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This week Dr. Alison dives into a heartfelt exploration of rejection, including how we internalize rejection from early life experiences, and how these moments shape our sensitivity to social dynamics and self-perception later in life. Dr. Alison shares personal stories and scientific insights to unpack the physical and emotional impacts of rejection, offering a pathway to healing and acceptance.
You’ll learn:
* How early experiences of rejection influence our reactions and relationships in adulthood
* The scientific basis for why rejection hurts so much
* Strategies for reframing our internal narratives
* Practical tips for engaging with the parts of ourselves that still feel the sting of past rejections
Resources:
- Episode 143: Reparenting Your Younger Self—How to Stop Seeking Approval From Others & Find Inner Security
- Psalm 34:18
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 87: A Surprising Way to Break Free From Self-Criticism & Comparing Yourself to Others
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Turn back time on the appearance of your skin with Purity Woods’s Age-Defying Dream Cream. Go to puritywoods.com/BESTOFYOU or enter code BESTOFYOU at checkout for an additional 10% off your first order.
- 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'm so glad you're here with me this week. I've received so many responses from you to our latest episodes, especially Episode 143, where I shared about reconnecting with a young part of myself.
I felt pretty vulnerable after recording that episode, and I so appreciated your notes and emails. Many of you reached out to share with me from your own experiences. It was so interesting to me to hear how much that resonated with you, even though maybe you didn't have the language to understand what was happening at the time.
One of you described that inner feeling as if you were smiling from ear to ear, or feeling giddy internally. It seems like that young part of us seems to emerge often when we're doing something alone. That was really interesting for me.
As I read some of your stories, I heard some of you share about being on a trip that maybe you were scared to take, but then that little young part of you couldn't stop smiling. A couple of you wrote to me about an experience of being at a restaurant by yourself. I have to admit, I also relate to that one.
It's almost like those young parts of us are like, oh my gosh, here we are. We're doing this very adult thing, this kind of sophisticated thing all by ourselves, and there's that childlike wonder that overcomes us. It was really interesting that in some of these moments that might even otherwise feel intimidating, they can also have the power to create opportunities to invite these young, playful, wonder-seeking parts of us to come to the surface.
I'm so grateful for your notes, for your emails. They mean a lot to me. Sometimes they challenge me. In fact, several of you have written to me over the past month or so asking me specifically about rejection, how hard it is as an adult, and what its relationship is to these younger parts.
That's exactly what we're going to dive into in this episode today. I have to admit, a part of me kind of winces a little bit. I have a very strong protector that doesn't like to think about rejection. In fact, I had to get curious about my aversion to the topic myself. Sure enough, that part of me doesn't want me to feel those painful, painful feelings that come from experiences of rejection.
But as we all know, it can be so helpful and so informative when we get curious about those feelings, and even befriend those feelings, because they are powerful lessons. They teach us about how to navigate those experiences in our adult lives more successfully.
I wanted to start out today's episode by sharing one of the stories that emerged for me about my own experience with rejection. Then I'll talk a little bit about the science of rejection, why it hurts so much, and how it can become a conduit for healing, even more confidence, even more courage, and even the clarity to step authentically into the lives we actually crave.
So here's my story. The truth is, I experienced rejection kind of a lot as a child. Honestly, I think most of us did, in one way or another. For me, it was not making the sports teams, or missing out on the role I wanted in a school play, or the subtle but still stinging pain of not being invited to join a group of girls or to attend a party.
One particularly sharp and poignant memory involves a boy I had a huge crush on in high school. I was not the girl that the boys were drawn to from middle school to high school. As much as my adult self can look back with relief and say, gosh, I missed out on so much unnecessary drama during those years at the time, it was really painful.
Speaking of rejection, it’s never being the girl that was chosen, to be asked by the object of my affection. I remember this night so vividly, I had been homesick, I had missed a couple days of school, and this boy that I had a crush on came over to my house. I couldn't believe he had showed up at my doorstep.
We were kind of friendly with each other, but it was an unusual occurrence that he rang our doorbell. As we sat there, my heart was soaring and I was wondering why he was there. Suddenly he began to share with me the real reason he'd stopped by was to confess his feelings for my best friend.
He wanted to confide in me and to get my support. Oh, it was heartbreaking. It was also a role I know all too well, the one others turned to for support, whether it be boys or female friendships, and rarely the person who was chosen to be the leading lady, to be the star, to be the one out in the front.
These early experiences have shaped me in many ways, and I wish that they hadn't, but they have. I still can be very sensitive to social dynamics. Sometimes that's why it's hard for me to be on social media. I'm aware of different groups of people, even different cliques, different in-groups that I might not be a part of. I feel it at large women's conferences, where I'll feel like no matter what I try or no matter what I do, I'll always feel a little bit on the periphery.
I've never wanted to blame others for those feelings, but that sensitivity is very real and it lingers. I often think of this part of me as highly sensitive. It's very aware of rejection, even when other people aren't necessarily doing it. Sometimes they are being cruel and sometimes they're not.
Regardless, I've had to learn how to work with this part of me and how to reframe the messages that this part of me often picks up. It's part of my own ongoing work of healing, of learning to both affirm the feelings of this part of me, as well as to reframe some of the unhelpful, untrue messages and beliefs this part of me has held onto for far too long.
Before we get into some of that healing reframing work, I want to touch on why rejection hurts so much. There are a lot of reasons that I think it hurts. I've already talked about the factor of being highly sensitive people. That's something we've talked a lot about on the podcast. In fact, I probably need to do a whole episode on what that means.
I think that many of us who are very empathetic, very aware of other people's feelings, also have deeply feeling parts of ourselves. So that's one piece of it, but the other piece of it is simply universal. There are studies in social psychology that tell us the pain of rejection isn't emotional. It's actually physical.
I have a dear friend who is a leading neuropsychologist, who actually worked on some of these early studies, where scientists discovered that our brains process social pain or the pain of rejection similarly to how it processes physical pain.
When they do these studies on people who are experiencing rejection or being excluded by a group, the same part of the brain that registers physical pain, as if you were punched, lights up. When you experience the pain of rejection, it's almost a literal punch to the gut and that's how it feels inside of us.
There is such a thing as social survival, and being excluded from a group hurts. Our brains treat social rejection as a serious threat. Often, these wounds go back to those formative years in middle school and high school when we're really shifting our attention to seeking approval and connection and validation from our peer groups.
Inevitably, when we experience pain during those seasons, a wound is so often created, and these childhood experiences play a big role in how we process rejection as adults. If we feel rejected early in life, often these moments happen in secret and we dismiss them, or we shame ourselves for them, or we tell ourselves it's my fault that I don't belong.
This is what I began to notice as I began to unpack this as an adult. At one point, several years ago, I was invited to attend a large women's conference, and I noticed from the start, this familiar feeling of, I don't belong. No one wants me here. No one's really reaching out to me to make me feel a part of this group.
It's not that anybody was being overtly cruel. They weren't, but I became instantly aware in sort of that teenage/preteen angsty way of, oh, I don't belong here. I felt awkward in the clothes I was wearing. I was very aware right away, oh, I'm not dressed in the same styles that everybody else is.
I could feel it, that people would nod and say hello, but they weren't really interested in drawing me into their already established groups. I don't know that anybody around me was necessarily doing anything wrong. I know in that moment, I felt like I stuck out like that proverbial sore thumb.
I felt that awkward, angsty, teenage part of me, desperate to look effortless, to look cool, to be part of the cool kids. I remember finally what I did for myself in that moment, what I didn't have the courage to do for myself back when I was a teenager, I took myself out of that experience.
In this case, I left the large group and walked all the way to the back of the stadium where no one could see me. I sat by myself, and I sat for that moment with that young 15-year old part of me and said, dear sweet girl, you do not have to do this. You do not have to turn yourself inside out to fit in with them.
You can be here with me. I love who you are. You do not have to do that work to try to fit in with them. And that moment was so healing, so freeing. It was the start of what I learned about reframing some of those old messages.
You see, that younger part of me had picked up the belief, this burden, that if other people aren't seamlessly inviting me in, there's something wrong with me. The first step was to get her out of that situation with someone who really loved her for who she was. In this case, that person was me.
So recognizing these patterns, these moments, when we feel that sharp sting of rejection, whether it's on social media, seeing a group of friends gathering that you weren't invited to, or whether it's at your church group where you're aware that other people seem to all be part of something that you feel on the outs of, or maybe it happens at work or in another community where you feel overlooked.
You're not given the promotion or you're not called upon in group conversations, and you feel like an outsider, you feel rejected. Believe it or not, recognizing those moments and pausing to get curious about your own responses to them is the first step toward healing.
So let's talk about how we heal from the sting of rejection. How do we comfort these parts of us that very understandably feel left out, ignored, overlooked, invisible, not good enough? How do we help comfort them and remove that sting of rejection? There's an old saying you'll often hear that says rejection is God's protection.
I actually really like that saying. I think there's a lot of truth in it. I know that when I look back on my high school years, I am so grateful for God's protection that saved me from heartache in a lot of ways. Even when I look back at jobs I didn't get, or promotions I didn't get, or communities that rejected me, often hindsight is 20-20 and I'm so grateful that God closed those doors.
Even today, when I'm more in the midst of it, when I'm aware, oh, there's a group of women over there that isn't showing any interest in me, or I feel rejected by colleagues or by peers or even online, yes, I can still feel that way on social media, I can more easily remind myself, wait a minute, there's a reason for that.
Either they will come around, or they're not the right fit for me. To really let the truth of that message sink in deeply into the parts of ourselves, we do need to connect first with the part of us that feels the sting. Otherwise, we bypass the pain. We give ourselves a superficial fix.
We tell ourselves not to feel that way and inevitably end up numbing or distracting ourselves because we haven't really gotten down to the root of where that sting might be festering. So here are three ways to get to the root of some of the sting of rejection so that you can begin to heal it deep down inside, which makes it a little bit easier to reframe what's happening in your present life.
Number one: get curious about the rejected part of you. When you feel rejected, pause, like I did at that conference. Pause and notice the part of you that's feeling that pain. Don't shoo it away or try to rationalize yourself out of it or logic yourself out of it. Get curious about that part of you.
My guess is that part of you is a younger version of yourself. She might go all the way back to childhood and have a memory of being rejected very early on. She might go back to your teenage years, but no doubt she's got memories of those feelings of rejection. If you're able, connect to her with compassion.
I see that you're here. I understand. I get it. This does hurt. I'm here with you now. God is here with us too. We're not alone in this experience of rejection.
Now listen, if you've got deep trauma as it relates to rejection and you've never really looked at some of those memories, don't do this work alone. Get the help of a therapist or a trusted advisor to take a look at some of those stories with you.
But as you develop trust with these younger parts of you, they will recognize that you are in fact the adult now in the room, and you can honor that part of you that feels so rejected, so left out, by extending to her your compassionate listening. I get it. This is hard. This does hurt. I wish you didn't have to go through this. You connect first to the part of yourself feeling rejected with compassion.
Second, get curious about what beliefs this part of you carries. What does she think is happening in this situation? If it's helpful, imagine yourself talking this through with your own child or a niece or a nephew that you love who is feeling rejected, and you're helping walk them through it.
Imagine this part of you as a beloved young child and ask her, what sense are you making of this? What do you believe is happening here? For example, in my case, at that large women's conference, this part of me was saying, this always happens to me. I'm never the one who easily enters into the party. I'm always on the edges.
I had a parade of images of being in high school and feeling on the periphery, never the one necessarily being pushed out cruelly, that wasn't my story, but also never the one really being invited in. I often felt on the periphery. That was the story that this part of me had. When I asked her more about the messages she believed, sure enough, she said, what's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me? It must be me. I'm the problem. And when I felt the angst of that energy in my spirit, it was almost like a light bulb going off. I could turn to that part of me and say, no, you misunderstand. There was never anything wrong with you.
That wasn't your time. That wasn't your season. Those weren't your people. That wasn't your guy. That wasn't your friend group. There was never anything wrong with you. You were made for something different from that.
I could reframe that message for the younger part of me, and that got the healing deeper into my soul. I knew that already on one level, but those younger parts of us, they're stubborn. They hang on to those old messages. So for you, what are some of those messages that young parts of you have picked up and kind of stubbornly cling to, even though parts of you know they're not true?
Some common ones as it relates to rejection are: "I'm not good enough” or “There must be something wrong with me” or “I don't belong anywhere. Nobody really wants me” or “I'll never succeed”. These are not true. These are messages that young parts of us feel and cling to at the depths of our being.
But as we connect to these young parts of us, we can help them reframe these messages and have a different experience as they connect with us, our adult self, and with God's Spirit.
Here are some truthful messages: I'm not good enough becomes maybe they're not good enough for me.
There must be something wrong with me becomes this isn't a good fit for how God made me to be.
I don't belong anywhere becomes I haven't found my people or my place or my work yet, but I will. God has that for me.
Nobody wants me becomes I'm going to commit to finding those people who do get me, who do see me, who do invite me in.
I'll never succeed becomes I may not have found my place yet, but with God's help, I will.
Shift to these more empowering messages, these messages you needed way back then. Imagine a wise parent sitting with you as a child saying, listen, it hurts to be rejected. I'm so sorry it happened, but this is not the end for you. There will be people out there. There will be opportunities for you.
You will find places to use your gift. This will happen for you. I'm here with you, and with God's help, I'm going to help you find those opportunities, those places, those people.
You are not alone in this, and I can help you find the things that make you thrive, that make you feel alive, that make your heart sing, because that's what makes God's heart sing.
You never got that parenting back then. You never got that reframing of those messages, but you can give those messages to the parts of yourself now.
Lastly, as you honor the part of you that feels the sting of rejection and you work with some of those old painful messages that parts of you have believed in the past and are tempted to believe in the present, you can now shift your energy toward finding those people, finding those places, finding that work that is meaningful for you, that does accept you, that does embrace you, that does make you feel valuable.
It may take some time, it may come quickly, but I promise you that as you put your energy into seeing yourself how God sees you, as worthy of love and capable of making deep contributions in this life you've been given, you will find doors that open for you.
Looking back, you'll realize that what seemed like insurmountable brick walls of rejection, of feeling on the outside, were actually the catalyst propelling you onto a new path, a better path, a path leading to a more fulfilling, more satisfying, more deeply authentic experience of yourself, of your relationships, and of your work and of every aspect of this life.
These are the gifts that God wants for you. So often we are so busy looking over at who's not inviting us in at the places we haven't felt included, that we are missing out on this path into green meadows and beautiful pastures. The path God actually has for us. These paths may not look like what parts of us have envisioned, but they will represent the absolute most beautiful life God has for us.
The paradox of facing the pain of rejection is that when we do, they present opportunities for us to dive even deeper into our understanding of ourselves, to really clarify our true desires and our deepest longings. This is where God loves to meet us.
I'm reminded of Psalm 34:18. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and he saves those who are crushed in spirit. Remember that the word saves, sozo, also means to heal. He heals those places deep inside us where we felt the sting of rejection. And we have a part to play.
We have to walk into those places and take a look at them with God's help. We have to grieve what wasn't fair, what was unjust, what we wanted and what we should have gotten but did not get, in addition to grieving what we wanted and was never ours to have. When we do that work, the healing begins.
As we confront those wounds and move toward acceptance, a beautiful thing starts to happen inside our own souls. We refuse to reject ourselves. We say heck no to those shaming messages, that somehow we are the reason for those rejections. We refuse those messages, and instead we affirm deep within our souls, this is a good soul.
God, this person you made me to be, who I am, God, this is a good gift. This person you have made me to be, regardless of what anybody else thinks. I want to become more of who you made me to be. I want to delight in this person you made me to be, as much as you delight in this person.
You start accepting and embracing and honoring the person God made you to be. You see yourself as the beautiful soul made in God's image that we all in fact are, one who is uniquely designed for loving relationships, for purpose, for a crucial role in God's Kingdom in this earthly life
This is what is true. What's so amazing is that you will start to believe this truth about you. Will other people still reject you at times? Probably. In fact, embracing ourselves fully often means acknowledging that everyone else will not choose us, and that's okay. It's part of life.
When we accept our inherent belovedness and the beauty of our God-made soul, and learn to delight in the different parts of ourselves in the core of who we are as God delights in us, we are then empowered to move toward those who do see us, who do choose us, who do truly understand and love and delight in us too.
This journey of self-acceptance and of healing begins when we first face and confront those feelings of rejection that we all feel at times. It means reframing the messages that we tell ourselves about those experiences, and then moving toward deep inner acceptance with God's help.
The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and he heals those who are crushed in spirit. Healing starts inside of you.
In this profoundly insightful episode, Dr. Alison explores the often overlooked "young places" within our souls with John Eldredge, New York Times bestselling author, counselor, and the author of the new book "Experience Jesus. Really." Together, they explore how these inner areas of wounding can lead to transformative encounters with Jesus, providing opportunities for deeper healing through experiencing God’s loving presence.
Here’s what we cover:
*John's challenge to move past our over-reliance on left-brain thinking
*The surprising ways God beckons our souls toward healing
*A powerful example of how Jesus responds to young parts carrying trauma
*The critical mistake many make when seeking healing
*Why John believes we are all like amphibians
*The difference between the illusion of security and the reality of safety
Resources:
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- The Sacred Romance by John Eldredge and Brent Curtis
- Experience Jesus. Really: Finding Refuge, Strength, and Wonder through Everyday Encounters with God by John Eldredge
- John 14
- Isaiah 61. Revelation 3
- Psalm 91
- John 7
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 76: When Self-Help Isn’t Enough—Finding the Faith & Strength to Move Forward after Loss & Heartache With Granger Smith
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.
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
- As a listener of The Best of You Podcast, you can qualify to see a registered dietitian for as little as $0 by visiting faynutrition.com/bestofyou.
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're here for this episode, because we are diving into something that honestly, I couldn't stop thinking about.
You know when you have those moments when you come across an idea, or you're reading a book, and it starts to connect a whole bunch of dots? In this case, it began to pull together a bunch of different threads from my own life.
That's exactly what happened as I was reading today's guest’s book, all the way to the very end, when he actually mentions the internal family systems model, which I was shocked by. I didn't know that this author was familiar with that model and there were definitely threads of that throughout this book.
Now, if you've been around this podcast for a while, we talk a lot about internal family systems, IFS. If you're new to the podcast, this is a powerful way of understanding the different parts of ourselves and how these different parts of us shape our behaviors, our emotions, and are often a huge part of our healing, of becoming more integrated and becoming more whole.
It's the topic of my first book that I wrote with Kimberly Miller called Boundaries For Your Soul. Today, to my surprise, my guest and I ended up taking that conversation into the intersection of IFS with mysticism.
Now, mysticism can sound like this lofty word that's reserved for saints who go out into the desert for weeks without food or whatever image you have in your mind about that word. It's really a way of describing a deeper, more experiential, more deeply intimate side of our faith.
As my guest will share with us today, it's how he believes we all should be living in this world as children of God. I had no idea until John and I started talking that the way I personally experienced IFS was what he describes as a form of mysticism. This conversation was really fun.
I have to admit, when I listened back to it for the first time, I felt a little embarrassed or a little chagrined because I talk a lot in this episode. I couldn't help myself. John's book resonated so deeply with different parts of my own story. He comes at these topics from a different angle, but we wind up at very similar places.
I found so many overlaps that I wanted to have this conversation with him as two people who have been circling around different wells and arriving at some similar themes from different places. It was a really fun conversation for me to have with John.
I really hope you will find it enjoyable as well. I promise you, though, if you're someone who came to this podcast because of my work in Boundaries for Your Soul, you'll be fascinated by this episode. Or if you're someone who has felt stuck in overanalyzing your faith where there's this divide between what you believe and what you know to be true in your mind, and what you experience in your heart, I really think this episode and John's newest book is going to speak to you.
So let me introduce you to today's guest. I don't think he is new to most of you. John Eldredge is a New York Times bestselling author. He's a counselor and a teacher who has spent decades helping people recover their hearts and encounter the presence of God in a deeply personal way.
You may know him from his book, The Sacred Romance, which is how I was first introduced to his work, but today we're talking about his latest book, where he invites us to reclaim an ancient way of connecting with God.
Not through self help formulas or mental gymnastics, or trying to will ourselves into believing certain things that we don't really feel, but instead through the life of what John calls “the ordinary mystic”. The book is called Experience Jesus. Really: Finding Refuge, Strength, and Wonder through Everyday Encounters with God
We talk about why so many of us have lost touch with wonder and mystery and deep personal encounters with God, and how our modern world often keeps us stuck in left brain pragmatism. We also talk about how reclaiming this connection with Jesus isn't for a select few–it's actually how God designed us to live.
Please stick around to the end of our conversation, because John shares a simple but profound practice that can help you start experiencing this shift in your own life today. It's something I wasn't expecting, and it left me thinking about my own faith and how I relate to God in a new way.
I cannot wait for you to hear this conversation. Please enjoy my conversation with John Eldredge.
***
Alison Cook: John, I am so thrilled to get to meet you for the first time and to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for being here. I'm surprised that this is our first meeting, given the similarity of our work. So I feel like I'm meeting a friend.
John Eldredge: I feel the same. I've known your work for a long time and you've informed a lot of my own thinking from early on, when I was trying to figure out how to bring together faith with psychology. You were one of those early voices, really trying to help us understand the inner work from that faithful perspective.
Alison Cook: I'm really grateful for you and grateful to talk to you about this new book. Man, it intersects with much of my life in so many ways. I'm thrilled to have this conversation with you.
John Eldredge: Great. Me too.
Alison Cook: The focus of your new book, John, is on what you call ordinary mysticism. I was laughing as we're getting ready to record, because most of my favorite saints are right behind us, which is not the way it normally is. I didn't plan that.
You are really bringing to life some of these beautiful thinkers from the past. I want to tell the listener, there are some really neat intersections with what John's doing in this book and with parts work in IFS, which we talk a lot about on the podcast.
We're going to get to that, but before we get there, I would love for you to talk about what you refer to as this discipleship we have to the internet, to pragmatism, this self-help gospel. The antidote to it is so surprising. You really had me in those first pages. You lay out the problem and you're like, here's my surprising offering to you. Tell us a little bit about what you're trying to do with the book.
John Eldredge: Yeah. Alison, if I were to tell you, hey, prayer is really important, you would go, sure. If I were to tell you, hey, I saw this study that shows the neuroscience of these nuns and how prayer shaped them over time, you would go, oh, that's so cool. We are such disciples of the internet. We've been trained.
None of us meant this to happen to us. It is the world we grew up in. We believe that the latest science is the coolest thing in the world. We believe that you can get to the bottom of any mystery. You can uncover any cover-up.
We also have come to fear and distrust anything that's right-brained, anything that's intuitive, that is apprehending truth through a means other than reason. Immediately our reaction is, that's the scary stuff. But the problem is, we are weary from this way of life. We are all such pragmatists and materialists.
Meanwhile, the soul is starving for the rest of God and for the rest of reality. So the surprise that you alluded to is the way out of the current madness. And it is to become an ordinary mystic.
Alison Cook: I love it. It captures me, because it's not a five step plan. I intellectually know that five step plans rarely work, but I've been so conditioned by our culture, to your point. In your book, you're really taking us back into this way of being that has become so foreign to us. Tell us a little bit, what do you mean by an ordinary mystic?
John Eldredge: Yeah. It’s foreign to us at this current moment. You don't realize what a hostage you are to this moment. This is normative. If you read the lives of the saints down through the ages, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, if you read the lives of these beautiful women and men, there is a common theme of a rich experience of Jesus.
And there is a way into that. It's almost by saying to yourself, I'm going to become an ordinary mystic. I'm not going to fear mystery, I'm going to embrace it. I'm not going to insist that God answer me like the internet does in 0.003 seconds.
Our soul has been so conditioned to immediate responses. We want to make God practical, just give me the three steps, show me how it works. I'm going to say, you know what? Go right brain. I'm going to wait, drop into an openness to experiencing God apart from the pragmatic, and see what happens.
Alison Cook: Okay, so I love this. You talk about this in the book, that this is a problem not only in the scientific rational world, but it has infiltrated the church world, where we need the steps and our pat answers. I've experienced it in both. When I started my doctoral work at the University of Denver in counseling psychology, we were studying statistics.
We're studying ANOVA, MANOVA, we're doing design studies, and I didn't mind it. The left brain part of me was like, this is interesting, but I was like, how is this going to help me heal humans? It's that gap in the educational process. I switched my degree, which in some ways made it harder for me to practice, because I switched to a joint degree in psychology and religious studies.
This is where I began to get more into what you're describing, this kind of less utilitarian, less quantifiable understanding of God and of myself. But that kind of took me out of the realm of psychology. And I entered the field of psychology, John, because I loved the human soul, the psyche, the beauty of the God-made soul.
I couldn't figure out how to find that in an institution of higher learning. Now, it's changed a little bit, and I began to really love IFS when I was introduced to it later. So it's in our training, it's in our institutions, but tell me how you also see it in some of our church culture.
John Eldredge: It's baked into church life for most people now. You take the average marriage conference in churches, and they are trying so hard to make it quick. They don't ask people for a lot of time. We're gonna do it on Saturday morning, and we try to make it practical.
If it's not practical, we can't get people to attend. So we're going to give you the tools, that's the language, to a better marriage, and it ends up missing all of the romance, the intuitive non-verbals, of an actual happy marriage. We're trying to fix it like you're fixing your car.
We are utterly enchanted with the latest science, the left brain, the practical. You were talking about healing souls–the soul is healed through union with Christ. If we are not leading people in their particular trauma into union with Christ, we can't heal their souls.
Alison Cook: It's experiential, that encounter.
John Eldredge: Yep. It’s an encounter. You and I have had clients who could tell you all about their eating disorder.
Alison Cook: All their diagnoses.
John Eldredge: Yes, they've got all the language, the latest jargon, and they're no better. There are these little epiphanies, folks, and one of them is, understanding does not equal restoration. Clarity does not equal healing.
Alison Cook: That's good. That's the left brain. I can have all the knowledge in the world, but it doesn't translate into the soul and bring me into that encounter with Christ. I had mentioned to you, this has been such a great week for me, a beautiful gift of a week, because I got to interview Dan Allender yesterday and I know you guys are good friends.
I got to read both of your books, and here's what's interesting. I want to try to put it into words. He tells stories from his own marriage. There's very little “how-to”. You tell story after story of these mystics. You tell stories of how it shows up in our ordinary lives, in nature, through the thrill of adventure.
I feel it in my being, and you definitely give us practical ways to approach this for sure, but I feel it. So even in your writing, you're doing what it is that you're trying to teach us. You're showing us, this is a different way. I really loved that.
John Eldredge: Yeah. You know what this is, Alison? This is like, the number of studies…and here I go. I have to do the studies. This is our lingua franca. It's the highly urbanized children who literally don't know what a duck is, or a turtle, and the level of deprivation of an experience of nature that they were created for is so profound.
So we're not talking about optional things here, not saying this is for some people, but not for others. God created a world in which everything has its habitat. Penguins want cold icy water, and hummingbirds love colorful gardens. The human soul is literally meant to live within the habitat of God, to dwell within the refuge of the Most High.
But also to be saturated with the presence of God. Most people are like a child who's never heard of a turtle. What's that? That's how low our baseline has fallen. This is normative.
Alison Cook: Wow. Yeah, I see what you're saying. It's like we're fish made for water and we don't even know what water is.
John Eldredge: Exactly. And rather than telling you about water, I take you there and throw you in it.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's like, wait, what is happening here? This is a different experience. It's beautiful. Yeah. It's not that science is bad. I want to put that out here. Gosh, it can be so helpful to, like you said, cite a study or to understand. That's a part of the whole, but it is not the whole, it is a part of it. It's not the end.
John Eldredge: Yes. The mind is a beautiful instrument, but it was actually never meant to be the center of our life.
Alison Cook: So good.
John Eldredge: The heart is the center of your life. That's why God put it in the center of your body. The heart is the new tabernacle. The heart is the dwelling place of God. To live purely in the mind, or mostly for the mind, or to mostly only trust the mind, you are depriving your heart of oxygen, the lovely presence of God that human beings need to live and flourish by.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love this. So you're painting a picture. We've got to find our way back. I'm going to ask the million dollar question: how do we do it? It starts with recognizing this longing in our hearts. You talk in the book about how children inherently understand this. What do we have to learn from children, and how do we reclaim that?
John Eldredge: I'm gonna say something that might need some unpacking. Friends, you are using your resistance to mystery, you are using your fear of encounter, you are using your insistence on the pragmatic as self-defense. What was the invitation? Unless you become like a little child, you won't enter the kingdom of God.
He's saying, look, all of that cynicism that you learn by adulthood, the instinctive mistrust and the default pragmatism, he says, you got to let all that go. We all do it as self-protection. You're going to have to lay that down and open the heart up to believe again, and to wonder.
What Jesus is saying is, you can do it. You can do it. It's okay. You can do this. It's actually possible.
Alison Cook: Okay. Everything you're saying is sending off all these bells in my mind. When I was in this doctoral program, years in my left brain, I started to have a lot of anxiety. This was in my early thirties, and I had to take time away. It sounds woo-woo, and this is sometimes challenging for Christians, but there was this deep thing inside of me.
I understand it now, but at the time it was like, I want to act, I want to be in a play, and the idea was, I wanted to play, and for some reason, because I was so at rock bottom, I couldn't stop having panic attacks. Everything I'd been trying with my left brain had failed me. It created, in IFS terms, that exiled child in me that used to love to play dress up and be silly and create and not have to have a reason for doing things.
So I signed up and took an acting class and I reconnected with that imagination. It was therapeutic. Here's the thing, John, that's so interesting for our field. At the time, I went to a therapist, and not all therapists do this, but they kept me in my left brain.
This cognitive behavior, it was all the rage back then. It didn't help me. I was like, I can tell you all the rational things. It was that acting class where I began to find my heart, to your point. It brings tears to my eyes, because at the time I felt like I didn't know how to make sense of that in my Christian context.
I knew it was okay before God. But I didn't know how to talk about that, either in my academic community nor in my Christian context. I knew it was what I needed.
John Eldredge: Isn't that beautiful? The soul will find a way.
Alison Cook: Yes!
