Episode 189 - Dr. Curt Thompson, "Anatomy of the Soul, Part 1"

“We are people who long for a world of beauty and goodness.” - Dr. Curt Thompson

On this edition of Restoring the Soul, Michael welcomes our good friend, Dr. Curt Thompson, back to the podcast. This special in-person conversation has been edited from a 12-part video series with Dr. Curt Thompson and Michael John Cusick. As a special blessing for our listeners, Restoring the Soul is making these two conversations available in advance of Curt’s forthcoming book, The Soul of Desire, published by InterVarsity Press.

In this podcast, we hope you will discover:

• What is a person? What is a soul?
• What does the mind look like when it’s flourishing?
• The understanding of interpersonal neurobiology as a Christian.

HELPFUL RESOURCES:
Episode 65 - Dr. Curt Thompson Part 1, “Being Known”
Episode 66 - Dr. Curt Thompson Part 2, “Being Known”
Episode 122 - Dr. Curt Thompson, "Love and Lament During the Pandemic"

Transcript

Michael John Cusick 0:12

Hello and welcome to Restoring a Soul, a podcast dedicated to helping you close the gap between what you believe and what you actually experience. I'm your producer, Brian Beatty. Thanks for listening. On this edition of Restoring a Soul, Michael welcomes our good friend, Dr. Kurt Thompson, back to the podcast. This special in-person conversation has been edited from a 12-part video series with Dr. Kurt Thompson and Michael Jones Kusick. And as a special blessing to our listeners, Restoring a Soul is making these two conversations available in advance of Kurt's forthcoming book, The Soul of Desire, published by Intervarsity Press. On today's podcast, you'll hear Michael and Kurt discuss what it means to be a person. What's a soul? What does the mind look like when it's flourishing? And the understanding of interpersonal neurobiology as a Christian. It's a classic Kurt Thompson, just for you. And now without any further delay, here's your host, Michael John Kuse.

SPEAKER_03 1:20

I'm so grateful for you to be here.

SPEAKER_02 1:30

Well, I'm uh, you know, as I've said and as I will say over and over again, I don't deserve my life. And you're no small part of why that's true. And I'm really grateful for the opportunity for us to do this together. Um, I, you know, I tell folks, uh, you know, following Jesus is really hard to do, mostly because like it's me that is is what makes it hard. It's not just the world, it's it's me, it's the things within me that I have to work at. And I am just so grateful to be in a space where there are other people that I can do the work with. We, you know, we like to say that the brain can do a lot of hard work for a really long time as long as it doesn't have to do it by itself. And so I I know I'm so grateful for the work that I know that you do in your own journey, how diligently you follow after the master, and uh the humility that you bring to that process. And I'm grateful to be in the room with you. I wish we could do this for five days in a row and then go fly fishing and then do something else. So I'm I'm just really grateful to be here and really uh glad for your really inspired by your vision to want to uh extend the work that I'm doing, that others are doing to train people. Uh, you know, we like to say that when people are come to hear me speak, I say, like at the end of this talk, you're not gonna be any smarter. Because my job is not to make you smarter, my job is to inspire you to go home and do the work. And so I think that's what we're doing. Like you're you're making it possible for people to drink this in, ingest, digest, metabolize it in such a way that they can then do the work. But doing it in community with each other, too. So I'm just so grateful for you. So thanks.

SPEAKER_03 3:27

Uh I received that, and uh, you're welcome and thanks back at you. So let's let's transition and segue your book, Anatomy of the Soul, surprising connections between neuroscience and spiritual practices that can transform your life and relationships. And uh you wrote this book as a psychiatrist trained in medicine, uh, neurology, psychiatry, and as a Christian, you took a very hard, long, deep look into scripture and all of your psychiatric background about what is a soul and what is a person. Um, so I want to get to what you mentioned, what is the work, but let's first start with what is a person? What is a soul?

