Episode 380 - Michael & Julianne Cusick, "Deep Dive Into Intensive Counseling"

Welcome back to Restoring the Soul! In this episode, Michael John Cusick and Julianne Cusick dive deep into the world of intensive counseling, unpacking what makes Restoring the Soul’s approach unique and transformative. You’ll hear about the practical structure of their intensives—meeting with individuals and couples in three-hour blocks over one or two weeks—and what sets this method apart from traditional weekly counseling. They explore the importance of stepping away from daily life to create space for profound healing, the individualized attention each client receives, and the holistic integration of soul care, psychological expertise, and contemplative spiritual practices.

Throughout their candid conversation, Michael shares stories of how Restoring the Soul began, while Julianne offers reflections on the power of holding sacred space for clients' stories. If you’ve ever wondered what intensive counseling really means, or how a focused, custom-tailored process can spark breakthroughs in just two weeks, this episode will give you clarity and inspiration.

Transcript

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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Restoring the Soul. It's another episode and I'm Michael John Cusick and I'm here with my bride, Julianne Cusick in the studio. Hey, Jules. Hi, Michael. It's good to be back in the studio with you. We are back to talk about intensive counseling from A to Z. So I'm glad that we have a chance to talk about this again so that our listeners can have a deep understanding of what exactly it is that we do at Restoring the Soul. Yes, that's a great question. There's. Intensive counseling is becoming kind of a buzzword in the field. And so I think defining it and also highlighting what makes Restoring the Soul's intensives different is worth the time. So thanks for tuning in. I often get comments from people saying, you know, I knew you were a podcast, but I didn't actually know that you were in intensive counseling ministry. And that always makes me think, well, something is missing. We're not doing our job because the whole point of the podcast is to help people have transformational resources. But you're right, you made this point that more and more people are talking about intensive counseling. And we're going to get to this in deeper discussion. But I've noticed, especially since the pandemic, that a lot of therapists have added intensive counseling to their website. And that can mean anything from instead of a 50 minute or one hour session that they do a two hour session or a three hour session. And then there's people that do intensive counseling two full days, all day long, every day. And our program is actually something very, very different with an intentional flow. But yeah, let's jump in. I love your definition of intensive counseling. You're the very practical person in our relationship and I, I like to kind of go abstract and macro and your micro. So give your definition of intensive counseling that you use when people say, well, what exactly is it? Okay. Intensive counseling at Restoring the Soul is where we meet with couples and individuals and three hour blocks for one to two weeks over five or ten days. Yeah. So that's the concrete, practical aspect of it. And I love that. Like, that's the nuts and bolts, okay? So everybody takes that and they go, oh, okay, thank you. And then I like to say, you know how some people will go to marriage counseling or counseling, counseling or therapy for months or even years at a time and never really get any traction or move forward in two weeks, three hours a day. Our intensive counseling programs help people to experience breakthrough. And the emphasis really is that it's over this extended period of time, three hours a day for two weeks with the weekend off in between. Hmm. Well, how did you get started in intensive counseling, Michael? You may remember the time when I was in private practice as I was a professor at Colorado Christian University. And a dear man who's now a dear friend called me up out of the blue, and he did mentoring with pastors where people would come and do leadership coaching for two weeks. And that was mostly people that were going through transitions with their staff or they were exiting ministry and going into secular work, or sometimes it was just a lot of conflict. And he called me up in advance of one of these pastors coming and said, this man and his wife are coming every morning. I go walking with him. We do structured exercises in the Rocky Mountains and some thoughtful leadership coaching questions. Will you be available in the afternoon for three hours Monday through Friday to meet with this person for two weeks? Initially, I thought he was insane. Like, what? That's 30 hours of spending time with somebody, and in two weeks, you've got to be kidding me. I'll be exhausted. They'll be exhausted. But I said yes. And I've shared this so many times that what I saw happen in that two weeks with the sequential day after day after day, and how I saw the impact of our conversations just exponentially increase. I left there with a sense of, I don't know what just happened, but I want to do this the rest of my life. And then I remember about three months later, this friend called again and he said, I've got another one. And, you know, back then, gosh, 25 years ago, everybody's hourly rate was a lot less. And, you know, I felt embarrassed to ask somebody for the amount of money that my hourly rate times 30 hours, that felt like, you know, the price of a luxury car. So it was just all kind of piecemeal together. But after that second time, I remember having a conversation with you and saying, this is what I want to do. And then it wasn't long after that, within the next year, that a group of us collectively resigned from Colorado Christians Counseling Program because we all felt led to actually go and do what we have been training students to do. And that was to do soul care. And then just a few years