John Eldredge: That's what's so lovely. Listen to your soul folks. It will tell you a lot about how you're doing, and what you need. Give your heart a voice. Yeah, that's beautiful. That's a big piece of it we want to add to the conversation. God has been healing human souls for thousands of years, before any of the latest science.
Right now, we're discovering many beautiful things. I'm super grateful for science. Like, my goodness. I look stuff up, I'm like any other person–I use Google. But God has been healing human souls for thousands of years, and he's really good at it.
There is a simplicity to the life of the ordinary mystic that will bring you the healing that you're seeking. There is a life that is available. It's not about taking on more activity. John Eldredge has a new program for you! God help us, we've all tried it. Instead, it is a different way of apprehending God that the saints knew, down through the ages.
Alison Cook: How have you come to inhabit this life of the ordinary mystic? What are some key moments where you began to really realize, oh, this is the way?
John Eldredge: The primary place has been in healing human souls. Because we began to encounter things that were outside our training–for example, spiritual darkness and the presence of evil, in people who were not former occult members or that sort of thing. You go, wait a second.
There is an unseen realm that is thwarting this dear soul's recovery. We need to learn about that. That would be one thing. Another is this very simple, beautiful practice of learning to hear the voice of God. Dallas Willard, who many of us respect and have learned so much from, an absolutely brilliant guy, maybe the smartest man of the 20th century, he wrote many books.
In his very first book, he chose to start with a book on hearing the voice of God, because he thought it was so essential to navigating your life, navigating a very complex world.
So as we began to listen, and oftentimes this would be in work with people, Jesus would gently say, ask them about the parakeet. I'd be like, no way man. That's woo-woo, that is crazy stuff. He's like, trust me. And I'd say okay, tell me about the parakeet, and they're bawling. At three, four years old, the death of the parakeet that their dad raged at.
Boom, we were at something that would have taken us a year to find. It was learning to hear the voice of Jesus and dealing with the unseen realm.
The third thing, and this will get us right into parts stuff, we also began to encounter young places within people, and going wait a second, they don't need left-brain cognitive therapy, they need reintegration. As we would invite Jesus into that, some of the most extraordinary experiences began to take place that were absolutely breathtaking.
The human soul is a lovely thing, and God is really great at healing it. Why don't we get him more involved in this process here?
Alison Cook: Yes. So this is where our work dovetails. When Kim and I, my coauthor, were writing Boundaries for Your Soul, we wanted to honor the IFS model, the idea of parts, but we made two key changes to the model. Dick Schwartz, he did bless us, he did sign off on it, which we're grateful for, but he talks about the Self as being the agent of healing.
We call it the Spirit-led self. It's the place inside where the Holy Spirit, John 14, comes to live. That is where we connect with the power of God inside our souls. So number one, that the parts are connecting with that Spirit-led place.
And then we added a step; you're not just focusing on the parts and learning about the parts–you're inviting Jesus in. We added that third step. Invite Jesus to be near the part and see what happens. To what you're saying in your book, it's fascinating what happens when we find those young places.
It's beyond what our left brain, what our best skills, could come up with. So I really loved that in the book. That was what was transformational to me. I never thought about it this way, but it brought me back into that inner mystic. You say in the book that children are little mystics.
John Eldredge: They are.
Alison Cook: I love that. Tell me more about that.
John Eldredge: Stace, my wife, took two of our grandchildren to Peter Pan this weekend, and there's the part at which Tinkerbell is dying and you need to clap. Everybody, you need to clap to bring Tinkerbell back to life. Our four year old grandson, with all his heart, is absolutely clapping and clapping and clapping, because he is not going to let Tinkerbell die on his watch.
Here is the capacity to believe, the capacity to trust the unseen, the capacity to enjoy something you don't need to understand. You can actually enjoy things, folks, that you don't fully understand. This is how you love any person in your life, by the way. You can enjoy them without figuring out why they're so quirky.
Children don't have the cynicism yet, they don't have the suspicion, the “prove it to me” attitude. There's an openness to belief and to wonder. So yeah, inviting Jesus in. Saint John of the Cross, as he writes some of his poetry about the intimacy of the soul with Christ, it sounds like parts work
Alison Cook: Oh wow.
John Eldredge: This is 500 years ago. Yes. You read the saints and you go, oh, they were coming in through the doorway of intimacy with God, and in that intimacy, they found the healing of their souls.
That's Isaiah 61. Revelation 3. I stand at the door and knock if you let me in.
Alison Cook: Yeah, it's David: I've learned to wean my soul like a child within me.
John Eldredge: Yes. He says, have mercy on me Lord and deliver me for my heart is wounded within me. He's inviting what the old saints called “consolation of God” into his wounded soul. It heals. And the more that we pay attention, the more we can experience Jesus showing up in a playful way on some days, in a very serious way on other days.
Sometimes he will show you something. For me, this has been going on at home in the last couple of weeks. It's been going on around four in the morning. He's been waking me up, and I call it “before the internal editor is on”. Your heart is more open. He's been putting his finger on things.
John, that fear, we need to go there together. Let's walk into this part of your soul together. I've been having this exquisite healing of my soul lying there in the dark at 4am. That's the life of the ordinary mystic. I don't fully have to explain it. I don't have to justify it. I can tell you it's 100 percent real.
Alison Cook: I get it. It sounds revolutionary, but actually, this is the way it's been. This is the way it's been. I love the way you phrase that we go there together, where there's a with-ness to it.
John Eldredge: Yes, very much so, because the mistake that many people make is they ask God to heal their soul from a distance. And that doesn't work.
Alison Cook: Okay. So this was exactly where I wanted to go with this. Tell me what you mean by that.
John Eldredge: The door opens from the inside. Jesus will never ever kick the door in. He doesn't do it. You see this. He'll let people go 30, 40 years in their rage, or their addiction, or whatever. He won't crash the door down, because he's very gentle with human souls. You have to go there in your soul and open the door from the inside, to ask Jesus to walk in. Together, you take the healing journey.
Alison Cook: Okay. This is to your point about the heart being at the center. Being someone who can really go into my left brain, what I got from this as I was reading your book, and it was so funny even reading, because this is not a book one can read with just their left brain.
It's beautifully constructed–it's an experience in and of itself. You're going into those places as you read. It's beautiful. It's a gift. I was thinking, early in my Christian walk, I theologically knew a lot of knowledge. I loved God. There was an experiential, emotional component, but I experienced it as inviting God in from the outside.
But what you said, that's it. We actually have to go into the broken place itself, which means we have to feel it, which means we have to go into the fear, into the pain, into the wound, into the brokenness, and invite Jesus in from the inside. That's powerful.
John Eldredge: Yes. Stay present to him while he does the healing work, because then he will usually begin asking us questions. He'll often start with young places. He usually asks the young parts, what are you feeling? He gives them a voice because older us has been exiling them for decades.
Alison Cook: Shaming them.
John Eldredge: Yeah. All that. He gives them a voice. What's really precious is the young places typically gravitate to Jesus very quickly. They know he's good and they know he's a healer. He'll ask questions like, where are you? And then they'll say, in my bedroom, or usually in the location the trauma took place, or in the location they used to feel safe.
I'm in the backyard, I'm at school on the playground, on the swings, that kind of thing. Jesus again, in his gentleness, will say, can I come and be with you? Your work is to let Jesus come to the part. And then to watch it from there.
There was this lovely session where he comes to this young little girl, and what Christ always wants to do is remove them from the painful memory. So this is a little bit like the theophostic approach. He paused and he asked the little girl, what would you like to do? They were looking at the house that she had been abused in as a child.
It was very much like that scene from Forrest Gump, but this is a little girl. Jesus says, what would you like to do? She said to him, I want to burn it down. Jesus said, me too. They torched the house, and it was a resolution. That house is ashes now. We're not going back there anymore.
Then what he will typically do is he will take the young places and say, I want to show you where I live, Alison, in the center of your being. They get to come home. They get to come back into an integrated life.
Alison Cook: I love that. It's empowering. There's a healing moment there, in that mystical way, something real happens.
John Eldredge: Yes. None of the mystics called themselves mystics. That was the historical appellation that was given to them later. They call themselves friends of God, or lovers of Jesus. This is normal, folks. This is not wacky taffy. You're simply describing the rest of reality, the unseen realm, the internal world.
It's the rest of reality. It's no less real than your car, your coffee cup, your table. The things we're describing right now are utterly real.
Alison Cook: It is. It's funny because there's a part of me, when we talk about this, that's always tempted to go to Bessel Van der Kolk or some of the science. Because these are stored memories. There is something happening in the body, and there isn't a divide between science and spirituality. I love how you use that word integrated, that Jesus is the integrating center of it.
John Eldredge: Of it all, of the universe. A hundred percent. Yes. He led you to the acting class, knowing that's what your soul needed to come back out of hiding.
Alison Cook: You have this quote that is important, especially for folks who have experienced trauma or who are doing a lot of numbing, doing a lot of distracting, doing a lot of avoiding. You say “Being safe and feeling safe are not the same thing. This difference can really shake the human soul.”
Then you write, “C. S. Lewis wrote, perfect love casts out fear. I love this, but so do several other things. Ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity”. We can create a pseudo-safety. I wonder, John, what you think about this, that sometimes the safety of torching the house with Jesus can feel initially scarier.
Like what is this, or I don't know what this is. I'm used to this little fortress that I've created over here. Do you bump into that with folks?
John Eldredge: All the time. The Old Testament prophets spoke to this all the time. You're going to build for yourselves broken cisterns. You're going to run to Egypt for safety. You're going to run to Babylon for safety. It won't work. The hound of heaven will come after you. In his love, he will allow your false securities to fail.
He will, so that you realize there is only one refuge. There is only one safe place in the universe, and that is in the God who loves you, literally in his presence. Psalm 91, the shelter of the most high.
Alison Cook: You really walk us through this in the book. It's a practice of inviting him from those broken places that we're trying to heal. We can't do it without going into those first.
John Eldredge: Yeah, that's right. Oftentimes it involves, let's be honest, the good old practice of the saints, of repentance. We do have to turn from our other lovers and false comforters and say, this is not working anymore. Forgive me for trying to secure my own rescue. Let's be frank.
There, there is a place for forgiving others that's required. All the old saints will tell you this. You cannot hold resentment in the soul. It will poison you. We have a part to play in allowing Christ to do his healing work with us. We really do.
Repentance from false securities, forgiveness of those who wounded us. This is Irvin Yalom. This is well known, but what's beautiful, gang, is we are simply recovering our own tradition. This is deep, and it goes all the way back into Jewish mysticism and the prophets and the writers of the Psalms.
They are experiencing God. I've seen you in the sanctuary, David says, I've seen you. I've beheld your glory, and he says, there is no love like your love. There is no life like your life. He is speaking out of an encounter that was life changing for him. This is normal, everybody, not weird.
Alison Cook: I love it. This is the everyday work of following Jesus. What would you say, John, to a listener who wants to experience Jesus in this way, longs to have those moments with God, walking with them into some of their hardest memories or into some of their hardest things, but it feels overwhelming? They don't know where to start. How might you encourage the listener?
John Eldredge: I would say, get the book and jump to chapter 11. If all you do is read chapter 11, it will bring you such comfort and show you how to do this. I will literally guide you through how to do this. Because we all need mentors. We all need spiritual mothers and fathers. This is how it works.
You are a spiritual mother to your listeners. You are helping them find the way. Don’t we all need this? I could say, oh, do this right now in five seconds, but that doesn't feel quite true. It doesn't feel fair. I would say, read chapter 11.
Alison Cook: At the end of every chapter, it's so beautiful, you say, let's pause. Let's notice. You speak right to those parts of us very gently. So I would underscore that. I would echo that, and one of the other things for those of you who are listening, who came to the podcast, because you've read Boundaries For Your Soul, you're already primed for this.
When Kim and I were writing, we were like, this is a therapeutic modality for sure, and, it's a spiritual practice. It is inviting Jesus into these parts of our souls. It is a spiritual practice, and you're laying it out so beautifully. You walk people through it very gently in the book.
There was one more quote, John, I loved this, and I wanted to touch on it so the listener could hear it. You're quoting Chesterton, but then you're expanding on it. G. K. Chesterton wrote, “The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland”.
You write that Chesterton was a devout Christian, and British. He wasn't somebody you would think would be talking about fairyland. What he meant by fairyland is the world of wonder and mystery that children accept as real, and which Christians understand to be the beautiful unseen realm, the rest of the kingdom of God.
One foot on earth and one foot in the realm the scriptures call the heavens, which is no less real. That's what we're after here. We're not trying to leave reality. That doesn't work. That's escapism. We're trying to bring a little bit more of heaven into the rough places here on earth. I thought that was so beautiful.
John Eldredge: Because you are an amphibian, friends. You literally have an amphibious nature. You are created to live within the world of bike rides and road trips and dinner with friends, and you inhabit a world filled with angels and the presence of God. When Jesus talks about the river of life, for example, in John 7, it's not a fantasy. It's not fairy dust.
It’s real. This will flow from your inmost being. The rest of reality is this beautiful kingdom that we actually need for our well being. If you take a frog, a true amphibian, and you put it only in water, it dies. If you put it only on land, it dies.
Alison Cook: That's good.
John Eldredge: It needs both realms. So do human beings. You can't live without the presence of God.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. It's a gorgeous book. John, tell people where to go to find the book.
John Eldredge: Go get it where you get your books. I would say, if you like audio books, I read the audio book and I got permission to riff, and so in the audio book, I go off script. I explain things a little more, and then when it's time to pray, I lead you through those. We play some music, and we take you into the experience. So the audio book's really lovely as well.
Alison Cook: I love that. I have two questions I like to ask my guests as we end. John, what would you say to the younger you, the younger place inside of you, from where you are now?
John Eldredge: You’re gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay. There is so much scrambling that we do when we're young. There's so much fear-based striving that is not true. You're gonna be okay. You are deeply loved. You are seen by heaven. You are watched over by myriads of angels right now. You're gonna be okay.
Alison Cook: I love that. What's bringing out the best of you right now?
John Eldredge: Oh, two things. One, my wife, who is marvelous. Two, having grandchildren is the most disruptive experience in the world. Little mystics. There's no clock. There's no calendar. When Poppy is in the room, it's pay attention to me. You don't hurry past me.
No efficiency. There's no pragmatism. None of that works. I am being forced to get down on my hands and knees and be utterly present to this precious little heart and surrender my agenda.
Alison Cook: I love it.
John Eldredge: Holy smokes, man. You don't need spiritual formation. Spend an afternoon with a three year old. You discover all of your sin, all of your addictions, and you will be invited to literally walk at the pace of a three year old down the street. It is so disruptive. It's healing. Oh my gosh, I had no idea how driven I was.
So they're transforming me.
Alison Cook: Cool that we get another shot at that. You get a shot when you're younger, but then you get another shot at slowing down as you have grandkids. That's beautiful. I love it. Thank you. Thanks so much for writing the book and for all that you've done all these years to inspire so many of us. Really grateful for your time.
John Eldredge: Thanks, Alison. Bless your work. Bless what you're offering to people and leading them into. Well done.
Alison Cook: Thank you. I will take that in younger places of my heart.
Today, we're diving deep into something that touches so many of us—why we seek external validation and approval from others, and how healing our younger parts can set us free. If you've ever found yourself people-pleasing, perfecting, over-performing, or seeking approval from others, this episode is for you.
We’ll explore:
✔️ Why younger parts of us drive our overfunctioning tendencies
✔️ How unmet childhood needs shape our patterns of guilt and perfectionism
✔️ The difference between external validation and true inner security
✔️ My own journey of reconnecting with an 8-year-old part of me (and how it changed everything)
✔️ Simple, practical ways you can start reparenting your younger self today
Whether you're longing for more joy, play, and vitality—or you're ready to step off the hamster wheel of approval-seeking—this episode will give you tools to start reconnecting with the young parts of you that have been waiting for your attention.
Resources:
- Episode 138: Breaking Free from Overfunctioning—Discover the Hidden Costs of Always Being 'The Responsible One’
- Episode 140: If You Struggle with Guilt and Second-Guessing Yourself, This Will Set You Free – How to Stop Blaming Yourself for Things That Aren’t Your Fault
- Boundaries For Your Soul Series on Youtube
- The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
- Matthew 19:14
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 6: Do I Really Have an Inner Child? What It Means to Reparent Yourself
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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 thrilled you're here this week. It's again, just me today. I had some thoughts that I wanted to share with you. They are related to what we discussed in Episode 138, when we explored how over-functioning can stem from our unmet needs and unresolved emotions. These are often rooted in patterns going all the way back to childhood.
Then we discussed in Episode 140 about how false guilt can develop as a way to try to manage our own feelings of helplessness or even sorrow for things that are actually not our responsibility. Both overfunctioning and false guilt are connected to parts of us that learned how to cope by over focusing on others, taking more than our fair share of responsibility.
All of that activity that we do to over-focus on others, to take a lot of responsibility, it’s almost always a cue that there's a young part of us that needs our attention. Today that's what I want to focus on. I want to focus on how we begin to locate and discover these young parts of us.
Once they receive the care and parenting and attention and validation that they needed but never got, that we are now capable of giving them, what it does is it helps soften all of that overfunctioning, all of that perfecting, all of that performing, all of that taking responsibility for things that weren't ours to take responsibility for in the beginning to begin with.
As we begin to learn how to find and locate and care for these young parts inside of us, it shifts how we show up in the world around us with other people. So today we're going to talk about how to reconnect to these young parts of yourself and how, when you do that, it can not only reduce some of our compulsive responsibility taking, our compulsive perfectionism, our compulsive pleasing, our compulsive guilt tripping and self-blame, but also can enrich our inner lives with a renewed sense of wonder and vitality and joy.
These young parts of us, that's what they're all about. Once we discover them and re-parent them, they just bring a wonderful source of playfulness and light. That is what I want to give us just a glimpse of today. To get started, I want to share with you a story recently that happened to me where I was able to reconnect to this eight year old part of me, this young girl.
I've done some of this work for a while, so I kind of have a sense of this part of me and what it feels like when she's active inside of me. But boy, I didn't realize how much I had been exiling her as a result of a lot of overfunctioning, a lot of taking responsibility for things that were not mine to take.
It all started with a trip that my husband had to take for work and invited me to go on with him. It was a trip to London. To be honest, I know this is going to sound crazy, but there was a sort of curmudgeonly overfunctioning part of me that was like, you shouldn't go, you've got too much responsibility. There are too many people who rely on you. You've got too much work to do. That would be really selfish to go on this trip.
It’s this guilt tripping part of me. Gosh, the truth is, there was no reason I couldn't take some time away to go on this trip. I hadn't been to London in maybe 25 years, and I was barely there when I was about 18.
So this was sort of a dream, to be able to do this, and those kind of curmudgeonly parts of me almost weren't going to let me do it. Thankfully, I didn't listen to them. I went on the trip and the truth is, I did have the freedom to go. I'm basically an empty nester. While yes, there are people who rely on me, they will be fine without me.
So I did that work inside my soul. I went on the trip. So imagine, I'm over there. I was kind of trying to figure out, what does this feel like, to be so far away? What do I think about this? One day my husband was doing work and I took a walk down. If you've ever been in London, this really buzzy kind of cool street, it's called Regent street.
There are lots of stores and lots of people and lots of old buildings, and even some cobblestone streets where it's this kind of old world feeling. I was actually walking toward Hyde park, which is close to Kensington Palace. I was kind of taking it all in and trying to figure out, what do I think about all this? How do I even feel about all this? What is happening?
It was just a walk. That's all I was doing was taking a walk. And I began to notice just this sense of almost overwhelming energy, kind of like when you're learning how to ride a bike, like the little kid energy of, I can't believe I'm doing this. I can't believe I'm here. I can't believe we're walking down the streets of London! I need someone to know about this.
That was sort of the overwhelming feeling. I need someone to know about this. Part of me was like, well, what does that even mean? I can't really pick up the phone and call someone because there's a huge time difference. I'm not even sure my phone works here. I don't really want to post on social media because to be honest, I kind of want to be in the moment and be enjoying this.
So it was very confusing to me, this sort of energy of, I need someone to know about how exciting this is. It was, again, this young feeling inside of me. Again, I've been doing this work for a while. So I used these tools, these skills, that I'm constantly trying to teach you about. I decided to get curious about it because again, that overwhelming urge didn't really make rational sense.
I was like, can't I just enjoy this walk? Why do I need to tell somebody? Why do I need to shout it from the rooftops? I felt the energy where it’s like, I need to shout it from the rooftops that this is what's happening. And yet I'm just walking down the street in London, and that didn't really make sense to me. So I decided to get curious about it.
Sure enough, I started to notice this feeling. This overwhelming energy in my body began to feel like a young eight year old part of me. The minute I began to do what we call “differentiate” from her, I realized she wanted me to know about this amazing trip. She didn't need anybody else.
The minute I began to notice her and say, this is exciting, this is amazing, adult me began to give this young part of me that internal validation, it's almost like she calmed down inside my body. It's as if a young little child, this young little part of me, crawled up on my shoulders and could see the sights even better as we're walking down the street.
I know this can sound kind of crazy, but it's real. Imagine your own child, crawling up and just being so excited to see everything. It was like she was with me, and suddenly that urge to tell somebody, to externalize, to get some sort of external validation for what was happening left, because I was there.
I was there, present with this part of myself, noticing with her, yes, this is amazing. I'm so thrilled that we are here. Suddenly it became almost a spiritual practice. Not only am I so thrilled that we're here, there's a sort of gratitude welling up in my soul. I'm giving thanks to God for the joy and wonder of this walk down a random street in London.
Suddenly, there we are, a trio. This young eight year old part of me filled with awe, filled with wonder. There's me there, validating that as an adult, saying yes, this is really, really cool. And, God the Father is there, just delighting in our delight and wonder and sheer joy at this experience, which is the heart of gratitude.
Oh, this is a good gift, God. I am fully present to it right here with God, with me and with this young part of myself. There was this beautiful family with God, with adult me, and this young part of sheer joy inside of me, and man, this was a profound moment that occurred literally just in a walk down a street.
Now, granted, it was a really cool street, but I will tell you, you do not have to go all the way to London to have an experience like this. Since reconnecting to this part of me, I begin to notice her everywhere. I noticed her driving to my local YMCA the other day. I reconnected to her, and now she's a part of me that I've begun to notice and attune to, so that she can bring some of that vitality to me in other contexts.
This experience really made me reflect on and think about how to first of all understand these young parts of us, and why we tend to exile them, shove them aside, and lose contact with them. This is a little bit about what I think Jesus was saying when the disciples were trying to shove the children away from him.
Jesus said, no, no, let the children come. There's something about that childlike heart that exists inside of all of us that is precious to God, and yet parts of us that kind of feel curmudgeonly and have lost that sense of childlike wonder try to shove these parts of us aside. Why do we do that?
Then I want to leave you today with just a couple of practical ways you can begin to reconnect with these young parts inside of you, not only to restore that beautiful internal connection with these young parts, but also to tap into all that they have to offer us.
So let's talk about understanding these young parts. What are they? Where do they come from? Well, if you think about the Internal Family Systems Model of Therapy, IFS, which we talk about a lot on the podcast, you can go back and check out some older episodes of the podcast if you want to get more of a deep dive into the model.
I did a whole series called Boundaries For Your Soul. So if you go to my website, dralisoncook.com/podcast, and look in the search bar for “boundaries for your soul” or “internal family systems”, you will find those episodes. It's a wonderful way of understanding your internal world, these different parts of your own soul.
But one of the types of parts that this model talks about are these young parts of us. These are the parts of us that carry our youngest memories, our deepest vulnerabilities, our deepest curiosities. They also often carry some of our deepest fears, some of our deepest heartaches, from when we were wounded when we were young.
So they carry a lot on our behalf in many ways. They're sort of the blueprint for how we relate to the world and to ourselves. So in the context of over-functioning, these young parts often represent unmet needs for care or attention, unmet longings, which we often attempt to fulfill by taking care of others excessively or simply overfocusing on others.
We might look constantly for external validation from other people, looking for that validation externally versus finding and discovering the joy of that deep down contentment within our own souls.
This battle of scaling back the overfunctioning, the hyper-responsibility, is a two-front war, if you think about it. On one hand, we're trying to curb that impulse to take responsibility for others that is not ours to take. We're trying to scale that back.
On the other side of it, we're trying to reconnect to that young part inside of us that actually does need our care and attention. If you think about my example of that story where that over-responsible part of me was like, I can't take a trip, I've got too many people to care for, I had to scale that back and give myself the gift of a vacation, a break.
Then that allowed that young part of me a window to make herself known to me, that she wanted my attention. It opened up the other side of it, that I could pull her in closer and give her some of that care that I'm so often busy giving out to other people.
I think so often about many of you who are parents out there, where it's so easy to fixate on all the needs of all your kids. It almost feels overwhelming to think, man, I've got a young child inside of me who also needs my care and attention. There's a young eight year old inside of me who I have to find a way to create some space for, and when I can give that young part of me some care and attention, I promise you, we all become far better parents to our children in real life.
I'm going to give you some practical ways to make space for her. But that's part of this process of beginning to heal from some of that over-functioning, from some of that incessant guilt tripping, from some of that taking so much responsibility for other people, from some of that perfectionism, where we're trying to be perfect for others, instead of learning to pull in closer those young ones inside of us who just want our undivided attention in sometimes very random, peculiar seeming ways.
These parts of us sometimes will lure us into an old bookstore where we find an old book that makes some part of us feel alive. They take us on what can feel like side trips and bunny trails. But really, they're trying to invite us back into some wonder and play in our own lives apart from other people.
So why do we push these young parts aside, if they're such a source of wonder and awe and vibrancy and curiosity and playfulness? Why would we push these parts of us aside?
Well, these are survival strategies that other parts of us have learned, to cope in the world. These protective parts of us that want to overfunction, that want to perfect, that want to perform, think that that's our best strategy for survival, for staying connected with others.
They mistakenly seek that external validation from others when what we really need is that inner witnessing, that inner validation, of I am so connected deep within myself with God and with these different parts of me, that I could not feel more full, more vital, more alive inside my own soul.
Yes, while it would be lovely if someone also externally said, that's really cool, if they do, great, but if they don't, I am also okay. That is so often the piece that we're missing. It's great to get external validation. It's great to get approval from others. It's great to get an “attaboy” from a boss.
It's wonderful when our kids or our parents or a spouse say, wow, you did a great job, or thank you, but if we're dependent on that from them, we're going to be on a hamster wheel constantly trying to get their approval, when the more important, deeper, more satisfying road to peace and contentment and joy is from finding that within ourselves.
So when these young parts were never fully parented or seen or securely attached, they tend to drive us to seek fulfillment or validation or approval in other people or places that are never ultimately going to fulfill them or approve them or validate them. We can never fully get that from other people.
But as you learn to reconnect to these young parts of you and become that wise inner parent, that wise loving adult that they so longed for all along in partnership with God, there's a co-parent, there's adult you and God, who come alongside these young parts of us, healing them and restoring that sense of connection.
You create this incredible reservoir of inner safety, of inner security, of inner validation, that is an absolute game changer as you walk through this life. As you do this work, when you get external validation, it's great. You're grateful for it.
If someone says, thank you, if your kids tell you how much you mean to them, or if your spouse really sees you in a certain way, it's wonderful. It's a bonus, but you don't need it so much anymore, because you have learned the joy of finding that within your own inner family.
There are three things that these young parts of us need that we are often not in touch with. Because we are not able to meet their needs, they often drive us to get these needs met externally. Here are the three needs that these young parts have.
Number one, they need connection. They need to feel connected. Often they've been exiled, where they feel lonely and isolated and unseen and invisible. In my case, walking down that street right in London, that part of me was like, I need someone else to see this. It's as if that part of me felt like if no one else saw what was happening, it wouldn't be real.
The minute I could connect to that young part of me, it's like my whole system relaxed. They have a need for connection. Many of them hold attachment wounds, where they didn't feel seen at critical moments, so they're searching for someone, anyone, out there to validate them.
Sometimes these young parts will want that external validation that they're making the right decision. I need someone else to tell me that I'm doing the right thing. That is often a way these young parts show up. I've got this really big, hard, scary decision to make. I need someone else to tell me it's the right thing.
When other parts of us are like, this is my decision to make. I've got to figure out how to make it, that's a cue that there's a young part of you looking for external validation.
Sometimes these young parts search for validation for their feelings. Instead of being able to feel what we feel internally, regardless of whether someone else fully gets it, we search for someone else to say, yes, you should be feeling sad. We search for someone else to validate our feelings.
Now, listen, it's wonderful when a friend, a spouse, a parent, validates our feelings. Also, it is as wonderful, if not more wonderful, when we can learn to witness and honor these feelings inside of ourselves.
Number two, these young parts of us need to feel safe and secure. They are very fearful. They're fearful of rejection. They're fearful of being cut off from other people. So again, when we are not aware of their fears, these parts of us can look for external sources to make them feel safe or secure instead of learning how to find that safety within our own souls.
Again, we do need to feel safe with other people. Also, sometimes other people let us down. Sometimes other people reject us, turn us down, say no, and walk away from us. While that hurts, when we learn to be present for these young parts of our souls and we parent them through that pain and say yes, this is hard and no, you did not deserve that cruel treatment, but I am with you and I will never leave you and God is with you and God will never leave you, we develop a sort of internal security that is not dependent on the whims and on the sometimes erratic behavior of even the best of other people, let alone cruel other people.
These parts of us need to feel safe and secure, and they need most of all, to feel safe and secure inside of us, even when other people let us down.
Number three, these young parts of us need to experience joy and spontaneity and play and curiosity. They do not do well in the context of shame or judgment and criticism. They just wilt like little flowers on a vine. They light up in the presence of unconditional love, in the presence of delight, the delight of the father and the delight of our own selves.
Again, I really love this co-parenting model where we have God, the father, and we have our adult selves, who come alongside these young parts. These young parts of us were often shamed and they carry those burdens, so they need to learn that it is not shameful to show us the things that bring them joy, that bring them delight.
It felt kind of weird to me, when I'm walking down this random street in London, to just be filled with this joy. I'm like, why am I so delighted? But the minute I stopped shaming myself and just let that joy waft over me, I became aware of a young part of me that just delights in the wonder of the fact that I was walking down a block that reminded me of books I had read as a child, those Noelle Streitfeld books about dancing shoes and ballet shoes.
