Wired For Connection: The Psychology Behind Our Need To Be Seen with Curt Thompson, MD - Part 1 (SEEN SERIES)

The human heart carries a longing to be truly seen and known. In this conversation with psychiatrist Curt Thompson, MD, we explore this universal yearning not as a weakness or flaw, but as the very cornerstone of our humanity.  Whether you've felt invisible, misunderstood, or afraid to reveal your true self, this conversation offers hope and practical wisdom. Join us as we explore how embracing the gaze of God and safe others can rewire our brains and restore our souls.

Click here for show notes and resources.

Watch this Episode on YouTube

Upcoming Events
Healing Power of Lament Workshop
Graced Women's Gathering
"The Women" Conference
Hope Restored Trauma Intensive

Chapters

• 0:00 Longing to Be Seen and Known
• 6:05 Looking for Someone Looking for Us
• 14:54 The Gaze of God: Intimacy and Fear
• 23:21 The Woman with the Bleeding Problem
• 31:54 The Power of Telling Our Stories
• 36:28 Episode Closing and Preview

Transcript

Curt: 0:00

We long to hear our stories be told. We're made for this. This isn't just a thing that we have to do as a way to heal, like okay, otherwise, you know, if we'd never sinned, we wouldn't really have to do this storytelling stuff and reveal Like, if we hadn't sinned, we would be doing this. All this is how we would be living all the time. You know, without guile, without shame. This is what we. We are storytellers. Without guile, without shame. We are storytellers. It's how we live.

Teresa: 0:26

There is a longing in every human heart to be seen and known. Sometimes we wonder does anyone even see me? Does it even matter? Do I even matter? As we begin the Seen series, I couldn't think of a better podcast guest than Dr Kurt Thompson. I deeply admire his work in the space of interpersonal neurobiology and how it intersects with our faith in Jesus. In today's episode, he shares with us about the power of storytelling and how it helps us heal. He also shares a beautiful perspective on the story of brings for healing.

Teresa: 1:24

I'm your host, teresa Whiting, an author, bible teacher and trauma-informed life coach, but mostly a friend and fellow struggler. No matter who you are or where you've been, I'm inviting you to encounter the God of rescue, redemption and restoration, the God who is still creating beauty right in the midst of your brokenness. Well welcome friends. I am so excited to introduce you to my guest, dr Kurt Thompson, today.

Teresa: 1:56

Dr Thompson is a psychiatrist, an author and a speaker who, in my opinion, is a master at weaving together the understanding of interpersonal neurobiology with a Christian view of what it means to be human. He helps people process their longings, their grief, their identity, their purpose, their perspective of God and their perspective of humanity, inviting them to engage more authentically with their own stories and their relationships. He's also the author of several books, two of which are my favorites the Soul of Shame and the Soul of Desire, and he's also the host of the being Known podcast, and if you haven't listened to that yet, I highly encourage you to go over and give it a listen and a follow. So, kurt, thank you so much for being here today.

Curt: 2:49

Teresa, thank you so much for inviting me. It's such a pleasure to be able to have our conversation together. Yeah, really looking forward to it.

Teresa: 2:55

I'm excited. Before we jump into a lot of the questions I have for you, would you just tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself, and if you want to throw in a fun fact, that'd be great.

Curt: 3:07

Well, sure, thanks. Well, probably some of the important things for me are I've been married to Phyllis for about 38 and a half years and we have two adult kids, rachel, our daughter Rachel, who's married and who gave birth to our first grandchild about three months ago, which is a big deal.

Teresa: 3:25

Congrats.

Curt: 3:27

Yeah, thank you. And then we have a son, nathan, who's 31. So those relationships have been, I think, over the course of the time that I've been in the world with them have been most formative. I'm really grateful for that. I don't have words and I often say to people I don't deserve my life and my wife and my kids would be. And now our grandson and son-in-law are evidence of that. Funds and I, you know, for my day job.

Curt: 4:06

I have the privilege of living here in the Washington DC area practicing as a psychiatrist, and over the course of the last 35 years or so I've had the opportunity to work with people in a range of different medical and psychiatric experiences that they've had.

