom who was as consuming as my mom was–I described even as a seventh grader feeling like I was living in the web of a black widow spider–I had to make sure I didn't move or if I did move, I created enough trauma in the web that the spider would move away.
So when you've got a woman, my wife, who lived by hiding literally in closets to avoid the rage of her mother, and me, lighting things on fire, stealing cars, selling drugs, creating havoc in my world, in part to keep my mother at bay, you've got a drama.
I don't hide in closets. She does. She doesn't burn things down. I do. Now, if you take that into consideration, these are the younger parts of us that found very different ways to not survive, but to find something that gave us even that modicum of life. Now it becomes clearer in the context of a normal fight why I'm loud and why she's stonewalling.
Again, with that inner play, you can stop and go, you need to learn how to communicate better. Yes, indeed. But if we don't deal with the heart, then it becomes the moral gospel rather than the gospel of there is no condemnation.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I have, very legalistically, as a trained therapist, said the correct words to my husband to let him know that I know what we should be saying in this moment to not be in conflict. It doesn't go over very well.
Dan Allender: No, I'm hoping he's at least at some point said to you, you're not my therapist and I don't pay you.
Alison Cook: It's the most humbling. Oh, he would actually love it if I'd get mad instead, because it's all about the heart, but to your point, if my heart is very pious in those moments, that's leading to contempt.
Dan Allender: Yes, exactly. Oh, so well said.
Alison Cook: What do you think is the key attribute in each individual that has to be cultivated to transform what can be a war into these moments of glory?
Dan Allender: Gosh, I often go back to the Luke 7 passage about dealing with the log in your own eye, and sadly we think of the word log as sin, but no, it's anything that keeps you from being able to see well. So to have compassion for a young four and five year old who's having to hide in a closet, it breaks my heart.
Yet, so often, including the baked potato, it was so interactive in a way in which I'm literally sending her back into the closet. For me to realize I'm replicating some of the same harm she endured as a young child breaks my heart. So the capacity to look at the log in your own eye and to say, with kindness, to those young parts, this is how you survived.
You learned to be verbose. You learned to talk loud. You learned to talk quickly in order to keep a woman who might have eaten you at bay. So with a phrase like Romans 2:4, it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance. The question is, can we join God in kindness for the young parts of our own hearts, let alone our partner’s?
What you find is kindness is not niceness. It's not even pleasant-ness. It's the capacity to see the other with eyes that are full of truth and yet are wrapped up in compassion. Therefore, it offers true curiosity, not interrogation, but true curiosity, like God in the garden when he says, where are you, Adam?
The question that I sometimes ask couples is, how do you hear that phrase? Because how you hear it will determine so much of your response. Are you being accused? Or are you being invited?
The idea that we could be in our own pain and suffering, and yet invite our spouse into an engagement where there's honor and ultimately the goal of delight, it changes the tonality, let alone the content of our interactions.
Alison Cook: You open the book with a scene on a ski slope, and you're pretty angry, primarily at your younger son. I won't take everybody through the whole story, but you're worked up. This is early in your marriage. What you're saying reminds me of that moment that you described, where your wife calls out the better angels of your nature, through strength.
Dan Allender: Yes, I was told by my wife to ski down about 200 yards. “Get out. You're trying to get your son down by force and power. It's not working. Go on down”. I came back up when it became clear that her empathetic and gracious, kind way was leaving him on the ground. So I had to come back 200, 300 yards, and I was boiling angry yet cold as ice inside.
As I put my skis on and made my move toward the two of them, she skied in front of him and it was clear she's protecting our insecure son. I mouthed to her the word, move. She shook her head very kindly, and said no. No force, no. When I got to her, and I'm like, move, she put her hand on my heart, and she said the words, I know the men who have humiliated you.
And I am not expecting my life story to be brought in one sentence to bear. Literally, that sense of being haunted, like my father, a coach, several pastors…all of a sudden, at the top of the slope, it's busy and there are people there, she said, “I know that's not what you want to bring to your son”.
Alison Cook: Wow.
Dan Allender: Again, I would wish that each and every time there had been some truth like that, that my heart had softened. But at that moment, tears came. All I experienced was her hand even more firmly on my heart, and she said, “you're a good man” and then skied away, leaving my son and I on the top of that slope to negotiate how we would get down.
That is a family story. My son tells that story. My daughters who had left to go down and get lunch early, though they weren't part of it, they were part of it, because they have known something of my own failure as a father. So all that to say, without being the face of God on behalf of one another, who do we become?
That's what a marriage, from my standpoint, is. The gift of you getting to be the face of God on behalf of your spouse. My wife's face was disruptive, was inviting, but also called me to be who I claim I wish to be.
Alison Cook: I love that story. I love that moment. My guess is, there are moments when you've had to do that for her in different ways. So there are a couple of things going on that soften you. Did I hear you correctly that your 48th anniversary is today?
Dan Allender: Yeah. Today.
Alison Cook: Amazing. Happy 48th anniversary! That's amazing. So over 48 years, moments like that start to crack open the hardness around the heart. It doesn't mean that magically you became the world's best husband or parent. It's a long journey, but it cracks you open, and then you have the capacity, something shifts inside of you.
There are those moments where our spouse holds up that mirror of God. I get that part of it. You lay that out so beautifully in the book, but again, back to these moments where we're both in our worst self. I'm thinking this through because marriage is such a dance, and there are so many different facets of it.
There are those moments that are so powerful, and I have those with my husband where it's like, oh my gosh, he cracked something open inside of me. I still have to work it out, but something shifted,
Dan Allender: Absolutely.
Alison Cook: And I know I've done that for him. Then we have those baked potato moments. Still, I'm intrigued by this. How do you make sense of that? You go back to that moment. You're like, something shifted in me. I guess I'm trying to get at the dance of the marriage, the being seen, the being witnessed changes you, changes her.
You each grow individually, but then you're also constantly coming back to each other with all those new things in motion. It's not static.
Dan Allender: No, but again, certain themes play out pretty predictably. I am the messy one. Oh my gosh, Becky is so orderly. But, again, she had to be, to escape the wrath of a mother who would have found fault if a piece of paper were on her desk and not being utilized at that moment.
Whereas chaos was part of my camouflage to escape the pursuit of my mother. So again, I'm not here to blame my mother or my father or her mother or father. I understand that all of us, generation by generation, all the way back to Adam and Eve, we all have trauma.
We all have often managed that trauma by a kind of survival structure that's deeply broken, and sometimes still showing a lot of beauty. Can we stop long enough to go, this is heartbreaking, and I understand it. Can it be used for good? Can it be used for good?
I've created, and I say with some grief, but also some pleasure, I've created a lot of complexity for the believing community asking people to deal with sexual abuse back in the mid-80s. I'm proud of that.
Alison Cook: Good for you.
Dan Allender: I'm proud of being able to have listened to my clients and written. There are a lot of people who hate my guts. I'm not thrilled with that, but if part of the adversarial interaction with my own mother gave me some basic structure for being able to have some thickness of skin to bear that, there's some beauty to it as well.
Unfortunately, the one person in the world who matters most to me, oftentimes gets the prickly, angry part. Yet because we both have language and experience, and we have shared lots of stories, not facts, but stories of the harm that we each have endured, that begins to create a kind of connection on the basis of compassion.
It allows you to intervene on behalf of one another more quickly. We had a traffic situation and she said, people are carrying guns. I'm not ready for you to be shot. Not today. Her humor, her playfulness, her exposure of my anger, I'm like, yeah, you're right.
People are carrying guns more often. It's an angrier world, and I don't think I want to get shot today. It's something that could have been felt on my part as something not very respectful. She's mocking me. But no, she is playfully, prophetically, exposing and inviting. We were able to laugh about that interaction and the baked potato.
Eventually, when you are able to, in one sense, escape the worst parts, there's much more gratitude. But what you were naming earlier is, there are times where both of us are in it. Those are the moments where one has to come back and say, I don't really understand all that occurred, but I know I harmed you. I know I feel harmed by you.
How do we hold together, from the vows we made and from the dreams we have, of how we want our lives to end? You need to know the alpha and you need to know the omega in order to deal with the middle. A lot of our messes are middle messes.
Alison Cook: Which is such a theme in the book. When we have one of those situations where we both go somewhere we don't understand, we call it a Seinfeld. It's an episode about nothing. We both go, oh my gosh, that was a Seinfeld. We don't even know what that was about.
We then can laugh about it, but there's a category for it. There's a naming. But Dan, while you were talking, I got tears listening to it, and here's where I hear the hope in this. Because marriage is hard and you're so honest about that. Here's where I hear the hope. I'm gonna take you off the spot for a second.
You're talking about anger and you're so honest about that. The part of me that's a people pleaser, my husband gets the good of that part when he sees me be kind to our kids. He was a widower when we met, so they’re our kids now, but they were his kids. And my empathy, he fell in love with that part of me.
Also, into marriage, boy, does he get the worst of the codependency of the people pleasing. He sees the worst of it–it's heaven and hell. As an individual, I can be like, why can't I get rid of this part? I know I'm not supposed to think that way, but I still do sometimes.
What you're saying is, this is love. Love is over time. Yes, I do get some of the worst of those parts, but I also get the best, and I'm willing to stick it out to see more and more of the best, and I'm willing to stick it out to see more and more of when you're able to go, yeah, that was the worst.
That's the hope, is that being seen in all of the glory of those parts also demands that we're going to be seen in the worst of it. That's powerful.
Dan Allender: Oh, to me, it's the end of Romans 8, where there's nothing that can divide us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, neither death nor life, nor angels, nor powers, nor principalities, etc. So when you begin to go, oh, we have hurt one another so deeply at times.
In those moments, I won't go into all the details, but my wife had three miscarriages in our early years, and whenever one of our younger friends is in the middle of a miscarriage, the two of us look at one another with a look like, oh, that is still broken, barren ground.
My inattentiveness to what she was going through in that loss, I go, who were you? How could you? Yet, the reality of how our culture has changed and come to own the affect of miscarriage today, I'm not excusing myself, I'm simply saying that we are meant to grow through the community that grows in an understanding of heartache and loss and yet goodness.