It was like all these young parts of me were lit up with joy. I decided to go with it instead of trying to shut it down. These young parts thrive when we let them play and create and find freedom to explore the world with wonder, when we don't try to exile them out of embarrassment.
When their needs are suppressed, we might find ourselves feeling stifled or joyless. When we stifle these young parts of ourselves, they'll go seeking out a sort of adventure in maybe a relationship that is exciting, but that isn't actually healthy for us. Maybe it's got a lot of drama, but it's ultimately not healthy for us.
Or they'll seek it out in other ways. But when we engage these young parts in activities that spark genuine happiness and allow them space to be playful, we help heal and integrate these parts into our adult lives.
So again, these young parts of us, they want connection, they need safety, and they need to feel a sense of wonder and play and joy.
When you begin to understand the needs of these young parts of you, you can begin to cultivate habits and rhythms and spaces where you can reconnect with them intentionally and begin to heal some of that connection internally, so these parts of you feel seen and validated from you. They begin to get those needs met in healthier ways.
I want to close today's episode with a couple of really practical ways that you can begin to re-engage these young parts of you. Now, I do want to give this one caveat–Aundi Kolber and I touched on this in last week's episode, Episode 141, but sometimes if there's a deep reservoir of pain, reconnecting with these young parts can feel overwhelming because there's a lot that they're holding.
If in doing some of these things, you notice, whoa, this feels overwhelming, or, oh, this feels like too much, notice that. That is a cue that maybe there's a backlog of pain there. Maybe there's a Pandora's box there that you need to get professional help with, perhaps a therapist or a trusted advisor, so that you're not taking that journey alone.
Here are four ways that you could begin to reconnect with the young parts of yourself.
Number one, this I got from the wonderful Julia Cameron who wrote a beautiful book called The Artist's Way. I highly recommend it as a way to reconnect with these young parts. But she calls it taking yourself on a date each week. What if you could take yourself on a date and notice what would genuinely feel fun to you?
Even if you only have a half an hour, even if you only have an hour, what would genuinely feel fun? Is it a walk through a park? Is it a jump in a pond or in a pool at the local YMCA? Is it taking a run? Is it listening to a particular song that makes you feel a certain way?
The point of this exercise is to simply notice, if I could take myself on a date, this young part of me on a date, what would she want to do? Let her take you down that rabbit trail. Don't analyze it. Don't try to make it rational. Just notice what would kind of feel fun. Maybe I want to go into the town library and pull out some old books that I used to love, and just kind of indulge that part of me that used to love reading certain kids books.
It could be that simple. This does not have to be lofty, but think about what would you do if you took younger you on an excursion once a week. It doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be expensive. It doesn't have to take a lot of time. Notice what would feel fun to you.
Number two is building in some time for creativity in your week, maybe letting yourself draw without structure, without rules, without pressure on an outcome. Just draw or play with clay or even dance freely to your favorite music. These kinds of unstructured creative activities allow our young parts to express themselves in sometimes surprising ways. I'm going to just draw for 20 minutes and see what comes out of me. You begin to kind of tap into those young parts inside of you.
Number three is creating comfort rituals. Now, many of us do this already, but I mean doing this with intention. Establishing a ritual that is soothing and comforting, such as rocking yourself in a rocking chair with a blanket that you love, or snuggling up in the sunshine with a soft blanket, maybe with pets if you have them.
Notice what that feels like to the young part of you. Again, many of us have these rituals already, but we're not necessarily doing them while mindful that this is something we're doing to nurture an eight year old us. When I retreat to my favorite couch at night and I pull up my blanket and I feel that feeling of, this is my moment, no matter how short it is, I'm trying to be better about becoming aware that I'm doing this for her.
I'm doing this for eight year old me. I've spent much of the day taking care of other people. This is a moment where I'm taking care of this young child inside of me. There's a way in which, when I do that mindfully and intentionally, some new details come to mind. Oh, she really does like that blanket, not this blanket.
Oh, she loves this rocking motion, or actually she likes that chair, not this chair. You begin to be really specific about this young part of you and her needs for comfort and for feeling safe and secure.
Lastly, and this is one that can conjure up some painful emotions initially, but it can be so revealing, is to find a photo of yourself from when you were young, maybe eight years old, seven years old, nine years old, just a photo that kind of speaks to you and put it up somewhere.
Notice how you feel toward the young person in that photo. Notice if you feel any criticism or shame or negative feelings. Those are coming from other parts of you, because this younger version of you is precious. She is precious. There is no other way to behold her but with pure wonder.
That is how God beholds her and that is how you, when you are living from that wise adult place inside of you, can learn to behold her. So no matter what you notice when you take a look at that image, just pay attention to that and see if you can connect to that younger part of you through that image with compassion, with curiosity, with even a sense of that love or that joy in your heart.
If you can't, that's okay. Just notice that too. That's a cue that there might be a little bit more work to do because there's some shame there. There are some wounds there, where you've been disconnected from this younger version of you, and that's okay. That's a journey you can take to heal.
Looking at that picture, begin to notice what it feels like to reconnect to her. You can imagine how it feels when you look at pictures of your own children and the love that you feel in your heart toward your children in real life, if you have them–that joy that you feel when you look at them and, and that parental affection that wells up when you see photos and images of your children when they were younger.
If you don't have children, if you have a niece or a nephew or a family member or a friend, and you see that image of them as a child, just the joy that you feel to behold them–that's what we want to feel when we connect with these younger parts of ourselves. They are worthy of that.
That is how God sees and experiences and beholds these young parts of you he adores. Your 8-year-old self, he sees her as beautiful. He sees this young one inside of you as precious. He says, I want her to draw near, and you can begin to see her that way too.
So notice what it feels like to connect to her through that photo and see if you can begin to build that connection with her that way.
When you engage in these activities, like taking yourself on a special date, a special excursion, indulging in playful creativity, establishing a really specific comfort ritual, or really looking at an image of yourself at a younger age with eyes of love and compassion, you are consciously and intentionally developing that connection with that younger part of you.
You're fostering a healing environment where that younger part of you can begin to thrive and trust that you are the adult in the room, and that you have what it takes to meet her needs. You have what it takes to care for her, to nurture her, to honor her, to protect her, to comfort her.
No matter what happens in your external world with your relationships around you, you have what it takes to show up for her.
Reconnecting with these young parts of ourselves isn't about indulging in foolishness or childlike antics. Instead, it is a crucial part of integrating these parts with our adult selves. We need these young parts of us to be reunited with our internal families. As we scale back on over-functioning for others and shift even a little bit inside ourselves to caring for the young one within us, we become more whole, more vital, and more vibrant.
We become better equipped to show up in our adult lives. These young parts of us that lure us to seek external validation, external approval, learn that they have a resource inside of you that is far better equipped to help meet those needs in partnership with God than anyone else is.
You begin to live your life with more authenticity, with healthier boundaries in your relationships, with realistic expectations of other people, where you are delighted when other people get you and see you and honor you, but you are also not rocked when they disappoint you and don't get you and even turn away from you.
Because you know your worth, your value, and your belovedness at the deepest parts of your being. Remember Jesus' words found in Matthew 19:14: “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these”.
That little young child inside of you is precious and she is worth your efforts to find her, to see her, and to bring her back into a beautiful, vital relationship inside your internal family.
In this unmissable bonus episode, Dr. Alison chats with Carlos Whittaker, best-selling author and podcast host, about his life-changing experience of going screen-free for seven weeks.
Immersing himself in the world of monks and Amish farmers, Carlos took a bold step away from the digital grind to reclaim his sense of connection with God, his community, and himself.
Tune in to discover the profound life lessons Carlos learned from his digital detox, and how you, too, can find the simple joys of human connection in your daily life. You'll leave this episode inspired to make meaningful changes that enhance your connections with those around you!
Resources:
- Reconnected: How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human by Carlos Whittaker
- Other books by Carlos:
- ReconnectedBook.com
- The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Episode 136: Sacred Attachment—Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love with Michael John Cusick
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 36: An Update on My Social Media Detox & How to Create Boundaries With Toxic Distractions, Numbing, & Unhealthy Coping Tactics
Thanks to our sponsors:
- 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. Welcome to this week's bonus episode of The Best of You Podcast. I want to try something new over the next few months. As we've entered into 2025, I've thought a lot about the podcast and where I want to go with it.
I decided I want to bring you some bonus conversations that delve even deeper into some of the topics that resonate with you. So many of you have shared how this podcast has become a bit of a touchstone or a refuge in your week, a space to pause and feel seen and encouraged, and that feedback really means the world to me.
It's why in this new year, I'm committed to offering content that continues to encourage and empower and invite every single one of us on this journey of healing, on this journey of becoming even more of our true selves in God.
There's never been a time where that is more important for each and every one of us where we stay focused on this work of inviting God into every single part of who we are, so that we continue to grow and heal and become wise and radiate that goodness and wisdom and strength into the world around us.
Today, we're going to dive into a unique spin on this idea of a digital detox. Most of us struggle with our phones, with our screens, how to help our kids with their phones and their screens. There's no surprise that that's a hot topic in many bestselling books and in the media, but today's guest has a unique spin on the topic that really meant a lot to me.
I really enjoyed his new book, and I wanted to have him on the podcast to talk about this experiment that he did. The book is called Reconnected and it's by Carlos Whittaker. Carlos is a new friend of mine. Though I've followed him on Instagram for a while now, along with his Instafamilia, I read his new book over the Christmas holiday.
I was actually sick. We were on a family ski vacation, and while I was stuck inside the lodge, unable to join my family on the slopes, I read this book, and it really spoke to me. We'll get into more of why it's a unique spin on this topic in today's episode. But let me read you the subtitle because it'll give you a great teaser of how unique this project is.
The subtitle of Reconnected is “How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human”. I really loved it. What I find so compelling about the book is that it's not about trying to convince us to get off our phones or spend less time on the screens, or even give us sort of practical steps on how to do those things.
Instead, Carlos is drawing us into a story that creates a longing for something more–for a richer, deeper way of life that we tend to forget, or at least set aside, because the screens are so compelling and quickly draw us in. Back in Episode 136, I talked about the power of imagination with Michael Cusick and how envisioning a different life or a better way of being can catalyze real change in our own current circumstances.
Carlos's book really helped do that for me in this realm of thinking about technology and screens. It helped me re-imagine what life beyond screens can look like.
If you're not familiar with Carlos Whittaker, he's an author, a speaker, and a storyteller who has built his career creating authentic, meaningful moments, both online and in person. You may have come across him during the pandemic. That's when I came across his work, when he became a source of wisdom, humor, and grace-filled conversations about some of the hard issues we are all navigating.
Carlos has an incredible gift for drawing people in and talking about difficult topics in a way that's both hopeful and encouraging. He's the author of several books, including the bestselling Kill the Spider and Enter Wild. His latest book, Reconnected, is a USA Today bestseller that takes readers on a journey through seven weeks without screens of any kind.
In our conversation today, Carlos shares the story behind this bold experiment. I loved his answer when I asked him at the very end of the episode, what was it like for you to come back online after these seven weeks away?
There's a lot of really, really great gems in this episode today. I'm so excited to bring you my conversation with Carlos Whittaker.
***
Alison Cook: Carlos. I came across your work in 2020 when we were all in the pandemic, on our phones, on Instagram. I really loved what you were doing. I have a very complicated relationship with social media.
To this day, you're creating authentic, beautiful moments. So this is what you do. This is your livelihood. It's your vocation, it seems like you enjoy it. There's a joy about it, which is why I like following you. It doesn't feel forced. And then even you have this moment where you're like, I am here seven hours of every day. I have to do something. Something has to change. Tell us about that.
Carlos: Yeah. Yeah. It is so weird whenever anybody asks me, what do you do for a living? I can say I'm an author because I have written a lot of books and I'm a speaker and I talk about my books, but what I really do every day is I look at my phone and talk to it.
And then I hit send and it whooshes off somewhere and lands on some server somewhere that sends it to this guy and then to everyone else's phones. Like you said, I love this kind of accidental career path that I've landed on, where I talk to people every day.
2020 was probably the year for me that my Instagram really exploded and people started coming to listen. I was talking about a lot of hard things that we were going through. I tried to talk about those things in grace-filled ways.
I felt like people could find a new friend, like I've got this kind of, I don't know, I haven't ever been able to pinpoint this, but people trust me very quickly, they rapidly come to trust me, and then I'm their buddy. Like oh, Carlos is my friend. So if I meet someone in a book line that follows me on Instagram, they will literally look at their friend and go, so this is my friend Carlos.
And then they catch themselves saying that and they're like, I know we've never met and you don't know me, but you're my friend. So all of that to say, yes, I love it and I love that and I love everything that social media and screens have allowed me to do.
So 2020 happens and we're all really on it. Everyone's got a podcast, everybody's doing Insta lives. We're all there. 2021, I'm doing it more and more. And then it was early 2022 when I got that notification that comes across my screen that we all get on Sundays, unless you turned it off. I learned recently that you can turn that off.
But it said that I was averaging seven hours and 23 minutes a day on my screen, on my phone. I was sitting in church. I remember being like, ooh, what? I'd seen that number many times, but for some reason in that moment I was like, wait a second. How many hours am I awake? Let me do a little bit of math.
So I started doing my math, which I'm not very good at, but that kind of equaled 49 hours a week. I was like, whoa. That's two full awake and sleepy times that I'm staring at this thing. Then I kept doing the math. It was close to a hundred days a year. Then I was like, if I live to be 80 something, I'll lose 12 years or I can't remember how many years of my life, and that was when I said, I have to do something.
No matter how much I love doing social media, no matter how much good I see happening and there's been so much good that has happened on my account, this can not go on. There's no way I was created as a human with some semblance of a soul in me to do this.
It became the journey of what am I going to do? I read a phone detox book and I read all these things. I started putting rules in place and I set up screen times. None of it worked. I was like, I'm going to have to go all in. I asked anyone that's tried to fix it with all the little things that we try to fix it with, how's it going?
And nobody has figured it out yet. So I was like, that's it. I'm going rogue. I'm going completely offline for two months. And it was a few days short of two months. I did not look at a screen for almost seven and a half weeks. I didn't look at an Apple watch, an iPhone, a laptop, a TV, nothing. I didn't consume anything.
I lived with monks and I lived with Amish farmers and I got my brain scanned by a neurologist before and after. I said, I'm going to make this a thing. And so it became a thing. That's where the book you're reading, Reconnected: How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human, came from.
Alison Cook: Okay. There’s so much that I love here. You are a storyteller and I love how you turned this experiment into a story about how God works with us. It's like there's a nudge–something's got to give, something's got to change, and then the storyteller creates a story about it.
It's such a good book and it draws you in with the story. The other thing that is really beautiful, and I want to get into this, Carlos, is it really becomes about what you experienced in these two places, and we forget about the devices.
Carlos: Yeah, I'm so grateful you even said that, because that's what I'm trying to tell people that maybe don't know about the book or aren’t interested– this isn't even about a phone. It is for three days out of 7.5 weeks, and then day four to the end, it wasn't even about that.
There's already so much good data and research done on what phones are doing to us. I didn't need to write that book. What it quickly turned into is not why phones are bad, but why it's so beautiful on the other side. Yes, that is where the stories in this book aren't necessarily teaching us how to not be on our phone.
They're reminding us of all these beautiful things that we used to do before the phones. Now, because I'm doing those things, I'm on my phone less. I literally haven't set up any rules. I don't have screen time on my phone. I've fallen back in love with all the things I learned at the monastery, all the things I learned with the Amish.
Once you taste what life is like, once you taste that goodness, once you taste a good steak, you don't want to have the sizzler steak anymore. You're like, oh, why would I want to go do that? So yes, I'm glad that you felt that because I tried to write a book that wasn't shaming people into getting off their phones. It was more about making people excited about what's on the other side of them.
Alison Cook: A hundred percent. That is what I was so drawn into. Again, that word longing. There was a longing. Oh, I want this. This is so good. It's not, “I don't need my phone”. I was thinking back to things I used to do as a kid.
I live now back in Wyoming, which is where I grew up. It's very rural and I'll try to explain to my young adult kids the joy of cruising Main. And they cannot understand it, Carlos. They're like, why? I'm like, we didn't have phones. We couldn't text each other. We didn't know where people were. So we had to drive up and down to find people.
And you were delighted when you found people and you pulled over and you had this impromptu get-together. They just don't get it. So I was thinking about all those things, and that was not what you were talking about, but it was reminding me.
So let's talk about it. Start with the Benedictine months. You get dropped off for two weeks. Tell us a little bit about what that was like.
Carlos: So I'm on my way there. I'm flying there. I'm in the car with my friend Brian, I'd already gotten my brain scanned, and so now I'm actually starting to feel as we're getting closer, literal physical symptoms of anxiety. My heart was palpitating. I was like, oh my God, am I having a heart attack? What's happening?
The closer I got, the more I couldn't swallow. I get there and they lead me up to father Patrick. He leads me up to my tiny little hermitage at the top of the hill, overlooking the monastery. My friend Brian helps me with my bags and I'll never forget. We go back down and he gets in my car. He takes my phone and takes my backpack, takes my laptop, takes out everything and he’s like, all right, dude I'll see you in two weeks.
I was like, what? And then he left me and I still haven't felt this feeling since that moment. I don't know what the feeling is, it's the, “you're dropped off on a deserted island and someone drives away and you have no way of getting off of it”. So then all of these massive realizations start hitting me.
Immediately, within two minutes, I reach into my pocket to grab my phone and it's not there. I go back up to my little hermitage and so begins the worst three days of the whole experiment. Those first three days were terrifying. They were lonely. The Benedictines spent a lot of time in silence. I was actually spending the first three days, about 23 hours of my 24 hours, in silence.
I know introverts hear about this and introverts are like, oh, I would love to spend 23 hours that way. But I don't know that you would, except for maybe if you're a monk that's really called into that. I had a lot of physical manifestations, like heart palpitations, night sweats, I couldn't sleep, I was tossing and turning, tightness in my chest, and it was rough those first few days.
I thought I was actually getting sick, like I thought I was getting the flu. Come to find out, after talking to my doctor when I got back, I was coming off of this drug and detoxing. So those first few days of detoxing from what I was consuming on my phone screen were horrible, but then it was day four.
I'll never forget, Alison, waking up, because for three days it felt like, the only way I can describe it is like if anyone has asthma that's listening to your show and you can feel an asthma attack coming on, and then you can't breathe for a minute but then you take a hit of the inhaler and then suddenly you go from not being able to breathe to whoa.
And day four felt like I took a hit of an inhaler and I could breathe for the first time. It felt like an elephant stepped off my chest. It was the realization of, wait a second, this is maybe how we were meant to be. This, the way I'm breathing, the deepness, the stillness, the slowness, all of these things, the way these Benedictines are living, it took a few days, but when I finally got there, oh my goodness, I got there, and it was an incredible few weeks.
Alison Cook: That's amazing. It reminds me when you describe it a little bit of The Last Battle, the last book in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis. If you've never read it, it's one of the most beautiful metaphors for what it's like to step into what we were meant for. We have so many bad cliches for heaven or eternity, but it's stepping into what we were meant for.
It's stepping out of this thing that we don't even realize is holding us back. When you go through that door, what you were describing, it's, whoa, this is the water in which I was meant to swim.
Carlos: Yes. I use the asthma example because literally when I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, I don't know, 15 years ago, I never had asthma in my life and we moved to middle Tennessee, I'll never forget, my wife after a few weeks was like, hey babe, you're wheezing every night. You're wheezing.
I was like, what do you mean? I feel fine. I'm not wheezing. She's like no, it sounds like you're not breathing. I was like, I'm fine. She says, go to an allergist. So I went to an allergist. I've been living here for a month now, but he had me blow into a tube and he's like, yeah, man, you're only using 60 percent of your lung capacity.
I was like, what? And he goes, yeah, the problem is, you're so used to it. You don't even know you're not breathing. So then he gave me an inhaler and after that first hit, I went from 60 to 100, and it was that narnia feeling you're talking about.
It was like, this is breathing. Oh, wait a second. I didn't even know I was suffocating before.
Alison Cook: Amazing. So you step into it then for these next two weeks, and you talk in the book about solitude and wonder. I loved that wrestling. Give us some highlights of some of that new awareness.
Carlos: Yes. I was living them. The first really cool realization that happened a few days in was I was sitting in the chapel. You would pray with the monk six times a day. It was a lot of chanting in Latin and a lot of praying very slowly. Those first few days, actually, I was really bored.
I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe they do this every day. I began to wonder why they do this six times a day. That's weird. I remember when I thought that, I tried to pull my phone out and Google it. All of a sudden I was hit with this realization–oh, I guess I'm going to have to wonder. This is weird.
Wait a second. Maybe God created us to not know everything. Maybe we're supposed to wonder as much as we're supposed to know. When I tried to pull out my phone, which wasn't there, the Benedictines were having this time of grand silence. So they have 14 straight hours where you can't talk.
This was during the grand silence, so I couldn't even ask one of the monks why they do this six times a day. I was stuck wondering. So that began seven weeks of me wondering about a lot.
Alison Cook: It was so relatable how quick we are to punch questions into our phones. Now we have ChatGPT, so it's even more instant.
Carlos: I know, I call Google the wonder killer, because what happens is when we're in a group, you're at lunch and someone's like, oh man, I wonder what…everyone pulls their phones out and your wondering is killed within half a second. For me, wondering became this thing that was annoying at the beginning, but then it almost became like a spiritual discipline.
It became this thing that I loved to do, because wondering led me to wonder. The wondering and wonder are two different things. I'm talking about wondering, not knowing, and having to think and question. And then wonder, the grandness of awe.
Those two are so closely connected, but people have lost their awe and wonder, because we know too much. We were never created, I believe, to know as much as we know. Wondering and wonder was one of the first things that I got reacquainted with.
It's funny because when I got back from this experiment, I did two weeks with the monks, two weeks with the Amish, and then three weeks with my family with no screens. Whenever I would have a question, or someone would have a question, and someone would pull their phone out, I was like no. I don't want to know the answer. I want to wonder.
Now it's funny because my kids, if I pull my phone out to answer a question or something, my kids are always like, nope, dad, we're going to wonder. We're not going to know. Wondering and savoring is slowly becoming a lost art. We get everything so quickly. There's Amazon Prime Now, which means you get it within two hours to your front door.
We take our coffee to go. Everything is rushed and I think, oh, what I got to experience with the slowness of living with these monks, is I got to savor. I was drinking Dunkin Donuts coffee. I talk about this in the book, the breakfast blend. I'm, I consider myself a coffee connoisseur. I know the best pour over coffee in Nashville, Tennessee.
I know the baristas. My palate is refined for coffee. But my Dunkin Donuts breakfast blend tasted better than any cup of coffee I'd ever had in Nashville, Tennessee. Why? Because I was moving slow enough to actually really taste it. I didn't have Twitter on my phone as I was scrolling and drinking my coffee.
No, I was drinking my coffee. Savoring is something that we've lost. It's another lost art of being human. When I was with the Benedictines, I didn't have my phone to look down to as I was walking the campus, as I was walking the Abbey grounds.
I would see things and notice things that if I had my phone in my pocket, I never would have. I don't know if I shared this in the book. It's in the documentary, but at one point I noticed a little hummingbird that had fallen from a tree and I actually spent three days nursing this baby hummingbird back to health.
I would go feed the little hummingbird and then I was waiting for the mom to come and the mom never came. I thought the hummingbird was going to die. I had this Netflix story that I'd found myself in with this hummingbird. Then the mom comes down and rescues the hummingbird.
I had three days with this hummingbird that I never would have had, had I been looking at my phone and not noticed it. You can ask me this one question, Alison, and I can talk for 60 straight minutes on all of the things that the monks taught me that I was able to get reacquainted with, that I fell back in love with. Now I do those things on purpose, instead of by accident.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that. Once you leave the monastery, you go live with an Amish community for two weeks, which is different in the sense that there's a lot of labor. I relate a lot to what you were saying. I come from a line of ranchers who work in the land. My uncle understands weather patterns a hundred times better than weather.com.
You're like, where does this knowledge come from? My family, when we were in Boston, when the pandemic shut everything down, we came to Wyoming to spend a summer. That's where I'm from. We love it here. It's the mountains. Because of the way the world shifted and everything became virtual, we can be here a lot more, but it did remind me a little bit of what you were describing, because culturally, being in a rural, more agrarian culture, it is different.
When we're in Boston, Amazon arrives the same day. It takes four or five days here. There aren't big storehouses nearby. That's a silly example, but it’s real. I want you to share about this Amish community. There's the work, there's the kind of intuitive understanding of the earth, and then I loved this word because it is so true–the visiting.
Carlos: Yes. Visiting.
Alison Cook: Sitting around the table, visiting, tell us about that. You're going to have to read the book to get all the nuance of this–we're getting the highlights–but tell us a little bit about what happened when you joined this Amish community, this farming community.
Carlos: Yes. So by the time I left the monks, I had gotten it down. I was like a semi-pro monk. I was like, put me in, coach. I love this. I didn't wanna leave. I made all these friends. I'd learned to move at God speed, at three miles an hour, this was my new jam. I was contemplative.
And it’s a shock to my system when I get dropped off at LAX, right after I'd spent 14 days in 23 hours a day silence, and there are screens everywhere. I go to the bathroom and there's a screen on the wall. There are screens on the back of the seats on the plane. I'm looking down, like get me to the Amish, get me to the Amish.
I get there and I'm thinking to myself, okay, I'm going to be Monk 2.0. And. Oh my gosh, was I wrong. The Amish go hard. I got to the farm around noon, and at 9 pm, I had not stopped. I talked more in those nine hours than I had the entire two weeks I was with the monks. They were pouring me coffee at 9 p.m. They're drinking coffee.
It doesn't even matter if it's the strongest cup of coffee ever. They work so hard all day that they fall right to sleep. I was so tired. I tell people that it was like moving from a cave to downtown Manhattan, and downtown Manhattan was a four way stop in Mount Hope, Ohio. For these Amish people, the community, the visiting, the talking, the sharing, the stories, it was so a part of their culture.
A few days in, Willis, my Jedi Yoda sheep farmer guy that was training me to be a sheep farmer, he kept saying, okay, so tomorrow's schedule is we're going to get up in the morning and then we're going to go visit this person and then we're going to go visit this person. They love to visit.
I asked him, what's with all the visiting? He says, Carlos, we don't have Facebook. We don't have Instagram, all of the things that you have. This is the only way we know what's happening. We don't have TVs, so this is the way that we know things, and so we love to visit.
They were so hard working. I was so tired every single night when it was time to go to bed. I would put my head in the pillow and I would be drooling within two seconds, I was so tired from the hard work that they would do.
But also I started falling in love with the way they did community and the way they took care of each other. I unlearned a lot of things that I had previously learned incorrectly about the Amish. I had all these assumptions, all these things that I thought about the Amish, like why is it they don't use technology?
Why is it that they don't watch TV or they don't drive cars? I thought maybe they thought it was evil. This was actually so fascinating. One of the biggest things I took from the Amish is, I'm asking Willis one day, what is it about phones or cars or TVs? How do you guys choose what’s not okay?
Because there were some things that they had. They had a generator on their farm, e-bikes. I was like, so you have a generator to charge the e-bike, but you won't have a car? This is weird.
How are you guys making these decisions? He goes, every church community sets up their own rules. There are different orders of Amish.
There are some super conservative, there are some less so. Basically the decision that we make with any piece of technology that comes is we ask this question: Will this piece of technology bring us closer together as a community, or will this piece of technology take us further apart?
When he said that, I started thinking, oh, there's nothing wrong with cars. He says, my daughter, she's Mennonite, she has a car. Sometimes she'll drive me to Cleveland if I need something. But if we all had cars, and Miss Betty's barn burned down, and I was in Cleveland, and Farmer Joe was over here, and we were hundreds of miles apart from each other, we could not come back together to rebuild her barn in 48 hours like we can when we stay close together.
That is why we have made the decision that a car's technology is never going to be. But on an e-bike, we can't get too far away from each other. We’re going to have to come back to charge. So e-bikes are okay. Every decision they make with technology isn't about whether they think the technology is evil.
It's about, is this piece of technology going to take us farther away from where we want to be or closer to each other? And wow, if that wasn't a revolutionary idea for me with every app I put on my phone. Is this going to take me farther away from my community or closer? That was something that I brought back to literally every single decision I make with screens now.
Alison Cook: That's incredible. It's like the spirit of the law. I'm sure it could get dogmatic–anything can, all of us can, but that spirit is a question we could all be asking in our families. If we bring this new thing in, will it draw us together or take us apart?
Carlos: Yes. I mean if I could share one more story about Willis, and again, I need everyone to imagine Carlos who makes a living touching his thumbs to his phone screen, trying to shear a sheep. I'm trying my hardest. We're trying to cut the hay and it rained, and he's like, we can't cut the hay because it's raining.
All of these rules that I don't understand with farming. You talk about their intuition and you talk about being connected to the land. We've been trying for seven days to cut the hay and I'm like, why can't we cut the hay? He says, it can't rain. So it didn't rain for two days and I was like, oh sweet. It's dry enough. We can cut it.
So I walked out super excited, like today's the day we're finally going to cut the hay. I walked out my door and I was like, no, it's going to rain. You can see the rain. It's right there. You can smell it. You can see it. So I walked up to Willis and I was like, man, Willis, another day we're not going to cut the hay. He says, "What do you mean we're not going to cut the hay?"
I was like, it's raining, look, and I pointed at the clouds. He says, no, don't look up at the clouds. Look at your boots. I was like, what? What kind of weird Amish thing is this? Look at your boots. What's on your boots?
I was like, nothing. They're wet. He says, they're wet. He goes, my daddy always told me, and his daddy still lived on the property, that if there's dew on your boots, it's not going to rain. I remember literally laughing out loud when he said that. I was almost embarrassed that I laughed out loud. I was like, oh that may be a good hunch thing, but look at the clouds. They're coming this way.
