Episode 407: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Curt Thompson, "The Look That Sees You"

Michael continues his conversation with Dr. Curt Thompson, picking up where last week left off. There's a tender ache running underneath the neuroscience here — the ten-year-old boy on a summer evening, looking for permission to just be a kid, and the mother who couldn't see it. Most of us carry some version of that missed look, and Curt names how the body remembers what the mind can't always explain.

From there, the conversation moves into the architecture behind that ache: the domains of consciousness and body, the difference between sensing and making sense, and why the left and right hemispheres were never meant to compete. Curt weaves in Scripture, his clinical work, and his own story to show how attention, attunement, and embodied presence shape not just our relationships but our capacity to receive love itself.

Dr. Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist, author of Anatomy of the Soul and The Soul of Shame, and a leading voice on the intersection of neuroscience and spiritual formation. This conversation is drawn from his 12-part video series, offered in conjunction with his book, The Soul of Desire, published by InterVarsity Press.

Transcript

— Introduction & Picking Up the Conversation

Brian Beatty 0:00

Welcome to Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick and our special soul care summer. I'm your producer, Brian Beatty. Last episode, Michael sat down with Dr. Curt Thompson for the first half of a rich conversation on the anatomy of the soul. And today, we pick right up where we left off. This is part two of that special in-person conversation drawn from Kurt's 12-part video series offered to you to complement his book, The Soul of Desire. Here's Michael, continuing with Dr. Curt Thompson.

Michael John Cusick 0:34

The

— Defining the Mind: Energy and Information

Michael John Cusick 0:35

field of neuroscience is changing so rapidly. And it's about 20 years old where there's this kind of new day in neuroscience. And so, therefore, these domains of the mind were not in Anatomy of the Soul. They're formalized by Dan Siegel, and you included them in your book, The Soul of Chain, right? If people want to access it there. But unpack these. And why is this important to understand these domains?

Curt Thompson 0:59

I'm going to go back and just wrap up our definition of the mind real quickly. There's one last piece of it that we didn't get to that I think is important. We talked about being an embodied and relational process that emerges from within and between brains, this notion that it's an emergent process and that it's taking place not just in my head, but between us, whose task it is to regulate the flow of energy and information. Again, a lot of a lot of words. But what's important about the task being to regulate the flow of energy and information is that it's helpful for us to know that all the things that the brain in my mind and the brain in your mind are calculating, taking in, sensing, imaging, all those things is the information. There's all kinds of information that we're processing all the time, all like the billions and trillions of bits of information that we are processing.

Michael John Cusick 1:52

Like temperature in a room, not just facts. Right.

Curt Thompson 1:56

But that information is first experienced as energy, right? So the mind is going to regulate the flow, right? This movement of energy and information. And the energy shows up in terms of all the biochemical, neurobiological events that are taking place throughout my body, throughout yours, and between us, like all the physics of light and sound and all the things that are happening. So when we say things like, oh, 60 to 90% of all human communication is nonverbal in nature, that's important to know because it means the energy that is being transmitted from me to you is in my facial expression, in my eye contact, my tone of voice. Those things that are important for us to give to patients as information for them to pay attention to, to say, I'd like for you this week simply to pay attention to your tone of voice. Now we should take the next seven days before we can get pay at pay attention to your eye content, pay attention to your body language, all those things that give people greater agency because we're helping to differentiate each part of the orchestra, no matter what kind of model we're using to help people bring that process along. So we are regulating, but again, we're regulating the flow of energy, all of this stuff that's happening, and information. And by information, we're talking about the meaning that we give it.

— When Anger Isn't Safe: A Personal Example

Michael John Cusick 3:23

Which has context of our story, uh, the symbolism you're talking about, you couldn't be angry. So someone's anger, you ascribe a meaning to that where that's unsafe or off-limits.

