When Rest Isn’t Enough: Dr. Henry Cloud on Burnout, Boundaries, and What Your Soul Needs
Episode Notes
Have you ever wondered whether you're truly burned out or simply depleted? And what happens when, in the process of meeting everyone else's needs, you lose touch with important parts of yourself?
In this episode, Dr. Alison Cook sits down with Dr. Henry Cloud, clinical psychologist, leadership expert, and co-author of the trailblazing book, Boundaries, to explore how we can recognize burnout, restore our emotional health, and reconnect with the parts of ourselves we may have lost along the way.
Drawing from his new book, Renewal: 90 Daily Readings for Restoring Your Mind, Your Boundaries, Your Relationships, and Your Peace, Dr. Cloud shares why rest alone isn't always enough, how our emotions signal when something is out of balance, and why healthy relationships help us become more fully ourselves.
Dr. Cloud also shares a powerful personal story about his own childhood that you do not want to miss.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
*The difference between depletion and burnout
*How to tell when your rhythms and boundaries need attention.
*Why structure is so important, and how to set intentional rhythms of rest and renewal
*How safe relationships can help us reclaim lost parts of ourselves.
About Dr. Henry Cloud:
Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, leadership expert, and New York Times bestselling author. He has written or co-written more than 45 books, including the bestselling Boundaries, with nearly 20 million copies sold worldwide. Drawing on his experience in clinical psychology, executive coaching, and leadership consulting, Dr. Cloud helps individuals and organizations strengthen relationships, develop healthy boundaries, and reach their full potential. He works with CEOs, leadership teams, and executives to improve performance, leadership, and organizational culture.
More Resources:
Dr. Henry Cloud is the author of a new book: Renewal: 90 Daily Readings for Restoring Your Mind, Your Boundaries, Your Relationships, and Your Peace
Other books of Dr. Henry Cloud
Listeners get exclusive access to the first 2 chapters of Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul.
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here.
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Transcript
Episode 230
Dr. Henry Cloud
Structure is necessary for life. You have a skeleton for a reason.
It's got to hold this thing up. And when we have structural breakdowns, either in our personality,
our character, our lives, the way time and rhythms go, something's gonna...
be okay. How do emotions give us a clue our rhythms are off?
Well, it can go in a couple of different directions. I know for me, it sounds funny. How do your
emotions clue you in? They clue me in when I don't feel them anymore. He said, God just told me
that when you were a child, something happened to you that made you afraid to speak in front of
people and that you've avoided it ever since then. And God wants you to begin to speak for him now.
And he's going to open some doors and you're to walk through them. And I remember sitting there
going, oh my gosh, you see us.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Allison and welcome back to this week's deep dive episode of The Best of You.
I am so excited to share today's conversation with you. I wanted to give you a fun fact,
a little behind the scenes. This interview felt really meaningful to me for a really personal
reason years ago. When my friend and co-author Kimberly Miller,
with whom I wrote Boundaries for Your Soul, we were working on the book. We hadn't yet titled it
Boundaries for Your Soul. We were spending a lot of time. We'd kind of figured out what we wanted
to do. We'd figured out the concepts. We'd studied the model and we'd kind of figured out how we
wanted to bring the integration piece on it. But we were trying to figure out how to describe what
we were trying to teach people in a way that would be practical and accessible and even familiar.
Because as we all know, the soul can feel like sort of murky terrain.
tend to what I can't even see. And a lot of us haven't known or been taught how to tend to these
inner places. As we were thinking about it, I remember so vividly one night we were just kind of
wrestling and talking and whiteboarding and putting ideas on a piece of paper.
And suddenly we just realized after, you know, been working on this for a while, we're like, it's
all about boundaries. It's about differentiating, right? Differentiating from yourself and a part
of yourself is very similar. We actually call it intrapsychic differentiation, which means you're
differentiating from yourself and a part of yourself that's carrying an emotion, right? I am not my
anger. I can connect with my anger. process is very similar to what we,
when we talk about interpersonal differentiation, right? I am not my spouse.