He says, we're cutting the hay. It's not going to rain. So I was like, this is the craziest thing. Kathy and I, we take off. We're a mile away from the farm and it's dumping on us. It's pouring away. We spent the day at Ed, his son in law's house. It's raining the whole time. We come back, we're a mile away, it's raining. Then, literally I still can't explain this correctly how shocking it was.
We got within, I don't know, three quarters of a mile of his farm. It's dumping rain and then the rain stops and when I say stops, it's not like the cloud moved through and the ground was wet. No, it was dry. The ground was dry. We pull up into his farm and Willis is standing there with his arms crossed smiling at me with that look.
I got out and he looked at me. Sure enough, he cut the hay and it didn't rain. It was this thing, like you said, he's got this relationship with the land. There's something spiritual about that we've lost, because we look at our phone apps all the time and it's wrong half the time.
So anyway, I'd like to share that story because it showed me that maybe I'm not as in tune with my intuition as I need to be.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I love that. It's God's time with the monks, and then on the farm, there's something about being connected with the land. I felt that difference when I came from Boston back to where I grew up, where there's this precision in the city. There's this precision.
Our son got married on a small piece of land out here in Wyoming and we were going to do it outside on the land. We needed to get it hayed, and I remember it’s not a time to get it done, like at two o'clock–it will be done when the conditions are right.
Carlos: Totally.
Alison Cook: I remember feeling in my body this different way of being with the land and nature.
Carlos: What gets thrown away for us city folk is efficiency. It gets thrown out the window. We get so efficient. We want to be so efficient. What I learned is man, there's so much life to be lived on the other side of efficiency.
There's so much wonder on the other side of efficiency. What if every once in a while, we're less efficient and we move a lot slower? Maybe that actually is more efficient. All of these things are going in my head, but yes. I'm in agreement.
Alison Cook: I want to finish out here. One, this is where I want to come back to Carlos. Because I'm dying to know, now you're back. You're back in Nashville. First of all, I love that in this whole conversation, we didn't talk about five steps to not having technology.
I love what you're doing. It's beautiful. You are someone who is using these gifts God has given you, and it's really beautiful. How do you come back into the world that you love? How do you come back and keep some of what you learned?
Carlos: Yes. I’ll let everybody know, it's not like I've not gone back on Instagram. I love it. I'm back with a force. I miss telling stories, I miss all those things–there's a whole documentary about this that I made–more content for screens.
I need people to know, my whole idea isn't why screens are bad. When I came back, first of all, to hold my phone in my hand, when my best friend, Brian, gave it back to me when he picked me up, it felt like it weighed 40 pounds. It felt like an anchor.
It took me another three days before I turned it on. I was like, I can't do it. Then I turned it on and sure enough, ding ding. It sounded like I won the lottery. My phone's going off. This probably can stress some of your listeners out, but I hit select all, and then delete, on all my text messages.
Alison Cook: I love that. Wow.
Carlos: Yeah, if someone needs to get a hold of me really bad, they'll come back to me. So I'm back now. Two years have passed since this all happened and this is what's so cool. There are little things that I set up in my life to help me. But there were no major guardrails that I put up or scaffolding I put up to keep me away from this evil phone.
No, it's really cool. I'm on my phone three hours a day. I literally gained more than half of my life back that I had lost. I went from seven and a half hours a day to three. When I launched a book in September, my screen time was five hours. Like it'll go up, it'll go down. But what's happened again, like you said, what's happened isn't that I’m off my screens.
No, I've actually fallen back in love with living all of these beautiful things. The noticing, the wondering, the getting lost and finding my way. So there are things that now cause me to be on my phone less. I pick it up less because I'm infatuated with living by wondering. I don't look things up anymore. I don't think we were created to know everything that we know.
So a few of the things that have been helpful for me are, for instance, I bought an alarm clock. I now don't charge my phone next to my bed. That's not a big deal, but that probably saves me a whole hour of screen time a day because I'm not in bed scrolling.
This is a fun one, I no longer use Siri or GPS or Google Maps to find my way. I look it up before I leave my house. I look it up, and I write the directions down on a piece of paper. I drive, and my sense of direction is so much better. Yeah, so there are some things that I've done.
But more than anything, I have fallen back in love with, again, the savoring, the wondering, the noticing, the solitude. All of these things that we don't have anymore. I don't want to lose it.
Alison Cook: I love what you're saying. My first solo book, The Best of You, is a book on boundaries. My thesis in the book, Carlos, is that boundaries are less about what you're saying no to, and more about what you're saying yes to, what you're protecting.
This is what you're saying–it wasn't about setting boundaries with my phone. It was, oh my gosh, I want these other things in my life, and that's allowed some boundaries around this. I love that.
Carlos: Yeah. And here's the cool thing–we'll take that yes a step farther. When I was home for those three weeks with my family, at the end of the experiment with no phone, I didn't have a phone, but my family still did. They still had Netflix. They were still TikToking.
When I came home for those three weeks, I did not set up one rule for my family. I was like, you guys keep living your life. If you turn on the TV, I'll walk out, I'll pick up my book. My family's screen time went down 50%.
Alison Cook: Wow.
Carlos: Because I was not on mine. Again, this is not some scientific experiment. The whole thing's not a scientific experiment. This is one man's story, it’s what I did. But again, when I started doing these things, even the people around me were affected. Suddenly there were these boundaries that got set up around my family, and so even my kids screen times are different because of something that I did.
This book can not only impact you and your life, but it really can impact those around you. Because they're going to be like, wow, I never even thought of that. I want to wonder a little bit more too. So be that person at the party, whenever you listen to this, when somebody has a question and someone pulls their phone out, you be the guy or the girl that goes, nope, we're not going to look it up. Let's wonder.
Alison Cook: Oh, it's so good. It's so good. More is caught than taught. You're showing, hey, I want to go outside and watch the baby birds. Maybe someone else will come join you. I love it.
This is a little bit of a side conversation, but I tend to think of social media a little bit in the same category as alcohol. Some people can use it in moderation and they're okay. I can have a couple of glasses of wine a week without an issue.
I don't think I have that ability with social media, so I've had to really curb myself. A lot of that is case by case. I will say, you're one of the people who uses it in a way where it's like watching someone who can drink in moderation. Like, wow, that's amazing that someone can do that and enjoy the good in it. And maybe I'm not able to do that. Does that make sense?
Carlos: That not only makes sense to me but is such a great way for people to look at it as well. Again, because I've got friends too that do things that I think, man, I would love to be able to do it like that, but I can't. So I have to know myself.
Alison Cook: Exactly. I love that you're back online and you are telling us the story and you are showing us through the means that we need. Otherwise, how would we know? So it's such a great read. I loved it. I read it straight through. It's got your authentic self, your humor, and I know there's a documentary now that's with it.
So tell my listeners where to find you, where to find your content, the movie, the book, all the things
Carlos: Absolutely. If you go to ReconnectedBook.com, the book's there, the documentary's there, the trailer's there, all of the things are there. Instagram is where I hang out. Instagram and YouTube as I'm making things on screens for you to look at them on screens. I want to remind people that in this book, there's zero shame involved.
You will not feel shame about your phone. You will not feel, oh my gosh, I'm on my phone too much! It's going to excite you about a lot of the things that maybe we've forgotten how to do. I encourage everybody to pick it up and get reconnected, because that's the other reason why I titled it Reconnected.
When I first came back everyone was like, how was it when you disconnected? I'd love to disconnect. The more people said that, the more I thought, I get what they're saying, but I really feel like I'm actually plugged in now. I feel like I'm actually reconnected. Again, I'm trying to spin everything a little bit, but it's going to be helpful for a lot of people.
Alison Cook: It's a great read and it's a bestseller. So you're hitting a nerve and you're touching on things people really need. So thanks for doing it. Thanks for continuing to create content. Thanks for joining us.
Carlos: You're the freaking best. Thanks so much for having me.
Have you ever wondered how to transform daily stress into personal strength and resilience?
In today's must-listen episode, Dr. Alison is joined by the incredible Aundi Kolber, a trauma therapist and bestselling author of Try Softer. You’ll hear the backstory behind Aundi's latest book, Take What You Need and learn tools needed to develop and practice self-compassion. This episode covers:
* How to recognize when you're outside of your window of tolerance
* What most of us have gotten wrong about developing resilience
* The research behind self-compassion and why it leads to unexpected strength
* A beautiful metaphor from the Bible to empower and encourage you on your own journey of healing
Leave us a question or comment on The Best of You Podcast question form
Resources:
- Take What You Need: Soft Words for Hard Days by Aundi Kolber
- Past episodes with Aundi Kolber:
- Bonus Episode: Aundi Kolber & Dr. Alison on Writing & Launching Books
- Episode 60: How to Make New Friends, Overcome People Pleasing, Identify Red and Green Flags, & Extract Yourself From an Unhealthy Situation with Aundi Kolber and Dr. Monique Gadson
- Episode 45: Strong like Water—Finding the Freedom, Safety, & Compassion to Move through Hard Things & Experience True Flourishing
- Episode 46: People Pleasing as Survival, How Jesus Regulated Emotions & the Problem With Toxic Positivity and Spiritual Bypassing
- Books by Aundi Kolber:
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- Psalm 23
- Instagram @AundiKolber
- AundiKolber.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 129: Understanding Anxiety—A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Calm, Advocating For Yourself, and Cultivating Inner Resilience
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.
- Get ahead of the New Year with a routine that helps you now by going to Seed.com/bestofyou and use code 25BESTOFYOU to get 25% off your first month.
- 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'm so thrilled you're here with me this week for this week's episode. We have a great episode today. I loved this conversation with my dear friend, Aundi Kolber, and I'm so thrilled to get to share it with you today.
If you have questions or comments or topics that you'd like me to cover in upcoming episodes of the podcast, I hope you'll leave those for me. You can do that on The Best of You Podcast question form. We'll link to it in the episode show notes as well as on my website over at DrAlisonCook.com.
I've loved hearing from you on that doc, as well as through email with comments and notes and topic ideas. The notes of encouragement mean a lot to me too. I've got to tell you, thank you for taking the time to leave those for me. They mean a lot. Brenda, you wrote to me about the episode on the 12 steps with Ian Morgan Cron and Julie, you shared a beautiful message for me about the episode with Michael Cusick and what it meant to you.
I really appreciate it so much. I can't tell you how much it means to hear from you and to know how this podcast is resonating with you. It's not easy to find spaces that bring together our faith, our desire to walk with God, along with really good and helpful and wise insights from the field of psychology.
Your support and your help in spreading the word about this podcast is so deeply appreciated. It truly makes a difference in this world. This work of healing is the work that we are called to do in partnership with God's Spirit. So thank you again for being here, for writing to me, and for sharing about the podcast.
I'm so thrilled to welcome Aundi Kolber back to the podcast today. Aundi is a dear friend of mine and she's a friend of the podcast. She's appeared several times on the podcast in the past. If you're new to the podcast or new to Aundi's work and want to hear more, we'll link to those prior episodes with Aundi in the show notes. You can hear more from her.
She's a trauma therapist, author, and speaker. Her work has resonated with so many of us through her bestselling books, Try Softer, and Strong like Water.
Today, Aundi and I are going to dive into her newest offering, Take What You Need. It's a beautifully contemplative book that invites us to pause, reflect, and care for the parts of ourselves that most need tending.
Before we dive in, I want to highlight some terms that Aundi and I use throughout today's episode. Again, in case you're new to the podcast, I don't want to assume that some of this language is familiar to you.
There's a concept that underpins a lot of Aundi's work. It's called the window of tolerance. This term was coined by Dr. Dan Siegel, and it's a way of understanding how our nervous system processes stress. When we're within our window of tolerance, we tend to feel more balanced, more present, and more able to handle life's challenges.
It's very similar to what Kimberly Miller and I call the Spirit-led self, as we describe in our book, Boundaries For Your Soul. It’s that place inside where we tap into the best of who we are that's calm, clear, and creative. It's not that the stressors of life go away. It's that we can access that place inside and lead ourselves through life's challenges with clarity and confidence and from a calm place inside.
However, when life's pressures push us outside of that window, whether due to trauma or overwhelm or day to day stress, we might swing into hyper-arousal, where we feel anxious or panicked or reactive, or what we call hypo-arousal, which is where we feel numb or disconnected or shut down.
The goal is to stay within that window of tolerance. This is what Aundi's work is all about. It's about teaching us how to expand that window of tolerance so we can recenter ourselves even in life's hardest moments.
That's what makes her new book, Take What You Need, so special. It's an invitation to slow down and ask what our bodies and souls truly need, whether it's rest, whether it's nourishment, whether it's courage.
As you'll hear us discuss later in the episode, this kind of compassion toward ourselves doesn't make us weak. It actually strengthens us and equips us to advocate for ourselves more effectively. You can find Aundi's new book, Take What You Need, wherever books are sold. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Aundi Kolber.
***
Alison Cook: I'm thrilled to have this opportunity to talk about you. We talk often, but this is a unique opportunity to really talk about you and talk about your work. So many of my listeners are familiar with your work. They have read Try Softer or Strong Like Water.
It's a really fun opportunity for me to get to ask you about this new book and in general about what shapes your work. So thanks for being here.
Aundi: It is so fun to be here, such a joy to get to share it with you, and I know we have such a shared love of so many concepts. We always have such a fun chemistry, and I respect your work so much, so I'm so grateful that we get to do this.
Alison Cook: It's pretty neat. I was talking to Ryan, a mutual friend of ours. He shared with us about OCD and he was saying that he met Chuck, our other mutual friend, online. I was saying that's how you and I met. These are the gifts that social media can give us. So I'm very grateful for that.
Aundi: That's amazing. I love that.
Alison Cook: Okay. So I want to dive in, Aundi. Really your whole body of work, including this newest offering, is grounded in the idea of a gentle approach to healing. Try softer, right? Instead of trying harder, white knuckling it, to use your phrase, we're trying softer.
And “strong like water”, initially, you think about that and you're like, wait a minute. Yeah, water is strong, very strong, but it's not necessarily the first thing we think about when we think about strength. It's flexible, it's pliable, it has movement.
Tell me a little bit about how and why this gentle, compassionate approach to healing has been so important to you and why you think it's so important for all of us.
Aundi: Yeah, great question. The first thing I would say is that I definitely didn't start writing about these concepts or haven't been drawn to these concepts because I automatically have an affinity for them. What I mean by that is to say, I love these ideas and they have become embodied in who I am, but because of my own story of childhood trauma.
The white knuckling, the pushing hard, there have been ways that strategy has saved me in my life. It felt like it was a lot of my personality growing up–having to be such a hard worker, having to be so ahead of the game, having to be hypervigilant or over-accommodating others or having to be the “strong” one.
What's tricky about it is, it looks impressive often, right? In our culture, whether you're talking about wider culture or Christian culture, these ideas get a lot of praise, and a lot of that is because they get things done. You know what I mean? There's something about it that works. There's parts of it that work.
But for me, there came a point, really multiple points, where that way of existing was burning me up. In a way it was still effective, but my ability to even exist was diminishing in so many respects. That followed a similar line as I was doing my therapeutic work with clients. I could see that my clients were trying so hard.
It was like they were stuck in the mud, like when a car gets stuck and you spin your wheels. Gosh, you are exerting a ton of energy, but it's not getting you anywhere.
Alison Cook: Exactly.
Aundi: That really drove me to consider, what if there was a different way? All of my work always comes back to this idea that yes, we want to honor all the ways we survive, but ultimately, we cannot exist without at least some of that compassion, at least some of the gentleness. We are made for it.
Without it, we become rigid. It breaks us in ways that are simply not worth it. Compassion and gentleness make us pliable. It's a way that our body gets to experience safety, even in the midst of really hard things.
Alison Cook: Yeah. You talk about that basketball, athletic side of you, the fierce side of you, that goes hard. So to your point, this isn't necessarily intuitive, this kind of “try softer”. You've gone hard out of survival, out of God-given parts of you. Do you see it as a both-and, where we need those parts of us that push, and we also need to know when to let up? How do you see that?
Aundi: No question. Absolutely. Absolutely. But the caveat, and to borrow some IFS language, it's all dependent on, can we lead those parts? The kind of framework I use a lot is to say, do I have at least one foot in my window of tolerance?
Am I able to, using Dan Siegel's language, can I think about thinking? Can I be with the part? Again, using IFS language, am I blended with the part, or am I differentiated from the part but with? To me, it is a whole world of difference. It literally changes the game.
I know you and I have had so many conversations about parts work. What does it look like to honor ourselves, honor our parts, and yet live in alignment too? It's not to say that our parts always know what is best for our full self. But being able to turn towards those parts with compassion allows us to integrate and to work with them.
Using my own story, I call a part of myself basketball Aundi, and she is fierce. I developed that part in the midst of severe trauma, and for so many years, if I would go to that part, it actually would feel scary to the rest of my system.
It felt scary to feel that intensity. So I would have this ping pong ball feeling in my body, and I didn't know how to be with it. Over time, one of the gifts has been building that compassion and really building an internal relationship with that part.
Now, I can work with that part, and it feels like I get to call that part up. I'm like, okay girl, let's do this thing. We're about to do this hard thing, and let's work together.
Alison Cook: You're in charge of it. You're deploying it with a foot inside your window of tolerance, or from a self-led place, and that's so important. It's not that being soft or gentle or understanding the flexibility of strength means being weak, or means not looking out for yourself.
I had a conversation with a couple about marriage, and we were talking about how, when you learn to do your inner work, your inner healing, and you stop trying to blame other people, it doesn't mean that you don't still at times stick up for yourself and say, hey, I'm not okay with this.
But you're doing that from a place of calm. You're doing that from a place of self-leadership or with that one foot within your window of tolerance. The strength is stronger.
Aundi: Yes, absolutely. This is such an important sticking point for people, because this is always the thing people wrestle with. The question comes down to, will it actually work? What do you do when you're in an abusive situation? What do you do when you're in hard situations where the answer isn't always to be soft?
Absolutely it's never to allow yourself to be harmed. But what's different about this kind of approach is that compassion, often even for ourselves, is part of what allows us to access enough safety that allows us then, using IFS language, to access some self energy.
What that's doing from a broader system perspective is it opens us up to all the resources available to us, right? Including the ability to set boundaries from a place that's not from a place of punishment, for example. It's the ability to hold the line with dignity, with power, and without dehumanizing others.
This is the work of compassion. I really appreciate Dr. Kristin Neff's work around self-compassion through two lenses: tender self compassion, which is often that more soft, gentle, nurturing type, but then she also talks about it through the lens of fierce self-compassion, which is also considered a mama bear energy.
It's a protective energy. It's still rooted in compassion, but it's from a place where, as a mom, if I see someone wanting to harm my kiddos, I'm like, oh, mama bear. Not to dehumanize those people, but that's like a no thank you. You may not do that. You may not pass. We are deserving of that, not only for others, but also for ourselves.
Alison Cook: That's good. There's more agency there, when you're in command of those parts of you. Tell me about this word, resilience. A lot of your work, this idea of strength, is getting at this word, resilience. It's thrown around a lot. It's foundational, I think, to this journey of healing.
What do you mean by it and what does it look like? How do we know we've developed resilience or we're helping our kids to develop resilience?
Aundi: Yeah. I love that you brought this up because this is something I'm really passionate about. For many years now, to be totally honest, I've had a little bit of a bone to pick, perhaps because I have seen resilience really misused. What I mean by that is, I've worked with many clients through the years who've been called resilient.
And that's not a bad thing, but it's often been used at a time when what they needed was support. But what they heard was, gosh, seems like you got it. You're resilient, right? Or there could be other iterations of that.
So I start there to say, there is a lot of misunderstanding around resilience. Ultimately, I think of resilience as the ability to return to some safety, to some connection, to that self energy. That is the pathway that allows us to ultimately be resilient. I want to give a couple of caveats, because I always have to.
Sometimes we have to push through. I talk about in Strong Like Water situational strength. Sometimes we do the best we can, and that gets called resilience, full stop. My concern with that is that basically we're telling people, hey, go get traumatized. Don't think about anything else. That's resilience.
My hope is to say, look, yes, there are times when we do what we have to do. It is worth all that we can give, all that we can offer, to experience as much resourcing and safety as we go through something hard, because that will ultimately allow us to move through it with less harm.
Alison Cook: Yeah. That's a really important distinction. I hear you saying resilience is not in survival. That may be a part of it, which you lay out so beautifully in Strong Like Water. Sometimes we do go back into survival mode and there's no shame in that. But the resilience is in our ability to come back to safety.
Aundi: Yes. Yes. There's a great quote from Sharon Salzberg, who is a mindfulness teacher. she says, the healing is in the return. If I could borrow her words, I would say, the resilience is in the return. Sometimes, it's not that we return all the way, it's not that everything's perfect or figured out.
It's when we can even get a tiny little toe in that window of tolerance. Neurobiologically, if we're only living from survival brain, what that means is there is no pathway to metabolizing the hard we're currently experiencing. So the only thing that can happen in the absence of safety is for trauma to develop.
It's not to say that we can't honor the way we get through, and it's not to say that the way we get through can't even be reclaimed as we go back and do healing work. But when we only classify resilience through the lens of pushing yourself as hard as you can, no matter what, we really set people up for harm. And I don't think that is true to what resilience is ultimately about.
Alison Cook: We've talked about this, how sometimes that’s a very helpful metaphor for this reparenting we're trying to do for ourselves. If your child experiences something incredibly painful at school, we don't say to our child (and some people probably did have this said to them), “That'll toughen you up”.
Helping our children develop resilience would be honoring the thing that happened that was hard, honoring what they had to do to get through it, and helping them, through that connection to us, have that full ability to cry, to feel the pain, to feel the anger, and to experience safety. That then equips our child to go back to school the next day and know how to advocate for themselves or know how to find a different friend group or whatever the thing is.
I'm pulling that example out of my mind because if we didn't have that experience as children, what we're trying to do on this journey as adults, is teach ourselves. To use your word, that flow of strength, to find that safety where we're honoring all the pieces, which then equips us to potentially have the agency to do the things we need to do to take, to protect ourselves.
Aundi: Yeah. Absolutely. That's so well said. I don't want to reduce this down too much. But to make it a little bit more simple or accessible, what I would say is, when you have pain plus a lack of support and resources, the likelihood of trauma is high. If you have pain or adversity plus connection and resources and support, the likelihood of resilience is high.
That's, really, the difference, right? I often say, pain does not automatically mean it will become trauma. It does not. That to me is so hopeful. Because we don't have to be fatalistic and say, sorry, that's it. That's the end of the road. Instead, the harder it is, the more gentle we must become.
Because it is in that place of connection, safety, support, however that needs to be expressed, where we can do that inner work. If that's with our kiddo, absolutely, because we are probably one of the best resources our kids have available to them. This is Allan Shore's work, a “neuro psycho neuro biological regulator”. I might be getting that wrong.
But essentially, we are part of what helps them regulate their bodies. So when we are regulated, they can tap into that. That allows them to experience hardship through the lens of having enough. There's a place of abundance rather than lack.
Alison Cook: This is hard and I have what I need. Both of those things can be true. That's so good. That's so powerful. This idea of resourcing leads us right to this new book you have coming out very soon. It's a little bit different than some of the other books you've written, and it's toward the end of resourcing.
It's called Take What You Need. Tell us a little bit about what led you to want to create this offering and what's unique about it.
Aundi: Yeah, I'm really excited about this particular book. It is a little bit different than my other books, and part of that is because I've drawn on a lot of my previous writing, Try Softer and Strong Like Water, and worked with my editor to look at quotes that people have really resonated with through the years, what has stood out to people, what has been meaningful.
And as I've thought about that, one of the things that I hear a lot from people, every time I speak publicly, in my email, my DMs, everywhere I go, people will say to me, I love your work so much. This has been really meaningful, but about 40 percent of people will say to me, it took me a while before I could even start your book because I was so overwhelmed.
When I first heard about it, I didn't even feel like I could begin this particular book. A lot of times, when I post on places like Instagram or in my email, people are so outside their window of tolerance, or maybe they've got their pinky toe in their window of tolerance. They're barely holding on; they got a little fingernail holding on, right?
I get it, because I've been there. Sometimes it's hard to metabolize a lot of information. What I tried to do with this book, and Tyndale, my publisher, has been wonderful; my editor was really open to this different idea. To set up this book and think about these different categories of where people might be in their story.
Things like, take what you need when exhaustion looms large, when you need to know God is with you, when you need a strength that is soft, all these different categories. There are probably 20 categories, and we took these quotes and tried to discern, where do these fit?
The encouragement to the reader, and the way I've tried to design it and set it up, is to be very picture/image forward. There is beautiful greenery and very gentle, contemplative imagery, to invite people to actually check-in with themselves. To say that phrase I've been using for many years now–if you were to take what you need, what would your body say that you needed?
If you were able to settle your breath and your system and your spirit and your body, what is it you would need?
This book is designed to help you strengthen that muscle that allows you to tune in, so that you might participate with God in offering to the parts of yourself who are hurting, who are exhausted, who are feeling alone, who are depleted–here is some hope.
Alison Cook: I love that. I love that you're naming that. It's really true. I can remember in my own life, feeling overwhelmed by what can feel like a Pandora's box of pain during seasons of my life. I remember an early experience with a therapist where she was actually very astute in hindsight, but in that first session, she put her name on a couple of pain points in my life.
And I never went back. I was like, wow. In hindsight, she was right on, but it was too much. I love what you're saying with this book–you're trying to empower the reader to honor it, to use a phrase I hear you use a lot, to honor the pace of their own bodies. To say, I need this today, versus feeling like they have to open up that whole Pandora's box of all the different things that they could take or do.
Aundi: It’s actually a really common experience for people. I've had that experience too, where the right thing at the wrong time is not the right thing. That's why I even tell people when they're like, I'm going to read your book, 80 percent of the time I say, hey, take it at your own pace.
I say that a lot, because it's not that I don't want people to read my book. I would love for you to read my book. I believe in the work I've done, but I also want to make this work. I know you are passionate about this too–accessible care. How do we take it out of the ivory towers of academia?
How do we take it out of even our therapist's office, which is wonderful? I love that people are getting to therapy. I love that it's discussed on all these levels, but I have always wondered, how do we get these resources to the people who actually need it the most?
Alison Cook: Yeah. Yeah.
Aundi: Because sometimes you have a little more capacity maybe to read something and that's not bad. Thank goodness that there can be folks who are more resourced. And my hope for this one is it's the kind of book that, whether it's for you or whether you're thinking of someone in your life going through a heck of a season, you could say, hey, here's something to consider.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I could see it working in one of two ways. I love that on the front end, where someone maybe doesn't even realize, maybe as a friend, you're aware, oh, they're going to need to do some of this stuff. But I don't really want to buy them a book–that's overtly saying, you have trauma, or, you need to work through this.
I could see it working on the front end, either for yourself or someone else, where the subtitle is “soft words for hard days”, right? I love that. I could also see it for folks who have worked through your other books. It's the ongoing work that we're doing, even when we have gone into Pandora's box and we have looked at it all.
We’ve maybe pushed on some of the bruises and for the most part, we can tap into that resilience. We still have hard days where we need to give ourselves the gift of those soft words. So I could see it working in a lot of different ways for folks.
Aundi: Yeah. I love that. It's my hope. I've been calling it a contemplative coffee table book, however you want to take that, because to me, sometimes, and I am a really deep thinker, I tend to think about 12 layers for one little idea. I know you and I are similar in thinking about it from so many different angles.
Sometimes, partly because I'm a highly sensitive person, I do have a history of trauma, all these things, what I need is not more, I need less. Oftentimes having something that's smaller, that allows us to take that bite size, like here's something, see how it lands and see where it meets you. See if it could be a resource to you. See the ways that this might help.
You and I were talking about this resilience conversation I'm so passionate about, because the pain is not going anywhere. Jesus said, “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart, for I have overcome the world”. What a beautiful promise.
Here's what we know: the pain in this world is not going to magically go away. Certainly we want to work towards things like justice. We want to work towards all the things. It's not that we want to cause pain on purpose, but I love considering, what are all the parts of the equation?
What does it look like to participate with God in meeting the needs that are present in that other part of the equation?
Alison Cook: We've talked a little bit about this, but I'd love for you to share with us more about this contemplative coffee table book and how our spiritual practices and our faith practices work into this “take what you need” approach to mental health. So for example, this book that you've beautifully put together and written reminds me a little bit of a book I got as a teenager.
Someone gave me one of those books of Bible promises where you can look up the thing you're struggling with and find the scriptures that kind of address that. I always thought that was a cool categorization. I'm angry. Okay. Here are 10 things that might meet you at that point.
I almost sense that there's that kind of energy with this offering. So how would that dovetail with your spiritual practices? How does this work dovetail with that?
Aundi: Yeah, what an important piece of this. I want to step back a little bit to say, one of the things I write in the introduction of this book regarding healing is that in many ways, in God's hospitality to us, the table is a really important metaphor. It's personally really meaningful to me.
There's this abundance and God invites us to come and partake. In Psalm 23, “he sets a table for me in the presence of my enemies”. There's this imagery of God setting tables for us in the wilderness. There's this important theme of healing as hospitality, God's hospitality, hospitality to ourselves.
In many ways, trauma has been the opposite, right? That's an understatement. Where there has been need, there has been lack, or there has actually been pain or overt harm or abuse. Oftentimes that has taken away our voice or our choice. It has cut us off from the God-given wisdom that God placed in our bodies.
To me, this concept of “take what you need" is meaningful because I see it as a repair. I see it as the repairing that occurs as we participate with God's spirit to say, no, you do not have to sit here and pretend that you're a robot. I promise to be with you. My spirit is with you. I gave you wisdom in your body. That is our birthright. God gave that to us.
When I think about this through the lens of spiritual disciplines, I think that as we restore and re-empower folks to, and on a very visceral level, that interoception, which often gets cut off when we go through trauma, it actually allows us to take this holistic posture and say in participation with God's spirit, God, what do I need?
We can take it out of the sacred into the secular and it can become, okay, maybe this breakfast is holy right now. Maybe receiving the beauty outside is what I need and it’s God's goodness to me. That also includes things like scripture.
That includes things that we're supplementing, things like The Book of Common Prayer or whatever that we're doing, we get to ask, is this in alignment? Does this honor? Is this in participation with?