— Domain One: Consciousness and Attention

Curt Thompson 3:35

Exactly. And of course, my wife would be like, why are you like she would get anxious, if she would get anxious about something, that would be legitimate. I would stop talking and I would just like disappear. Not literally, but like disappear from the conversation. I would because I don't know what to do with this that's now happening within me. And so the way I'm trying to, I'm not regulating my emotion. I'm clamping down on it. I'm gonna control this, I'm gonna bury it, I'm gonna contain this because it's too overwhelming for me. And you think, like, Kurt, like if you were to, if you were to be in the room watching this, you'd be like, well, what's like she's just a little anxious, like, right, but for me, it's me being four years old and having to manage my mother's anxiety in ways that I didn't even know that I was doing and practiced for the next 18 years. And so we learn that the brain is always, our mind is always regulating this information, this energy, all that's happening, and the information, the meaning that we make of all of the energy that we're experiencing. And when we head into these domains of the mind, this is crucial because as we name each domain, we're gonna see how it has its own particular way in which what we're trying to do is to regulate the flow of energy and information. But not just me personally, it's me and you together. And the more aware that I am that this is a corporate process, the more I will be ready and willing that when I'm in trouble to say, Mike, can I help? I need your help. As opposed to what I'm usually used to doing, which is I'm gonna like white knuckle this. I'm gonna do this on my own because I can't afford to upset Michael. Because this is the story of my story that I tell. Because if I if I upset him and he's gonna be upset with me, they're like, like, I'm gonna disappear. When we talk about the domains, we start with the domain of consciousness. This is the first one. And we ask the questions of are you awake? Are you alert? And are you attuned? The primary brain function of this domain is the function of attention. We ask the question, how well are you paying attention to what you're paying attention to?

Michael John Cusick 5:53

Say that again. How well are you paying attention to what you're paying attention to? Exactly. I had to repeat that because there's a dumpster outside the window. We're just going to keep that in, but I got distracted and I wasn't paying attention. But I've heard you say that before, and that's a really important practice.

Curt Thompson 6:07

And

— The Ignition Key and Missing the Look of Love

Curt Thompson 6:08

so we give patients exercises to do to first of all introduce them to the reality that they actually have more agency to regulate and direct their attention than they are aware of, and also to give them the experience and awareness that like their attention goes lots of places quite automatically that they don't know that it's going and takes them down all kinds of rabbit holes where they wake up to find themselves in trouble. And like, how did I get here? Well, as we like to say, the attention is the ignition key of the mind, in that there's nothing that we do that we do that is not a function of a shift in my attention. And so we want to pay attention to what we're paying attention to. Dan Siegel likes to say, we also want to pay attention to what our intention is. What am I intending to do? So we're paying attention to what we're paying attention to in order then to not let my old traumatized brain automatically hijack my attention and take it places that had been protective for me, but that also in the long run disintegrate my mind, either because I'm not very well differentiated, or those undifferentiated parts are not being linked together with other parts of my mind, and therefore I'm not going to be linked with you. But I need that for flourishing. It is not good for man to be alone. This is God waking people up to say, like, for those who have ears to hear, do I? How many people who Jesus said this to just blew right past that? Right? The rich young ruler in Mark chapter 12, where the only gospel record that we have where Jesus looked at him, he looked at him and loved him. And I keep thinking, wow, he missed the look. Everything was happening, and somehow all that was happening to the ruler made it difficult for him to attune to, to see Jesus looking at him with love. We take care of clients, we take care of patients on a regular basis, who we are loving and they are missing the look. I have parts of my own story that had not seen the look of love. So I'm like 10 years old, and I'm in my front yard on a Wednesday evening playing football. And I grew up in an evangelical Quaker community, and there were just an infinite number of rich, good, and beautiful things about that. And in a small town in Ohio, we were in church Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening prayer meeting. And I was the only person under 40, under age 40, who would ever be in these Wednesday evening prayer meetings. My parents would go take me, and I'm like looking around and wondering, like, I'm not really, I don't really quite get it. But and there's like, you know, 15 people in this room where my pastor is leading a Bible study and prayer and so forth and so on. But like there I am. But this one night, my mother, it's in the summer, we could walk to church. My mother is walking to church. It's about time to go to church. And I'm playing with my friends, warm summer evening, doing what a 10-year-old should be doing on a Wednesday evening in the summer. And she walks out of the house, comes out of the sidewalk, and she stops and she looks at me and says, Are you coming with me to prayer meeting tonight? Now I was aware at the moment that my father was not with her. He usually went, but not always. And I said to her, Do I have to? And she said to me, Where do you think Jesus would want you to be?

Michael John Cusick 10:00

So there's a right answer and a wrong answer to that question when you.