Curt: 4:28

And as we, anybody who's a psychiatrist or a therapist would say that you know our patients are the ones who teach us more about life than anybody else in the world, and so it's been humbling and gratifying to be able to do that. And then, over the last 20 years in particular, I've had the privilege of doing this work at the intersection of the emerging field of interpersonal neurobiology kind of a fancy schmancy term for lots of different scientific disciplines that have a stake in, you know, being curious about what is the mind, and what is the mind that is flourishing? Really being curious about that and its intersection with a Christian anthropology, as you said earlier. What does it mean for us to be human when we engage the biblical text, when we encounter Jesus? How does that inform our science? How does that inform all the things? And that brings me, then, to the privilege of having this conversation with you.

Teresa: 5:27

Well, I'm thrilled. First of all, thank you for that. You know telling us a little bit more about yourself, and one of the things that you have said often and I feel like it's part of the fabric of what you do and teach is that we all come into the world looking for someone, looking for us. And I know we're jumping right into the questions, but there's so many things I want to talk about and I want to really jump into understanding that statement. Can you unpack that?

Curt: 5:58

Like everyone comes into the world looking for somebody looking for them, Well, I think you know, if we were to take the world only on the world's terms, meaning like, if we don't look at the Bible, if we don't do which much of the world doesn't look at, the Bible isn't really thinking about those kinds of things. If we just look at the world of how we come to understand how humans develop, eventually, and especially as we're informed by the mechanics of the mind, which is what interpersonal neurobiology kind of reveals to us, how does the mind work? What is the mind? How does it work? How does it work? Well, what does it look like?

Curt: 6:35

When human beings begin to flourish, we come to recognize pretty quickly that we human beings are not isolated, siloed beings. Now, the world might tend to teach us that that's who we are. Not explicitly it doesn't say oh, you are by yourself in the world, but we subtly and implicitly form people into believing that that's what we are with all kinds of implicit messaging, and what that tends then to do is to put a lot of pressure on each of us to believe that, oh, my goodness, like I'm by myself in the world and I need to figure out things and I need to make my way in the world and I self-identify in the world, and what's so interesting is that the neuroscience would teach us that none of that is true. In fact, that when a newborn comes into the world with about 100 billion neurons ready to go in their brain, only about 15 to 20% of those neurons are really able and ready to go to do what that newborn needs them to do. The other 20 to, you know, 20%, the other 80 to 85% of those neurons, in order for them to become fully functioning, actually need to have an interaction with another human being.

Curt: 7:50

I have to have an interpersonal relationship In order for me to grow into a human. I need to see someone seeing me, I need to hear someone hearing me. And, of course, in the world of interpersonal neurobiology, we're really looking at the research in the field of attachment that shows us that we become more fully ourselves through what we would call co -regulation of our emotional distresses. We become more fully ourselves when I hear my story being spoken by you. As you hear me tell my story, I don't ever become fully who I am, apart from my interaction with other people. Hence I come into the world looking for someone who's looking for me and when you find me, moreover, when I discover, when I become aware that you've come to find me, that expands, that enables me to become more than I otherwise would have become, and then we say like, oh, that's, those are just the mechanics of how the mind worked.

Curt: 8:48

But then, you know, when you look at the second page of the Bible actually the first page of the Bible we see that when God is creating the earth, when God is like naming the things right, he's bringing order and purpose. That he says after day one, day two, day four, day five, day six, it's good, it's good. And there is the sense in which, at one level, we would say oh, that's God looking at an object and saying this thing that I've created, it's beautiful, it's good. What we sometimes miss is the nuance of the Hebrew, which is also saying that the goodness that God sees, the goodness, the beauty that God sees, that word good is interchangeable with the word beauty in the.

Curt: 9:23

Hebrew, the beauty and the goodness actually emerges as a function of being seen. So we think how many people in the world today, their lives are going to be made different because in our listeners? Our listeners are going to go into the world and all forth beauty in other people's lives by virtue of seeing them. I'm not just recognizing their beauty, but I'm calling it forth by giving them the experience of being seen by me. So that's page one. And then we get to page two of the Bible, where we read it's not good for the man to be alone. Right, we read let us make mankind in our image.

