Our nervous systems actually don't compare. All they do is they experience the stress and stress that can become trauma in the absence of a compassionate witness. What we long for, what our nervous systems long for, is not comparison, but connection.
You Hello
and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus, I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, I stepped into the living room of a family that just came to a new country. They were escaping war. The husband just fled from a job that required torture. They had twin babies that died at three weeks old. This is Big T trauma, I
didn't know what to say. I felt like I had no place to step into their situation, because I never experienced anything like they had to go through. But I became a compassionate presence. I was an empathetic listener to their story, and because of that, the healing process could go on, but if I am to be a listener, I also need to do the work of healing what's within myself, because I can't react out of my own woundedness. I can't regulate my emotions by trying harder and
trying to be significant. I need to reckon with my disconnection and move towards a more embodied connection with God, myself, others and creation. In this episode, Chuck DeGroat, Professor of pastoral care and Christian spirituality at Western Theological Seminary, dives into the wounds we all carry and the journey of healing
what's within. Chuck shares his own story of disconnection and isolation, and how he learned to pay attention to the dashboard of his thoughts, emotions, body, behaviors and relationships, to uncover the deeper wounds
beneath the surface. He unpacks the power of secure attachment and how we could find our way back to that sense of belonging, worth and purpose, not just in our minds, but in our very bodies, whether you're a high capacity striver or someone that is just trying to survive, this conversation will invite you into a transformative process of becoming more grounded, regulated and connected to yourself, others and to the God
who loves you. So get ready to lean in, because this is going to be a powerful and practical exploration of healing. What's within here is my conversation with Chuck to grote, Chuck. Welcome to shifting culture. Really excited to have you on. Thank you so much for joining me.
Yeah, it's good to be with you.
I'm really excited about this book, Healing, what's within. We all have wounds who we all have things in our life which we actually don't take care of, we don't heal from. And a lot of people, when we think of of trauma, we think of pretty big, big T trauma. I worked with Syrian refugees. And so I worked with war refugees. We had, I had to learn how to deal with, you know, people coming out of a war zone and what to do with big T
trauma. And I started to minimize my own wounding and my own pain and saying, Well, look at them. They have it much worse than me. And so I would react out of my own wounds, and I didn't do the work and my own life. Does everybody have wounds like and do we all have things that we need to heal from?
Yeah, well, I think the answer is yes. You know, I think we're born into a world that I mean, just think about how traumatic it is just to be born in the first place. You're in the safety of the womb and you're you emerge into this scary, cold world with people in white lab coats and fluorescent lights. You know, that's terrifying, actually, and, and, and, and I do think that there is this sense of of, you know,
this shift from the safety. It's analogous in some ways, to this, to the to the early Genesis story. You know, the safety of Eden and then Adam and Eve are sort of born into this world of shame and overwhelm and hiddenness and self protection.
And you know, I do think that there are wounds that all of us experience in one way or another, but they need not become traumatic wounds in the sense that we all experience stress to be human is to experience stress at some level, but stress that overwhelms our nervous systems becomes trauma, and oftentimes. That's in the context of these, these things that happen to us that that are
not met with compassion. You might say, you know, are not met with a compassionate the care of a compassionate friend or the attunement of a compassionate parent. And so you know, a child, two children may go through a similar situation, but one may be attuned to by a compassionate parent, and another one left to fend for herself. The first experience is stress. The second experience is trauma.
So then what then take us into, I know, in the beginning of your book, you go into Genesis three, and the questions that God asks Adam and Eve after they've they've taken from the dream the knowledge of good and evil. Yeah, so what are those questions? And what are the two different ways that we can actually hear questions from God?
Yeah. It's really interesting. Right before you and I got on, I was going back through old notes on my Mac, and I went all the way back to 2012 in a silent retreat that I led where I was beginning to use these questions. And years ago that I was I was wrestling through those early texts of Scripture, and I began to wonder, because I grew up in the reformed tradition, and I'm still in what we would call here a more generously reformed
tradition. But what I grew up hearing was that this is the story of a great tragedy, this is how it all went wrong. And what I sensed was that God was probably really mad. And as I spent time with particularly that first question, where are you? And did some work around it. Even work with the text. You know, God walking in the cool the day, probably the time of the day when he would walk with Adam and Eve go on their daily walk. That God asking, Where are
you? That's the first question of the book of Lamentations in the Hebrew. You know, it's a, it's a question of of that comes out of grief and longing, I began to hear God's kindness. And I think what what occurred to me was, in the midst of this moment of profound pain, because, because it's painful, right? And Adam and Eve discovered they're naked, there's a sense of, we need to cover up. They sow fig leaves. They hear God coming. They hide. God comes with, in my opinion,
compassion and curiosity. God didn't have to come with a question. You know, the Bible could have started in a different place. It could have been some sort of, how could you have done this? Now, that's a question too, I guess. But you know, you're so terrible, you've made a huge mistake. You know, the kinds of things I've said as a dad, by the way, but there is this sense of brokenheartedness, of where are you? I miss you. We were having so much fun. We were going on long walks in the cool
today. I miss us. I miss what we what we've experienced. And, you know, I one of the things I say in there that I think is kind of a well accepted truism among trauma therapists is that disconnection is at the heart of trauma. And of course, disconnection and alienation are at the heart of Genesis, three, two.