I am not my friend. I am not my child. We are interpersonally differentiated and that
differentiation to be healthy, right? It's actually a healthy thing includes both separateness and
closeness, right? And this is all about
boundaries. Boundaries aren't built to keep people out. Boundaries aren't built to keep parts of
ourselves out. Boundaries are what helps us stay differentiated from other people so that we don't
become enmeshed with them. We don't take them on in ways that aren't healthy. Boundaries are the
word that describe that process of staying differentiated. What I feel may be different from what
my spouse feels, what my experience of something might be different than what my child's experience
of that is. That's a boundary between us. It's beautiful. It's part of how God made us.
This is not about distance. Boundaries are actually about closeness. I'm going way off onto a
tangent to say that when Kim and I realized that what we were trying to do with boundaries for your
soul really was about boundaries, we immediately thought of the groundbreaking, trailblazing book
that has helped so many of us understand this idea. boundaries by Dr. John Townsend and Dr.
Henry Cloud. And in that moment of realization, I remember where we were in that moment when we
realized this was really boundaries work. We were essentially taking Cloud and Townsend's
boundaries work and applying it to our inner lives, to our souls, to the parts of ourselves.
We just knew that that was the direction that boundaries for your soul needed to go. And that
connection immediately made us feel like we wanted to get the blessing of Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr.
John Townsend. We wanted to let them know, A, how much there were. could have influenced us? And B,
could we have their blessing to use boundaries in the title for boundaries for your soul? Long
story short, they so generously and so graciously gave us their blessing to use boundaries in the
title of boundaries for your soul. Dr. John Townsend ended up also endorsing it. They encouraged
us. And I could not be more grateful to today's guest, Dr.
Henry Cloud, as well as to Dr. John Townsend for not only their trailblazing work and their
longevity of work, but also the way that they encouraged us in terms of boundaries for your soul.
So all of that to say that when I saw that Dr. Henry Cloud had a new book coming out this fall, I
was thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down and have this conversation. Dr.
Cloud's new book is called Renewal. 90 daily readings for restoring your mind,
your boundaries, your relationships. and your peace. I just loved this conversation with him. We
cover a lot of different topics. One of the things we talk about that I found really helpful is he
makes a distinction between depletion and burnout. And he also shares some of the rhythms he has
built into his own life over decades of doing highly demanding work so as to avoid burnout in his
own life. We talk about the warning signs for burnout, how you can notice them through emotional
awareness. We talk about simple rhythms, simple practices. to keep your soul grounded.
And then we get into a really fascinating conversation about what happens when we become so
overloaded or so adapted to what other people need from us that we actually start to lose access to
parts of our own soul. And this ties into the conversation about burnout. We might lose access to
our ability to be playful. We might lose access to a truth-telling part of us.
We might lose access to a feeling. part of us, where we get numb, we might lose access to a part of
us that knows how to rest, that knows how to slow down, that also might know how to take a risk or
to shift into a higher gear. I loved this conversation and I loved getting a little bit of a window
into Dr. Cloud's life. He closes with a remarkable story from his own life about a part of himself
he thought he had lost. And I won't spoil the story for you, but it was just beautiful and how it
brought together so much of what we talk about in this episode. conversation was such a gift to me
personally, and I think you'll find so much wisdom in it. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr.
Henry Cloud.
Dr. Henry Cloud, I am so thrilled to have you with us today. This feels like a long time coming and
I'm so glad you're here now. Well, it's good to be here. You do a lot of interviews, but it's rare
that I get to be the patient on your couch. So you're going to fix me here,
right? No, I don't think that's the case, but you've helped so many of us.
And I'm just really excited about this newest book,
which is really a devotional, if I'm understanding correctly.
You've written about a lot of topics. You had a fantastic book out last year about your faith and
why you believe in what. That was sort of a new book. for me i never you know i'll write books i
try to stay in my lane and write books that i know something about but i never had written one
specifically about the faith yeah and and why why i believe this stuff it's actually written i
wrote it to my friends who are non-believers and to tell them my story of why i believe and all
the reasons i believe and that's what that but so it was a different journey for me Yeah, I love
that kind of seeing what you're coming up with. I'm curious what made you decide what in what in
your own life, what in your own world made you want to slow down and write about renewal and
stillness. And, you know, you're someone who I think we see as very prolific.
