163 - The Soul Of Shame w/ Curt Thompson

You're listening to the Pure Desire Podcast. Your safe place to find hope, healing, and freedom from sexual addiction, betrayal, and relationship issues. What's up, people? I'm your host, Trevor Windsor, and you're listening to episode 163 of the Pure Desire podcast. Here joining me as always, is my co host, Nick Stumbo.

We're on a mission from God. We're getting the band back together.

Okay.

I'm starting.

You've got to know this movie. I thought this one would be in your wheelhouse.

Is it from Bible Man?

No. John Belushi.

Okay.

Dan Aykroyd.

Blues Brothers.

Blues Brothers.

That's a great movie.

We're on a mission from God.

Tell everyone to watch that movie. But it's a great movie.

In truth, I don't know if I've seen the movie other than just a few clips and them, you know, trying to recruit the band and saying they're on a mission from God.

It's so good. Okay.

But hey, Trevor, you and I, we're on a mission from God too, but we're not getting a band together.

I mean, we. We could. I mean, I was a worship pastor. You were a singer in a quartet.

I don't really play an instrument, though. I mean, I fiddle around on the piano, but I.

Your voice is an instrument, Nick. Okay, we're going to go. We could be like a boy band. So far off topic, It'd be called man band technically at this point. Okay, so we have a really, really good episode for you. But a couple things really quick. First, if you're not subscribed to the podcast, do it, don't wait. You can find us on all the major platforms and if you give us a review, it helps other people find. The podcast means a lot to us. Second, follow us on social media, primarily Facebook and Instagram. We're also on Twitter, sort of earedesirepdmi, if you also like to consume video content. We have some of the episodes and clips of the episodes up on YouTube. Just search Pure Desire Ministries. And then lastly, the Pure Desire Summit. It is coming this fall. The first ever Pure Desire Summit. You have heard almost every episode for probably months now about it.

Yeah, all summer, basically.

Right. Things have changed. We are now fully going virtual.

Yes. God bless our governor, Trevor, but it's Covid.

It's more Oregon.

Yes, Oregon is being very conservative and, you know, depending on how you fall on that camp, you agree or disagree, which really isn't the point. But we really did look at a lot of factors. What's happening in our state and schools and travel and hotels. And just for a lot of factors, it wasn't going to make sense to try to do the in person, which is hard for a lot of us that have been looking forward to a gathering. But we also see the opportunities here that we can do some really great things online. It gives people the ability to spread out the amount of time they have to watch it, to be able to attend all the breakouts where in person they'd have had to pick a couple. And we're just going to do our best to have fun with it. It's a shift for us and probably for people that we're thinking of coming, it's a shift as well. But that's kind of the name of the game right now in our world. And we just, we think the timing is good for this message of a gathering for all those that are just a part of the Pure Desire community. Because really, our hope is to encourage people. And I think if there's ever a time we need to be encouraged, whether we do it online or could have done it in person, this is a good time for it. And so I'm excited about the topics I'm hearing from speakers and what they're going to present. And it's, it's unique information. It's not like videos you could have seen somewhere else or at an event somewhere. We're designing new things just for this event. So, yeah, really looking forward to it.

So you can register. It's $59 for the virtual ticket. And then we're gonna also up that starting in September. You will also have. I think it's $79. It'll jump up to that. So if you wanna grab your registration now, do it. You'll be able to access it through our website. More information will be coming out on that. But you can go register@puredesire.org summit.

Okay.

Like I said earlier, we had. I mean, just recently we've had some really, really good episodes with some guests that are fairly new to me, and one of them being Jenna Reimersma that episode Internal Family Systems. But this one, we sat down with Kurt Thompson, who's an author, who's a, I think a medical doc. I mean, he's just incredible. He's got a lot of different things he's doing, but merges neuroscience and spirituality. And we talked to him about a place of expertise for him, which is. Shame.

Yeah. What I really appreciate about Kurt, you know, when you think about it, really, brain science, neurobiology is a relatively new field of study. And as is often the case, church culture and Christianity kind of lags behind new things happening in the world. And so to come across Christian neurobiologists and people that have a deep understanding of what we're learning about the brain and can accurately and biblically apply that to faith is incredibly rare. But that's exactly what Kurt does. And in this episode, I think that's what will be refreshing to people, is to see how the brain and shame and the Bible all fit together when you understand some of these things really seamlessly and. And how shame isn't just a concept or an emotion, but it has a physical, literal impact on us. And so I think it'll be really. This is gonna be mind opening for a lot of people to see what happens in our lives. And I think Kurt does a great job talking through it, and it was.

Really refreshing how vulnerable he was. And I mean, got emotional a couple times and was really cool to just see his heart on display as well. So just real quick. So you know as well, Kurt is our featured speaker at this year's Peer Desire Summit. And so if you like his stuff or interested in hearing more from him, we have him as our featured speaker this year. So interesting. Enjoy this episode. It's a really good one. Kurt Thompson, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for being here.

It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

I'm going to be honest, if you are watching this episode, you will see the beautiful bookshelf behind Kurt. And I'm a little jealous. I feel like I've got like a mini version behind me, but it looks like there was some design put in there, so I'm just throwing some appreciation your way as we get going.

Thanks.

Thank you for our listeners. And I think that I would be in this too. I'm fairly unfamiliar with your work until recently, Kurt. So for our listeners who don't know who you are, what you do, what you're involved with, can you kind of just fill our listeners in?

Sure. Well, I would like to say first of all that I'm like, most of my life's work happens in my house with my wife of 33 and a half years. And we have two adult children now, a daughter who's married and lives in Nashville, and a son who is currently living with us in Covid, but was in Manhattan before then. And if Covid does not, you know, pave too wide a path, we'll be headed to grad school in California in the fall. But what I do for a living is that I'm a psychiatrist in private practice in Northern Virginia, and I see individuals and couples. And we also, in our practice, do a lot of group work, which we will probably, and may, we may have talked a little bit about here today that we like to call these groups confessional communities. And the reason why we talk about, we call them those kinds of things, with that word confessional being much more broadly applied than just the whole notion of confessing things for sin. So my work in particular is that I do work at the interface of neuroscience and Christian spiritual formation. And we like to say that. I like to say that the work that I do with patients, whether it is in consulting work with businesses or schools, whether it's in psychotherapy with individuals, whether it's in group work, that we really do try to help people tell their stories more truly. And by the word true, I don't mean anything in the modernist use of the word. Truth is in terms of just facts on the ground, but truth, as in trough, as in faithful, as in faithful to the way the world really is. And in that sense, we are trying to remain faithful to a Christian anthropology of the world. We're trying to understand all the neuroscience and all the spiritual formation, all these practices that we eventually invite people to engage in through a lens of a biblical narrative. And recognizing that we live in a world in which we would pretty quickly turn to science for being the authority on all things and the way that we think about how we know things in the way that we think about science, that that's the authority for all things. And the biblical narrative, in fact, invites us to understand that the world operates through a different, even higher set of kind of laws, if you will, about how humans engage with God and with each other. And. And so that is what informs our work. And hopefully that's a pretty clear picture of what I do. It's a little long winded, but that's what I do.