So when we hold something of our past together, there's forgiveness. But there's still joint suffering we can enter, without accusation. It's without demand, without fear. Nothing can separate us. That's the ultimate truth and our ultimate desire in a marriage. Now, will we get close?
Yeah, closer, but as 1 John 3 says, when we see him, then we will be as he is until that day. The radical notion of sanctification is, the more we grow, the more we see how far we have to grow. So it's not American democracy nor capitalism, where the more you get, the more you have. It’s, the more you see, the more you're aware of the desire for redemption to be the deepest reality of how I engage, not just my wife, but my children, my grandchildren, the grand-dogs.
I have three grand dogs. When I had children, I knew there might be a day with grandchildren. Nobody told me about grand-dogs, and tending to them for a week while they vacation. So all that to say, none of us really ever fully understood what we were getting into. Yet the more we're in it, the more it is that I can't believe we get to love one another as we journey.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful, because I never thought about that sanctification process. The closer we get to God, the more we see our need for him, which is hard, but it would apply to marriage as well. The beauty part is, you're also seeing your spouse, your significant other, see that you're with them in it.
You're not bypassing it. You're not saying, oh no, it's fine. You're saying, yeah, there were some really rough patches. Also, here we are. Before we wind up, because I want to honor your time, this part of the book hit me and I want to get your thoughts on it. We've touched on this, but I want to circle back to it. I thought this was so powerful.
You write, as much as I loved Becky, I was more loyal to the role and demands of my family. As much as Becky loved me, she was more loyal to hers. You were more loyal to the demands of your mother. As much as Becky loved me, she was more loyal to being the bright sunlight for her father, and we didn't know it.
You're part of this becoming one. It's cliche, but there's so much depth to how you write about it in the book, of leaving those family of origin patterns that are so strong. 48 years in, they're still there. I really resonated with that.
You talked about how early on, the thing that attracts you about this person, because you get to leave these things of your family of origin behind, might then become the thing that you then dislike, because you actually have to change.
Dan Allender: Yes. Yes. I love how you put it. You put it so brilliantly and clearly. What do you want me to do other than to go, “Amen, sister”! I remember I had the privilege of officiating all three of my childrens’ weddings, and I remember sitting with one of them, and she said, look, dad, you've done this a lot.
You've had the privilege of marrying other people. What do you recommend for my future husband and I? I said, at some point during the ceremony, you should turn to us. I'll go from the front, sit with mom, and you and Driscoll will look at your parents and say, thank you for all that you've given us.
But from this moment on, as I turn my back on you, my loyalty no longer is to you but to my spouse. My daughter looked at me and she goes, it'd be the weirdest wedding in the world–I'm not gonna do that. And I'm like, oh yeah, I guess it would be, because nobody says that.
Nobody comes even close to saying what the scriptures say: leave your mother and father. Now, that's not geographic and it's not financial, because what we know about the ancient Near East, it was an agrarian culture. You didn't leave and go to the city. Your finances were bound into the larger family. So it is a deeply, shall we say, interior psychological process.
Right from the beginning, when you don't leave, the next portion of becoming one flesh, becoming one soul, ain't gonna work out. So much of what we're trying to do in The Deep-Rooted Marriage is to invite people to look at structures of how they interact with the history of what the roots are that allow you to make this transformation.
As you put it, and you put it so well, the passage and process is endless, but not hopeless. At times I find myself going, really? You didn't get this? I've written three books on marriage. Two with my best friend, Tremper Longman, and then with my dear friend, Steve Call.
Like, do you not get it? It's part of the kindness of God that his response is, of course you don't, but you do. So let's move on with what you do, but allow your heart to be open to what you don't see and have not named yet. Trauma experts will say, we need to engage traumatic stories up to 30 times for the neuroplasticity of our brain to change.
So if one were to measure my cellular process, there have been immense changes in the last 48 years. That's why, as an older man married to an older woman, every day we walk for about a 45 minute period, and it's our time to talk about the day, to pray, to laugh, to anticipate what the day holds.
The simple phrase of count your days. Becky and I don't know how much longer we will be on this earth. Count your days, that you might grow in wisdom. If what you want is a comfortable marriage, this is not a good book for you. But if what you want is something of the wild life of God, then I can't invite you any more to what your spouse reveals about you and what your spouse reveals about your heart with God.
What a process. Nobody could have told me when I made the vows I made 48 years ago today, at about 4:30 Pacific Standard Time, 7:30 Eastern Standard Time, what I was getting myself into, but I would not trade it for a living second, not for billions of dollars.
Now ask me if I'd be willing to have my children again, and it would take a second. Yes, the answer is yes, but give me a second. Much of my career, nah, I wouldn't do it again. But my wife, yeah, without a question.
Alison Cook: I want to do another podcast episode on that. That's interesting. I love it. It's so encouraging because it's so honest. It's so honest. That's your gift, Dan, that's why so many of us revere you. You talked about things before anybody else was talking about them. You said the hard things.
That's why it's so powerful. Now, when you're like, that's great, people love me for that. Guess what? Here's the other side of it. Let my wife talk to you about that. But it's hopeful to me here in my age where I've been writing books about codependency and boundaries, and I'm going through a whole ‘nother round of being horrible at it all.
And it's actually oddly hopeful to go, I’ll probably have another iteration of it as a grandparent. I'll have another iteration of it–
Dan Allender: –with grand dogs.
Alison Cook: Life is never boring. It’s a joy having someone like you and Becky to share the stories. There are so many good stories in the book. Sometimes I laughed out loud. I want to ask you questions I ask all my guests, Dan. The first one is, what would you say to young, newly married Dan now? What would you say to him now from who you are now?
Dan Allender: Hey, you got one of the most amazing human beings to marry you. And, yes, you pulled this off. You lied to her directly. She said at one point, I can't wait someday to walk the Appalachian Trail. I didn't know what the Appalachian Trail was, but I said, oh my gosh, me too. If she said, I want to go to the moon, it'd be like, that's absolutely my dream.
So yeah, courtship is a hopefully beneficial line without absolute cruelty. But you're on a journey that you cannot comprehend until you enter it. Even after you've been on it for 48 years, you can't imagine what's going to be required of you to die together. So you better know this is about life and death.
It isn't about owning a home or having children or having a nice vacation. This will shape you to be who you are and what you become for eternity. You are not up for it. You do not have the capacity. So you will have to depend upon me. I wish a good, wise, kind man or woman would have said that to me.
Alison Cook: Wow. What's bringing out the best of you right now on this day?
Dan Allender: Here's the intersection. We've had such a good day so far. Early in the morning, we took our walk and then we opened up our wedding photos. It's not the first time, but we laughed about where we were, what we saw. About two hours later, we got the news that a dear friend's wife has intractable and incurable cancer.
When we got the news, we sat on a couch and wept together. So a day where you laugh and you weep is a good anniversary.
Alison Cook: Oh, I love that. That's beautiful. Yeah. You do it together. That's beautiful. Dan, thank you so much. Where can people find the book?
Dan Allender: I'm not that fond of Amazon or its owner, but let's say Amazon's probably the quickest place to be able to get the book. But Alison, thank you. Thank you for the time with you. Your wisdom is very deep and sweet. So to join you in that, it's a great honor.
Alison Cook: It's been a pleasure. I hope we get to do it again and bless you on your anniversary. Blessings to Becky. Thanks, Dan.
In this powerful episode, Dr. Alison welcomes Adam Young, a psychotherapist and author of the new book, “Make Sense of Your Story”, to dive into the complexities of family dynamics, and how the stories we tell about our families shape our adult lives. Adam shares his personal experiences and professional insights on how being triangulated within his family as a child impacted his psychological development and emotional health.
Here's what you'll learn:
* Why it’s crucial to identify family myths
* The unique trauma of being the chosen child
* Idealizing families—why we do it & how it hurts us
* The danger of self-betrayal in relationships
* The #1 way to heal childhood attachment wounds
* Traits of securely attached relationships
Resources:
- Make Sense of Your Story: Why Engaging Your Past with Kindness Changes Everything by Adam Young
- The Place We Find Ourselves podcast
- The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse by Dan Allender
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller
- adamyoungcounseling.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 79: Surviving Trauma & A Path to Forgiveness—Finding God In the Hardest Parts of Your Story With Esau McCaulley
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
- Contact Restoring the Soul today at www.restoringthesoul.com and learn how their Intensive Counseling Process can jump start your journey to the place you want to be. As a special gift for The Best of You podcast listeners, visit www.restoringthesoul.com/bestofyou to download their pdf called "5 Ways Unresolved Trauma May Be Derailing Your Relationship."
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. 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 Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so thrilled you are here today for this incredibly powerful episode with someone many of you are probably already familiar with. My conversation today is with Adam Young.
Adam is a gifted psychotherapist and now a brand new author. His new book is hitting the shelves this week. It's called Make Sense of Your Story: Why Engaging Your Past with Kindness Changes Everything. For those of you who may not know him yet, Adam has profoundly impacted the field of trauma and recovery with his insightful approaches to therapy.
His podcast, The Place We Find Ourselves, has been a huge resource for so many people in understanding the narratives of their lives and the psychological underpinnings behind them. Adam's work, especially this new book which we talk about today, invites all of us to do the work of digging into the narratives that shape us.
What's so compelling about Adam's approach is his transparency in sharing his own journey, exploring his early family dynamics and how these dynamics have influenced his adult life. He shares so honestly about some of this on the podcast today, and his invitation to explore our stories is never about casting blame, but instead about naming.
It's something we talk about a lot on the podcast. We have to name things in order to brave a path to healing and to freedom and to healthier, more deeply connected lives. Adam discusses the crucial role of examining our formative relationships and their lasting impact.
He shares personal stories about his own discoveries and some of the painful realizations he had about his own family of origin and how these revelations have reshaped his understanding of himself.
Honestly, it's so rare to find someone who's willing to open up so personally about his own story in a way that both educates and heals. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Adam young.