I interviewed Elizabeth Oldfield, and she she talks about sin as disconnection and wanting to get us back into connection, I think that's a lot of what you the work that you're doing in here is bringing us back into connection with God and to ourselves and to others.
And we we isolate when we are hurt and wounded, and we actually disconnect from different things, where, where has that happened in your own life, where you have decided to go the route of isolation disconnection, rather than longing for more connection?
Yep. How long do you have? Are you a licensed therapist?
Yeah, charged by the hour, so we're good.
I mean, I think early on there was, there was a pretty early wound of my dad worked weeknights, weekdays, weeknights, and I only saw him on weekends. And so there's real kind of loss of connection to my dad that I that made me wonder. I didn't really get this till I was older, but maybe sort of wonder like, does he love me?
Does he want to be with me? I think my mom felt kind of overwhelmed, and I think in the midst of her overwhelm and some of her early trauma and addiction, she we didn't often get the best of her, and that's painful to say. My mom passed away at almost 90 last summer. And you know, there's a lot of reconciliation later on, but there was some pain there, you know. And I think as a young kid, I felt pretty lonely. I I kind of felt like I was on my own, that I had to go it on my
own. And, you know. There are things in life that reinforce that. One big thing that happened to me is I was fired from my first job in ministry in the midst of a clash with a senior pastor. And I very much came out of that with a sense of of, well, I guess I just, I've got to forge my own path. I had this sense that that that would do me in the future to future pastoral jobs, that that perhaps the word would get out, that somehow, some way, I wasn't hireable. And I very much felt
like, I guess I'm on my own. And the interesting thing there, and I think I reflect on this a little bit in the book, is people were saying to me, Wow, you're so resilient. You've really come out of this stronger, better. But in inside, I was ashamed. I had pulled away. I was I was coping in ways that I think were harmful to me and sabotaging to my relationships and and it really took, I mean, it took almost a decade. I mean, I ended up, I ended up in a hospital bed in
Mexico. I think my, you know the phrase The Body Keeps the Score right? Well, body kept the score amidst my disconnection.
Man, that's, there's a lot of stuff that you didn't work through. I think we all all do that. I think for me, when when things have not gone my way, when I feel like, oh, somebody, I was passed over for something, and I'm I'm telling myself different stories. And one of the things that you just said is, I'm going to forge my own app. I think that's the direction I lean towards. Is when something doesn't go my way, it's like, okay, I guess it's on me. I need to do this.
I'm all by myself. I'm going to forge my own path. What were some of the steps to help you move towards I know it took you a decade, but help you move back to saying, Oh, I may need some, some more connection, yeah, and and healing and revealing of what really was going on there, yeah.
I mean, most people can probably identify with this was pretty mixed. You know, on the one hand, I think I was engaging in ways that where I was disconnecting and sabotaging in other ways. I mean, the that note on my laptop that I found was during a season where I was leading retreats, and I was inviting people to do the work of reconnection with God. And so it just shows how contradictory I am. We all are right at some level. But I think what ended up happening was I had the sense that there's
something off. There's inside, you know, it's not comfortable to live with self alienation, you know, to feel sort of out of body. And it was showing up in my body and anxiety. And I think I was coping with too much coffee in the morning and too much alcohol in the evening, and so I was using external things to regulate my my nervous system, and then I put a lot on that second church that I worked
at. So I moved from Orlando out to San Francisco, where I took another pastoral role and and I put everything into this role like it had to go well, you know, because the last one ended poorly, and so I've got to be a superhero here. And by the way, people were responding with,
Wow, you are doing great. And so I was quickly sort of elevated into the senior leadership and given more responsibility and and I think, I think that was taxing, you know, because I was living with this sense of, as long as I'm doing well and as long as I'm kind of forging ahead, I can keep my deep shame and anxiety at bay, and I wasn't really, didn't have the kinds of relationships to be vulnerable people to be vulnerable. So I started in therapy. I did a bit of therapy, but I do think my
body caught up with me. Yeah.
So then through that process, that if we don't realize we haven't actually dealt with some of our wounding, how do we start to pay attention to our body and feel and know where what is going on? What does it look like to pay attention to our body and what our body is telling us? Yeah.