That's great.

Yeah. Kurt, I'm sure a lot of our listeners maybe have encountered you through a couple of your books. You've written the Anatomy of the Soul and the Soul of Shame. And I know that in both of those you do what you just described in terms of being both a neuroscientist, but also, you know, discussing Christian faith and practice. And for a lot of people, that's still kind of a foreign idea of really combining those two things. Well, I mean, it's one of the things we run up against in our ministry with pure desire that as we try to help people understand brain science and addiction science. What's actually happening in the brain. For some Christians, you know, it's that reaction like, well, you know, all we need is Jesus in the Bible and what's this science brain stuff? So how do you respond or help someone who's coming from that perspective kind of embrace this idea that that neuroscience and our Christian faith and practices really can function together? How do you respond to them?

Well, I think, Nick, there are a couple of things that I do. One is just it's really helpful to give people a quick tour of history, right. And like history tells us that there was a time when we didn't separate the world into a thing that we call spiritual spirituality and the material world. There was a time for the first 1200 years, probably after the birth of Christ, that the Christian experience didn't do that. We didn't separate that, that history would tell us that we've come to a place where we've separated those two realms. We think that there is a spiritual realm and that there is a physical, material realm. Yeah. And we don't really recognize that the way we even, that we even think about that is a really non Christian idea. And so that's so part of what's important is really to kind of help, you know, kind of educate people about history, which you think like, well, what's the psychiatrist, you know, doing about that? You know. But the other thing that's really intriguing about all this is that the neuroscience itself that we are learning about actually points back to the notion of the importance of telling stories that we don't like. Facts aren't just like self evidence. Facts become what they are because we decide what they're going to be. We make up a story about a fact. We make up stories about ourselves all the time, including the story that we tell that says that science and spirituality don't have anything to do with each other. Like that's something that we are making up. But when we go right back to the biblical text itself, and this is where especially people of faith, I think, at least in my experience, have found this to be helpful. Biblical faith. When we look at the Genesis narrative of creation, we see that we were dirt and were breath. Lord God formed the man from the dust of the earth. We breathed the breath of life into man's nostrils and man became a living being. We are dirt, right? We are material and we are the breath of God. And if you take either one away from us, we stop being who we are. And so we can't talk about. We can't talk about who we are as human beings without talking about the mechanics of how our material cells work. And this is what science really does. Science describes the mechanics of being just the mechanics. Science does not give us meaning. Our stories give us meaning. And we always have to be asking everybody the question, and in what story do you believe you're living? Because everybody's living in one human beings from the time they're about, from the time we start to acquire language, use language to tell stories, and from that time on, we collaboratively tell those stories with other people. And then we decide what story we believe we're living in. And, you know, I'd like to say that I believe that I'm living in a gospel story somewhere between the resurrection and the perugia. I think that's where I'm living. But, you know, somewhere today, I'm going to demonstrate that I don't believe I'm living in that story because I'm going to get irritated at my wife. I'm going to get anxious about something. I'm going to do something ungodly, at which point I will be demonstrating that I don't really believe that Jesus is in charge. I don't really believe that I don't have to be anxious. I'm turning to some other pagan God. I'm turning to something else within myself. I'm turning to arousal, I'm turning to money. I'm turning to my physical whatever. But all of that is part of a story that I believe I'm living in, in that moment. And so the mechanics of how we operate, which is what neuroscience is about, it's what all science is about, it's about the mechanics, is not the same thing as meaning. But when, as we'd like to say, you can, as Leslie Newbegin famously said, you can. You know, if an alien were to come to Earth and come upon a locomotive sitting on a train track, they might look at that locomotive and they might be able to be smart enough to take it apart and figure out how it works, but they would not, on their own be able to come up with, answer the question, why is this thing here? What is it like? Why whoever thought this thing up? Why did they build this thing?

Yeah.

And so for believers, it's really helping them recognize that as we learn about the mechanics, as we learn about the science of how the brain works and how the brain and relationships interact with each other, it actually is a way for us to validate what St. Paul writes in Romans 1:20 for from the beginning of creation, mankind has known from the creation about God's power and his nature. And that we look to the mechanics of the world actually to point to the gospel if our hearts are open to that reality. And so remind people that if we're going to cut the mechanics out, you, you cut out half of how it is that God's trying to get to you. And it is an invitation to see beauty in the world and then be curious about the mechanics of how that beauty operates. It is a way for us to be invited fully into the heart of God.

It's so good. I think of a time when it was a young life thing I was at with a bunch of kids from Spain. They had come over, we took them to young life camp and the gospel was pretty much laid out right, like to these kids for arguably the first time. And we talked about the weightiness of sin. And I remember they had us walk outside and this is, we use the language, a personal promise. That's something that is experiential, that's tied to a truth, you know, from scripture. And I walked outside and we're supposed to really just evaluate the weight of our sin and who God is. And, and I don't know if you guys have ever seen this, but sheet lightning was happening as we walked outside. And sheet lightning. I wish I could show pictures, but like it's basically, it looks like flashbulbs in the sky. It's lightning that's happening in this big cloud covering. And I remember at that moment feeling like, wow, the Lord through creation just showed up in a way that experientially for me showed the power that he has showed the, the majesty that he's created. And so for me it just has been a really cool thing to be able to tie those things together. And that's one of my favorite things about this conversation and what pure desire, what we do is we tie those two things together. Because at that moment my story changed. There was a new flavor to that story where I believed God was in more control maybe than I did before.

Right. I think one last thing I'll say about it and we can move on. When I first began to do work in this field of interpersonal neurobiology, back about now, it's probably about 15 or 16 years ago, and began to introduce patients to these ideas. This is before the first book was written, Anatomy of the Soul, one of the first things I started to notice is that as we would talk about things like the work of the vertical brain or the Horizontal brain, the right and the left hemispheres. When we talk about neuroplasticity, how long it takes for the brain to make changes. As we would talk about attention and attunement and attachment processes and so forth. I would have people that would come into my office and at times unsolicited, tell me about how their relationship of God was changing in ways they would never have predicted because of what they were learning about how the brain works. It wasn't just a matter of then that they are more attuned to nature and therefore they're like easily impressed with God as much as like boots on the ground. What I am going to now practice, like meditating, for instance, picturing in your mind hearing Luke 3:22, you are my son, whom I love, and I'm pleased with recognizing that that practice over and over again neuroplastically changes the content of your right hemisphere to the point where you now have a viscerally in literally in your solar plexus, you have a differently felt sense of the presence of God was giving people evidence, if you will, that was in fact visceral in nature. It was not abstract, it was not logical, it was not rational information or evidence that we westerners and we modernists like to turn to. But it is the kind of evidence that is suggestive of what I tell people that until we know it in our bodies, the truth isn't true for us yet. It doesn't mean that it can't be abstractly asserted that it's true, but it isn't ultimately true for us, whatever that is, until I have it in my abdomen, in my chest, in my face, in my hands and in my legs. And so hence what does it mean for us to love the Lord our God with all of our mind? And when we in interpersonal neurobiology terms talk about the mind as an embodied and relational process, it gives us a little better picture of how we can then do that very thing of loving God with all of our mind.

