Episode 345 - Adam Young, "Making Sense of Your Story: Healing and Freedom from Trauma"

Welcome to another episode of Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. In today’s conversation, Michael sits down with Adam Young—trauma therapist, host of The Place We Find Ourselves podcast, and author of the brand new book, Make Sense of Your Story. Together, they explore the profound journey of making sense of the stories that shape our lives, diving into how our earliest experiences continue to form our hearts, minds, and relationships well into adulthood.

From raw personal anecdotes to reflections on faith and neuroscience, Adam and Michael unpack why true healing requires curiosity, kindness, and courage to examine the ground-level scenes that haunt or shape us. They tackle the exhaustion that comes from running from our pain, the importance of kindness toward our past selves, and how our earliest attachments impact not only our relationships with others but our connection to God.

This episode is an honest and vulnerable exploration of pain, redemption, and beauty in embracing our full stories. Whether you’re deeply familiar with story work or just beginning to question how your past affects your present, you’ll find encouragement, practical wisdom, and hope here.

Transcript

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Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Restoring the Soul podcast. It is Michael, and today I have the honor of having Adam Young on the podcast. Adam is a trauma therapist, the host of the incredibly popular the Place We Find Ourselves podcast. He's a licensed clinical social worker and now an author of this book, Make Sense of youf Story. And I want to say to listeners ahead of time, there will be no hyperbole in our conversation today, because everything I say is coming from a place deep inside of me. I want to start with two brief endorsements from people that I really respect and know. Dan Allender said of this book, make sense of your story. Without a doubt, you will not be the same person you were when you began this book. And amen, Adam. In all honesty, I read five chapters, heavily skimmed the rest, looking forward to it. But what I thought was so brilliant was that in the first two and three chapters, you kind of set up the rest of the chapters because you talked about embodiment, you know, even in the beginning. I also want to say, because I've met Rich Velodas and I love his writing. He said, Adam Young has become one of my favorite people to learn from. Make sense of your story. Has the power to lead us into the whole and healed life we all long for. Adam, welcome to Restoring the Soul. Michael. Thank you for having me. Thank you for your kind words. Oh, they come from the heart. So let me start here in the very first chapter, after a beautiful foreword from our mentor, colleague and friend, Dr. Dan Allender, you jump in immediately with three incredibly vulnerable stories. And I imagine that at one point, all or some of those three stories had you bound in shame or silence or something, and yet you lead with those, so why start there? It's autobiographical. It's my story. I don't, I didn't know where else to start. The, the, the, the little vignettes that I share, all three of them are fragments of memory, partial memories, partial stories that I remembered. But as a 35 year old, I would not have said any one of those three stories was significant or had had any shaping power on the development of my brain or was worthy of further exploration. And yet what I've come to experience deeply is that all three of those stories, and they're just, I just give a paragraph on each, has been deeply formative of my heart, my brain, the way I carry myself in the world now as a 52 year old. And so I wanted to start by linking past to present, because that's a. Major thesis of the book and you've Already alluded to this distinction between 30,000 foot perspective of your story and then the ground level story. So you just said it was only a paragraph. And my initial response internally was but, oh, what a paragraph. Right. So it was loaded with meaning. And I immediately had curiosity and I felt sadness and heaviness within my body and I felt some sense of identification with some of it. And so in those paragraphs, that's what you would call the ground level of your story scenes as opposed to this meta narrative. Absolutely. And that's a really important distinction to make when I'm inviting people to make sense of their story. I'm not talking about like a 30,000 foot overarching narrative of your life from zero until however old you are. You know, I went to this school, this was the first car that I owned. I went to this college, I married this person. You know, my parents divorced when I was 7. That may all be true for you, but that's not really what I mean when I say your story. I'm talking about the particular scenes that you still remember. You may not be sure why you remember them, but they are there. And you likely do not remember the entire scene, but you remember a fragment, a vignette, a part of it. And what is your posture towards that incident scene story? In other words, do you welcome it with a posture of curiosity and kindness or do you dismiss it as no big deal? Yeah, and dismiss it in some cases. I know part of my story is dismissing is like pulling a curtain over it and it's just gone. So then you continue to stay in the personal in the first chapter, which again, I thought just really set it up. A lot of first chapters of books are an introduction and they're almost like a waste of space because it says, here's what you're going to get out of the book. But you dove right in and you answered some of those questions about where you're going. But you talked about in college, you took your journal, you went away to the mountains and you started journaling. And so many people can identify with this. I call it the delta, that space between what we are promised of our faith, but our actual real experience in that space. But you wrote something like, jesus loves me. If he loves me, then why do I feel the way I do? Why am I so stuck? Why am I not experiencing this rich, abundant life? And like so many, you tried everything. You were the Bible study guy, you were the, you know, you really loved Jesus, but you were stuck. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And that's agonizing. For a 19, 20, 21 year old, it's agonizing to be part of a community of faith. For me, it was the Church and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to see and hear from my peers something of the fruit that they were experiencing the sweetness of their own relationship with God and not being able to access that as often as I would like. And it's particularly agonizing when in the place of peace, goodness, delight. There's anxiety, there's depression, there's difficulty with relationships, there's a dysregulated nervous system on a regular basis. That was my reality in college. And it's agonizing to know that God intends to meet me there, but not feel a sense of God's presence in the very places where I needed God most. Yeah. And that's the struggle that many years later led you to kind of wake up to this reality of our inner world and our story and ultimately to become a therapist to help other people. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I know we're here to talk about your book, but as I talked about the delta as that space and the gap, the delta is the triangle in Greek. There's another kind of delta, and that's the delta of a river where two distinct things that seem opposite come together. Fresh water and salt water. And it's in that telling of your story and coming face to face with the pain where a new story emerges and your story is redeemed. So one of the reasons I loved your book is because in the first chapter, maybe the second chapter, you counted August and everything. After Round Here by Adam Duritz and the County Crows. I talk a lot about my love of rock music, and I think that's one of the 100 greatest albums of all time. So Adam is singing about Maria, who is a person who comes up in many albums over and over again, and she's going to jump off a building and you quote her. I'm not going to remember the lyric well right now, but it brings up this topic of exhaustion. She's just tired of living. She's tired of everything. And here's this quote. What if most of your. Your exhaustion is caused by running from your story? That's a pretty wild and audacious statement. Unpack that. Yeah. The Counting Crows lyric is about a woman who says she's tired of life and she's going to jump off a building. And the lyric goes on to say in the song round here, she says she's tired of life. She must be tired of something. Now, I love that. Because people at the extremity of their lives, people that are in places of suicidal ideation, are often absolutely exhausted by something. However, the thesis I'm making in the book is that very often the something that is exhausting us is actually a running from the truth of the heartache of our stories from our growing up years. You could call that avoidance, you could call it denial, call it what you want. The question, the invitation is what if you change the posture from running away from your story to exploring it with curiosity and kindness? And that's my longing for the reader is that they would begin or continue to explore their story, particularly during their growing up years, with a posture of curiosity about what that boy or girl experienced and kindness towards that boy or girl. I love that, the kindness. And so you have a whole chapter about what would it look like and what would it be like if you handled your story with kindness. And you know, gladly, there's more talk in the world and to some degree from church pulpits about kindness and compassion, but now we have a part of Christian culture that's actually telling us that empathy is a sin. Right? And I mean that's, that's just tragic. It's just tragic. My book, Sacred Attachment is the subtitle is Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting Divine Love. So I was particularly interested as you wrote about this exhaustion. So I want to make a statement to you and then let you unpack it. Agree, disagree. But that, that exhaustion that's caused by running from your story, the obvious part is that that story that you're living in, to cope, to survive, to adapt, to get relief from your wounds, that's actually counterproductive. And eventually we get to a place where it will cause exhaustion. But then there's also this aspect where because you talk so much about embodiment and the brain, that there's a tremendous amount of psychic energy that is taken that we're unaware of, that's literally calories that are burning and neurotransmitters that are not firing when we live in that avoidance and distance from our story. What would you say to that? I would say that's. I don't think there's any debate about what you've just said. I think the data from the neuroscience research is really clear that if you want to experience new levels