So you know, in some cases, in my case, you can't help but pay attention, because you end up in the hospital. I think, for those of us who are doing our work and the work I do continuously now, one of the things I talk about in the book is to pay attention to what I call the dashboard. The dashboard, you know of a car gives you a sense of what might be going on underneath the surface, right underneath in the engine, and how I imagine it. Our personal dashboard has like
five spots on it. You know, it's like five different components to it, our thoughts, our
emotions are. Body sensations, our behaviors and our interpersonal relationships, sort of the quality of our interpersonal relationships, and and, and as as I have, people reflect on these things, and they begin to write things down that I call, you know, yellow lights on the dashboard or red lights on the dashboard, they'll begin to notice like, yeah, my thoughts are very self judgmental and self contemptuous nowadays, my emotions, yeah, I'm feeling a lot of sadness, a lot
of grief, a lot of shame. My body, yeah, I constantly feel like tired or my body constantly gives me this sense of overwhelm. My behaviors, yeah, I am drinking too much, or overeating or numbing in particular ways. My my relationships. I really I haven't had an honest conversation with my best friend in a long time, and I kind of pulled away all people actually go through those, those five components and write those down, and those are pretty good indicators of what's going on
beneath the surface. And so that's sort of an initial way. Oftentimes, if people are skeptical of this or think it's psychobabble, I'll go back to Psalm 38 and I'll say, you know, David in Psalm 38 a pretty, pretty, uh, honest and explicit terms actually names as thoughts, as emotions, as embody sensations as behaviors, as relationships, in a way that gives us permission to name ours.
Man, I think that's it's really important. And so then what is the role of now, I think because we were we've been wounded, we're in isolation, a lot of times in disconnection. Through it, then what's the role of others to bring us back to know what, what is going on under the surface? Because I could, I could give you a bunch of symptoms, but I don't really know what's going on under the surface. Yeah,
I do think you know that when we're in what we call dysregulation, which is sort of the embodied state that I'm talking about, this embodied state of disconnection when our nervous systems are in a kind of coping mode, a survival mode, one of the surefire ways we know of getting back to a sense of regulation, to getting back home, as I call it, is through co regulation, it's through two people meeting with one another in an honest, connected, attuned
kind of way, you know. And the interesting thing about it, Joshua is like you and I don't know each other, but I pretty quickly felt safe with you. I don't know, I don't know what it is about you. Maybe it's because we're, you know, two middle aged men trying to survive in the world
the gray you know,
but there's this immediate sense of safety. And I think when we feel a sense of safety with others, when you know you have a person in your life who can really attune to you, ask good questions, your body feels safe. You know, there's this embodied sense of of I can relax my strategies for survival and and when we do that, we enter into a state. I won't get into too much, because it gets a little technical, but we enter into a nervous system state that's actually a state of
safety. I call it the still waters of God. You know, the green pastures of God, place where we feel rooted and grounded in love. And from that place, actually, we know physiologically, neurobiologically, that we can heal. Our bodies can heal. And I'm talking about any, anything from chronic illness to anxiety disorders, you know, and everything between, you know. And so our bodies have an innate capacity to heal, uh, but when we are in a state that allows
that healing to take place. So by the way, when I was in my state of alienation and disconnection, my body was in a well. Well, when they went in in this hospital in Mexico to take out my gallbladder, the doctor said, You are septic. Your system is septic. You have to stay in the hospital longer than we thought. Body was keeping the score. So clearly, my body there's a toll attacks on my body from living in dysregulation and disconnection for so long.
So I think part of that is being finding an empathetic listener. If you can find somebody that's empathetic, that could listen, one of the things that I know we have done, you know, my wife and I lead a missions organization, and we deal with some traumatic issues, and we've done a lot of critical incident stress debriefs, yeah, so just after a really traumatic event that happened. So, yeah, a couple in her home church had somebody break into their house that was there for 30 minutes.
They had to go out on their roof. She was pregnant. She was eight months pregnant, and it was just a scary time. The police didn't come for a long time. And so my wife went over and, you know, just that evening, listened to the whole story. What is the importance of of actually having somebody to sit there and listen and be an empathetic listener?