***
Alison Cook: Adam, I am so thrilled to have you here today. We have known of each other and been aware of each other and followed each other for a long time, but finally here we are. I'm so thrilled to have you on the podcast today.
Adam: Thank you. Thanks for your generosity and for inviting me. I'm happy to be here.
Alison Cook: I want to dive into this beautiful new book. Is this your first book?
Adam: First book.
Alison Cook: It's so powerful. It got me thinking about my own story. The title of it is: Make Sense of Your Story. One of the things I love about what you do in this book, like all good teachers, is you take us into your own exploration.
I'd love to start there if you're okay with it. One of the invitations in the book, there are many, but one of them is the importance of exploring our early family dynamics. I want to get into that, because it's not to blame, it's not to shame, it's to understand ourselves.
You talk about a specific dynamic in your own family of origin that over time, as you untangled the knots of it, revealed some things about yourself. Can you take us back a little bit and share with our listeners about what you uncovered about your own family dynamics and that part of your story?
Adam: Sure. Sure. When I was 35 years old, I would have said that I didn't have a story. I would have said I had a normal upbringing, and nothing really traumatic happened to me. I just don't have much to report. That would have been my answer, if you had asked me to tell you about my story.
But beginning in my mid-thirties, I began to explore the nature of my relationship with my mother and my father during my growing up years. The way I had made sense of my relationship with my parents as a 35 year old was, God gave me my sweet, tender mother to compensate for an often violent and emotionally distant father.
In my mind, the connectedness and the sweetness that I felt in my relationship with my mom was buoyed up in my heart, because it was often bludgeoned by the violence of my father. The dilemma with that is that it's not untrue. It's just not the full truth. What I came to explore and to understand was that I was what's called “triangulated” by my mother, which is just a fancy word for saying that my mother, from a very young age, trained me.
She groomed me and used me like an adult, like a surrogate spouse, because my father, her husband, was checked out emotionally from the marriage. When I came out of the womb, I became a very sensitive, tender boy, full of wonder, and extremely attuned to the insides of my mother. In time, that became sexualized and eroticized by my mother.
What I came to realize, and it took years to explore this, but what I eventually came to name, was that my mother used me as a surrogate spouse because her husband, my father was absent.
Alison Cook: There's so much in this. The first part is, there was a story until you were 35. So we have to understand that we create stories out of our families of origin, and there was truth in it, small t truth. There were truth pieces in it. Your dad was distant, you've experienced your mother as loving and close, but it wasn't the full story.
And it's important, because in the initial version of the story, there's a hero and a villain, and as you begin to untangle the knots of that, as that first story crumbled, I would imagine, Adam, that had to be a little bit anxiety-producing to let go of that first story.
Adam: Yeah. It wasn't merely anxiety producing. It was deeply disorienting. It was as if the foundation of my life had been pulled out from under me. I was falling through the earth. It's because my compass was whacked. My compass, as a 35 year old, was, Mom is true north.
She's the sweet, tender, in my dad's words, lamb of God. That was the word he used to describe her. She could do no wrong. My dad was violent, traumatized from the Vietnam War, and so my dad was true south. What I came to realize was, oh no, Adam, your compass is not oriented to the fullness of the truth of your story.
There is a wickedness and a darkness in your mother that is masquerading as an angel of light, to use a Pauline phrase. It was hard to name that, and deeply disorienting.
Alison Cook: My guess is there was an impetus at 35 for you needing to name that. Are you comfortable sharing that?
Adam: Sure. I had so many symptoms. Problems with anger, problems with anxiety–deep, debilitating anxiety, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning anxiety. I would have immense experiences of fear, trepidation, and overwhelming shame, particularly in my close relationships, like marriage and parenting, and I didn't know how to understand these symptoms.
More importantly, I couldn't find relief from them. I didn't know what was going on, why I was feeling these things in my body. What began the process of healing for me was somebody gave me a book called The Wounded Heart by Dan Allender, and that was my introduction to the idea that I had a story from my growing up years that was deeply related to the symptoms I was experiencing in my adult life.
Alison Cook: Were you a therapist at the time?
Adam: No. Oh no.
Alison Cook: Okay. Got it. So this was an opening to this whole idea that you'd been shaped by these forces and the story that you'd been told. As you went through this disorientation, how did you cope? Did you seek out therapy?
Adam: Yes. I sought out therapy. I went to what's called Recovery Week, which is a week-long program for men or women that have been sexually abused with Dan Allender out in Seattle. I had no category for being sexually abused. I would not have said that I was sexually abused. Why did I go to a recovery week for sexually abused men?
I can't tell you, except I wanted to be with the man who wrote the book that described the landscape of my heart better than anything I had read. So I read The Wounded Heart, and I'm like, okay, the author of this book understands something about what it's like for me on the inside.
I flew out to be with him, and he was the first person to name that my relationship with my mother was not what I thought it was.
Alison Cook: Wow. You talk in the book about how we have these fragments of memories, these scraps of memories, and I find this to be so powerful. I do a lot of IFS work, and in the work that I do, there's often this memory that in general is like, why is that important to me? Why do I care about that?
I tell a story in Boundaries For Your Soul about not making a basketball team. I was like, why is this an important memory? I minimized that for years. I'm like, this is ridiculous. Until suddenly, you go to the root of the memory and you're like, it's there for a reason. It's lit up in my mind for a reason.
Adam: Yes.
Alison Cook: In your story, there were these snapshots of times with your mom, where there was impropriety. The memories were there, but you'd minimize them or rationalize them or bypass them. Tell us a little bit about one or two of those where you began to go, oh, there's a reason for these.
Adam: Every day, when I would come home from school, walk in the door, the first thought I had was, do I need to tend to my mother? Does my mother need a hug? Does my mother need conversation? Does my mother need engagement? In other words, I was always taking the temperature of my mom's insides.
Then I was, automatically, based on what we can say is implicit memory, responding to my mother's needs. It was automatic and unconscious. I didn't think it was a story at all. It's just the water that I swam in as a boy. It was just normal for me.
It was not until other people spoke into that story with their perspective that I began to tilt my head and go, you mean you didn't do that with your mom? They would be like, no. I didn't ever do that. So then I was like, oh. Maybe there's something about this story that I'm not telling truthfully to myself.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It starts to crack that veneer. So Adam, I'm curious about this word
“triangulation”. You talk about it a lot, I talk about it as well. My experience with it was a little bit different, and I really want to have this conversation with you, because I actually think it's common in different forms in family dynamics.
You describe being triangulated where your mom leaned on you emotionally, essentially made you her surrogate spouse, and worked through her stuff with you. Instead of working through her stuff with your dad, she brings you in as that third person. Am I saying that right?
Adam: You're saying it right.
Alison Cook: I'm reading your book going, oh my gosh, there are so many ways this can happen. Again, not to lay blame–in many ways, people are doing the best they can, but to name. Adam, I love that you're such a truth teller; you name, and you don't mince words. We have to name what's really happening.
Tell me a little bit about what is happening in the person who is put in that middle position, who is put in that role they were never supposed to be in. Why is that so devastating to our psyches?
Adam: Two reasons. I'll just speak out of my story, at least to begin with, and then you can ask follow-up questions. The two dynamics of triangulation that the chosen child is burdened with is number one, they are consumed.
Usually, as in my case, by the opposite sex parent, but it doesn't have to be the opposite sex parent. They are consumed by one parent. My goodness, my tenderness, and my sensitivity was used by my mother to meet her emotional needs. Are her emotional needs valid? Absolutely. But they are designed to be taken to another adult, not to a child.
Dynamic number two is, as a result, there's a closeness, a connectedness between me and my mother, that everyone in our family knows. I have twin brothers, and if you interviewed them, they would say, mom and Adam were the two closest people in our family, besides the twins. The twins were probably closer to each other.
That enmity with my father, and it's not my fault, but my father was understandably envious that his wife preferred a child to him as a confidant, companion, and lover.
Alison Cook: That word “consumption” is such a powerful word. You're consumed for the purpose of the other person, and there is a power differential. The adult has the power. You are innocent. You have no way of understanding. It is supposed to be the reverse.
When you come home from school, all of those things that were going through your mind are what should be going through a parent's mind. How can I be there for my child? What does he need? It's crazy-making.
Adam: It is. It is madness for the chosen child, because here's the madness. There is a specialness that I understandably felt, and a power. It's not a good power, but it is a power. As children of a powerful God, we are designed to feel a sense of our own power.
The dilemma is, it's not to be in this particular way. I was not supposed to be the golden child who could come through for my adult mother. I was supposed to be 5. I was supposed to be 11. I was supposed to be 15. I was supposed to be needy, and I'm not using the term needy pejoratively. I bless the neediness.
Children are needy, but when you're serving another adult like that, you can't be needy. You can't be a child when you're functioning as an adult.
Alison Cook: You use that phrase, “the chosen one” and “the power”. I have power in my family that in some ways can feel good, and it's toxic in so many ways. It's power I'm not supposed to have. Figuring out how to give that power back to where the power belongs is so challenging for children who are chosen in that sense, the golden child.
It's so fascinating to me, Adam. Some of this was, your mom picked up on these natural gifts in you of being a healer, and instead of helping you steward those gifts, she exploited those gifts. How do you go on?
I'm thinking of the listeners who have high sensitivity, high empathy, are intuitive about other people, and deeply kind. And a parent or a sibling or whomever exploits those gifts. How do you learn how to steward those gifts in a healthy way? I know that's a huge question.
Adam: It's a brilliant question, and it's a necessary question for healing. I'll say the one word answer and then I'll expound on it. The one word answer is blessing. What does blessing mean? Blessing is naming the goodness, the gloriousness, the godliness of that ten year old boy who could attune to an adult woman, who could adjust, who could adapt, who could tend to her, and with his God-given sensitivity, who loved her.
There has to be a blessing of the goodness of that boy's heart. And, at the same time, there has to be a grieving of how that goodness was exploited and used. Both blessing and grieving have to be there for healing to occur in the brain.
