Episode 364 - Drs. Bill & Kristi Gaultiere, "Deeply Loved: The Power of Empathy"

Welcome to another episode of Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. In today’s conversation, Michael sits down with Drs. Bill and Kristi Gaultiere—psychologists, spiritual directors, and founders of Soul Shepherding—to explore the transformative power of empathy in the Christian life. Together, they dive into the heart behind Bill and Kristi’s newest book, Deeply Loved: Receiving and Reflecting God’s Great Empathy for You, discussing why so many of us struggle to receive love from God and others, and how empathy connects deeply to healing, spiritual maturity, and healthy relationships.

From personal stories of overcoming shame and abandonment wounds to confronting misconceptions around empathy in Christian circles, this episode offers practical wisdom and tangible spiritual practices for those longing to experience God’s love more fully. Whether you’re a leader, caregiver, or someone simply searching for greater connection and soul care, you’ll discover steps toward living more vulnerably, building stronger attachments, and living out the truth that you are deeply loved. Stick around for Kristi and Bill’s insights on soul care, their unique approach to spiritual direction, and ways you can get involved in their community.

Transcript

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Hi, everybody. Welcome to another Restoring the Soul podcast. Today's another special episode because I get to talk with two relatively new friends and colleagues, Dr. Christy Galtier and Dr. Bill Galtier. Welcome to the podcast. Hey. Thank you, Michael. We're so glad to be on Restoring the Soul with you and connecting with all your friends, which includes a lot of our friends, because we know they listen to your podcast. That's right. And many of our listeners know about the Apprentice gathering. That's where we met, I think, four years ago in Wichita. I think it was the 10th annual gathering of people that are interested in spiritual formation. And we bumped into each other almost every year there. And Bill, you and I have gotten to have a meal together. And Christy, I got to be on the podcast when you hosted me for my new book. So it's really been fun, fun to get to know you. And I have some dear friends that are in one of your cohorts for spiritual formation. So I get to see the direct fruit of your ministry in those dear ones. Well, thank you, Michael. We're so grateful to be partnered in following and serving Jesus together with you. So the. The immediate reason for you being on the podcast is you've got a brand new book that you've written a couple of books together, several books, actually. I want you to talk about not just this book, but today on the podcast about your ministry so that people can find out about it. Also some of your story, because you're both psychologists, doctoral level psychologists, in practice for a long time, and you made a decision to go a different direction than just psychology. But let me just introduce people to the book so that they can make a notation of that. It's called Deeply Loved. I always like to make a big deal out of subtitles because I know that a lot of work goes into that as well. Yeah. Deeply loved. Receiving and reflecting God's great empathy for you. Receiving and reflecting God's great empathy for you. And the reason why I was drawn to this book and you guys gave me the honor of writing an endorsement is the first thing that I thought was, I've struggled my entire Christian life to receive God's love. I'm really good at doing for God. I'm not so good at receiving from God. And I imagine that, you know, you wrote the book for people like that. So go ahead and jump in and talk about, like, who was in your mind when you. When you wrote this. Well, you know, I've trained over a thousand lay counselors when I was a spiritual formation pastor in a mega church. And everybody thinks that listening is about, you know, just the listening skills. And that's what. When they think of empathy, that's what they think about. And that's really not mostly what our book is about. We definitely include that. But to be good at giving empathy to others, the heart of that really is learning to receive it. And what I know is a psychologist, is that we all have resistances to receiving empathy, to receiving grace, to receiving truth. And so empathy softens the ground in our heart and in our life to receive truth and wisdom. And so we're really focusing on how to. And the title Deeply Loved comes from, like, the idea of a paraphrase of, well, what is empathy? Let's just put it into some really familiar, simple words. And it's really. It's really being deeply loved. It's really understanding and caring about people's emotions, their experiences, their thoughts in a way that helps them know that they are deeply loved by God. And, Michael, you know from our interaction that I have an abandonment wound, and empathy has been deeply healing for me in that abandonment wound. I too have struggled to trust God because of that abandonment wound and my tendency to project rejection into relationships, which just leaves me in isolation. And so empathy has been a way that I have been able to have God's love and grace mediated to me and then been