Curt: 10:01

This notion that we are made as social creatures, we are made as male and female, this notion that, like I, do not bear the image of God, apart from the fact that there are as a man, apart from the fact that there are women in the world, and the same is true for women that there are men in the world. We together are the image of God. And so this notion of how the mechanics of the mind reveal the depth of the purpose of our being known and being seen, right, everybody's looking for someone, looking for them, we would say. Well, of course, it's a reflection of what we read about, that people have believed in the Judeo-Christian heritage now for over 4,000 years, and so I think it's really important, then, for us to know that. Oh goodness, in order for me to flourish, I have to answer the question by whom am I being seen? By whom am I being heard on a regular basis?

Teresa: 10:52

Yes, yes, and that's why all the things that you're explaining, this is why I wanted to have this conversation with you, because I'm currently writing a Bible study called Seen, and it's all about that desire, that need, that innate wiring, that we have to be seen and known, and I love how you weave in both the interpersonal neurobiology and the biblical truth. Like we, this is a God-given thing and, honestly, like I feel like for myself, I have at times felt like I want to be seen, I want to be known, and I've almost seen that as like a flaw or oh, that's a weakness, that's me being prideful or whatever. Like. How do you explain that?

Curt: 11:47

as a good thing. Well, I'm reminded of this. You know I mentioned earlier. You know, three months ago our daughter gave birth to our first grandchild and even though they live in Nashville, we live here in the Northern Virginia area so we don't get to be in person. But they're moving to Charlottesville so we'll only be two hours away.

Curt: 12:06

I hope my daughter and son-in-law don't mind the fact that every weekend I can be, I'm going to want to be in Charlottesville, but even so, we see pictures, we have little videos of our son Simon, our grandson Simon, and this felt sense of looking at him right, looking to be seen. And you I mean anybody who's been around newborns and infants and toddlers right when they they are completely unabashed, they are guileless about wanting to be seen, they expect to be seen right. And we would never say to a six month old who looking for the parent looking for them, we would never say to the three-year-old who's looking for mom and dad, especially if she's in distress, but even if she comes in with her new art project, that you have no idea what, that is right, but she's looking to be seen. We wouldn't say, oh, what are you doing? No, of course they do, and then we get to the gospels, where Jesus says you know, unless y'all change and become like little children, heaven isn't going to work for you. This notion that we are practicing for heaven, we are practicing for a kingdom that is coming, in which it will be necessary for us to be able to tolerate the gaze of a God who is coming to find us with utter delight.

Curt: 13:33

And, as you know, we like to say when patients are coming into our office, like we look, we have all kinds of symptoms range of trauma, anxiety, depression, addiction, you name it. Anxiety, depression, addiction, you name it. And so much of this is we, you know, we look around at gosh, they're having a hard time. We see that loving other people is not easy for us to do, right, and love seems to be so absent in our current cultural moment. And yet, and so we say we're not very good at that. But the point, the reason we're not very good at it, is because we can't give what we don't have, and what that means is that the thing that we're even less capable of doing is being receptive to love. We think that love is a good thing. We love love until love actually shows up. And then it because it shows up and it wants us to give it the opportunity to let us be seen by it. And it's a terrifying thing, because all of our trauma has taken place in the context of intimate relationships.

Curt: 14:38

Our mind remembers that intimacy, as much as we long for it, is dangerous. It's like look, I can't get away from being thirsty. I have to have water to drink. But what if the water that I've consumed has been contaminated? And that's mostly what I know. But I can't stop myself from being thirsty, and so I can't keep myself from longing to be seen.

Curt: 15:00

Of course I might want to say, oh, I should be able to do this by myself. I'm going to feel bad if I long to be seen, because that is evil at work, trying to get us to forget that we are made as relational creatures, that this is what we are made to become. But the very thing that we then long for, evil, wants to reroute that and say, oh, no, that's not what you should need. You should be able to do this on yourself, by yourself, and so even the work that you're doing, teresa, no, that's not what you should need. You should be able to do this on yourself, by yourself, and so even the work that you're doing, teresa.

Curt: 15:39

These Bible studies are so crucial for folks because they ground folks in a text. It creates a hard deck in a text, a textual study that enables people to have the felt sense that this longing that we have, as much as we are imperfect at directing it, that longing is the eternity that God has placed in our hearts, our hunger and our thirst for him, and so that we have it is evidence that there is a God and he's coming for us.