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's hugely important, because that's where that CO regulation happens. That's where that sense of feeling mirrored, feeling attuned to happens with this. This is a this is a biological inheritance, a spiritual inheritance. We need attunement. We know in our earliest hours we need as we emerge from our mom's wombs, we need to be held. We need to be loved. Baby can't survive without connection. And so this
is a birthright. Connection is a birthright, and, and, and the Wild Thing is, is so many of us live disconnected for so long, right? And so what your wife did was, I'm sure she showed up in a way that provided that kind of
attunement. Now, now where you know therapist Chuck gets curious, then is your wife bears some secondary trauma, perhaps from sitting with I mean, I can imagine the ministry that you've done and what your bodies have absorbed, and even if you haven't absorbed it directly, there are those of us who do the work of helping, where we absorb a kind of secondary or adjacent trauma, and we begin to notice symptoms. We get kind of numb. We're not as you know, we don't feel as much. We get depressed,
we pull away. And so all of those things are things to pay attention to as well,
exactly, exactly you you get to listen, you get to take things, and then you have to give it away, and you have to you also have to say here and have somebody to be able to listen to you. And that's been crucial to us and our lives, and we need that. I think part of us growing up, and the woundings that we have, you talk about in one of the chapters in your book, you talk a lot about attachment theory and the different disordered attachments that we do have, or the secure attachment that we do
have, yeah, what is? What is attachment theory and the steps there. And why is it important that we actually recognize where we are in the midst of that? Yeah,
well, we just sort of hinted at it. We're designed for secure attachment. We're designed to be seen, known, loved, delighted in. Oftentimes, I'll talk about the image of God in terms of three things, a sense of worth, belonging and purpose, and that's something that comes that, that emerges out of the beauty of good, secure attachment. But the reality is, is we? We are born into a broken world and into broken
relationships. My parents, my parents, married in 56 I was born in 70 and there was a lot of addiction and talk of divorce and counseling, but counseling back then wasn't very good. There were miscarriages, it was just a lot of pain. So I was born into a lot of pain, and I was also born to be the hero that would save my parents
marriage. You know, I was born to be the glue that's a lot to absorb, and so I grew up with a mixture of anxious and avoidant attachment, which is to say, you know that the the anxious storms of my mom's dysregulation, she didn't want to lose another baby. She loved me, and yet she probably operated with too much control my dad's distance and avoidance, and so I was constantly craving more connection with him. And so I emerged into adulthood with this kind of mixture of of anxiety. I
need love. I want you to like me. I'm going to pursue it and avoidance. No one's really gonna love me anyway, and I'm never really gonna amount to anything. And so there was shame. And by the way, I went to seminary at 25 and no one was talking about this stuff. And so it was all about just figuring out your theology and performing well, right? And so, boy, that that's a that's just a scary cocktail for the formation of a pastor,
right? And so my my anxious and avoidant attachments led me to some of those things showed up in the early years of my marital relationship, of course, and my friendships, where I was constantly operating out of a push pull, of an anxious kind of tug. Do you like me? Will you be my friend? Am I doing okay and an avoidant pulling away? I guess I'm just better on my own. I better just kind of protect myself in this way, until I started doing my own work, until my counseling professor in
seminary said, Dude, you. Got work to do.
You got a lot of work to do. Let's work on
it. If you don't do your work, you'll be dangerous.
Wow, wow. And I man, so if you have avoidant detachment, or, you know, attachment, of course, detachment, that is the actual word that should be used right there. If you're avoidant, yeah, but if you do have these different attachments that are avoidant or anxious, is there a way to start to heal those things and get to a place of you feel like you have secure attachment in the world, and you're able to be connected to Yeah, to others again, and find joy in the midst of it you're like.
So what I also say about attachment is, with secure attachment, we we gained a sense of ourselves. You know, we have a stronger sense of who we are We? We? We have a sense
of like authenticity as well. I call it the sense that I connected to purpose with the image of God, like when mom and dad are connected to us, they'll champion our our voice in the world, our place in the world you know to both Michael W Smith, so old song that we would remember, and so there's this sense of, I'm loved, and I can enter into the world with confidence. And when, when you don't have that secure attachment, well, you're gonna be looking for, you gonna be
chasing after. You'll be chasing us off, and say, chasing after worth and belonging and purpose. Now, how do we how do we discover secure attachment as adults, if we find ourselves disconnected, well, we we find our way to secure attachment in a therapist, a friend, a pastor, a spiritual director, a mentor, someone that provides that kind of secure space. I do this with
folks all the time. I just spent two hours before our time with clients of mine as a therapist, where I get to create a space for 5055, minutes where they're held and they're known, and they're seen, all the things that we longed for, you know, and didn't get and and we can find our way back there. I'm really grateful in my earliest days to sat with a man named Roger shepherd who provided that space for me, and I remember just feeling like there's
something here. There's a there's a sense that I'm known here, and a safety that I feel here that I've never experienced in any other relationship, and he's allowing me to sort of grow up and make some mistakes, and he's, you know, and, and so, so we're sort of working through some things, like developmentally even that we didn't work through when we were
younger, you know. So, so there, there's oftentimes with attachment, we say that we can experience earned secure attachment, which is to say that through the work that we do of experiencing the kind of CO regulation, safety, delight, work, all those things, belonging that we needed, that we can find our way back to some sense of secure attachment. So
you're saying there's hope for us, we can solve for you. Okay, I didn't think there was hope for me. I was talking about other people.
Yeah, there's hope. There's lots of hope, you know. And I think, you know, we that's what I mean. I wouldn't be doing what I do. You know, in my past, more roles and my counseling and even teaching in a seminary program here, if I didn't think that this would amount to us experiencing a deeper sense of delight in God, you know, from God in our relationships, yeah, there's hope that's
good. You know, one of the things that you you talked about, you know, in your both, in your attachments, after your wounding, you were telling yourself a certain type of story. Yeah, we always tell we tell ourselves. We're probably our harshest critics, you know, on the inside and we're telling ourselves stories, yeah. How do we get back to a better story? A story where is it actually more reflects what God sees in us than what we see in us.