Curt Thompson 10:33

And so

— Domain Two: The Body and the Vertical Domain

Curt Thompson 10:34

again, anything that is good about my life, it's because of my parents. There are many, many, many things about my life that are rich and good, that in no small part are because of my parents. And there are parts about my life that really like like never got out of first gear because of my parents. And I have to work through that. But some of what that means is that like I'm trained to expect that certain things about me are just not going to be seen. And I don't know that I'm training my brain to do this. That attention is like I'm paying attention to anger in order to bury it. I'm paying attention to anxiety in order to fix it. I'm not paying attention to what I'm paying attention to or how I am, and nobody else is helping me do this. Again, this is we need a conductor to help us do that. So that's so we ask patients this question that attention is where everything starts. It's the ignition gate. How do you do that? That's domain number one, because everything else flows from there. Domain number two is the domain of the body, or what we call the vertical domain of the mind. And we talk about this, uh, your trainees who know much about Dan's work, and this has now become kind of this universal kind of brain in the palm of your hand kind of trick that we do, right? I've kind of added this notion that your forearm is actually your spinal cord, right? And everything we like to say it, the brain operates bottom to top and right to left. And this is important to train our patients to know that, like, well, first we sense, and then we make sense of what we sense. And this is what we're doing in nano and microseconds all the time. And the very things that I've made sense of now circle back to become things that I sense because I'm making meaning, I'm providing information for good or for bad, it circles back. Exactly. Right. And so I'm either going to expand into this emerging process or I'm gonna clamp down in response to what feels traumatizing in the moment. But the moment that we start to invite people to turn their attention, domain number one, to their body, my spinal cord, what my body is sensing, my brainstem, my flight or fight mechanism that's constantly radaring around, looking for what is it okay to be here? Do I need to leave? And if I can't leave, but it's not okay, am I able to fight? And if I can't, well, I just collapse. And then moving to my limbic circuitry up into my limbic circuit, this sense of like, this is where emotion beyond the automaticity of flight or fight emerges from. This limbic circuitry, what are we feeling even in primary ways? We talked about the difference of primary and secondary emotion, this sense that primary emotion are the things that are taking place even in my body before it reaches conscious awareness, in which I would say, I'm afraid, I'm ashamed, I'm sad, I'm angry, I'm happy. And then from there, this limbic circuitry, then we move into the prefrontal cortex. This that's on top. We like to say that it's on top, this middle prefrontal cortex that serves as my conductor. But as we like to remind people, my conductor, in order for it to do what it wants to do for my orchestra, it needs to go to conductor school. My middle prefrontal cortex needs my good friends, my parents to train it. To be, I need to be seen by you in order for my middle prefrontal cortex to register. Oh, this is what it feels like to be seen, and then it can do the job of helping to bring the rest of the parts of my orchestra along because it's going to conductor school.

Michael John Cusick 14:13

Can I

— The Prefrontal Cortex as Conductor

Michael John Cusick 14:14

ask a question, Kurt? I have been told, or I read somewhere along the way, that when the limbic system activates and increases and there's a fight or flight or freeze mode, but the prefrontal cortex dials down. So it's like our cognitive ability to comprehend and understand and manage it is decreased, but our nervous system is increased. And that's a catch-22.

Curt Thompson 14:37

Right. And it all depends on how strong and how well trained the middle prefrontal cortex has become. Exactly. So if my conductor has done all the good work at conducting and training, then it knows how to help regulate these things. But if my conductor has not done that, then when disintegrating experiences occur and my brainstem and my limbic circuitry start to actually expand, the conductor doesn't have the skill set to help regulate them. Again, not control them. Words are important to regulate them. And anatomically, we say, and we can, again, train patients to know this, that your part of the task of the middle prefrontal cortex, being anatomically close to the limbic circuitry and close to the brainstem, is to literally send fibers, send neurons that speak to and regulate these things. So for instance, my brainstem and limbic circuitry were activated when I'm when my daughter sighs and rolls her eyes at me when she's 14, and I'm ready to, I'm ready to have a fight. My prefrontal cortex on that one rare occasion was able to calm down the brass. It was able to quiet it in order for other parts of the orchestra, my thinking brain, my left brain, to be brought online and to be reflective of and say, wait a minute, pause, breathe, be curious, ask your daughter what's going on. Can we have a conversation about this? As opposed to the chaos that could have easily ensued had I just simply lost my temper, which I could do. And so this notion of paying attention to the embodied self is crucially important. Now we have lots of work that's now been done in the last 10 to 15 years. Vander Koch's work, trauma in the body's work, Pat Ogden's work, all these kinds of things that are really helpfully enabling us to actually begin the process of psychotherapy in the fashion in which the brain operates. For a long time, our therapy has been left to right and top to bottom. I'm going to think my way into my emotion and make my emotion downregulate my body. When in fact, that's not how the brain works. We sense and then we make sense of what we sense. And so we find that doing psychotherapy work in line with the way the body actually works is so much more effective. Hence, what we have with all the body work that we're doing, right? Where we have the work with EMDR, the work with neurofeedback, a range of different interventions to helping us pay in touch to this second domain of the mind.