later, Restoring the Soul started as a 5: 5:12

1C3 nonprofit. And I think it was 2005 where we started doing intensive counseling exclusively. So almost 20 years now that we've been doing this exclusively, and we've kept that format of one or two week programs. But a lot of what we do. And how we do it during those actual three hour sessions, as you know, has changed as we've learned more about healing and restoration and trauma. So Michael, Restoring the Soul has an intensive soul care process that we lead and guide clients through over one and two weeks. What makes Restoring the Soul different than another counselor who maybe says, I do intensives, but I do them over Friday, Saturday, Sunday. What's really different about just an intensive versus a Restoring the Soul intensive? I'm really happy to chime in on this. And after I do, I want to throw it back to your court and have you give input because you've been doing this for nearly a decade as well. And for the last several years as a licensed marriage and family therapist, I think the first thing I would say is that intensive counseling is all we do. When the average therapist says that they do intensive counseling, they might have 20, 25, 30 people that they're meeting with a week and that's what they're doing. And then out of that, that if someone requests some intensive time, they're building that into their general practice. And I don't have a private practice. I've not had a private practice for over 15 years. And this is all we do. And our staff of six therapists right now, this is all we do. In addition to training and speaking, all of our staff around the world and or around the country are actively engaged in training other therapists, other caregivers, et cetera. But let me answer the question that in addition to it's all we do, there's five components that I like to think of as really the key ingredients of this process. And it's important to just go back to what you said. I love how you're, you know, you're using not just buzzwords, but words that are really helpful for people to understand that we've not just put together, we do intensive counseling, but there's a process that's been finally honed, that builds from A to B to C to D so that in a traditional counseling hour that people might get back home or in their community where they have that standing appointment for 50 minutes or one hour, there's often a sense of coming with an initial problem and the therapist says, how can I be of help? And the people start to talk about their problem and the therapists ask poignant questions and that person might be well trained, they might be highly competent, they might be deeply compassionate and caring. But. But the nature of that one hour ish session on an ongoing basis is that that client comes back and the therapist will often say, so how was your week? How are you doing? And then the client, like I have done in counseling, says, my week's been pretty good, or as a couple we had a hard time. And you get to the end of the session and there's really no progress. And most importantly, there's often no defined target. And I like to think that sometimes, and I was in private practice for 10 years and made a living this way, so I'm not in any way against private practice counseling. But I like to think that sometimes weekly counseling or hourly counseling can be like shooting an arrow at the side of a barn and then getting on a paintbrush and painting the bullseye around the arrow, rather than let's define and create the target and now let's go after it quite specifically. Also, there's some data that suggests that the average person goes to counseling somewhere between 1.5 and 2 times a month. And oftentimes the weekly counseling turns into that. And then with holidays and everything else, it gets separated out. So it's a lot less than that. So the first ingredient of our intensives that I think makes it very powerful and very effective to help people get unstuck and experience breakthrough is simply the category of time. And the first thing is that we're spending three hours per day. And if you look at that hour long session that I just referred to at the end of a Monday session that's three hours long, you've had roughly one month of counseling. If in fact the average amount of time is 1.5 to 2 hours per month of counseling, then you come back for day two and you've just had a month of counseling and 24 hours later you're coming back. There's connection, there's safety, there's collaboration, there's that sense of whatever nervousness I've had that's been assuaged and you can just hit the ground running. And then there's more of an unpacking that's generally getting into somebody's story, their life experience, their narrative, the therapist starting to get some clarity. And the whole time it's like moving from the top of a funnel that's wide and where liquid in that funnel sloshes around. And then as it moves to the base of that funnel, it becomes more solid and or fluid, but collected. And then as it moves down into the spout of the funnel, it's