Yeah, yeah. This reminds me of, I tell the story in there of Isaiah, chapter 30, where Israel, you know, Israel, who you know is in a pretty vulnerable position, is is sensing that Assyria is going to invade, and if Assyria invades, it's over. And so in their anxiety, they they tell the story that we can't, we can't do this without help from Egypt. You know, Egypt, ironically, the nation that had enslaved them, and they live into this very old
story of. Uh, that that prompts them to go back for help instead of going to God and and I had the sense that we live that out too, like there are old stories inside of me that, you know, your dad was busy. He didn't take the time. No one really wants to take the time. You're not worth the time. Now, I know my dad loved me, and I know that that was in his heart, by the way, but that's what I internalized, and that's a very old story. Or for my mom, you're
never going to get it right. And so I just had this sense that, well, shame is always kind of right underneath, simmering right underneath, and just about everything I do that somehow, some way, it's not nearly like it used to be. But somehow, someway, even if, after I get off with you, Joshua, there might be some sense of like, boy, there are 100 different ways that you could have done it differently. Chuck, and you could have said this, you've
done that. And, oh, they're, they're, they're, think of all the people are far more articulate than you are, you know. And these are old, old wounds that have become stories that I tell myself. And part of why I introduced the three questions is to say God is so kind and curious and compassionate and longs for you
to know a better story. And I offer practices in there of embodying a better story as we remember, both in our own story and from God's story, where we've experienced worse and belonging and a sense of purpose. So
then, what is a good practice for us? Like, I know you have practices at the end of every chapter, and it's fantastic. A lot of great work, yeah, that I could just do as I'm reading the book. So what's, what's an example of a practice for us that we could get back to that better story?
Yeah, so one, one is that I practice that I call the timeline exercise, and it's simply put a horizontal line down the center of a paper, and I'll do this as I do counseling with people where below the line, the horizontal line, we'll think about how we experience woundedness around our sense of worth and belonging at purpose. And what I find is people have
plenty of content for that. You know, as mom and dad and coaches and pastors, all sorts of people in their lives, you know it's like, yeah, I didn't ever feel like I belonged, and I heard this message from my coach and but above the line, people were often surprised when I asked them listen for whispers of worth and belonging and purpose in your story, throughout your story, even now, and they'll be Like compelled to tears as they remember, yeah, there was, there was this consistent presence of
my grandma, you know. And whenever mom and dad weren't around, you know, grandma would be over, and she'd babysit me, and I'd always know I was delighted in we're prone. We know this research has told us we're prone to remember what's wrong. We're prone to remember the negative, and so my dog, my now adult daughters, remind me of this all the time when they say, Dad, I remember when you did this to us. And I'm like, but do you remember what I took out to, like, ride go karts and
get ice cream? And now I never don't remember that, you know? So I invite people to not just to listen for those whispers in their story, but from Scripture to like invariably, there are texts that people will will listen for and hear that are deeply reassuring to them, x, that remind them of God's delight. And I've got some embodied practices that I invite people into to to just sort of sit with them and allow them to kind of get into their bodies in a way that allows them to
experience it more deeply. Yeah,
I think I'll go back to the very beginning of what I was I was talking about is that we we compare our suffering to others, and we dismiss our suffering because it's not as bad as other people. Yeah. How do we let ourselves know, or let others know that their story matters, their suffering matters as well, and we don't have to compare?
Yeah, yeah. I, I find this a lot, you know, you know this, I've been involved in some, some work with churches around issues of church abuse, pastoral abuse and trauma and things like that. You know, I even tell the story, I think, in there of of sitting with a group of people who had been a part of a large staff, and they were comparing stories like you were just talking about, well, Oh,
you were there for five years. I was only there for two months, and yours is far worse than mine and and one of the things I said to them is, our nervous systems actually don't compare. All they do is they experience the stress. Stress that can become trauma in the absence of a compassionate witness. What we long for, what our nervous systems long for, is not comparison, but connection. Let's let go of the details here, and let's really just hear
one another. You may have been there for two months, but you had that that those interactions with that senior pastor that were incredibly damaging. You know, let's listen. It doesn't matter what she went through. If she went there for we could listen to her, but we really want to attune to your unique story, because you're our nervous systems are very different, and the trauma will be imprinted in ways that are radically different in different people, and I've seen this over
25 years as a therapist. Now I'll have people who come in who've been through very similar experiences, but one story of abuses is not a not like another, so I need to honor the uniqueness of people's unique stories, their unique experiences of pain, their unique nervous systems. I I'd say, I don't know if you've heard of this category, but a highly sensitive person in HST, I was a highly sensitive child. I'm a highly sensitive, not the highest sensitivity, but I think
that plays a role in this. And so there's a unique cocktail, you know, of human being that is Joshua and is chuck that to honor.