Teresa: 16:06

Yes, yes, and so in the study there's going to be six different women that are from Scripture, like Hagar and Leah and the bleeding woman who, you know, were completely discarded, forsaken, cast off by the world, and yet God came looking for them. And you mentioned this little phrase, the gaze of God, and I would love to press into that a little bit. How do we accept that, how do we acknowledge that God has come looking for us? He's calling us by name, he's pursuing us. Like he's calling us by name, he's, he's pursuing us, and yet, like you're saying, like there's this fear of intimacy, there's this fear of really being fully seen and fully known, even though that's what we long for.

Teresa: 16:56

We're afraid of it, you know. And yet how do we get to a place where we are accepting and enjoying and living in that beautiful gaze of God toward us?

Curt: 18:47

Well, in the soul of desire. We focus attention on the fourth verse of the 27th Psalm, this notion that I will dwell in the house of the Lord. One thing I've asked I will dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, that I may gaze upon his beauty. I may gaze upon his beauty. I may gaze upon his beauty, and there are multiple dimensions of that beauty. And one dimension of that beauty is not just I'm gazing at something that is beautiful, like the Grand Canyon or the Pieta or a sunrise, but I'm gazing at someone who's gazing at me.

Curt: 19:22

We have this exercise that we do for married couples. That at first is somewhat uncomfortable for them, especially if they're just coming into the office in the wake of having a fight. But we have them sit knees to knees looking at each other. We give them the assignment. We're going to give them just five minutes of this. We say we're going to ask you, we get to take a couple of deep breaths and then we're going to ask you to look at each other with love and kindness. We want you to gaze at each other Now. I don't want you to stare. You can blink, you can turn away, but I want you to continue to. Of course, this is very unnerving, if you can imagine. I can feel it.

Curt: 20:01

Mm-hmm, if you can imagine, I can feel it. Even the people that we like like the whole notion of like looking at people, right, when you look at newborns and infants, when parents and grandparents just love to look at their kids, and especially if their kids are looking at them and they're smiling, and so forth. But there will come a moment when, for the child, the gaze will be too much and they will look away and then they'll return. It's like, oh, I can tolerate looking at beauty, I can tolerate this for a certain amount of time, and then I have to catch my breath because it's almost like it's too much and there is a sense in which we have to practice doing this and that's a rhythm, right, it's not because we're made as rhythmic creatures as well. We could say more about that.

Curt: 20:47

But the whole point, then, is that when we have had so much experience with trauma, the notion of intimately connecting with someone else very often touches those parts that feel frightened, touches those parts where my ruptures have not been repaired, and then it feels painful to be seen in that space.

Curt: 21:15

And so we'll take this couple and we'll ask them to sit knees to knees and gaze at each other with love and kindness, and they're protesting like, do we really have to do this? And so forth, and it will take them somewhere, you know, somewhere in the range of 30 to 90 seconds to get comfortable with this. And once they do, and they just breathe in there and looking, and when the five minutes are up, most of the time they don't want to stop. Because when is the last time that you've allowed yourself the joy and the comfort and the exhale of being seen, being gazed upon? Well, you gaze upon someone with loving like, who doesn't want to be seen with loving kindness, who doesn't want to hear the words You're here, you're here, yes, and so this notion of being gazed upon is practice. But what's coming?

Teresa: 22:13

Oh, this is so good. I love it. And one of the things that you talk about as we experience healing from trauma, as we're seen and part of the healing process I think is telling our stories is finding a safe place where we can actually not just let people see our face or our body, but see the inside, see the things that have happened to us, the things that we've walked through, which, again, scary, uncomfortable. A lot of people are not used to that. So I guess my question is how does storytelling, really revealing the inner parts of ourselves, help in the healing process, like from the perspective of scripture and then from the perspective of the like neurobiology side?