learned to be able to receive and agree with his love. So much there that I want to unpack. But let me address the cultural elephant in the room. It's hard to believe that we live in a world where there are actually Christians, and this is not about political left or right, but there's the conversation where people are saying that empathy is a sin. I'm sure that you've heard some of that conversation. And how do you even begin to respond to that? Well, a hard response is, I was really sad early when this discussion began and these books came out. One of our spiritual directors was meeting with a client who heard a guest preacher speak on. On this. The idea that empathy is a sin. And as a younger spiritual direction client. And she came into her session just crying and trembling and feeling ashamed and saying, am I sinning? By talking with you and asking for your support? Because she was so impacted by that message that came across to her. And so, you know, as I've looked into those books, and they're really not against empathy. What they're against is coddling, codependency, rescuing people. And a lot of it is in the realm political discourse. And the way there are certain situations where it Seems like some people are using empathy for. For power, for manipulation. But the problem is that most people don't actually. They just kind of get that message as though empathy is a bad thing. And then what that taps into is their own internal critic, their own self judgments, their own tendency to feel like, well, I'm too emotional, I need too much, and all those hidden feelings of shame lurking in the unconscious. So a lot of people are being damaged by this message and they're not even talking about true empathy. They're not talking about biblical empathy. So it's a sad misunderstanding, really. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that. And there was a part of the book where I remember when I read it for the endorsement I got to early on, where a woman basically said, I feel like if I'm empathic or I'm asking for empathy, I'm whining or complaining. And so that it strikes me that another resistance to empathy is that it's inherently vulnerable, whether we're giving the empathy or whether it's. We want to receive it. So talk about that vulnerability because, Christy, you talked about how in the abandonment wound that that's what it healed, but it's also vulnerable to open yourself up to receive it. It's very vulnerable. And it was a learning process for me. I was raised in a family of strong people thinkers. Empathy was not a value in our home. And so when I had emotions as a strong feeler, I was told to snap out of it, Kristy, snap out of it, get with it. I was basically taught to repress my emotions, not asked to be understood or to be soothed in any way. So this definitely got in the way of attachment as you write about, and sacred attachment and my attachment to God, definitely as I projected onto God that He also expected me to snap out of it whenever I had any needs or any emotions that were getting in the way of my service to him or my ability to believe and obey his word. The problem is it just left me riddled with shame and self hatred. And it wasn't until I was listened to with empathy, where I was able to find people who love Jesus and come mediate his love to me in the pain of my emotion, in the shame that I was feeling. And absolutely, Michael, that meant I had to risk. I had to be vulnerable. I had to be willing to bring into the light, into the relationship with another person, my needs, my vulnerabilities and my emotions ask to be listened to and understood, ask for empathy and then receive it. And it took me a while. In fact, in our marriage, Bill, there were times when you would be empathizing with me, but it wasn't getting inside me because I wasn't agreeing with it. I was spoiling it because all the while while was empathizing with me and validating my emotions, I was treating myself the way I was treated and I was shutting it down. There was no self empathy going on. We say in deeply loved, you'll get help when you join me and Jesus in his empathy for you, love that. Say that again. You'll get help when you join me. Or the listener or the counselor at restoring the soul, when you join me and God in receiving the empathy and agreeing with the empathy we have for you that God has. In other words, this three way empathy. The Lord, me and you are empathizing with you. I like that phrase, agree with. Because there's for me, I can't speak for everybody, but certainly a lot of the people that I work with, there's a conscious disagreement like no, that can't be true, I don't deserve that. And of course it's not about deserving, but we really do have to make a choice to open ourself to it. Yeah, I've learned to say thank you out loud and then also just prayerfully as I'm being listened to, being cared for, because vulnerability, it took me a long time to learn to be vulnerable. I'm oldest of five kids and grew up in suburban Chicago, the city with broad shoulders. My both my grandparents and my dad were in the steel mill. I was raised on the football field. You get hurt, you just rub dirt on it. And I couldn't have feelings and needs in my family. There were so many things going on, so many problems for younger