Yeah, so, and this is. I'm excited to get your take on this question over the last. It's been about a year now for me, really pressing into spiritual disciplines, understanding more my personality and how I'm wired. How would you say that understanding this stuff, the neuroscience understanding, like you said, the story, getting a big, a bigger picture of the story that's going on. How. How would you suggest maybe are a couple ways that people can implement that understanding of the neuroscience into spiritual disciplines?

Well, and you know, as Richard Foster rightly says, disciplines for Discipline's sake is, you know, it's a pretty barren undertaking that what we're really trying to do with any discipline is that we are really trying to free. Free. Now, Foster doesn't say this in particular, but what I would say is that we are really trying to free our body. Relational complex, right? That our mind, we're really trying to free it up to do what it was made to do. And so in the same way that if I'm going to practice piano scales, what that does, if I practice those piano scales faithfully, it frees me to play Beethoven's fifth piano concerto. That's what it frees me to do. It doesn't just free me to, like, run all over the keyboard, however, I want to know. It invites me and frees me to do these other kinds of things. So, for instance, if I'm going to give you a simple breathing meditation practice, that would be like the Jesus prayer, right? A simple meditative prayer practice. Foster talks about this. Others have written about this. That kind of practice, literally. So that would be a discipline of meditation on the scriptures or on your breath, however we're doing this, that, for instance, literally strengthens the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the right part of the front part of your brain. It strengthens the connections between that attentional mechanism, the rest of my body, in such a way that I am able to remain present in the present moment, despite the fact that basically all hell's breaking loose around me, right? I've got things going on. If I'm. If I'm working to remain in the present moment over and over and over again. That's like going to the gym. But I'm not going to the gym just to go to the gym. I'm going to the gym to work out. So I can be a better basketball player, so I can be a better tennis player, so I can do other things, those kinds of things, then it means that when I come home and my kids and my spouse or I'm in the office or I'm tempted to go someplace where I don't want to go in my mind, I become much more acutely aware of the movement of my mind, of my anxiety, my distress. I become much more sensitively aware of it. Long before I used to become aware of it, where it used to be that I would already be down the rabbit hole. Temptation. Before I'd even recognized that I was down the rabbit hole. Now I become aware that I'm sensing, imaging, feeling, thinking. Things that alert me to the fact that I'M approaching the rabbit hole. And if at that point I'm also going to recognize that, oh, the mind is an embodied and relational process that I don't ever flourish apart from connection to other human beings, that means that if I'm getting close to the temptation of going someplace where I don't want to go, it's not just a function of, like, I'm living out my sinful self. It's also a function that in that moment, I actually need to be connected to somebody. I've lost some sense of connection within me. And what that means. I got to pick up my phone and text some of my friends to say, like, I'm getting close to the rabbit hole. But I'm not doing that just to keep from going down the rabbit hole. I'm doing that because I'm having to do the disciplined work of recognizing that the serpent in Genesis 3 did not just haul off and hit the first couple in the head with a rounder. Right? I mean, it was like you read Perelander, you read CS Lewis Perelander. It was a long conversation that it starts. It's a long on ramp onto the interstate of separation from God. And so those things that I eventually, you know, send me down the rabbit hole, they start, like hours, days, weeks beforehand. And so my sense of being cut off from others, if I'm practicing these kinds of disciplines, fasting, meditation, scripture, service, submission, confession, all these things in the way I tend to think about it, what it does is it makes us increasingly aware of the activity of our mind, increasingly aware of the moments in which I am less connected to myself and to others, increasingly aware of my need for, as my friend Dan Siegel would like to say, my need to be either seen, soothed, safe, or secure. And if I'm missing any one of those, I'm going down the rabbit hole. I can't expect to just do that all by myself. Certainly there will be times when my own personal agency is going to be the only thing that's going to keep me doing that. But I can't routinely assume that I have to be practicing being connected to others at the same time that I'm practicing some of these disciplines. I hope that's helpful. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I just love the reminder, and we talk about it a lot on other topics in the podcast, just how much of a gift self awareness is, not only to ourselves, but to others. When we begin to recognize why I'm doing what I don't want to do and where does it start? And, you know, for so many People that come like into a pure desire group, they're just there because they're like, well, I'm tired of looking at pornography and relapsing and it's hurting my relationships. And really their focus has been so entirely on that moment of, you know, crossing the line and whatever the line is in their story. They're just like, I've got to stop that. And then they begin to learn like, oh, that that crossing the line moment was probably, as you said, sometimes hours, sometimes days, sometimes weeks in the making. And if I don't see all of the other stuff that's going on behind it, I'm going to keep ending up in that same moment. So it's not just about stopping the moment, it's about seeing what are the messages I listen to. Where does my brain start to go away from trusting God and just into survival mode. And so what I like is you're really explaining we can engage in practices that help us to be more mindful of those movements within our own souls.

Right. I'm reminded of Luke's rendition of Jesus being of Jesus encounter with the devil. And you know, I tell people pretty routinely it wasn't just that Jesus was having to encounter the devil. Jesus was having to encounter himself. He was having to encounter the parts of himself that had desire, right? A desire for power, a desire to be seen and known, for his charisma, a desire for all those things that evil was kind of like circling the airport for him in that moment. But it's in Luke's version that they get, you know, they get done. And we read that the devil left him for another time. This sense that Jesus was not, you know, involved in a one and done kind of confrontation in his 40 day fast, right? He was in many respects doing. I think it's a story that reflects the kind of work that we're talking about. It's a story that reflects a guy who was really like intent upon being aware of what's true about his own heart and doing that in preparation for what's going to come down the line such that he. And then you hear in the rest of Luke's gospel in particular, like you hear it all the time. He's either up early or up late praying. We don't always hear what he's praying about. We just know he's up early and up late praying. And in this way it's not, at least for me, I would say it's not hard to imagine that what he's doing kind of filtering out what's happened in the day and getting ready for what's coming in the next day. So that when the time comes, when Peter says to him, like, we're not going to Jerusalem, Jesus doesn't hesitate and stop and have a conversation and, like, gather people around and give, you know, like, do a consultation about whether or not this is a good idea immediately. He knows what this is. And I think that that's. That's the kind of work that. That we're talking about that. And I just want to say to our listening audience, it is really hard work. It is. Like, it is. If you decide that you want to follow Jesus, like, it will be the hardest work you ever do. In which I say to people, look, if you're not suffering, then we're probably not following hard enough after our king. And I don't mean that because we're. Because we're masochists. I mean it because, like, we are so soaked in modernity, in our. Like, our. You know, I'll speak to myself in my. In my convenience, in my consumption, my consumerism, my this, my that, so forth and so on, such that, you know, to follow Jesus means I got to take off lots of layers of my idolatry. And I got. I got lots of, like. I tell people I'm glad there's only, like, 10 Commandments, because, like, if there were 12 or 15 or 20, then I'd, like, have 20 to break in the course of a day, and that would feel even worse.