Certainly, there are tons of caveats that I could name. Yes, there are times when we need to be uncomfortable. That’s not a bad thing. I'm not saying that we don't do things at times through a lens of even sacrificial giving. And I know this is something that you are so passionate about talking about and untangling, of saying, but this is different.
This is different because we need to make sure, in order to heal, we have to be able to actually connect to the truth of our experience. These things have a very significant intersection.
Alison Cook: It gets back to that idea of agency, which is what's taken from us when we've been hurt. I have a choice here, and God gives us that. He gives us that. He empowers us. I imagine that table as you're describing it, that smorgasbord of items to learn ourselves.
Maybe this is what will help. Maybe this is what will help. Ooh, that was too much. Oh, that wasn't quite enough. That's that “take what you need” idea. It’s so empowering because it's restoring our sense of selfhood, our sense of agency in partnership with God, to discern. That's so empowering.
This is what actually helps me. This doesn't. Now I know, and that's wisdom that I can take with me going forward. I love that this book is a resource in the very way it sets out an invitation for people to do that inner work of, what do I need at this moment? I love that.
Aundi: That's so well said. I geek out at the way these ideas tend to intersect. The thing about truth is that it cannot help but reveal itself and create. There's a beauty in recognizing how much these things build on each other.
Alison Cook: I love that. All right, Aundi, I want to ask you before we end. First of all, tell us where folks can find the book, how they can find your work, all the things.
Aundi: Take What You Need is available wherever books are sold. So I'd love folks to go to their favorite bookseller and that would be so meaningful to me. I hope it will be a resource for everyone who orders. You can find me on Instagram @AundiKolber, and you can also find me on my website, AundiKolber.com. I have lots of resources there so feel free to sign up for my newsletter as well.
Alison Cook: Sometimes you'll post the phrase “take what you need” in the sphere of social media. Sometimes I get overwhelmed with all the influencers that talk about an overwhelming potpourri/smorgasbord of options. People telling you different tropes or cliches or memes, and sometimes they're good, but it's like, which one of these should I apply?
I notice that you will often, when you post something, say, take what you need. Again, it's that invitation of, I'm going to offer something and you take what you need. It's that invitation to agency that is so beautiful. I love that about your online presence.
That is such a breath of fresh air in a place where there are a lot of expert voices. There are a lot of people telling you, this is what you should do. It's such a powerful phrase, “take what you need”.
Aundi: Oh, thank you so much. And, yeah, I appreciate you, and I feel like it's one of those things of trying to figure out, how do we do this work? I know you and I are always talking about: how do we innovate in a way that really honors the people that we are writing for?
It's not about likes, it's not about those things. How could it truly support folks, that they would feel the agency, even if it means that it's not supportive to them, to say, okay, I'm going to pass this time. God bless that. I love that.
Alison Cook: Exactly. That would, to me, feel like a win if someone said, this is actually not helpful to me today. Because that's what we need, that kind of discernment, that sense of agency within ourselves, where we can find that safety within ourselves to go, no that's not helpful. Or ooh, that is.
For folks listening, look for that kind of energy and that kind of approach in the people that you look to and in the people that you follow and in the ways we're showing up in the world. It gets back to that gentleness that we started with. Aundi, to close, a question I like to ask all my guests is, what is bringing out the best of you right now?
Aundi: Yeah, great question. The thing that feels most present in my life is that we were able to go to California. I had a speaking event and my family was able to come with me and we were able to go to Disney. It was a really special trip and it reminded me of the resource of play.
I can be a little bit of a serious person. I feel deeply and I have lots of compassion and all those things, but play is not an automatic thing. When I can connect to it, gosh, it opens me up so much. That is really bringing out the best of me right now.
Alison Cook: I love that. I love when you posted photos of your whole family with Mickey Mouse ears, because you're talking about serious topics. You're a very deep person, and I love when I see those because I know that's a beautiful way that you're being gentle with yourself.
Thank you so much for being here and for sharing your wisdom with us and for putting out so much goodness into the world. I so appreciate you.
Aundi: Thank you so much. I appreciate you so much.
Do you feel guilty for not doing enough—or take responsibility for things that aren’t yours to own?
Today Dr. Alison tackles the complex feelings of guilt and self-doubt—what guilt truly is, why it can feel so crushing, and how it often stems from taking responsibility for things that aren’t yours to own. She shares from her own journey of overcoming excessive guilt and the life-changing perspective that finally set her free.
Here’s what we cover:
* How to distinguish between true guilt and false guilt, and why it matters
* The #1 most important question to ask yourself when guilt takes over
* 3 buried emotions underneath false guilt
* Why excessive guilt damages your relationships
* 3 steps to help you understand and manage the voice of guilt in your life
Resources:
- Episode 138: Breaking Free from Overfunctioning—Discover the Hidden Costs of Always Being 'The Responsible One’
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No To Take Control of Your Life by Henry Cloud and John Townsend
- I Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
- 1 Samuel 15:22
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 93: 3 Ways to Stop Guilt-Tripping Yourself, Untangle Complicated Emotions, & Discover the Joy of Clarity
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Turn back time on the appearance of your skin with Purity Woods’s Age-Defying Dream Cream. Go to puritywoods.com/BESTOFYOU or enter code BESTOFYOU at checkout for an additional 10% off your first order.
- 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'm so thrilled you're here this week for this episode. It's a little bit of a follow-up to the episode I did a couple of weeks ago. It was Episode 138: Breaking Free from Overfunctioning, where we talked about the hidden cost and the hidden root of always being the responsible one.
Always feeling like other people's emotions are our responsibility, other people's reactions are our responsibility, other people's behaviors are our responsibility. That was the topic of that episode. This last year, I've been on a journey of recovering from overfunctioning.
It manifests a lot as people pleasing in my life. It has a real codependent connotation to it. I've written about that a lot in The Best of You, but as I've been on a new iteration of going deeper into the roots of this in my own life, the ubiquitous, constant feeling that surfaces that I have to deal with in a better way is guilt.
I remember maybe a year and a half ago, saying to my sister, who was one of my closest confidants, I feel guilty all the time. All the time, every interaction, I feel guilty. I should be doing more. I shouldn't have done that. I should be doing this. I shouldn't do it that way. That constant feeling of guilt was with me to the point where I was like, I've got to deal with this. What is this about?
In today's episode. I want to share with you some thoughts on false guilt versus true guilt and what the function of guilt is in our lives, and why it is essential that we begin to notice it, especially if we are people who overfunction, who take on too much responsibility for things that are not our responsibility.
If you think about it, that's the link right there. Why do I take on so much responsibility for other people's emotions, other people's reactions, other people's behaviors? It's because I feel guilty if I don't.
That's the big red warning flag that goes off in my mind. I've had to learn to reorient to that feeling. Now, what really prompted me to want to record this episode today was a friend of mine who reached out. This is a woman who works on the front lines.
She is a woman who is doing more good in the world on behalf of folks who are hurting the most. She works with people who are at risk, at rock bottom, maybe they're homeless. They're dealing with incredible traumas, where they're having a hard time even functioning in life because they've been so beaten down. They've been hurt so much.
This woman tirelessly works on behalf of these folks for very little return for herself. She's a saint. I love this woman. She's one of these people that is truly in the trenches, doing so much good for other people.
She wrote to me because she's had a diagnosis that has prompted her to take some time off of her work. In the midst of a serious medical condition where she could not do the work, where she could not be on the front lines helping all these people, she wrote, I cannot stop feeling this guilt.
Here she is, flat on her back. Literally, she cannot do these things. She's wrestling with this guilt, even though she's aware, “I know this is what I need to do for myself. I won't be able to help anybody if I don't heal and recover. I've got to take care of myself”.
It made me realize how ubiquitous this problem is. I hear it all the time from friends, from family members, from clients–there's this chronic guilt that people feel, and it's confusing because guilt is this feeling of I'm doing something wrong. Most of us who struggle with overfunctioning are sensitive to that.
We don't want to do something wrong. We don't want to do something that would hurt someone else. We don't want to do something that would be irresponsible. That feeling of “I'm doing something wrong” is very motivating. This is why guilt is so important to understand, because we want to feel guilt, we want to feel morally responsible, if indeed we have done something wrong.
We want to be able to name that, we want to be able to make amends, we want to be able to course-correct, but on the other hand, we don't want to feel guilty when we haven't, in fact, done anything wrong.
In today's episode, I want to tease out this emotion of guilt so that we can understand when we're feeling what I'm going to call true guilt, a clear conviction of the Holy Spirit that we are in fact doing something wrong, versus when we're feeling false guilt, which is actually not guilt at all.
So the first thing I want to do is define guilt. When we say the word guilt, according to the dictionary, it's the fact of having committed an offense. So guilt has this connotation that we have, in fact, done something wrong. If you're guilty of a crime, you've committed the crime. You've done it. You've in fact done something wrong.
But when we're talking about guilt in the realm of our emotional lives, when we're talking about it psychologically, we're talking about a feeling of guilt. It's an emotional experience where we feel like we've done something wrong. In the psychological sense, that feeling of guilt is very different from the actual fact of guilt.
Just because we feel guilty does not, in fact, mean that we've done something wrong. I love how John Townsend and Henry Cloud talk about it in their classic book Boundaries. They say it this way: “Our conscience isn't God”.
Our conscience, the part of us that cues us to right and wrong and to being sensitive, to not wanting to hurt someone or not wanting to do something wrong or not wanting to commit an offense against God or someone else, that conscience is actually, as Cloud and Townsend say, part of living in a fallen world.
It develops, with the rest of us, psychologically. Our conscience can develop in a way that doesn't align with the facts of reality. For many people who were parentified as children (we talked a lot about that in Episode 138), where you were maybe raised to feel more responsible for your parents or your caregivers than was your actual responsibility, that conscience can get skewed.
You can have a really sensitive conscience and feel more responsible for other people or for things than is actually your responsibility. So again, I'm going to say this several times in this episode, the bottom line is that the presence of a guilty feeling or guilty conscience does not necessarily mean you have done something wrong.
It is so important, especially if you're someone that over-functions, who pleases others, who tends toward codependency, that you begin to take a look at the feeling of guilt when you feel it and unpack it so that you can get to the root of what's actually going on.
From a psychological perspective, guilt is not considered a primary emotion. Instead, it's a secondary emotion, which means it's an emotion that arises from a combination of other primary emotions.
Guilt often serves as a signal that we believe we've violated our own moral code or our own conscience. It prompts us to reflect on our actions. That's not all bad. It's not all bad. That cue is a signal to reflect. However, guilt is often, in many of our lives, disproportionate or misplaced, especially if you've been through trauma, if you've been wounded, if you've been parentified.
Guilt so often masks deeper, harder to access feelings like shame, like fear of someone else's anger, and sometimes guilt even masks our own justified, exiled anger at someone else. Sometimes we guilt trip and blame ourselves because it's harder and more uncomfortable for us to take that blame that was never ours to hold and place it somewhere else.
This is why it's so important to pause and get curious about what's underneath your guilt. Because when you understand the root emotion, it will help you respond in a healthier and more balanced way instead of through over-functioning or being stuck in self-blame.
Understanding guilt involves getting curious about it, as you would any other feeling. If you feel really hurt or you feel really angry, you have to get curious about it and ask yourself, what's really going on here? What does this really mean? That's what happened to me in my life.
Like I said, about a year and a half, two years ago, I started going, this isn't normal that I feel guilty this often. I went on this exploration, and what I have come to discover is that almost always at the root of the feeling of guilt in my life is fear.
So let me give you a quick example. This literally happened this week. It took me a while to get there, but now that I understand it, I see it so much more quickly. I had to break up with someone. Now, when I say break up with someone, I don't mean in a romantic way. Sometimes we have to break up with an employer or we have to break up with a friend or we have to break up with a hair cutter or a therapist or a church group.
Any kind of situation, no matter how small or how big, when I have to set a boundary, when I have to say no, when I have to create distance, when I have to get out of a relationship, even if it's a relationship with someone I barely even know, I've barely even worked with someone, but I've maybe talked to them two or three times on the phone and I'm actually not going to proceed further with working with them, it feels like a breakup to me.
That's the stakes that it feels like in my soul. So I had to do this. I had to break up with someone and I really didn't want to do it. But the facts were so clear that I could not proceed in this relationship. I needed to end the relationship. Now, for those of you listening who are over-functioners or who struggle with people-pleasing or codependency, this can be almost insurmountable for us.
I've been working on this for a long time, but to execute a breakup can be so painful for me. It stirs up that feeling of guilt. I just, I feel it in my being. “You can't do that. You're doing something wrong. You're going to hurt someone. How could you do that? This is bad.”
There's this tape that plays and this part of me shows me all the ways it's going to hurt this other person. Their life is going to fall apart. They're never going to be the same, and it's all because of me. I am ultimately responsible for their wellbeing. If I end this relationship, their whole life is going to implode.
That's what this part tells me. Now, in this case, it was laughable because that was not going to happen, but that's what this part of me feels. It feels like if I end this relationship with this person, their life is going to go off the rails and it will be all my fault. That is what this part of me feels. It feels so real.
It feels so real to this part of me that it is almost painful and it is almost debilitating. I almost cannot do the thing I need to do, even to this day. I noticed that this part of me was very active, but I'm so familiar now with that feeling, with that onslaught of “you can't do this”, and the parade of images about this other person's demise if I am to execute this very simple breakup.
That this isn't going to work out for me if I need to go in a separate way. It's so painful to this part of me now, as I have done this work. What I have noticed is that the presence of that kind of guilt in my mind is nine times out of 10, maybe even 10 times out of 10, but I'll say nine times out of 10 to err toward being conservative, that's actually a cue that I actually should and need to go forth with the breakup, that I need to do this hard thing.
I've learned that over time, but it doesn't mean I don't feel that reflexive emotion of, oh my gosh, you can't do this. You can't do this. This is bad. This makes you a bad person. You're hurting someone. You're ruining their life.
That whole onslaught is still there. It's that I've learned that when I notice that, it's actually a cue that I'm about to do something brave. I've recast that in my mind because what I have come to understand about that part of me is that it masquerades as guilt, but it's really rooted in tremendous fear. That part of me is terrified.
How can you let someone down? How can you honor what's right when someone else might be disappointed or might be displeased or might be uncomfortable because of you? This goes right back to what we talked about in Episode 138 about parentification, because that part of me has never had anybody step in and go, listen, it's not pleasant to let someone else down, but it's also not the end of the world. It happens.
Sometimes we have to go separate ways. Sometimes I can't keep going to the same therapist or to the same hairstylist or to the same vendor or to the same church community,. Sometimes I do need to pivot away from a small group or even from a friendship or a relationship because it's the right thing to do before God.
Yes, maybe it is going to cause some discomfort for this other person. I do not wish for that to be true. Also, I have to be brave. That fearful part of me needs to learn now what it never learned when I was young. It needs to learn that I will be there for that part of me through the fear.
That even if we let someone down, I can be the adult in the room. I can re-parent myself in that way. God is here with me now. We've got two parents now. We've got God and we've got adult me to help that fearful part of me to be brave. This is what we have to teach our children.
If we were not taught that as children by loving parents, we have to do that work of being the adult in the room for those fearful parts of ourselves now. I have learned that when I feel that onslaught of guilt, it is almost always an invitation to be brave.
In fact, if God is inviting me to be brave in this way, God will not only show up for me as I take those brave steps, God is also going to show up for those other people that I have to walk away from. He will also meet them in this place where he is not calling me to be. God is a big God.
God can be there for the part of me that is terrified and anxious about losing attachments. Because that's what it is when we fear losing someone's approval, when we fear losing someone's love, when we fear disappointing someone, even when we know we have to do the thing we need to do. We're stirring up our old attachment wounds.
God is good and so kind to these parts of us. He takes us by the hand and he leads us through it. I know for a fact that God is doing that for me. He is also going to do that for the other person.
Now, listen, this is a journey. It's a process of retraining yourself and re-parenting your guilt and allowing it to become a cue that some other part of you needs your loving attention.
On the front end of this journey, seven times out of 10, eight times out of 10, nine times out of 10, you're probably going to default to what feels most comfortable to your system, to the path you've always chosen, which is to please the other person, overfunction, take responsibility for what's not yours to take, stay with the boss longer than you should, do more for a toxic parent than God is actually calling you to do, stay in a relationship longer than God is actually calling you to stay, do more for a friend or for a child or for a community than God is actually calling you to do.
It's okay. I want you to be kind to yourself in that process, because most of us who struggle with false guilt already have a built in propensity to want to be good, to want to be kind, to want to be pleasing, to want to help others, to always want to be responsible, to want to keep the peace.
This is a built in propensity that got exploited to where our guilt meter got knocked out of whack. I visualize it kind of like an old fashioned set of scales. When the scale is balanced, they're level. You can also imagine one side of that scale taking responsibility for everything, and the other side of that scale is taking responsibility for nothing.
I'm not going to take responsibility for anything. I'm not going to care about anybody else at all. I'm going to do what I want. I'm going to do as I please. A guilt meter that's really in line with the Holy Spirit is balanced. It understands how to take responsibility for what is ours to take responsibility for, and also understands what is absolutely not ours to take responsibility for,, for what absolutely and 100 percent belongs to other people.
The scale balances when our guilt meter is in line with the Holy Spirit. We're like, yeah, I can honestly look at that and say, I should take responsibility for that. On the other hand, I can look at that and say, that's not mine. I don't wish that person harm. I don't want them to feel bad. Also, I'm not responsible for those things that I either feel responsible for, or they're asking me to feel responsible for.
So it's having that guilt meter be right in line with the Holy Spirit. This is a process. It doesn't happen overnight. We have to work at it. For many of us, we're tilted to that side of taking responsibility for everything. Our job is to tilt that scale back.
Initially it's going to feel like we're being cruel. It's going to feel like we're being harsh. It's going to feel really, really hard, but all we're doing is bringing that scale back to the center where we're in line with the Holy Spirit.
So how do we do that? How do we understand what is true guilt? What is ours to actually own versus false guilt, what is actually not ours to own?
This was the key question I had to start asking myself. Okay. What am I feeling guilty about, number one? What am I actually feeling guilty about? What did I actually do, or what am I actually about to do?
As I thought through, what is actually happening here? What is the thing I'm feeling guilty about? What is the behavior that's occurring or that has occurred? That has led me to this key question that is foundational to understanding the role of guilt in your life.
It sounds so simple, but it's been transformative for me. The question is this, have I actually done something wrong? Is it in fact wrong to turn down a favor that someone has asked of me or to decline an invitation? Is that in fact wrong? Am I doing something wrong when I do those things?
Is it in fact wrong for me to prioritize my own health or my own body or my own self-care when I'm sick or tired or run down or on a day-to-day basis? Is that in fact wrong? Is it in fact wrong to step back from a toxic friendship or a toxic relationship when someone is not changing their behaviors?
Often when I really get to the root of those questions, the answer is no, it's not, in fact, wrong. When you begin to ask yourself that question and get down to the root of it, you build self-trust. You begin to rebalance those scales. I'm willing to answer that question with yes, if I have done something wrong, but if I haven't, then it's false.
The truth is, if you're feeling true guilt, you will, in fact, be able to name the thing you did wrong. For example, I yelled at my kids. I lied to my friend. I betrayed someone's trust. I went behind their back and I shared confidential information that I shouldn't have shared. Or I was cruel to that person when I needed to depart the relationship. I said unkind things.
Or maybe I ghosted that person because I couldn't figure out how to tell them, so I disappeared. So those are things we can say, maybe there is some guilt there. Maybe there is a prick of the conscience from God inviting me to take a look at that behavior.
On the other hand, the messages of false guilt show up when you haven't done anything wrong. You'll feel this vague sense of feeling bad about yourself and feeling uncomfortable and feeling like you've done something wrong.
But when you really go to try to pinpoint what it is that you've done wrong, it's something along the lines of, well, I feel guilty that they're going to be hurt, or I feel guilty that I can't be always available to my kids 24/7, or I can't be always available to my aging parents 24/7, or I feel guilty that other people are suffering and I'm not doing anything about it.
That's a very genuine feeling, but here's the thing I want you to know. In this case, I believe the word guilt is actually a misnaming. We're putting the word guilt on it because of that overfunctioning, because of that hypersensitivity. In these cases, I believe guilt is actually masquerading to keep us from a more primary vulnerable emotion, such as fear or sadness, even.
So, for example, I feel really sad and genuinely bummed out that I'm not going to work with this therapist anymore, that I'm not going to work with this church group anymore. I feel sad about that. That's valid. That's a valid emotion, but that's very different from guilt.
Or I feel fearful and scared that I am going to hurt my kids, that I am going to hurt my relationship with this person. I feel fearful about that. Sometimes it's hopelessness. I feel helpless, like I actually can't do anything to make this person feel better. I can't do anything to fix their problem. I can't do anything to fix their pain and I’m guilt tripping myself.
Taking on the blame for that is actually a way I've learned to cope with that feeling of helplessness, and what is actually more true at the root of this guilt is I am hopeless. Nothing I can do will make this person change and actually take accountability and responsibility for their own life.
Nothing I can do will solve this person's problem, because they are refusing to take responsibility for their own pain, for their own life, for their own poor choices. I cannot affect change in their lives. I feel helpless about that. I hate that feeling. One of the ways I've learned to cope is I beat myself up for it.
If I did more for them, maybe they would finally see the error of their ways and change. If I found one more way to go to them, maybe they would finally go get therapy. If I did one more nice thing for them, maybe they would finally feel the happiness I so long for them to feel. The truth is, they're never going to feel what they don't take responsibility for feeling in their own lives.
We are helpless to affect that kind of change. We have to recognize that those feelings of guilt are actually misplaced. That feeling of guilt is actually a misnaming. I'm not actually guilty in this situation. In fact, I'm helpless. There's nothing I can do. That's a hard feeling to face.
We don't like facing the limits of our own humanity. That in and of itself is a really hard thing to face, but it's so much more honest than taking responsibility for what is not ours to take. In those instances, that guilt tripping part of us is actually trying to play God.
It's telling us we have more power than we actually have, and it's actually a lie. In that case, you are essentially feeling guilty for being human. You're feeling guilty that you're finite. You're feeling guilty that you're not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent, that you don't have all the power in the world to affect change in other people's lives.
In other words, you feel guilty that you're not God. But the truth is, you're not God. You are human. You are finite. You are limited. You exist within boundary lines. You do not have the power to affect change in someone's life who is not taking responsibility for the changes they in fact need to make.
The antidote to false guilt in these cases is the acceptance of your own human limitations. This is what we mean when we talk about the word surrender. This word keeps coming up on different podcast episodes. There's a podcast episode coming up with a hero of mine and of so many of yours in this work of integrating Christianity with psychology.
We talk about the fact that so many times at the end of the day, what we are doing is surrendering to the fact that we are not God, that our power is limited to change ourselves, let alone to change someone else. When you surrender, you reframe your expectations of yourself.
You bring your guilt meter in line with the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Guilt says, I'm letting everybody down, but surrender says, I am limited, and I am a beloved child of God. Guilt says, “I should be perfect for everybody else”. Surrender says, “I will never be perfect, nor will I ever make everybody happy. God's grace is enough”.
Guilt says, I should have done more. I should do more. But surrender says, I will give my best and I will let go of the rest. I have to trust God with what's not mine to own. I have to trust God with that other person's reactions to my healthy boundary. I have to trust God with my spouse's decisions, with my parents' decisions, with my adult children's decisions, with my co-workers' decisions.
All I can do is my best within the limits of what God has called me to. Everything outside of that, I have to let go of. I have to trust God with the rest.
The antidote to guilt is a radical acceptance of your dependence on God. It's learning to bravely suffer the reality of our human limitations. Man, if I could be God, I would wave a magic wand and make everybody in the world happy, but I'm not. I'm not. I have to make hard decisions.
I have to walk away from this relationship. I have to leave this commitment. I have to say no to this person over here. I wish I didn't, but it is, in fact, irresponsible for me to play God. it is irresponsible to take responsibility for things that are not mine to take.
Braving radical acceptance and radical dependence on God, who is the one who actually holds all things together, is the work of developing faith. Allowing God to bring that guilt meter back to true north, back to the center, back to that balanced scale. Where with confidence before God, and with conviction, I can say, God, that is not mine to take.
I am not taking on responsibility for that person's feelings, for that person's disappointment, for that person's reactions. In this situation, I am going to keep my eyes fixed on you and do what I know is mine to do and let go of the rest.
So how do we do this? I've already talked about how this is a journey of healing and course correcting that guilt meter. Here's a simple exercise to help you on that path.
I'm going to use the framework from my book, I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. The tagline of the book is “Name What’s Hard, Tame Your Guilt, and Transform Self-Sabotage into Brave Action”. There's a lot more in the book, but the first thing you have to do when you notice guilt, kind of like what I was saying in my own life, is you have to name it.
You have to start becoming aware of what that feels like in your body. Because where we get into trouble is where we don't name it. We act reflexively out of it. We're not even aware of that feeling. We are doing the pleasing, perfecting, and taking responsibility when it's not ours to take.
Listening to this episode is a huge step in and of itself, of going, yes, that is me. I feel that all the time. Begin to notice it. Oh, I feel really guilty. I'm about to go to a different store in town and I feel guilty about that because I don't want my friend who owns this other store to see me. It could be that simple. Begin to notice the feeling. Oh my gosh, that's it. That's that guilty feeling. I'm feeling it right now. That's the first step.
Number two is to frame it. You've got to start getting curious about it and asking yourself the following questions. Number one, that magic question. Did I, in fact, do something wrong? Now, if you're having a hard time answering that because your guilt meter is so overweighted, go to part two of that question.
Would an objective third party agree that I did something wrong? If you need that help, ask somebody, especially on the front end of your recovery journey. Pull in some people and say, I feel so guilty about this. Maybe I shouldn't, but I do. Am I in fact doing something wrong? Because you really need to get that fact check.
What are the facts here? Am I in fact doing something wrong?
If you're not sure, here's the next question to ask yourself. Did I hurt someone else as a result of cruelty, of impatience, of selfishness, or did I act out of anger? If so, there might be true guilt.
Maybe I was harsh. Maybe I was selfish. Maybe I came down hard on my kids. I can name the thing I did wrong. I can tell a third party, no, no, no, I was harsh in that moment. I really was. And that other person, when they look at the facts, agrees with me.
Or did I hurt someone else as a result of setting a healthy boundary, of honoring my own needs, of honoring my own human limitations? So notice the difference. The first part of that is, did I hurt someone else as a result of cruelty, impatience, selfishness, or anger?
The second part of that is, did I hurt someone else as a result of setting a healthy boundary, honoring my own need, honoring a limitation that I have? I can't be in three places at once, I'm so sorry. If you start to notice a pattern of the latter, you are likely feeling false guilt.
You're feeling that thing of, I feel sad that I have to hurt this person, or I feel bummed out that I can't meet all the needs around me. But that is not in fact guilt. I have not in fact done something wrong. It is so important when you're considering these questions to be relentlessly honest with yourself. Look at the facts. Have I actually done something wrong?
It's really important to get to the root of this. Otherwise, you're going to continue in a pattern of enabling other people and taking responsibility for things that are not yours to take. That's not only not good for you, it is also not good for other people.
It's really important to begin to tip that balance of your guilt meter back toward alignment with the Holy Spirit. God, am I actually doing something wrong here or am I honoring your call? Am I honoring your call?
This brings us to step three, which is taking a brave step. If you are not, in fact, feeling true guilt, then the invitation is to be brave and do the thing that makes you feel uncomfortable because that's how you build up confidence in yourself, confidence that you can face the discomfort.
Confidence that you can face those feelings that no one ever taught you how to face and you can grow and you can gain resilience and you can gain inner strength. It feels fantastic. It's liberating. It's like, oh my gosh, I can do this. I can say no, I can get out of this relationship.
I can not do this thing that I don't feel called to do. You're aligning yourself with God's Spirit. There's a verse that has been so helpful to me in this journey of realigning my guilt meter with the conviction of the Holy Spirit. It's powerful. It's from 1 Samuel 15:22.
Here's what Samuel says: “To obey is better than sacrifice and to heed is better than the fat of rams.”
This is about obedience. If we are listening to false guilt, it's false. We're listening to a lie. We are not listening to the voice of truth. We are not listening to the voice of God. So this really comes down to obedience. God values a heart of obedience more than he values our pseudo-sacrifices that aren't really about honoring him.
They're about our fear. I don't want to hurt anybody. I don't want to be a bad person. I want other people to like me. Now, listen, we can be compassionate toward those parts of ourselves, but we cannot let those parts of us drive.
We need to honor first and foremost, the call of God before us. What is the truth of this situation? God, what are you calling me to? If you're calling me away from this person, away from this relationship, away from this responsibility, away from this habit, I have to follow you. I have to be brave.
That is what's most important to me. These fearful parts of me, they can be here. I get it. It's scary, but I will not let them lead me any longer. To obey is better than to sacrifice, to heed your way, God, is better than the fat of rams. I want to join you in this journey of aligning my conscience with your will, because that is the path where freedom, not only for myself, but for everyone around me, truly reigns.
This journey of learning to align your guilt meter and your conscience with God and the conviction of the Holy Spirit is crucial. It's crucial to not only our spiritual health, but to our emotional health, our mental health, and to the health of our relationships.
You can do it. God wants this for you, to learn to engage your conscience to the fullest of how God designed it to function. You will learn to release what isn't yours to carry, and you will learn to trust God to hold it instead. Obedience to God's call, not fear, not people pleasing, not misplaced responsibility, is what leads us to the joy of true freedom from the shackles of false guilt and over-functioning.
What if the behaviors you turn to for comfort—whether it’s overworking, people-pleasing, or numbing out—aren’t the real problem, but rather a signal from a part of you that’s desperately trying to help?
In this powerful episode, I sit down with Ian Morgan Cron—author, speaker, and renowned Enneagram expert—to explore the fascinating intersections between Internal Family Systems (IFS) and the 12 Steps. Together, we uncover why we’re all, in some way, prone to numbing behaviors and how understanding the role of our “firefighter” parts can lead to true emotional healing. If you’ve ever struggled to make sense of your coping mechanisms or felt stuck in cycles of avoidance, this conversation will leave you with tools and hope for real transformation.