siblings. And so I always tried to be strong. I'm a thinker, I'm a doer. And so learning how to feel my emotions, it took me some time. And in fact it wasn't until I was in college and I was studying psychology to be a counselor. And I actually had the thought, didn't realize at the time how arrogant it was. You know, I know what people say about psychology students, that they're here to fix themselves, but that's not me. I'm actually here to help other people. I mean, I'm embarrassed to admit that that's how I thought about it, but that's how much I was just like, I gotta be strong. I'm the helper. I'm the one that can care for others and lead others. And so I was meeting with my favorite college Professor. Cause I was her teacher's aide. And the first time I sat down to meet with her, that was what I got for grading papers and get to meet with her. So I sit down with her. I'm, oh, Kara, tell me about being a Christian counselor. She was my favorite professor because not only did she was she insightful, but she was a therapist. She was actually doing it. So the stuff that she shared came out of her therapy experiences. So I was excited to be mentored by her. And she says to me, well, Bill, we can get to that later. Let's start with you. How do you feel? And honestly, Michael, I was like looking over my shoulder like, who are you talking to? I just felt like I'd never been asked that question. And every week that I met with her, she would ask me, how do you feel? And so I learned to just start talking. I didn't know what I felt, but I started to learn the language of emotions because she felt what I was feeling, and she put words to it. And that helped me to start connect with myself and with her. And so that began the journey. And thank God the Lord led me on that journey so that when I met Christy, there was enough of me there to have little beginnings of empathy, so I didn't lose her. Yeah. So Professor Karen empathized with you when you were there, where she could have gotten all down to business, but she attuned to you and then actually cared about your feelings and listened. And that's one of the first parts of it. You know, you've both shared out of your personal background. And I appreciate that through the book as well. It makes it, you know, more powerful that you're not just giving stuff that's from a psychology textbook. So what are the barriers that typically prevent people from receiving? And I want to focus on that word receiving for a moment, because I think one of the most common refrains in my office, whatever aspect of counseling we're doing, it gets at some point to, well, I guess I need to learn to open my heart. And whether there's neurological barriers because of trauma or whether it's lies that people believe or like you, Bill, my dad and my grandfather and brother worked in the steel mill in Cleveland. So, yeah, there's cultural aspects about this. So what are the barriers? There's many barriers. One of them is that probably we've been judged for having needs or emotions. It hasn't been safe for us. And so we've learned to repress them, and we've learned to treat ourselves the way that we were treated. And so we judge ourselves as being, you know, why are you so emotional? You should be stronger. You're so sensitive. And those internal messages cause us to not think that we can let anybody in or let anybody know our needs or be vulnerable. We maybe think we'll be rejected, maybe we have been rejected when we've been vulnerable, or even worse, betrayed. And then there's barriers where we think that we, well, isn't wanting empathy. Isn't that like self pity? I don't want to just be pitied or fragilized. I don't want to be needy. I'm afraid I'll be needy. I don't want to drain people. And so that's a barrier to receiving the empathy that we need as well. Some of us have been strong and have had that reinforced. Like with Bill, you as a baby learned that you would cry and cry and cry it out, and nobody responded. So why even try? Why even try or expect somebody would respond to my need to my emotion? So there's different ways, but we end up settling for shallow relationships, for not being emotionally honest, for keeping people at a safe distance. But the problem is this impacts all of our relationships and we end up even being strangers, even in a marriage, sometimes being partners, maybe in life or parenting, but like two ships in the night, because we're not willing to risk really showing up and opening our soul to another and trusting that Jesus attunes to

us, that he. Like we read about in Hebrews 4: 14:37

15, we do not have a high priest who's unable to empathize with us, but one who has been tempted and tried and tested in every way. I mean, what is our incarnation without empathy? It's an empathy that Jesus came to take on the human experience and experience all that we do. And the Greek word in that Passage of Hebrews

4: 15:03