Michael John Cusick 18:17

Quick uh question. As you're talking about this uh left to right and top to bottom as opposed to bottom to top and right to left, it strikes

— How the Western Church Works Against the Brain

Michael John Cusick 18:26

me that the Western church uh post-Enlightenment has largely been that way. Get more information, uh, and then your emotions will follow, and then you'll act the right way. And what we're doing in your work, part of restoring the soul, part of your work with uh being known, is helping people the way that they're designed and the way their nervous system develops to um be attentive, to be awake, to be conscious, and the spirituality flows out of that. Because as you've written in an enemy of soul, uh God inherits the same nervous systems that we've been given and have lived uh our life with.

Curt Thompson 19:06

Right. I'm struck in the in this next book uh that I'm that I've written, I am just recognizing that you know, in

— Sensing Before Believing: John's Gospel

Curt Thompson 19:14

the first chapter of John, which frankly, I I don't know in all the scriptures if there's a more beautiful passage. Um when he talks about how we beheld the son. We read John having written it, and we think, oh, this is the truth because we read it, because it's been preached, we heard the words. But the reality is that John first has to behold him. The disciple that Jesus loved. At the Last Supper first has to lay his head on his breast. Before we write about what we beheld, first we sense, then we make sense of what we sense. It's not a surprise that when you walk into a Greek Orthodox church, you're overwhelmed with your senses long before the word is ever preached. But what we would say is like, no, no, no, no, no. The word is being preached according to how your brain actually receives it. Yes. And so this, I mean, I think that you're absolutely right. You know, we say, look, uh really, really good preachers are in trouble if they can't tell great stories. Because, you know, if you tell me a great story, I'll hold it forever. If you just give me an exposition on scripture, which is not a bad thing, like unless I'm gonna go home and study it like I'm studying for my history exam, I'm not gonna take it in. I have to sense it, and then I make sense of what I'm sensing. And so, you know, we find how many of the people that we take care of come into our spaces having had experiences in which some of the barrenness that they experience, even from an emotional standpoint, from the standpoint of attachment, actually is a direct result of the way in which they're churched. And the way in which they're being churched is actually pushing against the grain of how the mind works.

Michael John Cusick 21:34

And so we could do a whole separate episode on that. And so I digressed with my question, but we'll definitely come back to

— Connecting Neurology, Spirituality, and Relationship

Michael John Cusick 21:43

that because um ultimately what you have done with anatomy of the soul, the soul of shame, and your teaching is connecting our neurological embodied design with our spiritual design and our relational design. And so what our relationships will only be as healthy as our nervous system and our neurology and our anatomy.

Curt Thompson 22:06

And here's where I would emphasize to our trainees that are listening to this never underestimate the power of your embodied presence when you are with the people that you're with.