I think this is good. And I think one of the things, well, I think everybody needs this book, and everybody needs to heal what his within them. But one of the things that we do here, and my wife and I do a lot, so we train a lot of missionaries. And, you know, church planters in this world, a lot of times people are, how do I say this? They're actually reverting back to they're actually using their wounded, woundedness to get energy for
the for the work. So they're striving to go out to feel significance, yes, in in something. And so they're trying to get their significance out of the good work that they do, rather than the worth that they found and and who they are and who God has created them to be, as as we're training people for the the long haul, for especially for, you know, high capacity strivers that,
yeah,
how important is this work, this healing work, and what difference Is that going to make in our churches and our disciples down the road?
Yeah, oh, I It's such a good question, and there's so many different ways we can go. I'm just so glad you and your wife are so attuned to that reality, because it's often the case if, if you've experienced challenges and ministries, even some traumas of pain that you're you're going to chase another exciting situation in an attempt to to regulate your nervous system. I'm going to try again. I'm going to I maybe I was doing that when I went out to San Francisco. I'm
going to try again. I'm going to enter into this really challenging situation. I'm going to do it better. And really what we need to do in those kinds of situations is to slow down and to pay attention first to that dashboard and then underneath, to the engine, to the autonomic nervous system and the reality that that we might be living on this kind of, what I call sympathetic nervous system
hamster wheel. I I'll oftentimes do these five day intensives with pastors and missionaries, and I'll draw it up on the board. You know, your nervous system was meant to be in this kind of centered place that I call home, the still waters of
God. But you're living in your the sympathetic storm this hamster wheel, and you're chasing after other hamster wheels, other things that feel exciting or thrilling, or life giving or through approval seeking, whatever it might be, in an attempt to offer some sort of internal regulation, but you're never Going to get it by through the chase, you know, whether it's some form of addiction or some sort of ministry workaholism that's really challenging, as you know, because when your identity has
been wrapped around performing or workaholics or whatever it is to step off the hamster wheel, it's Like, I don't know who I am without the hamster wheel. And so it takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of support. Um, oftentimes, you know, when I'm working with pastors, it's like, there's no way, like my my church sent me to you, Chuck, to get fixed so I could come back and exert the same energy, or
more I was. You. And and so it's really risky in it, and often say, I'm not sure that I'll be able to keep my job if, if I do this, I I've got a friend, Steve Smith, who founded Potter Zen in the soul Care Institute. He tells a story of pastoring this mega church and going to spend some time with Dallas Willard. And then after his sabbatical, he came back a different person, and he realized I can't pastor the way I used to, and it's just not going to work. Okay. So,
yeah, that's it's so, yeah. So then you step into the next season of your life with hands open and with with great sense of awe and wonder as to what God might do.
You know, I think in this day and age that we live in, we are more informed with mental health issues than we ever have been before. We have more knowledge and more expertise in what is happening and what is going on, but there is higher levels of depression and anxiety than before as well. Yeah. How do, how do we move from understanding the mechanisms of mental health into actually healing and moving forward into a space? Yeah,
so that's, gosh, you asked really good questions and hard questions. And yeah, I
know it's hard, but I want to ask it because I think it's important what
you're touching on is a major shift that I've experienced in 25 years of doing the work where, where a lot of what we were doing was talk therapy for a long time, where we were talking about the issues and talking, you know, using DSM diagnoses, and talking about
family stories. And we're we're recognizing more and more that we've got to engage practices that invite us to wholeness, that invite us to connection, that invite us to regulation, and that requires more embodiment that I was trained in
such a long time ago. There's new research that is actually channeling what I think is ancient, an ancient understanding of the body and the breath that involves us finding our way back to the ground of our being, you might say, to use a philosophical phrase or ground a sense of groundedness. I remember when I first started engaging some new practices after this ordeal in the Mexican hospital. I began slowing down, I began breathing.
And it felt really strange, because I lived so dissociated, dissociated from my own body, and it was like, oh, there's an arm and a hand and a foot and a heart and, wow. So how did I get here in the first place, you know? And so this is where, where we can think about it. How did I get here to the point where I'm so disconnected, so dissociated from my body. How do I engage practices that allow me to re engage with my body, with my breath, and to heal some of
those deep wounds? And, you know, I think it's, I think we see this in seed form, in Genesis chapter three, when Adam and Eve hide. It's a way of coping hidden behind fig leaves. We we, we survive in ways that actually keep us functionally disconnected from ourselves, each other and from God. But reconnection involves becoming embodied again, while practices of oftentimes, my clients know this, but very early on, we're rubbing our chests. We're practicing bilateral tapping.