15 is fellow feeling he feels with us in all the vulnerabilities that we feel. Bill, are there other barriers that might be related to your story or in the work that you've done with people? Yeah, I would refer to it as self sufficiency or a performance orientation. It's so easy for us to get our identity and our ego identified with our performance, with how we're doing in whatever it is our work, how our kids look and behave, how well our marriage is going, how much money we have. I mean, there's so many things, our social media responses and these we, you know, most of us probably know better, but we don't realize how pernicious it is that our Identity is getting attached to what we're doing. And so it's a simple thing, you know, how are you? And it's like, oh, I'm busy. And it's like, I'm going to impress people with how busy I am. We don't, we don't realize the lack of genuineness and vulnerability in that. What we really need is to be known and understand for who we are, not what we do. And so to receive praise for a job well done, I mean, it's nice, it's like dessert. But it's not the meat, it's not the vegetables. That's to be vulnerable and to be known and to receive empathy and acceptance and grace. Everybody, we all long to be seen and heard and known. But if we don't accept that we have that need and learn how to form relationships that are based on that, then we never really become. Well, we never discover that we're deeply loved. Yeah. And then we, we miss the whole point of life, Right. That we might think that it's about accomplishment and performing and achievement, but at the end of, at the end of our lives, nobody says they wish they'd spent more time at the office or doing ministry. It's about that sense of the connections, the relationships, how we loved and how we were loved. Yeah. We're all like, we start chasing this rabbit, you know, we're trying to win, we're trying to advance in whatever it is. And a lot of that, the psychology of that is we're stirring up a certain excitement in the chase. And so when we actually get that rabbit, we catch it. You know, the greyhound dog race analogy, it's not satisfying because we're made for, as you said, for attachment, for relationship, like you write about. Yeah. The question I have, and I, I'm so tempted to want to talk about narcissism, but I'm going to hold off on that. And, and we may, we may get there and just touch on that a little bit. Because of course, the, the, the telltale thing that people say, well, if this person isn't empathic, they must be a narcissist. You know, and I get that all the time when people are doing intensives, that somebody will come. Why are you here? Well, my wife said, I'm a narcissist, or my wife's therapist said, I'm a narcissist. And occasionally the husband might say that. So there's problems sometimes when people don't have a capacity on the surface to be empathic, and then there's problems and you wrote a chapter about this in the book that when empathy drains you, and as caregivers, you know, we have this potential liability where we're trained to be empathic, we're compensated to be empathic. And sometimes that can take a toll. So how do you counsel people and the people that you're training and your cohorts? And Bill, as you've trained lay counselors in the past on a church staff, how do you help people to not get burnout or compassion fatigue or something like that? Well, that is so important that a lot of people won't give empathy because they're afraid of getting drained. And a lot of people won't ask for empathy because they're afraid of being draining. But what we've learned is that the most generous people are also people that have the best boundaries. And that's true for empathy, too. And so if you are someone who has a gift of empathy, it's something you value, it's something you're gifted in giving, it's something maybe you even have a natural ability to do, to feel with other people, then it is very important that you have good boundaries because you cannot be empathetic for everybody around the world all the time. You're going to need to have boundaries to not watch the news because your empathy isn't going to do any good for the people that you are watching before you on the news or not to read every missions letter that comes in the mail that really stirs and you feel the pain of the people in those pictures that you're seeing and that you're reading about. You need to have some boundaries so that you have empathy to offer the people that God has called you to journey with that God has called you to be ambassadors of his love too. So we need to. We definitely need to steward our empathy. And we need to have in balance the giving and the receiving. We love because he first loved us. We empathize because Jesus first empathizes with us. I need to be like you write about, attached to God. I need to be receiving his empathy for me personally, if I'm going to be able to overflow it and give out of the overflow. And if I'm only depending upon my natural gifts and abilities and empathy, I am going to hit a compassion fatigue. I am going to burn out with it. And I did that as a therapist too early on. I was out of balance with that. And so being able to learn that I need to receive, it's just like Jesus's commandment, love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself, not instead of yourself. So that's where that self empathy comes in to being too. I need to have empathy for myself in where I might tend to allow my soul to be drained, where I might have resistances to having my needs for empathy met. So the million dollar question is when someone says I'm good at giving to others, I'm good at serving, I