In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
* Why we’re all addicts in some way—and how the 12 Steps apply to everyone
* What “firefighters” are in Internal Family Systems (IFS) and how they work to protect us
* The true source of numbing behaviors
* The surprising and liberating goal of the 12 Steps and what it means for all of us
* Practical ways to find a safe person to share your struggles honestly and vulnerably
* How we can all achieve emotional sobriety
Resources:
- The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile
- The Typology podcast
- Pre-order The Fix: How the Twelve Steps Offer a Surprising Path of Transformation for the Well-Adjusted, the Down-and-Out, and Everyone In Between by Ian Morgan Cron
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- ianmorgancron.com/getyourdownload
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 108: Inside Out—Internal Family Systems, Therapy, and High-Performing Protectors with Jenna Riemersma
Thanks to our sponsors:
- As a listener of The Best of You Podcast, you can qualify to see a registered dietitian for as little as $0 by visiting faynutrition.com/bestofyou.
- 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'm so thrilled you're here for today's episode. Oh my gosh, this one was a blast to record. You will hear how much we ping off of each other's work throughout the episode.
I first want to give a warm welcome to so many new listeners who've tuned in this month to the podcast. I'm so glad you're here. And I want to thank those of you who've been listening now for a while. You are so faithful showing up every week, and I want to thank you for sharing these episodes with your friends, with your family members.
I love seeing new people find this place where every single week, we are seeking to grow and to heal and to become what I like to call soul menders, people who are invested in this ongoing work of healing.
My guest today is Ian Morgan Cron. He is the bestselling author of The Road Back to You, a renowned speaker, psychotherapist, and host of the Typology podcast. Ian is widely celebrated for his work with the Enneagram, but today we're diving into his powerful new book. It's called
Now here's a little backstory before we jump into today's episode. Just two days before I recorded this interview with Ian, Ian had me on his Typology podcast. This was coincidental. We didn't realize it until our second interview, that we were on each other's calendars for the very same week.
We'd never met before, but we very quickly discovered through both interviews, a shared passion for internal family systems or IFS, which if you're new to the podcast or to my work, is a therapeutic approach that views the self as made up of different parts. It's the topic of my first book with Kimberly Miller called Boundaries For Your Soul.
So in this conversation today, Ian and I couldn't help ourselves from focusing on the 12 steps through the lens of IFS and in particular, we talked a lot about firefighters. If you're new to IFS, firefighters are the parts of us that react impulsively to put out the flames of emotional pain.
These are the parts of us that try to escape or avoid pain primarily through numbing. While in Ian's case, this led to drug and alcohol addiction, for many of us, these parts of us act out through binge-watching television, through scrolling social media, through a daily wine habit, through shopping, or even through fantasy. They do anything to escape or avoid pain.
Working with these parts of us, no matter what your go-to numbing behavior is, is often a recovery process. In fact, Ian really reframes addiction as a universal human struggle, as something every single one of us has to come to terms with.
Today we explore how the 12 steps can become a trellis or a structure to support growth and healing, no matter what we're facing. I loved this conversation. Ian is so real. He's so honest about his own story and his own setbacks and his insights are so wise, compassionate, and practical.
You can pick up a copy of The Fix, as well as the accompanying workbook, anywhere books are sold. We'll link to it in the show notes. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Ian Morgan Cron.
***
Ian: Alison, I am so stoked. We did a podcast earlier this week when you were on my show, Typology, and I've read your books and I'm a fan. I so enjoyed our conversation a couple of days ago that I got up this morning like, I'm so stoked I'm going to see Alison today.
Alison Cook: I feel like there's this really cool thing where “coincidentally”, we have these back to back interviews. I read your book and I feel like you're an old friend that I've never met, because there's so much overlap. This book is really powerful. It's really hitting me in places..
There's so much I want to dive into, especially with this idea that we all in some way, shape, or form, are dealing with an addiction. So I want to go there, but would you start by sharing with us a little bit more of your story that you reveal a little bit in The Fix, for my listeners who maybe only know you through your work with the Enneagram or through your podcast? Tell us a little bit more about your story and what led to you writing this book.
Ian: Yeah. I've been a part of 12 step communities. I'm a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and I have been a part of 12 step communities for about 35 years. Four years ago, following a relapse, I went to treatment. This was obviously a private thing, and I haven't spoken about it publicly over the last almost five years now.
But I have been so beautifully and profoundly transformed by working the 12 steps. I felt like I got to let people know, who maybe don't self-identify with alcoholics or substance use disorders or overeaters or gamblers or whatever. I wanted everyone to derive the same benefit from the 12 steps that I have, as a program for living that is completely consistent with the gospel.
And that could really change people who don't show up in church basements a couple of times a week, but could really get something from it.
Alison Cook: It's really powerful how you recast it as something for everyone. You're so real. That's what I love about the opening few chapters of this book. There's such a raw realness, when you describe yourself as that young boy, looking for anything to numb the pain. There isn't a quick fix. There isn't a workaround, but the 12 steps do offer a scaffolding to us.
Ian: Yes, in a way, the 12 steps are a rule of life. The Benedictines and other monastic traditions had a rule of life. And the word “rule" there actually means trellis, in the original language. The 12 steps are like a trellis on which we can grow. They offer some new ways of being in the world that can help us live more comfortably with ourselves and our own skins.
I also love talking about internal family systems, which I know is a big thing for you. One of the things that internal family systems has helped me to do is to really understand my journey with addiction and that, as you read in the book, traumatized, exiled part of me. It got activated again and it resorted to addiction. My firefighter, if you will, woke up and went, oh, I know, I have a solution.
Alison Cook: Read the book, listener, because it’s such great writing, but there's this moment where you describe visiting a doctor and I saw that part of you. It was like, wait a minute, Adderall, oh, ding, here's a new solution. After I don't know how many years of dormancy where you were in sobriety, that part of you, you could almost visualize that part of you coming to life.
So Ian, I’d love to try to walk through these steps and think about this lens of the different parts of us as we're walking through the steps. Before we dive into that, for all my listeners who maybe don't identify as a typical “addict”, where we think about drugs or alcohol, tell me a little bit about how addiction applies to all of us.
Ian: Yeah. So let me give you my definition of addiction. It's an amended version that I've taken from lots of sources, but an addiction is an unhealthy compulsive relationship with a person, a behavior, or a substance that has mood altering effects and negative consequences. So who doesn't have that?
It could be alcohol or drugs, but it could be people-pleasing. It could be shopping. It could be food. It could be gambling. It could be sex. It could be porn. We're not people who have one addiction. I like to laugh and say that I can't get up in the morning without getting out of bed and tripping over one of my many addictions,
Alison Cook: You can list all the different ways that we are resorting to something, to soothe pain instead of sitting with what's hard.
Ian: And the thing is, our firefighters have good intentions. I would say that my firefighter believes that there is an external solution to my internal problem. Of course that's like going to the hardware store to buy bread. You're going to the wrong place, man. Thank you. But no, thank you.
Alison Cook: Yes. All right. So this is great. We talk a lot about numbing, about those firefighters, and to me, these are the parts of us that reach for something to put out the flames of pain. They might not always show up in stereotypical ways. When I was reading your story about being in college and being two people, it was like, I'm going to Christian groups and then I'm partying with my frat brothers, you were really living this double life.
I was thinking I've described my own college years in that way. It's the double life. The things that I was doing to soothe pain were more “socially acceptable”, things I could keep hidden or maybe “Christian acceptable”--the incessant people-pleasing or workaholism.
But that's what we're talking about, these parts of us that want to put out those flames of pain that can become more overt addictions. We're all doing it in some way. So let's talk about that first step. What's that moment of recognizing something has to change?
Ian: The first step is really honesty. It's reaching this moment where we say, you know what, I've tried everything to overcome this behavior or this dysfunctional relationship like codependency or a substance. It helps me disassociate or get out of the pain that I'm feeling, but it's beginning to have significant negative consequences in my life.
And I can't seem to stop, no matter what I do. The admission that on my own unaided willpower, I can't stop this. I've tried, and my life's getting unmanageable. If that word feels weird to you, try intolerable, like it's not working and I need help. I always say that in some ways, the three most brave words a person can say is “I need help”.
Alison Cook: Yeah. So it's that real admission, that naming, of this is out of control. And it's not immediately rushing to fix it. Which is my go-to. Is that what we mean by surrender? That first, it's here and I actually can't fix it?
Ian: Yeah, in fact, you could bundle those first three steps as: Step one, I can't. Step two, God can. Step three, I'll let Him.
Alison Cook: Wow. Wow. Okay. I can't. God can. And then step three, I will cooperate. I will work with God.
Ian: Yeah. And the word I love, Alison, is consent. I feel like so much of the spiritual life is built on that idea of giving God consent to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. And that's not easy. Because the will and the ego are pretty big forces, but basically to say, God, I give you consent to flood me with the grace necessary and the relationship with you that will render my addictive patterns unnecessary.
I love this prayer: God, help me to find in you what I look for in _____. So something like, God, help me to find in you what I look for in workaholism, or in achievement, or in perfection, or in Netflix, or in alcohol, or in porn, or in people-pleasing. Recognize that there are forces in our lives governing from the shadows that need our healing. And give God consent to rewire us.
Alison Cook: If we think about these first three steps, and you're going to get the deep dive in the book, but taking them in this way, is it something you then have to practice daily? Hourly?
Ian: Yeah. This is so good, Alison. You're a great interviewer. My sponsor, and for people who don't know, in 12 step communities, a sponsor is somebody who's been in the program longer than you and has worked the steps and helps you to do the same, walks you through them. They’re a great sounding board and counselor-advisor to you.
This guy's awesome. He's from East Tennessee, he's got a thick country accent. And he says stuff to me that's weirdly mystical sometimes, and I'm like, where did you get that? And he said to me, after you work these steps long enough, the numbers fall away.
And I thought, wow, he's right. In other words, yes, in the beginning you are very conscious of the order of the steps. I'm working step one. I'm working step two. I'm working step three. After you've been at it for a while, you discover that you're now reflexively living the principles of the program, all day, every day.
Sometimes it's very conscious. I could get up in the morning and say, boy, I admit that not only am I powerless over alcohol, but I am powerless over my fear of disappointing people. And it makes my life unmanageable today. And then I go to step two and I acknowledge that there's a power greater than myself that can restore me to sanity.
Step three, I say, listen, God, I've made a decision to turn my will and my life over to your care. I trust that with my cooperation and consent, that you can remove this defective character from me so that I can be free. And I hope we circle around to my understanding of my inner architecture and how it has been influenced by internal family systems.
It has given me language and a construct for doing internal work, for giving God consent. Like, hey God, I got this firefighter inside. It's called people-pleasing. I don't want to disappoint people. And no matter how hard I've tried, I can't seem to get this part to accept the leadership of my essential self. Can you help restore me to sanity here?
I've created kind of a hybrid of internal family systems with my recovery work. And I'm telling you, it has been incredibly helpful and I need so much to thank you for the work you've done, because it has really helped me have clarity and language for talking about my healing.
Alison Cook: I love that. When you're saying that, what it reminds me of is one of the things we say in IFS work sometimes–we're trying to get a paper's width's distance from that part of us. Especially those firefighters, because if we can even name it to God, that this part of me is so active right now, that's putting that tiniest sliver of space between us and that part.
And there's power in that. We don't have to make it go away altogether. We've placed a tiny hair of distance there that gives us a little bit more agency.
Ian: I love that. And I love this idea because when I have blended with these parts of me, I'm so over-identified and consumed. And secondly, when that happens, when I say I've come to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity, that to me is like that paper thin separation between my true self or my spirit led self and this other part.
It's, oh, there's a part of me that's not traumatized, that wasn't sexually abused as a kid, that wasn't affected by my dad's alcoholism and drug addiction, that is separate from the part of me that would seek to find a chemical solution to my problems. God placed that in me. I've come to believe that, and it's so helpful.
Alison Cook: It's like creating a little more inner awareness of other parts of you. So let's think about these first three steps. It sounds like what you're saying is that the first step is the acknowledgement of, I'm blended. This firefighter part of me is all that I am.
Ian: Yeah. And there are so many ways that we're powerless. You know what's so funny? There's an irony here. The moment you admit powerlessness, you're given a superpower. That's the strangest thing. Have you ever had a moment where you realized, I'm out of ammo?
Alison Cook: Yeah, totally. Totally.
Ian: You're like, I'm out of ammo. I've done everything. For those listening, if you're codependent, maybe over a kid that you can't get to stop drinking or drugging, or who has a behavior that you want to change and you realize, I've done everything, I've tried everything. And I am powerless.
What happens is this dilation in the chest sometimes, where everything finally relaxes. It's like all the parts go, finally, you've admitted what we've known all along.
Alison Cook: Yes. It's oddly a relief. It's not giving up. It's a very different energy–it's surrender, but it's very hard to describe. You said that so well. There's nothing more I can do.
Ian: What you described beautifully is the difference between surrender and resignation. Surrender is not resignation. People who are resigned to their life tend to be glum and resentful. I give up. We might even argue that's another part.
Alison Cook: Those are protector parts.
Ian: Yeah. When you surrender, especially when you surrender to a higher power, God as I understand Him, all the parts go, phew.
Alison Cook: Yes. You know what? It reminds me, as you're describing this, that giving up or resigning is a manager part that's actually trying to cope. Surrender is that true self. It's clarity. I actually don't have control. Our essential self from a Christian perspective understands and actually leads naturally to that step, because I'm not God, I'm not the ultimate power here.
Ian: Yeah. Yeah. Steve, my sponsor, one day said to me, Ian, we are well past any conversation about you fixing you.
Alison Cook: It's such a relief. It's such a paradox and I don't know why we fight so hard to fix ourselves, but it is such a relief. I love that. Okay. So those are the first three steps: I can't, God can, and then I consent, God. It's bending the knee in a way.
Ian: Yes, absolutely. So in a way we could say the 12 steps like this. One through three is about clarifying and mending our relationship with God. Four through six is about mending and clarifying our relationship with ourselves. Eight and nine are about mending and clarifying our relationship with others. And then ten through twelve is developing a lifestyle and a way of being in the world that supports ongoing health in each of those domains of our life.
Alison Cook: Oh, that's good.
Ian: When you get to four and five, four is a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Five is admitting to God, ourselves and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Now, some people read this and they're like, man, I don't want to go there. Yeah, those words are tough, man. I don't want to go there.
But I don't know anyone who's done a 4th and 5th step who has said anything other than, man, that was one of the most healing experiences of my life. So much of our work as therapists is making the unconscious conscious. What we do in this situation is, with a non-blaming gaze and with a non-judgmental compassionate spirit, we look inside and we take an inventory of ourselves. It should never be shaming, blaming, or unkind, but it needs to be rigorously honest.
When we make that inventory, we then go out and we admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Now, it sounds like hard language, I could reframe it in some different ways but it is really important. Johann Hari or Gabor Maté says that when you keep secrets about yourself, you are essentially at war with yourself. There's some truth in that, so we need to find a trusted other or a community where we can speak our truth.
Alison Cook: This is the one that's the hardest for me. You say it really clearly–it's being honest with ourselves, God, and another human. And I'm pretty vigorously honest with myself. I'm pretty vigorously honest with God. That other human is hard.
I imagine this could be different for different people. I'm curious for you, which one of those do you struggle with the most? One of the things I love about the 12 steps model is the sponsor, that safe person. A therapist can be that, but especially when you've been hurt by someone, it can be hard to trust others.
There are listeners who have been hurt in church settings with public confessions, where that's been used shamingly. So I feel a lot of tenderness toward folks where it's like, how do you find that trust? It’s really vulnerable when we're being really vigorously honest with ourselves and naming it to someone else.
Ian: Yeah. In the book and particularly in the workbook, I really help people through this. So for example, in the workbook, I have a sample letter that you can actually give someone that instructs them. You really do have to pick a trustworthy person. It shouldn't be your spouse, your partner, or one of your kids. It shouldn't be a friend.
Find a pastor or a therapist or somebody in your life that you know is safe. And if you don't have that person, that needs to be a separate conversation. Wow, I don't actually have a real friend like that.
It's really helpful if that person has been through this themselves in some way, had done a fifth step themselves, but there are instructions about how to do it. I get fairly granular in those two chapters to help people really think through who that person is. But I don't think you can skip this.
You can't decide, I'm going to stick to God and myself. It's really important. If you can't be vulnerable with your therapist, something's wrong.
Alison Cook: I love that. And I do want to let the listener know that the workbook is so practical. I'd never heard somebody say that so clearly as you say it, that it's probably not your spouse. And that makes sense, if you think about it, because some of the things we're really admitting, honestly, could be hurtful to the people we love.
There are different conversations one needs to have with a spouse or a best friend. But it really is the role of a pastor or a spiritual director sometimes. My mom is a really devout Catholic. I was raised in a mixed Catholic/evangelical home. And I envy the practice of confession.
Whatever we think about it theologically, it's a built in place to tell another human, this is what's actually happening in my heart. And that person has the capacity to hold that.
Ian: Yes. And James, of course, doesn't let us off the hook. Bill Wilson, who wrote the Twelve Steps, derives them from a Christian organization called the Oxford Movement. People need to know that. There's nothing in the Twelve Steps that is inconsistent or discontinuous with the teachings of Jesus, and they actually derive from a tradition that was very faithful and orthodox in its understanding of the human person and God.
James does say, confess your sins to one another that you might be healed. So it's not like the scriptures let us off the hook in this regard. Here's what people typically say. They'll say, I don't have to go to another human being to ask forgiveness–I can only receive that from God. And that's an anti-Catholic stance left over from centuries of Protestant problems.
But really, that person isn't going to forgive you. In the best setting, they're going to give you an assurance of pardon that you have already been given.
Alison Cook: That's right. And it’s embodied. It is so scriptural and the body of Christ matters.
Ian: Admit it to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs. And by the way, you could decide that there are pieces of your fourth step inventory that you’re going to share with a friend, but you have five things on there to share with a therapist.
You have to exercise discernment, and be smart with it. As my sponsor likes to say, Ian, not everybody needs to know everything about you, but somebody needs to know everything.
Alison Cook: That's so good. It's really revolutionary. I've been interested and intrigued by the 12 steps for years, but this book really makes it accessible for all of us. It really makes it make sense for how it applies to all of us. It's so helpful. So let's keep going then. What's next?
We're doing this fearless moral inventory. We're really getting honest with God, ourselves, and at least one other human. Then what?
Ian: So after that we go to six and seven. What has come up in doing that fearless moral inventory of ourselves and sharing it with God and ourselves and other human beings are some character defects, like we realize, okay I struggle with resentment with so and so. It's because I'm envious of them. That's the real reason.
For me, I had to realize that after an episode of sexual abuse when I was about nine years old, that even though there was nothing I did wrong, I built my identity in some ways around that experience and I used it as playing the victim card. That was my part in it. You know what I mean?
After the fact, not the actual event, but after the fact. One of my character defects is playing the victim card sometimes. “Character defects” always put me off when I first heard it because it's like, I'm already ashamed enough. I don't really need to be told it's my defect. I am defective. I don't like the word.
So sometimes I call it a character defense. These are things that I came up with. These were strategies a part of me came up with to explain my experience to myself and to others. And all of my worst behaviors in life are usually driven by a part of me that came up with a strategy that is maladaptive or doesn't work.
And that gives me a little bit more compassion and understanding for those character issues that keep dogging me. So in step six, we're entirely ready to have God remove these defects of character. That's six. And then we humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings in step seven.
Now, super important. This is all about humility. It's recognizing, I can't get rid of these on my own. In fact, God doesn't even want me to take on that responsibility. Most people hear those steps and they go, I'm entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. What we end up doing is trying to do it on our own with our own unaided willpower. And it doesn't work. It's an exercise in futility.
Alison Cook: So Ian, for a second, let's think about this from an IFS lens, because I'm thinking about removing character defects. You've said something so important–when there's trauma in the background, and a part of you has coped with a very real trauma that wasn't your fault, if we think about parts language and defects, I hear you saying in these steps, we're revealing the strategy that a part picked up that was not helpful, but we don't want to get rid of the part.
We want that part to unburden that poor coping strategy, that unhealthy coping strategy, so that it can be restored to its healthy, whole, and proper state.
Ian: Okay. You're so killer. I love this. Number one, what I love about the 12 steps is that they're so beautifully written and framed. Bill Wilson, who authored them, used to say, these are suggestions. And there's no single right way to do the steps. It’s very open ended and kind.
One of the things that we can do is blend it with IFS and look at it through that lens. You could say that this part of me came up with the idea that if I play the victim card, I can leverage this painful experience and use it to manipulate others to feel sorry for me and not ask too much of me.
And then say, God, can you humbly remove our shortcomings? Step seven. Can you help this part of me unburden itself so that it no longer has to rely on that strategy to help me get through life?
Alison Cook: Yeah, I love that. And that sounds like a very young part that's trying to cope. What might that part become if it can get rid of that strategy? It doesn't need that strategy any longer.
Ian: Yes, exactly. And I always remind people this might take a minute. Bill Wilson says, we are not saints. The point is, we are trying to live along spiritual lines. We live by the principle of progress, not perfection.
Alison Cook: That’s good. Yeah, that's beautiful. It's the slow work.
Ian: Isn't that beautiful? There's a prayer by Teilhard de Chardin, the great Catholic theologian and thinker. He opens one of his most beautiful prayers with the line: Above all, trust in the slow work of God. Isn't that beautiful?
Alison Cook: Yes. I love that. It's so beautiful when you think about that overlay of getting to that step, and then God being so excited to meet that part that picked up that strategy and shine the mirror, but so gently and lovingly inviting that part to release that. It's just, wow. Why wouldn't we want to do this every day?
Ian: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So when you get to eight and nine, right now we've dealt with self. Now, we move into others. Eight is, make a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all. It's a really simple step.
It's just, I'm going to make a list of people I've harmed in my life as either a direct result of my addiction or addictive pattern, and then make direct amends to those people wherever possible. It's not always possible. Sometimes the person is dead. Sometimes we don't know where that person is now and can't find them. And we don't do it when it would hurt them, if our sharing with them something that we did would actually cause more pain than be of service to them.
But again, could this be any more scriptural? It's when you go to the temple and you realize that you've harmed somebody. Before you do another thing, run out, fix that, and then come back. This is a difficult pair of steps, but so many people carry the burden of unprocessed or unconscious resentment and hurt.
And if they can be agents of reconciliation in the world again, what we're doing here isn't just healing our relationship with them. It's also unburdening ourselves of shame and guilt and unresolved brokenness in relationships. Again, these steps can take time. We don't have to rush this. You're not in a race against yourself. But it's helpful to have a plan, because most people don't have a plan for transformation.
Alison Cook: It's so good. And I love what you're saying about not rushing it. That's the willpower part of us that wants to power through right there. You might get to that point where you need to be like, I can't do it. God. Back to step one: I can't. I can't do it. I'm not there yet. The radical honesty.
Ian: Yeah. I write about this idea that I call the “Hell no, I'm never going to make up to that schmuck” list. And those are the four or five people in my life who I would rather eat glass than make amends with. You know what I mean?
Alison Cook: I love the book. There's a lot of honesty in it.
Ian: Seriously, like I've got people in my life that I feel have hurt me much worse than I ever hurt them. You think I'm going to go and make amends? And yet the steps are like, listen, pal, all you have to do is clean your side of the street. That's it. Clean your side of the street.
They may not cop to what they did wrong in the relationship, but you need to cop to what you did. And you will come out, by the way, unburdened by shame and guilt and the feeling of something being left outstanding. When that happens, the likelihood of you returning to old addictive patterns is going to be infinitely less.
Alison Cook: That’s so good. And it doesn't mean you have to become best friends with them.
Ian: Heck no.
Alison Cook: It means you're taking care of your side of the street. Yeah. One of the things in IFS work, when you have a part that's holding on to something, maybe the person's no longer with us, or maybe it's somebody toxic that it wouldn't be wise to go to, we do some visualizations.
It might be the case where you've told a therapist, you've told someone, but then in the quiet of your own spirit, you're still releasing that resentment in some way, shape, or form. And in such a healthy way.
Ian: I talk about some practices people can do to soften their hearts towards those people who we need to make amends with, because sometimes it's important before we make amends to actually have forgiven the person for what they did to us. We don't go into that conversation with some passive aggressive energy that wants to say, I did this, but you did that.
How do I really understand that this person has broken parts too? Bill Wilson says they are sick too, and they need the same love and tolerance that we would offer a friend who was sick. I find that to be so beautiful.
Alison Cook: I feel like after this interview, I'm going to go do a bunch of journaling because I can feel it. There are those places in my own heart. Everything you're saying–this is a lifetime's work. This is ongoing work, layer upon layer. I really hear that. It takes time.
Ian: Yeah. And everybody goes at their own pace. For some people they go through the steps for the first time really quickly, and they're students of it. Now remember, some people come in on fire. They get to work. They have to remove the obstacles to achieve what I would call physical and emotional sobriety.
You and I could have a long conversation about emotional sobriety, like what that means, because through the lens of IFS, we are talking about achieving emotional and spiritual sobriety. Maybe we could talk about emotional sobriety as inhabiting and living out of our Spirit-led self and having a conscious awareness of its presence in our lives.
I was actually thinking about this in a meeting this morning. So much of steps work is about activating and bringing into our awareness the Spirit-led self and operating from there more and more. These steps help to support that journey in a way that's really great.
Step 10 is continuing to take personal inventory and promptly admitting when we're wrong. It's owning your stuff every day. It's pausing to go back after a snappy moment with your partner and say, you know what? I wasn't my best self then. This part of me was upset, and I'm sorry, or I ask your forgiveness for not coming from a healthier place then.
Alison Cook: Yeah. So the daily work.
Ian: The daily work. And then step 11 is about seeking through prayer and meditation, to improve our conscious contact with God. Then the final step is, and this is big, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we try to carry this message to our fellow sufferers.
To practice these principles in all our affairs. That is the point of the 12 steps. The point of the 12 steps is not to get you to stop drinking or taking drugs or watch porn or any of the crazy strategies we come up with to deal with our pain. It's actually to have a spiritual awakening.
That's the whole purpose. That is the stated purpose of the 12 steps. Bill Wilson would have said, to have a spiritual awakening that now renders your need for these strategies unnecessary.
Alison Cook: That's amazing.
Ian: Yeah. And then to carry that message of hope to other people.
Alison Cook: Which is what you're doing. When you said that step, to carry it to fellow sufferers, that's what I felt as I dug into your book this week. I thought, oh, you're doing that. You're giving it out of your own suffering, which has not been insignificant.
You're bringing it to others. And isn't that the beauty of the upside down gospel? I love that idea of carrying it to others and bringing that freedom to others. I want to sidetrack into what you said about emotional sobriety, because it reminds me of what you asked me when you interviewed me, about the goal of this work of IFS, and I said, “harmony”.
It's balancing all of the different states inside of us in a way that allows for the existence of different parts, but creates a melody. It's where that Spirit-led self is leading. When you say sobriety, it reminds me of that.
We'll have to have another conversation because I feel like you and I could do a whole other deep dive around this, but that's a really beautiful thought. I'm going to keep thinking about that emotional sobriety.
Ian: There's a term I love, and I can't believe I've never heard a sermon on it. It's a word that the Buddhists use. I am a Christian, but I have learned a lot from Buddhists about different things, and I'm a critical thinker, so I'm able to go, oh. That illuminates the gospel in a way I haven't heard before.
Equanimity. I would define it as the ability to maintain emotional balance and wholeness in the face of whatever life throws at you.
Alison Cook: That's it. That's the word. Equanimity. Yeah. It's not doing away with the complexity–it's leading yourself through it without losing yourself, without losing connection to God, to the Holy Spirit. That's really beautiful work.
I want to ask you as we close, I ask all my guests two questions. What would you say to that younger you who picked up some of the unhelpful strategies? What would you want him to know if you could be with him now?
Ian: You know what? I was at a conference a couple of years ago and someone was doing a Q&A with me. I was on stage and this person said, what would you tell your 10 year old self? And when something comes out of your mouth before you can edit it, you're having an out of body experience. You're like, did I say that?
I said, “you are not what happened to you”. I'm actually getting a little puddly right now when I say it, because we tend to over-identify with what happened to us in our histories. We assign it a level of truth and meaning that it doesn't deserve. And then we become strangely loyal to that interpretation of our history.
It took me a long time, and the steps really helped, to realize that I am not what happened to me, so that is something I would definitely tell my younger self.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. What's bringing out the best of you right now?
Ian: Hmm. I guess a convenient answer would be to say the 12 steps, and get my book! But they do continue to bring out the best of me, by working them every day. I can also say my wife is bringing out the best of me. I've been married for 38 years.
We've been through a lot together and we've reached a point in our relationship where there's a beautiful, comfortable companionship and friendship. We dance well together, and also we're very different. I'm a complex artist-type and all that stuff. And she's a beautiful peacemaker type.
She loves to plant sunflowers and make meals and go to yoga and live her life very peaceably. I used to look at her like, okay, this is boring. And I realized one day that it’s an aspect of God that's being revealed to me. She's my teacher.
Alison Cook: Oh, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. Tell everyone where they can find your book, the workbook and your work.
Ian: Yeah. Thanks so much. The book is called The Fix: How the Twelve Steps Offer a Surprising Path of Transformation for the Well-Adjusted, the Down-and-Out, and Everyone In Between. We have an interesting offer right now. If you pre-order, it doesn't drop until January 28th, but if you pre-order now, we'll send a free copy of chapter one.
The way to do that is to go to ianmorgancron.com/getyourdownload. And we'll tell you how to show proof that you preordered it, and then we'll send you a link to read the first chapter so you can get a head start on it.
Alison Cook: It's well worth it. You won't be able to put it down. Please take advantage of that. This is such a good book. I would say right now, reading it is bringing out the best in me. It's been a real answer to prayer that is helping me work through some of the things in my own life.
That structure, like you said, that scaffolding, is so helpful. I'm so grateful for you and for the fact that you're sharing this with fellow sufferers.
Ian: Alison, dare I say, I hope one day we get an opportunity to make good trouble together. It would be so fun to do a gathering of people around internal family systems and addictions together and to help people find the next step in their journey toward disentangling themselves from the things that they feel powerless to do anything about.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I sense a real invitation there. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Ian.