Curt: 23:11

Yeah, well, there is this sense in which you mentioned the woman with the bleeding problem problem, right, and this is how she's known, right, she doesn't, she doesn't really. We don't even really give her a name in the new testament, in the gospel's versions, she's the one with a bleeding problem. Um, and I, and I think the gospel, in some respects, you know the gospel writers again, the bible man, like it is, it's, it's just, it's so brilliant. It's just so brilliant because they're really, they're really forcing the reader, they're, they're inviting the reader to say like, this is a woman, this is how the world sees her. The world sees her like who is she? Oh, she's not Sarah or Mary or Joanne, she's the woman with the bleeding problem. Like, this is how the world talks about a woman of this kind and so, and not only that, but she has a particular sense of herself and she sees herself as I'm a woman with a bleeding problem. This is the essence of who I am. How many of our listeners have a sense that like, oh, who I am is, and then we fill that blank in with some sense of our brokenness, some sense of like, I'm divorced, I've been sexually abused, I've been this, I've been that and these things are not untrue, but these are the monikers that we take on, like, this is how we understand who we are. This is the outside, this is the outside of her. In some respects, right, it is the outside of her. And yet it's also like, again this story, like you can't get away from the fact that she doesn't just have leprosy, she has this silent disorder that actually comes from within her, even physically, and it's what? What? It's the life giving sense, it's, it's blood, right, the sense that there's there. There is this like bleeding is going to talk to the one who's going to bleed, right, and so she in in mark's version, right, like they're already in a hurry because they're on the way to the priest's house where the daughter is dying, and so when there's urgency in the air and she has a plan, there's a plan for secret commando healing, right, I'm going to get in touch, the garment get out, nobody gets hurt, nobody, no, like it's all very silent.

Curt: 25:34

And then, of course, she does, and we know the story that jesus pauses and says stop, and and of course you can imagine what's going on in her mind. She's like, oh, my gosh, like wrong, like what has happened and the text reads that and she knew that she was healed because she felt it in her body. Now, of course, we wouldn't know it in real time because we don't even know she exists yet. Apparently, she would have had to have told this story to somebody else. And she thinks that the project has been completed, that healing has taken place, because she thinks that's all. This is who I am.

Curt: 26:06

I'm the woman with the bleeding problem and she's like nope, we're not done here. And he's like, he's not moving and like you can be aware, like everybody's, like we got to get to the priest's house and she's a speed bump along the way. So not only all the other reasons why now she's a holdup in the procession and then she finally comes with fear and trembling. Why should she be afraid? She'd been healed. With fear and trembling.

Curt: 26:47

And the text reads and she fell at his feet and told him everything about herself, at which point he says my daughter, when has she ever heard this? She doesn't have family, she doesn't have a marriage, she doesn't have children, she's got nothing. Her problem is so much bigger than her bleeding and it would be easy for us to just assume yeah, she's got. Like, her problem is so much bigger than her bleeding and it would be easy for us to just assume, yeah, she's healed. It's like that's the issue, and Jesus is not willing for it merely to be the outside of the cup that is cleaned. He's coming for the whole story and we cannot find ourselves being completely healed until jesus is allowed to have access to every single acre of the interior part of my story.

Curt: 27:50

That includes not just me, but also includes generations before me, and it is in that telling, telling everything about us, just like she did, that she can now know healing because she's going to have to go out into the world also like, but now the world's going to know something different about her. Now the world's going to know. We have to create a community for her, we have to create a family for her. This is j, to create a family for her, and this is Jesus in Mark, chapter three. Who's my mother? Who are my brothers? The one who does the will of my father, the one who's willing to come forward in front of everybody and acknowledge that. She's the one.

Curt: 28:27

You imagine how much courage that took. With fear and trembling she comes In order for the whole story to be told in order for the story that she tells in her head, which is that I don't have a family yes, I don't have a family, yes, I don't have bleeding now, which is fine, but she's not even thinking about all the other elements of her life that she doesn't know. She doesn't that she's not thinking about, but that Jesus is coming for everything. And this is the good news, and it can also be the uncomfortable news, because he's coming for everything, even the things that I don't know, that I don't know about myself. And this is why the telling of our stories to others who are in the position of asking us questions about things about ourselves that we wouldn't even think to ask because we've, so long ago buried our connection to them, because they're so painful.