You've put a lot out into the world. What made you want to write this book now?
Oh, gosh. Well, you know, in some ways.
I always try to write about something that I've experienced. People ask me sometimes,
how long does it take you to write a book? And I go, I don't know, because I don't write books.
I'm not an author. That's not what I do. And they go, what? And I go, no, I'm a practitioner. And I
spend all of my waking hours in the war rooms with CEOs and businesses and when I was doing
clinical work with people working through stuff. I always say the work writes the books because
it's what I've studied and seen and why. So it's not theory to me. This is real stuff that I know
is true and works. And one of the things that you see in more and more,
and everybody, you know, we can blame it correctly. So a lot of the bombardment we have of,
you know, technology. And now there's no such thing as going to work and to home.
It kind of all goes together. And it's hard for people to stop.
And from a science perspective, if you don't stop,
you're in trouble. I mean, it's going to hurt your performance, it's going to hurt your health,
everything else. But also for a fulfillment and satisfaction of life.
It's an important thing. And so I thought, you know, with the attention span being what it is
today, small snippets would be the best. So it's little daily lessons,
and it includes, you know, obviously guided by the scriptures, but each topic is something about
what I call the pie of life, which is your clinical well-being, how you're feeling,
depression, anxiety, fears, joy, happiness, all that. And the second piece of the pie is your
relationships, family, marriage, friends, extended family work. And then the third one is our
performance, reaching our goals and dreams. And so every day is a little lesson, something to take
with you that day and calm down and sit before God and allow him to do what he wants to do in you
and then take it out in the big world. I love that.
I love that your work flows out of your...
everyday interactions with real people. And you see that, that practicality of it. Theory is one
thing, but to really actually be able to apply it. You talk in the book about this idea that we all
live on a sort of bank account, a checking account of emotional energy and that we don't want to
dip in to the reserves that we also need.
to have. I love this idea, right? That we have enough for the day, but then we also need to have
some reserves for when we need those emotional reserves.
What do you notice in your work with high-performing leaders, with all sorts of leaders? You know,
we're this audience, we are all kinds of, you know, there's all kinds of ways to be high
-performing, whether you're raising, you know, kids, whether you're, you know, running a business,
whether you're running a ministry, whether you're a therapist, we have a lot of therapists
listening. How do we know when we're tapping into those reserves in a way that isn't sustainable?
What are the signs? One of the big signs and probably the biggest sign is between being depleted
and running out of gas and all that and burnout. One of the big signs is does rest solve it for
you? We're designed to run out of gas. That's why God gave six days and a seventh day of rest.
That's why he gave days and nights. That's why he gave you circadian rhythms and metabolic rhythms
that we have to obey or we are going to, you know, be in trouble. But sometimes people unplug and
they rest, and that doesn't do it for them. And that says something else is going on, some dynamic
in your life or something else that is sort of like you pull into a gas station and you fill it up
with gas and the car still won't go. Something's eating away at the equipment at that point.
But the big thing is, it's important to unplug and get back with the design of life.
You know, I always begin with a created order in any topic and ask, how did God design for this to
work? And if you're not resting, you're trying to fly a plane without knowing the laws of physics.
What
are some of, if you don't mind my asking, Because I'm just so aware of the wisdom in the room.
What are some of the rhythms of rest that have helped to sustain you? You know,
you continue to put out, to be productive, to keep going.
And that's not always the case with folks who start out young.
What are some, I mean, you know, you see people burn out. And I've recently had.
A moment of that where I've had to be like, oh, I got to slow down. I'm not what I'm doing is not
sustainable. I've got to reconfigure. I had to scale back. What has helped you? What rhythms have
helped you stay in a sustainable way? One of the first things is you got to you got to learn to see
the signals of when you need it. Because and I have a problem with that because I'm just my friends
that know me and. My wife and other people call me the, what was it,
the, who was the bunny, the battery bunny? The Energizer bunny.