We're breathing. We're engaging some ancient prayer practices, sometimes contemplative prayer, certainly, certainly some early church readings and biblical readings where we're breathing in and breathing out, where we're engaging lots of different practices to reconnect us to our bodies. Think
that's so good. I mean, I've had people tell me, I've been, you know, through tapping and different things with their body. I was like, I don't know how this works, but it does work, and it's great. And so I don't need to know that how it works, but I know that it does. And I think embodiment is
really important. And, yeah, and I think that's fantastic that you know as I mean, the last time I was feeling disconnected and anxious, one of the practices that I felt like I was invited to was to take my shoes off and just go into the dirt, yeah, and just be where I am, yeah? That helps so much. Just actually being there and feeling my feet on the ground, in the dirt, yeah. Was like, Hey, I am actually here. This is, this is perfect. Yeah,
I'll sometimes, I'll send my students. I'll know, you know, eight weeks into this. Semester that my students are pretty disconnected, right? I mean, they're just surviving the semester, and we've got this pine grove right next to the seminary grounds, and I know that they walk high speed through that Pine Grove to get from our campus to the coffee
shop or wherever they go. And so I'll say, so here's what we're gonna do for the next hour, you're going to slow down, maybe take off your shoes, if they feel comfortable doing it, and walk in the grass in the Pine Grove, slowly observing what you observe move, movement of the leaves, the flight of a bird, and some will come back in tears like that palpable sense of so we're talking about being out in nature now and slowing down and
getting grounded. You know that palpable sense of of I have been, I have been alienated for myself, disconnected from my own body, maybe even from my relationships, and that really slowed me down and invited me back home. And there are lots of different practices that that that can allow us to do this, both in contemporary psychology and in the ancient Christian tradition.
So is it, you know your definition of of home, what is back home? Is it that sense of purpose and worthiness and belonging? What? What is that? Where am I trying to head back towards? Yeah,
well, I think home. When I talk about home, I talk about it at multiple levels. I talk about it as spiritual level, a physiological level, I mean, so to spiritual levels, some have called it the true self, place where we feel centered, the still waters of God, where we experience feeling rooted and grounded in love, abiding in Christ. There are a variety of different metaphors what we know in an embodied
sense. Well, in the contemplative tradition, that's where we use the language of the true self, that place where God's image dwells, where God dwells in contemporary sort of trauma, informed physiological ways, neuroscientific ways, we talk about the ventral vagal system, which is the kind of the the regulating center of our autonomic nervous system. It's
it's home base. It's where we feel relaxed and grounded and creative and playful and at ease and connected and and so you know when, when you're at home in your own house, like you've worked a long day, and you walk in your house and you're just like, come on, that feels good. You know we feel that at a
physiological level. And these practices are geared toward shifting people's autonomic states from what I call sympathetic storm or dorsal fog, to use some technical terms, of our autonomic nervous system states, to this ventral sense of home, like, Oh, okay. I like this. This is I feel connected to myself. I feel connected to God. I feel like I can show up better in my relationships. I'm not prone to overeat. I'm I'm not going to drink myself to numbness tonight. This is nice, you know?
I Yeah, that's so good. I felt that last night after being gone for a couple of weeks. But I walked into my house. This this is, this is home, yeah. And I felt, I felt
so good just to sit Yeah. One of the things that I've noticed as I've done this work of dealing with my with my woundedness and my wounds in my life is that when I react to something out of my woundedness now that I am more aware of like, Oh, I did that because of my wounding, so I'm quicker to ask for forgiveness and to course correct and to move forward. Yeah, what is ongoing flourishing for us after we have started to deal with our wounds.
Yeah, we know, you know what is been going on in our lives? Yeah, how we can continue, continually flourish long term?
Yeah, I think you're getting at it. We begin to understand the landscape of our own soul, and in so doing, we understand that there are these detours that we take, there are these ways that we self protect or we disconnect that are often very familiar. You know, they're, they're learned over the course of a lifetime in our early schools of formation with our moms and our
dads. And so we notice, you know, we notice that slight dysregulation as, you know, I was, we're empty nesters now, my wife and I were on a road trip a few weeks ago, and I noticed some avoidance, you know, and, and it was like, kind of like, I need to pay attention to this. What's going on right now? I got in the car, we're driving, we're we're headed out, and, um. Um, I had to do the work, because if I wouldn't be paying attention, I probably just act out of that.
But I might have just stayed in that space for two or three days. But I wanted to notice what's, you know, what's coming up for me. And I did. I paid attention. I allowed myself. She didn't know this was happening. We were kind of driving along. She was taking a nap. I was, you know, driving a few hours, and I had this sense of, yeah, there's some old stuff that has bubbled up, and it has to do with some anxiety around some things that
are going on in our lives. And I want to be present, so I'm going to breathe and I'm going to ground, and I want to honor, you know, some parts of me that are feeling kind of fearful right now and overwhelmed. My daughter and her fiance were headed off to Japan. We've got a wedding. We're planning some things going on in our lives that feel disruptive, and honor those things and come back to a place of of center so breathing, my wife's sitting over there.
They're napping, and I'm rubbing my chest, and I'm four seconds in, holding for seven seconds out, for eight seconds, breathing, um, praying, this ancient prayer, call me, oh Lord, breathing in as you still the storm, breathing out, still me, oh, Lord, keep me from harm. I should have given you more
warning before doing that. I didn't know I was going to offer you that prayer, but this old, ancient Celtic prayer, and by the time she woke up, I was more grounded, you know, I was just more there and and we were able to be together, be connected. But I'm just growing to notice
those things more. And then there are times where, you know, my daughters and my wife call me out because I'm not noticing and it's the same old not that they're very familiar with, who gets really anxious or really disconnected.