don't know how to receive love. Where do you go with that? With people? How, how, how do they learn to receive? Well, at some point they're going to hit a wall or a compassion fatigue and empathy fatigue and hopefully ask questions and hopefully learn more about being vulnerable and ask the very question that you're asking, you know, what's broken in me, and begin to realize that they've got some unconscious resistances to empathy and to actually being deeply loved. And sometimes we're just busy or we're just staying in our head, but we have to. And that's where it's so powerful to get into a conversation with a counselor and soul shepherding. In our ministry we train spiritual directors and coaches and a really good spiritual director or coach like the ones we trained who are, it's informed by Jesus centered psychology. They're great, great at listening, they're great at giving empathy and doing that in a prayerful way and then in asking questions to get at where is the stuck point, where is the resistance? And so that's a really big deal. And why the psychology is so important here because we've got this unconscious stuff in us like we've been saying that feels like, well, I'm too needy or I shouldn't feel this way, or I'm too sensitive or I just need to buck up or I just need to be cheerful, I just need to be positive. And there's, you know, lots of misinterpretations of scripture that get in here to like justify all these things and spiritualize it all when actually the Lord is on the side of validating the truth of what we feel, our emotions, our needs. That's subjective truth. It's not the same thing as biblical truth or external truth that we get from observation or from science. But it's true in my experience. And so having my experience understood and validated for what it is is super important in learning how to receive and trust and agree with. And so what I do when I meet with somebody, what we train our spiritual directors to do, what we do in our soul shepherding retreats, Is we get at that deeper level and we help people begin to become aware. It's like, oh, we show them. It's like, you've got one foot on the gas, you're here, you want to learn, you want to connect with God and trust God's love. But then there's this other foot on the brake. That's like putting out a hand of resistance and saying, don't get too close to me. I'm afraid to be abandoned. Or I have too much emotion, it's going to overwhelm you. Or I got all this shame and I don't like me. So there's all these unconscious messages that we have. They need to become conscious, we need to articulate that. And so that comes through a process of being vulnerable, sharing our emotions and building a relationship with someone who's really listening prayerfully and can help you work that through. And so, of course, in that what's necessary is a safe space and a safe person. Which is what's so valuable that you're offering at restoring the soul in your intensives. It's also what we make a space for. Of offering at our Soul Shepherding Institute retreats. Because we're gonna need a safe place, a place of confidentiality. A place with someone who we know can hear anything that we're feeling and listen to us through the lens of God's love and grace. And it takes a while, doesn't it? Because we all think that it should be a one and done. Or that, you know, if we read the book, whether it's my book or your book, that if we understand it correctly. But information doesn't lead to transformation as we know. It takes a while on this journey to learn to trust and to let love in. That's right. And it's a practice. And I still need it as much as I've ever needed it. Michael, even over lunch today, I asked you for empathy. And I began to share with you some of the vulnerability of what I was feeling. Because I woke up today. And this was one of those days where it just seemed like all of my weaknesses were magnified to me. And I couldn't see anything else. Everything I saw, everything I did was through this filter of my weaknesses. And it was so painful and it was so debilitating. And so, thankfully, over lunch today, I took courage to begin to share. And I, you know, I broke. My voice, broke a little bit. I teared up a little bit because I was. I was letting myself be emotionally honest with God and with Bill about how painful this was for me and how entrapped I felt by it. And as you listened to me, as you helped me to articulate, as you communicated with your words, that you were hearing how this felt to me and how distressing and how overwhelming it felt to me in. In the ways it was affecting my work and the sadness you felt that sadness with me about that. I felt free of it and I got through it and I broke through and I was able to feel God's love and I was able to agree with God's love and shrunk it all back down to size again. And I felt honored that you shared with me that I got to listen to you, pray for you, and I respect you so much. And so I. And I relate with the things that you were sharing. And so that's what we need. You know, we need Soul Talks. Like, that's what our podcast is called, Soul talks, because everybody needs to be drawn into intimate dialogue. But. But most of us don't know how to get there. And so that's. That's what we're really all about in soul