of vitality, which I would say is the opposite of exhaustion, new levels of freedom, new ability to breathe in your day to day life, the single most important thing you can do is make coherent sense of your own developmental story. But sadly, many people when they think about their growing up years, when they think about that invitation, it's this sense of if I go there, I won't get, I won't come back. If I start crying, I'll never stop. It's a sense of overwhelm. I don't want to explore that. That's in the past. It would be too difficult. And what you're putting words to, Michael, is just simply what we've learned from a lot of the neuroscience research, that it is more energy expending to live with a posture of avoidance, denial, dismissal of your growing up experiences of your wounds than it is to grieve, rage, feel the big feelings, the terror, the anger, the overwhelm and grapple with what has actually been true of your life. And the way Jesus puts this is the truth will set you free. It's Jesus's way of getting at the same thing. The invitation of God is always into increasing levels of honesty about what actually happened for you. And it's that honesty that then, in processing it and working through your story, that then lives leads to the increased levels of things like joy, being a loving person, having a sense of peace and calm in your body, you know, the rest of the fruit of the spirit. And when people like you and me at different developmental points in college and in high school don't experience that life with God, it's. It actually comes back to these very same issues. Yes, yes, absolutely. And so you have a chapter on your story with God I may forget. So I'm going to make a note here, but if we don't come back to it, I'd love, as we close out in a bit, for you to talk about that. But you're a therapist. I'm a therapist. And you said it's possible to read books, do conferences, go to Bible study, and even do therapy with a decent therapist and still not engage your story in depth. Part of me thought, well, how could that be a decent therapist? But talk about that, because you're talking about something really in particular that can be missed. It's simply the case that like any profession, there is a wide diversity of approaches and skill levels among therapists, counselor types, story work coaches, and sadly, many, many therapists are not going to invite you to explore your story, your family of origin. They're simply not oriented that way. That's not how they approach the work. And in my opinion, that leaves the client you stuck. There's a ceiling on how much freedom, breakthrough and growth you're going to be able to experience if you do not take the risk of exploring what it was like for you as a 10 year old boy, a 14 year old girl in your particular family. And as I hear you talk, I think about how those kinds of therapy that don't engage family of origin and the scenes at ground level, as opposed to maybe the 30,000 foot, that doesn't take you into it, that it can bring some symptom resolution, but it doesn't bring cohesion. And that's so important for a story. You know, whether you're reading a novel or watching a movie, there needs to be a cohesive plot. Yes, yes. And I think each one of us knows deep down that we're made for more than healing. We're made for more than freedom. Healing is great, but it's not the goal. The goal, the goal of story engagement is so that you can know who you are created to be and what you have been put on earth to do. In other words, in the language of Jesus, you have a kingdom. Your kingdom is the domain over which you rule and reign. And every one of us has a kingdom. If you want to understand your kingdom, you do not primarily need to understand your gifting, which is what most people think. You need to understand your story. In the words of Genesis, when God sees Hagar, where have you come from and where are you going? There's a linkage between where we have come from and who we are to be in this world and where we're going in this world. And so I want to invite people to explore their story, not merely so they'll experience healing, though that will happen, but so that they will experience the glory of the contours of their particular kingdom. So there's so much you said there. We could unpack that and spend the rest of the time just having a conversation about that, but that you can't know who you are until you actually know your story and have worked through that, because so many Christian approaches are get a book about Christian identity or get a book about discovering who you are. And even the Enneagram, which One of my best friends is Ian Cron, Typology host, Road Back to you. And I love the Enneagram and believe it's helpful. But if you only learn your number and you don't go down into how did I get here? And what are my adaptive strategies? And what are those scenes? Which is what I love about Ian's book is that it wasn't just about the Enneagram. You know, his story of growing up with alcoholism and on and on is in there. So you talked about how our calling, our vocation is not based on our gifting, but it's based on our story. And talk about how that's related to the woundedness and the weakness inside of us. Jim Houston, I believe he's now deceased, but he was a contemporary with J.I. packer and Eugene Peterson up at Regent. And I once heard him say that our calling and vocation comes at the intersection of our woundedness, our weakness, and our wickedness. And I know that the word wickedness is triggering for some people, but we're just talking about our proclivity to live apart from being rooted in love. Isaiah 61 makes a brilliant linkage between the broken heart. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me. Bind up the brokenhearted. That's referring to our wounding, Michael. And we're all wounded to proclaim freedom for the captives. Now, the linkage Isaiah is making is that there is a connection between how my heart has been wounded and how I have become a captive or an idolater in Old Testament language, a slave to many, many things. And all of us know the feeling of being captive to things that we wish we weren't captive to. We're driven by things and we're not sure why, and we don't like it, and we're stuck and we can't get out of it. What if. What if the way forward is to explore the brokenheartedness that led to that captivity? That's my contention in Make Sense of your story. I want to invite people not merely to understand, repent of, and grapple with the ways that they're captive, but to understand what's driving that in the context of their story as a boy or a girl. And that refers to their wounding. So you know when. When Joseph says at the culmination of the Genesis story, what you intended for evil, God meant for good, he's at a place where he's looking back on how his heart was wounded, not just by his brothers, but far more by his Father, who showed favoritism. He's looking back on how his heart was wounded and how that was used by evil, but it was also used by God to bring about rescue and redemption. And in my opinion, Genesis 50, verse 20, that verse I just quoted should be a banner over every individual's life. But you've got to know the particularity of what evil intended for your harm and how God is using that for not just your good, but rescue and redemption for others. Gosh, again, so rich. I love how you Refer to evil there and many, many listeners will have had bad experiences. I've worked with a lot of people who someone tried to cast a demon out of them when they were depressed or anxious. And, you know, that's a reality, but it's oftentimes done as a spiritual bypass. But I have appreciated as I've gotten to know your work first on social media for a while and through your podcast, that you talk about evil and talk more about not the nature of that evil, but that when you say that what was intended for evil, God used for good, what does evil intend? Evil intends to steal, kill and destroy, to steal, kill, kill and destroy. And what I would say primarily is your glory. The unique way that you reflect the image of God, Evil despises that. And you, Michael, reflect that in a different way than I do. Therefore, you will be assaulted over the course of your life in a different way than I have been assaulted by evil. Why? Evil's not so much, in my opinion, after me, evil is after destroying the glory of God that I bear as an image bearer. And the same with you. And so you need, if you follow the ways that you've been assaulted by evil, the wounds, and by that I just mean your trauma, your wounding, you will learn something about your glory, your beauty, your goodness. And that is a very lovely realization. Yeah, I like that word, lovely. It's something very unexpected there. You quoted Isaiah 61, verses 1 and 2 about Jesus coming for the brokenhearted. And it describes the nature of our brokenness and the wounded heart. But then in verse three, to circle back to what you're saying about evil is intended to destroy glory. That verse says, and I will make you in the very place of your shame and your wounding, I will make you an oak of righteousness for the display of my glory or my splendor. So that's really beautiful. And the word oak there, I once thought, what's that about? But in Isaiah chapter 1, Isaiah chapter 57 and other places in scripture, the oaks are the places where the Israelites would go with the other Canaanite gods and engage in idolatry. So it's as if God is saying the very places where you've given yourselves over to that that is not loving, to that which is destructive, because Molech would require the sacrifice of children. Man. That's the place where I'm going to enter in and to display my glory. Yes. It's not through our success and our big programs and our mega churches. It's not through best selling books and being famous. It's through the places of weakness and woundedness. Yes. Yes. And this is what is so hard for people to learn. This is what the disciples fought Jesus about three times. And if you read the narrative of Mark, it's really the structure of the narrative is Jesus saying, I'm going to suffer humiliation and I am going to be crucified. And the disciples fought him on it three times. And then his response to them is, and if you want to follow me, you're going to need to walk in that path also. Yeah. And that's simply been my experience, not just personally, but as I've walked with others, is that everyone has to walk the path of suffering and of glory. And that in the intersection you find awe and worship when you reckon with the goodness that God brings through your suffering. Which is in no way to say that the abuse or trauma was ordained by God or worth it. I'm not saying that. I'm saying what Joseph said. God is in the business of making good things come out of horror. Right. Right. Not ironically. This is Holy Week. Yesterday was Palm Sunday. We've got Gethsemane on Thursday, Good Friday, that in between liminal space of Saturday, and then, of course, resurrection. But as you talk about the entering, the suffering, and talked about Christ's invitation to die