SPEAKER_02 4:09

Well, you know, it's hard to believe that the book has this is it'll be 11 years in like a few days that it will have been out. And I'm still surprised at how it's I like I feel like I continue to learn uh from the other people who are talking and writing and teaching about these very things that we talked about in the book. And so it still feels pretty fresh. And I'm I'm I I think you know, one of the first things that jumps off the page at me that when we talk about anatomy of the soul, when we talk about what is a soul, what does it mean to be a person, all those kinds of things, before I even get to this notion of what you know, how do how we define those things, we acknowledge that as people, uh, we are people who long for a world of beauty and goodness. This is what we long for. We're looking for this. Like we don't wake up in the morning and say, gosh, I hope my day is really mediocre. I really hope that it is. Or I really hope that my day is worse today than it was yesterday. We're not doing that, we're longing for beauty and goodness. And as you're aware, my friend and colleague Dan Siegel and I, like I had first exposure to his work now about 18 years ago, as it was, and really began to churn in my mind, raises questions and curiosity about how do we take this world of interpersonal neurobiology and Christian spiritual formation and bring this together. And it was in encountering this world of interpersonal neurobiology that we began to discover that neuroscience actually has a way to point us in the direction of answering this question: how do we realize a world of beauty and goodness? And interestingly enough, and I know that we're using this for training purposes, so one of the things that I think it's important for clinicians to know is that science, the neuroscience that we'll talk about here, is uh not independent in itself, right? As as Michael Polanyi once said, there's no such thing as science. There are only scientists. There are only people who tell us about the science. The science doesn't speak on its own. And so it's really important for clinicians to be very clear and rigorous about their anthropology and about their theology. Now, that doesn't mean that they have to be right, but they have to be rigorous as the foundation for the psychiatry, for the psychotherapy, for the neuroscience work that they're going to be walking into. And so, as we are first being curious about the science, we say, oh, even before that, we want to understand what's the anthropology, how do we understand what it means to be human? And what's really beautiful is that when we read the biblical narrative, we hear what neuroscience is telling us. And when we read the neuroscience, we see what neuroscience is showing us. We hear echoes of the biblical narrative all over the place. And so at first we would say, well, what is interpersonal neurobiology and how is it as a science, and what does it speak to? It is a collection of a number of different scientific disciplines, not all of which have to do with psychotherapy, but all of which do have a stake in asking the question, what is the mind? So we begin with that question, what is the mind? And we have all these different disciplines that coming together can shed some light on that. What are some of those disciplines? So we, you know, your trainees will be LPCs, they will be LMFTs, they will be PhDs, you may be having physicians who are working for you. So people who are trained as psychotherapists, people who are trained as family therapists, people who are trained as bench neurologists, right? These are neuroscientists who are studying how neurons work. These are people who do uh work in physics that teach us about what's going on between the brains of two human beings. And how does that look similar to animal models? All these kinds of things. So the world of physics, the world of philosophy, the world of anything in the psychotherapy realm, all these different disciplines all have a stake in answering the question, what is the mind? And what does the mind look like when it's flourishing? I was in medical school, not one class, let alone one lecture, on a what the mind actually is, which is kind of a bummer, right? You'd like to think that if you're an orthopedic surgeon, you've had something to tell you what a bone is, how it works. We don't really have that. Nor did we have some sense, let alone then, of like, well, what is a mind if it's flourishing? We have all kinds of ways of teaching us. Uh, graduate-level courses on psychopathology. We know when the mind isn't working, we have a sense of that. We can pick up the fragments of that all over the place. We know what a traumatized brain looks like. But what does a flourishing mind look like?