Ian: Thanks, Alison.
Are you always the one taking care of and fixing problems for everyone else?
Today, I'm taking a deep dive into the heart of overfunctioning—exploring why so many of us feel compelled to take on excessive responsibilities, often at the cost of our own well-being. I delve into parentification, which I believe often lies at the root of overfunctioning. I also share how understanding these dynamics through Mel Robbins' "Let Them Theory" can offer powerful insights for change.
Whether you're tired of always being 'the responsible one' or you're seeking to understand your deep-seated need to please others, this discussion will clarify the roots of these behaviors and guide you toward a path of healing and freedom.
Here’s what we cover:
*What is overfunctioning, and how does it impact your life?
*How childhood parentification fuels overfunctioning in adulthood
*5 clear signs you were parentified as a child
*3 practical steps to start healing
*How Mel Robbins’ Let Them Theory transforms boundary setting
Resources:
- The Best of You: Break Free from Painful Patterns, Mend Your Past, and Discover Your True Self in God by Dr. Alison Cook
- The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About by Mel Robbins
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 5: What is Codependency and Why Does it Matter?
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.
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
- Go to puritywoods.com/BESTOFYOU or enter code BESTOFYOU at checkout for an additional 10% off your first 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 glad to be here with you this week. It's just me this week, and I have a topic that I've been working on a lot in my own life. I've been having a lot of conversations about this with other people, and I wanted to bring it to the podcast.
The topic is over-functioning. It's incredibly relevant for so many of us, especially here in these few weeks after the holidays. A lot of us have been doing this for the last few weeks, if not the last few months. Overfunctioning is when you take on more than your actual share of responsibilities.
We often are doing this to manage our own anxiety or fears or insecurities, and I've had so many conversations about this with other people, with friends, with clients, with family members, in addition to so many conversations with myself about these patterns. I've been working really hard on a lot of these patterns, especially this past year as I've gone through some transitional seasons, so it's very fresh for me personally.
I want to talk about today why it's so prevalent for us to find ourselves in this cycle of over-functioning. I also want to explore three very practical ways to begin to heal as we head into the new year and seek to become the best version of ourselves.
Here's the thing about over-functioning. It's not that we work too hard or we get caught up in the moment. It's a way that parts of us have learned to survive. It's when we're managing other people's emotions or behaviors, or we're managing their problems instead of primarily doing the work of managing ourselves, of attuning to our own emotions, our own behaviors, our own problems, which is our primary responsibility in this life before God and before other people.
A part of us has learned to focus all that attention outward onto other people. It's often linked to codependency, when we are so focused on managing other people's problems that we miss out on the more important work that God is inviting us to do inside our own selves.
This pattern of over-functioning manifests in several different ways. It can show up as compulsive people-pleasing, where we try to please others at the expense of staying true to ourselves. It can show up as compulsive peacekeeping, where we're constantly trying to manage other people's conflicts that have nothing to do with us, instead of regulating our own anxiety.
In the face of conflict, it can show up as compulsive perfectionism, where we're working so hard to earn the approval of others through our own performance, instead of attuning to our own needs, our own values, and our own worth.
For example, you might find yourself managing your own anxiety by constantly rushing in to solve your friend's problems before they've even asked for help. In many cases, you might catch yourself frantically cleaning up your kid's rooms or cleaning up their homework, taking on tasks that they are fully capable of handling themselves because it's easier and quicker and more instantly gratifying than working through your own fears or your own stress.
Maybe you're someone who, when your mom and your dad start to bicker with each other, or maybe your spouse and one of your children starts to argue, maybe you're someone who jumps in and constantly tries to interpret their words or reframe what they're saying. “What he really means is this…”
You expend all this effort trying to smooth things over, to prevent their conflict from escalating, instead of stepping back and letting them address and resolve their own differences.
We all find ourselves doing these things in some ways, but when it becomes compulsive, when we're doing it mindlessly, almost outside of our conscious awareness, when we're so reflexively jumping in to keep the peace, to please, or to perfect instead of hanging on to ourselves and attuning to our own selves, our own internal responses, it becomes a problem.
We are managing other people instead of doing the work of attending to and managing and leading ourselves through our own uncomfortable emotions.
One way to see if this is a problem is to wonder if this is something I'm doing compulsively. Or is every once in a while, where I'm impatient and I jump in to try to fix a problem that wasn't really mine to fix? Ask yourself this: for the most part, am I acting from a place of calm and regulation, or am I engaging in this behavior to avoid, to escape or to deny or to bypass my own uncomfortable feelings?
Am I jumping in to please this other person out of a conscious desire to be kind and compassionate in this moment? Or am I behaving reflexively? What comes out of my mouth is what I know they want to hear, and I wouldn't even know how to show up with this person from a self-regulated space, where I might say the kind thing that they want to hear from me in the moment, but I'm also free to say, gosh, I'm not sure I see it the same way you do.
Am I jumping in to pick up after my child or clean up their mess, whether it's a relational mess or whether it's a literal mess, am I doing that out of a conscious desire to help them because they're in a bad spot? Or am I jumping in because I can't stand the discomfort that I feel seeing their room or seeing their relationships or seeing their homework in this state?
Am I jumping into the middle of this conflict that these two other people have with each other because I've really thought about it and prayed about it, and I'm deeply aware that I have some tools that might help them and they seem open to that, so I'm willing to step in as an objective third party to empower them to make a change? Or am I jumping in reflexively in this moment because I cannot stand how I feel when other people are in conflict?
How you answer those questions is crucial to understanding whether you're genuinely helping someone out of an overflow of your own heart, or if you're unknowingly perpetuating a cycle of codependency. This is a journey that I've been on personally for years.
And while I have healed in many ways, I'm telling you, different life seasons resurrect old wounds in new ways. I turned 52 years old, and I'm, for the most part, now in an empty nest. There are different factors and variables in my life right now that create new opportunities for deeper healing.
As I've reflected on my own journey this past year, as I've really been working through a lot of these dynamics in my own soul, I have noticed how often messages like the following rise up in my soul.
“I only know how to feel love.”
That rings true for me a lot of the time, when I'm aware I'm reaching to meet a need to feel loved and to feel comforted or to feel encouraged–to feel consoled in my own life through providing those very same things to someone else.
It's as if a part of me projects my own emotional needs onto others, and then I work to care for those imagined needs in others, instead of first pausing to ask myself, wait a minute, does that other person that needs my caregiving right now, or is it a part of myself? Increasingly, I am aware that the part of me that is constantly showing me all this concern that it has for others is actually a cue that there's a part of me in need of my care.
As I've unpacked this in my own life and helped others to unpack it in theirs, there's a concept that is often at the root of this kind of compulsive over-functioning, where we constantly work to manage other people instead of doing the work of managing and caring for the parts of ourselves. The word is parentification.
This is when you've been conditioned since childhood to take care of other people. I talk about this in my book, The Best of You: Break Free from Painful Patterns, Mend Your Past, and Discover Your True Self in God. The whole book really is about healing from this specific pattern of pain, of over-functioning on behalf of others to the neglect of your own self.
One of the stories that didn't make it into the final cut of the book was about a client, Emily. I've changed her name to protect her identity, but she grew up in a home where her mother often turned to her as a confidant. As early as the age of eight, she would remember sitting at the kitchen table, where she would listen to her mom vent about her friends or her work, or even about Emily's father.
Emily would listen and really try to help her mom, and here's the memory that Emily would constantly go back to as we unpacked this: her mom would end these conversations by saying, you are such a good listener, Emily, I don't know what I’d do without you.
Think about the impact of those words on a young child's soul. You are such a good listener. I don't know what I'd do without you. Emily took that in at a young age and she began to become a master at reading other people's emotions. She began to detect, before her mom would even say anything to her, when she needed help cleaning up.
When her mom needed space, Emily would tiptoe away and stay out of her hair. When her mom needed the right words of comfort, Emily became a master at reading those cues externally and then getting that hit of dopamine. That hit felt so good when her mom would say, you're so amazing, Emily, I don't know what I would do without you.
A young part of Emily picked up the idea that she could get a hit of love or affection through taking care of somebody else. The problem is that as an adult, Emily began to notice that she often felt invisible in her relationships.
She was really good at showing up for other people in her life. She showed up for her friends. She showed up for her kids. She showed up for her spouse. She showed up for her colleagues, but she had this chronic lingering loneliness inside, like nobody sees me. Nobody knows me.
I have all these friends, I have all these people in my life who turn to me, but why do I feel so alone? As we began to unpack Emily's past, this term, parentification, became a really helpful naming that began to set her on a path toward healing.
Parentification is a role reversal in which a child steps into a caregiving role for their parent. And in this case, I'm speaking primarily about emotional support, when a child is expected to meet the emotional needs of their parent. It might look like being a confidant, a pseudo-therapist, or a mediator between a parent and another parent or between a parent and siblings.
Now listen, this isn't about the occasional moment when a child helps a parent out. Those can be healthy and character-building and really beautiful. When a child shows us a moment of empathy or compassion, we want to honor that in our child.
But this is a really different thing. This is a chronic pattern, where the child's role in the family is distorted, where they are conditioned to become essentially the primary caregiver, the parent in the family. In this sense, the parent really abdicates their role as the primary caregiver when it comes to emotional care in particular.
It can happen in other ways, but we're going to talk about the emotional piece of it in today's episode, where the parent is supposed to be providing the guidance, the wisdom, the support. But instead of doing that, they're instead receiving the care and guidance and support from their child.
This role reversal really disrupts your development when you're a child–it affects your emotional and psychological health. Here's the thing that is so important to understand; there is a power differential in a family. At its core, parentification distorts the natural power differential within a family. Adults hold the greater power emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually. Children, on the other hand, are vulnerable.
A child's job is to rely on their caregivers to help them learn, to regulate their own emotions, to process complicated situations, and to set healthy boundaries with their own peers and even with their own family members. There are tasks children are simply not equipped to handle on their own.
The parent needs to be the primary caregiver in a family, so that a child knows what it feels like to receive care, to receive guidance, to receive support. This idea aligns beautifully with the biblical metaphor Jesus gives us for God as father or Abba, which translates to a deeply intimate and nurturing primary caregiver.
As humans, we look to God as bigger than us, as knowing more than us, as the one who provides, protects, and guides us. It's a beautiful relationship where we get to lean into God as that all knowing, all giving, all supporting being when we're feeling vulnerable or scared or broken down.
In a family system, while parents will never do this perfectly, we are entrusted as parents to reflect this type of nurturing Abba-like presence to our children. While we do this imperfectly, we still carry the responsibility that we have to shape our children's lives, and not the other way around.
So if a parent subverts that natural power differential and begins to lean on the child in a way that exploits the child's vulnerability, that family dynamic really shifts. Instead of being taught how to understand and regulate your emotions, you were leaned on as an emotional co-regulator for a parent or for a family member.
Instead of helping you process your own struggles, your own fears, your own insecurities, your own sensitivities, whether at school with friends or in your own family, you were groomed to serve as your parents' personal sounding board.
Instead of modeling healthy boundaries to protect emotional well being and physical space, you were constantly boundary-fouled. Your parent constantly overstepped the boundaries and placed inappropriate burdens on you.
So if you go back to Emily's story, let's say she's listening really attentively to her mom, and her mom says to her in that moment, Emily, you have such a kind heart. I love your empathy. I want you to know that these are my problems and I have other adults to work through these problems with. These are not your responsibility.
In fact, I want to be sure you're not feeling scared or anxious because somehow you've picked up on the fact that I'm feeling scared or anxious. I want you to know I'm okay. I'm getting the help I need. It's my job to be here for you. How are you doing in this moment?
When a child is over-functioning or stepping into the role of a parent or stepping into a role where they're taking on more responsibility than is theirs to take on, it's a parent's job to point that out. “This actually isn't your responsibility to step in here. So tell me a little bit about what that's about. What's going on inside of you?”
That's what a parent needs to do. As you can imagine, if that didn't happen for you, as an adult you're going to show some symptoms of that. Not only were you stepping into over-functioning through caring for your own parent, but you were being validated for it. You're being told, oh, I love this about you. I couldn't live without you. You take that with you into adulthood.
Here are five indicators that you may have been parentified as you struggle not to over-function in your adult relationships.
Number one, you struggle to identify your own needs. A part of you finds it easier to focus on others than to connect with your own feelings, desires, or needs. And this part often measures your self-worth based on your ability to satisfy the needs of others.
Number two, you feel responsible for other people's emotions. A part of you is hyper-attuned to the emotions of those around you. You feel responsible for their well-being, and this part of you feels guilty as if it's your fault when others are upset, angry, disappointed, or down, even when it has nothing to do with you.
Number three, you avoid conflict. A part of you tends to avoid conflict, and that part of you cannot stand the thought of someone else feeling uncomfortable as a result of your actions, even if they should feel uncomfortable because they're actually doing something that is wrong and you need to speak up and say, hey, I'm not comfortable with this.
That's going to evoke discomfort in them, and this part of you cannot stand that. It feels like anathema to you, and instead you sacrifice your own needs in the relationship so that they always feel good about themselves and never have to feel the pain of conflict. Conflict is healthy in relationships–we need to be able to enter into conflict to navigate through pain points in our relationships.
Number four, you experience hypervigilance, where you're always on duty. You're always on watch. I experienced this as an antenna part of me that's always out ahead of me, gauging what's happening in other people, gauging other people's facial expressions, gauging other people's subtext, gauging other people's moods.
It's constantly scanning for what others need, for what others are worrying about, for what others' expectations are in the moment, and feeding that information to me so that I can meet it, often before they even ask.
And I'll be honest with you. This vigilant part of me is often driven by number one, either a fear of abandonment, that if I don't anticipate and meet that need, I won't have a relationship with that person anymore, that I'll be cut off from that person. It's the only way that part of me knows how to experience connection.
Or number two, that part of me genuinely and sincerely believes that the other person can't manage without my help. And that's been a big one to unpack in my own life. What if there are other ways to experience healthy two-way connection? What if that other person not only can, but needs to learn to manage?
The fifth indicator that you have developed this pattern of over-functioning is that you have a lot of difficulty trusting others. A part of you, having been relied upon so heavily as a child, struggles to trust that someone else could actually show up for you when you need support or when you need a listening ear.
As a result, this part of you makes it hard for you to form balanced relationships where your needs are acknowledged as often and as frequently as you're acknowledging the needs of the other person.
If you've noticed any of these five indicators in your life, please know this is not your fault. This is a pattern that develops usually early in childhood and often as a result of parentification. It often begins with parents who were struggling in their own ways. So there's no blame here, but we do need to name it.
I have been over-functioning since I was eight years old. It's not going to change on a dime. There's a pattern here that I need to heal. And here is the good news–healing is possible. It's the work we're invited into. It’s the path that God invites each and every one of us on.
Naming is the marker at the beginning of the path. Oh, this is where I am. I'm an over-functioner. I tend to over-function. I have codependent patterns. I have no clue how to honor my own needs. This is the truth that sets us free, and we set down on the path of healing. We're getting there. God becomes the most wonderful sort of companion as we work to establish new ways.
The first of three steps to healing I want to share with you today is naming the pattern. Not only in general, but to begin to name it in the moment. Oh my goodness. I'm pleasing this person right now. I can't stop in this moment, but I'm aware I'm doing it. My reflex right now is to say whatever they want me to hear.
Just that awareness in and of itself is a huge step toward change. You might name it after the fact–oh my gosh, my spouse and my eldest son were in a conflict and I could not stop myself from intervening, from getting in the middle of it and it happened.
Noticing is what allows you to begin to blaze new neural pathways in your brain. It's going to take a few of those, where you notice it while it's happening or after it's happening, until you finally get to the point of realizing it before it happens and making a different choice.
When we can notice and name what's happening without shame, we get some distance from it and we begin to ask ourselves, what would it look like in that moment if I did make a different choice? What would it look like if, when I felt that anxiety inside of me, when two people in front of me are starting to fight, what if I got up and excused myself and left the room?
Could I really do that? It really starts with that internal what if-ing? What if I could make a different choice?
And this leads us to number two, where you reconnect to the part of yourself that has learned this strategy to survive. Oh my gosh. Right now, a part of me is scanning this Christmas dinner table and noticing which person is about ready to get angry or which person is about ready to feel hurt.
Instead of focusing on the other person or on other people, shift your attention to the part of you that's doing the scanning. I wonder what that's about. What is that part of me that is so invested in taking the temperature of everyone in the room? What does that part of me need from me right now?
What fears does this part of me have, if it weren't to do this job? What if I were to stop scanning everybody else and notice what I'm feeling in this moment?
Inevitably, when I start doing this work, when I slowly notice that part of me that's so tempted to read everybody else and I begin to attune to my own inner feelings, inevitably, I notice anxiety. I feel anxious right now. I don't like conflict. I want everyone to feel happy. And I begin to do the work of reparenting the parts of myself in need of care.
I let that part of me know it doesn't have to work so hard anymore. I play the role of the parent for that part of me, because that part of me is young. It's back in that eight year old self, thinking its job is to scan the needs of everybody else. And I let that part of me know, thank you so much for working so hard, but you don't have to do that job anymore. I'm here. I can handle it. You can rest inside my soul.
You begin to parent that part of you in a way that it never got parented.
Lastly, number three, as you begin to notice more of your own internal anxieties and fears that lead to the over-functioning and you begin to reorient to your own needs instead, then you can begin to set healthy boundaries with your impulse to over-function. Now, notice I didn't say set healthy boundaries with other people. I said, set healthy boundaries with your own impulse to over-function.
And here's why that's important to me. Part of why I wrote The Best of You is because I was concerned that most of the conversation about boundaries is written through the lens of saying no to other people, which if you think about it from this over-functioning lens, can easily become about managing other people.
I need to say no to other people because then they'll stop doing this thing. The focus is on other people. And that isn't helpful to those of us who over-function by managing other people. Instead, think about boundaries as figuring out what you want to say yes to inside your own self.
So for example, I don't like family conflict. I feel anxious. Instead of managing others, what other choice do I wish to make in this moment? Do I wish to leave or excuse myself from the room? Do I wish to limit the time that I'm present at these types of gatherings? You flip it from “I'm going to say no to other people”, to “What do I want?” instead.
What would I do if it weren't my job to intervene in this conflict that someone else is having? What would I do with my time if I weren't compulsively fixing other people's problems? What would I want to do in this moment if I wasn't cleaning up other peoples’ problems?
Let yourself wonder. It might take a while to answer those questions. This is the harder part of the equation. What would I do instead right now if I didn't race in to clean up that mess that someone else made?
One of the tools that I have found recently that has been really helpful for me on this boundary setting journey is by Mel Robbins, and she's got a new book out. It's called The Let Them Theory. It's everywhere. I highly recommend it. I would love to get Mel on the podcast. She's super busy, understandably, so I'm going to briefly use her words, but go check out her book to get the full deep dive on it.
She uses these two steps in the context of over-functioning. The first part of it is to let them have their mess. Let them have their disappointment. Let them have their emotions. Let them engage in that conflict that's not in my control, that's not mine to manage. That's the first part, recognizing that it's not mine to manage.
The second part of her theory, and this part is a lot harder and it gets at boundaries work, is let me. What can I control? What can I manage? What I can manage is myself. So I'm going to let them have their reaction, have their conflict, but then I'm going to let me choose to remove myself.
I'm going to let them work through their own problem that they created, and then I'm going to take a deep breath and I'm going to let me do something really nice for myself, because it's really hard for me to watch someone else suffer the consequences of their own actions.
That second part, what she calls “let me”, gets at this proactive side of boundary setting. We have to go, what do I need to do in this situation to take care of myself, to manage myself, to regulate myself?
This is a tool that honors our own agency. We let other people be responsible for themselves, and that allows us to take responsibility for what's ours, for our own anxiety, for what actually helps me. When I feel anxious, what soothes me? When I'm fearful, what makes me feel supported or connected or cared for?
Man, that is next level healing, when we actually start to tap into what we need from other people, what we need from God, what we need from our family members and from our friends to thrive and feel supported and loved.
When you shift away from managing other people to leading and nurturing and caring for and reparenting the parts of your own soul in partnership with God's spirit, you create an oasis of goodness and kindness and calm inside your own soul. And from this place of taking charge of your own self, you can begin to empower others in their own healing journeys.
What’s the secret to healing marriage struggles and fostering deep connection?
In this heartfelt and incredibly vulnerable conversation, Ron and Nan Deal share their journey of rebuilding a marriage that almost unraveled. Drawing from their new book, The Mindful Marriage, they reveal how understanding and managing your own pain cycles can transform relationships. Whether you’re married, single, or navigating any relationship, this episode offers profound wisdom and practical tools for emotional and personal growth.
Episode Highlights:
* Explore one couple's journey through shame, blame, and rediscovering connection.
* Learn 4 Pain Cycles that disrupt relationships and how to break free from them.
* Uncover practical steps to nurture your relationship’s “us-ness” without losing yourself.
* Learn what to do when you're willing to do the work—but your partner isn't.
Take the free assessment Ron and Nan mention in the episode here
Get your copy of The Mindful Marriage here.
Resources:
- The Mindful Marriage: Create Your Best Relationship Through Understanding and Managing Yourself by Ron Deal and Nan Deal
- www.worthypub.com/assessment
- Matthew 7
- Philippians 21
- Corinthians 13
- rondeal.org
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 115: 4 Ways to Transform Your Relationship: Expert Tips to Heal Pain Points and Deepen Intimacy
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
- Get ahead of the New Year with a routine that helps you now by going to Seed.com/BESTOFYOU and use code 25BESTOFYOU to get 25% off your first month.
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 glad you're here this week. This is a first for The Best of You Podcast–it's the first time we've had a married couple on, as they tell their story of how they came back from the brink of their marriage almost unraveling.
It's also the first time we've really had an episode devoted to the topic of marriage. Whether you're married, divorced, or single, this episode has something for everybody. My guests today have written a brand new book that is all about the secret to a healthy marriage.
This episode touches on so much of what we talk about regularly on this podcast, which is learning to manage our own emotions, learning to be more in tune with our body, with the messages we're telling ourselves, more in charge of our own responses to other people.
All that work is, in fact, the foundation for a healthy, long-term, two-way relationship with someone else. So in this episode, we're going to get deep into what my guests call the four pain cycles–the four ways most of us tend to cope when we feel threatened or hurt or fearful or controlled or even annoyed with another human.
We’ll see how it's our responsibility to learn how to shift from that pain cycle into a healthy response that honors the other person, but also reveals the best version of who we are in that moment.
My guests today are an incredible couple, Ron and Nan Deal. They've been married for 38 years and they've worked for decades to bring wisdom and incredibly practical advice for couples everywhere.
Ron is a licensed marriage and family therapist. He's a bestselling author and podcaster, and Nan is the co-founder of Connor's Song, which is a non-profit organization founded in honor of their son, Connor, who died at the age of 12 in 2009.
In this new book, The Mindful Marriage, Ron and Nan partner with pioneering therapists, Dr. Terry Hargrave and Sharon Hargrave, whose transformational restoration therapy has helped millions through the practice of emotional mindfulness applied to marriage. The book is called The Mindful Marriage: Create Your Best Relationship Through Understanding and Managing Yourself.
That subtitle really says it all. The more we grow and heal and learn to manage our own inner turmoil and become the best version of who we are, the more we show up effectively in our most cherished relationships.
This is such a rich episode from start to finish. Ron and Nan share incredibly honestly and vulnerably about each of their own journeys and how there were periods of time where neither of them was doing their own work and it really hurt the other one. They share how they not only survived those rough patches, but learned to thrive as a married couple.
This method that they're laying out in the new book and that they share with us today on this episode is what helped them heal their own marriage. You will hear us talk about an assessment you can take to help pinpoint your own pain cycle, which is the way that you tend to react out of pain when you feel hurt by someone else.
I took the assessment and we discussed my results in today's episode. If you want to take that assessment, it's free. It's at www.worthypub.com/assessment. I will send that link out along with an excerpt from the book in this week's email newsletter. It's free and it goes out every Tuesday. You can sign up for it at dralisoncook.com.
Without further ado, I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Ron and Nan Deal.
***
Alison Cook: Let's dive into this because you're both very real and honest in the book, which I so appreciated. Ron, you've worked with couples for years as a therapist. You’ve helped so many other couples and yet your own marriage was at a real crisis point.
Could you take us back to that moment where Nan, you really sat down with Ron and said, this isn't working. We've got to change. What was happening in your marriage at that moment?
Nan: I like to go back to the beginning. We both brought in some real hard baggage to the marriage, and we didn't unpack it back then. We actually didn't know how much baggage we were bringing in from our families of origin. I honestly wanted Ron to fix it.
He did go through graduate school and became a therapist, and I wanted him to fix it and I didn't want him to fix it. I wanted him to fix it on my terms, when I wanted him to fix it. You know what I mean? We brought in a lot. We brought in our pain, and we started unpacking that on each other, unknowingly.
There was a season, a decade or more, where Ron was really overworking. I would say he was a workaholic. There were multiple times I tried to get him to see, or I tried to coerce him into seeing, or I tried to blame him or shame him into seeing this bad pattern.
It was never enough for him. He was going after the next thing and the next thing, building this kingdom, so to speak.
Alison Cook: Good things.
Nan: Right. Yes. Our boys were middle school and under. So I'd say they were 8, 10 and 12 at the time. It was like, wait a minute, they need their dad. These are young boys who are going to become young men, and where is Ron? Why are we always walking into church by ourselves?
Why am I feeling so lonely on this side of the couch? He's gone all the time, and when he comes home, he's completely exhausted because he's given 150%. I had had enough, and we had made a move, too. I thought the move would make things better, when in fact it made it worse.
I met him one night with a suitcase and it really wasn't a kindness, it wasn't even a care-frontation at that point. It was, you get us some help or you're out of here. Or maybe I'm out of here, I don't know, but it’s either me or you kind of thing. I was done and in real desperation. He was like, okay, I'll get us some help. And that landed us into Dr. Hargrave's office the next day.
Ron: Alison, a lot of people can relate to some of that story. We just drift in our marriage and wake up one day and go, wow, you're way over there. How did we get here? That was certainly us then.
What we came to learn from Dr. Hargrave and the principles that we are now sharing in The Mindful Marriage, is that what was driving us, underneath my working, underneath her loneliness, was far more important than the fact that I was working a lot of hours.
It was far more important to understand that, because what was driving us would have continued to drive in all kinds of wrong directions, and we needed to get at that root.
Alison Cook: Yeah. The root. You had to get at the root.
Nan: That's right. In that office that day, I met them both at the door and I said, because I'm an early childhood education major, I have this doctor and a therapist staring at me and I said, no funny business.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that.
Nan: I'm like, none of this psychobabble stuff. Terry said, by all means, go first. He let me unpack and unpack my pain. Then he turned to Ron and he really nailed him to the wall.
Ron: He did. He really did. He was talking to Nan. He was doing a reflective statement to Nan, but boy, he was talking to me.
Nan: At that moment, I sat and I thought, yay, somebody's finally seen me and heard me. But Ron starts crying. At that moment, he starts a journey of humility. And I'm sitting there in my pain and in my anger going, good. You sit in that. You sit in that for a little bit because you have been so awful to me.
I did not see his pain. I was so glad that somebody else saw my pain and was calling him out on it, which was wrong on my part. So fast forward two years to when the bottom drops out and our son, our middle son Connor, passes away. We are back in Terry's office, hanging on by a thread.
I will say this about him. I love him dearly for how he tenderly and gently stepped into that space and was present for us. I am so grateful because of how hard it was for us and how broken we were. I hate the stat that people throw out when people lose a child, and they come at you and go, well your marriage is in a terrible crisis now.
95 percent of all marriages are gonna end because you've lost a child. First of all, that's not true. If you're in a crisis like us, you could become a statistic, but Terry was God's provision for when this crisis, this deep dark night of the soul comes on. I'm thankful for those two years we sat in his office and worked.
But I will say this about those two years. Ron starts his journey of humbling and Terry turns to me that day and he says, Nan, this brokenness in you, if you'll allow God to heal it, it'll be the most beautiful part of you. I sat there and I looked at him and I went, what? I've been trying to scrape this pain off my whole life. What do you mean the most beautiful part?
It wasn't until 2020 that I understood that for the first time. Oh, this is what you meant. So this journey with him and restoration therapy and our journey of grief has been a long windy one.
Alison Cook: Yep, I appreciate the honesty. You said something really interesting, and this is so relatable for people. When you were upset with Ron working all the time, not being available, that was real. It was valid.
But you also said that the way you were trying to get him to see that wasn't helpful. This is what gets tricky, I think, for people when we're in a marriage, when we're in a relationship—where it's not that what we're seeing in the other person isn't valid.
We hear the tropes of, I need to do my own work, but maybe he actually is the one with the problem!
Ron and Nan: You're right.
Alison Cook: It gets into what you lay out as these reactive styles.
Ron and Nan: Yep. Reactive coping.
Alison Cook: So this is where we can lose each other as a couple. It's a subtle, but really important shift. It's not that we're trying to gaslight ourselves and say, he's got to do him, I've got to work on myself. There is an issue, and we need to figure out how to come together in that. That feels like such an important spotlight you're placing. I want to dig into that a little bit.
Ron and Nan: If there's abuse, then there definitely needs to be safety. There needs to be boundaries. I sat with a woman last week at a recovery meeting, and she was setting a boundary because her partner was doing drugs. She asked me, do you think that was okay? Am I not showing forgiveness? I'm like, oh, most certainly you need to get to a safe place.
Alison Cook: I love that you're giving that caveat. We're not talking here about patterns of abuse or toxicity. We're talking about disappointments. Maybe the other person is really growing or doing their best. Maybe they are hurting us, but it's not in that category of abuse. I really appreciate that caveat.
Ron and Nan: Yeah. We never want anybody to hear us saying that. So let's get into that reactivity. Sure. First of all, this is the universal experience. Every person on the planet does it, anywhere from a couple of times a day to multiple times, if not constantly during the day.
Dysregulation is a natural part of our life. It happens when somebody cuts you off on the freeway. It happens when your 2 year old or your 16 year old or your 25 year old looks at you and says, I don't care what you say, you're stupid. You feel that disrespect. Those are moments of dysregulation.