Energizer bunny. Yeah. It's like I can just go and go and go and go. And for some reason,
I never kind of, you know, okay, what's next? You got a plane in the morning at 5 o'clock? Okay,
time to go. And do it again. And I don't feel it in that way.
What I've learned, my signal is I can feel it. I can feel it in my head.
I start to feel, you know those little snow globes where you shake them and then you have to let
them be still so everything calms down? I can actually feel cognitive overload.
I can feel when I just had too much internal demand,
external demand, and I know, oops, if I don't watch this,
you know. I'm going to, something's going to happen. So that's what I see first.
But to prevent that, and this is where I think you're going, Allison, to prevent it, a big word
that everybody should embrace and love. is the word structure.
Structure is necessary for life. You have a skeleton for a reason.
It's got to hold this thing up, right? And when we have structural breakdowns,
either in our personality, our character, our lives, the way time and rhythms go,
something's going to not be okay. So what I've learned to do is I've got a pretty good kind of
estimation of when that breakdown is going to start happening and i will structure and build in
even from the previous year um unplugged times yeah and um when when the kids were home we have two
girls in their 20s now but when they were home we would always gather we'd have family meetings you
know every week but but at one of them in the end of the year i would review with them
Because I travel with my work some. And I always let my kids set the number of how many nights I
would be away per month.
I would ask them, when does this start to get to you? And usually,
you know, at some age when they got aware, they'd say, I don't know, you know. Four or five is not
a big deal. Y'all go out to dinner and stuff like that. But if it gets much more than that, I
don't like it. And so I always had a rule of five to six nights a month.
And that was set by the kids. But in those meetings, what we would do and what I would do is I
would schedule.
There was going to be one big time for the family to get away. you know,
the vacation. But I would do quarterly rhythms of getaways.
Tori and I would have specific date nights that were scheduled and structured. And even if you hate
each other, you're going out that night, the babysitter's coming, you know. Because the word
structure, actually the etymology of it, it means to build something. You know, structure is a
building, right? So it's very important that we have these You don't have to be anal about this,
but you have some sort of things that you have planned, and you know that you're going to obey
those structures. I'm a lifelong competitive golfer, and there has to be that time built in.
I have a morning time where I try to get everything quiet,
and that's my quiet time. We structure things, Tori and I together.
We have a Doberman. She loves going long walks. So it varies, but the point is you have to do it.
And the other thing that's a real important unplugging time for me is I've got a guys group that I
meet with on a regular cadence. And then I've got an annual guys hunting trip that I go on.
a few golf outings with my buddies and so the point being you know everybody's got what does it for
you yeah so that's what i try to do i i think i love that word structure i love that and that can
also be the signal when you start to i noticed when i had to take a little step back recently um my
work was creeping into my after dinner hours yeah and i was losing some of my hobbies to your point
about golf and and that Like, those hobbies aren't just filling time.
Those are restorative. You know, I had to get back to, oh, no, after dinner I bake,
which for me is a sort of unwind. It's kind of getting the snow globe to settle.
It doesn't, yeah, those rhythms really matter. And that can become a sign if we're creeping into
those rhythms, those norms that we're out of balance.
I love that. All right.
And this doesn't have to be lofty and spiritual and otherworldly.
I have to, and the story will tell you this, I have to have some kind of mindless movie or show
that I'm engaged in that gets me out of it all. And for me,
it's always kind of somebody's got to be killing somebody in some CIA espionage type. But the point
is, Anything that will take me fully out of everything else. Yeah.
Yeah. That's kind of what replenishes. And there's research on that, that that that kind of that's
not just there's something happening in the brain when you you disengage and you kind of that soft
focus is really healthy for renewal. I love that you're mentioning that it doesn't have to be
lofty. You also talk about you've touched on this a little bit about emotions.
as signals. Talk to us a little bit about how you've seen in your clients,
in yourself and others. How do emotions give us a clue?
Our rhythms are off. Well, it can go in a couple of different directions. I know, I know for me,
it sounds funny. How do your emotions clue you in? They clue me in when I don't feel them anymore.