SPEAKER_03 9:16

Can I ask, what is your definition of the mind? Because I think when people hear mind, they immediately think of brain, you know, the little softball-shaped organ, and it's much more than that.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

Right. So, in the language of interpersonal neurobiology, we have a working definition that goes something like this, and we'll come back and unpack this pretty quickly, that the mind is first an embodied and relational process that emerges from within and between brains, whose task it is to regulate the flow of energy and information. Now, it's a lot of words. You can read that in Anatomy of Soul, you can read that in any number of books that write about interpersonal neurobiology, but if we unpack that, it's really, really intriguing. And I think what's really helpful about this as clinicians, for us to know this, is not just for us to know this as clinicians, but for us to train our patients, for us to teach our patients, and to teach them that knowing this actually has real life implications for how we're living our lives. And what was reported to us in the very early stages of applying these things with patients is that people were starting to report my relationship with Jesus is being transformed as I'm having greater access to how I have been made. And so when we talk about the mind, first of all, being embodied, right? That the mind is not just the brain, the mind is not just my head, the mind is not just my neurons, the mind is my gut lining, the mind is my trunk, the mind is my cardiovascular system, the mind has anything to do that is an embodied portion that contributes to my awareness of the world. And we read this directly in Genesis, where God formed the man out of the dust of the earth. So he starts with dirt, right? He starts with the material world. He starts with this. It doesn't say, and God formed the man out of the breath of life and added some dust to it. He starts with mud, that we are embodied. That we are embodied, that the mind is an embodied and relational process. Notice that in that same verse, that God breathes the breath of life into man's nostrils, right? And the Hebrew would have God doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, right? This up close and personal, there is a relational aspect to the life that is being given to the man. And that the man is embodied and the man is relational in nature, the breath. We are dirt and we are breath. And this embodied and relational process. Now, we Westerners, we modernists, like to think of things in static form. If you were to ask me, well, Kurt, um, what does it mean for you to be human? I would say, well, it's kind of tough because if you look at the actual volume and mass of the cells and genetic code that are now in my body compared to when I was born, the vast majority of it does not originally belong to me. The vast majority of it belongs to lots of other things that I've incorporated in my body. But in such small forms, whether that be virus, whether that be antibiotics, you know, whether that be vaccines, no matter what that is, there's all kinds of ways in which the turnover of my cells actually belongs to something else other than the thing that Kurt started with. And yet, well, here I am, like I don't seem to like, well, you know, your your entire red blood cell population turns over every 120 days. Like it's not, like, was that you that is it the same you that was there like six months ago? Well, is it or is it not? What we do know though, that it's a process. And this process is something that God is constantly breathing into.

SPEAKER_03 13:12

There's a already, I'm hearing, this dependence on something, someone outside of us.

SPEAKER_02 13:18

Exactly. And this notion that we are embodied and we are relational, shows up in the same way when a newborn comes into the world. Her neural networks, she's got about 100 billion neurons set to go. Those neural networks are about 15 to 20 percent mature and active and doing what they need to do. The other 80 to 85 percent of those neurons, in order for them to fully do what they need to do eventually, need the interactive relationship with another human being. So much of who we are becoming is a response to someone else paying attention to me and turning on those neural networks in a certain way that enables me to become fully who I am.

SPEAKER_03 14:04

So let me just get this right. Um, because this this is stunning as a scientific fact, but also relationally. When a parent or caregiver attunes to, attends to, pays attention to that infant or that child, it's as if that attention flips a switch and there is neural development inside of that infant that wouldn't otherwise happen without that attention.