with him, for many people, their suffering is profound, like in my story and your story. And yet what feels like the greater suffering because of our body's inability to regulate and to be grounded in the midst of thinking about our stories, the greater suffering is to start to remember and to actually begin to process it. Because if that weren't the case, then everybody would be doing it. Yeah. And that's not to minimize somebody's sexual abuse or the violence that they've experienced or the dysfunction or the abandonment at all. But one learns when they work through their story and face that suffering and suffer as they're facing their story, because it oftentimes does bring up a different level of suffering. What you're saying, and what I believe is that through it's available. And as they get to the other side, there's something that's really exquisite. It's the pearl of great price. Where the suffering has meaning, the suffering is redeemed, and where they can come to say what was intended for evil is actually being used for good. Yes. Yes. And that's a mystery that is unique to each person. It's a story that is particular to each person. And yet it is a theme that we see over and over and over again, not just in the scriptures, but in the lives of the body, of people, of our friends, of our family, of people we respect and look up to. There's no way to get to the resurrection of Sunday without going through the crucifixion of Friday and the descent of Saturday. The Old Testament metaphors for that are the wilderness, the desert, the valley of the shadow of death. That's the Saturday experience. And that experience is. I don't know. It's going to be okay, Michael. I don't. I could be working with you. You're believing for me, you're hoping for me, but in my body you're inviting me to go into territory and I don't know it's going to be okay if I go there. That's the Saturday experience that we're all invited into. Yeah, and I'm kind of thinking out loud here, but the Saturday experience is for us as creatures made by God. But there's a sense in which the whole week of Holy Week was a kind of Saturday experience for Jesus. And to some degree, because Jesus was fully God, but also fully human. In the garden of Gethsemane, as he prayed, take this cup away from me. There's a very real sense of I don't know if it's going to be okay. Absolutely. And then he surrenders to the thy will be done. But the text is very clear that that wasn't a one time thing. It was like the whole evening of processing that. And I can kind of see him going back to. But I still want you to take this cup away. And then, okay, it's going to be okay. But his body may not be completely regulated. And then he ends up in that space of surrender. And it's a process. Yes, yes. Another aspect of that, and this just is so tied into all the themes of your book, is that even we think of the crucifixion as in the Resurrection, as the end of the story. But if, you know, Jesus were to wake up on Easter and start to do story work and just kind of work backwards, it's like, oh, on the night when I asked my three friends to stay up and pray for me, they fell asleep not once, but three times. And the day before that, one of my closest friends, the guy that I had confidence in that I was going to build my church upon him, he betrayed me. And then Judas, who was my friend, and we all think Judas was just this ass all along, but he was Jesus close friend. Which if people see the TV show the Chosen, you get that. And then there's this kind of left turn. And so those are wounds and assaults to Jesus heart long before the crucifixion, that actually in the crucifixion, it was those wounds that he bore in all of our wounds as well. Yes. And so all of us have stories of betrayal, and all of us have stories of powerlessness. That's what you're putting words to, Michael. And what I'm inviting the reader to do is to write out what are some of your stories of betrayal and what are some of your stories of powerlessness. Because those stories deserve to be told, witnessed, and they need care. And when you say betrayal, you mean broken trust, where somebody breaks trust. And that betrayal might be horrible, like Peter to Jesus or somebody having infidelity, but it's just broken trust. Yes, yes. So for me, stories of betrayal. I mean, my. I have stories of betrayal with both my father and my mother. And I would suggest everyone does. It might not be a 10, it might be a small betrayal. But look, you have to grapple with the fact that your parents are sinners. That doesn't make them bad people. It just means they've harmed you. And have you gotten clear about the particular ways that you experienced harm from your mother and that you experienced harm from your father? And you talk about this in the chapter on family of origin. But two, tell the truth about your family, even at a two or three out of 10, is not to dishonor your parents. Quite the contrary. When I have two children, son and a daughter, 16. 