very, very focused. And what happens each day through the intensive, from Monday to Friday and then even deeper on the second week is that we get that kind of focus very quickly. And in that time, there's an ability to progress in a way that's very accelerated. So just to say that intensive is not just one hour counseling sessions, times, however many you're doing, it's the sequential process. So the second idea, the first is time and the second is space. The time is sufficient time, but limited time. And the space is the idea that when people get away for two weeks, and yes, in certain instances of people that have done a two week intensive, we'll have them come back for one week. But when people get away for two weeks, to a person over the 25 years I've been doing this, no one has ever said, gosh, I wish I had only come for one week, or I somehow wish that your program was able to, you were able to do it in 72 hours. On the front end. They go, wow, I wish I could do this program in 72 hours. Or can I come for one week? And we say, I guarantee you there's this intangible, kind of invisible, you won't yet understand it ingredient of the intensive. And that is when you pull away from your daily rhythms and routines and responsibilities, you're going to start to breathe. Your soul is going to breathe like a bottle of fine wine that's open. And Ruth Haley Barton has talked about for years in her spiritual formation books, teaching and workshops that our souls are like a big pickle jar. Think of a gallon pickle jar and then imagine taking a couple tablespoons of mud and pouring it into that pickle jar full of water. And you shake the pickle jar and then you set it on table. It's going to take a while for all that's been stirred up to settle down. And in that shaking, there's a lot that has been settled that actually needs to come up, that needs to be disrupted. And that's really the process of what happens during an intensive. There's a sufficient amount of time for things to settle in our soul and in our body. And then there's a sufficient amount of time and safety in order for the things that need to come up to come up. And that's really how healing happens. And with traditional counseling, we go to counseling for an hour and then you leave there and you go pick up the kids at a soccer game, or you go home and your hot water heater has broken, or, or you've got to respond to an urgent email or get to the bank before they close, or, you know, sick kids on and on and on and on, right Life continues to happen. Yeah, exactly. And so restoration actually

happens as we pull away. And as Psalm 46: 13:37

10 says, that we can begin to be still and know that he's God. So in this space there's a kind of rhythm that can open up. So I hear you saying a few things, Michael. One is you're highlighting the time and the space, not just the extended sessions, but the time away. You also mentioned, I think, an important distinctive, which is that our intensive therapists don't have private practices outside of restoring the soul. I don't. You don't, none of our therapists do. So we have the ability to spend all of our time and energy in the course of a week or two weeks devoted to that one single client that's in front of us. We're not juggling, you know, five or 10 or 20 or 30 other clients that week, but we have that ability to be very, very focused on that individual or couple that we're sitting with. Jules, I'm so glad you said that because one of the things people aren't aware of, that when folks go to counseling and they pay a therapist whatever their fee is for that one hour or 50 minute session, they're paying for time, that's obvious. They're paying for expertise, that's also obvious. I always say that you're not paying for the care and the love that's free, but you're also paying for the therapist to think about you outside of the session. And I don't think that there's a decent therapist around that doesn't think about their clients, either the impact upon them or upon the actual experience of pain or suffering that they're experiencing or reading a book or going to some kind of information for how can I be better equipped to help this person? So no small thing. All we think about when we're with a couple or an individual over the course of two weeks is that person. And that allows us to get some really great clarity, which is the next point I want to make. But I want to come back to what you were going to say first. Oh, just that recently I had an individual for a two week intensive and it was interesting because I asked her. She had done about a year of counseling, you know, the weekly counseling, and this was her first time to do an intensive. And we talked about what the difference was. And there are times when you really need to go every week. There's just so much going on. You need a place. You know, you're drinking from a fire hose and you've. You've got to get some grounding underneath you before you can do something like an intensive. And she had done that. But we talked about the difference between when she met with her therapist once a week or every other week and then what it was like meeting with me every day. And at the beginning of the two weeks, she wasn't sure what to expect. But as the week unfolded and we were able to take in a deeper dive, and we built on that the second week and were able to continue doing some trauma work, building in resources, equipping her for going home and the life that she was entering back into. We both agreed that, you know, she could see, see and experience the difference now