That's great.

Yeah. And so I'm just to say, like, this, you know, for. It's really hard to do, and it's not because we're weak or stupid or pansies or not trying hard enough. It's hard because, like, evil's intention is to devour us, and it's not about to go quietly into the night.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's great. So I know, Kurt, that a lot of your methodology or the things you try to help people in really involve experiential kind of practices, you know, connecting their body to what they're doing. I mean, the conference I was at where you and I met, you know, you have us raising our arms, you have us breathing deeply. You have us being aware of our posture, feeling things in different. You know, what's. Where do you feel this in your body? And, you know, for some people, that's maybe still, you know, they feel like that's psychology. That's fluffy, that's not spiritual. Like, so why is it, you know, help our listeners understand? Why is it so important to Connect our bodies, our, you know, the actual physical bodies to the kind of things we're thinking and understanding about ourselves and about God.

Well, again, just as a reminder about history, we have actively learned how we've been taught that our bodies are not nearly as important as the thoughts that we think. We've actively been taught that we think that's the way spirituality works. We think that we can preach a sermon and just because information is downloaded that somehow is going to magically change people's lives.

Yeah.

And I remind people, for those who are old enough to remember this, I remind people that there once was a phrase that you heard frequently in the back in the 19, you know, late 1980s, just say no to drugs. And I tell people the problem with that is that the part of my brain that hears the words just say no to drugs has got nothing to do with the part of my brain that wants to do the drugs. Right. And so it's like terribly unhelpful. And in the same way, it's important for us to recognize that, you know, just like gravity, quite literally, you know, God doesn't say like the biblical narrative does not say that God started with his breath. God took mud, right. He starts with the earth, he starts with our bodies. It does not mean that our bodies are the most important thing. But there is a progression of how we actually live in the world. First, we human beings sense and then we make sense of what we sense. The brain operates bottom to top and right to left spinal cord, the brain stem to limbic circuitry to prefrontal cortex on the right side of my brain. And then it runs things to the left side of my brain where I then think about where I make sense of what I've sensed. And here's the problem. My body is doing so many things that I am not paying attention to, that I'm not thinking to consciously make sense of what I'm sensing. So for instance, so I have this real quick story. A patient of mine, his name's Steve, came to me in his mid-50s, depressed. He was a scientist, smart, the whole nine yards. And he was there to see me for his depression. He knew smart. He knew that he wanted medication because for his depression, he knew that I was a believer. He categorically was not. But he'd been sent there by his primary care doctor. He was there to see me because nine months prior to that, his 17 year old son had hanged himself. And you know, like, you got no words for this. You don't have any. There's no answers for this, right? There's no answers. No answers to the question. And so in the middle of this, I start to talk to him about, you know, what, you know, what are you willing to talk about? And he's like, look, I know that you're a believer, but I don't want to have anything to do with that. I just want medication for. And I said, okay, I'm happy to prescribe medication. Because he clearly was a candidate for that. Right? This is a physical thing. We're going to do a medical intervention. I said, but before we agree to this, you, I need you to know that we don't need to talk about God, but we do need to talk about your story. And in the course of talk. And he agreed to this, in the course of talking about his story. And it turns out that Steve, now in his mid to late 50s, is a guy who, when he was growing up in his house, grew up in a Christian home where his parents were worried about educational practices, worried about evolution, worried about a number of different things. And when Steve, who had this keen, sharp interest in science, wanted to do that, his parents were really quite, quite unwilling and quite discouraging of that. And so when Steve left his home for college, he also left faith behind. And he was pretty actively and militantly angry about all that. But he wasn't aware that his story and how it was housed in his body was driving then the relationship that he wasn't able to form with his son. Because we keep our anger right here in the center of our abdomen, or we keep it in our face and our jaw, and it shows up in our irritability and our impatience, but we house it in our bodies. And if we do not pay attention to what we sense, what we sense is going to come out in all kinds of other behaviors. Jesus, interestingly enough, you know, when. When people. When. You know the stories of Jesus encountering trauma, it was all about him and people's bodies. It was blind dudes, it was lepers, it was a woman who couldn't stop her menstrual cycle. It was crippled. I mean, it's like it's embodied people.

Yeah, really physical.

And he, you know, he comes to the blind guy in John 9, and the guy doesn't even ask to be healed. And Jesus is like, we're going to reenact Genesis 2 right here, mud spirit. And like, I know there's going to be a price for you to pay, but we're going to start with your body. And the more we are willing to pay attention to our bodies, the more we actually become aware that the Holy Spirit is trying to get to us through a medium that we always have access to. Interestingly enough, you don't have to be a graduate student. You don't have to even be a high school student. You can become. You can be like, aware of God trying to be in and with you simply by paying attention to your body. But we don't do much work in the church paying attention to this.

Yeah, right.

Despite the fact that for the first 1,000 years of the church's history, so much of how we encountered God was enacted through the building of large, gorgeous cathedrals because we were going to do with our bodies and in the physical universe, we are going to live with God in the way that God first was living with us, right through our physicality. First we sense, then we make sense of what we sense. To the degree that we don't do that, we miss opportunities to be present with God and God with us. To the degree that we do pay attention to that, we find all kinds of new ways for life and liberty. Yeah.

Well, it's like we've said to so many people who are struggling with sexual addiction. You know, we'll try to tell them it's not about the sex, it's not about the pornography. And at first the reaction is like, what do you mean it's not. I mean, that's. I've got these hormones and desires and all the good feelings that come from it. It's like there's so many other things happening in your body that are driving it, that that's just the outcome of all the other stuff you're not seeing. And so, yeah, you know, just as you're talking, I'm like, boy, we. This is a message. Somehow we need to get into the church because we have become so faith head centric that's disconnected from our bodies, that people hear all the right stuff. They hear say no to drugs in a spiritual sense. And then they go right out the door and live contrary to everything they've just heard. And it's not only they've just heard it, they've heard it and believed it and believed it and said yes and amen. And then they go out and they're looking at porn and they're like, how can I do this? Like, well, because there's a huge disconnect between what you know and what you're experiencing. And if, if we can help reconnect that, then I think we see people moving towards healthier places.

Exactly. Yeah.