Alison Cook: I want to bring this to the beautiful book you've written and this invitation, because the first step of that is you have to tell the truth.
Adam: That's right.
Alison Cook: You have to tell the truth of the reality of your story. Why is that hard? What are the obstacles? Why are we fearful of looking at the truth of our stories?
Adam: That's a great question. There are a couple of answers to that. Number one, truth is largely lacking in our world. According to Jesus, it's the truth that will set us free. The nature of being human is very often to idealize our parents, our upbringing, our growing up years. Why?
It's not because we are deceitful, per se. It's because we want Eden. We want it to be good. A seven year old boy, a nine year old girl, does not have the mental capacity to lay down at night, put her head on her pillow at night, and say, my alcoholic father, or my sexually abusive stepfather, is doing what he's doing with some measure of intentionality.
A child's brain cannot confess that, if you will, or acknowledge it. It's overwhelming to their nervous system. So they make sense of it in other ways. The biggest way we make sense of the dysfunction of our families is with some measure of self-contempt, a turning on the self, like the problem is me.
That's how our narrative becomes coherent. For many of us, it’s well into our 30s, 40s, and 50s, until we begin the hard but good labor of exploring what was actually true for us.
Alison Cook: So we have to be willing to give up that story. It was there for a reason and we used it to survive in many ways, because I needed to tell myself as a child that this is normal, that this is good, and often we're parroting the story that was told to us. Parts of us have to be willing to let go.
Adam: Yes.
Alison Cook: That's hard. Sometimes that narrative is easier than the truth. How do you help people? I know this is what you're trying to do with the book. How do you help people move past that and move into healing? Because sometimes it feels worse before it feels better.
Adam: Yes, the starting point, in my opinion, and this is what I tried to get across in the book, is that you need to write one or two of your stories. Now, what do I mean by your stories? I don't mean an overarching, 25 minute telling of your life from 0 to 18. Like, my parents got divorced when I was 7, and then we switched schools, and then we moved towns, and then this happened.
You didn't make the basketball team. I want to hear that story. I want to hear when you saw the roster on the gym wall and your name was not on it. What did that stir in your heart and body? What was the interaction with your mother and father like when you told them? That's a story.
That story will give me more access to how the neurons in your brain have been shaped than if you tell me a 30,000 foot view of your overarching life narrative. It's in the details, on the ground, that our hearts are formed.
Alison Cook: Okay, I get what you're saying. We can have all the knowledge. We can give all the data, the fact points. But you're saying, actually begin to notice those scraps, those shreds, those stories that stick around even though you don't know why.
Adam: I love the word sticky. You remembered not making the team and you weren't sure why. My guess is, at some level, you minimize the story as this shouldn't be a big deal. This shouldn't still be affecting me. Why do I still remember this? But at some point, you found a new level of kindness, a new level of curiosity, and you gave that story weight.
Something opened up for you in that space when you gave the story weight. What my hope is for the listeners is that they would give their memories weight, even if they don't see how that story could possibly be a big deal.
Alison Cook: Yeah. You invite people to do this, to take this approach, not only with family of origin stories, but with spiritual stories, with God, and cultural stories. Talk to us a little bit about that. What are some other categories for us to consider these stories that may be a portal into deeper understanding and truth-telling?
Adam: Sure. You've named two already. Everybody has a story with regard to God. Even if you don't believe in God, there's a sense in which the cosmos has broken your heart, or let you down, or disappointed you. But for people who do believe in God, how do you come to terms with your unmet desires and your deep disappointments?
Because at some level, God is the one who's implicated in those deep disappointments and unmet desires. The question is, will you wrestle with God honestly and candidly about the true feelings in your heart and body with regard to how your story has unfolded so far?
Alison Cook: That's good. That's good. So there might even be the same story. There might be a relation back to parents and underneath that, a relationship or a belief system or a disappointment that came in with our attachment to God.
Adam: Yes, absolutely. Any time a boy or girl's heart is broken by heartache, by abuse, by trauma, the nature of the human heart is to make sense of that story in some way and then to resolve to live differently so that bad thing never happens to me again.
Very often, those resolutions or those commitments or those vows or agreements are made about God. They're made about how the world operates. Those become what we call our personality. Okay, so somebody says, I'm a diligent hard worker who doesn't trust anyone. I do it by myself. That's my personality.
I'm not going to argue with the language, but it's far more accurate to say, your heart was shattered as a child, in a particular moment or moments, and you made sense of the world as “I am alone and on my own”. I go to a gym here in Fort Collins, and there's this big sign. “If it is to be, it is up to me”.
Look, I get it for physical fitness. I get it. But sadly, many people go through life believing that's true about their life. That it is up to me. That is an incredibly lonely way of being in the world.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Adam, you provide so many practical ways in the book for people to begin to do this work. There are exercises, there are questions. There are so many ways into this work. It's so good. One of the things I've noticed, both in my work with clients and in my own life, and something you're saying there, is that we have a need to be seen, to be mirrored.
When you're walking in the front door, you need a parent who sees you and says, how was your day, Adam? You look a little down. When you haven't had that, and now you begin to realize and you begin to tell the truth and you're now in adulthood, how do you replicate that?
I know some of that is what we do as therapists. We provide some of that for our clients. And we can begin to map that onto God. I'm curious, how do you both in your personal life and in your practice when you're helping others? How do you remind yourself, wait a minute, it's not all on me? Because that's where that kind of comes from.
There's this almost Christ-figure feeling–it's me out here to be there for the world. Oh no. Wait a minute. I can start to use my imagination to go, wait a minute. Someone out there can see me and I can be small and held in that presence. But that takes a lot of mental work. I'm curious how you do that work in your own life and how you encourage others to do that work.
Adam: Sure. Neuroscientist Dan Siegel says that the greatest way to experience healing is by getting in as many relationships with a securely attached person as you can.
Alison Cook: I love it.
Adam: And that's a brilliant comment. What does he mean by that? He means that the way the human heart heals, the way the human nervous system heals, is by having healthy experiences of relationship.
By relationship, I mean navigating rupture and repair with other human beings and with God. The most healing thing for me has been relationships, and that includes my therapeutic relationships, when I'm getting therapy. I've had those relationships and I have them still, but I have non-therapist relationships also, where I experience and navigate rupture and repair.
And that does more to heal the fragmented neural networks in my brain than anything else. Relationships. Why? Because we are created in the image of the relationship. We are so relational in our core. The way the human heart heals is through relationship with God and relationship with human beings.
Alison Cook: You talk about attachment a lot. A lot of what we're talking about here are these secure attachments. How do you define and how do you experience a securely attached, reparative relationship?
Adam: If you and I were securely attached to each other in a relationship, we just met, but if we developed a relationship, here's how I would know. Whenever there was conflict between us, you would be able to bring your true feelings and experience to the dialogue. I would be able to bring mine.
We would both have an embodied sense of hopefulness that this will get repaired soon, without you having to sacrifice your perspective or your individuality and without me having to sacrifice mine.
What many people do is they either sacrifice their own truth, their own gut, their own experience. They ignore it. They dismiss it. They discount it. Why? Because they want a relational connection with the other person.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Do you find that through the process of healing, when you begin to tell the truth about your story, you begin to realize that you conflate the comfort of that actually-not-securely-attached relationship with your mother, and map that onto adult relationships?
To use terms like codependency, where I can feel connected to someone that is not actually a secure relationship. I know this is the experience of a lot of listeners. You're really saying something important here.
It can feel good when I'm abandoning myself to make you feel great. I might feel like, oh, I feel good in this relationship, when in fact that is not healthy.
Adam: Because you are dismissing an important part of your heart. You're doing it with some intentionality.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
Adam: I'm not blaming. I understand why you're doing it, because you are so relational. This relationship matters to you, and you are picking up, through your attunement to the other person, that if you don't swallow your feelings, it will jeopardize the relational connection. And that feels unbearable to your heart.
Alison Cook: Early on in the healing process, it can almost be like a backwards day at school. I remember when I was dating my now husband, I was like, this is weird. I don't feel right. It took me a long time to realize, this is health. Because we're not in that enmeshment, where I'm constantly picking up on his emotions and meeting them before he even realizes it.
I'm expected to show up as an adult in this relationship. It didn't necessarily feel safe initially. It didn't feel unsafe.
Adam: It didn't feel familiar.
Alison Cook: That's right. That's the word. That's right.
Adam: In the unfamiliarity, there was a disorientation in your body that you came to sort through as, oh, this is a healthy connection or a healthier connection than I am not accustomed to experiencing. I'm not doing what my brain typically does in relationship and it felt a little weird
Alison Cook: Yes. Did you go through that in your own experience?
Adam: I have gone through that. I've had experiences of that.
Alison Cook: It is actually this healthy back and forth. Someone is also attuning to me, when I'm showing up with my own sometimes negative emotions, and it is leading us to a better place because we're working through something. This is actually a secure attachment, versus that enmeshment.
Adam, one of the things I love about your approach, both in the book and just as I hear you and listen to you, is you're a truth teller. You use this word “intentionality”. You don't want to remove accountability from anyone, and simultaneously, you are deeply kind and you emphasize the importance of kindness. How do you hold those two intentions? That's rare in this world.
Adam: I think the way you hold those two in tension is with the word honor. For me to honor you, Alison, is to tell you how I experience you. There is nothing more honoring to another person than the gift of being told how you experienced them. So for example, my daughter tells me frequently how she experiences me.
I'll never forget. She's 8 years old. She's furious at me. She's at the top of the stairs looking down and she says, dad, the rocket ship of not caring about me is blasting off and you're driving it. Okay, now that is an 8 year old girl who is willing to name intentionality and harm.
She's expressing how she feels about how I just interacted with her, without trepidation. She's just telling me like it is. That was honoring to me.
Alison Cook: That is a brilliant example, because that shows how safe you are.
Adam: That's right.
Alison Cook: That she can tell you, dad, this is my experience of you right now. That you'll receive that. That's so interesting. So what you're saying there is, she's telling the truth of her experience. She's not being mean. She's honoring the fact that you're somebody who she cares about enough to let you know, this is what's going on.