of what intensive counseling was versus what weekly counseling or bimonthly or bi weekly counseling could give her back home. And we talked about how one week of an intensive wouldn't have been enough and how the second week really allowed us and allowed her to really build on the ground and leave in a much more confident and equipped place than she would have if we would have ended at one week. So it was really interesting to hear her reflection. And she said she was really glad she wasn't here for one week and she could see the benefit and experience the benefit of us sitting together for the two weeks. Yeah. I regularly hear people, as they walk out of our office at the end of two weeks say, I am so glad that I came for two weeks, because if we had six stopped at the end of the first, not knowing where we had gone. And we often describe it as that first week is from a medical analogy, kind of diagnosing and setting up for surgery. And then the second week is more surgery. Although healing happens from the first day to the last day in a lot of different ways. Absolutely. One of the holiest parts of the two weeks for me is holding space for someone's story and having the luxury of time and space, space to have them unpack it. And for me to really be able to enter in. For many people coming, it's the first time that they have told their story, start to finish, in one one session, because we have three hours together. And there's something very healing and validating and moving about being able to be. Be heard and that time in one. Slot and not just to be heard, which you do such an extraordinary job of, but to be heard in such a safe environment. I've heard people say before, and this, of course, is one of our core values of creating safety and safe connections for people, but I've heard people say over and over this phrase of this feels like the safest and most sacred place that I've been. And we've even had people, as you know, over the years that come through Colorado that they literally want to stop by our office, in our new offices over the last couple years and just say, we just wanted to come back and see this place or to show it to my spouse or something like that. So say hi. Absolutely. Yeah. So let me move on with the clarity. And I won't take a lot of time on the remainder of these. But so there's time, there's space, and there's clarity. This is the third component that I think makes the intensive counseling process at restoring the soul so transformational. And this clarity really is. We will guarantee you two things and hope and pray for a third. I like to say the first thing is that if you come here within a short amount of time, usually by day three, we will guarantee that you'll have utter clarity about what's going on inside of you. And so many of the people that have come for intensives have been to several counselors. We know people that have gone to five and literally even up to 10 different therapists. And those people may be in their 50s or 60s, but they've spent a lifetime in counseling. And we say to them, so what's your understanding of what the problem is? And they say, I have no idea. Which I understand that having been a therapist in private practice and being someone who has trained Counselors for over 25 years, but that I have no idea is really sad because I think one of the things that therapists ought to do is to give clarity in a way where that clarity becomes a target. Now, in the ultra clinical worlds where I've worked in the past, like community mental health centers, state psychiatric hospitals, back in my early 20s, they call those treatment goals. You know, I used to work with 100% Medicaid and Medicare clients in some of those clinical settings. And you could not end a counseling session without writing down for insurance purposes, what are the top three treatment goals and what are the modalities that you're going to use? Now, we don't do that specifically, but we come up with targets. And the clarity that we get is based on what we call around here, a 360 degree assessment. And the first aspect of that assessment is client self reporting, where we have a really extensive self reporting inventory that's kind of like an intake, but it also goes into clinical symptoms and trauma history and deep wounding. Then we also have the face to face assessment when people come in and we hear their story and we hear what their hope is for their outcomes and goals. There's often specialized testing that we do to rule out more significant psychological issues that sometimes people will bring up or we want to rule out. And then finally, and you're somebody that actually started doing this, that has allowed for the rest of our team to start doing this, but that we confer with people's therapists, their caregivers and their healing team before they ever come, and then we do that afterwards so that before you come that we can be plugged into and aware of all that has been happening. And I like to think that that's our way of having greater clarity about what God's up to in an individual person's life when they meet with us so that we can hit the ground running as much as possible. And then after somebody leaves, we want to make sure that their caregiver, therapist, et cetera, is really apprised of what happened and how they can continue in such a way. You have thoughts about clarity? Well, you mentioned two promises and then a third that you hope for. What are those two promises or two guarantees for clients who come for intensives? Yeah, thanks for coming back to that because you well know