As you're talking, Kurt I, during the pandemic, started to and it probably took me a week or two, but I started to feel the stress in my shoulders and upper back. And something that, something I've noticed with taking videos at home or replaying, really interactions I've had. I've noticed that when I get irritated, I start to move my shoulders a lot. And I can feel the anger and the stress and the tension. And it's cool because you're putting language to. What I feel like the Lord has been communicating is to start paying attention more to my body when those things rise up. And what I'm connecting that with is that the work of recovery I've done over the last five years, that would have gone unseen and unprocessed and then would have ended up in another relapse or in another bingeing on whatever unhealthy behavior I had. And that's what I love. And so for me, I'm just, I'm trying to map it out a little bit. For me, it is an experience for our listeners that that's what you're talking about. You're talking about going back to what happened in your body first.

So good. Speaking of the pandemic there I've had the opportunity. I've written about a half dozen essays or so on this over the course of its duration. And I think the second of the two that I wrote was titled A Body of Work that Addresses these Very questions and gives our listeners, if they were to, if they were to check it out. There are a number of just on my website, Kurt ThompsonMD.com There are a number of just practical steps at the end of that. And I think that you're right that it's easy for us to have developed all these habits, if you will. And we like to talk about this notion of the difference between what we call explicit and implicit memory, this sense that all it takes is a visual cue, an aromatic cue, a feeling cue, an emotional shift literally within me that activates my brain's capacity to remember, oh, this feels familiar. This feels stressful. And the way I respond to this is in a certain before anything else, before even thinking, my body is responding to whatever this thing is. And as, and you're right that as we have been kind of trained to imagine that the mind is mostly the thing that I do my thinking with, but it's not necessarily my body that I do like 90% of my life with. I'm not I don't have a lot of practice training myself to be attuned to my physicality right in. When we, when we talk about, in recovery rooms, we talk about the HALT acronym, right? Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. All of those things in many respects, especially the first and the last, are easy to recognize first as a physical response to things. And so paying attention to our physicality is really crucially important and helpful because I think again, you know, pursuing C.S. lewis and the Great Divorce, this whole sense of our coming to terms that if we are really practicing for heaven, that's what we're really doing here, then we better get used to our bodies like being these things that we will not be able to like, will be mind blowing. And if we're not getting ready for that, I'm not sure what's going to happen to us when it gets here.

So understanding your background in this and how you help people, connecting this. You wrote another book called the Soul of Shame. And we're just curious. I mean shame is something we talk a lot about here in our ministry. And so how did shame become a focus for you in your work?

I think quite honestly it really made its way, Trevor, to the front of the line. Even as I was finishing up the first book, it just became increasingly prominent. Just working with patients, it was just everywhere. And the more I thought about it, the more, and especially through this lens of interpersonal neurobiology, you, I think, I think the interpersonal neurobiology gave me yet an additional set of tools whereby, which to even kind of make sense of how shame operates. And so, you know, we began to educate patients about its ubiquity. Like that it's everywhere. Like there's, there's, you know, it's like a virus, like it infects everywhere. It doesn't just compartmentalize. I don't just have like the shame compartment of my brain. Right. It responds in my body. Right. You like dogs do this, Right. So it's not even human beings, dogs can be ashamed. They lower their head, they lower their tail. It's a primal thing for us. It's primitive in that human beings can begin as early as 15 to 18 months of age to experience it long before we have language once again, I'm going to take it in and appropriate it through my physicality, not through my thinking brain because a 15 month old can't think in that same way. So therefore I practice coping with it in my body as well. And heck, by the time I'm 6 to 8, 10 years of age, I have already begun to embed ways for me to respond to this that depending upon my attachment, how healthy my attachment is, I'm either going to be more or less likely to reinforce it or to dismantle it, depending upon that attachment. And that attachment is crucial because, as we've said, the brain can do a lot of really, really hard things for a long, long time, as long as it doesn't have to do it by itself. If you and I, if the three of us are together in whatever it is that we're doing, we can do a lot of. For a long time, that's really hard. But if I'm isolated, and especially with shame, I will only then tend to reinforce the literal neurophysiologic responses. And then when they get reactivated, I just double down on trying not to pay attention to them. And it only geometrically enlarges its strength as a neurophysiologic response within me. Which is why I would say in the biblical narrative, there are so many places and times in which when you read about sin, you read about shame. And it strikes me, and I'm not a theologian or a biblical scholar, and so, you know, don't quote me on this, but it strikes me that shame is the neuroaffective coat that sin wears. There's no sin that we engage in that does not. That is not accompanied by. It is not fueled by. It is not the result of it. So shame becomes both the seed and the flower of what we would call sin. And the beauty of Good Friday is it God says, nothing gets between me and my creation. There's no shame that you have that I'm not already there. Before you get there, the whole notion of being stripped naked like, you know, our artwork kind of doesn't do it justice in the sense that crucifixions were held where people were, like, 2ft from the edge of the road. They're 6 to 8 inches off the ground. Like, you know, you're looking at the crucified person, like, the whole thing right there in front of you, right? Because it wasn't just meant to torture its victim. It was meant to humiliate the culture. And God is saying, like, there's no humiliation that I don't know, and I'm gonna wait for you in yours until you're willing to, like, step into it to find that this is where I am, and I'm bringing you home out of this. And this is why we can look at Good Friday through the lens of Easter and say that shame does not get to have the last word, but it is necessary that when I am locked in, that I cannot get myself out of it. This is why I need somebody to come and find me. We need a savior to come and find us. My shame attendant has me that if I feel shame toward you or like, in response, if I've hurt your feelings and I feel bad about this, I am not very likely to turn toward you. I'm likely just like a dog to literally, physically and in my mind turn away from you, turn away from my own internal processes, and it separates my thinking from my feeling, from my creativity act, from my awareness of my body. I become disintegrated internally within myself, while I'm also becoming disintegrated and cut off from you at the same time. So no wonder then that when Paul writes in Galatians about this whole notion that one of the things that Jesus is doing is reconciling the world not just to himself, but to each other. I'll stop with that.

Yeah, yeah. So we see that shame is the great divider between us and one another, us and God, in a sense, us and ourselves. Because I think it divides us from, you know, what you said, that breath of God, the part of us that is God inspired and breathed and brought to life. Shame, in a sense, even separates us from that within ourselves.

Right, right. And I think the other thing, too, that's important to know is that, you know, we've mentioned already, evil is the second smartest force on the planet. Like, it's really smart. And so it doesn't show up at your door at three in the afternoon and say, hey, let's go rob a bank. No. It starts with very subtle things, weeks before I go down the rabbit hole. Which is why it's so crucially important for us to be in the practice of telling our stories truly as frequently as we can, in order for me to be able to be known by you. Because in being known by you, I become increasingly aware of myself. I can't really know myself apart from being known by you. I can't. My brain doesn't really allow for that. I can't really know God apart from my being known by somebody else. I can't know that with this sense of being known by God, including the parts of my, you know, emotional heart house where I have closets that have been closed and locked away, where shame resides. Like, I don't even know that they're there, let alone I know that they're there, but I'm just not telling you. But the more I am known by you, the more you come into my basement and say, Like, Kurt, like, what's, what's in here? I'm like, I didn't even know that there was a door there. Yeah, we should maybe go look. Or not.