SPEAKER_02 14:27

That's absolutely right. Some of us may be familiar with studies that have been done with cats, and there is a latency period wherein which, if cats' eyes are not exposed to light within the first eight to twelve days of their life, that latency period passes, and the connections between their optic nerves and the posterior portion of their brain that lets them know what the light is telling them don't make connections and they don't ever get them back. And so there is a sense in which this isn't just a thing that we can roll the dice with. We have to be aware that we are always in this process, right? That the mind is an embodied and relational process that's constantly moving. And one of the things I want our trainees and our listeners to really pay attention to is not just that this is happening to us, it's happening to you, it's happening to me, like even right now, right? I'm my mind is being made more integrated, more whole, because I'm seeing you see me. Like I and I have we have this relationship that I'm just so grateful for. And what we often don't recognize as therapists is the power that we bring to the table simply, simply by our being aware that the other is in the room. I ask people often when we're doing trainings, when do you, when's your sense that psychotherapy begins? And they'll often say, Well, I think therapy probably begins like when we first meet them, right? Like, well, back up a little bit. Well, maybe when they make the first phone call and they crop my back up again. You see, therapy is beginning the moment that they think about possibly calling you. Because if you aren't out there, they don't have something to imagine. Now, what they're imagining might not at all be close to what they eventually find, but you are already having impact on people even when you're not aware of it. And how many times have we been in the room with a patient? And like, and I think like I'm not being any help to this person at all. And this is where evil would want to talk to us. Evil would want to convince us that the very fact that if you're not doing something that is concrete and measurable in this very moment, that you're not being effective. But we know that this process is always happening. And the very fact that even in the moment when I don't feel like I know what I'm doing, I'm paying attention to them. And even if I were to say, you know, Mr. Jones, I have to say, I'm not sure I'm being very helpful. I'm feeling kind of like unhelpful for you right now. And I don't want you to leave here feeling like you're not being helped. Even that is attuning to Mr. Jones in a way that his parents never attuned to him. Right. The very act of that attunement is part of this process that demonstrates the embodied that is absolutely necessary and relational process that are the early parts of what we talked about with the mind. So the mind is an embodied relational process that emerges, it's an emerging process. Now, I like to be in control of things. I don't. You know, if you were to talk to my wife, she'd say, mm-hmm. Um, I like to be in control of things. I like to know the outcomes for things. I like to be able to plan now and know that my plan is going to be forthcoming, the treatment plan with the patient. Or for that I have for my daughter and son, who are now 30 and 27, despite the fact that they're adults and I still want to tell their stories for them. Um, how many times have we found ourselves as clinicians, as people, on the brink of something where, you know, this was not supposed to go this way. And I now am out of control of the situation. Because the situation is emerging. I'm not going to be able to straight line it and connect all the dots in the way that I want it to connect. It's going to have to emerge outside of my purview. Again, this sense that God is in the business of creating and maintaining, sustaining, and bringing to fulfillment relationships. And I would like to know that I'm in charge, and we'll get to this when we talk about shame and the taking of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But this sense that the mind is something that we are to welcome into the world, even in ways that we can't predict. Which of like it's like parenting, right? So I'm I remember I'm sitting with my daughter who's about 14. We're in the kitchen one night after a, you know, where we were going to have this church work detail on a Saturday morning at eight o'clock, which of course is like, why would you ever ask a 14 or 11-year-old? This is like what parent would do this, otherwise, you know, just stick an ice pick in your eye. So I think, like, okay, we're gonna be doing this on a Saturday, and I'm like, I'm gonna do this right. So I start to alert them at dinner on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Like, okay, we're gonna be doing this and that. So they're aware. Friday night, it's like 10 o'clock. I'm ready to go to bed. All I want to know for my daughter, who's sitting on the kitchen counter, I still see this. And I just want to know what time would you like me to get you up in the morning? Because we've already talked about it at dinner that night. What time would you like me to get you up in the morning? And you know, she does this.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

I still hear it, I still see it.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