Adam: Yes. For me to honor my father and mother is to tell the truth about my relationship with my father and mother. My parents are both dead now, but I did get to speak with my father before he died in a very honoring way about the ways that he harmed me. How did that transpire?
I called him up. Dad, would you be willing to have some conversations about some of the ways that I felt harmed by you as a boy? To my astonishment, he said yes. We began talking every Friday at 4 p.m. in 2009. It lasted nine months. I would share with him the stories of his harm to me. We would talk it through.
He owned what he could own. It was incredibly healing. However, for many people, the idea of picking up the phone and saying to their mom, dad, stepmom, stepdad, hey, could we sit down to dinner and have a conversation about some of the ways I felt harmed by you? That would cause World War III in their family constellation.
Alison Cook: It would not be safe.
Adam: It may not be safe. So not everyone can do that. But then the question is, how is it that your mother or father is unwilling to hear your heart? That is a devastating realization, whether you're four or 54.
Alison Cook: Therefore, if you cannot do it with them, all the more that you have to find a place to tell the truth.
Adam: Yes. If you cannot tell the truth to your parents, your nervous system is going to be shaped in such a way that you will be very reluctant to tell the truth to your spouse or your coworker or your boss, or your best friend.
You have learned, and your neurons have wired in response to your experience of telling the truth, that “Ouch, that hurt me dad” never goes well.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It leads to breach. It leads to rupture with no repair, which is a void. So Adam, this gets back to what you said about the antidote. If you cannot find it with the people who hurt you, you need to build up as many securely attached relationships where you can practice that muscle.
Adam: Yes, and that's what, in a book called The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, he calls the village. He says, in contemporary American society, the village is largely absent. What does he mean by the village?
He means other elders, like warrior princes and princesses who have engaged their own story, suffered their own grief, and know how to use their power on behalf of the wounded. That's the village. We are sadly, often longing for one or two people that can be the village for us, and we don't know how to find them.
What you keep returning us to in this conversation is we need those people in our lives to heal. You're absolutely right.
Alison Cook: Yeah. As we wind down here, one last question–you allude to this in the book, as we grow that muscle to be able to tell the truth about our stories, do you think it facilitates our ability to tell the truth about ourselves and face the truth about ourselves?
Adam: Oh, absolutely. Look, truth-telling is a holistic endeavor. The more truthful I am about how you, mother, have harmed me, the more truthful I can be about how I've harmed my son. The invitation is into the light of truth, 360, all the way around.
If I can tell the truth about my own failures, as a father, as a husband, if I can tell the truth and own those without shame, but with integrity and honor for the other person, which means to repair, then why am I unwilling to tell the truth about the ways my heart has been harmed by others?
Alison Cook: So good. It's so good. For many of us, it's easier to tell the truth about our own shortcomings than to tell the truth about how we've been harmed. Just to listen to you say that, I imagine even when your little girl says that to you, you have the capacity as a dad to hold that, without shaming yourself as a parent.
You also have the ability, in the way that God holds up that mirror of truth for us, you can also hold up that mirror of truth for others. It's so freeing. It's so worth doing the hard work of facing your story and the things that we don't want to face. It's so worth it. I'm so grateful for your voice, that you're talking about it and that you've brought this book into the world.
Would you tell our listeners how they can find you? A lot of them already are listening to your podcast, but how can they find you and your work and your book and all the things that you're putting out there?
Adam: Sure. You can find me at adamyoungcounseling.com, or you can listen to the podcast that I host called The Place We Find Ourselves, which is on all podcast platforms. The book comes out March 4th, 2025. It's called Make Sense of Your Story, and you can pre-order it anywhere books are sold.
Alison Cook: Adam, I want to close by asking you a couple of questions I like to ask all my guests. What would you say to that younger version of you, that young boy showing up worried about mom after school on the front doorstep, what would you say to him now?
Adam: Your heart for relationships is so good. Your heart for bringing goodness into this world is so holy.
Alison Cook: And what is bringing out the best of you right now?
Adam: My marriage. Engaging with my wife. Engaging is a fancy word of saying: fighting, listening, refusing to misattune to her, and refusing to ignore myself, which is to say, refusing to misattune to me. Bringing attunement to my heart, my perspective, my reality, and bringing attention to her perspective, her heart, and her reality.
And then especially what God is mysteriously and playfully doing through our fights. That's bringing out the best of me.
Alison Cook: Wow. That's a podcast episode. I love that. Adam, you are bringing so much good. into this world. This is a powerful book. It's impactful. It will make you consider your own story in new ways. I am so grateful that you're putting such goodness into the world. Thank you. Thank you for being here.
Adam: Thank you, Alison. This was a delightful conversation.
In this special bonus episode of The Best of You podcast, Dr. Alison welcomes Annie F. Downs, New York Times bestselling author and founder of the That Sounds Fun network. Together, they explore the balance between joy and hardship, and the crucial differences between escapism and genuine relief. Annie also shares the story behind her new children’s book, Where Did TJ Go? as well as insights into how fun and play can be integral to healing.
Here’s what we cover:
* The negative internal messages Annie had to overcome
* The difference between real relief and escapism
* Annie's personal journey through grief and how it has deepened her understanding of joy
* Practical advice on integrating play into everyday life
* An exclusive look into Annie’s new children's book, Where Did TJ Go?, a heartfelt tool for families navigating grief
Purchase Annie's new children's book Where did TJ Go?
Resources:
- That Sounds Fun networkThat Sounds Fun podcast
- Books by Annie F. Downs
- Single Purpose League Patreon
- singlepurposeleague.com
- Romans 5:3-4
- AnnieFDowns.com/pastoringsingles
- wheredidTJgo.com
- anniefdowns.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 142: Digital Detox—Surprising Insights from 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks & Amish Farmers Featuring Carlos Whittaker
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
- Contact Restoring the Soul today and learn how their Intensive Counseling Process can jump start your journey or launch. And be sure to visit www.restoringthesoul.com/bestofyou to download their pdf called "5 Ways Unresolved Trauma May Be Derailing Your Relationship."
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. 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 Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to another very special bonus episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so thrilled to bring you today's conversation. I first met our guest today when I joined her podcast network. When you look at The Best of You Podcast, you'll see that I am part of the That Sounds Fun network.
It's a group of podcasts where they really support us and they also help us work with advertising partners, which allows us to bring you this content for free. Annie's “That Sounds Fun” network is really the people behind that whole part of this podcast. I don't even have to think about it. I would not do it if I had to be the one trying to figure out those ad placements. They do all of that work for us and I'm really grateful for that.
I will say, in today's episode, we touch on this. Initially I thought to myself, is it strange for a podcast all about healing from trauma, healing childhood wounds, taking charge of our mental and emotional health, does it make sense for this podcast to be on a network called That Sounds Fun?
The truth is, it is my deepest joy to dive into this content, both for my own work and with other mental health experts out there to bring this content to you. So to me, this is the absolute definition of joy and vitality that underlies this idea of fun, as Annie and I talk about in today's episode.
I also am so grateful that as I've gotten to know Annie, she really embodies the both-and. That's why I'm so thrilled to bring you this conversation today, because it speaks to something we all need, especially in the midst of life's challenges.
We need to be able to hold both joy and hardship to cultivate lightness even in heavy, hard seasons, and to reclaim, as we've talked about in past episodes, the parts of us that have been buried under the weight of responsibility, fear, or pain. That's part of the work that we are doing here.
That's why I'm thrilled to have Annie on the podcast today. Now, Annie is all about fun. That's the name of her podcast, That Sounds Fun. That's the name of our podcast network. She brings this infectious energy wherever she goes, whether she's talking about faith, friendships, or the struggles in her own life.
But what I have learned to really respect and love about Annie is that her joy is not shallow or naive. It has been shaped by grief, by loss, by her own pain, and by the hard and deeply formative work she's had to do to hold on to hope.
That makes me want to listen even more when she talks about the importance of fun and of joy and play. So in our conversation today, that's exactly what we do. We explore the both-and, how to navigate heartache and struggles without losing sight of joy, and how playfulness can actually be a sign of wholeness, integration, and healing.
Fun is not a luxury or a side note, but a really important component in healthy relationships and a flourishing life. Annie shares how for much of her early life, she actually wondered if her love for fun was a weakness, if it was keeping her from being taken seriously, or even from growing up in the ways she thought she should.
She shares more about how she learned to integrate that part of her into her internal family. As a result of all that work, she has some really profound insights about the difference between getting real relief through play and through fun versus escapism, when we're trying to run away from things or avoid things.
She's had to learn how to work through that the hard way. Then in the last part of our conversation, we go deeper into how Annie created meaning through a profound heartbreak. A couple of years ago, her family experienced the devastating loss of her baby nephew, TJ, and Annie shares with us how she processed that in her own unique way, through writing a children's book.
She initially wrote it for her family, but actually discovered that there's a real need for books such as this. The book is called, Where Did TJ Go?. Today, she shares that story with us. So if you're in a season that's really hard and you're hanging on by your fingernails, I hope this episode will give you a bit of relief or a bit of a vision of what's possible.
Or if you're someone who needs permission or simply a reminder to recover your sense of play or your desire for fun, you're going to find so much encouragement and insight in this conversation.
Annie F. Downs is a New York Times bestselling author, sought after speaker, and host of the popular That Sounds Fun podcast. Her books include That Sounds Fun and Chase the Fun. Annie is also the founder of the That Sounds Fun network, which supports and uplifts other voices in the podcasting world, including yours truly.
She's also the founder of the Single Purpose League, which is a community for Christian singles seeking connection and purpose. She shares a little bit about that on today's episode as well. Most recently, Annie channeled her personal experience of loss into a children's book called Where Did TJ Go?. It's written for families who are navigating the grief of losing a child.
I'm so thrilled to bring you my conversation with Annie F Downs.
***
Alison Cook: Annie, I'm so thrilled to have you here today. I got to know you actually through your books. I had read most of your books before I even really knew you as a podcast host. One of the things I really love about you, you have what I'm going to call a spiritual gift of playfulness.