Or.

But like, you know, but if you're willing to go with me into the room. Yeah. You know, if I've been hiding it for this long, it becomes like a three year old. Like, you know, where in the middle of the night they wake up and think there's a monster in their closet and dad comes in and says, let's go look together. Like, I'm not leaving the room. Yeah, I'm not leaving the room.

Yeah, that's cool. So for, for a lot of people, Kurt, you know, we think of shame as an emotion. You know, something we feel I did something wrong, so I feel badly about it. And we think of that as shame. But I know you describe shame as having an impact on our brains, you know, being present in our physiology. Talk a little bit about that. How do we actually see the physical impact of shame in our lives? That it's not just an emotion or a feeling.

Right. Well, it's. Again, if you were to. I think probably most of our listeners have seen what it looks like if a dog has been ashamed. Yeah. And if we were to say, like, okay, I can imagine, you know, you know, spot being ashamed. And now I would say, okay, imagine the last time you felt ashamed, last time you felt any of it. Like, where do you feel. This is one of the questions that we ask people frequently. Where in your body? Like, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling ashamed. Where do you feel it? Where do you sense it? And they might say, I feel it in my chest. I feel it like, I don't want to look at you. I don't want to look at you. And what's important about naming where. So we have people do these shame inventories. Right. It's really a pleasant exercise, sounds fun. And in which we are simply asking them to pay attention to when the shame inventory works. Something like, you take a three by five card and. And anytime you sense, image, feel, think or feel in your body an action toward shame, I simply want you to observe it, note it. I don't want you to stop and think like, well, where did it come from? Why did it happen? I don't want you to do that. I simply want you to pay attention to how you're experiencing it. You note it, make a mark on a card. I've got people come back and say, look, by 10:00 in the morning. I got two cards that are filled front and back, and I actually have a job that I have to do. I don't have time to, like, just keep doing the shame inventory. I could do it all day, every day for a week, and I couldn't come up with everything. The point is this, though. When we do a shame inventory, our point is to help people identify in their physicality what their experience is. And then we also give them correlated exercises to which we want them to turn their attention. So in Anatomy of the Soul, for instance, there's an exercise that we do for folks around Luke 3. 22 and Jesus encounter at his baptism. You are my son, whom I love. And we run people through this whole exercise, wanting them to pay attention to what they feel in their body and their surroundings. When they have the encounter with God in which God says, you're mine, nobody gets between us. I can't believe how proud I am of you. Yeah, I know about all the stuff. Your mind. What is it like for us to take that in, drink that in, practice that, and then in the very moment when you. And that takes that. Like, that would be, you know, what we talked about, Trevor, the spiritual discipline, right. Of practicing this. And then when this shame attendant wants to act, and I. I'm gonna say, we're gonna take 30 seconds, and I'm gonna close my. I'm gonna pause, and I'm gonna imagine I'm gonna be in the space where I'm hearing God, tell me you're mine. Yeah. And in so doing, two things are happening. One is I'm literally interrupting the. That begins with my sensed, imaged, felt, thought, or behaved encounter with shame. I'm interrupting the network flow most of the time. And that's really all I want to do. I want to interrupt it. I don't need to figure out where it came from, why it happened, because that whole obsessive train just takes me further down the rabbit hole. If I simply interrupt it, it keeps it from going down the rabbit hole, like I usually do, without even paying attention to it. But when I then substitute it with a different activity, what I'm actually doing is I'm beginning to link my experience of shame with redemption. I'm literally in my neurobiology, in my neurophysiology, I am beginning to couple. Instead of my shame sending me into a place I don't want to go, my shame begins instead. With enough practice, it sends me to the very place I've always wanted to be. And in so doing, we find That I have less desire for that kind of arousal than I do have desire to hear my dad tell me that he's coming for me. That takes practice and that takes community. But in that sense, we are literally using our bodies once again for new creation. Because new creation begins with mud, to which breath is added if we're going to take St. Paul seriously. Therefore, by the mercies of God, don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. That whole renewing of your mind is not an abstraction. It's not just like, think differently. It is about a brain change that takes place because we are choosing to tune our attention to the story that we really believe that we're living in, which is a story of Jesus on the mount of transfiguration, or the story of Jesus at his baptism that God is telling us. This is who we are. As opposed to the narratives that my shame through my body typically wants to tell.

Yeah, yeah. It makes me think of the concept, you know, Scripture saying that what you intended for evil, God intended for good, or guide you used for good shame, which is that very thing that for so many of us has propelled us towards evil because we were just trying to answer or numb. The shame can actually become the very thing that, as you're saying, propels us back to God because we recognize our need for that connection, our need for that just being in that place where we're receiving from him the sense of sonship or daughtership, of belonging, like. And so shame intended for evil actually becomes the very thing God uses for good.

Right, Nick? You know, it's funny, the question is not uncommonly asked. Well, is. Is there any experience of shame that's actually good? I mean, like, what happens if you. Like, if we didn't have any shame in the world? Like, wouldn't everybody just be running up and down the street naked? And I'm like, well, that would be weird. But, you know, I probably would still. I would have a lot of business then. But also, I would say this. You know, it's important to know that shame emerged in the garden long before fruit gets eaten. Now we don't. We have to read it, and we have to see it in the story. And when Paul writes in Second Corinthians 7:10, he says there is a godly grief that leads to repentance, and there is an ungodly grief that leads to death. What I hear Paul referencing in this is that shame is actually built into the creation. It is a signpost. It is an Indicator that abandonment is coming. It's an indicator. It's a fever. It's an indicator that there's a problem. Our problem is not shame per se. Our problem is our response to it. What would have happened in the garden? What would have happened if Eve would have said to Adam, excuse me, like, I'm like the snake, Like, I'm really sick of this conversation. Could you please go get God and tell him to get here? Right. I would love to have some help. Because this is the other thing, right. Evil uses shame like isolation is one of the primary functions and features whereby which evil uses shame in its most devastating forms. It's isolation, you know. You know, the serpent does not say to the woman, hey, I got a question for you. But first, let's go see if God would be willing to join our conversation. He does not say, you know, Adam, I've noticed that you're not talking much. Could you please speak up? Evil does not want anybody else being part of this conversation. And shame is then able to be wielded to do its work. But with Paul's words, what I hear is that, you know, there are things that we do for which shame is actually the proper response. It is the proper response. The question then becomes, what do I do in response to that?

Yeah.

And do I have people regularly in my life who, upon coming for me in my shame, are able to say, we're not leaving you alone with this. Now, what do you want to do in response to what you're discovering about what you've done? Well, it leads to repentance. There is a godly grief that leads to repentance. It leads to turning around and doing life differently. There is an ungodly grief. There is a way to respond to shame that leads to death. And notice he doesn't say that leads to bad behavior or leads to further shame or further grief. He leads to death. Death. Because that is exactly what happens if life, if it's not good for man to be alone. That means that when I am alone, like death is coming for me.