This was not as life was predicting to go. Like I was predicting a different outcome. I was predicting to say, like, oh, get me up at whatever time. I find myself reaching for the meat cleaver behind me, right? Because I'm like this. Like, not only have I been polite in asking, like, I've done all my homework as a parent in the five days preceding this. Right. And this is how this is supposed to go. But as it turns out, the moment is going to emerge and my mind is going to explode. And so it was one of those moments I'll never forget, where the first thing I sensed was this feeling in my chest and my solar plexus, like I felt like I was coiled to spring. And I knew that like one of these rare occasions where I like make a good decision as a parent, I knew that I had to, like I had to not talk. Keep my yap shut because what was emerging was not what I was predicting, and it was creating all kinds of distress for me. And that was your embodied self. My embodied self, my embodied mind, that if I'm not paying attention to it, and I don't always do this very imperfectly, if I'm not paying attention to it, I'm like bad things are going to happen in the kitchen. They won't involve the meat cleaver, although they might want them to. And instead, I said, I took a breath, I said, okay, can we talk about this? And here's the other thing, Michael. You know, I mean, you know, she's 14, I mean, she's just such a beautiful soul. I mean, she's a pastor of the church now as a 30-year-old. She's an amazing, beautiful soul. And I knew that if I said, could we talk about this? This was not going to be a five minute conversation. Because even as a 14 year old, this is a girl who had already suffered in her journey with Jesus. And, you know, she's a girl who, you know, like when she wants to talk, she starts these conversations with her parents at like 11 o'clock at night. This is like, I'm ready to go. This is when she starts. And so I wanted to go to bed. I didn't want a half-hour conversation. But that's what she needed, and that's what we had. And it all had to do with you know the week that she'd had at school that was anything but good. And the last thing she wanted to do was to get up to go to do work at a church at eight o'clock on a Saturday morning. But it changed the evening forever. And I would say that by the end of that conversation, we were both more integrated. Now I've had plenty of experiences in which I haven't done that well. But that's a moment in which we see that we have an embodied and relational part of our mind that is emerging in the moment. And how many of us, myself, would be the chief of this, like how many of us, when life is emerging in a way that is surprising to me and that is making me anxious and speaking to the parts about me that are afraid, even when I'm with the patient, that I tend to turn to old coping strategies as opposed to being aware that like at the end of the day, God is inviting me into an emerging process that only He has the purview for all the beginnings and ends and ups and downs of that. And he's inviting me to trust him in the emergence of that moment.

SPEAKER_03 23:20

I want to ask a final question in this segment, and I think it's in some ways related to the next segment, but we had a conversation last night at dinner, and I referred to your writing, uh The Anatomy of the Soul, The Soul of Shame, The Teaching You Do, you have a new book coming out in the fall, as a model, a model of change. And you didn't correct me, but you said, well, actually how I think about it is, and you described it as and I forget the exact word now, but as a way of understanding a person as opposed to a model. And I think that is so powerful because as you're talking, um, my mind is being sparked by your thoughts. And I'm thinking about, okay, the implications of this for child development and parenting, the implications of this for addiction, the implications of this for our sexuality, for uh intimacy and marriage, handling conflict, uh, spirituality, which of course is woven all throughout uh your writing. I'm struck by how you're so free, on the one hand, to say, I wanted to pick up the meat cleaver, and that that's you can actually allow that to be there. That can be present as opposed to, ooh, I've got to push that down. And on the other hand, attend to what's happening and then sit down and have that conversation. So will you put some words to this larger understanding of interpersonal neurobiology, but especially how you've come to understand that as a Christian?