14. Daughter 16. When you know the day is coming, Michael, the day is coming when Hope, my daughter, is going to say to me, you know, dad, here are some of the ways that you harmed me growing up. When she does that. And she's already done that to a certain degree, but as she continues to, I feel honored. Why? Why? Because she's inviting me to participate in the restoration of some of the brokenness in our relationship, she's not blaming me. She doesn't necessarily have contempt for me. She's wanting more from her relationship with her father. And when I work with people who are reluctant to name some of the ways their parents harmed them, more often than not, those people are motivated by I want, while my mom and dad is still alive, I want more. I want more connection, more intimacy with my dad, with my mom. That's what's driving them to consider naming some of the harm. Because they want a deeper connection that's holy, that's honoring your father and mother. Yeah, I think so many people misunderstand that Commandment, you know, as you're talking about that, it's a little bit of a funny phrase for this conversation. John Gottman's idea of a bid for connection, that, that bringing shortcomings, wounds, ways that we've been harmed to a parent can be a bid for connection. But if they've not done their work, if they are not able to be present in their body, and if they're insecurely attached, then they may likely not respond well, which is not about the individual sharing and bringing the harm, it's about them. Yes. I want to shift gears a little bit. You wrote something that I thought was a radical idea across the field of mental health and psychotherapy. It's an idea that I subscribe to and that we do at restoring the soul. But you said, don't assume when you start to experience symptoms and distress in your life that something is wrong with you. Instead, these are actually signs that you are awake and starting to be aware that you want more. Yeah. Very often your symptoms are evidence that you're paying attention. Look, we live in a very broken world. If that is not disruptive to your nervous system, you are simply not paying attention. That's number one. But number two, very often the brokenness that we see in our culture became very particular for people in their specific families. And so as a four year old, as a six year old, as an eight year old, they experienced harm. And what I want to invite the reader to do is to take that harm seriously. That harm shows up down the road as symptoms. The symptoms are not designed to be eradicated, conquered, overcome. They're to be listened to. Yeah, listened to because the symptoms themselves, someone's migraine headaches, someone's anxiety, depression, addiction, that. That's actually telling them a story and crying out, saying, pay attention, listen to me. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Gabor Mate, the neuroscientist trauma therapist, is fond of saying, don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain, why the wound? And that's what I'm inviting people to ponder is the nature of the particular wounds that they've suffered in their bodies, in their hearts, in their minds, especially relationally in their families. And as you quote, Mate, it makes me think of his work, compassionate inquiry. And in relation to the chapter you have, or actually it's a, It's a section of a chapter you have, and it addresses the question of, well, what if I had a good family? You know, what if I didn't have trauma? What if nothing bad ever happened to me and I've seen Videos of mate where he's sitting with someone who says, nothing ever bad happened to me. And four or five questions in with great gentleness, like, this person is crying, going, oh my goodness, yes, so what do you do? Or to the listener who is saying, yeah, but, but I don't. I grew up in a good family and I don't, I don't have trauma. Okay, well, here's what I would say. You may not have trauma, some people escape trauma. But you have not escaped having your heart deeply harmed and wounded by your parents and. Or by siblings, if you have them. That's just what it means to live east of Eden, Michael. We live in a world. Look, the cross. There's nothing abstract about the cross. When Jesus is suffering the crucifixion, that is because of particular sins in the world. Not brokenness, not sin as a category, it's particularity. And so everyone has experienced the particularity of harm, even if you've escaped trauma. And all I'm inviting people to do is to take those stories of harm seriously. Because the neurons in your brain were affected when you were harmed. And you have to, in my opinion, bring some curiosity and some kindness to your stories of harm, even if it wasn't traumatic for you. And you say over and over again in the book that every life experience, positive or negative, or negative or positive, shapes our brain and shapes our nervous system. Yes, that's just the nature of neurons. Neurons are shaped in one of two ways. Genetics, hair color, eye color, height. That's genetics. Neurons are connected to one another because of genetics. But the only other way that neuronal connections form is through the experiences that you've had in life. That's how neural networks have been developed in your life. The experiences you had as a three year old, a ten year old, those shaped the neural networks that currently as a 58 year old, reside in your brain. Talk about attachment. I love how you. And as I look through the table of contents and another part of the book, I actually wrote in the table of contents, I wrote in the margin, why not anxious attachment. So chapter five, you wrote, insecure attachment, avoidant and ambivalent. And I wrote why not anxious? But you actually start with. And this answered the question, secure attachment. And then you worked backwards from there and went into the insecure attachment. So for our listeners, I, I think that you say this in a beautifully succinct way. What are the ingredients of a secure attachment? And unpack as you're able, what those are. Yeah. Secure attachment is the embodied sense that Whenever there