It's not good.

No.

So, Kurt, I think what you're saying is making a lot of sense, making a lot of connections for people. How would you say you've seen the church misunderstand shame? And then how can we counteract that? What can we do to actually deal with it in a way that is going to lead us to the Lord and is going to lead us to that repentance?

You know, I would say that, you know, the Bible talks an awful lot. The Entire Gospel of John is about the light coming. And the Bible talks about what happens where we. When we walk in the light. First, John, when we walk in the light, and evil wants no part the light. And so one of the challenges is that shame, necessarily evil, would very much does not want me acknowledging the things that I'm ashamed of, does not want me acknowledging that I walk around with it, does not want me acknowledging, like, it's. Like it's the air that we breathe. And so I would say that, again, it's important to know that, I mean, just kind of functionally and theologically and so forth, that we have to be aware that it is in the air, it's in the water that we drink, and evil is going to use it all the time. But what is most powerful, I think, is when we are able to talk about our own stories in the presence of those with whom we can be confident we'll receive those stories. And instead of shaming us with those stories, we'll be able to say, or are we glad that you're here? We're not leaving the room. This is really hard. This is really hard acknowledging those places where I've made mistakes, where I have sinned, where I have done shameful things, and to say, yep, this is hard. This is hard. Struck by, you know, in the last year, I'm read for the first time in my life. I'm reading through. I'm just reading straight through the prophets as part of my kind of like, daily, you know, scriptural nourishment. And, you know, I've never read Ezekiel before straight through. And in the 16th chapter of Ezekiel, I am struck by, you know, because there's. There's all this language about that through the prophet, God is talking about Israel as a whore. And, like, the language is unabashed. He's not holding back. And he gets to the end of this chapter, and he's just going on and on and on about how Israel has basically, you know, been unfaithful. And he gets to the end and he starts to talk about redemption. But part of the redemption picture, he says, but you must bear your chain. You must bear it. You must bear that which is despicable about you. And of course, like, being the good evangelical, I'm thinking, like, wait a minute. I thought there wasn't going to be any. I thought, like, Jesus takes all that and so forth and so on. But I hear this point, this point that Yahweh is saying to the people, look, you can't pretend that the things that You've done. You haven't done. In order for you. In order for us to disempower shame, in order for us to disempower evil, evil needs to know that we're not afraid of it. Evil needs to know that we can be with ourselves. We can acknowledge our shame. And everybody who's with us while we do it, they're not leaving the room. But I have to be able to bear it in the same way that I then see Jesus coming for Peter in John 21. They're sitting on the beach, they've had breakfast, and he starts with his inquisition, right? Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And I'm like, if I'm Peter, I like, you know. And the third time he asked, he was grieved in his heart. Yet one more time, he's grieved that he asked him. And I'm like, well, of course he's grieved. Because if I'm Peter, I'm like, okay, fine, I don't love you, right? Because if I did, I wouldn't have thrown you under the bus six weeks ago. Are you happy now? You just wanted me to admit it finally, in front of everybody. Like, there's a sense in which. Like, I wonder if Jesus knows. There we are in front of all the other disciples that are out fishing, and Peter's going to be the leader of this bunch, and everybody knows what he did, but nobody's talking about it. And what does Jesus ask Peter to do? I think Jesus asks Peter to do what Ezekiel said the people of Israel was going to have to do. They're going to bear their shame and by bearing it, not bear it alone, but pull it into the light and say, this is who I am. This is what I've done. And I hear Jesus saying to Peter, I don't want you to be afraid of your shame. I want you and me to go into that room together. We're going to look at it, and then I want you to start to pay attention to me and leave this behind, knowing that we all know what we all know and we all know now all the disciples will know that Jesus knows about what Peter did. And we're not going to let shame have that silent, isolating capacity by pretending that nothing happened. Hmm? You're gonna bear it, but you're gonna do so in my presence and then in Ezekiel, then this is what God says, right? But I will form for you a new covenant. He doesn't like. God isn't like, he's not shrinking or flinching back from what Israel has done. He's saying, like, you need to bear this. And as you do, New Covenant is coming for you. And this is the thing, right? We got this. You know, shame, it's. Neurobiology is such that we feel ashamed, and then we feel ashamed for feeling ashamed, and the whole thing, like, neurobiologically, it snowballs. So I don't want to tell you, because the moment that I tell you, I feel bad for, right? So I don't. And the moment that I choose not to reveal my shame, I strengthen it. I reinforce the sense, the felt sense that I can't tell you this. It is in it being revealed. This is what Jesus does, right? On Good Friday, he just says, evil can throw everything at once. We can take it, we'll absorb it, we'll hold it, we'll forgive, because we're coming for the world, and that's what we are called to do in the church. But I can't come for the world if I don't have people coming for me. If I'm a pastor, I can't be naming people's shame if I don't have people who are coming from mine. But if people are coming from mine, then I can talk about it from the pulpit, because I know that when I talk about it from the pulpit, I'm going to have people who are not going to leave me alone in the room. I've become friends with a pastor in Houston. His name is Eric Huffman. And one of the ways that Eric, I think, demonstrates a ministry that is so powerful and, you know, you can check out his work, is that he is unafraid to tell the truth in public about his life. And he does so with wisdom and grace and discernment. He's not casting pearls before swine. But he is a man who has learned what it means to tell his story more truly, and he's working it. And he would be the first to tell you that he doesn't do it very perfectly, but his congregation are becoming the beneficiaries of a man who learns to tell his story more truly in the presence of others to whom he is revealing the totality of his life. And so it's not just a matter of, like, how do we teach this theologically? It's a matter of how do I live more faithfully and openly in the light, as pastoral leaders, as elder leaders, as family leaders, and so forth, so that we can name what is really happening, so that I can name that, you know, like, I've just wrapped up another book, and one of the main. The leading chapters is that we are people of desire. That's what we are. You come out of the uterus, like, screaming for stuff, and it never stops. Yeah. And we then find that this notion of desire to be seen, soothed, safe, secure, as my friend Dan Siegel says, like this desire, because we don't get seen and we're not soothed in ways that are important, desire then ends up getting channeled in ways that are not okay. And then to take care of that, instead of backing it up and saying, wait a minute, what are we really desiring? We just say that desire is bad. And we don't name that we really are people of desire. But when we have people coming for us who are able to sit with us in our shame, it doesn't just heal our shame. It creates channels of liberation for our desire to move in a direction of great creativity instead of having all that creative energy bound up with me managing my shame, which is what most of us are doing most of our waking hours.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That seems to be in terms of where maybe in the church we can misunderstand shame is. You've talked about us bearing it and living in it so we can work through it with others and with God. And I think the. Whether intentional or not, the message I got a lot in my Christian faith was to bury my shame, to forget it. God forgave you. You laid it down at the cross. Now just move on, and everything's good. And it kind of whitewashes all these areas of my life that I didn't ever really figure out what happened there. Just like, what. We're just moving on. And in that, the shame just keeps. Like you're saying, it just keeps impacting everything we do. And so this idea of being willing to sit with it and acknowledge it with others, I mean, that is powerful. And it's a lot of what I think happens in whether, you know, the groups you talked about, a pure desire group. It's like finding out, I can handle it. I can speak the very worst of stuff I've been a part of or felt about myself and others in the room go, yeah, that's tough. And we're there with you, and it's like, oh, right. That begins to change how I see myself, and it's powerful. So how. Kurt, you know, lean into that a little more, because a lot of our listeners obviously are tuning into this podcast because of how addiction to pornography or a spouse's addiction or affairs has really wrecked their Life. And now they're moving towards recovery. So talk specifically about the role that shame has in addiction. How did it become part of our addictive cycle?