Yeah, yeah, I can see that that's that's so good. What a great example. You know, I was able to read healing, what's within while we were camping and fly fishing, so around a fire, it was, it was a perfect spot to actually sit there and read your book. And while I was reading it, I was like, I want to give this. I just want to, just like, hand out copies. I was like, you need this. You need this. This is amazing. What is your hope for your readers? People would pick
up your book? What would you want to them to get out of it and implement in their lives? Yeah,
well, I mean, I think I want them to experience an invitation to to this transformation, this path of transformation that that that I lay out in the book I want, I want them to experience it as inviting, accessible, safe, not too complicated. Not complicated by too much verbiage, you know, from from from theology or psychology, but really just Invitational and accessible. And as you know, there are practices, and there's a bit of a stair step approach, where we're com We're layering some
things in the book. We're becoming aware in the early chapters, by the middle chapters, we're paying attention a bit more to some of the complexity of our own stories. By the last chapters, we're looking at ways that we cope. I think if, if people can find their way into this inner conversation, I have a lot of hope for the healing that can happen. The problem is we stay
pretty externalized. And as you know, I've done some writing on narcissism and spiritual abuse, and I I know from my own story and other people's stories, we're looking for someone to blame. We're looking for how we might get justice. We're looking for some sense of control. I get it because I've lived in all
those places. But I I had to do the work I was compelled to do the work of turning my attention to the wounds that I carried within me that were unique to me, and that's the invitation in this book that's
really good. I have a couple quick questions to the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Man, I would almost just sit in silence with tears in my eyes and looking into the eyes of a young guy with so much anxiety who's so disconnected and so scared at some level and working really hard to belong, I think I just give him a hug and say, you're loved, and you don't have to try so hard, and God is more near than you can imagine, you know, but, yeah, that's a good question. Man, thanks.
But I think that's so good because I think even what you're doing in. In your your road trip of saying, Okay, I feel, uh, disconnected. I not attach it like I'm avoiding something here. Sometimes it takes a lot to get over that fear of, okay, I I'm kind of scared to actually engage in this connection right now. But you actually did it.
It's the same thing you were gonna say, you know, you talked about your 21 year old self as someone who was fearful of anxious, yeah, and I think the work is continues like you're giving, you're not giving into fear. You're actually stepping into a place of hope and healing, even when it is scary, because all of these things, is actually putting yourself out there of saying, hey, I need some connection, or you can actually be there with me. So,
well done. Next one, anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend,
oh, yeah, well, I've been watching the Euros and the Copa matches, but those are over now. I will tell you who won readers. Yeah, I'm reading a new book called The secret language of the body that just came out that I think takes a next step in, in the inner work, the body work that that I think I'm still learning on the go, and so many of us are learning, of course, Bessel van der Koch invited all this too many years ago, on the Body Keeps the
Score. There's going to be more and more work like that coming out, I think, in the coming, the coming years, as we understand the, you know, the the mind, heart, body connections and and do that kind of work. So that's one. That's one I'm I'm reading right now. I'm rereading a book that is really wonderful, called trauma stewardship, by a woman named, I just blanked out her first name, but her last name is Lipski. It's a it's an old one.
It was a best seller, and it's one that I assigned for pastoral care class on its secondary trauma, adjacent trauma, so that pastors and missionaries and counselors know what the tax, the toll of listening to these stories and being in these challenging situations. And so, yeah, that's one I've gone back to. And yeah, I've been doing a little dabbling in a book that that came out of a retreat that Henry now and LED on the
prodigal son. It's a book called home tonight, further thoughts on on the return of the prodigal son. And I actually got to listen to that retreat on CD, if you remember what those were, but they don't want that's not available anymore, but it's been. It's this really book, and I need a lot of Henry now in my life. So, yeah,
well, the first CD I ever bought was co West, young man, by Michael Louis Smith. You know, place in this world which you come full circle. Come full circle. I remember that. How could people connect with you? Where were you like one people to go out get your book healing. What's within?
Yeah. So is this gonna come out before it's released in October?
Nope, it'll come out the week it releases. Okay,
so either way, my website is chapter growth.net and you know, the book will be available wherever you can buy books. I'm at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, not Western in Portland, and I teach here. And so people can find me here if they'd like to. And, yeah, I think that's it. On social media you know, where we're all just trying to survive. That's right,
we are trying to survive. That's good. Well, Chuck, thank you for this conversation. Fantastic. Your book is is incredible. It's great. I really recommend everybody go out and get healing what's within. So thank you for taking us through your story, and helping us through reckoning with our own wounds and helping us heal from what we have been wounded with. So Thank you Chuck. It was fantastic. No
way I I've done a bunch of these with the narcissism stuff. You're really good at what you do, and you ask crazy good questions. So thank you so much for like actually reading the book. Number one questions, yeah, thank
you so much. I really appreciate it. You.