Annie: Yeah.
Alison Cook: You call it fun. The Bible calls it joy. Sometimes that can feel heavy-handed. But in the work that I do for my listeners, we talk a lot about IFS, internal family systems. That's my background. That's the core of my work. One of the qualities that Dick Schwartz, the founder of the model, attributes to what he calls the self, what I call the spirit-led self, when we're walking in our true self, is playfulness.
I love this quality because it gets at this side of life sometimes, especially for those of us who can get into what's hard, who in some ways have had some of that robbed through painful childhood experiences, where we're supposed to hone that playfulness, that sense of wonder.
I see that in your work. There are times of looking for love and remembering God and chasing the fun, where I needed your voice to help take me back to what I believe is a quality of the spirit-led self.
Tell us a little bit, Annie, I'm curious, was that always a part of you? What were you like in your early twenties? What was that like for you when you were younger? Were you always someone who wanted to find joy, wanted to find fun? How did that show up in you as a younger woman?
Annie: That has always been me. The transformation has been probably in my twenties. I asked more questions like, how did everybody else stop having fun? I don't want to stop having fun. I deeply dislike this phrase because I don't think it's true or real, but I felt more like a “late bloomer".
I thought, everyone else is growing up and I'm not. I didn't have a theology around fun, and I didn't have a theology around or a psychology around, what does it mean if this is how God made me? It was not that it became part of me–it was always part of me.
The more work I've done, the more counseling I've done, the more growth I've done, the more I've embraced that as part of me and let it be part of the mature me, versus trying to get it out of me, and thinking I wasn't mature.
Alison Cook: Oh, wow. I think about Jesus' words, “become like little children”. I think about the work that I'm doing and some of my colleagues are doing with folks who've lost that sense of play and that sense of wonder as a result of childhood wounding and childhood trauma. We're trying to restore that.
It almost sounds like your experience was the opposite. I feel like there's something wrong with me. Why am I wanting to keep this part of me?
Annie: My childhood wounding feelings were more around, I'm an Enneagram seven. Our main question is, who's going to take care of me? So a lot of my entertaining myself, a lot of it was, if there's chaos going on around you and it doesn't directly affect you, can you go have fun? Can you eject out of that and go have fun?
I was able to entertain myself a lot and have the fun that I needed. As I grew up in that, one of my counselors from onsite is Jim Kress, who I know and love. One of the things Jim taught us at onsite that he has repeated to me multiple times is, the tools you needed to survive as a child are not tools you necessarily need anymore.
What does that mean? Every kid has to survive something: being picked on, all sorts of levels of something. For me, being an entertainer and entertaining myself was a tool that I didn't have to let go. I've been in therapy since 2013 regularly, like monthly or weekly for 11 years, going on 12 years.
A lot of the work has been, you don't have to let go of that tool. Let's figure out how to actually use it in a way that reflects who you are. That's been different. I didn't get there until my thirties, probably.
Alison Cook: I get it. I love that. There's a way in which there was a part of you that helped you, and it also probably helped others, but you had to learn how to exercise agency. There's a time for it, but there's also a time for other things. I love that you didn't lose it.
Annie: Yeah. So I'm 44, and I've never been married, and don't have any kids. In my twenties, when people were partnering off and getting married, the other narrative that was in my head was, you must not be mature enough, because you still love fun and nobody's marrying you.
So you must not be as grown up as everyone else is. I felt I was stunted in a lot of ways in my 20s. Can you imagine if I'd have killed the fun? My entire career is based on that word. Everything God is doing in my life, publicly, is through the concept of what you said. It is what I am known for.
I'm known for my friendships, and I'm known for having fun. I would tell you what the enemy tried to steal, kill, and destroy in my 20s was, hey, this part of you is actually keeping you from being who you want to be. Meanwhile, what God was saying is, no, this is exactly how I made you. Can you mature in it versus trying and believing it needs to be removed from you?
Alison Cook: 100%. Yeah I relate to that. I relate to that with the “achiever” part of me. There are these really beautiful and good parts, and they map onto the Enneagram for sure. For me, being single into my late thirties had me feeling like that part of me that loved being in school was maybe wrong, because maybe it was a little bit different.
As opposed to knowing that part of me is a beautiful part of how God made me. But we have to learn how to hold that part in tension with the rest of us. So Annie, one of the things I love about you and about your writing is you do go to what's hard. I've wanted you on the podcast because in the process of talking about hard things, we need this art.
It's an art. It's a spiritual discipline. I love how you use the word “theology” of play, of fun. It's so important when we're hurting, not to lose that. I have seen that quality be so essential in marriage, in being a good friend to someone, that there's an art. You don't want to be that person that shuts down someone when they need to grieve, but you also can strategically use play when there's annoyance or when someone's done something.
There's a way when we are spirit-led, that it becomes such a tool for harmony and laughter. It is such an art that I don't want to lose. One of the things I noticed about you is I have friends, for example, who I know will make me laugh and I'm like, oh man, I need to do something fun. But I might not call them when I'm hurting, and there's that dissonance there.
Putting you on the spot here as my case study, how have you cultivated the both-and?
Annie: I'm not sure my friends call me when things are really hard. I'm not sure that's the phone call I get, when they're in a deep, emotional, sad place. Now, there are some of my up close best friends, where we talk about everything. That's true, but that second tier and beyond?
When they think, man, when I'm going through something, this is who I'm going to call. I don't think I'm that for a lot of friends, and I'm totally okay with that. Because, genuinely, I don't enjoy it either. I'm not helpful. I didn't sign up to be a counselor for a reason.
My college best friend is a therapist, and at the end of our work days, when we're Marco Poloing back and forth, I'm like, you listened to people all day? What a nightmare! I cannot fathom that. I'm not built like that at all. I am really built for emergencies.
I am very good in traumatic situations and in emergencies when you need someone to come in and get things right and get people fed, because my emotions are not my first stop in my life train. My train's going to different stations. My emotions are not the first stop. I am very good when everyone else is very emotional.
I get that call far more than I get the, “will you sit in my pain with me” call. I got it today. Hey, we're going through a really traumatic thing with our family. I said, okay, I've got dinner. Tell me the restaurant and I'll send you too much food. I can do that.
I can do the, hey, thanks for coming over to dinner tonight. Our kids have had a tough week at school, and it is so good that you're the one coming to dinner because our kids laugh so much when you're here.
So those are what I get, more than the “hey, I'm processing this really hard, painful thing, and you're a second or third tier friend that I want to process that with”. I don't get that call unless it's someone I'm discipling. There are a handful of women I disciple, and that makes sense because I'm a leader to them, but that is not who I am for my peers.
But I'll tell you one thing I do pretty regularly, Alison. There's a game called Tenzi. Do you know Tenzi? It's so easy. You buy a four set of 10 dice. So 10 dice that are orange, green, blue, purple. It is the easiest game where everyone has a dice of their color, and you roll them until they all match.
It's like a version of Yahtzee, but you can play it in two minutes. It's a really easy game to bring with me anywhere, because then you sit down and when you're playing a game or when you're out on a walk or if you're doing anything like that, there's a space for conversation that may not happen if you're sitting around the table drinking coffee.
Now, some of our friends listening and some of my real life friends love going to coffee with someone and talking for two and a half hours. I do not. I do not think a long amount of time equals a quality amount of time. I'd much rather go on a walk with you for 45 minutes and talk. I'm also like, hey, if we went and saw a movie together, that's quality time too.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
Annie: I'm built a little bit different from the people who you go to when you are in your saddest moments.
Alison Cook: I love that. I love the self-awareness and I love that we need all different kinds of people. I love that you're the one that's prepared to show up to bless your friends with the game. I also think I heard you say somewhere, Annie, that sometimes you will act as a fun coach.
Annie: Yes. Yeah. Now, no one pays me to do it. I don't have time to do it. But yes, when we did the That Sounds Fun Tour a couple of years ago, one of the segments every night was fun coaching, where we brought someone on stage who had presented a fun problem. Because here's the reality, Alison, that anybody who's looking for fun is looking for something deeper.
Alison Cook: Yes!
Annie: You really need peace. You really need joy. You really need relief. Because fun can go a couple of different ways. If you're pursuing fun, you can either do it in a way that is redeeming, or you can do it in a way that is escapism. There's redemption and relief, and then there's escape. Those are the two paths.
I got questions on tour. Maybe in Indy, a young woman was like, my dad died and he was the fun person. How do we do holidays? I can pretty quickly think up fun things you can try. Or, I want to be a fun mom, but we don't have the budget to go to Disney World once a year. What do we do?
I'm always like, go to four Mexican restaurants in your town and taste the guacamole at all of them. It's a three to five dollar investment every time. Give your kids scorecards. Y'all score the guacamole, and you've spent $20 that night. But you've given your kids this ridiculous experience that they can't believe they're going to four Mexican restaurants in a night.
My brain thinks that up pretty quickly. So that's what the fun coaching looks like, though it is not for hire currently.
Alison Cook: I do think it's a gift, because there's an art to it too. Like you're saying, I had a friend, I remember, I was so down. I was so bummed out, telling this friend of mine who has this gift, that all of my friends were getting married. I was consistently finding myself demoted.
I'm so glad we can talk about this on the podcast for my listeners, because we've had a few episodes recently on marriage. There are some fantastic books coming out on marriage this quarter. I always think about my listeners who are single or divorced, and what that feels like. I remember being in those shoes.
I visited my seventh friend, it's 27 dresses, my seventh wedding, and I was feeling woe is me. This friend, I'll never forget it, just turned it and by the end of it, we were laughing hysterically. Every single thing that had been hurting me or causing pain or making me feel bad, she would turn it into a joke and we would start laughing and it was therapeutic.
It was cathartic. It released all of that. It's a gift. I don't have it. To your point, I wish I had that gift because it has meant so much to me when others have offered that gift to me. It's healing when we can go right in there. Because to your point, it's coming out of pain, when we need to find that release and when it's done well, not as escapism, but as I see you, I get it, I know what's going on and I can bring into this some levity and some lightness–it's really a gift.