Well, I think it is, if you can. If you can imagine now. Well, I don't know how many of our listeners will be familiar with this, but if there's any sense of awareness of a flywheel, right. A flywheel is a mechanical device that once. It basically depends and uses the momentum of itself to kind of be. As long as you get enough. Kind of, like enough energy thrown into it, the flywheel can just keep moving over and over and over as long as you just get a little bit of momentum put into it, if that makes sense. And in a sense, we have great desire that is often channeled in direction that does two things simultaneously, right? It activates our dopamine tracks that we're. That many people are now familiar with. So in the brain, it, like, it gives me them and my nucleus accumbens, my pleasure centers, this sense of, like, whatever that is that happens right at orgasm, whatever that is, that's what happens with our addiction. While simultaneously cutting us off from people and from ourselves. It is disintegrating us from, while at the same time flushing us with dopamine. And my brain will then, of course, have the downside of, you know, where. There. Where the dopamine, you know, runs out, and I start to feel bad and so forth. And I have lots of other elements. I have lots of other elements of my story that will then start to contribute to this, and shame will start to flood. This I will feel ashamed of. I mean, I don't feel ashamed in the middle of orgasm because orgasm is too, like, there's too much dopamine. It like, literally blindside. It really, like, overshadows shame for the moment, but shame shows up again just like a wave hitting the beach. It just keeps coming. It keeps coming. It keeps coming. And, you know, one of the things that we talk about from a neurophysiologic standpoint is that there are certain ways in which we interact and regulate. Interact in the world and regulate uncomfortable emotion. And shame is an affective state that once it gets activated, it runs on the rails of neurons that we say are non myelinated. They don't have myelin in them. And, you know, who cares what that's about? The point is that they're the kind of neurons that once you turn them on, they're really difficult, take a long time to run out. They'll be on for a long time. They're not like a rheostat where you turn it up and turn it back down. They're like, you hit it and it's done. And so shame lurks around neurophysiologically for a long time. And then we add to it. The pictures, the sensations, the stories that we tell, we add to that. And the only way then, that I becomes. The only way that I can, like, imagine getting out of that neurophysiologic state is to return to my addiction, to return to my dopamine high, which is.

But.

But I can't keep doing that in the way that I'd like to. Which is why we know that addictions need to be compounded. They have to be larger and larger and larger in order for us to get the same kind of effect. And this is where, again, the whole notion of the mind being an embodied and relational process is important. It's not good for man to be alone, that when man is together, man flourishes, joy comes. And of course, this is challenging because I can get to orgasm a heck of a lot faster than I can get to relationship. I've never said that before, but, like, maybe we can use that as a quote.

That's a great quote.

I can get to orgasm faster than I can get to relationship. And so this is what we say, like, the body, the human being, when left by itself, will do anything it can that can most expeditiously reduce its distress. Yeah, if I'm left by myself. But if I am committed to relationships, I recognize two things that I'm actually. The relationship isn't about just preventing me from doing bad things. The relationship is primarily my desire to create new things, to create goodness and beauty. It is not just about avoiding bad things. It's not just about avoiding shame. It is about creating new things. It turns me further into my right hemisphere to create new things and takes me out of the dominant, condemning, analytic left hemisphere that only sees bad things, feel. And the only way I get out of that is like, I'm just going to go do the addiction thing again. And so shame and my orgasm, we'll just call it that. Like, they're on this flywheel where the orgasm does its thing. I come off. That is shameful. Floods the room. I got to get back out of that room. I go back, and this thing, it just cycles on itself over and over and over again. And of course, there are two things that we need. We do need the restraint from behavior, which is why, like, recovery requires sobriety. It does require that. And, like, there's Only one person who can enter into my sobriety, that's me. And it requires my willingness to begin to create beauty and goodness in relationship. Hmm. So often early in the process, all that, you know, going to meetings where whatever we're talking about here. Right. Going to meetings is just a way to keep me from drinking. And for many in early stages, maybe that's what it's going to be. But from the beginning, we really want to be talking with people, and this is what we want to be talking about with people in the church. Like, we want to say, like, look, you don't come to church to manage your sin. You don't come to church, like, trying not to be bad people. We come to church because Jesus is. This is new. We're here to build something. Yeah. We're here to create relationships. We're here to create goodness and beauty and evil does not want you to know this because the minute you start paying more attention to answering the question, what's the next new beautiful thing God and I and community want to create, the more as soon as I start paying attention, I stop paying attention to my shame. And the minute I do that, evil knows its days are really numbered. Mm. And so I would. You know, my sense is like, again, back to something we said earlier in our time. Like, this is really, really hard. Yeah. This is really hard to do. And it's not just because we're weak or stupid. It's because we're pushing against the earth. We're pushing against evil, who has, you know, it has every and no intention of going far into the night. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm just. I'm reminded that there's nothing that we do of importance or significance or influence that is done alone. It's something that we do together. Kurt, this has been like. It's one of those episodes I'm going to have to go back and listen to again, which we're just so thankful for, you and you being here. But we just tell our listeners how they can connect with you, where they can consume your content, find your books, all that.

Sure. Easiest way is to go to Kurt ThompsonMD.com that website. There are options for the resources, resource options where you'll find ways to get the book if in the Soul of Shame, in particular, if you want, you can download a free chapter from the book if you just want to get a sense of what that book is like. Also, there are some interactive exercises that I've given to people that are reflections of artwork, music, poetry, a number of things, some mindfulness, interactions, that they can also access for resources there. That's the easiest way. And if you have any questions, there's a contact page on the website as well.

It just becomes so evident again, and just a great reminder that vulnerability and seeking connection is how we break out of shame. It's how we break out of those unwanted behaviors that shame keeps us stuck in. And Kurt, you've helped us really start to see the dynamics of shame much more. And really, I think what you've done is given some stepping stones for more of us and our listeners to take those steps toward breaking shame. Because we understand it, we're able to sense it earlier, and now we know what to do with it. So thank you so much for your time.

You're very welcome. It's been a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

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