SPEAKER_02 24:52

Well, we like we talk an awful lot about how uh flourishing minds are minds that demonstrate properties of what we would call integration. That word integration is uh used in a lot of different realms to mean different things. What we mean by this uh really um invites us to look at the physics, as it turns out. And we wonder like, well, I didn't get a physics course in my master's degree for you know psychotherapy. But physics are important because the physics of even your very presence in the room, the more attuned we are to this, the more likely we are to then act in the direction of integration with intention. And so the physics of integration would suggest that any kind of complex system of which the mind is one is a system that has multiple different parts. With the mind, we talk, we might talk later about these eight different and then nine different domains of integration that we talk about, or we talk about the shorthand of it, that the mind we sense, we image, we feel, we think, and we behave with our bodies. Sift B, we like to say, that we are doing these like an orchestra, the different parts of the orchestra. And that a flourishing mind is one in which all the parts are really well differentiated in terms of the part that they specifically have to play. So I sense and I'm aware of what I sense. I image, I feel, I think, I behave with my body, and I don't just do those things, I am aware that I'm doing those things. I'm attuned, I'm alert to that. I am with intention directing my attention to bringing these things together. They all need to be well differentiated. But we've all grown up in families where some of those things are either traumatized or ignored, ignored through, you know, they're traumatized actively or passively. And when that happens, we have parts that are fairly undifferentiated. They're not very well developed. You know, in my house, the single disciplinary tactic from my father was you stop your crying, or I'm going to give you something to cry about. Which, of course, I beyond the illogicalness of this, right? Like you, if I stop crying, but then you give me something to cry about, that doesn't really work. I'm not really quite sure how that's supposed to work. But okay, you're right, you know, peace. This notion that we may have been in places where certain parts of our minds weren't really paid attention to, weren't attuned to, or were traumatized. When that doesn't happen, it's kind of like, oh, I want Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but the strings aren't going to be part of the orchestra. Or they're not going to be very well developed, or they'll be making mistakes, or the brass is just going to be jumping in wherever they please, right? Because they didn't get very well differentiated, they didn't get good truth, they didn't get the attention of their caregivers in order for that to develop. As a believer, we of course are looking at this whole notion that when we say, when Jesus says to his disciples, therefore, be ye whole, be ye perfect, even as your father in heaven is also whole, it's also perfect. I hear him saying, be integrated, become integrated people. But those differentiation processes require a second element, and that's this linkage. If I want to hear Beethov's ninth, I can't just depend on every section of the orchestra doing, having practiced their thing well. I need to know that they're actually able to listen to the other parts. They need to be linked together. I don't just want to come to the symphony and they just decide that they're going to play their parts, albeit really well, but however they darn well please. So how do I link together what I sense with what I image, with what I feel, what I think, with my embodied relationship with my other, right, with another person. Well, how what do I do with anger? What do I do with shame? What do I do with joy when joy has been spliced together with shame? Like how do I differentiate and link? And here's where we would say that this process of the gospel uh shows up because when we talk about integration, when we talk about differentiation and linkage, what we're really saying is that the orchestra needs a conductor. The orchestra needs someone to stand at the podium and help everyone make sure that they've been well, they've been practicing. And then I'm gonna help the strings pay attention to the brass. And I'm gonna make sure that this happens. And not only that, but I'm gonna make sure that when we make mistakes, I'm not gonna shame you for that. We're gonna pause, we're gonna back, we're actually gonna pay attention to the mistake, and we're gonna go back and we're gonna drill into that. Because I'm not here to shame you, I'm here for us to produce the ninth. Like it's never been produced. And we want everybody to know that they are in the joy of that process as we're doing this. And this is what the gospel does when Jesus, as our primary conductor, both heals the different parts of us as individuals.

unknown 30:20

Right?

SPEAKER_02 30:21

The part of me, for instance, to grew up in my house where, you know, that whole anger thing, right? We grew up in a house where we learn without it being said explicitly, that I am not really allowed to be angry at my parents. Now, I can be angry about other things that are outside the house, but I can't be angry about anything that my parents do. I just need to be a good soldier. Now, my temperament kind of fit that because I was a good soldier. I came along as the fourth of four sons, but they were my brothers, were all much, much older than me, 18, 16, 11 years my senior. And I grew up in some respects as kind of a second wave of a firstborn. So I'm like, I'm gonna like stay in my lane, do what I'm told to do, but not really given opportunity to be angry. And so I became afraid of being angry. I became I like I and so I grew up working really hard to make sure that I didn't piss anybody off, and that I was making sure that nobody else in the room was mad at anybody else in the room. It was too frightening for me, it's too overwhelming for me. And I had a mom who, I mean, both of these, both of my parents, god-fearing people, love God. And I had a mom who was an orphan and who had her own set of unfinished traumatic business. And uh her anxiety was something that I ended up, you know, you know, I I probably ended up being uh a listener for her in ways that my my father should have been. And that made me someone who's gonna work really hard to make sure that nobody's anxious. So can you imagine a psychiatrist who like I like I like I started my training when I was three, right? Like you're gonna work really hard to make sure that people aren't mad and people aren't anxious, like and and and then and then they give me a prescription pad to write with. Like I am so set for life.

SPEAKER_03 32:12

You're finely tuned, you've got radar.