When your spouse looks into their phone rather than looking into your eyes, you feel that gap. Where'd you go? That's a moment of dysregulation. What happens neurologically is our brain goes into fight or flight reactivity. Everybody's heard of that these days. We talk a lot about trauma, and you're an expert, Alison, at that.
Fight or flight really takes on four different expressions. Blame, shame, control, or escape. Those are the categories. There are different things underneath that. But blame is basically that I'm against you. This is your fault. I'm going to point out what you did wrong. It's Adam and Eve in the garden. It's somebody else's fault.
Shame is, it's my fault and I'm unloading on me and there must be something wrong with me. So it's not the feeling of shame. It's the activity of shame. It's putting ourselves in a corner and saying, this is about me. I'm not good enough. That's why you would rather spend time on your phone than talk to me. That's shame.
Control is, I'm going to take charge of the circumstances. I'm going to try to prevent this thing that's causing me pain from happening anymore. So I'm going to tell you to do that. It's criticism. It's defensiveness, where I talk you into liking me better than you like me now. It's argumentative-ness. That's what control looks like.
Escape is 20,000 things that you can run to that will numb you to your pain. So it's running into working all the time, or running into alcohol or drugs or porn or your kids, or lots of things. Food, overeating, exercise, all the things that we can do excessively because we're running away from something.
Now, some people are one of those four, and as it turns out, some people do all four, or a combination. That would be me. This is the start of understanding yourself, which is why we have an assessment now online that people can go online and do. I know you're going to put a link in the show notes for that. It's very eye opening.
In about 10 minutes, you'll go, wow, that's me. As I've been on this journey, I did a lot of blame and shame when I was younger. I'd vacillate between the two, because I was in a very shameful home. I would blame the situation, but then I'd shame myself because maybe it was me. I did a lot of blame, shame, blame, shame.
Then when I got with Ron, it was like, I'm going to blame, shame, but ooh, now I want to control you. After our son passed away, this was the straw that broke the camel's back for me as far as the pain. There was nothing I could do. I went to escape, and for a decade, I numbed with alcohol and prescription medication because it was instant.
But the pattern was already established with the blame and shame and control. This took on a life of its own. I can still, though, in certain situations, find myself going, what are all four of these things doing? Why are they still here at the table? Alison, did you get to take the assessment?
Alison Cook: I did. I found it very eye-opening. I actually had parts of me that were like, wait a minute. So I want to get into that. I'd love to get into that and let you guys dissect it a little bit for me, because I have one very clear one. Part of me can feel like, how is this hurting anybody? The escape one.
So I want to get into that, but before we go there, I want to ask you, because you're saying something really important with these reactive styles. I'm going back to “Ron's working too much”. There's something legitimate there. Maybe feeling you're wanting to blame him. You're feeling shame inside.
What I notice in marriages, and I'd love for you to speak to this, is often it's not *what we say to our spouse. It's the place from which we say it.So if I'm feeling shame, the way that I come at my spouse is going to come out of that shame. That shame is what's going to spill out of me when I get tipped over.
I'll say to people, as you get healthier, you may be even more able to go to your spouse and be like, hey, what's going on with this? You might be more empowered to actually say, this isn't working for me. It doesn't diminish your voice.
Ron: It gives you agency at the end of the day. You have more agency to speak into the relationship from a position of calmness, from a position of strength, rather than dependence. See, that's the thing. I'm leaning on Nan to finally act right and do right, so that’s my sense of inadequacy.
There's my pain. That's what drove me to work all the time. I didn't know that. I knew I worked a lot, but I didn't know why. But once I discovered my pain, inadequacy, that was driving my control, I had to face myself with that. Rather than going, Nan needs to love this out of me, which is what most of us do our entire lives. I've become convinced of this.
We spend our marriages saying, if you were more _____, then I wouldn't feel inadequate. I wouldn't fight. I wouldn't be controlling. I wouldn't work too much. And the truth is, that's not accurate. You have something driving you from within that you gotta learn what it is and take charge of it.
Nan: Believe me, I tried. I tried so hard to love that out of him, or be what I needed to be for that. All of a sudden you look up and you go, but he's still working a ton. Wow. That didn't work. Mine comes from abandonment. I have so much abandonment in my family of origin story.
I'm with you and I'm feeling abandoned by you. Then we lose Connor, and I'm feeling abandoned by God. It's this abandonment, abandonment, abandonment. Then, Ron’s drive to work and travel and be gone and conquer and do for all the other people in your world taps into my abandonment.
It is nasty and ugly–I don't even want to call it a dance. It's dysregulation, a cycle we can't pop out of.
Alison Cook: That's such an important nuance, because we do need to speak into our spouse's lives. That is part of it, but we have to be able to do it from a place that isn't coming from my wounds.
Ron and Nan: Right.
Alison Cook: It is coming from my love, and this isn't okay.
Ron and Nan: Alison, we are dancing around Matthew 7. Judge not that you be judged. By the way, the measure you give will be the measure you get, so when you stand in pride looking at your spouse saying, you're the one with the problems, I'm okay, but you're messed up, then what happens?
They return fire, and now you have a cycle. So what does Jesus say to do? Stop focusing on the speck in the other person's eye. Start dealing with the log in your own eye. Then, what happens when you take the log out of your own eye? Then you will be able to help them with the speck.
When I take agency over my pain, I manage me, rather than expecting Nan to manage me, to fix me, to help me, to love it out of me, whatever is going to happen there. When I take agency over myself, deal with my own log, my own pride, my own issues, my own pain, I am in a better position to be self-giving toward her.
It empowers my ability to love her at that point in time. So this is not about me pulling away and fixing me and not worrying about you. No. At the end of the day, it moves us.
Alison Cook: That's right.
Nan: It happened last week. I'm getting ready to go to a meeting on Thursday night. I asked him, what are you going to do? I'm going to be gone for two and a half hours. He's worked a full day. He's had a long week. It's Thursday, the book's coming out. There's a lot, and he said, yeah, I'm going to work.
I said, no, why don't you watch something? You love that. Just get lost in that and give yourself a little evening. You work so hard and you should do that. He’s like, okay, yeah, I'll think about that. Then I left him to it, because that's not mine to manage, but I can love you.
Old Nan would have said, yeah, that's what you're probably gonna do and you do that all the time because all you can think about is work. That's the love of your life. I came home and I said, what'd you do? He goes, I took the evening off for myself. I was like, this is a miracle. In my mind I'm going, God, did you see that? He's like, yes. I didn't need your help. I need you to love him like I love him. Then you need to back away.
Alison Cook: That's a great example. You were in that moment trying to love him, not control him, not blame him, not shame yourself. It is so much more freeing and so much more powerful. That's an incredible example.
Nan: I wasn't trying to get something out of him. That was genuinely for him.
Ron: I can tell you on my end, I immediately felt her compassion and I know the difference. A decade ago, it would have been contempt and anger, and it’s what motivated me at that point to take her suggestion.
Back then, I would have said I'm going to do what I'm going to do, and here we are against each other again. Both dysregulated, both reacting at one another, and nobody is giving love. But when she came softly and gently, and we've done so much work together, I knew where that was coming from.
I heard it, and I didn't think I had to do it. I wasn't being controlled by her. I had complete options. But it landed on my heart in a way that I could entertain it.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that difference is powerful. Early on, and I've shared with you a little bit in previous conversations, Ron, when I was dating my husband, he'd been married before. His wife had died and he was a widower, so he had a little more experience than I had coming in.
Some of my own abandonment and attachment issues came to the surface that I tried to put on him. He very early on would say, I don't think this is about me. And he was right. There was something about how he said it though, because he said it so clearly–there wasn't a hook, there wasn't blame, there wasn't control.
It was the truth. I could feel that he was actually loving me in that moment, because I then had to go, wait, if he can't solve this ache in my heart, I’ve got to get to the bottom of the ache then. Because this marriage isn't going to solve that. That's going to set us up for defeat. That was life changing to me, to do my own work.
I love that you're putting your fingers on this in the book. You do such a beautiful job through your own stories, through such practical wisdom on how to apply it. I want to talk a little bit about this assessment and encourage folks to take it. I took the really short version, and very clearly came out as someone who escapes.
It’s my primary go-to. I was feeling so proud of myself because I don't try to control people. I don't try to blame people. I don't really shame myself.
Ron and Nan: Hahaha!
Alison Cook: Oh and here's what's interesting about that one. I'm curious about your thoughts for those of us who avoid conflict, who escape it. There's a way in which we can tell ourselves, the only person I'm hurting is myself. I do it through disappearing. Nan, you talked about this in the book, disappearing into books and movies.
I know when I'm disappearing into a world of my own instead of wanting to face what's hard in a relationship. It's taken me a long time to recognize, and I can tell myself, I'm not hurting anybody.
Ron and Nan: Yeah. Let me say, there are some things that are socially more acceptable to escape into. Binging Netflix. Shopping. Religiosity is something people escape into, and they call it being Christian, and really they're running from their pain. They're still running from something.
Yes, some things have more negative consequences, such as drinking alcohol and doing drugs. That's not the point. The point is, what is this telling me about me? That is what we call chasing your pain. That question has been life changing for us. Not when our marriage came to a crisis, but every day since.
If I'm driving down the road and somebody cuts me off, and I have a few choice words for them, as if they could hear me, why do I do that? What is that? That's dysregulation. There's no thoughtfulness to that. It's reactivity. Then I ask myself, Ron, what is that telling you about you? What is going on with you right now? Why did it bother you so much that the guy cut you off on the freeway?
That little question will lead to amazing insights and discoveries about what you're running from. Then I know what to do with it. I know how to face it. I know how to move myself. We've mapped the peace cycle out of my pain. The book helps outline that for people.
I'm learning the vulnerabilities in me, the issues in me, and I'm seeing what I can choose to do to put on my new self and not be that anymore. With both control and escape, what I was doing was defending my pain. Because I had found something that took the edge off that made me feel better.
It was a false sense of better. It has to do with trust in God. Because in this life, we're gonna have trouble. We're gonna have pains. We're going to be disappointed in relationships. Grief and loss are going to happen. God has to be the carrier for me.I had to trust Him with my loss, with my grief, with my pain.
He doesn't take it away. There are some things He has healed. He has healed our marriage. There are things in my pain He has taught me from childhood. With the loss of our son, he's not taking it away this side of heaven, but I can trust Him to help me carry it.
Boy, if one glass didn't help, or 10 shows didn't help, or three blouses that I bought, or whatever the numbing is, it can be pornography, it can be food, it can be all kinds of things. That's me not trusting God to heal or help me carry or take on that pain and to learn from it. You do that for 10 years and you get further and further and further from what the truth is and further from the light.
That's what was happening with me. I didn't trust him with it. I got one more thought, Alison, and then I'd love for you to respond to what we've been rambling about here as it relates to you being an escaper.
Yes, sometimes you can escape into things that aren't really immoral or causing great difficulty. You think, I'm the only one who's suffering here, so it's not a big deal. But the other thing I would say is, what are the opportunities you miss as a result of not taking agency and facing whatever pain is behind it?
What are the things that you're having to give up? Yes, you're the one suffering, but are there other choices you could have made that would have brought about different things if you faced the pain rather than ran from it?
Alison Cook: I love what you're both saying, and it takes me right back to the core of your book. In my case, because I can be very autonomous, I can exist in my mind. You talk about us-ness in the book. My escape is not only depriving God of the opportunity to enter in, but it's depriving my most significant people of the opportunity to bear those burdens together, or to bear the hardships together. It's preventing intimacy.
Ron and Nan: That's beautifully said.
Alison Cook: One of the things I love about your book that is so different is that you talk about how a marriage becomes its own entity. There's an us-ness that's its own thing that we have to nurture and nourish. I love that because it takes us out of the 50-50 or compromise or negotiations.
It's this thing that's bigger than me or my spouse that I need to nurture. When I'm in avoidance or escape, I'm not nurturing that us-ness, because I'm leaving somebody out of that. I thought about this after I took your assessment, as the Lord has tapped on my heart. You are depriving yourself and others of something when you refuse to walk into pain with others.
My husband's very active. I could curl up on a couch forever. He's very active. He loves to hike. He loves to be outside. He's always out. To nourish our us-ness, we do those things together. I could tell myself I'm doing those things for him, but that's the escaper part of me. The Spirit-led side of that is, I love solitude, I love contemplation, I love to ponder, and when we're cross-country skiing together, I get to do that in a far healthier way.
I take his invitation to us-ness and we're doing something together that I might not choose on my own. There's fruit in that for me, and I've discovered that. Suddenly I'm like, when can we go hiking again, and he's like, that’s what you want? I’m like, not only because I want to be with you, but because the us-ness that we've created to establish those rhythms is also good for me.
Ron and Nan: That's exactly it.
Alison Cook: That's what I realized. The us-ness invites me into, wait a minute, this hiding that I do actually can be redeemed into something that's more contemplative. These things I want to be, I do that far better when we're an “us” and we're coming together. It's so much deeper than, “I’m doing this for him. He does this for me.”
Ron and Nan: Exactly. Us-ness is like a baby. It's a thing you gotta feed and care for and grow and nurture, and it's a living, breathing thing that you created on the day that you got married and dedicated your lives to one another. The word picture I would give you is the unity candle.
Normally people walk up and they grab their individual candles and they light the “us candle”, if we could say it that way, and then they blow themselves out. Which never should you do in marriage; it is not designed to blow you out. Marriage is designed for you to be able to thrive and flourish.
But now there is this third entity that you both need to feed and care for and fan that flame. By the way, that flame, as the us-ness grows and gets stronger, feeds each of you individually so all three candles are lit. That's the design for marriage. All three candles are lit and your us-ness becomes that thing that requires something of you to give to. And it gives back.
Here's my quick example, similar to yours. My wife was a runner for years and had a little injury. She became a walker, and she's not a walker, folks. She is a walker. I can't hardly keep up with her. I've had knee surgeries and now I'm doing better than I ever have physically and I'm joining her.
Guess what? Ron does not like walking. Ron gets tired. Ron gets sore. Ron can't keep up with Nan. But our us-ness likes walking because it's time together, it's conversation. I know it feeds her for me to be with her. It feeds me to hear her thoughts as she walks and talks.
Yes, I pay a price for the us-ness to be fed and our us-ness enjoys it. Ron probably won't walk at all, if it were up to me. I probably wouldn't do it. But together, that's something that really feeds both of us.
Your us-ness is gonna ebb and flow and change and grow and look differently than it did 39 years ago. You're gonna have seasons where it looks different. You've got to be a student of your us-ness too. We're an empty nest right now. So that's a different season and we're grandparents. So that's a different season with our us-ness.
Alison Cook: Yes. I love that. You have to be intentional about it at each of these seasons in your marriage.
Ron and Nan: To tie it in with our previous conversation, when I am at my worst, when I'm bringing dysregulation and reactivity, blame, shame, control, and escape to our us-ness, I'm not feeding it. I'm not nurturing it. I'm not contributing to something that is loving, stable, and emotionally safe for both of us.
I'm bringing the worst of me to us. I need to manage myself to bring the better parts of me to us. And, at the end of the day, that's the message. By the way, this is the New Testament calling us out of our old self into the new self. We already have the new self in Christ, but not yet, because I'm still trying to work out my salvation every single day of my life.
It's a discipline of putting on the new, putting on the new, putting on the new. At the end of the day, that's why we are so grateful to the Hargraves for their work, to help us take off our old selves and learn how to put on the new self. Every once in a while, we slip right back into the old because that thing doesn't want to die. It resurrects every single day.
We gotta kill it all over again with humility, and try to put on the new one more time. It gets easier as we grow and change. It was really hard in the beginning, but it's so much easier now. It's easier because we've practiced and worked at it and worked at it. Like muscle memory, when you're building a new skill, it does get easier.
Alison Cook: I love the word practice. The title of the book is The Mindful Marriage. What you're teaching us to do is to be mindful of these patterns in ourselves. It does take practice. That's a good word. I love that you talked about how in marriage, we don't snuff out the individual candles. They still exist.
The us-ness doesn't take us over. But it takes mindfulness. So for example, it takes mindfulness for me to say, what is feeding our us-ness? It actually feeds the us-ness for me to have this interest, or for my spouse to have this interest over there. It actually feeds the us-ness.
Versus when I'm being selfish and I don't want to do this thing. It takes that mindfulness to really stay on top of ourselves. You lay out in the book four practices, essentially. Could you talk us through those a little bit?
Ron and Nan: It's a little bit of a workbook. People are going to do exercises. They're going to put pen to paper, and they're going to identify, oh, wow, this is my old reactive self. This is what I do. Huh. Wow. Then they're going to map out, what's the truth?
What’s rooted in God, rooted in the truth I'm learning about myself, about our us-ness? How then am I going to respond differently to the same circumstance? I'm still going to get dysregulated. She's still going to do something that from time to time triggers something in me.
It's my job to manage me in those moments. Not to expect her to fix it, because it's my job to manage me. That culminates this whole journey. This book is one journey. Not a chapter on this or that. It's one journey to help you identify these four steps.
When I know what they are, then that is my way out of dysregulation, back into self-regulation or self-control, so that I can put on a better me, so we can deal with whatever the issue is at hand. That's in a nutshell the journey that the book takes you on. Those four steps are very intentional to say out loud.
Your old self. The new self you're trying to work into. You're going to love this as a clinician–the psychology of this is when you get dysregulated and go into fight or flight mode, you're in your midbrain and your prefrontal cortex isn't working anymore and you need to turn it back on.
The four steps actively turn back on the better part of your brain. The part of your brain that knows what love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and goodness are. You can say, I gotta move toward that. You are using mindfulness and taking back control. You're renewing yourself by renewing your mind. It’s helping you stop being the old and start being the new.
The four steps do that.
Alison Cook: Love that. It's so practical. Because we can’t really will ourselves into being more loving, which is often what we try to do. Like you were saying, Nan, earlier in your marriage, “I'll try to love them out of my own willpower.”
Ron and Nan: So let me give a quick example. When I get triggered about something, it often sounds like, okay, here's step one. Say what I feel. I'm feeling inadequate. Now, by the way, I used to say, I'm feeling controlled by you and you need to knock it off.
See, I focused on the speck in her eye. Now I'm focusing on the log in my own eye. I feel inadequate. Because that's at the root of it. What I usually do, Nan, with my inadequacy, is I usually blame or control you by making it your fault or pointing out the one thing in your argument that's wrong. That's what I normally do.
The truth is, I might have something I need to listen to in this moment. The truth is, God loves me and I'm not inadequate and I'm actually very capable of managing myself in this moment. Number four, this is the key. What I'm going to do differently based on the truth, is I'm going to slow my heart rate.
I'm going to slow down. I'm going to listen. I'm going to try to hear what it is you're trying to share with me and put my defensiveness aside. Okay, deep breath. Alright, you can go. So what I did is I talked out loud to myself and to her. I talked to myself. I told myself, get in charge of your log, Ron. Don't go into reactivity. Move in a better direction.
Number two, I talked to her out loud and told her what I was doing in the moment. She's used to me being reactive right back. But when she hears me saying this, she goes, oh, Ron's putting on humility. Ron's taking charge of himself. I don't have to control him. He's controlling him. That's a good thing. It relieves her of any hook, to try to jump in and do what she used to do. So now we're both on a better plane.
The biggest thing it does is neurologically, it's slowing you down and reactivating your mind. We are transformed, Alison, by the renewing of our minds because our mind renews our brain, and the brain renews the body and how we respond. When we get the mind, then the rest of us follows.
Step four is, so here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna calm down in this moment. My example is, I'm gonna try to listen to you and put aside my defensiveness. It's the doing that helps us reinforce this.
Neurologically, again, the more you do it, the more your brain gets used to the new activity rather than the old, and it replaces the old with new. That's the neuroplasticity of our minds, that we're actually able to restructure the neurological ruts of our brain.
Literally, you're not just renewing the consciousness of your mind, you're renewing your brain structure. It is physical, what happens as a result of this process. Not immediate, but over time, the more we do this, the easier and easier it gets.
Alison Cook: When you're both doing that, you're aware. It's a cue when one of you takes that first step, for both of you to essentially slow yourselves down and be present to the other in a different way.
Nan: Or it could be, I went off the rails, and I really got dysregulated, and I may go into blame. I may go into control. I've caught myself, and I'm gonna come back, and I'm gonna say, hey, earlier, here's what was happening with me. This is what I did. For that I am so sorry. That is old Nan talking.
I know I had to have God speak to me, the Holy Spirit, and I needed to hear from Him, and I know now that it was pain, that was my abandonment talking. I hate that I do those old things, but I'm gonna move towards you, I'm gonna ask for forgiveness. I'm going to move towards you, and I am going to now walk in truth.
Sometimes we get dysregulated. Some of those things happen in a nanosecond. Those ruts can be so powerful. Early on, when I was in my recovery and I was implementing these practices, I cannot tell you how many times I would get dysregulated and go, man, I could use a drink right now.
Years down the road now, that's the last thing that comes into my mind. And yet I still get dysregulated. It's the last thing, because that rut is not there anymore. But there are others, and you're peeling back the layers. It's a humility posture.
It's still triggering to me. Let's talk about this. What I want to do is this, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to move towards you. I'm going to trust God with it, and I'm going to come to you with it.
Ron: Alison, what do you think happens in my heart when I hear her doing all that work out loud? It absolutely softens my heart.
Alison Cook: A hundred percent.
Ron: A hundred percent. Like, all of a sudden, instead of being on guard and dysregulated, I'm going, okay, wow, beautiful. I see you working. I see in that moment her sacrificing something about her for our us-ness.
That moves me toward her. That makes me want to invest in this and look in the mirror at myself. All of a sudden, both of us are putting on humility, which softens the whole dynamic. Again, I don't want to pretty this up for people. This is a hard journey.
If you've been to really hard places like we've been, this is not a turn on a dime sort of stuff. This is sledging for quite a while. But my goodness, what used to take us two weeks to even begin to try to deal with happens in a minute and a half in this season of our life. It's so different.
Alison Cook: I'm so glad you're saying this for people, because especially when we've dug those ruts internally and with our partner for a long time, they're deep. I so appreciate your honesty and vulnerability, both of you, about your personal struggles and how that affects the marriage.
This picture that I get as you're describing the process are these circles where we go into our individual selves with all the reactivity, but you're coming into that us-ness circle, and that's the space where the defenses melt away.
Let's come back to us, and the word you keep using is humility. You talk about it a lot in the book. It melts the ego and the pride. Oh, I got to apologize to him. Let's go back to the us space. This is for us.
Ron: What does Philippians 2 tell us about our Lord, who put on humility and became obedient to death, even death on a cross? In that whole section, Paul lays out, this is how you do your relationships. This is how we do marriage. This is how we do friendships. This is how we do parenting.
Humility says, I'm not going to rule over you. I am managing me. Did you know the Latin root word for humility is grounded? You get grounded with humility. You know who you are and what you're not. You know where you fit in the world. You know who God is and that you're not him.
That posturing softens my heart, and it absolutely makes it easier for her heart to soften towards me.
Nan: I want to say this, because it's not perfection you're going after, because you're not going to get that. It's not that we do these steps and then Ron never blames me for anything. Our flesh is there, but, when he blames me, I can go, wait a minute.
This is causing me pain, and what do I normally do in my pain? I'm gonna come at you. I'm gonna go in this loop of, you always do this to me. No, I can slow this roll down, and I can say, that's shaming, and that's on you. I'm not going to receive that.
But I don't have to withdraw. I don't have to control him. I don't have to beat him over the head. I don't have to do all of the stuff that's in 1 Corinthians 13, the record of wrongs. I love to be an archaeological digger, and just, yeah, you've been doing this for years. Your dad did this, and on it goes.
Alison Cook: Even if it's in your own mind and it's not coming out, it's still building that rut.
Nan: That is the pain talking. What does Nan normally do? She goes to all four of these things. No. Take a breath. Look at him as God looks at him, because that's the truth. He's having a moment here. I don't know why, but I can say, you don't need to be shaming me right now. I'm not gonna withdraw. I'm gonna move towards you, and I'm gonna listen to the truth.
Alison Cook: There’s that agency piece. He may or may not take accountability for that. Hopefully he will as time goes on. You don't need him to, because you know what's true. That's so empowering.
Nan: It’s so empowering. It unhooks you from that loop and that rut. We hear from couples all the time, “we do the same thing all the time”.
Let me tell you, there are times when he can say something and my flesh goes, oh, here we go again. It's so freeing to go, wait a minute, no. I'm going to walk in truth. I feel a lot of freedom in that. By the way, I want to go full circle before you ask that next question.
We said earlier, we never want somebody in an abusive situation to hear us saying, suck it up and stay. Oh no. I want them to listen to what we just said. The empowerment is in recognizing what is true about me from God's point of view. God says you're a worthy person. That means you're not worthy of being hit or beaten or pressed down upon, or whatever you're receiving in your current marriage relationship.
That is not how God sees you. It's not what you're worth. So God's truth empowers me to take agency to act out of my worth. That's very important. If I'm acting out of my worth, I'm not gonna stand here and be subject to that.
At the same time, I'm not going to close myself off to the relationship, or the possibilities of change, or whatever. But I am going to take action, so that doesn't happen anymore. Boundaries.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's such a nuanced thing because sometimes, for women who are in abusive relationships, the shame makes it hard for them to leave. Being able to get to this point of, “I have to remove myself from this situation–this is unsafe for myself and my kids”, comes from this work of turning inward and the confidence that it can give you.
I have a question for you before we wind down. I appreciate you staying a little bit longer. I can hear a listener in my mind wondering about, let's say it's not an abusive situation. It's not toxic, but one member of the couple is not willing to do their own work.
One is sitting there going, I'd love to do this. I want to do this. Let me start tomorrow. But my spouse or whatever is never going to. They're sedentary. They're not growing. What do you do in that situation?
Ron: We do address that in later chapters of the book, and it's a very important question. Let me say, in our own journey, both of us had seasons where we were not doing our work, for sure. In 2007, when our marriage blew up and we found ourselves in Dr. Hargrave's office, I wasn't doing any work on me.
She was the one who needed all the change as far as I was concerned, and that was my pride talking. Dr. Hargrave helped me begin to go on a humility journey that continues to this day. During the worst season of her drinking, I was every day trying to self-regulate. Every day I was trying to say, how do I put on love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness in this moment with her?
I was working on me, trying to take off control and blame–stuff that I was really good at. It was a lonely experience. My prayer was, Lord, since I'm not doing the same dance with her anymore that I used to do, let her get tired of dancing all by herself.
I don't know if that ultimately played a role or not. I know eventually she came to the end of herself and she made some really hard, amazing decisions that brought about recovery for her. I do think I was doing what I could. She was “managing me and staying in my lane”, as she's come to say it.
I love that state. I needed to stay in my lane instead of crossing into her lane, and eventually that created an environment where it was more likely that she started looking in her own mirror, doing her own work. But I'm not gonna guarantee that to anybody listening. I wish I could. I can't guarantee that, but I do think it is the right way to respond.
Nan: It doesn't do anything for your us-ness. If we can go back to that season where Ron wasn't ever seen, when I would say, hey, this is too much. I think, what about us? While I'm doing this for God, and he was so into his pride, that did nothing for our us-ness. Our us-ness was stagnant, and it was very isolating and there was not any intimacy.
Same with the season that I was in it. There's gotta be some grace there. There's gotta be prayer on the part of the other person for that person, but ultimately it's got to be them doing the work together, and God working in them.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Again, it's just, you're being so real about this. We're talking about nuanced situations, but if I can do my own work, stay in my own lane, I might be more able when the other person is ready to meet me there.
It's not easy. It's hard. Marriage is a marathon, not a sprint. It might be a series of marathons. It's a long journey, but these are tools. I like what you're saying. These are tools that really can help you regardless of the season you're in.
Ron and Nan: Yeah. The alternative is to be reacting out of your own pain. When you react out of pain, that ignites their dysregulated pain, and now you're in the couple pain cycle and you are stuck. When one person starts pursuing peace by self-control, it has to change something. You're not doing the same dance anymore.
It has to change something. Ultimately, it will. You don't know exactly when or how quickly, but it will. There is power in taking your agency.
Alison Cook: There might come a moment, like for you, Nan, where you say, I'm not doing this anymore. Or where you have to say to a spouse, this isn't okay. I'm not going to leave you, but I'm not okay with this. Again, it's coming out of that self-regulated state.
Ron and Nan: You're right. That's right. My prayer for couples is that they will do the work together, and that they will do the work. I do like to tell people, don't gloss over it and read it real quick. Do the work and dig in and stay in your lane.
Do the work for you, but also if they're doing the work and you come together and share, it's going to be beautiful. Don't do the work because you want that person to stop doing whatever they're doing or get off their phone. Don't pick up this book if you want your husband off his phone.
No, it's a Lord, what do you have for me? What do I need to work on so that I can bless my spouse, my significant other, and our us-ness? That's my prayer for people. But I'm not going to lie. It's work. I'll never forget this man that came up to us at a conference that we did. He said, thanks for helping me open Pandora's box.
He goes, I'm dealing with the pain of a mother. They had lost a daughter. He's like, man I had shoved that so far down, and I don't want to deal with that. Here's what I would say to him. Oh, man. Buddy, you have been living in light of that pain. You don't think you have, but it affects you every single day. So do the work.
Alison Cook: This is an invitation to a more beautiful, vibrant flame for each of us, for the us-ness with the people in our lives. Thank you so much for putting the work into sharing your story with us and creating this resource. Tell people the best way to find you and find the resource. We'll send some information out in the show notes as well.
Ron and Nan: Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity. We appreciate it. rondeal.org is our website where people can get tapped into the book. We have bonus material available there for free. We're doing a mindful marriage conference for churches where we're talking and walking couples through this process. We'd love to get connected to anybody interested in that.
Alison Cook: I love it. That's great. I'm so glad you're bringing these tools into church spaces, because I sometimes feel like we don't get the richness of what you're trying to describe here. It’s the paradox that as we tend to our own healing, our own selves, we are nurturing us-ness.
Ron and Nan: Yes. Thank you so much for your time. It's been an honor.
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