Oh, yeah. When I start to get numb, you know,
kind of. Going through the motions, maybe feeling detached a little bit. That's a big signal to me.
The other ones, you know, if you kind of categorize these, Allison, I think the next grouping would
be the protest emotions. You know, we're built by God to,
and this is where boundaries come in, it's where your whole nervous system is wired in this way.
When something intrudes, and it could be work, it could be people, it could be whatever, but when
there's an intrusion, our system activates to fight against that or to flight away from it.
When I start to feel those, it's kind of when you get short with people or you get easily agitated
or things bother you that you can't let it roll off your back. That's kind of a signal. You're
irritated and overstressed. Or the flight part of it is when you see yourself wanting to run away,
wanting to get away. The emotion of wanting to escape in some way. People do that in various ways.
Yeah. Yeah. And the emotion itself is a cue. It doesn't mean something is way off,
but it is that yellow light to pay attention, to pay attention, to notice.
That's why it's so important, you know, and a lot of times in the Christian world in some goofy
ways. We've really put the mind and the intellect over the emotions as if these little kids,
okay, they're okay to have, but you better rule over them with your thinking. And people don't
understand that's not how God wired us. In fact, a lot of our goofy thinking is coming from our
emotions. In other words... people are into cognitive therapy,
for example, we know that your thinking can affect how you feel. But what they don't recognize is
that how you're feeling affects your thinking. Because our limbic system, our emotional wiring,
actually... produces its own way of seeing the world, its own thoughts, its own paradigms, its own
maps. And a lot of people's real, even their belief systems and, you know, ways that they see other
people, ways they see the world, that can be coming from trauma or emotions that aren't dealt with.
And so they're signals, you know, and like you're saying, we need to listen to them. I loved...
Dr. Cloud, you talk about in this dovetail so, so much with the work we talk about a lot on the
podcast, because my background with boundaries for your soul is this inner, these inner parts of
us. And another thing you talk about is losing access to valuable parts of yourself.
And, and that, and that we can seal these parts of us.
off, and that renewal is about allowing Jesus to help us re-engage these parts of us.
This is kind of how I'm, you know, this is a lot of what we talk about on the podcast. I'm curious,
and I think that's such a, if we're having to, it kind of gets at what you were saying about
numbing, but if we're having to kind of shut down. a part of us,
that that's a, that's a signal. How have you seen that again? I like hearing kind of how, how did
you arrive at that and how have you, you seen that? Cause it's a little more, that could be a
little bit more hidden, I think. So how do you notice that?
How have you seen that in people? And we may be unaware that it's happening, but it's really,
this is a, this is a big area, Alison, that you bring up that we don't address oftentimes enough.
You know, we have a lot of different parts.
God has created us, you know, as the scripture says, we're fearfully and wonderfully made. And we
have many, many, many different parts because they're in his image. God has even different names
for his different parts. You know, you got the warrior and the healer and the provider and all of
it. You look in the Bible, there's all these different names. Well, those apply to different parts
of him. But God is one. Yes. And that's what you got to remember. I often have said God is a
multiple personality who doesn't split. Yeah. Yeah. And what that means is he has access to all of
himself. Yeah. At all times. And when he's speaking from one part of himself,
it's not compartmentalized from other parts of himself. So if he's speaking truth,
for example. It's not split off from his grace. Yeah. So he's going to...
Yeah, they're always integrated. They're always integrated. Even if one is leading, yeah. What
happens to us? Well, we get compartmentalized or split. And sometimes some people split off their
truth-telling parts. Yeah. And they're giving grace to everybody, but they can't grab that truth
-telling part. And what do they become? They become enablers. They're graceful and giving, but they
have no limits. And then some people have access to the limit part and,
you know, they're sitting back, but they're angry and they're not gracious when they do it. They're
not speaking the truth and love. And so what a lot of healing is about is,
you know, Jesus said, I came to seek and to save that which was lost.
Now, certainly that applies to the whole world, but it is a statement about redemptive work that he
does. He's looking for, seeking, to save.
That word literally in the Greek means to heal that which was lost.