Annie: It is. What I would encourage our friends listening is, if it feels easy, it's probably a gift. If it feels easy to you, it's probably a gift. Because there are some people who are like, the easiest thing for me is to sit and listen to people talk about their problems. That is so easy for me. That isn't a heavy lift nine out of 10 days.
Honestly, if someone would have told Annie at 21 that this is a gift, in my 20s and my 30s I'd have been easier on myself. If I would have thought, this could be a gift. But I'll tell you the other thing, Dr. Alison, that the image I use a lot to separate relief from escapism is, especially when we're helping other people, is that you don't want to take the whale out of the ocean.
You want to bring the whale to the top of the ocean and let them blow out their blowhole. It's not ours to remove people from their pain. It's not ours to take them out. It is ours to figure out a way to help them come up from the depths and get to the surface, and then go back down. So it's an hour. It's two hours. It's an evening.
You may have read this in Looking for Lovely, but there was a time when I got on a plane and flew away from everybody and didn't tell. And that is taking the whale out of the ocean. That was not a relief. That was an escape. When we do that for ourselves or for other people, we aren't actually helping them heal.
We're a whale that can't survive outside of the ocean. But real whales have to come up to the surface. We have to. We need to do that for our friends too. How can I help them get to the surface, and not try to take them out of the ocean? That is how we can help shape relief versus escapism for each other.
Alison Cook: That's so good, Annie. That's the art of it. I can't pluck you out of this and rescue you, but man, I can give you the gift of a few moments to come up for air. I love that.
Annie: We don't actually want to rescue them. I was talking to Tyler Staten about this. He has a book coming out about the Holy Spirit and he has been through a pretty serious cancer battle. He said, I don't ever want to do that again. But would I go back and choose this again for what I have gained from God? Yes.
Scripture says suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. This is hard when there are kids involved. This is hard when there are people we love involved. We actually don't want them not to suffer. We actually want people to walk through this, through what God has for them, so that they get the gifts God has for them.
So we can't take them out of the ocean, because the ocean is full of the gifts from God, but we can help them. Okay. I know this is the hardest season. I know you've never been through anything like this. Let's go get pedicures and put our headphones in our earbuds in and listen to an audio book. We don't even have to talk.
Can I help you get to the surface for two hours? Then you can go back to what you need to go back to. A cooking class, a pedicure, going to a movie, going on a drive, going on a walk–there are lots of things we can do for ourselves and for each other that help us come to the surface.
Alison Cook: There's an authority with which you talk about this. I can tell when someone is doing that with that intention. They're not afraid of my pain. They're not like, oh, let's go do this because I don't want to see your pain. This is the gift I have to bring; that's what I hear you saying.
There's a self-awareness which has to have come out of your own ability to learn, maybe it's not my favorite thing to do. I don't want to be the one to sit and process all your emotions with you for two hours. But I can see your pain. I can see it. I get it. I've been there myself. I've been to those places in myself, which gives me an authority. That's what I hear.
Annie: The self-awareness of, the deeper you go in a conversation does not the best friend make. I had to come to terms with this. I'm thinking of my friend, also named Annie, which is complicated. Annie can get in this with you and she can talk it through with you. Annie Downs can help you have fun.
Experiencing both Annies, one is not necessarily a better friend. That's the work I had to do. To go, I want to be a good friend. I want someone to call me their best friend. Do I have to be serious to be someone's best friend?
For some people you do. For my closest friends, the closer you get in with somebody, the more they experience a 360 of you. My coworkers and my best friends get all the sides of me that can sit in pain with you. That's the work I had to do, Alison, of saying to myself, hey, you aren't a lower tier friend because of the gifts you offer. You're a different kind of friend because of the gifts you offer.
Alison Cook: I love that. How much do you think that in the Christian world, there was another overlay of second-guessing? That's why I keep wanting to call it a spiritual gift, because it's lacking. There can be a heaviness sometimes, but I'm curious if that's your experience.
Annie: The teaching, whether it was caught or taught, especially as a teenager, was more about how not to be rebellious and escape. Here's what you don't do. I don't know if there was good teaching that I recall that said, here's what redemptive fun can look like, and fun can be mature.
But I also don't remember there being teaching against it. I didn't grow up in a church culture that said you shouldn't laugh or you shouldn't have fun. Or if you're laughing, you're doing this wrong. We grew up and had a ton of fun. Our youth group had a ton of fun.
I remember thinking, especially in college, because I was really involved with my college ministry at the University of Georgia, the Wesley Foundation. I remember thinking, I feel like I'm spiritually maturing. Why do I feel like I'm behind in every other way?
Alison Cook: That's so interesting.
Annie: That's probably what I thought the most, versus the church telling me not to have fun. I thought, is everyone else growing up without me? It feels like they might be growing up without me. Because I had different gifts.
I've probably bought my counselor a boat. It has taken work to get here. To some degree, that work did mature me. I wasn't right, but I was right in some ways, because I was slower to accept my gifts than some other people.
Alison Cook: That's the irony.
Annie: That's the irony. Again, the term late bloomer is so unkind because who scheduled anything? Who decided? I don't use that term as much as I say, I probably matured a little slower because there were other people who accepted their gifts quicker.
Alison Cook: Interesting. Yeah, “integration” is the word. This takes time. We are all complex, but when there's a complexity of parts, where there's that fun side of you, there's that business savvy, culture-building side of you, that spiritual side of you, that deeply feeling side of you that I see come out in your writing, I relate to a lot of that, when you use that word late bloomer.
I resonate with you, because I feel like it took me a while. I have a lot of different sides. There's a therapist part of me, but there's a really lighthearted, playful part of me. How do those go together? There's a driven part of me. How does that work with these other pieces?
Listening to you, Annie, and I love that you embody this and having this chance to talk to you when you're able to own being good at fun and good at helping people. Like, I know what I'm doing and I know what I'm bringing and I know what I don't bring. There's an inner peace that spills out and frees other people.
That kind of healing that flows out of you may not look like being the therapist in the therapy chair, but it's impacting so many people and I love hearing that from you and seeing your eyes light up as you describe that. It took a while to get there.
Annie: Yes. Yeah. Once you learn what you're really good at and what you're not good at, I'll tell you, it can be polarizing for people. They know whether they like you or not. It's polarizing in dating, it's polarizing in friendship, it's polarizing in coworking, where you're like, the reason I'm in therapy is I need someone else keeping me between the lines at all times.
So I'm not saying this is me, deal with it. What I'm saying is, I know my strengths and my weaknesses as I continue to grow as a person. If these don't match your strengths, if this isn't attractive to you in friendship or dating or coworking, go with God. I wish you well, because my gifts aren't going to change. My maturity will hopefully keep changing. My gifts don't change.
Alison Cook: I love that. There's an inner acceptance, recognizing that the more I become who I am and the more I embrace it and own it and put it into the world, some people may not go for me.
Annie: If I thought I was perfect and everyone should come in alignment with me, that's a whole other problem. I say a lot, I have perfect attendance to my wins, and I have perfect attendance to my sins. I know exactly who I am. I know my weaknesses. I know that I laid in my bed and scrolled on my phone this morning instead of reading my Bible.
I know me. Because of that, when I'm like, man, I can still get disappointed and still get my feelings hurt. I'm like, I brought myself and you did not choose me. I can't change myself, but I can grow. I brought to you the basics of me, and the basics weren't interesting to you. Go with God.
You know what else? This is true about you, Dr. Alison, and I'm thinking of some other friends too. Sometimes, people walk away because they haven't done the work to know their strengths and weaknesses. It causes an internal turmoil that has nothing to do with you.
Sometimes they walk away because they don't like you. You may never know why. But there are people that I could go, oh, I don't think I like you, and a lot of times, it's because they're living a truth that I'm unwilling to live. I wish them well.
Alison Cook: Before we shift to the book, I've noticed you're doing more to gather community for single folks, especially single folks in the church. I know that for me, being single in my thirties in the church in particular were some of my loneliest years, and I hate to say that. I don't want that to be true, and I spent a lot of time trying to explain to people what was helpful and what wasn't.
I see you doing it a lot more publicly. I hate that you have to do it, Annie, because there's so much more to you, and I almost don't want to ask you about it, but for those listening, are there places where they can find your work and the good work that you're doing there?
Annie: I'll tell you briefly why this became a yes for me. I have been unmarried the entire time I've been a public figure, the entire time I've been a person, but the entire time I've had a public job, I have not been married. I made a pretty strong decision early on that I did not want to talk about being single because I didn't want to be the poster child.
I’m very uninterested in being the poster child of this. A couple of summers ago, we did a dating series on That Sounds Fun called Summer Lovin’. I got on Instagram and I said, hey, if you're single, I want to tell you something. Can I have your email address? I'm not selling anything, I want to tell you something.
We were hoping for a thousand email addresses. By the end of the week, we had 20,000 email addresses, Alison. What that said to me was not that other people weren't doing work for singles in the church. There's a lot of good work being done. What it said to me is, there is an audience waiting for you to talk about it.
I was like, yeah, I'm still not very interested in that. Then the Lord had this conversation with me, Alison. I'm pausing to be like, do I want to tell the world that? I said to the Lord how much I didn't want to do this. The Lord said, it's only a season. Now, does that mean I get married? No, it does not.
What it means is I could get married. Or I could die or Jesus could come back. If any of those three things happen, Alison, I lose the influence I have right now over unmarried people. I lose some of it. People will be happy for me. Then they will say, she doesn't understand us anymore.
When the Lord said that, I was like, he knows me. He knows the only thing he's got to do is go, hey, if there's a timeline on this, will you let me squeeze everything out of the window when I've got it? He knows that's like catnip to me. I'm like, then let's go.
And it could be 30 more years, Alison. But what the Lord said to me is, this is only a season. Can I have it? When he did that, a lot of things changed for me, where I went, let's talk about it then. Most of the information is at singlepurposeleague.com, which is the group people can be a part of that is 2,000 plus singles, mostly females, mostly Christian, who are trying to figure out, not necessarily how to be married, because a handful of them don't care. They want community.
