Dr. Alison Cook is a psychologist, host of The Best of You podcast, and the author of The Secure Soul — and the first line she wrote for that book was: a part of me doesn't like God very much. She assumed her editor would cut it. Her editor said it was staying.

That moment — a prayer walk in London, an eight-year-old part of her that didn't want to be there — opens a conversation with Michael about what it actually looks like to pay attention to the inner life. Alison and Michael talk about bids for connection: the tiny, persistent movements within us that signal something needs to be seen. They discuss how trust breaks — not just through the big wounds, but through the ordinary absence of presence, the childhood of empty sunlit rooms. They get into the shadow self, the young one, and what the difference between bruised and broken might mean for people who don't see themselves in the language of shattered things. And they talk about what it looks like to train the soul — not through willpower or discipline, but through two movements: recognize and return.

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