— Domain Three: The Horizontal Domain and the Hemispheres

Curt Thompson 22:15

Never underestimate that. Never underestimate what those seven nonverbal cues are doing for you and for them at any given time. That's one take the message that we have. And so, in the same way that with domain number one, we have attentional exercises that we give to people to strengthen that they pay attention to, and then what they pay attention to, meditation practices, the breath, and so forth, which is an exercise that kills lots of birds with one stone. We also with the body, we do this thing called the body scan, in which we want people to practice paying more and more attention to their experience of their body at any given time, which enables them then to be aware of anything that their body is telling them at any time outside of that particular time that they're paying attention to their body explicitly. The third domain that we talk about is the horizontal domain. And here's where we, again, bottom to top, right to left, we're moving into this horizontal domain between the right and the left hemispheres. Ian McGilchrist, in his book, The Master and His Emissary, writes so elegantly about how not just the brain works in a right-left hemispheric mode, but also the degree to which, culturally, in the last 400 years, we've become dominantly, overdominantly, a people that function primarily out of their left hemisphere. Well, what does that mean? Well, the right brain tends to develop first from birth to about 18 to 24 months of age. The right brain is the primarily most active hemisphere in its development, meaning the neurons that are connecting within it are happening, that connection process is happening more quickly than it is with the left hemisphere that starts to come online at about that 18 to 24 month place of place of development. At which point, all those things that are going on in the right hemisphere are holistic processing, are sensing things all at once. My nonverbal cues, my sense of emotional tone in the room, my fenchoa sense of like how things are, my sense of uh the way in which people's intention is. This is where when we get to mirror neurons, there's a dominant way in which my right hemisphere plays a role in like sensing your intention, whether you're saying it explicitly or not. So there are a lot of things that happen. And this is, of course, as we'll get to when we talked about shame, this is why shame is so potent, because it is so actively present in the activity of the right hemisphere. But then it uses the left hemisphere to cope with it in ways that are unhelpful. By the time my left hemisphere comes along, I then acquire this logical, linear, and linguistic form of processing in a line, which words follow, and they're going to be logical. And they're also quite literal. I tend to take in literal things with my left hemisphere. Now, the beauty of how these are to work, and again, like this orchestra, I've got one section of the orchestra here, one section of the orchestra here, and many of us grow up in settings in which different parts of these did or didn't get developed very well. If I grow up in a house where emotion doesn't get paid much attention to, as we'll talk about when we talk about attachment, then I turn to a more dominant left hemispheric way of being in and surviving the world. What's logical, what's linear, what makes sense, how can I fix problems, how can I like sort this out, keep things neat and tidy. All those kinds of things, my left brain is actually doing extra work it was never intended to do because it's trying to compensate for what the right hemisphere didn't really get an opportunity to do to develop. And so you've got strings that are making up for work the brass was supposed to play. Wow. And the strings can do work for a certain time, but like then you don't get the bait, you don't get the ninth symphony. And at some point, our brain's gonna run out of gas. At some point, the strings can't keep doing their job and somebody else's job at the same time. And so we then give people exercises as to how do you now pay attention to these several different ways that we know the right hemisphere operates. We give people exercises how to strengthen that. How do we then give people ways to exercise the left hemisphere in the service to the right? Not to dominate it, but to serve it because that's its primary purpose. Look, I need to know how things work. That's my logical left brain work. I need to know the process of changing my tire to my car. But I need to know it because I want to drive my car. I want to drive my car to pick up my wife at the airport. I want to meet my bride. That's why I need to know how to change my tire. I need to know the math so that I can build the bridge. So that people can cross the river to get to work. Because they gotta feed their families. I need to know this, but I'm knowing this, all for the purpose of building beauty and goodness in the world, which is really my right hemisphere. Talking back to it's God that has made it.

Michael John Cusick 27:44

So the right brain is what perceives and experiences beauty and therefore spirituality.

Curt Thompson 27:49

Right. And it's I want to be very clear, McGillchrist is clear about this, and and we we we do this

— The Right Brain, Beauty, and Spirituality

Curt Thompson 27:53

for training purposes. It's important to know that there are few things that the right brain does that the left brain cannot also do, and vice versa. Over time, we practice doing certain things over the course of our lives such that dominance takes place in one for certain functions and takes place in another for other functions. But it's not as if the left couldn't perceive beauty or the right doesn't have space for language. In fact, we know that it does for certain words. But the one thing we do know that is fairly categorically different between these two, this horizontal, is that the right brain pays attention to the world in a here and now we with kind of posture. I'm going to mean with you. Presence. The left brain pays attention to the world more in a more distant posture because it needs to. It needs to be able to look out, see. There's no danger, it needs to be able to process things, it needs to be able to analyze things. So the way that it postures is an analytical posture. There's distance between it and the world in order for me to survive. In order for me to enjoy, I need to be with the world with my right brain. I need to be able to perceive the world and properly discern the world with my left brain. We'll talk later about how shame tends to hijack that process and turning my discernment process into a condemnation process. Because both require distance in order for me to see it. And so teaching people this helps them say, oh, this is my left brain trying to usurp its role because it's had to, because it's doing the best it can try to help me survive in my world that I grew up in or in the world that I now occupy in my job or in my church.

Brian Beatty 29:55

So we've wrapped up another episode of Restoring the Soul. We want you to know that Restoring the Soul is so much more than a podcast. In fact, the heart of what we have done for nearly 20 years is intensive counseling. When you can't wait months or years to get out of the rut you're in, our intensive counseling programs in Colorado allow you to experience deep change in half day blocks over two weeks. To learn more, visit restoringtheoul.com. That's restoring the soul.com.