shepherding. And in this book, Deeply Loved is trying to facilitate these conversations. We need language. We need language that describes our. Our experience because then we can. We can. We can pray about it. We can work it into our discipleship to Jesus. We can bring it into our relationships and our work and all. All that we do. Well, Christy, thank you for sharing that in real time. And as the two of you kind of turn to each other on the video, it was a really intimate moment to witness, Bill, you responding to that. You know, it's easy for people to hear a podcast and say, okay, they have each have doctor in front of their name and they've written these books, so it must be that, you know, that they've. They've gotten beyond this. But there's something refreshing and actually encouraging that we can go there any time on our journey and that this really is an ongoing thing because for eternity we're going to be learning to receive God's love. I want to wrap up with two things. First, another thing I loved about the book is how concrete and practical it was. And you have numerous empathy practices, as you call them, woven throughout the book. Can you take somehow split up between you two or three empathy practices and for our listeners, talk about what that is and how someone could do it? Yeah, well, one of our practices was mindful prayer. It's a term that some of you might be aware of. And we talk about that as a way of meditating on Scripture and really savoring not only God's word, but God's presence and being emotionally present to God, who's emotionally present to us. And I share an example in the book of Christian I walking down the Oregon coast and running, just chancing on one of the free little library boxes and discovering an old bass psalm book and opening up this ancient book with the Psalms, the very first book printed in America, and going to Psalm 23, a favorite Psalm, and just beginning to slow my thinking down and to meditate on Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd. And this version talks about the tender folds of grass and finding rest there and nourishment in the waters of God's love. And as I'm at the ocean and listening to the waves come in, it's like my breathing rate starts to slow down and smile comes on my face. And I'm really enjoying where I am. I'm in God's presence. I'm alive. It's a beautiful place. And that's mindful prayer. It's being really present, and it facilitates giving and receiving empathy. I am so much better as a husband, as a father, as a spiritual director, as a friend, as a colleague, or when I am emotionally present, grounded, breathing at a slower rate. I can get anxious about stuff. And when we get anxious, you know, our breathing rate goes faster. We're going to like every 15 seconds of breath. But when we practice mindful prayer, everything slows down. We start savoring. And now it was like about 30 seconds a breath, and we're just breathing in slowly and deeply, and we're really present. We can actually practice breathing. That's another empathy practice that we talk about, is using a breath prayer. We usually take a phrase of scripture and just tie our breathing into that and just breathing in deeply. You know, the Lord is my shepherd breathing out. I shall not want you just repeat that over and over. It helps you to be more present, more engaged, more attuned. And so now I'm better able to feel what it's like to be me or to feel for the person that I'm listening to. And that's where the connections, the relational connections happen. And Kristi, what are a couple of empathy practices that come to mind for you? Yes. Well, we love God, we love his Word. And so we have over 117 empathy scriptures in our book Deeply Loved. And those scriptures are so important because they help me connect with God's empathy for me. And so when I'm having something that is emotionally upsetting to me, hurtful painful, maybe I'm feeling disrespected. I can go and I can look to a time, did Jesus experience this? Where did Jesus in his life feel disrespected? And as I identify that and I see that and I think, okay, yes, he. He fellow feels with me. He has empathy for me. He understands what it's like to feel disrespected. And yet how did he secure himself in those moments in his Father's love? And how can he mediate that love to me right now? How can I connect with that? And we've got all kinds of helpful ways to do that with the scriptures, with a empathy prayer. We call it a worksheet that you can journal, a prayer to the Lord, and it leads you in being able to agree with God's empathy for you. These are tools that we've put in this book because we have developed them for ourselves personally. Then we use them with people we journey with. And then as we've tested them and seen they're so helpful, we're offering them in our book again. That's why I so appreciate the book. And I don't think I've read a book like this because it's not a philosophy or a theology of empathy. It's, let's dig right in. Like you said, there's worksheets, there's questions for reflection, there's the empathy practices. And it really is just for somebody that wants change and somebody that wants a path to walk. This is a great, great resource, and I want to thank you for writing it. Before we end, I want you to talk more