Then there are a bunch of us who do want to get married, and hope. I'll say to people, listen, I know you don't want to be in here. I know this isn't what you wanted to be in. Me neither. But we're here. So what do we do? How do we actually make this time count?
We did a survey about a year ago, a little less than a year ago, in the Single Purpose League. We said, do you feel supported by your church? 65 percent of people said no, or not really. Then we said, where do you want to meet somebody? And the top four out of the top ten were church or church-adjacent.
Then it was like, we got to tell the pastors, because pastors are wishing they could figure out how to help singles. Singles are saying, I don't feel supported, but I'm not going anywhere. So we gotta get everybody on the same team. If you have any pastor friends listening or leaders, we have this resource for pastoring singles.
It's free. You take it. It's at AnnieFDowns.com/pastoringsingles. We're like, start some conversations in churches. We've had over a thousand people download it and have it. We don't care. So that's where all that stuff is.
My promise to God is that as long as I'm not married and as long as he'll give me influence over this audience, as long as I have a voice to these people, I'll use it. But I know my voice is more profoundly helpful when I'm one of them. I get to do that right now.
Alison Cook: Wow. I am so grateful. I wish you'd been around.
Annie: But I wasn't talking about it.
Alison Cook: Yeah, but Annie, I get it. I get it. I don't know why it's so fraught. I wish it wasn't, especially for women. I don't know why it's so hard. It adds this whole extra layer of self-doubt. It did to me too. I wish it didn't.
I've seen so many clients come through my door, and I remember saying this to my therapist, they're there for the structure and the support and the company. I'm like, I will be that for you. I want to be that person for you because I get it. I get it. I get that marriage does not solve all of life's problems. It does not.
Also, there's this layer of alienation that you can feel in our culture. I'm grateful that you're doing it. I hope the listener will check it out. Thank you for talking about it.
You've also been through this incredible tragedy in the last couple of years. I know it happened a few years ago. I don't think the grief ever fully goes away. Let’s pivot here to this children's book that you've written out of a personal tragedy that you've gone through with your family. You wrote the book with your sister. Can you tell us a little bit about this?
Annie: Only the Lord would be like, you know what you're gonna talk about in 2025, Annie? Being single and your nephew who passed away. Have fun.
Alison Cook: Grief and singleness.
Annie: Come up for air when you want to. Don't escape, but relief. I have had so many conversations, as you can imagine, I've had so many conversations with the Lord in the last six months. I'm really good at folding a fitted sheet. Where's the ministry around that? Because we'd love for that to be it.
But I am also really thankful that the life God hands us, he does not waste. TJ is a part of my family and a part of my life. I'm glad God has kept finding ways to use his little life. But my sister and her husband were pregnant with TJ in 2022.
They knew very early. They have another son named Sam, who's two years older. They knew pretty early in their pregnancy that TJ was sick and that he had a life-limiting diagnosis. The grief and joy we held in the middle of that was, we know what the doctors are saying, and we know what God could do.
We spent Tatum's pregnancy hopeful that God would change the story from what we were told. Meanwhile, there's a two year old in the story as well. There's a two year old who thinks his little brother's coming. There's a two year old who calls his brother TJ. There's a two year old that we all care about.
I jokingly say he's a little bit of an idol in my life. I love him so much. But as we got closer to the birth of TJ, and as the doctors kept saying, his lungs have not developed, his heart has not developed, you need to be prepared that he will not live. If he lives days, we'll be surprised, probably more like hours.
I may have emailed you, Alison. I started calling therapists, counselors, and other friends I have that have lost children while raising other children. I said, what's the book we read? And there was no answer. There was a recommendation of one that's pretty popular, but it doesn't have a gospel story. It's a mainstream story, which it's still helpful.
Then there were ones where one family liked it, but another family didn't. David Thomas and Sissy Goff, when they didn't have a resource and they are the experts to me for raising kids, I thought, there's a problem here. How do I help Sam, my nephew?
So I wrote a book for Sam. I was like, if we can't find it, I'll write it. Again, knowing my skill set, I knew what I couldn't do was I couldn't rescue my family from the pain. I'm not a doctor. I couldn't do anything about that, but I could help Sam understand what was gonna happen to TJ. I wrote it the week before TJ was born, thinking he would never come home from the hospital.
That's what plays out in the book. The mom is pregnant. When I tell you, it looks like my sister and my brother in law, my nephews, I'm like, y'all are very kind to let us draw pictures that look like you. So as TJ is being born the week before, we don't think he'll live. In the book, the baby dies in the hospital. We were very clear in the book that TJ died.
We need to use facts, is what David Thomas says. In fact, he wrote a letter in the back of the book for parents to help them as they're reading the book with kids. I thought, we need some expert stuff in here. I need you to tell them what to do after they read this, which was very generous of him to do that.
I write it out in Word and steal clip art from the internet, go to FedEx and print it out, laminate it, and make a copy for my parents and a copy for my sister. I thought, that's what we were going to do with it. I thought it was going to be for Sam. Then, as we started reading it to Sam, TJ ended up living 56 days, 3 weeks, in the NICU, and then 5 weeks at Tatum and Jacob's house in hospice, 24/7 care.
Unbelievable. The trauma was unbelievable for our family, particularly for Tatum and Jacob and Sam, but they didn't leave their house for five weeks. People were with them constantly, doctors and nurses and family and friends. A while after he died, Tatum started reading it to Sam, and then I sent it to my agent and I said, hey, this has helped us.
I want to write the book that when people call David and Sissy and say, how do I help my family? They go, here it is. Where did TJ go? Especially in the loss of another kid. I said to my agent, will you ask the publisher? This is such a niche book. I wasn't sure they'd say yes.
Because they don't have to. They don't have to pick a book that is so niche in who it'll serve. But they were like, you're right, this doesn't exist, and we need it. The through line, Alison, is there is good news even in sad stories. That's the gospel. There's good news even in sad stories.
Parents need that, and kids need that. What we've seen as we've announced it and made it public is, sadly, it is massively needed more than we think. One in four women have a miscarriage. Because TJ doesn't go home from the hospital in the book, it is a book that can be read to families who had miscarriages or stillbirths or had to make tough medical decisions or that the baby never came home. We're thankful for who it's serving.
Alison Cook: I love that you're putting your finger on that need. It is so common. It is so hard to know what to say. So many times people say something well-intended that isn't helpful. The book is there to help reframe some of that and give language. I know so many of my listeners have that need. How do you talk about it with kids?
Annie: While you're grieving, as the mom or dad, you're barely surviving the grief of losing one of your children. And you've got three others who need breakfast. I don't know how they do it. I don't know how they do it, but our hope is that Where Did TJ Go? will be a tool that helps maybe a grandparent or an aunt or a friend or a partner.
And the parents read it when they can. But you're right, it is this go between that hopefully helps.
Alison Cook: It's naming something for kids, because we know that kids suffer more when things go unspoken.
Annie: That's right, they know. You and I know, the trauma that happened in our house when we were kids that's never been talked about? You feel it in your guts. Kids know.
Alison Cook: It's a beautiful offering. Thanks for coming on and sharing about it with us. Tell everybody before I ask you my last two questions that I ask everybody, where can people find the book? Where can they find all things Annie Downs?
Annie: Yeah, wheredidTJgo.com will help you. The book is everywhere you love to buy books. It comes out February 18th, anywhere you love to buy books. There's something we're doing until people don't want me to do it anymore, where if you have lost a child in your family, we have these “in loving memory of” book plates, where I'll sign your child's name.
That's one of the most important things to families, is that you say the name of the baby or the child that is with the Lord now. In the first week, there were over 300 book plates I signed, Alison. Unbelievable. So that's available at wheredidTJgo.com as well.
Embarrassingly, I'm everywhere. Anywhere you're looking for me, it's Annie F Downs. You can get to everything from anniefdowns.com. Single Purpose League is there, the That Sounds Fun Podcast, all that you can find at anniefdowns.com.
Alison Cook: We'll link to everything in the show notes. Annie, before we wind down, a couple of questions I ask all my guests. What would you want 25 year old Annie to know with what you know now?
Annie: I get to answer this a lot because it's a question that goes into Q and As. What would you go back and say to yourself? Number one, I always say, wear your retainers. Your parents already paid for your braces.
Alison Cook: I knew you'd deliver something we hadn't heard.
Annie: Nighttime for a lifetime, because spoiler alert, what happens is, 40 year old Annie had to pay for Invisalign because 25 year old Annie quit wearing her retainers. So wear your retainers!
The other thing that I would go back and tell myself that we have talked about today without using this language is, fall in love with your life. Whatever life God's given you today, fall in love with it. Because when you fall in love with the life that you have, then everything is a bonus.
Everything's a bonus. Every gift, every person, every relationship is a bonus. I already loved what God had given. Now, the week after TJ died, was I in love with my life? Of course not. I understand there are nuances to that sentence.
But, in general, can I figure out how to fall in love with the life God has given me right now so that I can see gifts when they show up? That's the goal.
Alison Cook: I love that. Your energy is infectious. Annie, what's bringing out the best of you right now?
Annie: Oh, what is bringing out the best in me right now? Self-tanner is bringing out the best in me right now. I feel different when I'm tanned in the middle of winter. That is a gift.
Alison Cook: I get it.
Annie: I've had a really interesting couple of years with surgeries. I've not had surgery in my whole life until the last three years. I've had one a year, the last three years, and two of the three were repairing my knees. The other thing that's given me life right now is how much I'm enjoying getting my legs stronger so that my knees are stronger. It is really fun to get stronger.
Alison Cook: Oh, cool. Yeah. I love it.
Annie: I cannot have surgery in ‘25. That's my motto. No surgery in ‘25. August of ‘22, August of ‘23, August of ‘24. Brutal. Brutal.
Alison Cook: Alright, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks, Annie.
Annie: That was great. Thank you so much.
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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.