And lost doesn't mean he can't find them. It means broken, beyond repair. And we can lose touch
with parts of ourselves because of trauma. You know, there are aspects that are wounded and they
actually exit time. I mean, how do you get PTSD post-traumatic as if it's happening now because it
hasn't had the effects of time to heal it?
Yeah. And when you bring those wounded parts back into time where...
ingredients can work on them. Then you begin a process of healing and those parts actually get
restored and they get reintegrated. And so that's an important part.
We all need to be in some sort of process that, as Proverbs says,
you know, a person's heart is deep waters and the person of wisdom draws them out.
And we've got to be in a place that is, and I always start with this, melting us enough.
Because you're not going to get to lost parts if there's not empathic grace that's making you feel
safe enough to where you let go of whatever's guarding that part from emerging.
That's why when you get in conversations with people, they start to talk about something, and
instead of giving them an answer, oh, it's going to be okay, Romans 828, this will be good, they're
in heaven now, or whatever, you empathize. Yeah. And they just feel your presence.
What happens? The tears begin to come. Yeah. Because that safety has melted the need to
compartmentalize or the defenses. It's also holding up that woundedness when they can't hold it up
themselves. And they're integrating. Yeah. Well, we better always all be in that process.
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I
love how you describe that again. Even if we think about burnout,
I know for me, and I'm just realizing this as we're talking and as I'm thinking about this book,
I just put together that I was losing the playful part of myself because I was so focused on work.
And that part of me that just could be whimsical or could play hooky for a couple of hours or,
you know, and that someone else's quiet noticing,
not harshness, but I miss that. I miss that. You know, kind of what,
oh. Oh, what's happening? It's your right, that melting of, oh, I don't want to lose that.
How do I cultivate that? How do I make sure that I'm not so into this kind of focused, productive
part of me that I'm losing access? And I just love that you brought that into this conversation.
It's not all or nothing. It's bringing more of who we are online as we are made in the image of
God. I really love that. I think that's powerful. And parts really get lost.
They do. From wounding. Parts get lost from prohibitions to feel them.
You know, you grow up in a hungry way. If you haven't got anything nice to say, don't say anything.
You know, well, okay, what do you want me to do with that part of me? It doesn't want to give a
compliment right now. It wants to say that's not okay. So we can be talked out of them in so many
ways. And it's really important to reclaim another one. This is a hobby horse or it's not a hobby
horse. What's the word? I'm trying to think of the right way to say it. It's kind of a pet peeve.
Oh, let's hear it. We want to hear it. A lot of times now we have,
and I'm not saying these aren't helpful. They're very helpful in some ways to get people talking to
each other, get them looking at themselves, all that. But a lot of these typology tests,
assessment tools, people are using in the wrong way.
Now, I'll give you an example. The Myers-Briggs, for example. Everybody knows the Myers-Briggs,
right? Introvert, extrovert, thinking, feeling, all this stuff. Well,
what they do is they take it and they say, oh, I'm a T. Thinking instead of being an F where you're
a feeler. Well, what they don't understand, and I bet a lot of them don't even know this because
they would really have problems with it if they did, but that was built on Jungian psychology.
Carl Jung had a theory that there were these polarities, which actually was the
compartmentalization, of we are both thinkers and feelers, as God is,
right? Yes. Well, what happens is somebody splits off their feeling part. Now I'm a T,
and they wear it like that's how God created me.
Jung's theory, and again, I'm not waving the flag for you, I'm just telling you where this came
from, that you're to integrate. Yes. The thinkers need to get in touch with their feelings.
Yes. And if all you do is feel, you better think about it before you act out that feeling, et
cetera, et cetera. Yes. And so we need to find ourselves in these.
Yeah. These anal OCD, rigid, black and white rule people, they need to get over it and free up and
let some people breathe. And other people need to add a little bit of structure to their freedom
and know what day it is. So it's important that we're developing all of who God creates you to be.
Yeah, I love that. A personality type or even a diagnosis is not an identity. It's not all of who
we are. I love that. And we love hearing your Dr.
Henry Cloud pet peeves. I love it. And again, my pet peeve is not that people use the instruments.