Teresa: 29:17

Yes, oh, I love that story so much and I love the way you conveyed just the heart of Jesus toward that woman that he wasn't willing to just let her be healed, but he had to turn around and make eye contact with her and he had to let her know that she has been seen, not just healed but seen too. Oh, I love it. And I'm thinking about the listener who has never felt seen, who has never felt like they even have a safe place to tell their story to anybody. What's a first brave step that they can take to say I, I acknowledge that I need to be seen, that I feel unseen and I don't even know where to start.

Curt: 30:06

Like, what would you say to that person? Well, uh, you know, teresa, there is um, I, this, this is a, this is a I think a common question that many of us think. You know, uh, when we hear these I think a common question that many of us think, when we hear this kind of a conversation that we're having, my guess would be that there would be those of our listeners who are waking up to something like, really, you can actually do that, you can actually have those kinds of conversations, but really, really, when can we do this? Really, really, where can we do this? And it's easy for us to think that this is only a human endeavor until you ask the question that the author Paul Borgman asks in his beautiful book Genesis the story we haven't heard. When speaking of Abraham, dr Borgman asked the question. Dr Borgen asked the question who knows how many people God asked to go with him to Canaan before in Abraham, he finally found someone who said, yes, I'll go. We don't know because there's no story that's been told there, but it's an important question because, in many respects, what God is doing in asking Abraham to go to Canaan with God, partner with him is.

Curt: 31:23

God is saying to Abraham I want to tell my story and I want you to be a co-author with me in the story that I am telling about that. I've been telling about the world from the first page of the Bible. Y'all have had challenges with this world from the first page of the Bible. Y'all have had challenges with this, but it has not stopped. My mission of this is the story that we are going to tell for humans. I'm a storyteller. I want to tell my story.

Curt: 31:47

God wants a receptive audience for the story that he's telling. Jesus comes and utters the seven great I am's in the gospel of John I am the bread of life, I am the good shepherd and all the other five and so forth and so on, and for us Christians these are words of comfort and joy, but they are the same words that got him killed. Which means what is he doing? He's telling us his story. He's not just downloading information. He's trying to tell us his story and he wants listeners who will join in the storytelling of this. When you get to Jesus, he also, like God with Abraham, he asks a number of people to help him tell his story. Will you listen to my story. Sorry, I've got to go bury my dad, I've got to go check out this plot of land. There are plenty of people that Jesus asks to follow him who say, no.

Curt: 32:46

Jesus knows exactly what it's like for us to be in this position of people who are made to tell our stories. We long to hear our stories be told. We're made for this. This isn't just a thing that we have to do as a way to heal, like okay, otherwise, you know, if we'd never sinned, we wouldn't really have to do this storytelling stuff and reveal Like if we hadn't sinned, we would be doing this. All this is how we would be living all the time, you know, without guile, without shame. This is what we we are storytellers. It's how we live.

Curt: 33:17

Jesus knows what it's like to be rejected when he offers and invites people. Would you listen to my story? Would you follow me and listen to my story? No, and so for those of us who ask us the question like, how do I do this? Where do I find it, I want to say look, this is not easy to do and Jesus knows exactly what this is like. So that's the first thing. I know that's really wordy, but it's important for us to know that this whole notion of telling our stories in this way is what it means to be human. It's not, oh, the thing that I have to do or the only option that I have in order for me to be healed. Right, the woman with the bleeding problem. The telling of her story was not just well, this is the only option Jesus is giving me in order for me to be fully healed. No, he's turning her into the person that she was so to have been from before the foundation of the world. The telling of her story.

Teresa: 34:10

Okay, guys, I'm going to break in right here and interrupt this conversation with Dr Thompson, but you absolutely have to come back for part two Next week. He's going to share about what it means to be known, how we're partners with God in creating beauty, the power of telling our stories, and he's going to give practical tips on how we can actually rewire our brains so that we can tell ourselves the truest stories. Thanks for hanging out with me today on Beauty and the Brokenness. To find anything I mentioned on the episode, go to TeresaWhitingcom slash listen to find all the show notes. If you want to connect with Dr Kurt Thompson, I will have links to all the ways you can connect him. Better yet, get on my email list, because I send out an email every week with links to how you can connect with the guests, links to their books and sometimes some little background information. I pray that you have eyes to see the beautiful redemptive work of Jesus in the midst of your broken life. I want to leave you with this verse from Numbers 6, 24-26.