that when I'm speaking and riffing, I'll just give a certain number and then I'll only give a couple of those. Number one is we give utter clarity about what the problem is. The second guarantee is that we will give clarity about what to do to move forward. Here's the problem, here's how you actually heal this. And not just say, oh, you need EMDR or oh, you need internal family systems or cognitive therapy or medication. But here's what the cutting edge empirical evidence based research says. Here's what best practices, here's in terms of what I'm experienced with you, the client in front of me, and your unique story, here's what you need to do to move forward. And sometimes 50 to 75% of that is outside of the intensive and beyond. And sometimes it's, here's what I'd like you to think about or journal about in your hotel room or your Airbnb tonight. And then that is sufficient. It really depends on the nature of the situation. The third thing that we can't guarantee, but that we pray for and we regularly see is actual healing along the way. You know, people will often leave here saying, this changed my life. I want, you know, these 10 people in my family or my friends or in my church to come here and experience this, this changed my life. Because it's not just the information and the clarity about what's wrong and how to heal it, but it's what actually happens in the session as people have safe connections with an informed, expert therapist. And then this, this vast space to experience the healing of God, oftentimes as much outside of our sessions as they're walking in nature or hiking or hanging out in a coffee shop or journaling, oftentimes as much happens outside of the sessions as in the sessions. And there's a cumulative effect in the intensives that I believe is miraculous and it's just beautiful to see. Yes. And I have seen it so many times myself. And it's such an honor and privilege to get to be on a journey with someone and be alongside them and also be leading and guiding them and be supporting them and launching them as they return home. One of the things that I was thinking of about what makes Restoring the Soul intensives different, in addition to everything we've already discussed, it's the fact that our program is custom built for each individual or couple that comes right. So we're solely focused on them. And this is not a cookie cutter program where they're fitting into what we do with everybody. They're not sharing us with four or five or six other clients or couples, but they get our time undivided, focused, and we customize the intensive to meet their needs. And those needs are different. Sometimes, you know, something I might do in the second week, I might end up doing in the first week because there it's, it's timely or something I might usually begin with, you know, I might wait till the fourth or fifth day and I'm always, as you mentioned, I'm always preparing ahead of time and then kind of processing after the session of what's needed, what direction, how do I best meet this client and what they're here for. So I love the clarity and I love the plan. And yes, we do see a lot of healing take place. And there's such a foundation, I think, that happens that when people leave, then they're stepping into just a different way of approaching their life back home. Yeah, we like to say that we launch people to do life differently. I want to just tell a quick story about this idea, Jules, of how we are, that we're customized, that we individualize, and that there's no cookie cutter programs or jumping through hoops. I had someone come here who knew our program well through our podcasts, and they had several family members come for multiple two week intensives and they were meeting with an individual therapist, and the therapist said, you need to go to Restoring the Soul and spend two weeks getting emdr. So they came here, they had listened to our podcast about emdr. They had read a book about emdr. They had even had a therapist prepare them for emdr. And when they got here after a couple of days, I said, good news, bad news. The bad news is we're not going to do emdr, but the good news is we're going to do what you need. And they were like, oh, well, that's disappointing. What do I need? And I said, rather than focus on your brokenness in all these places of trauma, I believe that if we go there, there's not enough resiliency and resourcing and calm in the nervous system yet. So we're just going to be focusing on building, identifying and building your strengths and instilling in you the ability to be present within your own body. And as we did that, some of the trauma came up, and for lack of a better term, it kind of dissolved because that person felt safe in their own body. And so what happened in this instance, and this is not what we do all the time, we dealt with the trauma indirectly. And in that person's case, if we had gone directly after it, I think that it would have taken a lot more than two weeks and it would have actually been re. Traumatizing, perhaps not very effective. Yes, you bring up a really good point. Part of our process at Restoring the Soul is initial intake, paperwork, and a consult with one of our therapists, sometimes even you or I, depending on the situation. And the point and purpose of that consult is to make sure not just that, that that client is a good fit for us, but that we're a good fit for that client. We know there's an investment of time and money and coming to Restoring the Soul, and we want to make sure up front that it's a good fit, that we're going to be able