The instruments can be great ways of understanding each other, how you respond to each other, the
best way to respond to each other. I guess you said it even better. It shouldn't be an identity.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, who wants to go through life being one of those polarities?
Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's just, it's not okay. And humility is a wholehearted person.
Humility is, oh, wow. I favor this. Great.
Wonderful. That maybe I have this strength. I need to work on how do I, how do I develop?
this other part of me. And if you think about healthy relationships, right? If a spouse is like,
well, no, I'm sorry. I'm just a T or I'm just an introvert. I'm just this. There's not much you can
do with that. Whereas the humility of this is my bent. This is how I'm, you know,
there's truth in that. This is my, my wiring. And I, I, I want to, you know, to the best of my
ability, you know, kind of fill out as a full human. I love how you're kind of giving us the, the
integrated God, but. Many of us have only encountered one part of God through a parent,
maybe through a harshness, right? How do we begin, if that's our story,
right? We only know one part of this God because that's all we ever were exposed to through a
caregiver. How do we begin to recognize that and rediscover the fullness of God?
Well, that's a lifelong journey. It's a big question. Yeah. You know, it's interesting that you say
that about the attachment aspects of this. I wrote a book about my journey last year.
I never had done that because I wanted to... It was actually written to my non-Christian friends
about faith and why I believe. It's called Why I Believe. And it was,
you know, about that journey because it is a... journey.
And as you're pointing out, that journey begins in attachment.
Now what does that mean? Well, it means exactly what David said in the Psalms.
You know, you're talking about how to know God, right? What David said was, oh,
when I was a baby, my mom taught me theology. Or my mom taught me the catechism.
Or, no, that's not what he said. What he said was, God, you taught me to trust you at my mother's
breast. Okay? Long before there's words.
Long before the secondary processes of the brain begin to develop, it even has language.
It even has symbolic representations of what we're feeling or experiencing. What's happening is the
nature of that connection is being wired into the limbic system, which becomes a map.
And psychologists call it a schema or structures or whatever it is. It kind of becomes the pathway.
that relationship, pain, experience, and all this other stuff runs on.
So what happens is if we have early attachments that take us down a certain path that don't include
attaching to the wholeness of it. See, that's why it's really good to have integrated parents.
Yeah. Because you're developing attachment to somebody who can,
be nurturing when you need it, who can be firm when you need it, who can prod you to go past where
you feel safe and grow and take risk and fall down, and who can protect you from your wanting to
take too many risks, who can see your talents and call them out, who can play with you and all of
this. That's what good parents do. And this attachment builds all of that equipment.
Well, this is not rocket science. To fix something,
we got to fix something in the way that it's designed to be done in the beginning. Yeah.
Which means you are, and we know this from all sorts of neuroscience and other things,
but especially the scriptures, we are formed and developed in relationship,
period. We need, you're going to find your own experience. What does a baby do?
They're experiencing something, and mom... and gives she coos has this tone and all of that and
you've got mirror neurons that are learning she is actually naming your experience for you without
words and you learn what it feels like to hurt what it feels like to be have joy what it feels like
to have you know hunger and desire and fear and all of that but you learn it in relationship so
you're not going to go find yourself by sitting on a rock in the woods
Solitude is really important.
Jesus sought solitude. We're to seek solitude. But when you're in solitude,
you should at least be with yourself.
And if you can't access yourself, solitude is just going to further an experience of isolation.
But to find ourselves, we have to find that in relationship. So you're going to rediscover these
parts of you. You've got to get in very safe relational settings. that you can open up to and
rediscover what you've lost and have people see that. We have to be seen to exist.
We have to be seen to grow. Who sees you? And a lot of people have lost many parts of themselves
because they're not seen in their closest relationships. They're not even noticed how they feel.
And so they lose touch of all of that. And this happens a lot of times in marriage. The loneliest
places you can be sometimes is in a relationship. And couples need to work on that.
So that's also the way I think, that's the beginning of how we reclaim ourselves. Yeah,
I love that. I think that's powerful and just a word that's going to track with someone listening
today, right? Where are you seen? Where are you seen? I think that's kind of the start of,
and also how we... connect with God, right? That being seen-ness.