is conflict or rupture between you and me, Michael, it is going to be resolved and restored soon. And it will come about without you having to sacrifice your perspective and your individuality and without me having to sacrifice my perspective, my individuality, my reality. We both get to have our big feelings and our opinions, but our relational connection is going to be restored shortly. That is how a nervous system of a securely attached individual is primed. And by primed I mean that's what they anticipate. They assume it's going to happen. Now that is a lovely way to go through life, but sadly it's foreign to many of us. And the research says that about 60% of people have a secure attachment. And I don't know if it's my bias of having insecure people in my office, but I've often thought, no way are there 60. Just what's your take on that? Like how many people are securely attached? I don't know. I think it's our line of work, Michael. Look, this is probably an unpopular thing to say, but I just don't gravitate very often to securely attached people. I am fascinated by the wounded among us. Why? Because I'm one of the wounded. And so when in the Gospel of Luke, for example, Jesus is always gravitating towards the marginalized, the outsider, the person who's scapegoated, the person who's excluded. Jesus tends to gravitate towards the wounded. And I've experienced the same in my life. I'm deeply wounded and I gravitate towards other wounded people. And so it's very healthy for insecurely attached people to get in relationship with securely attached people and just do life with them. That will have a bigger effect on your nervous system than you may imagine. I have experienced that early on. It's safer, quote, unquote, putting it in air quotes to be around insecurely attached people because they get me, they have language, their anxiety and depression matches mine. And it can feel like safety because of that familiarity. It's the person. I grew up in an alcoholic family and it's like it made me nervous to be around healthy families. Like that was, this is not normal, you know, for, for people to give each other hugs and to have a 16 year old boy sit on his mom's lap while she runs her fingers through that child's hair, you know, in a very innocent, beautiful way. I was like, oh my God, that's, you know, that's impure or something. Yeah, not, not even theologically, but just like because of my abuse. That just felt awful to me. Therefore, I'm going to gravitate toward the dysfunctional. Quick question. Would you say that Jesus had a secure attachment? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Jesus is. How do we know that? Look at the ways he interacts with those who envy him, who disagree with him, who are out to get him. He is very grounded in his own understanding of. Of reality. He is very, very in, you know, therapeutic language, differentiated. Yes. This is a man who knows what's true and who is able to playfully interact with a wide variety of. Of kinds of people because he's grounded in his relationship with his heavenly father. But I think nobody's ever asked me this, Michael, so it's a fascinating question. He must have had really, really tender present parents. Yes. Yeah. Mary and Joseph, despite starting out with a traumatic birth, as they were homeless and in a stable. And yeah, that's a beautiful thought of the tenderness of their parenting. And not perfect parenting, but tender, which is that aspect of repairing rupture. The reason I asked wasn't theoretical, but perhaps you have clients like this. But I think a lot of people think that if and when they get to secure attachment, that they won't have to deal with their humanness. Right. They're not going to be activated, that they're never going to get angry and erupt, that they're never going to get pissed off when somebody cuts them off in traffic. And yet Jesus, let's go back to Gethsemane. Let's go back to him with the whip that he makes in the temple where he has the full range of emotions. And that there were times in both of those times when his heart rate was not a resting pulse of 70, but it went up really high. So this fullness of humanity is modeled in Jesus as the secure attachment. Absolutely. That's such an important point you bring up, Michael. Secure attachment or healing or wholeness or growth does not equate to a level grounded 70 beats per minute pulse 100% of the time. That is not what it means to be sanctified, to become more fully you, to be healed. It is not. Healing does not mean that you're always regulated. Absolutely not. There is a lot happening in this world to cause dysregulation. And Jesus, when he was, when he made that whip, was unbelievably dysregulated. That's what rage is. Yeah. So the question is, can you tolerate increasingly deep levels of rage, deep levels of sorrow, deep levels of anxiety without either panicking, dissociating through panic or dissociating through numbness. And that's in, you know, therapeutic language. The result of a widening window of tolerance is what it's called. Yeah, but. But what? But all you're putting words to is a nervous system that is increasingly able to tolerate sorrow and joy. And back to your idea of the increased and expanded window of tolerance. In one sense, it's expanded, number one, so that people can handle what we might call the normal emotions of life, but also expanded so that they can experience the extreme emotions of life, but without it becoming an impairment and without it causing people to not be grounded. Recently I was with Dr. Ariel Schwartz, and