to help this individual or couple and that this individual or couple is going to be able to receive the help that they need and achieve the goals that they are setting out to achieve during their time here. So we, we do our best. We can't guarantee that it's always going to be a good fit. Sometimes we've actually said to folks, hey, we think based on your current situation, it might be a good idea for you to read these books and listen to these podcasts and get some weekly counseling for about six months or a year before you come out. And sometimes we say, to people that are just, you know, ready. Yes, you are ready. Let's get you on the books, come out and do an intensive. We're just not trying to sell a product or push a program for people. We really want to make sure that we're a good fit for them and they're a good fit for us. Which brings me to ask Michael, who typically attends a soul care intensive at Restoring the Soul. Yeah, this is one of my favorite questions to talk about, because the first answer is, everybody. When we first started out back in

2002 and we applied to become a 5: 31:16

1 not for profit organization, we started out just working with clergy and missionaries. So I was a professor for a number of years and through that context, worked a lot with Christian leaders and started to do some work of traveling and training missionary caregivers. And so I had a real passion and calling to be able to care for the caregivers, to be able to help the helpers, and immediately began to see this idea that if you drop the stone in the pond, the ripples go out concentrically. So if you impact a pastor, that impacts his marriage and his family, and then he's going to start living differently and it's going to trickle down from the pulpit. And we've seen some pretty dramatic ways where that's played out through the life of a Christian leader. But then through the years, and particularly as I wrote Surfing for God, which was released in 2012, which is hard to believe, more and more people started to come that were not clergy or missionaries or expatriates or overseas workers, but more folks that are just everyday laypersons from all different walks of life. And then I did some work with Christian Medical Dental association for member care for a while. So we work with a lot of physicians and then CEOs and entrepreneurs. And it's not surprising that of three of those four categories I just described, you know, clergy are often in crisis and their job is so demanding, as are missionaries and overseas workers, that they just want to come and deal with this all at once. They don't have the luxury of going to weekly counseling. And then physicians and CEOs and entrepreneurs are oftentimes, you know, people that they want to go in and operate and remove the tumor or the appendectomy and that kind of thing. And so they just want to get on, so to speak. And so a big part of our client base have been physicians over the years, but the people who come here are really people that are willing to do whatever it takes, people that have been doing the work and not gotten where they want to go. People that feel like they're stuck, people that are just sick and tired of being sick and tired, and for whatever reason feel like hourly counseling is not what they want. Yeah, I like that you say everyone can benefit. And it's true. Whether it's a youth pastor or a missionary or a CEO or somebody that's disillusioned with their faith, struggling in their marriage, struggling with singleness, struggling with coming back from, you know, being on the mission field, that we have a team that's able to meet people where they are. Some have been missionaries or pastors. We have those that specialize in betrayal, trauma, neurodiversity, soul care. Really being able to provide a real holistic approach in our thinking, as well as be able to treat and address a number of different presenting problems, if you will. Yeah, and that word holistic is a good segue. Julianne, to the last two aspects of these five identified aspects of why the intensives are so powerful. So number four is integration. And so by integration, I mean bringing together into wholeness. And we offer an integrated model of what I call clinical soul care. And if a counselor is in graduate school, they may take at a Christian counseling program or a seminary, a class called Integration. And what that often looks like is here's the Bible and theology in one hand, and here's psychology in the other hand. And that class is helping people figure out what they believe and how to blend those together. And at best, that looks like people coming up with their own independent model of what it means to bring their faith into their counseling. Trained in secular psychology. And at worst, it looks like what I call baptized secularism, where you take the field of psychology and secular science and you just sprinkle Christian verses on top of it. And what we do, largely through the training that I received through Dr. Dan Allender and Larry Crabb, which you and so many other people in our community have been influenced by. It's a model of understanding people theologically, understanding the soul, understanding people's stories in the same way that we would understand a novel or a passage in the Bible, and having an understanding of the culture that people live in and how that shapes them. And so that integration is all the different aspects of who we are, including the exiled parts of us, the wounded parts of us, the healthy parts of us, the strong parts of us, and then taking all of that