I want to just close. The God who sees me. Yes. Yes.
That's a quote, right? Yes. And so often that felt experience of that comes through that loving,
safe presence of another person, right? And we just don't know how much God sees us.
And if we're not... Putting ourselves in places where we can experience that.
I know we're running out of time. I remember one day when I really woke up to how deeply God sees
us.
And I put this in my book, why I believe it's got a whole section in there on miracles that I've
experienced. But one of them was... When I was in the seventh grade, I had kind of a meltdown,
giving an oral book report in front of the class. I got flustered and started studying, and I
couldn't do it. And the teacher said, sit down. And she said, you'll never be successful in front
of the class. You'll never be successful in life if you can't speak in front of people. So you can
forget ever going to law school or something like that. I mean, she literally said this. I talk
about getting shut down. I just couldn't do it after that. And all through the rest of junior high
school, high school, college, I never, ever would accept any invitation to speak.
And when I tried to even do it, I just couldn't do it. Well, roll the clock forward,
and I was in my mid-20s when I first went into practice. And I would get asked by churches all the
time, you come teach a class on... stress or you know and i would always say no i don't do that and
i literally didn't do it ever i'm in the gym working out
after you know you shower and you go to the you're in the locker room and all this i look up and
there's this big naked guy walking up to me i mean and he's like 100 feet tall it turned out he
played for the la ramps but he walked i didn't know who he was he didn't know i was And he walks up
to me and he says, are you a Christian? And that's a weird question for a big naked guy standing in
front of you. And I go, yeah, why? And he said, well, God just told me to tell you something.
And I said,
okay, I'm a psychologist too. I can help you with those voices that you're hearing.
I love it. I can give you a little medicine for that. But he said, no, seriously,
I'm a pastor. He told me the church. It was a legit church. He said,
God just told me to take some. I said, all right. So we went and sat down.
He said, here's what the Lord says. And he did not know me at all.
He said, God just told me that when you were a child, a kid, I said a kid, something happened to
you that made you afraid to speak in front of people.
And that you've avoided it ever since then.
And God wants you to begin to speak for him now. And he's going to open some doors and you're to
walk through them.
And I remember, this is a long, I wrote about it in the book of many other stories like that, but I
went back to my office and I remember sitting there going, oh my gosh,
you, you see us all
the time. Yeah.
Next week I get an invitation to go speak to a small group of pastors. And I knew I had to do it.
I mean, last time God told somebody to speak, they didn't. They got swallowed by a whale, right?
Remember Jonah? So I got to do this. And I was petrified.
And I asked a friend of mine who's a prayer warrior and a speech therapist to help me.
And she
let me practice it with her a hundred times. Wow. And then she actually went. She sat in the front
row and I gave the talk to her. I don't want to make a long story short, but that was, and I
stumbled through it and I barely made it. It took about a year and a half for me to get to where
that wasn't an issue anymore. Now, I mean, not to be weird, but I speak in arenas, you know, like
lots and lots of people and it doesn't bother me at all.
But here's the point.
That part of me had been lost.
God sees the parts of you that have been lost.
He wants to seek and to save that which was lost. So I would just encourage you be seeking him and
asking him find those parts, even things I don't even know about myself.
I never knew I'd do some of the stuff I do now because I was out of touch. God wants to find you.
Dr. Henry Cloud. Thank you. The new book is called Renewal,
90 Daily Readings for Restoring Your Mind, Your Boundaries, Your Relationships, and Your Peace. And
you have... just for decades now been such a trusted voice for so many of us.
And I'm grateful to you. I'm grateful for the work that, that takes,
uh, inwardly. And the cost to that, but also to just your faithfulness,
even just to that moment that you just shared with us. Thank you for sharing that with us. It's
meant a lot. You've just been, again, just such a steady,
trustworthy voice. And I'm grateful to you. And I see what that takes.
And I'm grateful for your time today. Well, thanks. I hope it's been helpful.
It's a pleasure to be on with you and God bless you for all you're doing. Thank you for joining me
for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you take a moment to
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