she was talking about her frustration of how people that are especially new to trauma work, how they're constantly talking about getting people into their parasympathetic nervous system. And she was like, that's not the point, people. The point is to get people to have the freedom to experience positive activation or positive deactivation so that in that window of tolerance, they can be fully human. And there's a sense where there's pressure on people, where if you've got to get into your parasympathetic nervous system. I think I read somewhere you're an enneagram8 where I heard you say that. Is that true? Yeah. So you're going to live with a lot of activation. Right. And if you went down into parasympathetic, like, you'd probably become a 9 and need to wake up. So just unpack that. Well, I think that those words from that person are absolutely right. The goal is not to become like Zen would be the term. That's in our culture where you're totally relaxed all of the time. The goal is vitality. The goal is aliveness. The goal is to become increasingly you in all of your ups and downs, and to be able to tolerate that while staying in relationship with others. That's the key. Because the byproduct of dysregulation is often isolation and withdrawal. And human beings are created to stay in constant relationship. It doesn't mean, you know, if you're an introvert, that you don't need to pull away. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about when you're in distress, are you able to reach. I'm holding out my hand. Are you able to reach relationally and receive care? And the nature of trauma, the nature of harm in our past stories is very often the reach becomes very difficult for people. Yes, yes. And not in any way to disagree with that. But there's also this connection relationally to oneself and dissociation in that state of dysregulation can have us completely disconnect from ourself. Yes. And so, as you know, as C.S. lewis said, that how can we look into the face of God until we have faces? We actually have to be able to see our own face, to see our own nervous system, and to begin to be present to it. Which is a great segue too. Let's wrap up with this. Talk about how doing your story work affects your story with God. And say a little bit about how our human horizontal attachment affects our vertical attachment with God. Oh, sure. So profoundly. I mean, the, the ways you learned to relate to your mother and father are going to be transferred to the ways you relate to God. That's just because you have neurons. And so when you think about your relationship with God, what are the attributes? How would you describe the dynamics of that relationship? Are you free to bring anger to God, anger at others, anger at God? Are you free to bring sorrow, to grieve, to weep in the presence of God? Or are those kinds of emotions, big emotions, off limits or not appropriate for your spiritual life, for your relationship with God? And what I would say is that increasingly, if you are moving into a secure attachment, you are likewise going to be able to bring the fullness of yourself into the presence of God and relate with God just like you would another person from those places of big feelings, whether it's fear, sorrow, anger, joy. But it will be the dynamics of your relationship with God will become increasingly securely attached. And for lots of us with trauma, the way we relate to God is not very securely attached. And so for me, as an ambivalently attached man, so much of my relationship with God has been filled with anxiety and worry. It's like, am I doing this right? Do I have a felt sense of God's closeness to me? Or does God feel distant? And when God feels distant, I start to panic inside. That's because of my attack. That's because I have neurons. That's because of my attachment style. It's not because of my theology. It's like you said at the beginning, Michael, the delta. There is a delta between what I believe about God and how I experience experience God. And that's true for all of us. But what if you explored why that's the case for you? What if you made some linkages between how you learned to relate to your primary caretakers and how you presently relate to God? Someone once said, critiquing Christianity, that the problem with Christians is that they have the answer, but they've not lived the questions. And your book helps readers to live the questions. The question, which is the title of your book, how do I make sense of my story? How do I make sense of what has happened to me? How do I make sense of what hasn't happened to me? And then once I understand that, how in the world can I begin to be with myself? Because my anxiety drives away to be free instead of addicted, to be awake as opposed to be depressed. And so thank you, Adam Young, for helping us to ask the questions and to live the questions as we close out make sense of your story, the brand new book by Adam Young. You can get it wherever fine books are sold, on Amazon and beyond. And I simply cannot recommend this enough, and I mean this very, very seriously to listeners, but I'm also saying it to you, Adam. This is a book that deserves and is worthy of being a number one New York Times bestseller. If even a fraction of that happens, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives are going to be changed. It might not happen this year, but over the rest of your vocation and your lifetime, this book will be a perennial classic. So thank you, Michael. Thank you. Thank you for your kindness. It's been so meaningful to me.