about soul shepherding, this ministry that you do. Your background is a psychologist, but at some point you made a decision to actually give emphasis to soul care and help to nurture people's inner lives. So why that decision? And then specifically, what are some of the programs that people can investigate for their own development and to join a community? Well, we were working as therapists in private practice at the same time. We were different times in pastor roles. Christie's had a pastor role. I've had a couple different pastor roles. We shared a lay pastor role and a church plan. And in soul shepherding, we put the two together. And the idea was for years we had helped pastors, missionaries, other leaders as counselors, and we highly value that. We love what you're doing in restoring the Soul and the intensives. But we felt like God was calling us to transcend the clinical office and, and get into more like, how pastors relate with people, more pastor to Pastor, person to person, life on life. And the way we did that was through learning spiritual direction. And so we went through a certificate training ourselves to be spiritual directors. And then we based soul shepherding on the ministry of spiritual direction because it's more growth oriented. So rather than sort of being in the place of just repairing the brokenness, we're more in the face of helping people look towards what God is calling them to do and on that path as there is brokenness in the way we're helping them work that through. So we're integrating psychology with discipleship more in a personal framework, especially on our soul shepherding retreats. And we do eight of these a year and they're five days long. And so that's our version of an intensive. And they're very encouraging. It's an authentic community. About 50 people together. Pastors, missionaries, spiritual directors, church leaders, men, women, some as a couple, most not as a couple. And together we're learning and we're growing. There's some teaching, there's a lot of experiences that we're facilitating. People get to meet with a spiritual director. We do spiritual direction groups. Then every day we give five hours of TLC time. Tlc, the tender love and care of life, is to love Christ. So it's very experiential. Nobody leaves exhausted, but people do deep inner work on that. It'd probably be a great step for someone after doing an intensive with you to come away with us on retreat or if they're not in a place where they're in a stuck place in their life and they're just looking to go deeper spiritually. Our retreats, just everybody that needs soul care, that's what we're doing in soul shepherding. So in soul shepherding. So in soul shepherding we offer resources, care and training in spiritual formation and Jesus centered psychology in order to help people to be more emotionally and relationally healthy and more loving in their leadership. That is awesome. And yeah, people have gone from intensives here either to be immersed in your books or this couple that I had talked about that has done the training. If I'm not mistaken, is there a certification as a soul care provider or spiritual director? We have a two year certificate in spiritual direction. And so we have 150 students in that program. This year, last year, the year before, it's really grown. And that includes the retreats. So there's four retreats in the program. Spiritual formation is the first retreat and then spiritual and psychological development, then soul care ministry, and then relationally healthy leadership. Additionally, it's a hybrid of in person retreats and then online training and spiritual direction. Or you can do it 100% online. And then we have an additional year option for coach training on top of the spiritual direction training. Okay. Well, it sounds really comprehensive and just those different categories that you talked about is the theme of each retreat obviously takes people through a very inside out journey. Yes, it does. It's so exciting for us to see what God does in the lives of the people that come in faith and the way that he brings such healing for them and then releases them to be wounded healers. And so your podcast is called Soul Talk. I want to direct people to that and talk about your website and how people can learn more about your other books as well as the retreats and training that you do. Yeah, it's all on soulshepherding.org and best way to learn about our book, Deeply Receiving and Reflecting God's Great Empathy for your is to go to soulshepherding.org deeply loved book and there you get a quick summary of the book and where to get it. If you go to that page, you get special bonus offers as well. Here it is again, the book Deeply loved. I love the book because those colors are the internal colors of our home and also here at the office. So deeply loved receiving and reflecting God's great empathy for you. Bill and Christy, thank you for your time today and may this book find itself into the hands of many, many people who are hungry for this kind of receiving. Thank you for your encouragement, Michael. You've been so great. We so appreciated your endorsement and really admire the work that you're doing with the intensive counseling and all your books. We appreciate it very much. Well, blessings to you both.