and bringing it together through the best of clinical counseling psychology, empirical methods and theories and research about change with historic, ancient practices. In contemplative spirituality. And contemplative spirituality is really a way of being with God and living the Christian life that's more about being loved by God instead of striving or performing to have to love God or somehow be good enough in Christianity. And so we introduce people to practices of silence, solitude, stillness, not for the purpose of becoming a monk or changing their faith to a liturgical tradition if that's not their background, but because we were made to live in rhythms of solitude, silence, and stillness. And more than ever in our world that is on fire and gone crazy and fast, full of anxiety and uncertainty, this is just what people are craving. And it's now a way of integrating change and transformation in psychology in powerful ways that we're learning about our nervous system. Absolutely. The power of mindfulness, the power of presence and being present in the moment, that's where we engage with ourselves and with others, is in the present moment. I can't engage you in the past, I can't engage you in the future, but I can engage you right here in this moment. Yeah. Gabor Mate says in his book in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts in terms of addiction, but I would say this in terms of all compulsions and even anxiety. He says that addicts despise the present moment. And I like to say that it's impossible to be addicted anxious in the present moment if we're actually present to it. Hey, I want to move on for the sake of time and just talk about this final ingredient. We've talked about time, space, clarity, integration, and finally, momentum. Momentum is. We're not arrogant enough to believe that when people come to us that they have reached the pinnacle of all mental health and that they're just so lucky to be here and we're going to fix them. We assume that God, who began a work in them long ago, is completing that work before, during, and after they are with us. So there's a momentum coming in. There's a momentum that happens during our session, and the weight or the gravity of that momentum is often accelerated. And people are launched forward with that momentum. And the beautiful thing is that we provide a transition plan and then we discuss and actively work on aftercare for an individual to continue the gains that they've made. And this is really important. I think most people would not come to an intensive counseling program and say, I know, and I'm requesting that this once and for all fixes me, and on the last day I'm going to walk out fixed. But there is this internal sense within us that, okay, if I get a breakthrough, I'm not going to have to struggle like this anymore. But as Tim Keller once said, most of us have very little understanding of how long it takes to get this gospel, that we are deeply loved, that we are seen, soothe, safe and secure, as I like to say, deep inside of us. And so the process continues long after the intensive but substantial healing happens. During the intensive, yes, absolutely. I like to think that. And I've heard you say this before, but we. We're releasing people from something, and we're also releasing them into something, because the best work is the work after they leave here, where they go home and they're living differently, they're doing life differently, their relationships, they start to change because they're relating differently. And I love how you put that with he who began a good work in us, because that's so true that the best is yet to come.

Yeah, Philippians 1: 40:37

6. I love that verse. And that's a big basis upon what we do. Let me just end with this, that there's three levels of connection that we talk about here. There's connection to ourselves, there's connection to God, and there's connection to others. And when people struggle with relational issues and which, like in a marriage or with other people, and they come and say, I need help connecting in this relationship, or if they come and they have struggles connecting with God, it's oftentimes because there's a lost connection with themselves. They've lost themselves. And so we help people identify the barriers to those connections. And that's part A. That's the biggest part of healing. But then the best part of healing is actually, okay, now that those connections are there. What does it mean to live in this health? What does it mean to live in this shalom and to become who I'm meant to be? And the beautiful part is that we have been given a great gift at restoring the soul, where we get to see that happen in beautiful ways. And because I'm looking at your lovely face and picture on this computer screen, I think I just want to share with everybody that I'm the most luckiest man on the planet because I get to do this with you. Oh, boy. I think we could do a whole other podcast just on that connection, connecting with God, connecting to ourselves and connecting to each other. But well done. Great to be with you today. So thank you for listening to another episode of Restoring the Soul. We want you to know that Restoring the Soul is so much more than a podcast. What we're all about is helping couples and individuals get unstuck. You know how some people go to counseling or marriage therapy for months or even years and never really get anywhere? Our intensive programs help clients get unstuck in as little as two weeks. To learn more, visit restoringthesoul.com that's restoringthesoul.com.