SPEAKER_02 32:13

I'm I'm I am ready to go. But it means that there are parts of my orchestra that never got developed. And then I get married. And like, I'm married to a woman who wants the whole orchestra in the hall. And I'm like, dang, like, I'm I didn't know that you were allowed to be angry, but apparently you are because you're like, you're mad at me. And I got like I got no tools in my bag to stop this, even in the slightest ways. And the gospel says bring all of your instruments to each of us as individuals. I even want the instruments that are broken.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

And you're like, no, I don't want to bring this because like I can't play the cello. I've never been able to play the cello. You're gonna learn to play the cello, and it's gonna feel hard, but I want you in a ninth. I want you with this production.

SPEAKER_02 33:08

And not only that, Jesus goes further and says, I don't just want this part of you, but I want you and the other people with whom you also have great difference. We'll begin with your wife. I tell people, right, I thought I really wanted to marry my wife, and then I discovered, well, actually, I didn't really want to marry Phyllis. I wanted to marry some version of Kurt that just looked like her. I just wanted to marry me. Until I discovered that actually she's a very different person. And so now we've got two differentiated people that I'm gonna have to learn to love in ways that I couldn't predict is going to emerge. But I like to have everything packaged wrapped so that I can know that nobody gets pissed off and nobody's anxious. And somehow that just wasn't happening. And then it goes from there to, I mean you have children, but then you also have friends. And if you're really serious about life, if you're serious about the gospel, you're gonna have enemies. And I don't mean enemies that persecute you, I mean people that you like. And then we have our current day, right? We have my African-American friends, my Asian friends, my Hispanic friends, these others who live a very different life, who've lived a brutalized, traumatized life. Like, I'm like them, like I'm a 58-year-old white dude. There are very few places where I'm not the most powerful guy in the room, even though I don't think that's true. And so, what do I have to do now to awaken to how we're gonna take this process that Jesus is standing on the podium and directing not just these parts of me that are wounded to the orchestra, but me to the orchestra with those who are also in the family of God, with whom I have great difference. And he's saying, like, I'm not wanting anybody to leave the room until we have this ready to go. And so when we talk about integration, this is 1 Corinthians chapter 12, this notion that the body of Christ has lots of different parts to it. And within that body, it's not okay for any part of the body to say to another part, oh, I'm not good enough for you.

unknown 35:26

Right?

SPEAKER_03 35:27

That passage through this lens of integration takes on such a different, richer meaning.

SPEAKER_02 35:32

Right. And you know, one of the things that we uh I in our in our practice, we part of our training that we try to do is uh, you know, people get a lot of great training in terms of the mechanics of psychotherapy. For instance, uh there are any number of different emerging psychotherapeutic interventions that are really helpful. Pardon me, that we didn't have around 20 years ago. EMDR, internal family systems, neurofeedback, among other things that people are doing that are ways in which people provide metaphors for people's minds to capture to essentially move to states of integration. This is why interpersonal neurobiology isn't really a methodology for doing psychotherapy, like you know, EFT is, or these are these are methodologies, all of which are really, really helpful and important. They are ways of applying the mechanics that interpersonal neurobiology talks about. And so you can talk about this integration process from any number of different angles, and we would say, yeah, this is what Jesus is saying in Mark chapter, at the end of Mark chapter 9, where his disciples complain. John says to him, hey, there's a guy who is casting demons out in your name, but he's not one of us. We told him to stop. Jesus says, Look, he's using a different methodology because he's like, but but he's like, he's doing the work of integration. Like nobody can heal in my name and not be one of us, even if he's not falling around in our particular way of doing things. He's doing the work of integration. We have lots of folks who are doing different things that are enabling integration to take place. And this whole notion of then naming these nine different domains, and we'll decide if we want to get to those or not. Naming these, what's important about that, and I think practically helpful, is that we can then begin to practice turning our attention to these explicit domains. In any particular methodology of a psychotherapy application that you want to, when we draw our patients' attention to these, there are things that we can ask them to do that give them greater agency in the process of integration, in the process of healing, in the process of moving out of trauma and into beauty. And maybe we can talk a little bit more about that as we go on.

Michael John Cusick 38:25

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